Yet all of those organisations are private companies, and none of us is locked into any of them. There are alternative search engines, websites, and forums that work pretty well.
Cockatoos are very intelligent and are perfectly capable of finding food themselves. The problem is many people feed them and they get bored, so they take to pulling out nails. Some communities here have begun to distribute flyers warning people not to feed them but stricter enforecement is probably needed, especially as in some places feeding birds is actively encourage, even though they don't need this type of help.
Postdoc in math here. Most people with a PhD in progress already either already know they want to do something else besides academia or are unsure, so the numbers aren't that grim.
On the flipside, those that do want to go into academia are still facing an incredibly hard time. In math, there are about 200 permanent, reasonable positions that actually let you do research and there are at least 700 people applying for them.
The sad thing is, a huge factor that determines whether you get such a position is not how hard you work or how smart you are, but rather if you manage to get into just the right popular area and clique. And believe me, this has little or nothing to do with how valuable your research might be to society.
When Facebook first came out, I read the TOS and it basically said "we can do whatever we want to do your data". So it a perverse way I have to agree with you: why does this fine exist at all?
Only partly true. Python does so many things right that languages Perl or Bash are just ugly in comparison, and are thus often slower to write medium-sized programs. And PHP and Javascript have limited applications ouside the web.
The headline makes the content look far more devious than it is. There are two things you should know about price discrimination and online shopping:
1) If you get the cheapest price online, then you shouldn't worry about price discrimination.
2) Price discrimination often isn't price discrimination at all. Pay more for shoes after a certain time? Perhaps the people that shop after 7PM are more likely to take advantage of the customer service and return policies, so they are actually paying for the shoes and customer service. Price tag different if you live in the suburbs? Perhaps the people who live in the suburbs are harder to deliver to, so the delivery cost is built into the price.
Price discrimination by definition is two identical products offered at different prices. If on the other hand you can find a difference in two seemingly identical products then it isn't pure price discrimination.
And seemingly different price differences have been around long before the internet. Example: coupons for the grocery store. Airlines are just an extreme example of this.
The problem is that the initial effort needed to engage in the internet is often far lower than the effort required to engage in non-internet interaction, not unlike certain native populations being exposed to a processed carbohydrate-rich diet.
I have a bit of internet addiction myself, which I noticed when I was an undergrad. After moving on my own, I decided not to get the internet at home or on my phone. I noticed a vast improvement in my life, and I fear the increasingly richer content and easier access will turn us all into zombies one day.
The article actually advocates the protection of the most ecologically rich already roadless areas, not the destruction of roads. Roads in lots of these areas wouldn't necessarily be beneficial to humankind. It's just that in many of these areas there is insufficient protection of the habitats in them.
Obviously, there can be a smarter strategy for humans than the two extremes of no farming and killing everything that you seem to outline in your post.
And, most environment researchers (or academics of any type) are definitely not rich, especially if you take into account the atrocious salary for early career researchers who make less than bus drivers.
Maybe people have pointed out that Ebola is not very contagious and is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids. However, the Ebola Reston strain is airborne though only dangerous to monkeys.
The current strain in Liberia and other places is Ebola Zaire, and is not airborne, but there is nothing preventing its mutation into something that is more contagious like Reston, so we should be cautious.
The summary suggests that Ramanujan wrote down some results that were conjectures until now. He wrote down many results, few if any on his deathbed, and most of them have already been verified for years, though some were still open until recently. Apparently the actual article is about the closing of the last few ones only.
The summary is actually referring to other conjectures from his notebooks and other notes, not 'the' Ramanujan conjecture as proved by Deligne, so the summary is not really incorrect, just misleading. It should be noted that these other conjectures are in fact not unusually important and certainly not even close to the Weil conjectures, but are nevertheless interesting.
Actually, he was unusually gifted in mathematics and certainly much brighter than the average mathematician, at least in terms of raw power and intuition. Evidence of this can be found both in his work and in the comments on him by G.H. Hardy, the eminent English mathematician who helped Ramanujan come to England and who collaborated with Ramanujan for years.
