But the Russian's would never do that! They're the good guys, not like those sneaky Canadians that sold India the reactor they used to produce their bomb materials!
They're hardly similar.
India and Canada are both commonwealth countries. India has a stable, democratic government and doesn't go around starting wars. China (a nuclear power) and Pakistan were both threatening India.
Also, India isn't well off as far as natural resources go, and has a large population, so nuclear power is the obvious choice for their electricity needs. Giving them the capability to make their own fuel wasn't nearly as much of a risk.
And they made nukes from it. The world watched, and learned.
Iran, on the other hand, is openly antagonistic toward quite a few of their neighbors and is ruled by a religious body. It doesn't need nuclear power - it's got plenty of oil - and certainly doesn't need to make its own fuel to be energy independent. After seeing what the Indians did when being able to make their own fuel, no one sane is going to give Iran the same capability.
A better comparison would be the US giving nuclear weapons capability to Pakistan. That was just fucking stupid.
Seriously? They've built a lot more than the US has over the last 30 years and they've got the accelerated thorium idea heading towards construction.
Considering the US doesn't care about thorium reactors, that's hardly surprising.
From Wikipedia:
According to replies given in Q&A in the Indian Parliament on two separate occasions, 19 August 2010 and 21 March 2012, large scale thorium deployment is only to be expected "3 – 4 decades after the commercial operation of fast breeder reactors with short doubling time".[69][35] Full exploitation of India’s domestic thorium reserves will likely not occur until after the year 2050.
India discovered large uranium deposits in 2011. I will be surprised if this doesn't delay their thorium plans.
I highly doubt the Joran reactor will be a breeder reactor.
It's one thing to build a nuke plant in a non-nuclear country, it's something completely different to give them a machine for making plutonium. Yes, commercial plants produce plutonium, but it's not weapons grade and requires a lot of processing to make it so - which is why you still see RMBK-style reactors running.
As far as the thorium thing goes, considering most plutonium in the US is produced by reactors specially built for the purpose of creating plutonium, your argument doesn't quite fly. It's much more likely that, given the abundance of uranium and the extremely conservative nature of the nuclear industry, it wasn't considered important to spend time and money developing an entire new reactor technology.
I really hope someone does, though. It would solve a lot of the proliferation issues and offer a safe alternative for situations like this. India's been making noise about it, but the last I checked they hadn't really done much in the way of building actual reactors.
The US and Isreal don't really care if Iran builds nuclear plants. They could make dirty bombs with them, but that's about it. Most reactors don't produce plutonium, and even Russia isn't crazy enough to build them one that would.
We don't like them enriching uranium to fuel their reactors. Russia and France have both offered to provide them with fuel (at a very low cost, IIRC), and the Iranians have refused.
The same process that makes nuclear fuel can make weapons-grade materials. If you can get weapons-grade uranium, you can build little-boy style bombs dead easy - they're much less complex than plutonium-based bombs. Just the stuff you need if you want a nuclear weapons program quick.
Iran hasn't come up with a good explanation of why they want to process their own fuel. The equipment is expensive, the maintenance is expensive, and the energy cost is high. Iran is also antagonistic against the only nuclear power in the middle east. It's not too hard to connect the dots.
The people in power and the people trying to push the country in one direction or the other are not identical.
There are three groups here: 1) People actually in power (which means able to influence the government). These include a lot of non-elected people and organizations such as government employees, lobbyists, special interest groups, media outlets (Fox, MSNBC), and large corporations. These may or may not belong to or support a particluar party. They always look out for their own best interests.
2) People who vote and are easily swayed by sayings such as "let's make the government smaller!" or "Let's make things fair for everyone!" This is the majority of both parties. They don't have power, but are the source of power for those in office. They generally don't think too much about politics and believe what they hear on TV or from their friends. They can only influence group 1 as a group, but group 1 is pretty good at controlling them. This sounds cynical, but remember how much of a stink was raised because of who Obama's pastor was? Or that GWB tried cocaine? That's group 1 trying to control group 2. It works.
3) People who are irrelevant. Since I'm an independant in a heavily red state, that would be me and those like me.
The libertarian subset of the Republican party is generating a lot of votes. Those in power know this. Why give you the apple for $1 today, when they can get $1 every day for the promise of an eventual apple? The small-government people will keep voting for them, and keep seeing the government grow, because Democrats and communism and unamerican types. When the Republicans gain power again, it'll be the same old, same old - just watch and see. Why would they limit the government when they're in charge of it?
There is another party (including almost all of its supporters) which has contempt for limited government.
It's a valid viewpoint. Some things are done most efficiently from the top, and it's easier to have standardized laws for things that aren't location specific. You obviously don't agree, but that's a valid viewpoint too.
Both viewpoints are largely irrelevant, however. The government isn't going to get any smaller. You're better off thinking about what you want the larger government to be like. Don't like social programs? Vote based on that. Want more military spending? Vote based on that. Want to limit the power of the government? Not going to happen.
But what would you have done? Nothing?
That's all I can do, since I'm in the third group. But even if my vote did actually count, I wouldn't buy the limited government line. It's never going to happen.
Learning vi (at first) is all about building muscle memory. Once you do, it feels natural.
