The reason tablets became popular is because people had begun to use their phones in similar ways, and the price wasn't too outrageous. Microsoft had tablets before they became popular, too, but they didn't kick off the tablet craze. Pioneering technology is one part tech, ten parts timing.
You're supposed to have both "Developers who do Ops" and "Ops guys who develop" in one team to do "DevOps".
If you're working in a place that's done "We'll just get the developers to do Operations" then they're doing it wrong.
I just started a new position where they had just figured this out and split the team into two. A couple of our developers trend toward the surly, and they would get a bit short with our customers (who are internal customers, but customers nonetheless) when interrupted. Which totally makes sense, by the way, because it kills productivity, but it was causing issues on all sides. Now we have this separation and process where our customers no longer contact us directly but fill out a quick report that automatically contacts the newly-formed ops team. We don't have to bother the developers except in extreme cases, and the folks who specialize in troubleshooting handle almost every issue. And even though I joined the ops team, but I still squash bugs and add minor features so the dev team can focus on the big stuff. This literally just happened in the past few months, but the improvement in our metrics for the most recent release was pretty impressive.
Conway's game of life creatures became sentient.
They discovered they are made of cells.
They said "Look, THE INFINITESIMAL CELL is always created from NOTHING. If things happens FROM NOTHING, there is NO NEED FOR A CREATOR, so THERE IS NO CREATOR, and besides NOBODY ever witnessed something different THAN THE DETERMINISTIC APPLICATION OF RULES. How smart are we?"
So the guy at the PC said to himself "Thank you for nothing, guys" and went making himself coffee.
Note that the guy at the PC doesn't care what happens to the sentient creatures, doesn't interact with them in any way after he starts the universe, and doesn't take any portion of the sentient creature with him for all eternity.
You have it wrong, anyway. The vast majority of these creatures would say that they were Created. Some would simply accept this, having been taught so ever since birth, specifically with the knowledge that questioning their beliefs is one of the worst things they could do. Some others would look at the rules and realize that, had the rules been different, they would not have existed at all. They would see that as proof as a Creator and (through some further leap of logic) the rest of their beliefs, even though such a "proof" of the former does not in any way imply the latter. Still others would simply take Pascal's Wager and hope that their particular religion is the correct one.
To epilepsy, probably not. But blind and deaf people are known to have enhanced other senses to make up for it. Note that they don't just train themselves to pay more attention to senses they do have, but the brain actually "rewires" itself to use visual or auditory processing centers for processing other senses. Incidentally, this is why cochlear implants do not work as well as expected when the person has been deaf for a long time: the person receiving it is already using that part of the brain for other things. (source)
The underlying point still stands, though. The drawbacks of blindness or deafness far, far outweigh the benefits. Only a few potential counterexamples like Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles might exist, though we'll never know how popular they might have been had they not been blind, and certainly not every blind person has musical talent on that level.
Ouroborosin would make them eat themselves, which is a whole other thing. The drug you're describing would probably be called cannibalis. I can just see the tagline: "Cannibalis: giving parasites a different kind of the munchies."
Could someone patiently explain to me what's going on? Why is it seen as flamebait? Why do people think it's saying Eich should be punished for his private opinions when I say the exact opposite?
I agree that you say the opposite, but there are subtleties in this issue that can easily be missed by someone (like me) who hasn't followed this story very closely. I believe the nuance that mods have missed in your post was that Brendan Eich didn't just donate to some generic Prop 8 campaign as most news stories say. There is no such thing as "the Prop 8 campaign." There were several groups of people running campaigns to support Prop 8, and some of them were...mean-spirited, to put it lightly. The particular group that Eich supported ran ads with the underlying message that gay parents are doing harm to their children, and that rejecting Prop 8 would be harmful to children in general. Once I understood that (see this story, for example), your arguments made a lot more sense.
let's take HADCRUT4 as being at least a reasonably honest attempt to evaluate a global surface temperature anomaly even though they do not attempt to correct for e.g. UHI and hence almost certainly have a monotonic warming bias
A November 2013 paper (so, after AR5) pointed out that HadCRUT4 has no data from the polar regions, which might mean the most drastic warming -- in the Arctic -- is not taken into account (source). Obviously this will spur some further research, but whether it's true or not, there is an option c) the global mean surface temperature change has been underestimated.
Which is neither here nor there -- if global warming is disappearing into the oceans, that's fabulous news as the oceans can absorb the heat for a century and still hardly change temperature, if not, well, time will tell.