Do you think there is any substantially new feature to be added to desktop environments? In particular, do you think the desktop environment in 20 years will be different than those of today?
Hi Mark! It seems based on your blog and other sources that an Ubuntu tablet is definitely planned and should be in the works at least sometime in the next year. When do you think consumers will be able to walk into any decently-sized electronic store and pick up an Ubuntu-based tablet?
I don't recommend reading it. There is absolutely nothing in this article about the actual engineering problems behind scaling for this number of users and how these problems are solved. In fact, there is nothing technical at all in this article except for some vague descriptions of the "bootcamp".
I had high hopes for Diaspora, but the problem with it is that it doesn't replicate certain features of Facebook that would be a necessary condition for people to switch to it. For example, it doesn't have an event creation and invite feature, and that is really the only reason why I would join a social network in the first place.
Diaspora shifted focus a while ago to concentrate on organising internet discussions amongst people with common interests rather than focus on interactions with real-life acquaintances. With this goal they will never overtake Facebook, which is not what they want to do any more anyway. Now they are just closer to Google+, and in my opinion not terribly appealing especially since the interface is irritating.
It is unfortunate because I'm sure the two goals could exist in a decentralised network, but it was apparent from the beginning that the Disaspora team did not have the raw coding power to create this possibility.
Despite my username, I am a mathematician, and I can say doing mathematics definitely affected the way I think. Of course I do math as my job, but I also think of the rest of my life in very mathematical terms.
For instance, to measure my productivity I have created a detailed spreadsheet of my progress and the hours that I work. I view my efforts as a dynamical system, and potentially I can use this to clarify and understand the periodicity in my productivity using differential equations.
I view my purchases at the grocery store as an economic system and I have often come to rational decisions about money management using decision theory.
When I drive I think of minimizing the time of my route using traffic models. I probably haven't gained much on my travel time but looking at everything mathematically has clarified my view of the world.
My point is that every problem I encounter my mind can't help but look at it from a mathematical perspective, and the act of formulating problems in a precise way with all the necessary hypotheses have helped me solve many problems, even those that don't require heavy mathematical machinery. Mathematics isn't just solving specific problems but looking at a question from all perspectives and formulating thoughts in an extremely precise manner. These are things I of course did not do before I started to study mathematics.
The effects on me are pretty apparent because I have been doing mathematics for so long but I believe even a little bit can be very useful.
Letting technical writing people doing the writing won't work. A large part of the scientific writing is the discussion of the experiment, which not only helps the scientist clarify his or her own thoughts and gives insight into future experiments, but also really only is worth reading if the scientist or members of the experimental team do it themselves. Technical writers really only would have the ability to write the experimental procedure, and even then it would be hard. Since science is so specialized you'd have to have technical writers for thousands of subdisciplines, etc. This goes especially true for mathematics, where the writing procedure is very closely related to doing mathematics.
Already because of this, no time for the scientist would be saved. A Google moderation system would have two problems. First, it wouldn't save any time because you still have to have some person doing the reviewing, and secondly you have to have someone qualified doing the reviewing whom you can trust to some extent to review in confidence, for otherwise if there are certain major problems with the paper but a few good ideas, they can be "stolen" by others, which may become a problem.
Even in a seemingly anti-apple place like this, I don't think there's much negativity towards OS X. It started with the iPod and continued with the iPhone/iPad because they're not open enough.
I dislike the iPortables because without modding I can't open a terminal and browse the filesystem, install arbitrary software, and look at the source. I suspect a lot of geeks want something that 'Just Works' AND is open. The anger comes from the thought that IF only Apple opened the iDevices then geeks could finally have this.
IMO the n810 which I am typing on now (and similarly the n900) is pretty damn close if only more developer efforts were directed towards it. Sadly few people care about open source so right now devices like the n810 show promise and the fade away into obscurity.
Hopefully Nokia with MeeGo will come a bit closer.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet all of those organisations are private companies, and none of us is locked into any of them. There are alternative search engines, websites, and forums that work pretty well.
The last thing we need is for humans to live longer.
