The last thing I want to do when I get home is trick my own damn computer into working.
But spending hours hand editing.conf files and unnecessarily recompiling packages means that your an uber 1337 open sores fag!
I know you're just trolling, but in case anyone thinks there's truth to this, it's worth pointing out that editing conf files and compiling packages hasn't been necessary in Linux for a few years now. I haven't compiled a package or hand edited a conf file once on my 2 month old laptop, and don't expect ever to have to. Also, installing XP (It came with Vista, which I didn't want) and making it work properly with all the necessary drivers took about 3 times as long as installing Ubuntu, and was much more difficult and stressful.
The idea that Linux is harder to use than Windows is really pretty ridiculous.
if (MajorVersion>5) and (MinorVersion>1) then {// compatible with Windows XP or later
}
Which is fine for 5.1 and 6.1...
Don't you mean (MajorVersion >= 5) ?
It's probably safe to assume that the Major/Minor version numbers are integers, so the two are equivalent. I mean, if you put your version number together by concatenation (Major version = 5, minor version = 1 => version number = 5.1) then it's really unclear what exact behaviour would make sense with a floating point value for major version.
The question is, is a Paul McCartney song worth a $1 to you. If so, then pony up. Otherwise, don't listen to it.
You seem to have completely failed to grasp the supply half of supply and demand economics. Where did this magical $1 figure come from which you must pay or else not listen to the music? If going to a movie isn't worth the $10 the big theatres charge to me, am I not allowed to go see it in the second run theatre for $2? If I go perform music in the street can I then insist that everyone who enjoys it has to pay me? Just because you produce something doesn't mean you have some intrinsic right to make money from it - unless there's some reasonable way to ensure the scarcity of what you're selling, you need to resign yourself to the reality that you can't really sell it.
Copyright exists to promote creation of art. Right now, most artists make very little money from records and depend on live performances to make their money. With the exception of a few mega stars who don't need extra money to make it worth their while, copyright is protecting businessmen and lawyers rather than artists here, and on the whole increasing the total cost to society, while doing very little to encourage art. Why, as a society, should we make it possible for Paul McCartney to make yet more money, rather than making art widely and freely available to people?
If recordings of Paul McCartney's music were in limited supply things would be different, but introducing artificial scarcity unbalances the economic system for no good reason that I can see.
Well, if every comet that hit earth dropped off a little bit of water--even in the form of noctilucent clouds... it'd take a while but is it really so far fetch to think that ultimately all our water and atmosphere are extra-terrestrial? Probably unlikely but over a long enough time, who knows?
I think that the point of the summary is that if the water were primarily from comets then we'd expect the water on earth to have a similar ratio of deuterium to hydrogen to that found in comets. Since it doesn't, either most comets out there have a very different composition from the ones we've observed, or the earth's water must have a different source. Of course the water is extraterrestrial in origin (like everything else), but it looks as if we didn't get it from comets.
Well, they did not go to the Moon using existing technology...
The technology needed to go to the moon was at least all pretty clear when we decided to do it. We'd already been up in space a few times. We knew how to make most of the bits and pieces we'd need, or at least knew exactly what the things we were missing would look like. We, at the least, knew where to start. In this case it really is pure speculation since we don't even know where to start in engineering the sort of nano technology he's talking about. Maybe 10 years from now something like this might be viable, but until someone can tell me what sort of manufacturing technique will be used to make these nano bots, this is just sci-fi.
Legalize it, then it can be taxed and regulated. We should strongly consider doing the same thing with other drugs, too. If drugs were legally available, there would be no profit in the illicit drug trade, we would see a reduction in crime at all levels, and the medical costs associated with overdoses and adulterated drugs would also decrease. Legalizing marajuana would be an excellent test case.
Also, if marajuana was legalized, then hemp would be legalized, and the USA would again have a valuable cash crop to grow on marginal lands. It is stupid that hemp is an illegal crop... the only reason for it being illegal is that it seemed easier to pass a law against hemp than to train law enforcement personnel in the simple botany needed to make the distinction. I, for one, think that our cops are smart enough to learn how to do a simple field test.
Of course, legalizing any of the highly profitable black market drugs would mean bucking the lobbying efforts of one of the USA's major industries, and one of the very few that enjoys freedom from paying any taxes on its profits. So I don't expect this to happen soon or without great effort.
I agree with you entirely that marijuana (and many other drugs) should be legalized. The vast majority of the problems associated with drugs are direct results of their being illegal, and enforcement accomplishes nothing but raising the price.
I'd like to ask the slashdot community if they've ever heard of anyone who wanted it having trouble getting pot (or almost any common street drug for that matter). If we're not making access to the drugs difficult, what exactly are we doing? It's pretty damned obvious what the negative effects of making drugs illegal are - at the most basic level, the drug trade funnels millions of dollars to organized crime. Then there's the fact that it's much harder to help people with drug problems if they're afraid of being treated as criminals. Finally, without regulation and control, otherwise safe drugs (at least as safe if not safer than alcohol) can be adulterated and made toxic. The laws don't seem to be doing anything other stuffing our overcrowded prison systems. Personally I dislike pot - I think it makes people stupid and boring, and I don't like my mind to feel dull - but it's pretty damned obvious to anyone with half a brain that right now we're doing nothing but harm.