That might be generically true (I'll take your word for it), but the way it's happening -- absorbing CO2 -- is causing ocean acidification. We know this for sure, and it's a bad thing for current ocean life. Between that, overfishing, and pollution from oil and nuclear accidents, we're messing up a rather important food source. True, it may adapt as you implied in a later post, but it will cause upheaval in the meantime. In addition, I know researchers have proposed links between warmer oceans and extreme weather events like the polar vortices causing the cold snaps this year, that is, warmer oceans weaken the jetstream. But I don't know how much traction that has among climate scientists.
If you bother to actually go out and grab AR5 to read what it actually says instead of what distortions of summaries of paraphrases might have said, you might stop by and read paragraphs 9.2.2.2 and 9.2.2.3. They are sublime. Basically they say "We have no defensible reason to think that the average of all of the climate models in CMIP5 has the slightest actual meaning, and we have excellent reasons not to just take the numerical average of their individual mean predictions with equal weight and to prune out the failing models, but we're going present the numerical average of all of the models, including the ones that are overtly failing, anyway".
I just looked at those sections, and to me it reads, "these (Multi-Model Ensembles and Perturbed-Parameter Ensembles) are the types of simulations we've taken into account [9.2.2], these are their weaknesses [9.2.2.1-2], and this is how we combined them to evaluate them as a whole [9.2.2.3]." Perhaps you're referring to the direct quote "...collections such as the CMIP5 MME cannot be considered a random sample of independent models," which is repeating the weakness described in 9.2.2.1, which is that a lot of models in that set use components from other models in the set. To me that makes perfect sense because we do that in engineering all the time: reusing model components that (seem to) work well. I can see why that would seem fishy, though. It'd be nice to see someone dig into that and see what components are reused and how they might bias the results.
...a Quart shrunk to a litre, a gallon likewise shrinking to 4l. It still happening as many containers are 3.78 litres so almost a pint and a half shaved off the old gallon.
The quart and gallon you referred to at first are UK measures (I had to read that again to understand, but thankfully a couple posts above you had the conversion), and 3.78 L is a US gallon.
40 odd years later, we drive mostly in metric with most people being bilingual, weather is in metric. Groceries are in litres and pounds, hardware is mostly in standard. So go out and buy a litre of milk, a pound of hamburger then half a kilo of 1/2 in nails, some 8ft 2x4s and 3/8 plywood. Probably varies across the country.
Wow, I never thought I'd say this, but you've just convinced me that "switching" the US to metric (or, more realistically, a horrendous hybrid of the two) would be a disaster.
The placebo effect is very real, it really works, and that's what this is, ie. placebo in the guise of "Energy Medicine" instead of a sugar pill.
Yes, it can cure, it can help people, but not people with real diseases/illnesses.
In no circumstances should it substitute proper science if there's something seriously wrong with you.
It depends on what you mean by real diseases or illnesses. Mental illnesses such as phobias, depression, or anxiety disorders, and partially mental symptoms like pain and nausea, can be treated pretty effectively with placebos and other holistic approaches like exercise and meditation. For example, we know cursing up a storm to be a pain-relieving exercise (as long as you use swear words sparingly the rest of the time). I would almost prefer people turn to some of these things first rather than drugs. But yeah, what makes me wary of the Change.org petition are the references to specific techniques, which probably require expensive certifications for practitioners so that patients have to pay an arm and a leg.
Sure enough, after I typed this, I looked up Wikipedia's page on "Thought Field Therapy" and found this:
[Roger Callahan, the inventor of Thought Field Therapy] also asserts that his most advanced level, Voice Technology (VT) can be performed over the phone using an undisclosed "technology". Training for the advanced VT is provided by Callahan. The fee listed on Callahan's website for this training is $100,000. Trainees must sign a confidentiality agreement not to disclose the trade secret behind VT.
Well, that and you could make some badass telescopes on the dark side.
You mean on the far site.
Or perhaps he means in a crater near one of the poles, like Shackleton crater. These are known as "craters of eternal darkness," by the way, which obviously sounds way cooler than "the dark side of the Moon."
The moon is a symbol, but there's no *practical* reason to go there, establish a base, a colony, or a really good restaurant. Near earth orbital stations, in contrast, might be developed profitably for power stations, zero G manufacturing of exotic materials, ubiquitous satellite-based internet, and so on.
The focus on the moon and Mars is just cold war era, retro silliness. We have limited resources to throw at space. This is the time to throw them at something that will give us some return.
