Unfortunately there is no benefit for either Apple or Microsoft to ever agree to even the concept of multi-boot since it is against their respective business models.
Um... ever heard of Boot Camp? Apple not only "agrees" to multi-booting, they actively support it. Blame Microsoft for hostility to the concept all you want, but there's no reason to drag Apple into it.
Replying to myself to clarify: I'm not arguing with Colonel Sellin's point at all; he's absolutely right, and the service could use a lot more officers like him. I was replying only to Simonetta's comment that "If he isn't... actively engaged in killing people... then he has no business being there," which shows complete ignorance of how the military functions.
The military is a very large organization, and like any large organization, it has lots of people who are involved in running the organization rather than actually doing whatever the organization actually does. Based on my own service, I'd wholeheartedly agree that we need a lot fewer staff officers and a lot more boots on the ground, but pretending that the military -- or even that portion of the military deployed to the theater of operations -- is ever going to consist solely of people who are actively engaged in killing the enemy is just silly. An army without a command structure isn't an army at all, it's an armed mob.
The problem is that it's the government selecting the vendor. If the government would just get out of the vendor-hiring-business maybe the Free Market could fix this mess.
I'm not sure if you're joking or not. If you're serious... um, who do you suggest should hire people to run the government's servers, other than the government?
Also, this can happen when you hire an external firm to manage something that you should be managing yourself. External managers for projects like this are motivated by extracting as much money as possible from you. Internal departments of technology, by comparison, are motivated by convincing co-workers to not shout at them.
B-b-but you're saying that the bloated corrupt government that takes money from people at gunpoint and has no incentives for efficiency might have done a better job than a private contractor that works on the God-given free enterprise system that rewards efficiency and punishes waste! That's unpossible!
Since the UK is an important trading partner as well as military and diplomatic ally, it's my guess that the US has all kinds of agreements with them which generally allow civil cases to proceed across the Atlantic, and that types of cases which aren't reasonable under US law have to be specifically excluded from those agreements. This is just a guess; does anyone know for sure?
but what it *does* do is call into question the very premise that those methods are based on... It seems that the more we study the more we find out that these things humanity has been 'sure of' at points in history are just plain wrong: the earth isn't flat, the earth isn't the center of the solar system, and maybe the earth isn't billions of years old
TFA doesn't say how much the observed decay rates might be changing, but I really, really doubt that it's enough to make a difference to our large-scale picture of how old things are (Earth, billions of years; multicellular life, hundreds of millions of years, etc.) If the rates were that variable, we would have seen other signs of it before now. Things might turn out to be a little younger or older than we thought, but Really Old is still going to be Really Old.
I don't think anyone really believes the earth is 6000 years old. Just that Adam lived 6000 years ago.
Nope, there are plenty of people around who believe that the days referred to in Genesis are literal days, that Adam was around less than a week after the Earth itself, and that all of this happened six-millennia-and-change ago. They even have a shiny web site where they explain everything.
Motive, no big deal, being a heterosexual male is enough.
No, being a heterosexual male is not sufficient motive to commit rape. Jesus. That's like saying being poor is "enough" to commit armed robbery, or being pissed off at the guy who cuts you off in traffic is "enough" to commit murder. No matter how much you might want something (sex, money, revenge) most people have the self-control not to commit serious crimes to get these things, regardless of whether means and opportunity exist.
You have to remember, blair1q is a guy who thinks massacring civilians and paying protection money to the people you're supposed to be fighting are not crimes.
His sense of right and wrong is not in balance with the rest of the world's.
... the MSNBC lefty spin vortex... the NPR Intelligensia Superiore Ruling Class network... the ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN all-Obama-pats-on-the-back-all-the-time networks...
Thank you for demonstrating so thoroughly what GPP was talking about.
I sincerely hope moderators understand tongue in cheek humor.
Since your "humor" is based on a nasty strawman caricature, you deserve all the downmods you get. Saying something blatantly stupid and insulting and then retreating behind "but I was joking!" is a classic bit of troll cowardice.
The headline, and the first few paragraphs make it sound like this is a solved problem: theories were proposed, experiments were done, results were verified and a conclusion was concluded.