Perhaps he is only playing Devil's Advocate (har har irony), but the point he makes is ridiculous: That the postulation of a creator is exactly as valid as a scientific theory constructed from what we currently understand about the Earth. On one hand, we have a scientist hypothesising that the Earth's magnetic field is created by electrical currents in the oceans (or more traditionally, by the spinning of the Earth's Iron core), and on the other hand, we have a creator who is necessarily more complex than the entire Universe and all it's systems just popping into existence and thinking to himself "Gee, it sure would be nice to have worshipers, maybe I'll make a planet of those." The former builds upon our prior knowledge, the latter defies probability.
The real problem here is the media presenting these poorly substantiated earth science hypotheses as if they were solid science. Then the creationists come along and poke holes in the theories and think they're poking holes in the fabric of science itself. To be fair to the GP, we really don't understand the earth's magnetic field well at all. We shouldn't be arguing that either of these theories is better than the 'God did it' theory, we should be arguing that admitting our own ignorance is better than the 'God did it' theory.
As a physicist you would know that the laws of physics appear to be the same throughout the universe. The binding energies of the carbon atom are just right to make the complex structures necessary for life. There is no other chemistry that we know about that could form any life other than carbon based. Neither scientists nor theologians ever prove anything, but only believe or disbelieve in various facets of their respective discipline.
Of course there's no other chemistry that we know about! Our ability to accurately model complex chemical systems is very limited still, and the vast majority of what we know about chemistry, we know from direct observation of systems in the relatively narrow range of conditions we have here on earth. Maybe in 20 or 30 years we'll have the ability to accurately model the sorts of alternative chemistries that might give rise to different sorts of life, but for the time being, we're limited to what we can see. You're making an argument from lack of imagination, which is what the fine tuning argument is in essence.
The part of my comment felt a little off to me too. You're probably right that GDP is at least as important a factor as anything else here. Still, the main thing I wanted to get across was that societal factors influence technological advance, and it's certainly the case that there are reasons the per capita GDP is so low in China.
Personally, I'm inclined to think that lack of freedom of expression is a huge contributing factor to poor GDP since it allows for the sort of corruption which cripples economic efficiency, and also gives free reign to nepotism and cronyism which make it much more difficult for competent individuals to get into positions of power.
Even more relevantly, the top 5 selling games of the current generation (and 7 of the top 10) are for the Wii. Amazingly enough, people don't buy video games just because they're told the games are the most technically advanced - they buy games because they're fun!
Someone get rid of the troll mod on this. It's not an unreasonable question, and it's asked in about the most politically correct language manageable for such a charged issue.
The truth is that the scientific and technical advances don't come at random, but are dependent on a range of societal factors. China has one of the largest populations of any countries on earth, yet many much smaller countries produce far more scientific advances per capita. This is clearly not a genetic issue - the Chinese are dramatically disproportionately represented in the sciences in the US, but their society isn't managed in a way that's conducive to training the independent thinking skills needed to do the best science. Go back a few centuries though, and China was the most sophisticated and advanced civilization in the world.
I'm not passing value judgements here, every civilization has it's own strengths and weaknesses, but the sort of mindless PC attitude that mods such a reasonable and polite question as trolling really shouldn't be tolerated.
The parent post (and probably mine as well) could very reasonably be modded off-topic however!
1) I'm not aware of an analogous effect that will work for phonons. Tunneling itself is on the wrong lengthscale.
2) Since the virtual particle pair splitting explanation also satisfies the radiation equations, maybe this difference doesn't have much significance. Were someone to convince me of this, I'd fully agree with you.
Well, I'll admit that my knowledge of Phonons is actually fairly limited, so I'm trusting the article in it's claim that the equations governing the two systems are the same. If not then the article is being very misleading, and I'd have to change my stance! My own personal opinion about quantum mechanics though is that the equations themselves represent the fundamental thing, and the particular interpretation you place on them is just a convenience.
So both the 'split virtual pair' explanation and the tunneling explanation are really just approximations that give us something to visualize. Particles themselves don't really exist as independent physical entities in a truly meaningful sense, they're just manifestations of modes in the system's wavefunction, and so both the ideas of 'virtual pairs' and of tunneling are somewhat misleading. We can pretend that quantum mechanical particles are like billiard balls, except with special properties like the ability to randomly appear in pairs, or to tunnel through potential barriers, and that'll get us a long way, but there will be places where the analogy breaks down. From the wave function point of view, virtual particles are no stranger than nodes and anti-nodes appearing in a string when you shake it.
The real metaphor here is the idea of the particle. It's a fairly good metaphor, but the equations of quantum mechanics aren't the equations of classical mechanics, and at some point the metaphor stops being relevant.