It's relatively close, placing a colony underground is cheap and easy radiation protection, the presence of gravity will reduce the amount of required exercise (and avoid the other issues with zero-g environments), it would be inspiring in ways that robotic explorers are not, and it will provide us with experience extracting resources from and growing food on other planets, which is critical for humans to become a space-faring species. And this is something we can do with today's technology. Sure, at some point in the near future we will have developed improved radiation protection and centripetal acceleration-based artificial gravity, thereby making space stations a better environment in the long-term (assuming the food issue is solved), but we haven't done those things yet.
Call that "space nuttery" if you will...I accept that establishing a Moon colony isn't cost-effective at the moment, but establishing a permanent, self-sufficient colony outside of Earth is something we as a species need to do at some point. Since there are still so many ways humanity can be destroyed, taking steps toward that goal sooner would be better than later.
You know just 1% of our military budget diverted to NASA could do amazing things.. imagine if we diverted half of that budget!
To put that in perspective, you're talking about diverting about $5 billion from military spending, which would increase NASA's budget by about a quarter. If they put it all toward space stuff, it's an even larger increase. Check out the NASA 2015 budget request summary. No, seriously, check it out, it's actually a really interesting document with pictures, details, and progress of all of their programs.
Whenever people talk about cutting or diverting budgets, it usually means shaking up and losing jobs, which is bad for productivity all around. But, if you cut the budget for certain military programs and give it to civilian space programs, a lot of the same players, needing a lot of the same engineering talent, are involved. There would still be shake-ups as contracts are lost by one company and picked up by another, but it's a far better situation than simple budget cuts or taking money away from one industry to spend in another.
Additionally just because the planet hasn't warmed in 17 years...
Wow, do people still actually point at the anomalous 1998 data and ignore the decades before that? I didn't think anybody did that anymore, ever since GWB finally admitted global warming was a real thing (though he never accepted it was man made).
It seems to me there should be a fourth category: gas giants. They are considered planets, but there's more differences between Earth and Uranus than there are between Mars and Pluto.
To add to the confusion, Uranus and Neptune are sometimes considered "ice giants," since their composition is so significantly different than Jupiter and Saturn.
So here's a question: since we'll have much, much better data on Pluto in just over a year when New Horizons gets there, should we even bother looking right now? New Horizons took some awesome pictures of Jupiter's moons so I'm stoked to see what it finds when it gets to Pluto, but I'm having a hard time caring about this finding in the meantime (beyond the desire to once again check out Wikipedia's list of solar system objects by size).
Children can be more clever than non-parents expect.
Surely, you jest! This is Slashdot, where everybody except actual parents knows the proper way to raise children, and supervision means hovering over your child at all times, never bathing or using the restroom or cooking meals or sleeping.
I'm glad some commenters don't have children, although if they did, they wouldn't sound so high and mighty at times like this. Seriously, my six year old plays outside with neighborhood kids all the time and builds way cooler stuff with Legos than I did at his age, but having other recreational activities didn't stop him from getting his hands on my wife's phone for a few minutes earlier this week and spending $16 on in-app purchases before she stopped him. And that's all because we had the audacity to have an infant that needs more attention when we aren't rich enough to both stay home and hover over the children all day.
We're not going to be joining the class action lawsuit or anything, but it's tiresome to see armchair parents pretend like they could stop it happening. Like most of you we have a lot of devices around, and no matter how well you think you have everything locked down, all it takes is one mistake. This is the only time my son has "accidentally" spent money, and no matter where you want to lay the blame, consider this: if my wife had an iPhone, this wouldn't have happened. Is that really the response you think Google should give?
I would modify that last statement to be "not letting your social agenda affect your research, your report or the your release of either" (or something more compact that gets the same point across). Very few foundations fund research out of the goodness of their hearts, so most of the time (if not *all* of the time), their research is structured specifically to give them what they want (e.g. wording survey questions a specific way). Or if that's not possible, they cherry pick data. Or they simply don't release their findings, if it turns out it won't help their cause.
Anyway, the links in the parent post show some incredible stuff, and pretty much all the scientific criticism I can find is led by one man, Dr. David Briske from Texas A&M. So we have one guy with extensive credentials that says it works, one guy with extensive credentials that says it doesn't, and a slew of others who have tried it (or something similar) with varying results. I'd like to see Savory get a bigger tract of land and a larger herd to see if it can scale. Same with the permaculture stuff: we've got deserts right here in the US, let's see what these guys can do.
Feynman, in the first of his Lectures on Physics asked his reader to imagine that some cataclysmic event has wiped out all human knowledge, but that one single sentence could survive to be passed on to the next generation. What would he suggest that sentence be? The universe is made of atoms.
