I can't claim that KDE 4.2 actually works, but I do know that Kubuntu is an atrocious implementation of KDE. I've been considering giving another distro a chance to try out KDE4, maybe SUSE or Mandriva.
quote.
Good point. I understand the Gentoo devs are rumored to be planning release a 4.2 overlay in early 2011.
I speak as a long-time KDE fan.
Simply based on my own experience, I would not recommend upgrading to Kubuntu Jaunty. Kubuntu Intrepid sucked. It looked great, but was buggy as hell, not to mention insanely slow on Nvidia cards. It sucked on every box I put it on. Jaunty didn't work at all for me. That was the last straw.
If KDE 4.2.4 is the ultimate, then I'm glad I decided to migrate to Gnome. They really screwed the pooch with KDE 4.
actualy there is a logical reason other thanstyle for a product like this.. given it's size and the goal of being light weight.. by spacing the keys out and allowing the upper frame to be solid accross the mid secion of the device allows the surface to he structural - there for allowing the bottom of it to be thiner and allowing the whole device to be thinner as you don't have to make room under the keyboard for support and you don't need heavy materials around the edges for support - caluse as soon as it flexes watch it die.
Yours evidently has a malfunctioning "Shift" key...
Cosmologists spent decades establishing the subject as respectable science, and now these nitwits come along and blow all that good will. I see a number of specific problems with the Anthropic idea:
(1) It makes no predictions. There is no way to either verify or falsify it.
(2) The measure problem: in an infinite multiverse, there is no way to define probability. Think of a box with 1000 black marbles and 1000 white marbles. If you pick a marble out blind, your odds of getting a black one are 50%. Now consider a box with an infinite number of marbles, arranged Black/White/Black/White... and so on. What are your odds of getting a black marble if you pick one out blind? If you say "still 50%," consider this: since the number of marbles is infinite, I could just as well rearrange the marbles to be Black/Black/White/Black/Black/White... and so on. Now what are the odds a random pick will give me a black marble?
(3) Who is to say that a universe with very different laws of physics can't support life? Sure, it probably won't be based on carbon and DNA, but as long as you can build a Turing machine with available materials, then you can have life, and given enough time, you will have life. So how "special" is our universe, really? See (2) above.
Calling the "Anthropic Principle" a principle is pure PR. String theory's original promise that self-consistency would provide a unique theory has completely failed, and Anthropic arguments are an attempt to create a quasi-mystical explanation for why this is ok.
The speed of light is also the maximum speed of causation...if these "super structures" are outside the observable universe, how in the hell are they affecting anything within the observable universe? If they can exert causal influence on these galaxies, and the light from these galaxies has time to reach us... I could be wrong but I feel like someone, somewhere, is seriously contradicting themselves.
It's not a sharp cutoff. If there is a structure in the universe larger than our horizon, and we are only seeing part of that structure, it would appear to us to be a gradient (a "dipole") extending across our entire observable universe. The signature of this would be that everything we observe appears to all be flowing in one direction relative to the Cosmic Microwave Background. This is what these folks are claiming to have observed, and at very high statistical significance.
The tie-in to inflation is that, if this observation is correct, it might be an indication that the bubble of spacetime which expanded during inflation didn't end up getting much bigger than the current size of our observable universe, and that just outside what we can see of the cosmos is quantum-gravitational chaos, very different from the nice, homogeneous and isotropic universe inside the bubble.
Would this be a problem if the legislation was written in such a way as to be progressive? No. But, as it currently stands, Journals want to charge researchers for publication - even if they don't have the money to pay for it.
Page charges are not evil. Open access journals work on exactly this model: they fund themselves by page charges rather than subscription charges. This is on the face of it entirely reasonable. The real killer is that universities pay journal subscription costs out of overhead, so researchers publishing in open access journals pay twice: once in page charges, and once in overhead to cover library costs for the subscription-based journals they're not publishing in. Until this changes, open access journals are DOA. But it's not the page charges that are the problem, it's the blanket subsidy to closed-access journals from overhead. It's the academic equivalent of paying the RIAA a fee for every blank tape you buy.
Good luck getting the university to reduce your overhead for the privilege of cutting off Elsevier's profit...
For example, one might use individual pixels on the paper. Or you might want to group several together and treat as a bit. Or use an innovative coding scheme that doesn't just map individual bits to spots on the paper.