Cockatoos are very intelligent and are perfectly capable of finding food themselves. The problem is many people feed them and they get bored, so they take to pulling out nails. Some communities here have begun to distribute flyers warning people not to feed them but stricter enforecement is probably needed, especially as in some places feeding birds is actively encourage, even though they don't need this type of help.
Postdoc in math here. Most people with a PhD in progress already either already know they want to do something else besides academia or are unsure, so the numbers aren't that grim.
On the flipside, those that do want to go into academia are still facing an incredibly hard time. In math, there are about 200 permanent, reasonable positions that actually let you do research and there are at least 700 people applying for them.
The sad thing is, a huge factor that determines whether you get such a position is not how hard you work or how smart you are, but rather if you manage to get into just the right popular area and clique. And believe me, this has little or nothing to do with how valuable your research might be to society.
When Facebook first came out, I read the TOS and it basically said "we can do whatever we want to do your data". So it a perverse way I have to agree with you: why does this fine exist at all?
Only partly true. Python does so many things right that languages Perl or Bash are just ugly in comparison, and are thus often slower to write medium-sized programs. And PHP and Javascript have limited applications ouside the web.
The headline makes the content look far more devious than it is. There are two things you should know about price discrimination and online shopping:
1) If you get the cheapest price online, then you shouldn't worry about price discrimination.
2) Price discrimination often isn't price discrimination at all. Pay more for shoes after a certain time? Perhaps the people that shop after 7PM are more likely to take advantage of the customer service and return policies, so they are actually paying for the shoes and customer service. Price tag different if you live in the suburbs? Perhaps the people who live in the suburbs are harder to deliver to, so the delivery cost is built into the price.
Price discrimination by definition is two identical products offered at different prices. If on the other hand you can find a difference in two seemingly identical products then it isn't pure price discrimination.
And seemingly different price differences have been around long before the internet. Example: coupons for the grocery store. Airlines are just an extreme example of this.
The problem is that the initial effort needed to engage in the internet is often far lower than the effort required to engage in non-internet interaction, not unlike certain native populations being exposed to a processed carbohydrate-rich diet.
I have a bit of internet addiction myself, which I noticed when I was an undergrad. After moving on my own, I decided not to get the internet at home or on my phone. I noticed a vast improvement in my life, and I fear the increasingly richer content and easier access will turn us all into zombies one day.
Don't worry, soon systemd will run within Emacs and all will be back to normal.
The article actually advocates the protection of the most ecologically rich already roadless areas, not the destruction of roads. Roads in lots of these areas wouldn't necessarily be beneficial to humankind. It's just that in many of these areas there is insufficient protection of the habitats in them.
Obviously, there can be a smarter strategy for humans than the two extremes of no farming and killing everything that you seem to outline in your post.
And, most environment researchers (or academics of any type) are definitely not rich, especially if you take into account the atrocious salary for early career researchers who make less than bus drivers.
A web workaround is just to go to http://slashdot.org/archive.pl
The headlines tell you as much as the summaries around this place, and you don't have to see the ugly front page any more.
Maybe people have pointed out that Ebola is not very contagious and is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids. However, the Ebola Reston strain is airborne though only dangerous to monkeys.
The current strain in Liberia and other places is Ebola Zaire, and is not airborne, but there is nothing preventing its mutation into something that is more contagious like Reston, so we should be cautious.
The summary suggests that Ramanujan wrote down some results that were conjectures until now. He wrote down many results, few if any on his deathbed, and most of them have already been verified for years, though some were still open until recently. Apparently the actual article is about the closing of the last few ones only.
The summary is actually referring to other conjectures from his notebooks and other notes, not 'the' Ramanujan conjecture as proved by Deligne, so the summary is not really incorrect, just misleading. It should be noted that these other conjectures are in fact not unusually important and certainly not even close to the Weil conjectures, but are nevertheless interesting.
Actually, he was unusually gifted in mathematics and certainly much brighter than the average mathematician, at least in terms of raw power and intuition. Evidence of this can be found both in his work and in the comments on him by G.H. Hardy, the eminent English mathematician who helped Ramanujan come to England and who collaborated with Ramanujan for years.