My job involves converting MS Office documents into webpages. I do it all in vim. I've scripted a lot of it (and obviously I didn't write the docx2txt converter), but I still do a lot of manual editing as well. Jobs I've had in the past involved doing security audits on Sun and HP machines that didn't have anything but vi, so I started this job with the skillset I needed.
I used to use pico (what nano is a clone of) and DOS edit before that, and I was adept at them. For my current work, I wouldn't have near the productivity in nano that I do in vi.
Here's the key words of your post:
whenever I need to edit text in a Linux terminal
That's why vi is arcane to you. You don't spend hours a day editing text files. For those of us that, do, vi (or emacs, for the people that went that route) is a godsend.
nano is great for what it is (well, pico was, I'm assuming nano is). It's an editor for people who don't edit enough text to make it worth learning a more complex editor.
Attitudes like this are part of why commercial UNIX got clobbered by Linux and BSD.
Ever use an old version of Solaris without GNU utilities? Or HPUX? Or (shudder) UNIXware?
The basic utilities would feel right at home to someone on UNIX 7. Clunky, unintuitive, lacking modern features, and bug-ridden. Some hardcore UNIX heads liked it, although I can't fathom why. Sun wised up after a while - no idea about HP. Even on Linux, you're seeing vim replace all the other vi clones like elVIs, to the complaint of practically no one.
If you're going to spend all day wielding a buggy whip, you want one that's comfortable in your hand.
The thing about vi and emacs is while they're superior editors, they're really only helpful for people who do a lot of text editing. If you don't, you'll never build up the skill those programs require.
I picked up vi because I had to work on Sun and HP machines that didn't have anything but vi and ed. It wasn't hard, but I did (and still do) a lot of text editing so I was able to build the muscle memory. If you need it - it's great. If you don't, pico/nano is more than adequate for most people.
If your needs change, and you find yourself editing a lot of text, don't shy away from the more powerful editors. Once you learn one of them (really learn, not just play around for a couple hours), you'll never look back.
Which of the two political parties in America want to roll back Imperial Washington?
Neither.
Which of the two political parties wants an ever larger, ever more powerful government and which one has a large percentage of people who want to go to a government with limited powers as enumerated in the US Constitution?
Both parties want a larger, more powerful government, despite what the libertarians say. When was the last time anyone actually made the government smaller? The only difference is what shape the larger government will be.
I've generally found that "smaller government" and "less regulation" pretty much equates to "let the big corps do whatever they want." People who think it means "less social safety net" are forgetting Medicare part D and the other social programs put through during the Bush II administration.
And "limited powers as enumerated in the US Constitution?" Nobody in power wants that. Don't listen to what they say, watch what they do.
The rarity of intelligent life is up to debate, sure, but I think you're missing just how insanely huge the universe is and how many stars are in it.
It's highly unlikely (unless our understanding of the universe is completely off-base and practical FTL travel is possible) that we'll ever encounter extraterrestrials - remember, there's not just a lot of space for them to be in but a lot of time, too - but the probability of Earth being the only place where life exists is small enough to be indistiguishable from zero.
Blender's not just for the Blender faithful, but yeah, the UI is quite a bit different than the other major 3D suites out there. The same skills apply, but there's an adjustment period if you want to switch from one to another.
(Note that ZBrush - considered the ultimate in sculpting programs - also has a completely weird interface)
Anyway: Apps: Blender's nice because it does everything, although some things it doesn't do too terribly well (for instance, you can edit images in it, but you're better off using Photoshop or Gimp for anything complex). If you don't like Blender, Maya or 3DS Max are considered pretty standard. They're both owned by Autodesk, and Autodesk knows that the people who pirate their software today are the people who buy their software tomorrow. That's why there are free downloads these days.
Course: like another poster said, Youtube is your friend here. If you need motivation, most colleges offer 3D classes. Forums are a good source of information and motivation, especially competitions that push you to do something you normally wouldn't think of trying.
Formats: No idea, I don't do the 3D printing thing. It most likely depends on what hardware you're using.
Packages: For 3D printing, you want modelling and maybe sculpting tools. For 3D animation, you want animation tools (as well as texturing, sculpting, modelling, compositing, etc.). 3DS Max or Blender are good for modelling. Both can create models useful for 3D printing (with add-ons, possibly - Blender addons are generally free). I've heard a lot of complaints about Maya's modelling system, but I don't have direct experience with it - YMMV. For Animation, Blender and Maya are good. I've heard good things about Daz Studio as well, but it has no modelling capability - it's animation only. I'm not sure what kind of post-processing Daz or Maya offer, but Blender has many features in that area as well - video sequence editor, compositing system, etc. and can (more or less) replace software such as Adobe Aftereffects and your video editor - the featureset isn't as complete, but it may be enough for your needs.
Printer: No idea here.
PC/CUDA/etc.: Unless you're doing a lot of rendering using a CUDA-aware renderer, you don't need anything fancy here. As long as you have a decentish video card and relatively fast system, your best bet is to maximize your system RAM. Cycles on Blender uses CUDA, and whlie it's much faster than CPU rendering, it's not feature complete on the GPU (yet). Luxrender is the way to go if you're a Blenderhead and have an AMD card. If you do want to do a lot of GPU rendering, video RAM is probably the most important factor after making sure your rendering software can support the technology used by the card. For a home user, just setting up another machine that you can offload the rendering to is usually good enough - let it render while you sleep.