What a great idea! You could even make the information density higher by assigning colors to the spots on the paper which correspond to the hue, saturation, and value of the pixels in the image file. They could, say, be arranged in an array that corresponds in one-to-one fashion to the raster of the image.
I have recently received several emails from Elsevier "inviting" me to review graduate-level textbooks. I know for a fact that at least one of these books is sold to students at well over $100 a copy, and is nearly a thousand pages long.
For my services as a reviewer, Elsevier is offering to pay me a "$250 honorarium". For a thousand page technical textbook. Either they don't really give a damn whether or not I give them an informed review, or they are expecting me to work for them for pennies an hour. I am not really sure what kind of moron would agree to this arrangement, but they must find takers.
I have added them to my spam blacklist.
In practice, under the amendment to our rules, renters will be able, subject to the terms of our Section 207 rules, to install Section 207 devices wherever they rent space outside of a building, such as balconies, balcony railings, patios, yards, gardens or any similar areas.
Secondly while Hawking has made several important discoveries, he was cited by my college physics professor to be a 'pop' physicist. Hawking is a genius but mostly in theoretical physics. My professor also degraded Brian Greene to a much further point by saying he was nothing more than someone relaying physics to the general public. Here are citation summaries for Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene. Unless your college physics professor is Ed Witten, he would probably do well to shut the fuck up.
Initial reviews of these devices unsurprisingly expose them to be underpowered and lacklustre. What's the appeal? I am totally sold on the EEE. The damn thing is a limited, but basically fully functional Linux desktop box. It weighs two pounds, and is the size of a hardcover book. I can put it, an actual book, notes, and two days worth of clothes in a large messenger bag to carry on to the plane. Weighs ten or twelve pounds and gets me through the gauntlet at airport security in seconds if there's no dork in front of me fishing in his pockets for change and undoing his belt. Fits in the same bin with my shoes and my 3-1-1 bag. People ask me all the time where they can get one: I must have accidentally viral marketed six of them on a one-day business trip this week. I spilled a pint of beer on the thing yesterday, and it's dead as a doornail. But I'm only out $350. If it had been a Macbook, I would be out two grand at least, and in mourning.
I'm ordering another one tomorrow.
If there are any physicists out there, can they explain how we know the universe is predominantly matter? What's to say that the andromeda galaxy isn't 100% anti matter (i.e. all positrons and neg-protons.. negtons?). You can't tell just by looking: matter and antimatter interact with light identically, so if the stars in the Andromeda galaxy were made of anti-hydrogen, they would shine identically. However, if the universe were broken up into domains of matter and antimatter in this way, there would be annihilation at the boundaries, which would be detectable in the form of gamma ray emission. Current limits from the gamma ray "glow" in the sky put very strong limits on the existence of antimatter domains: see this paper, for example.
For all we know, the mysterious "Dark Matter" could really be just a very dense repository of all of the discarded fruitcakes from around the universe.
No, it couldn't. One thing that is definitely known is that the dark matter is not made of regular atoms (baryonic matter). Baryonic matter is known to comprise no more than about four percent of the total density of stuff in the universe, versus about 25 percent for dark matter. If the universe were 25 percent baryonic, all sorts of measurements would come out differently than they do:
(1) The primordial abundance of elements, which is observed to be about 76 percent hydrogen and 24 percent helium and a trace of lithium, would be very different. See here
(2) The signatures of acoustic oscillations in the Cosmic Micrwave Background would be much larger than they are observed to be. See here
(3) Any extra baryons would show up in the hot gas between galaxies in large clusters, which is very accurately measured by X-ray satellites. See here.
(4) Dark matter consisting of small condensed objects like Jupiter-sized planets would show up in gravitational microlensing surveys. They don't.
We don't know what dark matter is, but we sure as hell know what it's not, and it is not ordinary matter that just happens to be dark. There are multiple, independent lines of evidence which support this conclusion.
PRL persists despite the fact that it has no identifiable purpose. At one time, the idea of a "Letters" journal was for rapid publication of select short articles. Letters journals needed to be selective, so they could operate in an efficient fashion. Ironically, in practice it typically takes much longer to get a paper published in a rapid-publication journal like PRL than in a regular journal like Physical Review, because the referee process is so ponderous. Papers always go to at least two referees, sometimes three or more. In my experience (I have published in and refereed for PRL), this does little to improve the quality of the referee process: it simply makes it more capricious.
