Well, I'm an Atheist, but I'd like to point out that if God did exist, and liked to play mind games (option c), the obvious rational response is to play the damned mind games. Doing anything else would be bloody stupid!
Which is why, if I believed in God, I would without hesitation donate all my worldly goods to charity, and join a monastery. I have never heard anyone come up with an explanation that held any water as to how an actual Christian believer could do anything else. Are 80 odd years doing what you like on this planet really worth risking losing eternal bliss?
Keep in mind that the people you're arguing with are the same people who, despite countless examples that sex can lead to pregnancy, and zero examples of virgins getting pregnant, still believe Mary was a virgin.
It's quite clear that these are not people who believe in evidence supporting hypotheses.
Because I should be able to use the Windows Kernel with X, the Windows API on Linux, and Office on Free BSD.
You might just get Office on Free BSD, but if the Windows API weren't tied to the Windows Kernel I don't think either would continue to exist for long. Both the Windows kernel and the Windows API are really quite unappealing on their own; it's the lock in that the combination of the two creates, and yes, to a lesser extent, the advantage gained from their better interoperability, that make Windows successful.
And yes, I've done enough work with the Windows API that I know what I'm talking about.
As stated in the article, he would not have been prosecuted if he would have looked at horticultural Web sites [and uploaded pictures of flowers].
Mod parent up! The hacking charge isn't the important thing here, this is! The law is being used in an an unbalanced fashion to persecute someone not because of the crime he committed, but because he doesn't conform to the social norms of the leaders of his community. This is disturbingly close to burning people at the stake because they don't share your beliefs, and should not be tolerated.
This man's life is going to be in chaos for years dealing with the results of this. The question to ask is, is that a fair punishment for someone who uploaded flower pictures from work?
You're entirely right. Which is why it annoys me to no end when people argue that Linux being 'hard to make work' is a reason for manufacturers to favor Windows. It's completely irrelevant to the end user, and it's not true anyway.
OF COURSE your manufacturer configured OS is going to work out of the box
This is a key point. User friendly version of Linux like Ubuntu are absolutely easier to install and get working than windows. Most end users buy a computer with a preinstalled OS, and aren't able to reinstall the OS if they have to.
Installing ubuntu on a machine and getting up and running with all the software I need has never taken me more than an hour and a half. I've never gone from an empty hard drive to a fully functional windows machine with all drivers and essential software in less than 3 hours, just the rebooting alone to get all the drivers functional probably eats up half an hour.
I am completely confident that if you took a random group of people gave them blank computers, and gave half ubuntu cds, and half windows cds, the ubuntu group would have a much higher success rate for getting a working computer, and would finish faster. Now, installing Ubuntu is much harder than buying a computer with a factory installed and tested drivers, but that's not saying a whole lot.
Austria isn't decreasing it's science budget, just reallocating it. Frankly, it seems very unlikely to me that CERN will produce as valuable scientific results as that same money spread over many smaller projects could, so i think Austria might have the right idea.
The whole "Wikipedia vs. Britannica" thing really needs to be put to rest. Maybe Wikipedia is as reliable, or maybe it isn't. It really doesn't matter.
Both Wikipedia and Britannica have information that is unreliable on a fairly regular basis, and if any piece of information you find in them is critical (because, for instance, you intend to publish it) you absolutely must verify it with outside sources. Wikipedia is vastly more useful than Britannica as a place to get general information on a topic because a great deal more detail is available, most of which can be confirmed, and Wikipedia conveniently provides references to relevant sources at the bottom of the page to help you start your research.
Britannica may be slightly more reliable than Wikipedia, I honestly don't know, and wouldn't tend to trust any study that came to a conclusion one way or the other, but focusing on accuracy is completely missing the point in this case. Both are unreliable, and Wikipedia is more useful.
Well, not quite. A wire may be capable of receiving television programmes, but it isn't capable of exhibiting them. The conjunction used here is 'and' not 'or.'
Is it laziness or is it pressure from the deadlines? When I think of the press, I think of fast-paced people who work all day and all night, the opposite of laziness.
That's because the press is in the business of selling spin. They may be no good at investigative journalism, but a media outlet that didn't have the competence to generate the right spin for itself would go out of business pretty quick.
I've never wanted mod points as much as I want them now. People need to start realizing how serious a problem this is and we need to do something about it.
This one needs modding up! The Feynman lectures provide an impressive and thoroughly non obvious way of understanding physics. While they don't contain original research, the lectures' approach to the subject is insightful and unique.