Physics: This will depend on what you're trying to do. If you're talking gaming, forget the Blender game engine - it's cool, but useless for commercial work. Choose what software (Unity, Unreal, etc.) you're going to use and get the hardware supported by it. If you're talking physics for animation, Blender and I'm sure Maya has you covered. How to do it depends on the software. Youtube is your friend here.
What else: If you really want to learn, you have to do it, and keep doing it. Just like most things, really. Read all you want - it helps - and watch videos and tutorials - but in the end it's all about getting in there and screwing things up. The software used isn't important, and the hardware isn't important - until it is, but by that point you'll know what you need to know and can make more informed decisions for yourself. Someone who spends an hour a day making useless crap in Blender is going to be a much better artist than someone who watches every Maya video out there. Get something and do something with it, and keep doing something until you're good.
It doesn't need double floats for rendering, and it has to load the data for the whole pass into the video RAM to use CUDA. That puts a limit on your scene complexity.
There are various issues using monolithic kernels on AMD cards. Until Blender's GPU renderer (Cycles) is redesigned to use microkernels (work is in progress, but it'll take a while), NVidia is where it's at.
I just do the stuff as a hobby, but if I were a professional, I'd have a couple of Titans in my machine right now, largely for the 6GB vRAM.
In other words, competing with the telco is easy - you just have to be a gigantic company with tons of money to do it. That doesn't apply to the vast majority of companies, hence why Google doesn't count.
The FCC are more or less semi-communists, A number of "rules and regulations" were bought and paid for by corporate monopolies and have in fact severely hurt if not killed certain freedoms.
Those two statements are contradictory. Americans are still getting over the cold-war anti-communism brainwashing that resulted in millions of people absolutely hating communism without having any idea of what it actually is.
Now, if the FCC was greatly expanded and took direct ownership over the companies that operate under its rules, that would be semi-communist.
Or, for instance, when the government bought General Motors.
Your description is more akin to fascism than communism.
(I'm not defending communism here, BTW - it just pisses me off that so many people use the term incorrectly when they usually mean totalitarian or fascist.)
In this case investors will opt-out of providing last-mile networking services.
What investors?
Who in their right mind would invest in providing last mile networking service anyway (besides Google, they're big enough they don't count)?
The only way to make money putting in last mile infastructure is to be the first to do it. Once that cost is done, the owner of those lines can charge whatever they like, including dropping prices to make it unprofitable for any competitor.
Who owns the lines? AT&T, Verizon, and the other baby Bells (and occasionally the city government (probably contracted to a Bell to actually operate the lines) or a small local phone company (I'd be surprised if those aren't rare these days)), and the cable companies. They're the people who have the natural monopoly. If you have more than one choice for broadband (two if you have cable where you are), it's in spite of the efforts of the local monopoly. The only reason cable and DSL coexist is because the phone monopolies didn't see the cable companies as a threat when the cable lines were installed.
So imagine these new rules didn't exist. Things are all status quo, just another day, ho humm. Would you invest in a company that wants to provide last-mile networking service? If so, I have some nice beach property to sell you here in beautiful Oklahoma.
Second, you credit the FCC for not harming people in the same way you might credit a robber for not shooting a clerk for cooperating during a robbery. It's the threat of violence that's a problem.
Did a government run over your dog or something as a child?
You think the FCC is going to show up at AT&T headquarters with their vans and run in with assault weapons? All the cubicle monkeys forced to lay on the floor with their hands over their heads?
Yes, the FCC does have them. I know someone who was stung by them (for operating a linear on his CB to pump a few kW into his signal). They take all your equipment and charge you $1/watt in a fine (might be higher now). Do you really think they'd do that to a company in breach of broadband regulations? If so, see above comment about beach land - I'll throw a bridge in with it.
No, the FCC would issue AT&T a fine. If AT&T kept it up, they'd take them to court. It's no different than you being taken to court by AT&T or a collection agency if you ran up a huge phone bill and didn't pay it. Sucky? Yes. Violent? No.
1) You don't need rockets to launch from the moon. A mass driver would do the trick nicely, and only require electricity. Plenty of sunlight on the moon. 2) Solar, for above 3) Not really. You need to be able to mine them and put them into space for a reasonable cost compared to Earth. It's the "put them into space" that's expensive. 4) Adjust that to add the cost to launch into space, but true nonetheless. We won't be putting semiconductor fabs on the moon any time soon. Things like concrete, on the other hand, would likely turn out cost effective. We don't build space stations with a lot of mass because of the cost to put that mass up there.
Cheaper rockets are a good thing, and will be necessary if we're to put anything permanant on the moon, but the moon is still required if we are ever to do any sort of large-scale construction in space.
It's easier to go to the moon than go much further down than we already have. There's a lot of unexplored sideways, though.
That said, while I'm not sure the moon holds anything that would be worth bringing back (as a commodity, not as research), asteroids do. The amount of gold and platinum group metals in the crust is limited. Certain types of asteroids carry those in abundance (they're where we got our gold and platinum from, after all - all the original heavy metals sank into the core when the Earth was still molten). There are forms of solids in asteroids that just don't form in a gravity well - the properties of which we know almost nothing about. Who knows what material researchers could do with them?
