You are a crazy person for conflating the right to bear arms (a uniquely American thing which the rest of the world sees with incomprehension and disgust) and the freedom of press which is enshrined in the international charter of Human rights (a fundamental right everyone thinks is really important unless they are Putin).
Also, I don't see how there is any value in allowing any organisation to pass things which are demonstrably lies as true news, nor how the "freedom of the press" somehow trumps the right to privacy. Regulation is difficult, but necessary. It should be possible to seek redress and obtain retraction/damages when a news organisation willingly lied about something.
I will go further. If you are a blogger, you are potentially a news organisation: you are publishing information for a very large public. This information may be about the best way to cook burgers, or it may be about the fact that you saw some politician/relative thereof in a compromising situation. If this is the latter, this better be true and not violate their privacy, otherwise what you are doing is immoral. And if it were illegal, that may not be a bad thing.
Otherwise, you are basically complaining about the fact that you are not allowed to propagate any rumour online which your deranged imagination came up with. Suck it up.
You need not guess: this is actually the case. I guess they are really worried they might have to stop lying outright, meaning their political power will be reduced.
I personally think freedom of the press is really important, but that you do not have a right to publish lies. It may be that determining what is and is not true should not in general be determined by political power, but this does not mean that there should be no oversight nor that you should be allowed to own your own propaganda platform disguised as a news organisation.
No matter how much I think the plasma desktop is better than the mac alternative, it is clearly a waste of resources to maintain it: if people wanted to run a Linux interface, they would run Linux:)
If call quality was an important aspect of cell phones, Nokia would still rule the world. Apparently, angry birds is more important, so you get what most other people pay for.
90% of MDs don't understand conditional probabilities. This is probably about the same as the general public (see the Monty Hall problem), but in that case it has very real consequences.
But then I don't expect much from MDs anyway.
But for researchers, not understanding what a model is (never mind a statistical one), this is a sin.
Yeah, the trick is that you should always try to get funding for projects you have already completed, thus claiming a 100% success rate. Of course, this only happens in very large lab and has a bootstrap problem.
On the other hand, the biological sciences are especially tough because experiments are hard, expensive and unreliable, and those doing them typically not so sophisticated with data analyses. Or else you are doing bioinformatics, which is either algorithmic research or also costly and generally inconclusive unless you do in vivo validation, in which case you are back to problem number one.
But seriously, if you work with old-school biologists, do the world a favour, and teach them that a Gaussian error on a number of cells is dumb and wrong.
The correct answer to that wizard is no. Also, if someone tells you you can have all the knowledge in the world, this is a nasty trick they are playing on you.
This is because knowledge is largely useless, only relevant knowledge is valuable. Also, the number of negative results in any field is probable infinite and uncountable. Although it is useful to know that this or that theory which had some data supporting it is wrong (a false positive, and a publication of a negative result), it is not useful to know that this other theory no one ever thought was right except perhaps you in your lab is in fact wrong.
This is true. Which is why, for all its flaws, I suspect the slashdot solution is the best-ish you can get. It is not perfect, and perhaps a slightly more fine-grained solution to points would be nice (for example, getting+1 would require 1 moderator giving you a point, +2 two mods, and so on).
But in general moderator aversion to shills helps a lot: to give an example, if you read the Guardian, whenever there is a subject remotely connected to the EU, a horde of people are there to spew general nonsense, and they will repeat the same false points again and again. Except there simply are not that many people who care that much and I suspect that this is an organised ploy which is meant to push a particular political agenda. Same thing for nuclear, or any topic where there is a very vocal minority who has an agenda.
I realise this is all conspiracy-theory sounding, but it is a documented truth that activists groups of all sides do that, and to me, when you are a respected news organisation, it falls within your duties to police the trolls.
This is true. But also, there is the problem of determining what/who is a troll. If you admin a forum, and especially if you are a media organisation, you should be aware that people will try to push their political message, and you should simply remove these comments if you cannot filter them before their arrival. In internet communities, sockpuppets are frowned upon, but it seems that the old media has not caught up yet, thus multiple trolls thrive.
Then there are idiots and rude people. A simple upvote/downvote system can keep that under control.
Also, threads. Threads are good because they contain/constrain the trolls who cannot effectively pollute large number of conversations (if they try, they will also "lose" large numbers of conversations, to the detriment of their "side".)
Look, UI is important, I care about UI. I even have strong opinions about which is better. But there are degrees, and the bizarre, raving opinions one sees in these threads go beyond having preferences. Also obligatory XKCD .
It's crazy to express foam-in-the-mouth dislike for a whole desktop environment because you dislike their new device notification. And you don't even dislike it per se, you dislike it because it looks to you like the solution from another environment.
No, you are the one spreading misinformation. when KDE4 was released, the apps had been ported and were fine, but the desktop was basically just the libraries and a feel of what was possible so that the devs could give it ago.
