Unbuntu will never hit that target if they continue to push that Unity stuff down the throat of their user base. I'm a Unbuntu user and would like it if they gave a choice at upgrade time. Unity could be a choice (even the default choice) but they make it hard to install a different desktop. You have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get other than Unity.
This brings up an interesting point about the language of science. String theory is not yet proven to be true. There may be some evidence that it is true but is there enough evidence to justify the term "theory". (I'm not qualified enough to say.) Certainly there is not as much evidence for it as Einsteins general theory of relativity. I think science has to invent a term for an idea that, although it is promising, is not adequately proven. Maybe postulate? It might be a good idea to come up with a gradient of terms to describe things (Starting with "stupid idea") and ending with theory. The term "law" is inappropriate because it implies that no further refinements are possible. Look what happened to "Newtons Law of Gravity" and how Einstein changed our thinking about that.
I think this is more a commentary on the poor state of many programs today. Back when the Osborne was on the market, programmers had to get the most out of every byte of memory and every cycle of the CPU. Now, nobody cares about efficiency, we just put it on a faster bigger computer and throw away the "obsolete" computer. Yes, this also happened "way back when" but paying a thousand or more on a computer made people think twice before upgrading.
I refuse to play the "discount card" game. When I make a purchase at the local CVS, they ask if I have a discount card. I say "no" and the clerk scans the store copy and I get the discount anyways without giving personal information. Often when going to stores that do not have a "store card", another customer offers their card and the clerk scans that without objection. I have even encountered clerks that have their personal card that they scan. These "discount cards" are a farce!
I heard something about urban sprawl that "might" make sense. It was said by one of the big city mayors that part of the reason for urban sprawl was a secret cold war program (by the federal government) to encourage urban sprawl. The thinking was that the U.S. would better survive a nuclear war if the population density was less. I don't have any facts to back me up on this other than it was said by a big city mayor. It does seem to make some sense but, if so, it was a misguided policy.
Nice try but no cigar! There is one problem with standardized time. There is the matter of Einsteins theory of relativity. In our daily lives, time seems to be constant but time really is relative. If you are talking about the millisecond scale, a fixed time might seem possible. At the picosecond scale, a single time for all the earth is not possible. It only seems that there is a single time for everybody but in reality, it's an illusion.
It's also true when vast distances are involved. For example, an event in a galaxy a million light years is observed. Did it happen a million years ago? To astronomers, it is irrelevant because looking at objects that are far away can be thought of happening in the past. The catch is we are just now observing them so to us, it is just now happening and since time is relative, who it to say whose clock is right.
Honestly, some of the national security nutcases just go ape about releasing anything to the public. In the 1990's there was a review of top secret documents to see which could be declassifies. They found battle plans concocted by General Pershing for a battle in WW!! That was a 75 year old document that was still considered top secret. In Britain, they have (had) a policy of releasing any top secret document to the public 25 years after the fact. That is how the Enigma secret was made known to the world in the 60s of 70s. I thing that balance has to be restored between secrets an d the publics right to know. Obviously, I am not in favor of releasing secrets that might still cause us harm if they got out but most of the old stuff is harmless if released now. The only harm they might cause is harm to some politicians legacy.
"The Kings Speech" is another example of just how ludicrous the movie ratings system is. It got an R rating simply because the doctor was trying to get the king angry and asked him if he could say the "F" word. Of course the response was a few sentences of vulgarity. There was nothing in the movie that could be described as sex scenes and the vulgarity was short in critical to the overall theme of the movie. A R rating just for a short scene where the "F" bomb is thrown? WTF?
This doesn't sound like it would work! It's not as easy as netting fish in an ocean. We are talking about very high velocities here. If the orbital velocity of a piece of space junk doesn't closely match the orbital velocity of the net, it probably will blast right through the net. There are stories about a paint chip putting a crater in the space shuttles windshield. There is just that amount of energy involved. A possible scenario.... You are going after a piece of space debris and another piece of space debris collides with the net. The second piece, which you were not going after, is going to damage the net. Remember, they are talking about very large nets, the probability of this happening is not small.
