Actually, the greatest strength of the standard Ubuntu install (which I'm using to type this, btw, having used it as my primary home O.S. for about 4 years now) is that there's only one company supporting it, and so it has some kind of cohesive vision. Too often, 'open source' devolves into 'anyone can edit it' which in turn falls into a shambles of 'too many cooks'. It's usually only when a single organised group takes charge of tending a project that you get focused, productive development.
Open Source's greatest weaknesses, from a user's point of view, are choice paralysis (oh god there are 900000 things that do the same thing which one do I even bother trying?) and inconsistency (every single distro picks something to 'improve' and makes it different, completely missing the point that an operating system is a tool and as such should be easy to use and have a consistent interface.)
Doesn't *ALL* software "belong to someone else"? Even with FOSS software you depend on others to maintain it. If they stop, then you don't get updates.
All software belongs to someone else. The difference with FOSS (or with software developed by a firm that you own, I guess) is that FOSS is owned by someone else AND YOU.
Now sure, you could theoretically go down to the local college and get a programming degree and learn to do it yourself--but how often does that REALLY happen? At least with MS, I know the software is going to be supported for several years, and not become adandonware because Jeremy got a new job and doesn't have time to update it anymore.
You don't need tertiary education to be a good programmer. You need experience... but tertiary education is only one way to get that. What you get from university is a social network which will help you get jobs in the future.
What we're talking about isn't "Jeremy doesn't have time to update the software any more." Microsoft could toss XP into the wind and say "hey guys I'm bored with this game, anyone else wanna play it?" and never update it again. People would still use it because it's still useful. What this is is Jeremy deciding that everyone should pay him to upgrade his software to the latest version even though they don't want to and actively trying to prevent any existing users from continuing to use that software. I'm all for commercial software (or at least, I'm all for someone paying me six digits to write software), but I can't see how what they're doing is right.
The face tracking bit had it tracking his face for a while, once it'd learned enough example images he held up what looked like a class list sheet with a bunch of small black-and-white mug shots on it, and it picked his face out. That seemed like a fair test for rejecting false positives (it was actually looking for HIS face, not just A face).
Actually I turn 30 this year. I don't seem to get this thing you're talking about (and a lot of people seem to get it) where you think you were some kind of half-wit when you were 15 or 20 or 25, but now you've learned so much more and you're so much smarter. Why do people think that? If you're 40 and some 60-year-old guy tells you to do something that seem arbitrary and frankly kinda stupid, would you do it just because he's older and told you to? If not, nothing's changed for you.
I know more stuff now than I did then, but fundamentally, I'm the same person. I think in pretty much the same way (although I'm better at it now). Obviously at points I've made poor decisions and I've learned from that - but given the same information, I can't think of many (if any) where I'd choose differently now. Maybe I was just never a cocky impulsive know-it-all when I was young, and so I thought things through and listened to older people back then too.
I'm sure you found some way to apply differential equations to your bathroom remodel, but where were they actually *needed*? I'm sure if the kid you were talking about was doing a plumbing course, and needed to know differential equations, any good teacher would be more than happy to explain why. The whole "you will learn X because I tell you" is retarded, if only because giving the student a few mental 'hooks' to hang new information on will make it far easier for them to learn.
For what it's worth, at 20 I was studying mech. eng. and computer science in the hope of working in robotics. My first job was in robotics. Now, having tried a few things in the mean time, I'm back in my chosen field and loving it. That 'master plan' that you disparage so much? I laid down the basics of mine when I was 21, it's nicely on track and I'm in the buildup to phase 2, right on schedule. No regrets.
A test of memory will require you to memorize the equation (or have it written down). A test of acuity should provide all equations etc. that you would require, but should require you to know (or be able to figure out) how to apply them to the question at hand. I wouldn't put much store in a test which simply required memorization.
I wonder why some 20 years old would think he had the merest grasp of what would or would not be "useful" to him.''
I wonder why you would think you have a better grasp of what would or would not be useful to this 20-year-old than he does.