Well, it's kind of hard to do experiments on the Sun. This is one of the problems with the idea that a lot of people seem to have, usually based on half-remembered lessons from high school "science" class, that there's thing called "the scientific method." There isn't; there are a whole bunch of scientific methods, all more or less related but difffering from field to field. Observational sciences such as astronomy must by the nature of the field use different methods from experimental sciences such as, say, microbiology.
Anyway, as far as the specific article goes, it makes no such claims as you, um, claim it does. From the very first sentence: "Solar physicists may have discovered why..." And it goes on with "The new research suggests that...", "... one reason for the prolonged period of weak activity could be...", etc. This is actually a pretty good job of pop-sci reporting, and from your complaint it sounds like you read what you expected to see in the article, instead of what's actually there.
Unfortunately, that opening paragraph is horribly written. The rest of the entry is better, and gives an accurate though terse description of the problem. Before the 1940s, many aeronautical engineers believed -- quite rightly, givem the technology of the day -- that they couldn't design a plane that would hold together while passing Mach 1. Nobody ever claimed that it was physically impossible to fly faster than sound, and of course such a claim would have been absurd given that there were plenty of examples of things that did just that (e.g. bullets.) Serious attempts to build a supersonic airplane began in the 1930s, and by the start of WW2 everyone working in the high-performance aircraft field knew it was possible, they just didn't know exactly how to do it.
In short, it was an engineering problem, not a scientific one. This is completely different from limitations which are founded, as far as we can tell, not in the state of technology but in the laws of nature.
If out current understanding of the limiting natural laws turns out to be wrong, great -- I'd love to see a Death Star just as much as any nerd would. But don't bet on it. The fact that the X-1 flew no more means that we'll someday have faster-than-light starships with planet-destroying laser weapons than the existence of the internal combustion engine implies that perpetual motion machines are right around the corner.
that contains things most here would *not* be okay with, including things that have no bearing on NN at all, and/or remove individual freedoms we enjoy currently
Can you name some of these things? I'm kind of curious. Not, mind you, vague mutterings about what the bill might contain, but actual, specific text in the bill which you believe threatens your freedoms.
The "M" in MASER stands for "microwave." The waves used here are non-visible, sure, but they're shorter than microwaves, closer to what's usually called infrared. And "laser," no longer capitalized, has entered the language as a word for any device that emits a beam of coherent EM radiation of whatever frequency -- thus you'll hear "IR laser," "X-ray laser," "gamma laser," etc. It would be pretty silly to insist on a separate word for each frequency band.
Um, no, I know when I'm being X-rayed. A remote sensing system that can see what I have in my pockets a mile away, without my knowledge, is highly invasive.
Yes, yes, they mean "invasive" in the medical sense: the frequencies they're using don't penetrate inside the body. But it would be nice if they'd clarify the meaning without being so blase about it. "DHS will be able to scan anyone, anywhere, any time for anything -- what could possibly go wrong?"
it's slashdot, you aren't in the computer industry?
I think the GPP was talking about the CEO industry, which is quite separate from the industry of any company the CEO happens to be running at the moment. It's really bizarre how successful the business model is: tell people what to do, even when what you tell them to do is quite clearly contrary to their own interests and the interests of the company, and they give you gobs of money for it; then when they finally get sick of doing all the stupid and counterproductive things you've been telling them to do, they give you even more money on your way out the door.
Imagine, if, oh, say, plumbing worked that way.
"Hi, is this Joe's Plumbing? My toilet's leaking, what should I do?"
"Okay, what you need to do is turn off your water, disconnect the toilet, and then turn the water back on."
"Um... shouldn't I connect a new toilet first?"
"No, trust me, it'll be fine."
"Great, thanks! Here's my Visa card number... Okay, hold on a minute, let me try this... now I've got water gushing out of my bathroom and flooding all over my house!"
"Sorry, can't be helped. That just happens sometimes."
"You're incompetent! I'm going to call another plumber who knows what the hell he's talking about! Oh, and before I hang up, here's my Mastercard number too."