In addition to the proposal, they should also make all elections non-partisan. Eliminate party affiliations from the ballot. The candidate could have a party affiliation, it just wouldn't be on the ballot.
Also, list the names randomly and if the ballot is on an electronic media, you could change the order of listing whenever a new voter used the machine. This would eliminate any advantage of being the first name on the list. You might have to limit the number of listed candidates to the first N candidates based on the nominating process to keep the list to a m manageable size..
"Known attempts at permutations of physical constants: 1"
And there is the crux of the problem! We just don't know how many universes there have been (or are)! Even the concept of time was made in the big bang. For all we know, there might have been an almost infinite number of attempts.
I wonder if informed consent is possible just before surgery. Even if the patient is alert, (and often elective surgery involves giving a sedative before surgery) can he observe the doctor long enough to decide he is sleep deprived? How much before surgery can informed consent be made? If the time delay is sufficiently long, the doctor might cross the line of being sleep deprived but the patient saw him an hour before surgery and decided he was not sleep deprived? Also, some surgeries are long affairs, the surgeon might cross the line sometime during surgery. I think informed consent in this case is worthless. It's just like the driver that had been drinking and starts driving just before he gets drunk. He wasn't drunk when he started driving but he soon will be.
Yes a robot might be able to play music perfectly but the performance will always miss something. The missing element is playing with "feeling". This element is hard to define but music aficionados will always be able to tell if it is missing. Maybe, in time, robots will play with true feeling but we are a nowhere close to that goal. Viewers of Star Trek will know what I mean. Data could play music perfectly and he could even simulate the style of great performers but there was nothing of himself in those performances.
Obviously the teacher knew (and was expecting) the cheating. Actually this was an opportunity he took to teach us about how statistics can be misused. He misused statistics intentionally. His lesson gave me a healthy distrust of statistics. True, it can be used correctly but too often it is used ti mislead. Mark Twain had it right when he said that there were "Lies, damned lies and statistics".
As for what did he loose? Who are you referring to? The teacher lost nothing as there were no repercussions. Remember, this was the mid 1960's at a private boys school. Cheating was grounds for immediate expulsion without a refund of tuition. Nobody wanted to contest it and the students handled the matter themselves.
As for mt personal feelings on cheating. It seems rampant today and society in general is hurt when it is accepted.
He didn't care! His reasoning was that enough of those innocent students would address that situation. And, yes, we took care of the perpetrators. This was at a private boys only high school in the mid 1960's. Needless to say, the attitudes then were different.
I remember an example from my high school days. It was a statistics class and the teacher had three classes of the exact same subject. He would give the same test to all the classes. One would think that the situation was ripe for massive cheating and you would be correct.
When the first test was given, he purposely allowed the students to take their tests from a pile. Of course, there were more tests taken than there were students in the first class. These purloined tests made their way into the hands of students from the second and third classes who did unusually good on that test. By the way, the first class was composed of the best students. When the test scores were analyzed of course the second and third classes did much better than the first class. When the tests were handed back, everyone noticed that they had unexpectedly bad test scores. Here is what happened.
For the first class, the teacher lumped their scores in with the other two classes. Of course, this skewed their curve so that they received low marks. For the second and third classes, he did not do this and their average was so high that it was impossible to get a good mark. Their curve was "skewed" also. He then went into length about how he used statistics to teach us a lesson about cheating. He explained that the good students were aware of the cheating and did nothing, as such they were enabling the cheating. The students that distributed the stolen tests actually were damaging their test scores so they lost. The students that used the stolen tests also lost out because to the "skewed" curve. In the teachers words, he "SKEWED" all of us. Needless to say, we were all leery about cheating in his classes after that.
I find your comment about ancient somewhat troubling. The writings of Confucius or Aristotle are ancient. Of course, most of the stuff we keep on computers is not important but there are some things that we want to recover. Some stuff might be quite valuable. Yes, the pace of technology is very quick but that is irrelevant to the value of a file.
" What's more, the molecule consists only of nitrogen and oxygen, which would make the rocket fuel environmentally friendly."