Feynman is awesome, but that dude has a serious under-appreciation for abusively long run-on sentences filled with literary non sequiturs and mathematical and chemical formulae.
The issue here is evolution. Any version of creationism that denies evolution is incompatible with science.
It's not really incompatible, Creationism is just an unnecessary and illogical addition to it that has been around for all of recorded history and beyond. The ancients thought gods were the reason behind everything, like the Sun moving across the sky. The only difference between that and modern Creationists is that they no longer believe a god has to manually push the Sun around. I imagine they have different beliefs about how the solar system formed, spanning from the YECs belief that a god placed the planets where they are today, though the people that think a god just kicked off the Big Bang and nudged a few cosmological constants around.
You don't even have to think in such grand terms as evolution, just look at how people think giving birth is a miracle and that the baby is a gift from their god. Never mind the fact that the billions people they condemn to eternal torture for not believing in their particular god have just as many children. It's the same for evolution: some people accept evolution as the overwhelmingly likely scenario, but choose to see their god as the guiding force behind it. Or perhaps it's just like the YECs, who think god placed fossils on Earth in their current form: their god just happened to make human embryos go through stages where they develop several repetitions of temporary organs -- sometimes appearing and disappearing before they even become functional -- very similar to ancient aquatic animals.
Or perhaps the GP has read on anti-evolution sites that Haeckel's recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") was discredited, which is often used as justification to throw out the entire theory without bothering to understand why Haeckel's theory was discredited (he wasn't completely wrong...embryonic development is just not as straightforward as he claimed) or how modern biologists understand evolution.
No, instead they just cancel your flight if it's half empty and make you wait a few hours to be crammed onto the next flight.
Random anecdote: I was once speaking to my wife wondering if that's why our flight was cancelled, and an airline employee that overheard me became very offended that I suggested it. I wasn't even speaking sarcastically or anything, because they actually put us on a better flight that got us in earlier (shorter layover at an airport that wasn't so far out of the way). It was genuine curiosity, but I guess they hear enough customers complaining about that to make it a sore spot with them.
We all wish Mathworks/MatLab well. I used it at university and I use it at work. I use Octave at home (and sometimes at work). Octave is good for getting answers, not so good at graphing.
Are they competitors? Yes. Is there room for both? Yes.
There is room for both even within the same organization. Wherever your scripts are fairly standard MATLAB and don't use GUIs or toolboxes, you can use Octave as a drop-in replacement and save money on floating licenses. With a little legwork, I had Octave producing very nice graphs comparable to MATLAB. I never got the go-ahead to attempt a more substantial deployment, unfortunately.
Anyway, congrats to John Eaton and the Octave developers on the final GUI release. I remember checking the early versions out a year ago or so and chatting with the guy who added JIT as part of the Google Summer of Code about static JIT versus tracing JIT (in general terms only, if I was good enough I would have added it myself).
"Missing large parts of the conversation" is more likely to occur to people raised by luddites who make their children play outside rather than "socialize" as many kids do these days. Already, most of my kindergartener's (my oldest kid's) homework is given online, aside from a few worksheets sent home with him (we went two weeks and a couple missed recesses before we realized that he was in trouble because he wasn't doing all his homework). I can only imagine in the later grades he'll have to be glued to a computer screen in order to get his work done.
Also, there are so many cultural references people miss that Biblical ones aren't really a big deal these days unless you send your kid to a private, religion-affiliated school or something. We have never taken our children to church, and they are very rarely exposed to religion in general. Still, religion has some easy shortcuts for dealing with tough subjects like death (actually, that's the only subject I can think of at the moment). Luckily nobody in our family has died since my son was born, but my in-laws dog did. It's just so much easier for kids to understand that the dog went to some abstract place to explain why they'll never see the deceased again. I'll never forget my dad coming home from a hospital after saying goodbye to his father when I was twelve, because that is the only time I've ever seen him cry. He hugged my mom, looked at me and said, "this is why it's so easy to believe in heaven." It was probably ten years later before I stumbled upon usenet and realized how profound that was.
Anyway...point is, as long as you don't make a big deal about praying and all that, your kids won't either.
Replying to myself. I just did some searching, and it seems that up until VS 2010, it didn't have zero-width selection, which I have just verified to be true in VS 2008. I can see how that could be a bit annoying, though there is a pretty simple workaround (select the column, press tab, then column select the new whitespace). Notepad++ (6.2.2) and gVim (7.3) both have zero-width selection. Any others?
Slashdot Mirror
The reason tablets became popular is because people had begun to use their phones in similar ways, and the price wasn't too outrageous. Microsoft had tablets before they became popular, too, but they didn't kick off the tablet craze. Pioneering technology is one part tech, ten parts timing.