SuSE had the updated apps and still packaged KDE3. Redhat didn't care for KDE so just ripped out KDE3 -- which was not abandonned at that point, there even were point releases after KDE 4.0.
The release was done so that bugs could be found and development kickstarted. It worked and this is how KDE4 today is all kind of awsome.
No, you are not the oddball. Most of us are happy and relatively flexible -- and KDE user according to the linux user choice awardss. People who feel compelled to explain how desktop X (KDE SC 4, GNOME 3) destroyed their workflow/unhinged their view of the universe by changing the three crucial pixels on which everything stood are mad.
Also, they try to convince you that their solution (a 1% preference on Linux which is itself a 2% preference in general) is the best thing ever for $BATSHIT_INSANE_REASON.
Now I do think that KDE in its latest iteration is the best desktop there is bar none. And I am irritated a times by the idiosyncrasies of the other desktops (windows, mac, gnome) when I need to use them. But if I had to work for any length of time in any one of them, I'd be OK and quickly pick up the habits. These threads only tell you what the crazies are all about this timeof year.
No, KDE 4.0 was always "the base is complete, we are going to make it into an awesome interface, look at what we have now!". Stop spreading lies.
The apps were mostly straight ports which were better or the same than their predecessors. The desktop was somewhat unfinished, but not worse than KDE3 was when the transition from KDE1 happened.
When the underlying libraries change API stuff like that is going to happen, and if you don't release, your bugs won't get fixed.
You will likely wait forever: a one-man team is never going to catch-up with a hundreds-strong team. Also, the guy is clearly clueless and will not listen to well-intentioned advice from the people who actually wrote the code he pretends to maintain.
Because "French taxes are high" is oft-repeated, irritating, mostly-wrong, truthiness.
Is the French taxation regime inefficient? yes, but mostly because a lot of the redistribution it is meant to produce is in the form of market-distorting goods and services instead of cash. Also, capital gains are, like everywhere else, insufficiently taxed.
But the level of taxation is pretty much the European average. Higher than the US? Yes. Better value for money? Probably.
You misunderstand the laws of thermodynamics. They apply also at the quantum level, and deal mostly about the energy cost of transferring a bit of information. The trick being that the bit may or may not decay with some probability which depends on how much energy you put into preserving it. Where a "bit" is for example the excitation level of an electron.
The universe is truly nondeterministic. It really is a hugely complicated probability density function:)
Sorry, but this is not the way it works. You have problems such that you can prove there exists an optimal algorithm to solve them, and simultaneously prove you cannot actually write it.
Or for cases such as this, there may not be a finite number of solutions. In fact, there may not be a countable infinity of solutions. At which point, since the axiom of choice may not be true (your choice!) it may be that you may not be able to pick all the solutions which are true and exist, nor even write them as families of solutions.
The universe may still be deterministic, but it may not be computable (in fact, I suspect that). this means that even is all events are perfectly defined from the past, you may not make a prediction about future events in general.
Actually, people came to America because they couldn't properly oppress the people back in Europe that did not have quite their exact brand of puritanism...
I have a strong suspicion that Wayland was not even such a good idea: after all, X can run on hardware of minuscule power. Clearly however, it is not convenient to do so for a number of modern applications.
This is why extensions exist.
Also, not convenient really means "we devs are bored with our codebase: it basically works and there are no new exciting features to add". At the end of the day, a modern display system does one easy thing: display textured/alphablended rectangles, and a hard thing: deal with input. Input is already there in X, and it also supports exotic things old-style application needed.
Now the Wayland guys know that exactly, and they might get better input than X -- but likely not, because this is not about being clever but about having killed all the bugs. And of course they already do composition very well. But at the end of the day, there is nothing in Wayland you cannot get in X. So it'll fail.
Which brings us to mir. They want a better Wayland, but is coded by less competent people, and they haven't started the hard part yet. Conclusion, if canonical are really pushing that, they are idiots. As a side note, this was already obvious when they badly recoded plasma. Just because.
Dude, if someone lends you money at a rate below the inflation and you refuse, you are an idiot. Alternatively, if you cannot get more returns than the minuscule rate at which th US borrows, you are an incompetent.
At a time where the economy is below potential and there is a dearth of investment, of course the US should borrow as mucha s it can, and invest all that money in infrastructure, but also research and better unemployment benefits. Because unemployed people tend to need and therefore spend that money. Unlike banker who will tend to hoard it.
I can tell you, the passages picked in this test would have all been already read by a moderately assiduous student. This whole thing is a blatant attempt at selection based on social class.
Slashdot Mirror
You are a crazy person for conflating the right to bear arms (a uniquely American thing which the rest of the world sees with incomprehension and disgust) and the freedom of press which is enshrined in the international charter of Human rights (a fundamental right everyone thinks is really important unless they are Putin).