Mining asteroids wouldn't be cost effective at first, but once you scale it up it might be. Even if it's not, imagine if we found enough metals to double the amount of platinum we have access to (I've heard that by melting all the platinum in the crust, you could fill an olympic sized pool three inches. That's not a lot.). There are a lot of applications that could benefit from platinum, but we don't use because of the cost and low availability.
Back to the point, the true value of mining the moon would be the savings involved in getting mass into space. Set up some mining and basic factories on the moon, and fling the products into orbit with a mass driver. If we are to start building in space, we need the materials the moon can provide. Or we need a space elevator. Rockets just aren't cutting it.
I don't have any math to back me up, but I seriously doubt we'd be able to get anywhere near the core on the moon.
It's nothing to do with temperatures, it's the pressure. We've never managed to get close to the mantle here on earth because rock under that much pressure has some of the attributes of a viscous liquid. You'd think that would make the drilling easier, but it doesn't.
The moon has ~1/6th the gravity of the Earth, but it's still a long way down to the core. We could most likely drill much deeper than we could here on Earth, but getting all the way to the core isn't going to happen.
The mantle may be a possibility. Someone more familiar with the geology of the moon could comment on the mineral content of the lunar mantle.
We could try your experiement on one of Mars' moons, though.
I played with KDE back before GNOME started. It was OK, and for non-geeks that was the desktop I set up. My girlfriend at the time had no issues with it. I was bouncing between Enlightenment, FVWM, and Afterstep at the time.
The GNOME started up, and I switched to it back when it was barely there - 0.20 or something. Officially, Enlightenment was their reccomended WM, but it worked with almost anything. I ran it under TWM for kicks once. Painful...
Fast forward, and GNOME just started getting less and less to my liking. The "usability experts" Sun was providing kept wanting to dumb everything down and remove configurability. GNOME switched from E to Sawmill (later Sawfish), which required you to learn some obscure dialect of Lisp to configure. Then it switched to Metacity - the "our way or the highway" window manager. I said screw it and went back to FVWM and stayed there for about a decade (Enlightenment had gotten weird, with their pull-down desktops and whatnot, and I wasn't into that at all).
Fast forward again to about six months ago. I was getting off the road (I was a truck driver) and going to do some development work out of the house. I built a nice beefy machine and tried running Mint with the Cinnamon desktop (getting a non-DE setup like FVWM working with polkit and all the other stuff is a nightmare). After about a month, I noticed my workflow was exactly the same as when I was forced to use Windows. So, I decided to give KDE a try...
And WOW. It's great. I've got usable desktop switching - something I've only experienced in the older WMs. Move the mouse to the edge of the screen (any edge, my desktops are in a 3x3 configuration) and it works great. Cinnamon could do it, but it was practially unusable (and limited to horizontal desktops, IIRC), and most other modern DE can't do it at all. Everything I want to configure is configurable.
The only complaint I have is that every time it starts, I have to load my.Xdefaults file. No biggie. I know I can turn off the option for that, but that same option also configures GTK apps, which I _do_ want to happen. I restart maybe once every two or three months, so it's not a big thing for me.
My laptop still runs FVWM, and probably will until it dies. It's my primary work machine, ironically enough - I'm not productive at home. I admit I will miss the absolute configurability you get with FVWM, but I'm old enough now that spending hours honing my.fvwmrc to perfection just isn't as appealing as it once was.
(Completely unrelated to this but marginally related to the topic: Blender got rejected by GSOC for the first time in 10 years. I'm kinda bummed about that.)
Re:R is fine if you're in love with statistics
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Go R, Young Man
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That's certainly very true, except for the "good luck doing this in VBA" thing. VBA is turing complete. It might not produce dozens of plots in a few seconds, but it certainly can produce the same plots. I'm not doubting R's ability to do what it was designed to do - I'm doubting its applicability to the average office worker.
Imagine you're a random drone working in HR for a company producing nozzles for squirt bottles. You do a lot of work in Excel because hey, it's the lingua franca of the business world. VBA and Access can:
a) automate many of the boring, repetitive parts of your job b) allow you to do many more things with your data than vanilla Excel is capable of c) impress your boss and coworkers, which if you play the rat race, is the most important thing
Something like Crystal Reports (again, I have no idea if it's still used, I'm a decade and a half behind in the business world) can turn your spreadsheet printouts into beautiful documents. VBA can be used along with Word to do this too, and would be an option if you don't have access to a good reporting suite.
Oh, and good luck convincing the IT guys to add an R environment to the software they allow on the corporate network. VBA is on every corporate machine that has Microsoft Office.
The only real downside I see to VBA is the fact that it's a horrible abortion of a language that makes you want to stab yourself in the eyes rather than program in it. Or maybe that's just me.
Given that I know a lot more about what's going on in my own head, I'm calling bullshit on your armchair psychology.
I know what I'm capable of, and what I'm not. I wasn't capable of attaking someone with a pencil in school. I was capable of shooting someone in anger, had I been armed. It's the difference between standing up to a bully and his friends, therefore getting your ass kicked, and shooting the bully and any of his friends that didn't run away.
The difference is obvious to me. Just because it isn't obvious to you doesn't mean you understand how my brain works.
Maybe. I don't know, I don't worry too much about what the president or any random senator does, as long as they don't have much affect on my day-to-day life. So far Obama hasn't, and didn't when he was a senator either.