Meanwhile, with the advent of arXiv, rapid publication is no longer an issue: by the time a high-quality paper makes it through the review process, it has already been cited a dozen times, and the citing articles have themselves been read and cited. Likewise, there is no longer any point whatsoever to a four-page limit like that imposed by PRL: who cares?
The only reason PRL still exists is the perceived prestige. Having a dozen PRL publications is a gold star on your job application or tenure portfolio, even if those papers are wrong, or poorly cited. Meanwhile, more modern, efficient and useful open access and online journals are poorly indexed by commercial citation services such as ISI Web of Science: even influential, highly cited papers published in these journals count for relatively little with university administration bean counters. And tenure is no insulation from the pressure to publish in letters journals: tenured faculty frequently publish with students and postdocs, and recognize the need for their more junior collaborators to count the proper coup. And so the system perpetuates itself. PRL will continue to matter until the old guys (and they're almost all male) who think it matters die off. Which will be a while.
I'm a university professor in the sciences. I encourage students to collaborate on homework. To my way of thinking, one of the purposes of homework is to teach collaborative skills essential to success in science. Scientists talk to each other. A lot. Sharing information and ideas is what science is all about.
The question of students simply copying solutions off the internet is a little trickier. I address the issue by expressly allowing use of the net for problem solving, but I require students to cite all sources used in writing their solution. This teaches good scientific practice, and it also removes gray areas where violations are concerned. If you look the answer up in a book or on the web, but don't cite the source, it is academic misconduct, period.
This is really not very hard to deal with.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't claim that KDE 4.2 actually works, but I do know that Kubuntu is an atrocious implementation of KDE. I've been considering giving another distro a chance to try out KDE4, maybe SUSE or Mandriva. quote. Good point. I understand the Gentoo devs are rumored to be planning release a 4.2 overlay in early 2011.
I speak as a long-time KDE fan. Simply based on my own experience, I would not recommend upgrading to Kubuntu Jaunty. Kubuntu Intrepid sucked. It looked great, but was buggy as hell, not to mention insanely slow on Nvidia cards. It sucked on every box I put it on. Jaunty didn't work at all for me. That was the last straw. If KDE 4.2.4 is the ultimate, then I'm glad I decided to migrate to Gnome. They really screwed the pooch with KDE 4.
Yours evidently has a malfunctioning "Shift" key...
Cosmologists spent decades establishing the subject as respectable science, and now these nitwits come along and blow all that good will. I see a number of specific problems with the Anthropic idea:
(1) It makes no predictions. There is no way to either verify or falsify it.
(2) The measure problem: in an infinite multiverse, there is no way to define probability. Think of a box with 1000 black marbles and 1000 white marbles. If you pick a marble out blind, your odds of getting a black one are 50%. Now consider a box with an infinite number of marbles, arranged Black/White/Black/White... and so on. What are your odds of getting a black marble if you pick one out blind? If you say "still 50%," consider this: since the number of marbles is infinite, I could just as well rearrange the marbles to be Black/Black/White/Black/Black/White... and so on. Now what are the odds a random pick will give me a black marble?
(3) Who is to say that a universe with very different laws of physics can't support life? Sure, it probably won't be based on carbon and DNA, but as long as you can build a Turing machine with available materials, then you can have life, and given enough time, you will have life. So how "special" is our universe, really? See (2) above.
Calling the "Anthropic Principle" a principle is pure PR. String theory's original promise that self-consistency would provide a unique theory has completely failed, and Anthropic arguments are an attempt to create a quasi-mystical explanation for why this is ok.
Fine. But then don't call it science.
http://www.mythtv.org/modules.php?name=MythFeatures
HTH.
It's not a sharp cutoff. If there is a structure in the universe larger than our horizon, and we are only seeing part of that structure, it would appear to us to be a gradient (a "dipole") extending across our entire observable universe. The signature of this would be that everything we observe appears to all be flowing in one direction relative to the Cosmic Microwave Background. This is what these folks are claiming to have observed, and at very high statistical significance.
The tie-in to inflation is that, if this observation is correct, it might be an indication that the bubble of spacetime which expanded during inflation didn't end up getting much bigger than the current size of our observable universe, and that just outside what we can see of the cosmos is quantum-gravitational chaos, very different from the nice, homogeneous and isotropic universe inside the bubble.
... is Firefox and an index fund. Dollar-cost averaging is your friend.