It actually takes no work at all. All one has to do is make a positive remark about Windows and BAM! -1. My mother is very proud that I think for myself and don't blindly "hate the man" just because it's the cool thing to do. I've outgrown that paranoia. I'm the fanboi? Sif. I comprehend what's going on here just fine - look at the mod! Just because you're so smart doesn't mean you're in the majority. I work on a Mac btw. I use Windows sparingly and have a linux machine that I loaded just to do it to see what all the fuss was about. I'm an anti-fanboi and that's the reason for the attitude. So your critique has missed its mark. Given the environment this is oh so expected.
Well, you're right that there's an definite anti-windows attitude here, which means poorly supported comments about windows are more likely to get modded down than similarly deserving comments about Linux. I think you'll find, though, that if your comments are relevant and you back them with evidence you'll get modded up - or at least not modded down.
When someone makes an off-topic comment about Linux, just ignore it instead of answering and getting modded down, and things will balance out when you have mod points to use on poorly supported and off-topic Linux comments!
That's somewhere in between a metaphor for Hawking Radiation and the real thing.
This isn't really a metaphor exactly. If the equations governing two systems are the same, then we expect the behavior to be the same, and we can describe them in the same terms. Phonons themselves are a good example of this: a phonon is hardly the sort of thing that you would intuitively think of as a particle, but because the equations governing phonons are the same as those governing quantum mechanical particles, physicists describe phonons as particles. Subatomic particles themselves bear very little resemblance to the 'billiard ball' particles that most people imagine. I think that it would be better to say that Hawking radiation is just an effect predicted for systems obeying certain equations, and in that sense, both the acoustic and traditional black holes exhibit completely real Hawking Radiation.
It is true that getting 'acoustic Hawking radiation' wouldn't constitute absolute proof that Black Holes do the same thing - our model may be wrong. What it will do do is provide proof that, assuming our model is correct, Hawking radiation is real, and there isn't some unanticipated effect which invalidates the theory.
True, but it works fine without Compiz (Metacity I guess). I doubt that a 7" netbook has the hardware to support compositing anyway, so Compiz would be a really particularly bad choice for window manager on this device.
We all love to hate Microsoft here, but this isn't as simple an issue as it might seem. The cost of doing business in the US is quite high compared to much of the world, but people still want to set up here because we're the world's biggest market, and there's value in being close to your market, and because the tax schemes are quite beneficial to businesses. I'm not going to miss Microsoft if they go, but the US already lost manufacturing to Southeast Asia and our financial industry's in disarray. If we lose our tech industry, I start to wonder just what it is this country will have left to export in 20 years; the trade deficit is already a serious problem. Of course, losing our tech industry to India may just be inevitable anyway, but we have to do something to attract and maintain industry.
That said, current tax laws are a mess. The base levels for taxes on corporations and the wealthy are far too high, and to solve that problem, legislators have put in so many loopholes that many corporations get away with paying almost nothing. Just closing the loopholes is no good, because the loopholes are the only things that make operating in the US economically viable for many companies. The tax system needs a large scale reorganization, but it's not going to happen, because there are too many vested interests. Something has to be done, and I'm glad Obama's trying to do something, but I worry that a real solution isn't politically possible.
This is probably true; I think qt does a better job of feeling native on other platforms than GTK. I'm not saying that it's impossible to make a cross platform program feel natural, just that exactly duplicating the UI from one system to another won't do. I'd guess that Psi under OS X has some noticeable differences from Psi under Windows.
Transmission is an example of a very succesful cross platform program (it's at least quite popular on both OS X and Linux.) and they actually have not only an OS X native version, but both Qt and GTK versions.
For a UI, writing the code just isn't the hard part. The hard part is designing the UI specification so that you know exactly how you want it to behave in every situation. Once you have that, coding to spec is a matter of man hours and testing, but there's nothing fundamentally difficult or uncertain about it. Keep in mind that no one's talking about rewriting the engine for each OS.
For the vast majority of projects, you're entirely right that it makes more sense to take a small performance penalty for the advantage of cross platform code. I think that the web browser is almost unique in this case though, because it gets such heavy use that even a very small performance penalty is significant to many end users. You're being dogmatic, and usually you'd be right, but I think that this is the exception.
Also, people don't expect exactly the same behavior from the UI cross platform; quite the opposite in fact. People expect you to design the UI to integrate well with the desktop environment you're working in, and that means slight differences in appearance and behavior from one system to another.
Looking at some major cross platform projects - GIMP and VLC come to mind, they're excellent programs, but their adoption has not been widespread outside of Linux, and I think it's primarily because their UI doesn't feel natural on other platforms. (well, VLC's interface doesn't even feel natural in Linux, and I personally wouldn't use it if the underlying engine weren't so dramatically superior to the competition, every time I install Ubuntu on a machine I start by trying to use Totem, but eventually run into something that Totem doesn't handle gracefully, that VLC does)
This is what makes evolution a bad theory and creationism a much worse one, neither makes concrete testable predictions.