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But the Russian's would never do that! They're the good guys, not like those sneaky Canadians that sold India the reactor they used to produce their bomb materials!
They're hardly similar.
India and Canada are both commonwealth countries. India has a stable, democratic government and doesn't go around starting wars. China (a nuclear power) and Pakistan were both threatening India.
Also, India isn't well off as far as natural resources go, and has a large population, so nuclear power is the obvious choice for their electricity needs. Giving them the capability to make their own fuel wasn't nearly as much of a risk.
And they made nukes from it. The world watched, and learned.
Iran, on the other hand, is openly antagonistic toward quite a few of their neighbors and is ruled by a religious body. It doesn't need nuclear power - it's got plenty of oil - and certainly doesn't need to make its own fuel to be energy independent. After seeing what the Indians did when being able to make their own fuel, no one sane is going to give Iran the same capability.
A better comparison would be the US giving nuclear weapons capability to Pakistan. That was just fucking stupid.
Seriously? They've built a lot more than the US has over the last 30 years and they've got the accelerated thorium idea heading towards construction.
Considering the US doesn't care about thorium reactors, that's hardly surprising.
From Wikipedia:
India discovered large uranium deposits in 2011. I will be surprised if this doesn't delay their thorium plans.
I highly doubt the Joran reactor will be a breeder reactor.
It's one thing to build a nuke plant in a non-nuclear country, it's something completely different to give them a machine for making plutonium. Yes, commercial plants produce plutonium, but it's not weapons grade and requires a lot of processing to make it so - which is why you still see RMBK-style reactors running.
As far as the thorium thing goes, considering most plutonium in the US is produced by reactors specially built for the purpose of creating plutonium, your argument doesn't quite fly. It's much more likely that, given the abundance of uranium and the extremely conservative nature of the nuclear industry, it wasn't considered important to spend time and money developing an entire new reactor technology.
I really hope someone does, though. It would solve a lot of the proliferation issues and offer a safe alternative for situations like this. India's been making noise about it, but the last I checked they hadn't really done much in the way of building actual reactors.
The US and Isreal don't really care if Iran builds nuclear plants. They could make dirty bombs with them, but that's about it. Most reactors don't produce plutonium, and even Russia isn't crazy enough to build them one that would.
We don't like them enriching uranium to fuel their reactors. Russia and France have both offered to provide them with fuel (at a very low cost, IIRC), and the Iranians have refused.
The same process that makes nuclear fuel can make weapons-grade materials. If you can get weapons-grade uranium, you can build little-boy style bombs dead easy - they're much less complex than plutonium-based bombs. Just the stuff you need if you want a nuclear weapons program quick.
Iran hasn't come up with a good explanation of why they want to process their own fuel. The equipment is expensive, the maintenance is expensive, and the energy cost is high. Iran is also antagonistic against the only nuclear power in the middle east. It's not too hard to connect the dots.
The people in power and the people trying to push the country in one direction or the other are not identical.
There are three groups here:
1) People actually in power (which means able to influence the government). These include a lot of non-elected people and organizations such as government employees, lobbyists, special interest groups, media outlets (Fox, MSNBC), and large corporations. These may or may not belong to or support a particluar party. They always look out for their own best interests.
2) People who vote and are easily swayed by sayings such as "let's make the government smaller!" or "Let's make things fair for everyone!" This is the majority of both parties. They don't have power, but are the source of power for those in office. They generally don't think too much about politics and believe what they hear on TV or from their friends. They can only influence group 1 as a group, but group 1 is pretty good at controlling them. This sounds cynical, but remember how much of a stink was raised because of who Obama's pastor was? Or that GWB tried cocaine? That's group 1 trying to control group 2. It works.
3) People who are irrelevant. Since I'm an independant in a heavily red state, that would be me and those like me.
The libertarian subset of the Republican party is generating a lot of votes. Those in power know this. Why give you the apple for $1 today, when they can get $1 every day for the promise of an eventual apple? The small-government people will keep voting for them, and keep seeing the government grow, because Democrats and communism and unamerican types. When the Republicans gain power again, it'll be the same old, same old - just watch and see. Why would they limit the government when they're in charge of it?
There is another party (including almost all of its supporters) which has contempt for limited government.
It's a valid viewpoint. Some things are done most efficiently from the top, and it's easier to have standardized laws for things that aren't location specific. You obviously don't agree, but that's a valid viewpoint too.
Both viewpoints are largely irrelevant, however. The government isn't going to get any smaller. You're better off thinking about what you want the larger government to be like. Don't like social programs? Vote based on that. Want more military spending? Vote based on that. Want to limit the power of the government? Not going to happen.
But what would you have done? Nothing?
That's all I can do, since I'm in the third group. But even if my vote did actually count, I wouldn't buy the limited government line. It's never going to happen.
Learning vi (at first) is all about building muscle memory. Once you do, it feels natural.
My job involves converting MS Office documents into webpages. I do it all in vim. I've scripted a lot of it (and obviously I didn't write the docx2txt converter), but I still do a lot of manual editing as well. Jobs I've had in the past involved doing security audits on Sun and HP machines that didn't have anything but vi, so I started this job with the skillset I needed.
I used to use pico (what nano is a clone of) and DOS edit before that, and I was adept at them. For my current work, I wouldn't have near the productivity in nano that I do in vi.