Page charges are not evil. Open access journals work on exactly this model: they fund themselves by page charges rather than subscription charges. This is on the face of it entirely reasonable. The real killer is that universities pay journal subscription costs out of overhead, so researchers publishing in open access journals pay twice: once in page charges, and once in overhead to cover library costs for the subscription-based journals they're not publishing in. Until this changes, open access journals are DOA. But it's not the page charges that are the problem, it's the blanket subsidy to closed-access journals from overhead. It's the academic equivalent of paying the RIAA a fee for every blank tape you buy. Good luck getting the university to reduce your overhead for the privilege of cutting off Elsevier's profit...
What a great idea! You could even make the information density higher by assigning colors to the spots on the paper which correspond to the hue, saturation, and value of the pixels in the image file. They could, say, be arranged in an array that corresponds in one-to-one fashion to the raster of the image.
Should make decoding the image a lot easier, too.
I have recently received several emails from Elsevier "inviting" me to review graduate-level textbooks. I know for a fact that at least one of these books is sold to students at well over $100 a copy, and is nearly a thousand pages long. For my services as a reviewer, Elsevier is offering to pay me a "$250 honorarium". For a thousand page technical textbook. Either they don't really give a damn whether or not I give them an informed review, or they are expecting me to work for them for pennies an hour. I am not really sure what kind of moron would agree to this arrangement, but they must find takers. I have added them to my spam blacklist.
In practice, under the amendment to our rules, renters will be able, subject to the terms of our Section 207 rules, to install Section 207 devices wherever they rent space outside of a building, such as balconies, balcony railings, patios, yards, gardens or any similar areas.
No, it couldn't. One thing that is definitely known is that the dark matter is not made of regular atoms (baryonic matter). Baryonic matter is known to comprise no more than about four percent of the total density of stuff in the universe, versus about 25 percent for dark matter. If the universe were 25 percent baryonic, all sorts of measurements would come out differently than they do:
(1) The primordial abundance of elements, which is observed to be about 76 percent hydrogen and 24 percent helium and a trace of lithium, would be very different. See here
(2) The signatures of acoustic oscillations in the Cosmic Micrwave Background would be much larger than they are observed to be. See here
(3) Any extra baryons would show up in the hot gas between galaxies in large clusters, which is very accurately measured by X-ray satellites. See here.
(4) Dark matter consisting of small condensed objects like Jupiter-sized planets would show up in gravitational microlensing surveys. They don't.
We don't know what dark matter is, but we sure as hell know what it's not, and it is not ordinary matter that just happens to be dark. There are multiple, independent lines of evidence which support this conclusion.
PRL persists despite the fact that it has no identifiable purpose. At one time, the idea of a "Letters" journal was for rapid publication of select short articles. Letters journals needed to be selective, so they could operate in an efficient fashion. Ironically, in practice it typically takes much longer to get a paper published in a rapid-publication journal like PRL than in a regular journal like Physical Review, because the referee process is so ponderous. Papers always go to at least two referees, sometimes three or more. In my experience (I have published in and refereed for PRL), this does little to improve the quality of the referee process: it simply makes it more capricious.
Meanwhile, with the advent of arXiv, rapid publication is no longer an issue: by the time a high-quality paper makes it through the review process, it has already been cited a dozen times, and the citing articles have themselves been read and cited. Likewise, there is no longer any point whatsoever to a four-page limit like that imposed by PRL: who cares?
The only reason PRL still exists is the perceived prestige. Having a dozen PRL publications is a gold star on your job application or tenure portfolio, even if those papers are wrong, or poorly cited. Meanwhile, more modern, efficient and useful open access and online journals are poorly indexed by commercial citation services such as ISI Web of Science: even influential, highly cited papers published in these journals count for relatively little with university administration bean counters. And tenure is no insulation from the pressure to publish in letters journals: tenured faculty frequently publish with students and postdocs, and recognize the need for their more junior collaborators to count the proper coup. And so the system perpetuates itself. PRL will continue to matter until the old guys (and they're almost all male) who think it matters die off. Which will be a while.
I'm a university professor in the sciences. I encourage students to collaborate on homework. To my way of thinking, one of the purposes of homework is to teach collaborative skills essential to success in science. Scientists talk to each other. A lot. Sharing information and ideas is what science is all about. The question of students simply copying solutions off the internet is a little trickier. I address the issue by expressly allowing use of the net for problem solving, but I require students to cite all sources used in writing their solution. This teaches good scientific practice, and it also removes gray areas where violations are concerned. If you look the answer up in a book or on the web, but don't cite the source, it is academic misconduct, period. This is really not very hard to deal with.