Where do you get the idea that evolution doesn't make concrete testable predictions? The theory of evolution is based on a few concrete premises each of which is very concrete and testable, and implies countless predictions.
Properly, the theory of evolution might be better called the theory of descent with modification, evolution was never Darwin's choice name, he used the word once in his book, and the newspapers ran with it. The theory of descent with modification is very concrete.
Offspring tend to share properties of their parents, but also have random variations. This is easily tested. Breed a bunch of fruit flies, kill all the ones that don't have a desired trait each generation. After a while you will find that the trait is much more strongly represented in the population. You will also find that some of the offspring will have traits neither parent had, and some may even have traits none of their ancestors had. This is just one test I came up with off the top of my head. There are millions. You can further more do tests to verify specific models of inheritance, but it's important to keep in mind that the general theory of evolution doesn't say anything about the specific mechanism for descent with modification.
The rest of what we think of as the theory of evolution follows pretty quickly. If a selection pressure acts on a population over enough time, it becomes a statistical inevitability that the trait which leads to greater reproductive success will become more represented in the population. As a condensed matter physicist, this sort of statistical argument should be very familiar to you, and while the numbers involved aren't at the 10^24 order of magnitude that physicists consider in statistical mechanics, over a long enough time frame, the error bars on our expected values for representation of a trait in a population ought to get quite small. You ought to have the training to do some persuasive calculations on this front yourself if you make a couple simplifying assumptions. (and don't try to tell me that physicists don't make simplifying assumptions; unless you're talking about simple harmonic oscillators, or particles in boxes, pretty much all the calculations at the core of your discipline depend on reasonable simplifications)
Now, I'm not claiming I have complete respect for what most academic biologists out there do with their time. An awful lot of what they do barely qualifies as science, but the basic theory of evolution is a very concrete, testable, and well understood theory, and is a heck of a lot closer to real science than string theory or a lot of the other flavor of the month theories that physics has been producing of late.
It would have been smarter to use Qt than to have very Windows- and Mac- customized ports, and then you would have got a Linux port for free. You can use QGtkStyle (included in Qt 4.5, but you can run it yourself now) to make Qt apps look like GTK ones.
Qt may be a cross platform toolkit, but the reality is that you don't get the same level of responsiveness out of it on all platforms as you can get using platform specific tools.
In a market like the web browser market, feeling a little sluggish compared to the competition is fatal, and they were completely correct not to use Qt for all platforms. Not that I'm sure GTK is the best choice for Linux, but for a project like Chrome, it's definitely the right choice to use the best tools available on each platform even if it means rewriting a lot of code.
Huh, I actually wondered about that. Unused presents actually is a much more consistent explanation in this case. While it's definitely the case that you find a lot of remaindered goods at Goodwill, the Ralph Lauren shirts tend to come in small numbers. I need to remember to start visiting Goodwill a little after Christmas!
Well, the market value of the games rapidly goes down from $60 after a couple months when you can buy a used copy. Often the value of new copies also goes down in price right away. Personally, i don't find that newer games are in any appreciable way better than older games, and playing all my games at a few months delay doesn't mean I end up missing games, or playing worse games.
My point was that you're paying a premium for playing the newest games. To me that feels like overpaying. I also prefer second run theaters for much the same reason. Why pay $10 to see a movie when I can watch a movie for $3 and catch today's blockbusters a month from now?
No one's arguing that the market won't bear a $60 price tag on video games, but if I'm paying more than twice as much as I could for the same net entertainment value in the long run, I feel I'm overpaying.
Buying more cheap shirts, while fully functional, doesn't change the fact that you're walking around in a cheap shirt. So you buy a nice shirt, not because you need it but because it's more functional to you than buying another cheap shirt.
This is a valid point. Personally, though, I buy nice shirts for $5 from goodwill (seems I usually end up with Ralph Lauren, though I never look for any brand in particular). It's cheap because the stores can't sell last season's shirts, and they'd rather take a tax write off giving them to Goodwill than pay to ship them back to the factory.
The thing is, you're not paying $60 for the game. You're paying $60 for the latest game. Just like last season's shirts, lots of people don't want to buy last season's games, and if you're one of those people, that's fine, but I think it's clear that it's not the quality you're paying for. There are games that are certainly worth $60 for the entertainment they provide, but those games are rare, and in any case, you're always overpaying for the right to play the latest thing.
This is a good point. For my part, I never bought a PS2 until the PS3 came out and I could get it second hand. I bought a whole bunch of games, and enjoyed them thoroughly, but again, bought them all second hand. It's just not worth $50 to me for most games, I'd get more and better entertainment out of 6-7 new books, or dozens of used books. $10-$20 seems to me much more in line with the real value of a video game. I don't just buy used games; I recently paid for fantasticcontraption (an online flash game that I can't recommend strongly enough), but again, it's in the $10-$20 dollar range.
I don't know how big a market segment I represent, but the market's out there!
Slashdot Mirror
The last thing I want to do when I get home is trick my own damn computer into working.