Here's the key words of your post:
whenever I need to edit text in a Linux terminal
That's why vi is arcane to you. You don't spend hours a day editing text files. For those of us that, do, vi (or emacs, for the people that went that route) is a godsend.
nano is great for what it is (well, pico was, I'm assuming nano is). It's an editor for people who don't edit enough text to make it worth learning a more complex editor.
Attitudes like this are part of why commercial UNIX got clobbered by Linux and BSD.
Ever use an old version of Solaris without GNU utilities? Or HPUX? Or (shudder) UNIXware?
The basic utilities would feel right at home to someone on UNIX 7. Clunky, unintuitive, lacking modern features, and bug-ridden. Some hardcore UNIX heads liked it, although I can't fathom why. Sun wised up after a while - no idea about HP. Even on Linux, you're seeing vim replace all the other vi clones like elVIs, to the complaint of practically no one.
If you're going to spend all day wielding a buggy whip, you want one that's comfortable in your hand.
The thing about vi and emacs is while they're superior editors, they're really only helpful for people who do a lot of text editing. If you don't, you'll never build up the skill those programs require.
I picked up vi because I had to work on Sun and HP machines that didn't have anything but vi and ed. It wasn't hard, but I did (and still do) a lot of text editing so I was able to build the muscle memory. If you need it - it's great. If you don't, pico/nano is more than adequate for most people.
If your needs change, and you find yourself editing a lot of text, don't shy away from the more powerful editors. Once you learn one of them (really learn, not just play around for a couple hours), you'll never look back.
Which of the two political parties in America want to roll back Imperial Washington?
Neither.
Which of the two political parties wants an ever larger, ever more powerful government and which one has a large percentage of people who want to go to a government with limited powers as enumerated in the US Constitution?
Both parties want a larger, more powerful government, despite what the libertarians say. When was the last time anyone actually made the government smaller? The only difference is what shape the larger government will be.
I've generally found that "smaller government" and "less regulation" pretty much equates to "let the big corps do whatever they want." People who think it means "less social safety net" are forgetting Medicare part D and the other social programs put through during the Bush II administration.
And "limited powers as enumerated in the US Constitution?" Nobody in power wants that. Don't listen to what they say, watch what they do.
The rarity of intelligent life is up to debate, sure, but I think you're missing just how insanely huge the universe is and how many stars are in it.
It's highly unlikely (unless our understanding of the universe is completely off-base and practical FTL travel is possible) that we'll ever encounter extraterrestrials - remember, there's not just a lot of space for them to be in but a lot of time, too - but the probability of Earth being the only place where life exists is small enough to be indistiguishable from zero.
Blender's not just for the Blender faithful, but yeah, the UI is quite a bit different than the other major 3D suites out there. The same skills apply, but there's an adjustment period if you want to switch from one to another.
(Note that ZBrush - considered the ultimate in sculpting programs - also has a completely weird interface)
Anyway:
Apps: Blender's nice because it does everything, although some things it doesn't do too terribly well (for instance, you can edit images in it, but you're better off using Photoshop or Gimp for anything complex). If you don't like Blender, Maya or 3DS Max are considered pretty standard. They're both owned by Autodesk, and Autodesk knows that the people who pirate their software today are the people who buy their software tomorrow. That's why there are free downloads these days.
Course: like another poster said, Youtube is your friend here. If you need motivation, most colleges offer 3D classes. Forums are a good source of information and motivation, especially competitions that push you to do something you normally wouldn't think of trying.
Formats: No idea, I don't do the 3D printing thing. It most likely depends on what hardware you're using.
Packages: For 3D printing, you want modelling and maybe sculpting tools. For 3D animation, you want animation tools (as well as texturing, sculpting, modelling, compositing, etc.). 3DS Max or Blender are good for modelling. Both can create models useful for 3D printing (with add-ons, possibly - Blender addons are generally free). I've heard a lot of complaints about Maya's modelling system, but I don't have direct experience with it - YMMV. For Animation, Blender and Maya are good. I've heard good things about Daz Studio as well, but it has no modelling capability - it's animation only. I'm not sure what kind of post-processing Daz or Maya offer, but Blender has many features in that area as well - video sequence editor, compositing system, etc. and can (more or less) replace software such as Adobe Aftereffects and your video editor - the featureset isn't as complete, but it may be enough for your needs.
Printer: No idea here.
PC/CUDA/etc.: Unless you're doing a lot of rendering using a CUDA-aware renderer, you don't need anything fancy here. As long as you have a decentish video card and relatively fast system, your best bet is to maximize your system RAM. Cycles on Blender uses CUDA, and whlie it's much faster than CPU rendering, it's not feature complete on the GPU (yet). Luxrender is the way to go if you're a Blenderhead and have an AMD card. If you do want to do a lot of GPU rendering, video RAM is probably the most important factor after making sure your rendering software can support the technology used by the card. For a home user, just setting up another machine that you can offload the rendering to is usually good enough - let it render while you sleep.
Physics: This will depend on what you're trying to do. If you're talking gaming, forget the Blender game engine - it's cool, but useless for commercial work. Choose what software (Unity, Unreal, etc.) you're going to use and get the hardware supported by it. If you're talking physics for animation, Blender and I'm sure Maya has you covered. How to do it depends on the software. Youtube is your friend here.