You're supposed to have both "Developers who do Ops" and "Ops guys who develop" in one team to do "DevOps".
If you're working in a place that's done "We'll just get the developers to do Operations" then they're doing it wrong.
I just started a new position where they had just figured this out and split the team into two. A couple of our developers trend toward the surly, and they would get a bit short with our customers (who are internal customers, but customers nonetheless) when interrupted. Which totally makes sense, by the way, because it kills productivity, but it was causing issues on all sides. Now we have this separation and process where our customers no longer contact us directly but fill out a quick report that automatically contacts the newly-formed ops team. We don't have to bother the developers except in extreme cases, and the folks who specialize in troubleshooting handle almost every issue. And even though I joined the ops team, but I still squash bugs and add minor features so the dev team can focus on the big stuff. This literally just happened in the past few months, but the improvement in our metrics for the most recent release was pretty impressive.
Let's simplify.
Conway's game of life creatures became sentient. They discovered they are made of cells. They said "Look, THE INFINITESIMAL CELL is always created from NOTHING. If things happens FROM NOTHING, there is NO NEED FOR A CREATOR, so THERE IS NO CREATOR, and besides NOBODY ever witnessed something different THAN THE DETERMINISTIC APPLICATION OF RULES. How smart are we?"
So the guy at the PC said to himself "Thank you for nothing, guys" and went making himself coffee.
Note that the guy at the PC doesn't care what happens to the sentient creatures, doesn't interact with them in any way after he starts the universe, and doesn't take any portion of the sentient creature with him for all eternity.
You have it wrong, anyway. The vast majority of these creatures would say that they were Created. Some would simply accept this, having been taught so ever since birth, specifically with the knowledge that questioning their beliefs is one of the worst things they could do. Some others would look at the rules and realize that, had the rules been different, they would not have existed at all. They would see that as proof as a Creator and (through some further leap of logic) the rest of their beliefs, even though such a "proof" of the former does not in any way imply the latter. Still others would simply take Pascal's Wager and hope that their particular religion is the correct one.
There is no upside with these problems.
To epilepsy, probably not. But blind and deaf people are known to have enhanced other senses to make up for it. Note that they don't just train themselves to pay more attention to senses they do have, but the brain actually "rewires" itself to use visual or auditory processing centers for processing other senses. Incidentally, this is why cochlear implants do not work as well as expected when the person has been deaf for a long time: the person receiving it is already using that part of the brain for other things. (source)
The underlying point still stands, though. The drawbacks of blindness or deafness far, far outweigh the benefits. Only a few potential counterexamples like Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles might exist, though we'll never know how popular they might have been had they not been blind, and certainly not every blind person has musical talent on that level.
Ouroborosin would make them eat themselves, which is a whole other thing. The drug you're describing would probably be called cannibalis. I can just see the tagline: "Cannibalis: giving parasites a different kind of the munchies."
Could someone patiently explain to me what's going on? Why is it seen as flamebait? Why do people think it's saying Eich should be punished for his private opinions when I say the exact opposite?
I agree that you say the opposite, but there are subtleties in this issue that can easily be missed by someone (like me) who hasn't followed this story very closely. I believe the nuance that mods have missed in your post was that Brendan Eich didn't just donate to some generic Prop 8 campaign as most news stories say. There is no such thing as "the Prop 8 campaign." There were several groups of people running campaigns to support Prop 8, and some of them were...mean-spirited, to put it lightly. The particular group that Eich supported ran ads with the underlying message that gay parents are doing harm to their children, and that rejecting Prop 8 would be harmful to children in general. Once I understood that (see this story, for example), your arguments made a lot more sense.
The USA has been very good at injecting puppets so that political control remains possible.
I don't know about that. I mean, we try our best, but I wouldn't say we're good at it.
let's take HADCRUT4 as being at least a reasonably honest attempt to evaluate a global surface temperature anomaly even though they do not attempt to correct for e.g. UHI and hence almost certainly have a monotonic warming bias
A November 2013 paper (so, after AR5) pointed out that HadCRUT4 has no data from the polar regions, which might mean the most drastic warming -- in the Arctic -- is not taken into account (source). Obviously this will spur some further research, but whether it's true or not, there is an option c) the global mean surface temperature change has been underestimated.
Which is neither here nor there -- if global warming is disappearing into the oceans, that's fabulous news as the oceans can absorb the heat for a century and still hardly change temperature, if not, well, time will tell.