But spending hours hand editing .conf files and unnecessarily recompiling packages means that your an uber 1337 open sores fag!
I know you're just trolling, but in case anyone thinks there's truth to this, it's worth pointing out that editing conf files and compiling packages hasn't been necessary in Linux for a few years now. I haven't compiled a package or hand edited a conf file once on my 2 month old laptop, and don't expect ever to have to. Also, installing XP (It came with Vista, which I didn't want) and making it work properly with all the necessary drivers took about 3 times as long as installing Ubuntu, and was much more difficult and stressful.
The idea that Linux is harder to use than Windows is really pretty ridiculous.
if (MajorVersion>5) and (MinorVersion>1) then { // compatible with Windows XP or later
}
Which is fine for 5.1 and 6.1...
Don't you mean (MajorVersion >= 5) ?
It's probably safe to assume that the Major/Minor version numbers are integers, so the two are equivalent. I mean, if you put your version number together by concatenation (Major version = 5, minor version = 1 => version number = 5.1) then it's really unclear what exact behaviour would make sense with a floating point value for major version.
The question is, is a Paul McCartney song worth a $1 to you. If so, then pony up. Otherwise, don't listen to it.
You seem to have completely failed to grasp the supply half of supply and demand economics. Where did this magical $1 figure come from which you must pay or else not listen to the music? If going to a movie isn't worth the $10 the big theatres charge to me, am I not allowed to go see it in the second run theatre for $2? If I go perform music in the street can I then insist that everyone who enjoys it has to pay me? Just because you produce something doesn't mean you have some intrinsic right to make money from it - unless there's some reasonable way to ensure the scarcity of what you're selling, you need to resign yourself to the reality that you can't really sell it.
Copyright exists to promote creation of art. Right now, most artists make very little money from records and depend on live performances to make their money. With the exception of a few mega stars who don't need extra money to make it worth their while, copyright is protecting businessmen and lawyers rather than artists here, and on the whole increasing the total cost to society, while doing very little to encourage art. Why, as a society, should we make it possible for Paul McCartney to make yet more money, rather than making art widely and freely available to people?
If recordings of Paul McCartney's music were in limited supply things would be different, but introducing artificial scarcity unbalances the economic system for no good reason that I can see.
Well, if every comet that hit earth dropped off a little bit of water--even in the form of noctilucent clouds ... it'd take a while but is it really so far fetch to think that ultimately all our water and atmosphere are extra-terrestrial? Probably unlikely but over a long enough time, who knows?
I think that the point of the summary is that if the water were primarily from comets then we'd expect the water on earth to have a similar ratio of deuterium to hydrogen to that found in comets. Since it doesn't, either most comets out there have a very different composition from the ones we've observed, or the earth's water must have a different source. Of course the water is extraterrestrial in origin (like everything else), but it looks as if we didn't get it from comets.
Well, they did not go to the Moon using existing technology...
The technology needed to go to the moon was at least all pretty clear when we decided to do it. We'd already been up in space a few times. We knew how to make most of the bits and pieces we'd need, or at least knew exactly what the things we were missing would look like. We, at the least, knew where to start. In this case it really is pure speculation since we don't even know where to start in engineering the sort of nano technology he's talking about. Maybe 10 years from now something like this might be viable, but until someone can tell me what sort of manufacturing technique will be used to make these nano bots, this is just sci-fi.
Legalize it, then it can be taxed and regulated. We should strongly consider doing the same thing with other drugs, too. If drugs were legally available, there would be no profit in the illicit drug trade, we would see a reduction in crime at all levels, and the medical costs associated with overdoses and adulterated drugs would also decrease. Legalizing marajuana would be an excellent test case.
Also, if marajuana was legalized, then hemp would be legalized, and the USA would again have a valuable cash crop to grow on marginal lands. It is stupid that hemp is an illegal crop... the only reason for it being illegal is that it seemed easier to pass a law against hemp than to train law enforcement personnel in the simple botany needed to make the distinction. I, for one, think that our cops are smart enough to learn how to do a simple field test.
Of course, legalizing any of the highly profitable black market drugs would mean bucking the lobbying efforts of one of the USA's major industries, and one of the very few that enjoys freedom from paying any taxes on its profits. So I don't expect this to happen soon or without great effort.
I agree with you entirely that marijuana (and many other drugs) should be legalized. The vast majority of the problems associated with drugs are direct results of their being illegal, and enforcement accomplishes nothing but raising the price.
I'd like to ask the slashdot community if they've ever heard of anyone who wanted it having trouble getting pot (or almost any common street drug for that matter). If we're not making access to the drugs difficult, what exactly are we doing? It's pretty damned obvious what the negative effects of making drugs illegal are - at the most basic level, the drug trade funnels millions of dollars to organized crime. Then there's the fact that it's much harder to help people with drug problems if they're afraid of being treated as criminals. Finally, without regulation and control, otherwise safe drugs (at least as safe if not safer than alcohol) can be adulterated and made toxic. The laws don't seem to be doing anything other stuffing our overcrowded prison systems. Personally I dislike pot - I think it makes people stupid and boring, and I don't like my mind to feel dull - but it's pretty damned obvious to anyone with half a brain that right now we're doing nothing but harm.