The law-as-software metaphor is pretty common on Slashdot for obvious reasons, and in most ways I think it's a good one, but here it breaks down. Courts aren't like programmers in this regard; that would be Congress, i.e. the people who write the "software." Nor are they users; that role is taken by the executive branch (consider how users often abuse software, and this part of the analogy becomes startlingly accurate.) We, The People? We're the poor bastards who have to deal with all the "come fix my computer" requests and bot spam and DDOS attacks from idiots who don't understand the first thing about how their magic glowy boxes work or how to take the most basic precautions
Couts are more like operating systems, except subject to all the vagaries of human behavior. There really isn't anything in the tech world that's comparable.
Especially when you consider a liberal is replacing a liberal.
If anything, all you people yelling about how things will be thrown off-balance should be happy. Should another conservative been nominated and made it to the court, things would be skewing towards the right.
To right-wingers, a "balanced" court means one made up of nine copies of Scalia, just as "bipartisanship" in Congress means Democrats doing everything Republicans say, and "President" means a rich white Republican. Once you understand the language, it's not hard to figure out what they're saying, but it's important to remember that they're speaking something that sounds a lot like English but really isn't.
That makes a hell of a lot more sense than any of the other explanations that have been posted. "Never attribute to malice what can properly be attributed to incompetence" -- ideas like shadowy international organizations communicating coded messages through stock trades or self-aware machine intelligences a la Skynet forming on the exchanges are certainly entertaining, but they're not needed to explain this phenomenon.
What is needed, of course, is an explanation of why We The People put up with this crap, when traders and their bots are playing Life not with blobs on a screen, but with our whole economy.
The point is that the "motion" you see on a movie screen isn't real either; it's just as much an optical illusion as 3D is, or the moving-circles thing. It's really just a series of still images, projected one after another fast enough that your brain is fooled into believing it's seeing motion. So it comes down to a question of which particular optical illusion you prefer. De gustibus, and all that. Pretending that one type of illusion adds information while another doesn't is just silly.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately there is no benefit for either Apple or Microsoft to ever agree to even the concept of multi-boot since it is against their respective business models.
Um ... ever heard of Boot Camp? Apple not only "agrees" to multi-booting, they actively support it. Blame Microsoft for hostility to the concept all you want, but there's no reason to drag Apple into it.
And in the anarchy that would follow, no one else would need servers either. I guess that's one solution to the problem.
Replying to myself to clarify: I'm not arguing with Colonel Sellin's point at all; he's absolutely right, and the service could use a lot more officers like him. I was replying only to Simonetta's comment that "If he isn't ... actively engaged in killing people ... then he has no business being there," which shows complete ignorance of how the military functions.
The military is a very large organization, and like any large organization, it has lots of people who are involved in running the organization rather than actually doing whatever the organization actually does. Based on my own service, I'd wholeheartedly agree that we need a lot fewer staff officers and a lot more boots on the ground, but pretending that the military -- or even that portion of the military deployed to the theater of operations -- is ever going to consist solely of people who are actively engaged in killing the enemy is just silly. An army without a command structure isn't an army at all, it's an armed mob.
The problem is that it's the government selecting the vendor. If the government would just get out of the vendor-hiring-business maybe the Free Market could fix this mess.
I'm not sure if you're joking or not. If you're serious ... um, who do you suggest should hire people to run the government's servers, other than the government?
Also, this can happen when you hire an external firm to manage something that you should be managing yourself. External managers for projects like this are motivated by extracting as much money as possible from you. Internal departments of technology, by comparison, are motivated by convincing co-workers to not shout at them.
B-b-but you're saying that the bloated corrupt government that takes money from people at gunpoint and has no incentives for efficiency might have done a better job than a private contractor that works on the God-given free enterprise system that rewards efficiency and punishes waste! That's unpossible!
Since the UK is an important trading partner as well as military and diplomatic ally, it's my guess that the US has all kinds of agreements with them which generally allow civil cases to proceed across the Atlantic, and that types of cases which aren't reasonable under US law have to be specifically excluded from those agreements. This is just a guess; does anyone know for sure?
but what it *does* do is call into question the very premise that those methods are based on ... It seems that the more we study the more we find out that these things humanity has been 'sure of' at points in history are just plain wrong: the earth isn't flat, the earth isn't the center of the solar system, and maybe the earth isn't billions of years old
TFA doesn't say how much the observed decay rates might be changing, but I really, really doubt that it's enough to make a difference to our large-scale picture of how old things are (Earth, billions of years; multicellular life, hundreds of millions of years, etc.) If the rates were that variable, we would have seen other signs of it before now. Things might turn out to be a little younger or older than we thought, but Really Old is still going to be Really Old.