After all, learning to braze or cadweld a pipe could be much more useful than learning to solve a partial differential equation, if you wanted to be a plumber.
Exactly. Maybe the 20-year-old you're talking about knows he's going to be a plumber. Should he learn to solve partial differential equations just because you (or his teacher) says so?
Looking back on my own education, the one quality I wish I'd had more of is humility.
If that's the only thing you think you're lacking, then you're still lacking it.:P
Just you wait... if you watch closely enough long enough, everyone will be found to have done something wrong!
This is an aspect that I think people miss. It's the same as the "put a GPS tracker in everyone's car to prevent speeding" suggestion. Built into our unspoken understanding of the law is that you get punished for breaking the law IF YOU GET CAUGHT. Generally the argument against universal observation is some rah-rah-rah about privacy and whatnot, but underlying it all is the feeling that if you break the law in such a way that no-one else is affected and no-one would ever reasonably find out, then you probably didn't do anything wrong and don't deserve to be punished.
I think that, for people to be more receptive of universal observation and telemetry - and it's going to happen; not only via police cameras but individuals' mobile phones, web services like Google's Street View, more and more automated systems using video, etc. - we will at some point need a major overhaul of our legal systems. The vast majority of petty laws are simply special cases of "don't be a nuisance". We need to stop applying them to people who aren't being a nuisance.
Terminal velocity: 270km/h (High end of the scale but for most of the trip you're in very low atmospheric density so your fall rate should be at least this high).
Distance to fall: 10km
Time taken at terminal velocity: 2.4 minutes.
So call it 3 minutes breathing freezing low-pressure air. If you survived, you'd have to find some way of landing safely - water is a bad option, apparently, I'd guess you'd want to try and direct your fall towards the steepest slope you can find, preferably covered in thick snow and small springy bushes. There's at least one documented case of a human falling into such a landscape at terminal velocity and surviving.
I would argue that if any faith is required to believe in science, it's the faith that the universe obeys a universal and consistent set of rules. I can see an argument that this is a matter of trust (ie. we trust that the rules stay the same because they seem to have done so so far, and if the rules change we'll stop trusting them) but given the scale and age of the universe, compared to the time in which we've been observing it, I think it's fair to say this is more faith than anything.
Of course, I believe that this is still the most likely scenario, which is why I have faith in it. But it's still faith.
Here in the UK you only have to pay a TV license if you're watching live TV. iPlayer is free. So, we don't pay a TV license, and any time someone has mentioned a worthwhile TV program to me (which was.. one time this year!) I just looked it up on iPlayer.
This was the first thing that came to my mind when they said "it's just another TV set". Is this going to result in a bunch of non-TV-watching UK residents being forced to buy a TV license for any "television-equivalent media viewing device"?
How many of Mr. Foy's female graduate assistants were tested for the disease?
For all we know, there could be an outbreak going on right now at the CSU campus.
More importantly, how many mosquitoes are there around Mr. Foy's home and/or workplace? I mean, it's a friggin mosquito-borne disease. Living in the same house as his wife, you'd expect it to be as likely for them to both be bitten by the same mosquito as it would be for a disease to spread in a manner previously thought impossible.
For a plutonium bomb (a la Fat Man), sure. It seems pretty darn tricky. A gun-type U235 bomb like Little Boy could basically be made with two lumps of uranium, a sturdy metal cylinder, and a sledge hammer.
Don't be ingenuous. Nobody's denying that suicide bombers are people. People are denying that they'd hesitate for a split second before using a nuke to blow up an American city.
"Why haven't they, yet?" Good question. Then again, we had airliners for 30+ years before someone thought to use them as a weapon and then had the audacity to actually carry it out. I'm betting the audacity is the key component.