Perhaps he is only playing Devil's Advocate (har har irony), but the point he makes is ridiculous: That the postulation of a creator is exactly as valid as a scientific theory constructed from what we currently understand about the Earth. On one hand, we have a scientist hypothesising that the Earth's magnetic field is created by electrical currents in the oceans (or more traditionally, by the spinning of the Earth's Iron core), and on the other hand, we have a creator who is necessarily more complex than the entire Universe and all it's systems just popping into existence and thinking to himself "Gee, it sure would be nice to have worshipers, maybe I'll make a planet of those." The former builds upon our prior knowledge, the latter defies probability.
The real problem here is the media presenting these poorly substantiated earth science hypotheses as if they were solid science. Then the creationists come along and poke holes in the theories and think they're poking holes in the fabric of science itself. To be fair to the GP, we really don't understand the earth's magnetic field well at all. We shouldn't be arguing that either of these theories is better than the 'God did it' theory, we should be arguing that admitting our own ignorance is better than the 'God did it' theory.
As a physicist you would know that the laws of physics appear to be the same throughout the universe. The binding energies of the carbon atom are just right to make the complex structures necessary for life. There is no other chemistry that we know about that could form any life other than carbon based. Neither scientists nor theologians ever prove anything, but only believe or disbelieve in various facets of their respective discipline.
Of course there's no other chemistry that we know about! Our ability to accurately model complex chemical systems is very limited still, and the vast majority of what we know about chemistry, we know from direct observation of systems in the relatively narrow range of conditions we have here on earth. Maybe in 20 or 30 years we'll have the ability to accurately model the sorts of alternative chemistries that might give rise to different sorts of life, but for the time being, we're limited to what we can see. You're making an argument from lack of imagination, which is what the fine tuning argument is in essence.
The part of my comment felt a little off to me too. You're probably right that GDP is at least as important a factor as anything else here. Still, the main thing I wanted to get across was that societal factors influence technological advance, and it's certainly the case that there are reasons the per capita GDP is so low in China.
Personally, I'm inclined to think that lack of freedom of expression is a huge contributing factor to poor GDP since it allows for the sort of corruption which cripples economic efficiency, and also gives free reign to nepotism and cronyism which make it much more difficult for competent individuals to get into positions of power.
Even more relevantly, the top 5 selling games of the current generation (and 7 of the top 10) are for the Wii. Amazingly enough, people don't buy video games just because they're told the games are the most technically advanced - they buy games because they're fun!
Someone get rid of the troll mod on this. It's not an unreasonable question, and it's asked in about the most politically correct language manageable for such a charged issue.
The truth is that the scientific and technical advances don't come at random, but are dependent on a range of societal factors. China has one of the largest populations of any countries on earth, yet many much smaller countries produce far more scientific advances per capita. This is clearly not a genetic issue - the Chinese are dramatically disproportionately represented in the sciences in the US, but their society isn't managed in a way that's conducive to training the independent thinking skills needed to do the best science. Go back a few centuries though, and China was the most sophisticated and advanced civilization in the world.
I'm not passing value judgements here, every civilization has it's own strengths and weaknesses, but the sort of mindless PC attitude that mods such a reasonable and polite question as trolling really shouldn't be tolerated.
The parent post (and probably mine as well) could very reasonably be modded off-topic however!
1) I'm not aware of an analogous effect that will work for phonons. Tunneling itself is on the wrong lengthscale.
2) Since the virtual particle pair splitting explanation also satisfies the radiation equations, maybe this difference doesn't have much significance. Were someone to convince me of this, I'd fully agree with you.
Well, I'll admit that my knowledge of Phonons is actually fairly limited, so I'm trusting the article in it's claim that the equations governing the two systems are the same. If not then the article is being very misleading, and I'd have to change my stance! My own personal opinion about quantum mechanics though is that the equations themselves represent the fundamental thing, and the particular interpretation you place on them is just a convenience.
So both the 'split virtual pair' explanation and the tunneling explanation are really just approximations that give us something to visualize. Particles themselves don't really exist as independent physical entities in a truly meaningful sense, they're just manifestations of modes in the system's wavefunction, and so both the ideas of 'virtual pairs' and of tunneling are somewhat misleading. We can pretend that quantum mechanical particles are like billiard balls, except with special properties like the ability to randomly appear in pairs, or to tunnel through potential barriers, and that'll get us a long way, but there will be places where the analogy breaks down. From the wave function point of view, virtual particles are no stranger than nodes and anti-nodes appearing in a string when you shake it.
The real metaphor here is the idea of the particle. It's a fairly good metaphor, but the equations of quantum mechanics aren't the equations of classical mechanics, and at some point the metaphor stops being relevant.