I don't think anyone really believes the earth is 6000 years old.
Just that Adam lived 6000 years ago.
Nope, there are plenty of people around who believe that the days referred to in Genesis are literal days, that Adam was around less than a week after the Earth itself, and that all of this happened six-millennia-and-change ago. They even have a shiny web site where they explain everything.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/get-answers#/topic/age-of-the-earth
Don't underestimate these people. They're loons, but they're well-organized and numerous loons.
First of all I would like to state that I am NOT a racist.
Any time anyone feels compelled to lead with a statement like that, you can pretty much bet that racist bilge is going to follow.
Motive, no big deal, being a heterosexual male is enough.
No, being a heterosexual male is not sufficient motive to commit rape. Jesus. That's like saying being poor is "enough" to commit armed robbery, or being pissed off at the guy who cuts you off in traffic is "enough" to commit murder. No matter how much you might want something (sex, money, revenge) most people have the self-control not to commit serious crimes to get these things, regardless of whether means and opportunity exist.
You have to remember, blair1q is a guy who thinks massacring civilians and paying protection money to the people you're supposed to be fighting are not crimes.
His sense of right and wrong is not in balance with the rest of the world's.
... the MSNBC lefty spin vortex ... the NPR Intelligensia Superiore Ruling Class network ... the ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN all-Obama-pats-on-the-back-all-the-time networks ...
Thank you for demonstrating so thoroughly what GPP was talking about.
I sincerely hope moderators understand tongue in cheek humor.
Since your "humor" is based on a nasty strawman caricature, you deserve all the downmods you get. Saying something blatantly stupid and insulting and then retreating behind "but I was joking!" is a classic bit of troll cowardice.
The headline, and the first few paragraphs make it sound like this is a solved problem: theories were proposed, experiments were done, results were verified and a conclusion was concluded.
Well, it's kind of hard to do experiments on the Sun. This is one of the problems with the idea that a lot of people seem to have, usually based on half-remembered lessons from high school "science" class, that there's thing called "the scientific method." There isn't; there are a whole bunch of scientific methods, all more or less related but difffering from field to field. Observational sciences such as astronomy must by the nature of the field use different methods from experimental sciences such as, say, microbiology.
Anyway, as far as the specific article goes, it makes no such claims as you, um, claim it does. From the very first sentence: "Solar physicists may have discovered why ..." And it goes on with "The new research suggests that ...", "... one reason for the prolonged period of weak activity could be ...", etc. This is actually a pretty good job of pop-sci reporting, and from your complaint it sounds like you read what you expected to see in the article, instead of what's actually there.
That big glowing ball in the sky is now called "the Oracle." Get with the times!
Unfortunately, that opening paragraph is horribly written. The rest of the entry is better, and gives an accurate though terse description of the problem. Before the 1940s, many aeronautical engineers believed -- quite rightly, givem the technology of the day -- that they couldn't design a plane that would hold together while passing Mach 1. Nobody ever claimed that it was physically impossible to fly faster than sound, and of course such a claim would have been absurd given that there were plenty of examples of things that did just that (e.g. bullets.) Serious attempts to build a supersonic airplane began in the 1930s, and by the start of WW2 everyone working in the high-performance aircraft field knew it was possible, they just didn't know exactly how to do it.
In short, it was an engineering problem, not a scientific one. This is completely different from limitations which are founded, as far as we can tell, not in the state of technology but in the laws of nature.
If out current understanding of the limiting natural laws turns out to be wrong, great -- I'd love to see a Death Star just as much as any nerd would. But don't bet on it. The fact that the X-1 flew no more means that we'll someday have faster-than-light starships with planet-destroying laser weapons than the existence of the internal combustion engine implies that perpetual motion machines are right around the corner.
that contains things most here would *not* be okay with, including things that have no bearing on NN at all, and/or remove individual freedoms we enjoy currently
Can you name some of these things? I'm kind of curious. Not, mind you, vague mutterings about what the bill might contain, but actual, specific text in the bill which you believe threatens your freedoms.