In particular Archimedes' The Sand Reckoner is an amazing text foreshadowing mathematical ideas which civilization has only thoroughly grasped in the last couple centuries. When you compare the work of Archimedes to the natural philosophy of his contemporaries it's hard to fathom how he could have been so far ahead of the rest.
While the intended meaning of the sentence is clear, the sentence is poorly written. "Showing up on time" isn't a rule, it's a action, and as such doesn't make much sense modifying 'rules.' A more correct statement would look something like "insubordination or repeated violation of rules such as the rule requiring teachers to show up on time."
Of course, that's awful too, so probably the whole thing should be rephrased to something like "insubordination, repeated violation of rules, or chronic tardiness," which conveys all the intended ideas much less awkwardly. I'm sure a better phrasing exists, but the point is, if this is the sort of writing produced by professionals today, our education system has been a mess for a long time now.
First I'd like to say that for the most part I agree with your stance. Copyright and patents exist for a reason, and the reason isn't obsolete just yet. That said, I agree with the people who say that intellectual property doesn't exist.
There is no intrinsic reason that people should be granted an exclusive right to the use of ideas they come up with, and claiming otherwise is basically equivalent to claiming that because a law exists, it is incorrect to try to change it. Rather, IP law exists because it provides a net benefit to society by encouraging creation and innovation. It comes with the negative effects of slowing the spread of new ideas, and of having associated legal costs for the enforcement. The question of setting copyright law for a given area comes down to deciding if the benefit in increased innovation is greater than the costs.
The recording industry is an example of copyright gone wrong. The benefit to society is rather small; the vast majority of artists make their money primarily from live performances, and would still make that music if they couldn't sell CDs. In fact, I'm reasonably confident that most artists would continue to make cds and give them away for free for the publicity. On the flip side, the cost in terms of legal enforcement, and complications about what you can and cant do with music is rather large. Clearly the law isn't serving it's purpose in this case.
Reporters necessarily leave out most of the details of any event they report on. For example, at a convention thousands of things will be said, but there's only room in the article to provide a handful of quotes. Reporters will (and should) pick the quotes that they believe are most representative and telling - they will report the things which they believe best convey the essence of what happened. If you think that any two reporters (let alone reporters with different political affiliations) are going to consistently agree about what constitutes the essence of what happened, I think you're crazy!
Some sort of bias is inevitable. A good reporter can make the bias small, but there are, as far as I can tell, very few if any really good reporters out there.
I never claimed that protests are the exclusive means for the people to make their will known; there are of course other measures such as the ballot box and lobbying. However, the idea that protests represent a breakdown of the democratic process is downright fantasy. I've never heard of a democratic government that operated for any length of time without protest, so your real democracy has never existed on earth.
The idea that the will of the people is "imaged onto the actions of their elected government" seems equally bizarre to me. I've never seen the slightest evidence for this occurring in any democracy, and more importantly, don't see it as remotely desirable. It is a fundamental feature of a representative democracy that sometimes the will of the majority is ignored, and often this is a good thing.
Finally, if you can't see how protesting in a dictatorship is less effective than protesting in a democracy, I really don't know what to add to my earlier post. It seems so blatantly obvious that I'm at a loss to guess what part needs explaining.
Either we have a democracy, in which case demonstrations and protests again the democratically elected goverment shouldnt be needed, or we dont, in which case we dont need elections.
You must be one of those people who believes democracy operates based on fairy dust and kittens. Protests in the street are a particularly notable feature of democracy, not something democracy eliminates the need for!
To spell it out for you, politicians are for the most part corrupt and immoral and have little interest in mirroring the will of the people, but at least in a democracy the people have some leverage. Politicians can ignore a small fraction of the population pretty safely, but when that fraction takes to the streets and threatens to attract a lot of attention the politicians have to start worrying about reelection.
Democracy is not a perfect system, in fact it has many disadvantages when compared to a well run dictatorship, but the fact people can safely and effectively take to the streets in protest makes it the most effective system we've found yet.
The options to check time are limited...
* Local machine time
* NTP server time
* Specialized time server set up by creators
Or there's a fourth option. (which according to TFA is what it actually does) which is to get time from http headers by contacting a bunch of websites. Which is a lot like your 2nd option, though slightly harder to fool.
More importantly, there's not much to be gained by tricking the worm, we know what it does - it tries to get instructions from the internet. For that matter, even if we didn't know, it would be simple enough to push an update to change the behavior of the worm at the last minute
Just looking at the physics, rear end collisions tend to be much safer than other types because you generally have the least relative velocity, and the damage done is proportional to the energy dissipated, which is roughly proportional to the square of the relative velocity.