It actually takes no work at all. All one has to do is make a positive remark about Windows and BAM! -1. My mother is very proud that I think for myself and don't blindly "hate the man" just because it's the cool thing to do. I've outgrown that paranoia. I'm the fanboi? Sif. I comprehend what's going on here just fine - look at the mod! Just because you're so smart doesn't mean you're in the majority. I work on a Mac btw. I use Windows sparingly and have a linux machine that I loaded just to do it to see what all the fuss was about. I'm an anti-fanboi and that's the reason for the attitude. So your critique has missed its mark. Given the environment this is oh so expected.
Well, you're right that there's an definite anti-windows attitude here, which means poorly supported comments about windows are more likely to get modded down than similarly deserving comments about Linux. I think you'll find, though, that if your comments are relevant and you back them with evidence you'll get modded up - or at least not modded down.
When someone makes an off-topic comment about Linux, just ignore it instead of answering and getting modded down, and things will balance out when you have mod points to use on poorly supported and off-topic Linux comments!
That's somewhere in between a metaphor for Hawking Radiation and the real thing.
This isn't really a metaphor exactly. If the equations governing two systems are the same, then we expect the behavior to be the same, and we can describe them in the same terms. Phonons themselves are a good example of this: a phonon is hardly the sort of thing that you would intuitively think of as a particle, but because the equations governing phonons are the same as those governing quantum mechanical particles, physicists describe phonons as particles. Subatomic particles themselves bear very little resemblance to the 'billiard ball' particles that most people imagine. I think that it would be better to say that Hawking radiation is just an effect predicted for systems obeying certain equations, and in that sense, both the acoustic and traditional black holes exhibit completely real Hawking Radiation.
It is true that getting 'acoustic Hawking radiation' wouldn't constitute absolute proof that Black Holes do the same thing - our model may be wrong. What it will do do is provide proof that, assuming our model is correct, Hawking radiation is real, and there isn't some unanticipated effect which invalidates the theory.
Well, dunno about studying or socializing, but if you can afford a mac, you're probably not ransacking couches for Ramen money.
True, but it works fine without Compiz (Metacity I guess). I doubt that a 7" netbook has the hardware to support compositing anyway, so Compiz would be a really particularly bad choice for window manager on this device.
We all love to hate Microsoft here, but this isn't as simple an issue as it might seem. The cost of doing business in the US is quite high compared to much of the world, but people still want to set up here because we're the world's biggest market, and there's value in being close to your market, and because the tax schemes are quite beneficial to businesses. I'm not going to miss Microsoft if they go, but the US already lost manufacturing to Southeast Asia and our financial industry's in disarray. If we lose our tech industry, I start to wonder just what it is this country will have left to export in 20 years; the trade deficit is already a serious problem. Of course, losing our tech industry to India may just be inevitable anyway, but we have to do something to attract and maintain industry.
That said, current tax laws are a mess. The base levels for taxes on corporations and the wealthy are far too high, and to solve that problem, legislators have put in so many loopholes that many corporations get away with paying almost nothing. Just closing the loopholes is no good, because the loopholes are the only things that make operating in the US economically viable for many companies. The tax system needs a large scale reorganization, but it's not going to happen, because there are too many vested interests. Something has to be done, and I'm glad Obama's trying to do something, but I worry that a real solution isn't politically possible.
This is probably true; I think qt does a better job of feeling native on other platforms than GTK. I'm not saying that it's impossible to make a cross platform program feel natural, just that exactly duplicating the UI from one system to another won't do. I'd guess that Psi under OS X has some noticeable differences from Psi under Windows.
Transmission is an example of a very succesful cross platform program (it's at least quite popular on both OS X and Linux.) and they actually have not only an OS X native version, but both Qt and GTK versions.
For a UI, writing the code just isn't the hard part. The hard part is designing the UI specification so that you know exactly how you want it to behave in every situation. Once you have that, coding to spec is a matter of man hours and testing, but there's nothing fundamentally difficult or uncertain about it. Keep in mind that no one's talking about rewriting the engine for each OS.
For the vast majority of projects, you're entirely right that it makes more sense to take a small performance penalty for the advantage of cross platform code. I think that the web browser is almost unique in this case though, because it gets such heavy use that even a very small performance penalty is significant to many end users. You're being dogmatic, and usually you'd be right, but I think that this is the exception.
Also, people don't expect exactly the same behavior from the UI cross platform; quite the opposite in fact. People expect you to design the UI to integrate well with the desktop environment you're working in, and that means slight differences in appearance and behavior from one system to another.
Looking at some major cross platform projects - GIMP and VLC come to mind, they're excellent programs, but their adoption has not been widespread outside of Linux, and I think it's primarily because their UI doesn't feel natural on other platforms. (well, VLC's interface doesn't even feel natural in Linux, and I personally wouldn't use it if the underlying engine weren't so dramatically superior to the competition, every time I install Ubuntu on a machine I start by trying to use Totem, but eventually run into something that Totem doesn't handle gracefully, that VLC does)
This is what makes evolution a bad theory and creationism a much worse one, neither makes concrete testable predictions.