How many people leave the GPS on their phone turned on all the time? If nothing else it burns the batteries faster. My phone's a two-year-old model, so maybe newfangled ones are different, but mine only knows where it is when you fire up a mapping application, wait 30+ seconds, cuss at it, and hold it near a window in clear line of sight of the sky.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Sum Of All Fears - not the movie (which almost completely missed the point) but the book, which goes into a fair amount of detail as to the exact amount of work it would take to manufacture not just a fission bomb (a la the bombings in Japan) but a two-stage thermonuclear fusion bomb. Even back then (and this was written in 1992) it would have been well within the reach of a moderately wealthy industrialist. By now, I bet you could print yourself the shaped charge and other components for a kiloton-range fission bomb using a Thing-o-matic. Assuming you had 6.2kg of plutonium (available from N. Korea for a few cases of fine cognac) and the right contacts to get hold of the RDX (the TNT is easy enough to make yourself) you could probably build it for under $20k.
Probably you didn't have a plane like that when you were a kid.
No, but now you're all grown up, you can build one in your living room for less than a grand if you're even moderately technical. I'm currently designing a hexacopter for aerial photography, when it's done it will have significant autonomous capability (GPS position hold and waypoint navigation, vision based object tracking, GPS-radio-beacon based object tracking) and a payload capacity of over 1kg. If I went for a fixed-wing design instead of a 'copter, the extra range and ceiling would be easy to exceed.
Hell, if you added a GPS module to a Parrot AR.drone you basically have a cut down version for $350.
ALL fines should be paid back out to the public, or simply destroyed increasing the value of our dollars.
I think this is very interesting. Closed-loop economies are difficult to balance properly, we know this from video games. How would an open-loop economy moderated by the government work? Taxes, fines etc. are the 'money sink'. The government simply destroys funds recovered in this way. New currency is issued at a rate which allows the purchasing power of a dollar to remain roughly constant with time. I haven't figured all the details out but the basic principle may be sound.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the greatest strength of the standard Ubuntu install (which I'm using to type this, btw, having used it as my primary home O.S. for about 4 years now) is that there's only one company supporting it, and so it has some kind of cohesive vision. Too often, 'open source' devolves into 'anyone can edit it' which in turn falls into a shambles of 'too many cooks'. It's usually only when a single organised group takes charge of tending a project that you get focused, productive development.
Open Source's greatest weaknesses, from a user's point of view, are choice paralysis (oh god there are 900000 things that do the same thing which one do I even bother trying?) and inconsistency (every single distro picks something to 'improve' and makes it different, completely missing the point that an operating system is a tool and as such should be easy to use and have a consistent interface.)
Doesn't *ALL* software "belong to someone else"? Even with FOSS software you depend on others to maintain it. If they stop, then you don't get updates.
All software belongs to someone else. The difference with FOSS (or with software developed by a firm that you own, I guess) is that FOSS is owned by someone else AND YOU.
Now sure, you could theoretically go down to the local college and get a programming degree and learn to do it yourself--but how often does that REALLY happen? At least with MS, I know the software is going to be supported for several years, and not become adandonware because Jeremy got a new job and doesn't have time to update it anymore.
You don't need tertiary education to be a good programmer. You need experience... but tertiary education is only one way to get that. What you get from university is a social network which will help you get jobs in the future.
What we're talking about isn't "Jeremy doesn't have time to update the software any more." Microsoft could toss XP into the wind and say "hey guys I'm bored with this game, anyone else wanna play it?" and never update it again. People would still use it because it's still useful. What this is is Jeremy deciding that everyone should pay him to upgrade his software to the latest version even though they don't want to and actively trying to prevent any existing users from continuing to use that software. I'm all for commercial software (or at least, I'm all for someone paying me six digits to write software), but I can't see how what they're doing is right.
I don't know who you are, sir, but I like you.
Holy snap!
The face tracking bit had it tracking his face for a while, once it'd learned enough example images he held up what looked like a class list sheet with a bunch of small black-and-white mug shots on it, and it picked his face out. That seemed like a fair test for rejecting false positives (it was actually looking for HIS face, not just A face).
The goatse that has goatse in the link is not the true goatse.