That might be generically true (I'll take your word for it), but the way it's happening -- absorbing CO2 -- is causing ocean acidification. We know this for sure, and it's a bad thing for current ocean life. Between that, overfishing, and pollution from oil and nuclear accidents, we're messing up a rather important food source. True, it may adapt as you implied in a later post, but it will cause upheaval in the meantime. In addition, I know researchers have proposed links between warmer oceans and extreme weather events like the polar vortices causing the cold snaps this year, that is, warmer oceans weaken the jetstream. But I don't know how much traction that has among climate scientists.
If you bother to actually go out and grab AR5 to read what it actually says instead of what distortions of summaries of paraphrases might have said, you might stop by and read paragraphs 9.2.2.2 and 9.2.2.3. They are sublime. Basically they say "We have no defensible reason to think that the average of all of the climate models in CMIP5 has the slightest actual meaning, and we have excellent reasons not to just take the numerical average of their individual mean predictions with equal weight and to prune out the failing models, but we're going present the numerical average of all of the models, including the ones that are overtly failing, anyway".
I just looked at those sections, and to me it reads, "these (Multi-Model Ensembles and Perturbed-Parameter Ensembles) are the types of simulations we've taken into account [9.2.2], these are their weaknesses [9.2.2.1-2], and this is how we combined them to evaluate them as a whole [9.2.2.3]." Perhaps you're referring to the direct quote "...collections such as the CMIP5 MME cannot be considered a random sample of independent models," which is repeating the weakness described in 9.2.2.1, which is that a lot of models in that set use components from other models in the set. To me that makes perfect sense because we do that in engineering all the time: reusing model components that (seem to) work well. I can see why that would seem fishy, though. It'd be nice to see someone dig into that and see what components are reused and how they might bias the results.
...a Quart shrunk to a litre, a gallon likewise shrinking to 4l. It still happening as many containers are 3.78 litres so almost a pint and a half shaved off the old gallon.
The quart and gallon you referred to at first are UK measures (I had to read that again to understand, but thankfully a couple posts above you had the conversion), and 3.78 L is a US gallon.
40 odd years later, we drive mostly in metric with most people being bilingual, weather is in metric. Groceries are in litres and pounds, hardware is mostly in standard. So go out and buy a litre of milk, a pound of hamburger then half a kilo of 1/2 in nails, some 8ft 2x4s and 3/8 plywood. Probably varies across the country.
Wow, I never thought I'd say this, but you've just convinced me that "switching" the US to metric (or, more realistically, a horrendous hybrid of the two) would be a disaster.
Enjoy the occasional drink
Yes.
or smoke.
No.
The placebo effect is very real, it really works, and that's what this is, ie. placebo in the guise of "Energy Medicine" instead of a sugar pill.
Yes, it can cure, it can help people, but not people with real diseases/illnesses.
In no circumstances should it substitute proper science if there's something seriously wrong with you.
It depends on what you mean by real diseases or illnesses. Mental illnesses such as phobias, depression, or anxiety disorders, and partially mental symptoms like pain and nausea, can be treated pretty effectively with placebos and other holistic approaches like exercise and meditation. For example, we know cursing up a storm to be a pain-relieving exercise (as long as you use swear words sparingly the rest of the time). I would almost prefer people turn to some of these things first rather than drugs. But yeah, what makes me wary of the Change.org petition are the references to specific techniques, which probably require expensive certifications for practitioners so that patients have to pay an arm and a leg.
Sure enough, after I typed this, I looked up Wikipedia's page on "Thought Field Therapy" and found this:
[Roger Callahan, the inventor of Thought Field Therapy] also asserts that his most advanced level, Voice Technology (VT) can be performed over the phone using an undisclosed "technology". Training for the advanced VT is provided by Callahan. The fee listed on Callahan's website for this training is $100,000. Trainees must sign a confidentiality agreement not to disclose the trade secret behind VT.
Well, that and you could make some badass telescopes on the dark side.
You mean on the far site.
Or perhaps he means in a crater near one of the poles, like Shackleton crater. These are known as "craters of eternal darkness," by the way, which obviously sounds way cooler than "the dark side of the Moon."
The moon is a symbol, but there's no *practical* reason to go there, establish a base, a colony, or a really good restaurant. Near earth orbital stations, in contrast, might be developed profitably for power stations, zero G manufacturing of exotic materials, ubiquitous satellite-based internet, and so on.
The focus on the moon and Mars is just cold war era, retro silliness. We have limited resources to throw at space. This is the time to throw them at something that will give us some return.