Also, I don't see how there is any value in allowing any organisation to pass things which are demonstrably lies as true news, nor how the "freedom of the press" somehow trumps the right to privacy. Regulation is difficult, but necessary. It should be possible to seek redress and obtain retraction/damages when a news organisation willingly lied about something.
I will go further. If you are a blogger, you are potentially a news organisation: you are publishing information for a very large public. This information may be about the best way to cook burgers, or it may be about the fact that you saw some politician/relative thereof in a compromising situation. If this is the latter, this better be true and not violate their privacy, otherwise what you are doing is immoral. And if it were illegal, that may not be a bad thing.
Otherwise, you are basically complaining about the fact that you are not allowed to propagate any rumour online which your deranged imagination came up with. Suck it up.
You need not guess: this is actually the case. I guess they are really worried they might have to stop lying outright, meaning their political power will be reduced.
I personally think freedom of the press is really important, but that you do not have a right to publish lies. It may be that determining what is and is not true should not in general be determined by political power, but this does not mean that there should be no oversight nor that you should be allowed to own your own propaganda platform disguised as a news organisation.
No matter how much I think the plasma desktop is better than the mac alternative, it is clearly a waste of resources to maintain it: if people wanted to run a Linux interface, they would run Linux :)
It does, and amarok/digikam are infinitely less shitty than itunes/iphoto.
If call quality was an important aspect of cell phones, Nokia would still rule the world. Apparently, angry birds is more important, so you get what most other people pay for.
90% of MDs don't understand conditional probabilities. This is probably about the same as the general public (see the Monty Hall problem), but in that case it has very real consequences.
But then I don't expect much from MDs anyway.
But for researchers, not understanding what a model is (never mind a statistical one), this is a sin.
Yeah, the trick is that you should always try to get funding for projects you have already completed, thus claiming a 100% success rate. Of course, this only happens in very large lab and has a bootstrap problem.
On the other hand, the biological sciences are especially tough because experiments are hard, expensive and unreliable, and those doing them typically not so sophisticated with data analyses. Or else you are doing bioinformatics, which is either algorithmic research or also costly and generally inconclusive unless you do in vivo validation, in which case you are back to problem number one.
But seriously, if you work with old-school biologists, do the world a favour, and teach them that a Gaussian error on a number of cells is dumb and wrong.
The correct answer to that wizard is no. Also, if someone tells you you can have all the knowledge in the world, this is a nasty trick they are playing on you.
This is because knowledge is largely useless, only relevant knowledge is valuable. Also, the number of negative results in any field is probable infinite and uncountable. Although it is useful to know that this or that theory which had some data supporting it is wrong (a false positive, and a publication of a negative result), it is not useful to know that this other theory no one ever thought was right except perhaps you in your lab is in fact wrong.
This is true. Which is why, for all its flaws, I suspect the slashdot solution is the best-ish you can get. It is not perfect, and perhaps a slightly more fine-grained solution to points would be nice (for example, getting+1 would require 1 moderator giving you a point, +2 two mods, and so on).
But in general moderator aversion to shills helps a lot: to give an example, if you read the Guardian, whenever there is a subject remotely connected to the EU, a horde of people are there to spew general nonsense, and they will repeat the same false points again and again. Except there simply are not that many people who care that much and I suspect that this is an organised ploy which is meant to push a particular political agenda. Same thing for nuclear, or any topic where there is a very vocal minority who has an agenda.
I realise this is all conspiracy-theory sounding, but it is a documented truth that activists groups of all sides do that, and to me, when you are a respected news organisation, it falls within your duties to police the trolls.
This is true. But also, there is the problem of determining what/who is a troll. If you admin a forum, and especially if you are a media organisation, you should be aware that people will try to push their political message, and you should simply remove these comments if you cannot filter them before their arrival. In internet communities, sockpuppets are frowned upon, but it seems that the old media has not caught up yet, thus multiple trolls thrive.
Then there are idiots and rude people. A simple upvote/downvote system can keep that under control.
Also, threads. Threads are good because they contain/constrain the trolls who cannot effectively pollute large number of conversations (if they try, they will also "lose" large numbers of conversations, to the detriment of their "side".)
Look, UI is important, I care about UI. I even have strong opinions about which is better. But there are degrees, and the bizarre, raving opinions one sees in these threads go beyond having preferences. Also obligatory XKCD .
It's crazy to express foam-in-the-mouth dislike for a whole desktop environment because you dislike their new device notification. And you don't even dislike it per se, you dislike it because it looks to you like the solution from another environment.
No, you are the one spreading misinformation. when KDE4 was released, the apps had been ported and were fine, but the desktop was basically just the libraries and a feel of what was possible so that the devs could give it ago.