/zen
Actually I turn 30 this year. I don't seem to get this thing you're talking about (and a lot of people seem to get it) where you think you were some kind of half-wit when you were 15 or 20 or 25, but now you've learned so much more and you're so much smarter. Why do people think that? If you're 40 and some 60-year-old guy tells you to do something that seem arbitrary and frankly kinda stupid, would you do it just because he's older and told you to? If not, nothing's changed for you.
I know more stuff now than I did then, but fundamentally, I'm the same person. I think in pretty much the same way (although I'm better at it now). Obviously at points I've made poor decisions and I've learned from that - but given the same information, I can't think of many (if any) where I'd choose differently now. Maybe I was just never a cocky impulsive know-it-all when I was young, and so I thought things through and listened to older people back then too.
I'm sure you found some way to apply differential equations to your bathroom remodel, but where were they actually *needed*? I'm sure if the kid you were talking about was doing a plumbing course, and needed to know differential equations, any good teacher would be more than happy to explain why. The whole "you will learn X because I tell you" is retarded, if only because giving the student a few mental 'hooks' to hang new information on will make it far easier for them to learn.
For what it's worth, at 20 I was studying mech. eng. and computer science in the hope of working in robotics. My first job was in robotics. Now, having tried a few things in the mean time, I'm back in my chosen field and loving it. That 'master plan' that you disparage so much? I laid down the basics of mine when I was 21, it's nicely on track and I'm in the buildup to phase 2, right on schedule. No regrets.
A test of memory will require you to memorize the equation (or have it written down). A test of acuity should provide all equations etc. that you would require, but should require you to know (or be able to figure out) how to apply them to the question at hand. I wouldn't put much store in a test which simply required memorization.
I wonder why some 20 years old would think he had the merest grasp of what would or would not be "useful" to him.''
I wonder why you would think you have a better grasp of what would or would not be useful to this 20-year-old than he does.
After all, learning to braze or cadweld a pipe could be much more useful than learning to solve a partial differential equation, if you wanted to be a plumber.
Exactly. Maybe the 20-year-old you're talking about knows he's going to be a plumber. Should he learn to solve partial differential equations just because you (or his teacher) says so?
Looking back on my own education, the one quality I wish I'd had more of is humility.
If that's the only thing you think you're lacking, then you're still lacking it. :P
Just you wait... if you watch closely enough long enough, everyone will be found to have done something wrong!
This is an aspect that I think people miss. It's the same as the "put a GPS tracker in everyone's car to prevent speeding" suggestion. Built into our unspoken understanding of the law is that you get punished for breaking the law IF YOU GET CAUGHT. Generally the argument against universal observation is some rah-rah-rah about privacy and whatnot, but underlying it all is the feeling that if you break the law in such a way that no-one else is affected and no-one would ever reasonably find out, then you probably didn't do anything wrong and don't deserve to be punished.
I think that, for people to be more receptive of universal observation and telemetry - and it's going to happen; not only via police cameras but individuals' mobile phones, web services like Google's Street View, more and more automated systems using video, etc. - we will at some point need a major overhaul of our legal systems. The vast majority of petty laws are simply special cases of "don't be a nuisance". We need to stop applying them to people who aren't being a nuisance.
Terminal velocity: 270km/h (High end of the scale but for most of the trip you're in very low atmospheric density so your fall rate should be at least this high).
Distance to fall: 10km
Time taken at terminal velocity: 2.4 minutes.
So call it 3 minutes breathing freezing low-pressure air. If you survived, you'd have to find some way of landing safely - water is a bad option, apparently, I'd guess you'd want to try and direct your fall towards the steepest slope you can find, preferably covered in thick snow and small springy bushes. There's at least one documented case of a human falling into such a landscape at terminal velocity and surviving.