It's relatively close, placing a colony underground is cheap and easy radiation protection, the presence of gravity will reduce the amount of required exercise (and avoid the other issues with zero-g environments), it would be inspiring in ways that robotic explorers are not, and it will provide us with experience extracting resources from and growing food on other planets, which is critical for humans to become a space-faring species. And this is something we can do with today's technology. Sure, at some point in the near future we will have developed improved radiation protection and centripetal acceleration-based artificial gravity, thereby making space stations a better environment in the long-term (assuming the food issue is solved), but we haven't done those things yet.
Call that "space nuttery" if you will...I accept that establishing a Moon colony isn't cost-effective at the moment, but establishing a permanent, self-sufficient colony outside of Earth is something we as a species need to do at some point. Since there are still so many ways humanity can be destroyed, taking steps toward that goal sooner would be better than later.
You know just 1% of our military budget diverted to NASA could do amazing things.. imagine if we diverted half of that budget!
To put that in perspective, you're talking about diverting about $5 billion from military spending, which would increase NASA's budget by about a quarter. If they put it all toward space stuff, it's an even larger increase. Check out the NASA 2015 budget request summary. No, seriously, check it out, it's actually a really interesting document with pictures, details, and progress of all of their programs.
Whenever people talk about cutting or diverting budgets, it usually means shaking up and losing jobs, which is bad for productivity all around. But, if you cut the budget for certain military programs and give it to civilian space programs, a lot of the same players, needing a lot of the same engineering talent, are involved. There would still be shake-ups as contracts are lost by one company and picked up by another, but it's a far better situation than simple budget cuts or taking money away from one industry to spend in another.
Additionally just because the planet hasn't warmed in 17 years...
Wow, do people still actually point at the anomalous 1998 data and ignore the decades before that? I didn't think anybody did that anymore, ever since GWB finally admitted global warming was a real thing (though he never accepted it was man made).
It seems to me there should be a fourth category: gas giants. They are considered planets, but there's more differences between Earth and Uranus than there are between Mars and Pluto.
To add to the confusion, Uranus and Neptune are sometimes considered "ice giants," since their composition is so significantly different than Jupiter and Saturn.
So here's a question: since we'll have much, much better data on Pluto in just over a year when New Horizons gets there, should we even bother looking right now? New Horizons took some awesome pictures of Jupiter's moons so I'm stoked to see what it finds when it gets to Pluto, but I'm having a hard time caring about this finding in the meantime (beyond the desire to once again check out Wikipedia's list of solar system objects by size).
Children can be more clever than non-parents expect.
Surely, you jest! This is Slashdot, where everybody except actual parents knows the proper way to raise children, and supervision means hovering over your child at all times, never bathing or using the restroom or cooking meals or sleeping.
I'm glad some commenters don't have children, although if they did, they wouldn't sound so high and mighty at times like this. Seriously, my six year old plays outside with neighborhood kids all the time and builds way cooler stuff with Legos than I did at his age, but having other recreational activities didn't stop him from getting his hands on my wife's phone for a few minutes earlier this week and spending $16 on in-app purchases before she stopped him. And that's all because we had the audacity to have an infant that needs more attention when we aren't rich enough to both stay home and hover over the children all day.
We're not going to be joining the class action lawsuit or anything, but it's tiresome to see armchair parents pretend like they could stop it happening. Like most of you we have a lot of devices around, and no matter how well you think you have everything locked down, all it takes is one mistake. This is the only time my son has "accidentally" spent money, and no matter where you want to lay the blame, consider this: if my wife had an iPhone, this wouldn't have happened. Is that really the response you think Google should give?
I would modify that last statement to be "not letting your social agenda affect your research, your report or the your release of either" (or something more compact that gets the same point across). Very few foundations fund research out of the goodness of their hearts, so most of the time (if not *all* of the time), their research is structured specifically to give them what they want (e.g. wording survey questions a specific way). Or if that's not possible, they cherry pick data. Or they simply don't release their findings, if it turns out it won't help their cause.
Anyway, the links in the parent post show some incredible stuff, and pretty much all the scientific criticism I can find is led by one man, Dr. David Briske from Texas A&M. So we have one guy with extensive credentials that says it works, one guy with extensive credentials that says it doesn't, and a slew of others who have tried it (or something similar) with varying results. I'd like to see Savory get a bigger tract of land and a larger herd to see if it can scale. Same with the permaculture stuff: we've got deserts right here in the US, let's see what these guys can do.
Feynman, in the first of his Lectures on Physics asked his reader to imagine that some cataclysmic event has wiped out all human knowledge, but that one single sentence could survive to be passed on to the next generation. What would he suggest that sentence be? The universe is made of atoms.