SuSE had the updated apps and still packaged KDE3. Redhat didn't care for KDE so just ripped out KDE3 -- which was not abandonned at that point, there even were point releases after KDE 4.0.
The release was done so that bugs could be found and development kickstarted. It worked and this is how KDE4 today is all kind of awsome.
No, you are not the oddball. Most of us are happy and relatively flexible -- and KDE user according to the linux user choice awardss. People who feel compelled to explain how desktop X (KDE SC 4, GNOME 3) destroyed their workflow/unhinged their view of the universe by changing the three crucial pixels on which everything stood are mad.
Also, they try to convince you that their solution (a 1% preference on Linux which is itself a 2% preference in general) is the best thing ever for $BATSHIT_INSANE_REASON.
Now I do think that KDE in its latest iteration is the best desktop there is bar none. And I am irritated a times by the idiosyncrasies of the other desktops (windows, mac, gnome) when I need to use them. But if I had to work for any length of time in any one of them, I'd be OK and quickly pick up the habits. These threads only tell you what the crazies are all about this timeof year.
And the lifetime of an apple release is really short.
No, KDE 4.0 was always "the base is complete, we are going to make it into an awesome interface, look at what we have now!". Stop spreading lies.
The apps were mostly straight ports which were better or the same than their predecessors. The desktop was somewhat unfinished, but not worse than KDE3 was when the transition from KDE1 happened.
When the underlying libraries change API stuff like that is going to happen, and if you don't release, your bugs won't get fixed.
You will likely wait forever: a one-man team is never going to catch-up with a hundreds-strong team. Also, the guy is clearly clueless and will not listen to well-intentioned advice from the people who actually wrote the code he pretends to maintain.
In fact, you could make that into a pretty GUI. Oh wait, that's what the update dialogue is when you pop in the new DVD/network install CD.
It is still nice that the CLI option exists and works well. Maybe windows users are not green with envy, but it makes my life as a SuSE use nicer.
Because "French taxes are high" is oft-repeated, irritating, mostly-wrong, truthiness.
Is the French taxation regime inefficient? yes, but mostly because a lot of the redistribution it is meant to produce is in the form of market-distorting goods and services instead of cash. Also, capital gains are, like everywhere else, insufficiently taxed.
But the level of taxation is pretty much the European average. Higher than the US? Yes. Better value for money? Probably.
You misunderstand the laws of thermodynamics. They apply also at the quantum level, and deal mostly about the energy cost of transferring a bit of information. The trick being that the bit may or may not decay with some probability which depends on how much energy you put into preserving it. Where a "bit" is for example the excitation level of an electron.
The universe is truly nondeterministic. It really is a hugely complicated probability density function :)
Sorry, but this is not the way it works. You have problems such that you can prove there exists an optimal algorithm to solve them, and simultaneously prove you cannot actually write it.
Or for cases such as this, there may not be a finite number of solutions. In fact, there may not be a countable infinity of solutions. At which point, since the axiom of choice may not be true (your choice!) it may be that you may not be able to pick all the solutions which are true and exist, nor even write them as families of solutions.
The universe may still be deterministic, but it may not be computable (in fact, I suspect that). this means that even is all events are perfectly defined from the past, you may not make a prediction about future events in general.
Actually, people came to America because they couldn't properly oppress the people back in Europe that did not have quite their exact brand of puritanism...
I have a strong suspicion that Wayland was not even such a good idea: after all, X can run on hardware of minuscule power. Clearly however, it is not convenient to do so for a number of modern applications.
This is why extensions exist.
Also, not convenient really means "we devs are bored with our codebase: it basically works and there are no new exciting features to add". At the end of the day, a modern display system does one easy thing: display textured/alphablended rectangles, and a hard thing: deal with input. Input is already there in X, and it also supports exotic things old-style application needed.
Now the Wayland guys know that exactly, and they might get better input than X -- but likely not, because this is not about being clever but about having killed all the bugs. And of course they already do composition very well. But at the end of the day, there is nothing in Wayland you cannot get in X. So it'll fail.
Which brings us to mir. They want a better Wayland, but is coded by less competent people, and they haven't started the hard part yet. Conclusion, if canonical are really pushing that, they are idiots. As a side note, this was already obvious when they badly recoded plasma. Just because.
Dude, if someone lends you money at a rate below the inflation and you refuse, you are an idiot. Alternatively, if you cannot get more returns than the minuscule rate at which th US borrows, you are an incompetent.
At a time where the economy is below potential and there is a dearth of investment, of course the US should borrow as mucha s it can, and invest all that money in infrastructure, but also research and better unemployment benefits. Because unemployed people tend to need and therefore spend that money. Unlike banker who will tend to hoard it.
I can tell you, the passages picked in this test would have all been already read by a moderately assiduous student. This whole thing is a blatant attempt at selection based on social class.