What else: If you really want to learn, you have to do it, and keep doing it. Just like most things, really. Read all you want - it helps - and watch videos and tutorials - but in the end it's all about getting in there and screwing things up. The software used isn't important, and the hardware isn't important - until it is, but by that point you'll know what you need to know and can make more informed decisions for yourself. Someone who spends an hour a day making useless crap in Blender is going to be a much better artist than someone who watches every Maya video out there. Get something and do something with it, and keep doing something until you're good.
Blender would find it useful.
It doesn't need double floats for rendering, and it has to load the data for the whole pass into the video RAM to use CUDA. That puts a limit on your scene complexity.
There are various issues using monolithic kernels on AMD cards. Until Blender's GPU renderer (Cycles) is redesigned to use microkernels (work is in progress, but it'll take a while), NVidia is where it's at.
I just do the stuff as a hobby, but if I were a professional, I'd have a couple of Titans in my machine right now, largely for the 6GB vRAM.
Are you familiar with the term "outlier?"
In other words, competing with the telco is easy - you just have to be a gigantic company with tons of money to do it. That doesn't apply to the vast majority of companies, hence why Google doesn't count.
Not the guy you were talking to, but I'll answer.
Nothing. You've got fuel but no oxidizer.
Jupiter has thunderstorms larger than our planet. If the atmosphere could burn, it would have done so long ago.
Serious question. Last time I worked with with a Windows network, time was set by the domain controller on login.
I think, anyway. That was a long time ago.
A nitpick:
The FCC are more or less semi-communists, A number of "rules and regulations" were bought and paid for by corporate monopolies and have in fact severely hurt if not killed certain freedoms.
Those two statements are contradictory. Americans are still getting over the cold-war anti-communism brainwashing that resulted in millions of people absolutely hating communism without having any idea of what it actually is.
Now, if the FCC was greatly expanded and took direct ownership over the companies that operate under its rules, that would be semi-communist.
Or, for instance, when the government bought General Motors.
Your description is more akin to fascism than communism.
(I'm not defending communism here, BTW - it just pisses me off that so many people use the term incorrectly when they usually mean totalitarian or fascist.)
What investors?
Who in their right mind would invest in providing last mile networking service anyway (besides Google, they're big enough they don't count)?
The only way to make money putting in last mile infastructure is to be the first to do it. Once that cost is done, the owner of those lines can charge whatever they like, including dropping prices to make it unprofitable for any competitor.
Who owns the lines? AT&T, Verizon, and the other baby Bells (and occasionally the city government (probably contracted to a Bell to actually operate the lines) or a small local phone company (I'd be surprised if those aren't rare these days)), and the cable companies. They're the people who have the natural monopoly. If you have more than one choice for broadband (two if you have cable where you are), it's in spite of the efforts of the local monopoly. The only reason cable and DSL coexist is because the phone monopolies didn't see the cable companies as a threat when the cable lines were installed.
So imagine these new rules didn't exist. Things are all status quo, just another day, ho humm. Would you invest in a company that wants to provide last-mile networking service? If so, I have some nice beach property to sell you here in beautiful Oklahoma.
Second, you credit the FCC for not harming people in the same way you might credit a robber for not shooting a clerk for cooperating during a robbery. It's the threat of violence that's a problem.
Did a government run over your dog or something as a child?
You think the FCC is going to show up at AT&T headquarters with their vans and run in with assault weapons? All the cubicle monkeys forced to lay on the floor with their hands over their heads?
Yes, the FCC does have them. I know someone who was stung by them (for operating a linear on his CB to pump a few kW into his signal). They take all your equipment and charge you $1/watt in a fine (might be higher now). Do you really think they'd do that to a company in breach of broadband regulations? If so, see above comment about beach land - I'll throw a bridge in with it.
No, the FCC would issue AT&T a fine. If AT&T kept it up, they'd take them to court. It's no different than you being taken to court by AT&T or a collection agency if you ran up a huge phone bill and didn't pay it. Sucky? Yes. Violent? No.
You will still be here, so they're still right.
1) You don't need rockets to launch from the moon. A mass driver would do the trick nicely, and only require electricity. Plenty of sunlight on the moon.
2) Solar, for above
3) Not really. You need to be able to mine them and put them into space for a reasonable cost compared to Earth. It's the "put them into space" that's expensive.
4) Adjust that to add the cost to launch into space, but true nonetheless. We won't be putting semiconductor fabs on the moon any time soon. Things like concrete, on the other hand, would likely turn out cost effective. We don't build space stations with a lot of mass because of the cost to put that mass up there.
Cheaper rockets are a good thing, and will be necessary if we're to put anything permanant on the moon, but the moon is still required if we are ever to do any sort of large-scale construction in space.
It's easier to go to the moon than go much further down than we already have. There's a lot of unexplored sideways, though.
That said, while I'm not sure the moon holds anything that would be worth bringing back (as a commodity, not as research), asteroids do. The amount of gold and platinum group metals in the crust is limited. Certain types of asteroids carry those in abundance (they're where we got our gold and platinum from, after all - all the original heavy metals sank into the core when the Earth was still molten). There are forms of solids in asteroids that just don't form in a gravity well - the properties of which we know almost nothing about. Who knows what material researchers could do with them?