Do you think there is any substantially new feature to be added to desktop environments? In particular, do you think the desktop environment in 20 years will be different than those of today?
Hi Mark! It seems based on your blog and other sources that an Ubuntu tablet is definitely planned and should be in the works at least sometime in the next year. When do you think consumers will be able to walk into any decently-sized electronic store and pick up an Ubuntu-based tablet?
The print version is available.
I don't recommend reading it. There is absolutely nothing in this article about the actual engineering problems behind scaling for this number of users and how these problems are solved. In fact, there is nothing technical at all in this article except for some vague descriptions of the "bootcamp".
I had high hopes for Diaspora, but the problem with it is that it doesn't replicate certain features of Facebook that would be a necessary condition for people to switch to it. For example, it doesn't have an event creation and invite feature, and that is really the only reason why I would join a social network in the first place.
Diaspora shifted focus a while ago to concentrate on organising internet discussions amongst people with common interests rather than focus on interactions with real-life acquaintances. With this goal they will never overtake Facebook, which is not what they want to do any more anyway. Now they are just closer to Google+, and in my opinion not terribly appealing especially since the interface is irritating.
It is unfortunate because I'm sure the two goals could exist in a decentralised network, but it was apparent from the beginning that the Disaspora team did not have the raw coding power to create this possibility.
Despite my username, I am a mathematician, and I can say doing mathematics definitely affected the way I think. Of course I do math as my job, but I also think of the rest of my life in very mathematical terms.
For instance, to measure my productivity I have created a detailed spreadsheet of my progress and the hours that I work. I view my efforts as a dynamical system, and potentially I can use this to clarify and understand the periodicity in my productivity using differential equations.
I view my purchases at the grocery store as an economic system and I have often come to rational decisions about money management using decision theory.
When I drive I think of minimizing the time of my route using traffic models. I probably haven't gained much on my travel time but looking at everything mathematically has clarified my view of the world.
My point is that every problem I encounter my mind can't help but look at it from a mathematical perspective, and the act of formulating problems in a precise way with all the necessary hypotheses have helped me solve many problems, even those that don't require heavy mathematical machinery. Mathematics isn't just solving specific problems but looking at a question from all perspectives and formulating thoughts in an extremely precise manner. These are things I of course did not do before I started to study mathematics.
The effects on me are pretty apparent because I have been doing mathematics for so long but I believe even a little bit can be very useful.
Thanks. This is much better. The fixed bars are extremely annoying.
Letting technical writing people doing the writing won't work. A large part of the scientific writing is the discussion of the experiment, which not only helps the scientist clarify his or her own thoughts and gives insight into future experiments, but also really only is worth reading if the scientist or members of the experimental team do it themselves. Technical writers really only would have the ability to write the experimental procedure, and even then it would be hard. Since science is so specialized you'd have to have technical writers for thousands of subdisciplines, etc. This goes especially true for mathematics, where the writing procedure is very closely related to doing mathematics.
Already because of this, no time for the scientist would be saved. A Google moderation system would have two problems. First, it wouldn't save any time because you still have to have some person doing the reviewing, and secondly you have to have someone qualified doing the reviewing whom you can trust to some extent to review in confidence, for otherwise if there are certain major problems with the paper but a few good ideas, they can be "stolen" by others, which may become a problem.
Time travel, and it runs in Emacs now.
Even in a seemingly anti-apple place like this, I don't think there's much negativity towards OS X. It started with the iPod and continued with the iPhone/iPad because they're not open enough.
I dislike the iPortables because without modding I can't open a terminal and browse the filesystem, install arbitrary software, and look at the source. I suspect a lot of geeks want something that 'Just Works' AND is open. The anger comes from the thought that IF only Apple opened the iDevices then geeks could finally have this.
IMO the n810 which I am typing on now (and similarly the n900) is pretty damn close if only more developer efforts were directed towards it. Sadly few people care about open source so right now devices like the n810 show promise and the fade away into obscurity.
Hopefully Nokia with MeeGo will come a bit closer.
How are porn and strip clubs unethical?