The "M" in MASER stands for "microwave." The waves used here are non-visible, sure, but they're shorter than microwaves, closer to what's usually called infrared. And "laser," no longer capitalized, has entered the language as a word for any device that emits a beam of coherent EM radiation of whatever frequency -- thus you'll hear "IR laser," "X-ray laser," "gamma laser," etc. It would be pretty silly to insist on a separate word for each frequency band.
Um, no, I know when I'm being X-rayed. A remote sensing system that can see what I have in my pockets a mile away, without my knowledge, is highly invasive.
Yes, yes, they mean "invasive" in the medical sense: the frequencies they're using don't penetrate inside the body. But it would be nice if they'd clarify the meaning without being so blase about it. "DHS will be able to scan anyone, anywhere, any time for anything -- what could possibly go wrong?"
it's slashdot, you aren't in the computer industry?
I think the GPP was talking about the CEO industry, which is quite separate from the industry of any company the CEO happens to be running at the moment. It's really bizarre how successful the business model is: tell people what to do, even when what you tell them to do is quite clearly contrary to their own interests and the interests of the company, and they give you gobs of money for it; then when they finally get sick of doing all the stupid and counterproductive things you've been telling them to do, they give you even more money on your way out the door.
Imagine, if, oh, say, plumbing worked that way.
"Hi, is this Joe's Plumbing? My toilet's leaking, what should I do?"
"Okay, what you need to do is turn off your water, disconnect the toilet, and then turn the water back on."
"Um ... shouldn't I connect a new toilet first?"
"No, trust me, it'll be fine."
"Great, thanks! Here's my Visa card number ... Okay, hold on a minute, let me try this ... now I've got water gushing out of my bathroom and flooding all over my house!"
"Sorry, can't be helped. That just happens sometimes."
"You're incompetent! I'm going to call another plumber who knows what the hell he's talking about! Oh, and before I hang up, here's my Mastercard number too."
The law-as-software metaphor is pretty common on Slashdot for obvious reasons, and in most ways I think it's a good one, but here it breaks down. Courts aren't like programmers in this regard; that would be Congress, i.e. the people who write the "software." Nor are they users; that role is taken by the executive branch (consider how users often abuse software, and this part of the analogy becomes startlingly accurate.) We, The People? We're the poor bastards who have to deal with all the "come fix my computer" requests and bot spam and DDOS attacks from idiots who don't understand the first thing about how their magic glowy boxes work or how to take the most basic precautions
Couts are more like operating systems, except subject to all the vagaries of human behavior. There really isn't anything in the tech world that's comparable.
Especially when you consider a liberal is replacing a liberal.
If anything, all you people yelling about how things will be thrown off-balance should be happy. Should another conservative been nominated and made it to the court, things would be skewing towards the right.
To right-wingers, a "balanced" court means one made up of nine copies of Scalia, just as "bipartisanship" in Congress means Democrats doing everything Republicans say, and "President" means a rich white Republican. Once you understand the language, it's not hard to figure out what they're saying, but it's important to remember that they're speaking something that sounds a lot like English but really isn't.
That makes a hell of a lot more sense than any of the other explanations that have been posted. "Never attribute to malice what can properly be attributed to incompetence" -- ideas like shadowy international organizations communicating coded messages through stock trades or self-aware machine intelligences a la Skynet forming on the exchanges are certainly entertaining, but they're not needed to explain this phenomenon.
What is needed, of course, is an explanation of why We The People put up with this crap, when traders and their bots are playing Life not with blobs on a screen, but with our whole economy.
The point is that the "motion" you see on a movie screen isn't real either; it's just as much an optical illusion as 3D is, or the moving-circles thing. It's really just a series of still images, projected one after another fast enough that your brain is fooled into believing it's seeing motion. So it comes down to a question of which particular optical illusion you prefer. De gustibus, and all that. Pretending that one type of illusion adds information while another doesn't is just silly.