Mining asteroids wouldn't be cost effective at first, but once you scale it up it might be. Even if it's not, imagine if we found enough metals to double the amount of platinum we have access to (I've heard that by melting all the platinum in the crust, you could fill an olympic sized pool three inches. That's not a lot.). There are a lot of applications that could benefit from platinum, but we don't use because of the cost and low availability.
Back to the point, the true value of mining the moon would be the savings involved in getting mass into space. Set up some mining and basic factories on the moon, and fling the products into orbit with a mass driver. If we are to start building in space, we need the materials the moon can provide. Or we need a space elevator. Rockets just aren't cutting it.
I don't have any math to back me up, but I seriously doubt we'd be able to get anywhere near the core on the moon.
It's nothing to do with temperatures, it's the pressure. We've never managed to get close to the mantle here on earth because rock under that much pressure has some of the attributes of a viscous liquid. You'd think that would make the drilling easier, but it doesn't.
The moon has ~1/6th the gravity of the Earth, but it's still a long way down to the core. We could most likely drill much deeper than we could here on Earth, but getting all the way to the core isn't going to happen.
The mantle may be a possibility. Someone more familiar with the geology of the moon could comment on the mineral content of the lunar mantle.
We could try your experiement on one of Mars' moons, though.
Same here, actually.
I played with KDE back before GNOME started. It was OK, and for non-geeks that was the desktop I set up. My girlfriend at the time had no issues with it. I was bouncing between Enlightenment, FVWM, and Afterstep at the time.
The GNOME started up, and I switched to it back when it was barely there - 0.20 or something. Officially, Enlightenment was their reccomended WM, but it worked with almost anything. I ran it under TWM for kicks once. Painful...
Fast forward, and GNOME just started getting less and less to my liking. The "usability experts" Sun was providing kept wanting to dumb everything down and remove configurability. GNOME switched from E to Sawmill (later Sawfish), which required you to learn some obscure dialect of Lisp to configure. Then it switched to Metacity - the "our way or the highway" window manager. I said screw it and went back to FVWM and stayed there for about a decade (Enlightenment had gotten weird, with their pull-down desktops and whatnot, and I wasn't into that at all).
Fast forward again to about six months ago. I was getting off the road (I was a truck driver) and going to do some development work out of the house. I built a nice beefy machine and tried running Mint with the Cinnamon desktop (getting a non-DE setup like FVWM working with polkit and all the other stuff is a nightmare). After about a month, I noticed my workflow was exactly the same as when I was forced to use Windows. So, I decided to give KDE a try...
And WOW. It's great. I've got usable desktop switching - something I've only experienced in the older WMs. Move the mouse to the edge of the screen (any edge, my desktops are in a 3x3 configuration) and it works great. Cinnamon could do it, but it was practially unusable (and limited to horizontal desktops, IIRC), and most other modern DE can't do it at all. Everything I want to configure is configurable.
The only complaint I have is that every time it starts, I have to load my .Xdefaults file. No biggie. I know I can turn off the option for that, but that same option also configures GTK apps, which I _do_ want to happen. I restart maybe once every two or three months, so it's not a big thing for me.
My laptop still runs FVWM, and probably will until it dies. It's my primary work machine, ironically enough - I'm not productive at home. I admit I will miss the absolute configurability you get with FVWM, but I'm old enough now that spending hours honing my .fvwmrc to perfection just isn't as appealing as it once was.
(Completely unrelated to this but marginally related to the topic: Blender got rejected by GSOC for the first time in 10 years. I'm kinda bummed about that.)
That's certainly very true, except for the "good luck doing this in VBA" thing. VBA is turing complete. It might not produce dozens of plots in a few seconds, but it certainly can produce the same plots. I'm not doubting R's ability to do what it was designed to do - I'm doubting its applicability to the average office worker.
Imagine you're a random drone working in HR for a company producing nozzles for squirt bottles. You do a lot of work in Excel because hey, it's the lingua franca of the business world. VBA and Access can:
a) automate many of the boring, repetitive parts of your job
b) allow you to do many more things with your data than vanilla Excel is capable of
c) impress your boss and coworkers, which if you play the rat race, is the most important thing
Something like Crystal Reports (again, I have no idea if it's still used, I'm a decade and a half behind in the business world) can turn your spreadsheet printouts into beautiful documents. VBA can be used along with Word to do this too, and would be an option if you don't have access to a good reporting suite.
Oh, and good luck convincing the IT guys to add an R environment to the software they allow on the corporate network. VBA is on every corporate machine that has Microsoft Office.
The only real downside I see to VBA is the fact that it's a horrible abortion of a language that makes you want to stab yourself in the eyes rather than program in it. Or maybe that's just me.
Given that I know a lot more about what's going on in my own head, I'm calling bullshit on your armchair psychology.
I know what I'm capable of, and what I'm not. I wasn't capable of attaking someone with a pencil in school. I was capable of shooting someone in anger, had I been armed. It's the difference between standing up to a bully and his friends, therefore getting your ass kicked, and shooting the bully and any of his friends that didn't run away.
The difference is obvious to me. Just because it isn't obvious to you doesn't mean you understand how my brain works.
Maybe. I don't know, I don't worry too much about what the president or any random senator does, as long as they don't have much affect on my day-to-day life. So far Obama hasn't, and didn't when he was a senator either.
You're a few years too late for that. You shoulda asked him back when he was a senator, and could actually, you know, pass laws.