If you're both moving and the guy in front brakes, the guy in back may brake too late but even so, the relative velocity is going to be a lot lower than in a side or head on collision. If the guy in front wasn't moving to start with, then the cars were probably pretty close together to start with, and the car behind hasn't had enough time to build up much speed.
T-bone collisions are bad because there's a lot less metal between the car and the driver to absorb the energy of the impact. Head on collisions tend to be bad because cars have very high relative velocities (the velocities add instead of subtracting as in a rear end collision).
e.g. when I went from a 4 mega pixel camera to an 8 mega pixel camera my file sizes became 4 times larger.
This is normal. When you double the resolution, you double it in 2 dimensions. (Height and Width) This results in a four-fold increase in data size.
Actually, this is just plain wrong. A camera's megapixel rating specifies how many million pixels it stores, and should scale linearly with file size. So, for example, assuming a 3:2 aspect ratio (which I understand is pretty common), a 4 megapixel camera would produce images with a resolution of approximately 2450x1630 (I'm rounding to the nearest 10 pixels), and an 8 megapixel camera would produce images with an approximate resolution of 3460x2310. So both dimensions aren't in fact doubled. (They're multiplied by root 2 for those keeping track)
If an 8 megapixel camera is producing images four times as large as a 4 megapixel camera it must be using less effective compression.
Here and here. I've not used Scribus much, but I actually prefer GIMP to Photoshop in most cases.
I agree that Open Office really just isn't up to par, though. Open Office is fine, or even better than MS Office for a casual user, but it fails pretty badly for a serious user.
This article does indeed highlight a disturbing lack of scientific literacy, but only by demonstrating how poorly even the authors understand science. Science is a method, not a collection of facts, and while the first question (about the time it takes the earth to revolve around the sun) might qualify as a real question of understanding, the other two are just factoids.
The core of scientific literacy is having the set of skills listed above, and a mindset that insists on applying these skills to every situation you encounter. Anything short of that is, at best, bad science, and more often than not, mere metaphysics.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm an Atheist, but I'd like to point out that if God did exist, and liked to play mind games (option c), the obvious rational response is to play the damned mind games. Doing anything else would be bloody stupid!
Which is why, if I believed in God, I would without hesitation donate all my worldly goods to charity, and join a monastery. I have never heard anyone come up with an explanation that held any water as to how an actual Christian believer could do anything else. Are 80 odd years doing what you like on this planet really worth risking losing eternal bliss?
Keep in mind that the people you're arguing with are the same people who, despite countless examples that sex can lead to pregnancy, and zero examples of virgins getting pregnant, still believe Mary was a virgin.
It's quite clear that these are not people who believe in evidence supporting hypotheses.
Because I should be able to use the Windows Kernel with X, the Windows API on Linux, and Office on Free BSD.
You might just get Office on Free BSD, but if the Windows API weren't tied to the Windows Kernel I don't think either would continue to exist for long. Both the Windows kernel and the Windows API are really quite unappealing on their own; it's the lock in that the combination of the two creates, and yes, to a lesser extent, the advantage gained from their better interoperability, that make Windows successful.
And yes, I've done enough work with the Windows API that I know what I'm talking about.
As stated in the article, he would not have been prosecuted if he would have looked at horticultural Web sites [and uploaded pictures of flowers].
Mod parent up! The hacking charge isn't the important thing here, this is! The law is being used in an an unbalanced fashion to persecute someone not because of the crime he committed, but because he doesn't conform to the social norms of the leaders of his community. This is disturbingly close to burning people at the stake because they don't share your beliefs, and should not be tolerated.
This man's life is going to be in chaos for years dealing with the results of this. The question to ask is, is that a fair punishment for someone who uploaded flower pictures from work?
You're entirely right. Which is why it annoys me to no end when people argue that Linux being 'hard to make work' is a reason for manufacturers to favor Windows. It's completely irrelevant to the end user, and it's not true anyway.
OF COURSE your manufacturer configured OS is going to work out of the box
This is a key point. User friendly version of Linux like Ubuntu are absolutely easier to install and get working than windows. Most end users buy a computer with a preinstalled OS, and aren't able to reinstall the OS if they have to.
Installing ubuntu on a machine and getting up and running with all the software I need has never taken me more than an hour and a half. I've never gone from an empty hard drive to a fully functional windows machine with all drivers and essential software in less than 3 hours, just the rebooting alone to get all the drivers functional probably eats up half an hour.