I would argue that if any faith is required to believe in science, it's the faith that the universe obeys a universal and consistent set of rules. I can see an argument that this is a matter of trust (ie. we trust that the rules stay the same because they seem to have done so so far, and if the rules change we'll stop trusting them) but given the scale and age of the universe, compared to the time in which we've been observing it, I think it's fair to say this is more faith than anything.
Of course, I believe that this is still the most likely scenario, which is why I have faith in it. But it's still faith.
Here in the UK you only have to pay a TV license if you're watching live TV. iPlayer is free. So, we don't pay a TV license, and any time someone has mentioned a worthwhile TV program to me (which was.. one time this year!) I just looked it up on iPlayer.
This was the first thing that came to my mind when they said "it's just another TV set". Is this going to result in a bunch of non-TV-watching UK residents being forced to buy a TV license for any "television-equivalent media viewing device"?
Damn your plausible explanations. :P
0.3% might be the correct value for vanilla sex, it's suprisingly low anyhow.
Whereas the risk is somewhat higher for chocolate sex, and extremely high for strawberry sex?
How many of Mr. Foy's female graduate assistants were tested for the disease?
For all we know, there could be an outbreak going on right now at the CSU campus.
More importantly, how many mosquitoes are there around Mr. Foy's home and/or workplace? I mean, it's a friggin mosquito-borne disease. Living in the same house as his wife, you'd expect it to be as likely for them to both be bitten by the same mosquito as it would be for a disease to spread in a manner previously thought impossible.
For a plutonium bomb (a la Fat Man), sure. It seems pretty darn tricky. A gun-type U235 bomb like Little Boy could basically be made with two lumps of uranium, a sturdy metal cylinder, and a sledge hammer.
Don't be ingenuous. Nobody's denying that suicide bombers are people. People are denying that they'd hesitate for a split second before using a nuke to blow up an American city.
"Why haven't they, yet?" Good question. Then again, we had airliners for 30+ years before someone thought to use them as a weapon and then had the audacity to actually carry it out. I'm betting the audacity is the key component.
How many people leave the GPS on their phone turned on all the time? If nothing else it burns the batteries faster. My phone's a two-year-old model, so maybe newfangled ones are different, but mine only knows where it is when you fire up a mapping application, wait 30+ seconds, cuss at it, and hold it near a window in clear line of sight of the sky.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Sum Of All Fears - not the movie (which almost completely missed the point) but the book, which goes into a fair amount of detail as to the exact amount of work it would take to manufacture not just a fission bomb (a la the bombings in Japan) but a two-stage thermonuclear fusion bomb. Even back then (and this was written in 1992) it would have been well within the reach of a moderately wealthy industrialist. By now, I bet you could print yourself the shaped charge and other components for a kiloton-range fission bomb using a Thing-o-matic. Assuming you had 6.2kg of plutonium (available from N. Korea for a few cases of fine cognac) and the right contacts to get hold of the RDX (the TNT is easy enough to make yourself) you could probably build it for under $20k.
Probably you didn't have a plane like that when you were a kid.
No, but now you're all grown up, you can build one in your living room for less than a grand if you're even moderately technical. I'm currently designing a hexacopter for aerial photography, when it's done it will have significant autonomous capability (GPS position hold and waypoint navigation, vision based object tracking, GPS-radio-beacon based object tracking) and a payload capacity of over 1kg. If I went for a fixed-wing design instead of a 'copter, the extra range and ceiling would be easy to exceed.
Hell, if you added a GPS module to a Parrot AR.drone you basically have a cut down version for $350.
This question becomes especially pertinent when our neighbours have the right to own and arm bears.
ALL fines should be paid back out to the public, or simply destroyed increasing the value of our dollars.
I think this is very interesting. Closed-loop economies are difficult to balance properly, we know this from video games. How would an open-loop economy moderated by the government work? Taxes, fines etc. are the 'money sink'. The government simply destroys funds recovered in this way. New currency is issued at a rate which allows the purchasing power of a dollar to remain roughly constant with time. I haven't figured all the details out but the basic principle may be sound.
Irony again?
Yes, although ironically it tastes coppery.