I'm not saying that the byproducts of combustion will be dangerous but just because it is composed of only nitrogen and oxygen does not automatically make it "environmentally friendly". One of the major components of smog also consists of only oxygen and nitrogen. It's nitrogen dioxide.
I do not claim to be an organic chemist but I did have a full year of organic chemistry in college. There are significant differences in the chemistry of arsenic and carbon. First off, compounds of arsenic would be more metallic in their properties due to its position of being two rows lower in the periodic table than carbon, This would seem to imply that long complex compounds similar to DNA, proteins, etc. would be much more unstable than when you use carbon. Also arsenic and carbon are not even in the same row of the periodic table which means that there are different electrons available to form chemical bonds. All in all, I am doubtful that this report will not withstand closer inspection of the facts. Carbon is unique in its ability to form many different types of chemical bonds. Surely there are qualified organic chemists that should comment on these observations because I might not be accurate in all of my assertions.
"leading some to question the Volt's EV credentials." ???
Let's be realistic here! It may not be a "pure" EV but the infrastructure is not here yet to support a pure EV. We are at the very start of a transition from gas stations to charging stations. Until charging stations can be found in most places at least a small gas engine to recharge the batteries is needed.
The point that agriculture will increase in the Arctic is irrelevant. It doesn't matter if the temperature would rise enough to support agriculture. The soil in the arctic is very poor. It will not support agriculture on the scale that humanity will need. Maybe if growing conditions prevailed for many centuries the soil would improve.
Sometimes using outdated technology has advantages.
I remember hearing about a state of the art Soviet fighter. Its pilot defected to the West and the CIA inspected the plane thoroughly before returning it to the Soviet Union. The plane was using vacuum tubes in the radio at a time that equivalent Western fighters were using integrated circuits in their radios. It was realized that using vacuum tubes made them resistant to the effects of electromagnetic pulse from atomic bombs. They would be ale to withstand more radiation than Western fighters. Probably vacuum tubes were not used because of this and this was just a side benefit.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops! I read the summary, logged it and went to the wrong article. Mea culpa!
Unbuntu will never hit that target if they continue to push that Unity stuff down the throat of their user base. I'm a Unbuntu user and would like it if they gave a choice at upgrade time. Unity could be a choice (even the default choice) but they make it hard to install a different desktop. You have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get other than Unity.
I disagree! No competent scientist makes such claims. Usually they come from wishful thinkers or politicians.
This brings up an interesting point about the language of science. String theory is not yet proven to be true. There may be some evidence that it is true but is there enough evidence to justify the term "theory". (I'm not qualified enough to say.) Certainly there is not as much evidence for it as Einsteins general theory of relativity. I think science has to invent a term for an idea that, although it is promising, is not adequately proven. Maybe postulate? It might be a good idea to come up with a gradient of terms to describe things (Starting with "stupid idea") and ending with theory. The term "law" is inappropriate because it implies that no further refinements are possible. Look what happened to "Newtons Law of Gravity" and how Einstein changed our thinking about that.
I think this is more a commentary on the poor state of many programs today. Back when the Osborne was on the market, programmers had to get the most out of every byte of memory and every cycle of the CPU. Now, nobody cares about efficiency, we just put it on a faster bigger computer and throw away the "obsolete" computer. Yes, this also happened "way back when" but paying a thousand or more on a computer made people think twice before upgrading.
I refuse to play the "discount card" game. When I make a purchase at the local CVS, they ask if I have a discount card. I say "no" and the clerk scans the store copy and I get the discount anyways without giving personal information. Often when going to stores that do not have a "store card", another customer offers their card and the clerk scans that without objection. I have even encountered clerks that have their personal card that they scan. These "discount cards" are a farce!
"Make cities denser"
I heard something about urban sprawl that "might" make sense. It was said by one of the big city mayors that part of the reason for urban sprawl was a secret cold war program (by the federal government) to encourage urban sprawl. The thinking was that the U.S. would better survive a nuclear war if the population density was less. I don't have any facts to back me up on this other than it was said by a big city mayor. It does seem to make some sense but, if so, it was a misguided policy.