I am completely confident that if you took a random group of people gave them blank computers, and gave half ubuntu cds, and half windows cds, the ubuntu group would have a much higher success rate for getting a working computer, and would finish faster. Now, installing Ubuntu is much harder than buying a computer with a factory installed and tested drivers, but that's not saying a whole lot.
Austria isn't decreasing it's science budget, just reallocating it. Frankly, it seems very unlikely to me that CERN will produce as valuable scientific results as that same money spread over many smaller projects could, so i think Austria might have the right idea.
The whole "Wikipedia vs. Britannica" thing really needs to be put to rest. Maybe Wikipedia is as reliable, or maybe it isn't. It really doesn't matter.
Both Wikipedia and Britannica have information that is unreliable on a fairly regular basis, and if any piece of information you find in them is critical (because, for instance, you intend to publish it) you absolutely must verify it with outside sources. Wikipedia is vastly more useful than Britannica as a place to get general information on a topic because a great deal more detail is available, most of which can be confirmed, and Wikipedia conveniently provides references to relevant sources at the bottom of the page to help you start your research.
Britannica may be slightly more reliable than Wikipedia, I honestly don't know, and wouldn't tend to trust any study that came to a conclusion one way or the other, but focusing on accuracy is completely missing the point in this case. Both are unreliable, and Wikipedia is more useful.
Well, not quite. A wire may be capable of receiving television programmes, but it isn't capable of exhibiting them. The conjunction used here is 'and' not 'or.'
Is it laziness or is it pressure from the deadlines? When I think of the press, I think of fast-paced people who work all day and all night, the opposite of laziness.
That's because the press is in the business of selling spin. They may be no good at investigative journalism, but a media outlet that didn't have the competence to generate the right spin for itself would go out of business pretty quick.
I've never wanted mod points as much as I want them now. People need to start realizing how serious a problem this is and we need to do something about it.
Thank you.
This one needs modding up! The Feynman lectures provide an impressive and thoroughly non obvious way of understanding physics. While they don't contain original research, the lectures' approach to the subject is insightful and unique.
In particular Archimedes' The Sand Reckoner is an amazing text foreshadowing mathematical ideas which civilization has only thoroughly grasped in the last couple centuries. When you compare the work of Archimedes to the natural philosophy of his contemporaries it's hard to fathom how he could have been so far ahead of the rest.
I'd like to throw in a vote for Harvey. His Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Living Beings is a fantastic example of scientific writing, showing the sort of rigorous reasoning I would associate more with mathematics than biology.
You do realize that my correction is more succinct than the orginal right?
While the intended meaning of the sentence is clear, the sentence is poorly written. "Showing up on time" isn't a rule, it's a action, and as such doesn't make much sense modifying 'rules.' A more correct statement would look something like "insubordination or repeated violation of rules such as the rule requiring teachers to show up on time."
Of course, that's awful too, so probably the whole thing should be rephrased to something like "insubordination, repeated violation of rules, or chronic tardiness," which conveys all the intended ideas much less awkwardly. I'm sure a better phrasing exists, but the point is, if this is the sort of writing produced by professionals today, our education system has been a mess for a long time now.
First I'd like to say that for the most part I agree with your stance. Copyright and patents exist for a reason, and the reason isn't obsolete just yet. That said, I agree with the people who say that intellectual property doesn't exist.
There is no intrinsic reason that people should be granted an exclusive right to the use of ideas they come up with, and claiming otherwise is basically equivalent to claiming that because a law exists, it is incorrect to try to change it. Rather, IP law exists because it provides a net benefit to society by encouraging creation and innovation. It comes with the negative effects of slowing the spread of new ideas, and of having associated legal costs for the enforcement. The question of setting copyright law for a given area comes down to deciding if the benefit in increased innovation is greater than the costs.
The recording industry is an example of copyright gone wrong. The benefit to society is rather small; the vast majority of artists make their money primarily from live performances, and would still make that music if they couldn't sell CDs. In fact, I'm reasonably confident that most artists would continue to make cds and give them away for free for the publicity. On the flip side, the cost in terms of legal enforcement, and complications about what you can and cant do with music is rather large. Clearly the law isn't serving it's purpose in this case.