Feynman is awesome, but that dude has a serious under-appreciation for abusively long run-on sentences filled with literary non sequiturs and mathematical and chemical formulae.
The issue here is evolution. Any version of creationism that denies evolution is incompatible with science.
It's not really incompatible, Creationism is just an unnecessary and illogical addition to it that has been around for all of recorded history and beyond. The ancients thought gods were the reason behind everything, like the Sun moving across the sky. The only difference between that and modern Creationists is that they no longer believe a god has to manually push the Sun around. I imagine they have different beliefs about how the solar system formed, spanning from the YECs belief that a god placed the planets where they are today, though the people that think a god just kicked off the Big Bang and nudged a few cosmological constants around.
You don't even have to think in such grand terms as evolution, just look at how people think giving birth is a miracle and that the baby is a gift from their god. Never mind the fact that the billions people they condemn to eternal torture for not believing in their particular god have just as many children. It's the same for evolution: some people accept evolution as the overwhelmingly likely scenario, but choose to see their god as the guiding force behind it. Or perhaps it's just like the YECs, who think god placed fossils on Earth in their current form: their god just happened to make human embryos go through stages where they develop several repetitions of temporary organs -- sometimes appearing and disappearing before they even become functional -- very similar to ancient aquatic animals.
Or perhaps the GP has read on anti-evolution sites that Haeckel's recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") was discredited, which is often used as justification to throw out the entire theory without bothering to understand why Haeckel's theory was discredited (he wasn't completely wrong...embryonic development is just not as straightforward as he claimed) or how modern biologists understand evolution.
No, instead they just cancel your flight if it's half empty and make you wait a few hours to be crammed onto the next flight.
Random anecdote: I was once speaking to my wife wondering if that's why our flight was cancelled, and an airline employee that overheard me became very offended that I suggested it. I wasn't even speaking sarcastically or anything, because they actually put us on a better flight that got us in earlier (shorter layover at an airport that wasn't so far out of the way). It was genuine curiosity, but I guess they hear enough customers complaining about that to make it a sore spot with them.
We all wish Mathworks/MatLab well. I used it at university and I use it at work. I use Octave at home (and sometimes at work). Octave is good for getting answers, not so good at graphing.
Are they competitors? Yes. Is there room for both? Yes.
There is room for both even within the same organization. Wherever your scripts are fairly standard MATLAB and don't use GUIs or toolboxes, you can use Octave as a drop-in replacement and save money on floating licenses. With a little legwork, I had Octave producing very nice graphs comparable to MATLAB. I never got the go-ahead to attempt a more substantial deployment, unfortunately.
Anyway, congrats to John Eaton and the Octave developers on the final GUI release. I remember checking the early versions out a year ago or so and chatting with the guy who added JIT as part of the Google Summer of Code about static JIT versus tracing JIT (in general terms only, if I was good enough I would have added it myself).
"Missing large parts of the conversation" is more likely to occur to people raised by luddites who make their children play outside rather than "socialize" as many kids do these days. Already, most of my kindergartener's (my oldest kid's) homework is given online, aside from a few worksheets sent home with him (we went two weeks and a couple missed recesses before we realized that he was in trouble because he wasn't doing all his homework). I can only imagine in the later grades he'll have to be glued to a computer screen in order to get his work done.
Also, there are so many cultural references people miss that Biblical ones aren't really a big deal these days unless you send your kid to a private, religion-affiliated school or something. We have never taken our children to church, and they are very rarely exposed to religion in general. Still, religion has some easy shortcuts for dealing with tough subjects like death (actually, that's the only subject I can think of at the moment). Luckily nobody in our family has died since my son was born, but my in-laws dog did. It's just so much easier for kids to understand that the dog went to some abstract place to explain why they'll never see the deceased again. I'll never forget my dad coming home from a hospital after saying goodbye to his father when I was twelve, because that is the only time I've ever seen him cry. He hugged my mom, looked at me and said, "this is why it's so easy to believe in heaven." It was probably ten years later before I stumbled upon usenet and realized how profound that was.
Anyway...point is, as long as you don't make a big deal about praying and all that, your kids won't either.
Replying to myself. I just did some searching, and it seems that up until VS 2010, it didn't have zero-width selection, which I have just verified to be true in VS 2008. I can see how that could be a bit annoying, though there is a pretty simple workaround (select the column, press tab, then column select the new whitespace). Notepad++ (6.2.2) and gVim (7.3) both have zero-width selection. Any others?