Nice try but no cigar! There is one problem with standardized time. There is the matter of Einsteins theory of relativity. In our daily lives, time seems to be constant but time really is relative. If you are talking about the millisecond scale, a fixed time might seem possible. At the picosecond scale, a single time for all the earth is not possible. It only seems that there is a single time for everybody but in reality, it's an illusion.
It's also true when vast distances are involved. For example, an event in a galaxy a million light years is observed. Did it happen a million years ago? To astronomers, it is irrelevant because looking at objects that are far away can be thought of happening in the past. The catch is we are just now observing them so to us, it is just now happening and since time is relative, who it to say whose clock is right.
Honestly, some of the national security nutcases just go ape about releasing anything to the public. In the 1990's there was a review of top secret documents to see which could be declassifies. They found battle plans concocted by General Pershing for a battle in WW!! That was a 75 year old document that was still considered top secret. In Britain, they have (had) a policy of releasing any top secret document to the public 25 years after the fact. That is how the Enigma secret was made known to the world in the 60s of 70s. I thing that balance has to be restored between secrets an d the publics right to know. Obviously, I am not in favor of releasing secrets that might still cause us harm if they got out but most of the old stuff is harmless if released now. The only harm they might cause is harm to some politicians legacy.
"The Kings Speech" is another example of just how ludicrous the movie ratings system is. It got an R rating simply because the doctor was trying to get the king angry and asked him if he could say the "F" word. Of course the response was a few sentences of vulgarity. There was nothing in the movie that could be described as sex scenes and the vulgarity was short in critical to the overall theme of the movie. A R rating just for a short scene where the "F" bomb is thrown? WTF?
This doesn't sound like it would work! It's not as easy as netting fish in an ocean. We are talking about very high velocities here. If the orbital velocity of a piece of space junk doesn't closely match the orbital velocity of the net, it probably will blast right through the net. There are stories about a paint chip putting a crater in the space shuttles windshield. There is just that amount of energy involved. A possible scenario.... You are going after a piece of space debris and another piece of space debris collides with the net. The second piece, which you were not going after, is going to damage the net. Remember, they are talking about very large nets, the probability of this happening is not small.
In addition to the proposal, they should also make all elections non-partisan. Eliminate party affiliations from the ballot. The candidate could have a party affiliation, it just wouldn't be on the ballot.
Also, list the names randomly and if the ballot is on an electronic media, you could change the order of listing whenever a new voter used the machine. This would eliminate any advantage of being the first name on the list. You might have to limit the number of listed candidates to the first N candidates based on the nominating process to keep the list to a m manageable size..
"Known attempts at permutations of physical constants: 1"
And there is the crux of the problem! We just don't know how many universes there have been (or are)! Even the concept of time was made in the big bang. For all we know, there might have been an almost infinite number of attempts.
I wonder if informed consent is possible just before surgery. Even if the patient is alert, (and often elective surgery involves giving a sedative before surgery) can he observe the doctor long enough to decide he is sleep deprived? How much before surgery can informed consent be made? If the time delay is sufficiently long, the doctor might cross the line of being sleep deprived but the patient saw him an hour before surgery and decided he was not sleep deprived? Also, some surgeries are long affairs, the surgeon might cross the line sometime during surgery. I think informed consent in this case is worthless. It's just like the driver that had been drinking and starts driving just before he gets drunk. He wasn't drunk when he started driving but he soon will be.
Yes a robot might be able to play music perfectly but the performance will always miss something. The missing element is playing with "feeling". This element is hard to define but music aficionados will always be able to tell if it is missing. Maybe, in time, robots will play with true feeling but we are a nowhere close to that goal. Viewers of Star Trek will know what I mean. Data could play music perfectly and he could even simulate the style of great performers but there was nothing of himself in those performances.
Obviously the teacher knew (and was expecting) the cheating. Actually this was an opportunity he took to teach us about how statistics can be misused. He misused statistics intentionally. His lesson gave me a healthy distrust of statistics. True, it can be used correctly but too often it is used ti mislead. Mark Twain had it right when he said that there were "Lies, damned lies and statistics".