Reporters necessarily leave out most of the details of any event they report on. For example, at a convention thousands of things will be said, but there's only room in the article to provide a handful of quotes. Reporters will (and should) pick the quotes that they believe are most representative and telling - they will report the things which they believe best convey the essence of what happened. If you think that any two reporters (let alone reporters with different political affiliations) are going to consistently agree about what constitutes the essence of what happened, I think you're crazy!
Some sort of bias is inevitable. A good reporter can make the bias small, but there are, as far as I can tell, very few if any really good reporters out there.
I never claimed that protests are the exclusive means for the people to make their will known; there are of course other measures such as the ballot box and lobbying. However, the idea that protests represent a breakdown of the democratic process is downright fantasy. I've never heard of a democratic government that operated for any length of time without protest, so your real democracy has never existed on earth.
The idea that the will of the people is "imaged onto the actions of their elected government" seems equally bizarre to me. I've never seen the slightest evidence for this occurring in any democracy, and more importantly, don't see it as remotely desirable. It is a fundamental feature of a representative democracy that sometimes the will of the majority is ignored, and often this is a good thing.
Finally, if you can't see how protesting in a dictatorship is less effective than protesting in a democracy, I really don't know what to add to my earlier post. It seems so blatantly obvious that I'm at a loss to guess what part needs explaining.
Either we have a democracy, in which case demonstrations and protests again the democratically elected goverment shouldnt be needed, or we dont, in which case we dont need elections.
You must be one of those people who believes democracy operates based on fairy dust and kittens. Protests in the street are a particularly notable feature of democracy, not something democracy eliminates the need for!
To spell it out for you, politicians are for the most part corrupt and immoral and have little interest in mirroring the will of the people, but at least in a democracy the people have some leverage. Politicians can ignore a small fraction of the population pretty safely, but when that fraction takes to the streets and threatens to attract a lot of attention the politicians have to start worrying about reelection.
Democracy is not a perfect system, in fact it has many disadvantages when compared to a well run dictatorship, but the fact people can safely and effectively take to the streets in protest makes it the most effective system we've found yet.
The options to check time are limited... * Local machine time * NTP server time * Specialized time server set up by creators
Or there's a fourth option. (which according to TFA is what it actually does) which is to get time from http headers by contacting a bunch of websites. Which is a lot like your 2nd option, though slightly harder to fool.
More importantly, there's not much to be gained by tricking the worm, we know what it does - it tries to get instructions from the internet. For that matter, even if we didn't know, it would be simple enough to push an update to change the behavior of the worm at the last minute
Just looking at the physics, rear end collisions tend to be much safer than other types because you generally have the least relative velocity, and the damage done is proportional to the energy dissipated, which is roughly proportional to the square of the relative velocity.
If you're both moving and the guy in front brakes, the guy in back may brake too late but even so, the relative velocity is going to be a lot lower than in a side or head on collision. If the guy in front wasn't moving to start with, then the cars were probably pretty close together to start with, and the car behind hasn't had enough time to build up much speed.
T-bone collisions are bad because there's a lot less metal between the car and the driver to absorb the energy of the impact. Head on collisions tend to be bad because cars have very high relative velocities (the velocities add instead of subtracting as in a rear end collision).
This is normal. When you double the resolution, you double it in 2 dimensions. (Height and Width) This results in a four-fold increase in data size.
Actually, this is just plain wrong. A camera's megapixel rating specifies how many million pixels it stores, and should scale linearly with file size. So, for example, assuming a 3:2 aspect ratio (which I understand is pretty common), a 4 megapixel camera would produce images with a resolution of approximately 2450x1630 (I'm rounding to the nearest 10 pixels), and an 8 megapixel camera would produce images with an approximate resolution of 3460x2310. So both dimensions aren't in fact doubled. (They're multiplied by root 2 for those keeping track)
If an 8 megapixel camera is producing images four times as large as a 4 megapixel camera it must be using less effective compression.
where's the Photoshop or InDesign clones?
Here and here. I've not used Scribus much, but I actually prefer GIMP to Photoshop in most cases.
I agree that Open Office really just isn't up to par, though. Open Office is fine, or even better than MS Office for a casual user, but it fails pretty badly for a serious user.
Mod parent up!
This article does indeed highlight a disturbing lack of scientific literacy, but only by demonstrating how poorly even the authors understand science. Science is a method, not a collection of facts, and while the first question (about the time it takes the earth to revolve around the sun) might qualify as a real question of understanding, the other two are just factoids.
The core of scientific literacy is having the set of skills listed above, and a mindset that insists on applying these skills to every situation you encounter. Anything short of that is, at best, bad science, and more often than not, mere metaphysics.