Where do you get the idea that evolution doesn't make concrete testable predictions? The theory of evolution is based on a few concrete premises each of which is very concrete and testable, and implies countless predictions.
Properly, the theory of evolution might be better called the theory of descent with modification, evolution was never Darwin's choice name, he used the word once in his book, and the newspapers ran with it. The theory of descent with modification is very concrete. Offspring tend to share properties of their parents, but also have random variations. This is easily tested. Breed a bunch of fruit flies, kill all the ones that don't have a desired trait each generation. After a while you will find that the trait is much more strongly represented in the population. You will also find that some of the offspring will have traits neither parent had, and some may even have traits none of their ancestors had. This is just one test I came up with off the top of my head. There are millions. You can further more do tests to verify specific models of inheritance, but it's important to keep in mind that the general theory of evolution doesn't say anything about the specific mechanism for descent with modification.
The rest of what we think of as the theory of evolution follows pretty quickly. If a selection pressure acts on a population over enough time, it becomes a statistical inevitability that the trait which leads to greater reproductive success will become more represented in the population. As a condensed matter physicist, this sort of statistical argument should be very familiar to you, and while the numbers involved aren't at the 10^24 order of magnitude that physicists consider in statistical mechanics, over a long enough time frame, the error bars on our expected values for representation of a trait in a population ought to get quite small. You ought to have the training to do some persuasive calculations on this front yourself if you make a couple simplifying assumptions. (and don't try to tell me that physicists don't make simplifying assumptions; unless you're talking about simple harmonic oscillators, or particles in boxes, pretty much all the calculations at the core of your discipline depend on reasonable simplifications)
Now, I'm not claiming I have complete respect for what most academic biologists out there do with their time. An awful lot of what they do barely qualifies as science, but the basic theory of evolution is a very concrete, testable, and well understood theory, and is a heck of a lot closer to real science than string theory or a lot of the other flavor of the month theories that physics has been producing of late.
It would have been smarter to use Qt than to have very Windows- and Mac- customized ports, and then you would have got a Linux port for free. You can use QGtkStyle (included in Qt 4.5, but you can run it yourself now) to make Qt apps look like GTK ones.
Qt may be a cross platform toolkit, but the reality is that you don't get the same level of responsiveness out of it on all platforms as you can get using platform specific tools.
In a market like the web browser market, feeling a little sluggish compared to the competition is fatal, and they were completely correct not to use Qt for all platforms. Not that I'm sure GTK is the best choice for Linux, but for a project like Chrome, it's definitely the right choice to use the best tools available on each platform even if it means rewriting a lot of code.
Huh, I actually wondered about that. Unused presents actually is a much more consistent explanation in this case. While it's definitely the case that you find a lot of remaindered goods at Goodwill, the Ralph Lauren shirts tend to come in small numbers. I need to remember to start visiting Goodwill a little after Christmas!
Thanks!
Well, the market value of the games rapidly goes down from $60 after a couple months when you can buy a used copy. Often the value of new copies also goes down in price right away. Personally, i don't find that newer games are in any appreciable way better than older games, and playing all my games at a few months delay doesn't mean I end up missing games, or playing worse games.
My point was that you're paying a premium for playing the newest games. To me that feels like overpaying. I also prefer second run theaters for much the same reason. Why pay $10 to see a movie when I can watch a movie for $3 and catch today's blockbusters a month from now?
No one's arguing that the market won't bear a $60 price tag on video games, but if I'm paying more than twice as much as I could for the same net entertainment value in the long run, I feel I'm overpaying.
Buying more cheap shirts, while fully functional, doesn't change the fact that you're walking around in a cheap shirt. So you buy a nice shirt, not because you need it but because it's more functional to you than buying another cheap shirt.
This is a valid point. Personally, though, I buy nice shirts for $5 from goodwill (seems I usually end up with Ralph Lauren, though I never look for any brand in particular). It's cheap because the stores can't sell last season's shirts, and they'd rather take a tax write off giving them to Goodwill than pay to ship them back to the factory.
The thing is, you're not paying $60 for the game. You're paying $60 for the latest game. Just like last season's shirts, lots of people don't want to buy last season's games, and if you're one of those people, that's fine, but I think it's clear that it's not the quality you're paying for. There are games that are certainly worth $60 for the entertainment they provide, but those games are rare, and in any case, you're always overpaying for the right to play the latest thing.
This is a good point. For my part, I never bought a PS2 until the PS3 came out and I could get it second hand. I bought a whole bunch of games, and enjoyed them thoroughly, but again, bought them all second hand. It's just not worth $50 to me for most games, I'd get more and better entertainment out of 6-7 new books, or dozens of used books. $10-$20 seems to me much more in line with the real value of a video game. I don't just buy used games; I recently paid for fantasticcontraption (an online flash game that I can't recommend strongly enough), but again, it's in the $10-$20 dollar range.
I don't know how big a market segment I represent, but the market's out there!