As for what did he loose? Who are you referring to? The teacher lost nothing as there were no repercussions. Remember, this was the mid 1960's at a private boys school. Cheating was grounds for immediate expulsion without a refund of tuition. Nobody wanted to contest it and the students handled the matter themselves.
As for mt personal feelings on cheating. It seems rampant today and society in general is hurt when it is accepted.
He didn't care! His reasoning was that enough of those innocent students would address that situation. And, yes, we took care of the perpetrators. This was at a private boys only high school in the mid 1960's. Needless to say, the attitudes then were different.
I remember an example from my high school days. It was a statistics class and the teacher had three classes of the exact same subject. He would give the same test to all the classes. One would think that the situation was ripe for massive cheating and you would be correct.
When the first test was given, he purposely allowed the students to take their tests from a pile. Of course, there were more tests taken than there were students in the first class. These purloined tests made their way into the hands of students from the second and third classes who did unusually good on that test. By the way, the first class was composed of the best students. When the test scores were analyzed of course the second and third classes did much better than the first class. When the tests were handed back, everyone noticed that they had unexpectedly bad test scores. Here is what happened.
For the first class, the teacher lumped their scores in with the other two classes. Of course, this skewed their curve so that they received low marks. For the second and third classes, he did not do this and their average was so high that it was impossible to get a good mark. Their curve was "skewed" also. He then went into length about how he used statistics to teach us a lesson about cheating. He explained that the good students were aware of the cheating and did nothing, as such they were enabling the cheating. The students that distributed the stolen tests actually were damaging their test scores so they lost. The students that used the stolen tests also lost out because to the "skewed" curve. In the teachers words, he "SKEWED" all of us. Needless to say, we were all leery about cheating in his classes after that.
I find your comment about ancient somewhat troubling. The writings of Confucius or Aristotle are ancient. Of course, most of the stuff we keep on computers is not important but there are some things that we want to recover. Some stuff might be quite valuable. Yes, the pace of technology is very quick but that is irrelevant to the value of a file.
" What's more, the molecule consists only of nitrogen and oxygen, which would make the rocket fuel environmentally friendly."
I'm not saying that the byproducts of combustion will be dangerous but just because it is composed of only nitrogen and oxygen does not automatically make it "environmentally friendly". One of the major components of smog also consists of only oxygen and nitrogen. It's nitrogen dioxide.
I do not claim to be an organic chemist but I did have a full year of organic chemistry in college. There are significant differences in the chemistry of arsenic and carbon. First off, compounds of arsenic would be more metallic in their properties due to its position of being two rows lower in the periodic table than carbon, This would seem to imply that long complex compounds similar to DNA, proteins, etc. would be much more unstable than when you use carbon. Also arsenic and carbon are not even in the same row of the periodic table which means that there are different electrons available to form chemical bonds. All in all, I am doubtful that this report will not withstand closer inspection of the facts. Carbon is unique in its ability to form many different types of chemical bonds. Surely there are qualified organic chemists that should comment on these observations because I might not be accurate in all of my assertions.
It's also a hell of a lot more expensive! We really want a vehicle for the masses!
"leading some to question the Volt's EV credentials." ???
Let's be realistic here! It may not be a "pure" EV but the infrastructure is not here yet to support a pure EV. We are at the very start of a transition from gas stations to charging stations. Until charging stations can be found in most places at least a small gas engine to recharge the batteries is needed.
The point that agriculture will increase in the Arctic is irrelevant. It doesn't matter if the temperature would rise enough to support agriculture. The soil in the arctic is very poor. It will not support agriculture on the scale that humanity will need. Maybe if growing conditions prevailed for many centuries the soil would improve.
Sometimes using outdated technology has advantages.
I remember hearing about a state of the art Soviet fighter. Its pilot defected to the West and the CIA inspected the plane thoroughly before returning it to the Soviet Union. The plane was using vacuum tubes in the radio at a time that equivalent Western fighters were using integrated circuits in their radios. It was realized that using vacuum tubes made them resistant to the effects of electromagnetic pulse from atomic bombs. They would be ale to withstand more radiation than Western fighters. Probably vacuum tubes were not used because of this and this was just a side benefit.