Are you just going to troll me by saying "use linux instead you noob"?
Why not? In Linux you don't need to go through your registry and boot files daily to not be a "stupid user", Linux does what an OS is supposed to do for you - take care of the basic functions of your machine while you run the programs you need.
Linux is easier to install, easier to configure, easier to use. Why not use Linux instead?
I also understand spatially, just how far away a mile is. It is 5,280 feet. Same thing with liquids. I have a much better idea how much liquid is in one gallon based on the container sizes, and an even better idea just what is 5 gallons. You tell me a liter and it is much harder for me to visualize it.
I can't understand why Americans make so much of this "gut feeling" thing about their stupid measuring system. When I first went to the USA in a couple of days of driving I had a pretty good feeling of what a mile is, if you traveled abroad you'd have no problem in getting this "gut feeling" for the International System which is, after all, much easier to understand.
The biggest problem is not taking a look at a container and estimating its size. A liter is pretty much the same size as a quart, I don't think anyone could distinguish a liter from a quart just by looking at it.
The problem is estimating "how many X in one Y". For instance, I know that a drink shot is about 50 ml so a 750 ml bottle has 15 shots and one liter has 20 shots. I have no idea on how to do the same calculations in quarts, fifths, oz, or gallons without looking up the exact sizes of each.
You give me a number of measurements in meters and I can add them up to get a total in kilometers. Now try to add a bunch of measurements, some of them in feet, others in yards, some in fractions of miles, and get a total in miles.
In metric countries house numbers are in meters from the start of the street, the distance from one address to the other is easily calculated and measured from your driving distance.
If only you Americans did a small and short time effort to have a feeling for those basic distances, weights, and volumes, your life would become easier.
Who cares about boot time. Its a phone, when is it ever off?
Yes, because anyone who does anything different from the way you do it is stupid, right?
I often turn my phone off. Longer battery life, fewer interruptions. However, when I need to make a call, I'd rather have my phone on as quickly as possible.
A quick boot is a great feature for people who use their phones as a tool, not for people whose life runs around their phones. And, believe me, despite what you see on the streets these days, there are people whose lives haven't been totally dominated by their phones.
they are from the last ice age, so they would melt anyways
They have been there for a thousand years, then they lose half their size in six years and you think that's nothing to worry about?
If the rate of melting had been the same for those thousand years as it has been for the last six years that ice would be 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000006735 times the size it is now.
Anarchy creates new smaller governments that are brutal, violent and inefficient.
The largest and most powerful government in the world hasn't managed to create anything much better in Iraq and Afghanistan either, despite having spent a trillion dollars there.
I'm sure there was a time when the Tevatron was useful, just as there was a time when the Turing test was useful, but I don't see either of these fields showing either growth or usefulness now. Am I wrong?
Yes, you are wrong, on both counts.
The development of true human-level artificial intelligence would be a discovery that would eclipse everything else humans have ever done. How would you feel to have a robot that would go to work in your place and let you do whatever you'd like to do best? A robot that would know every profession, every trade, with a mind superior to the greatest scientist that ever lived until now?
In physics we are still short of a universal theory. We do not have any idea on how to unify gravitation with quantum physics. We simply have no idea of what will happen when we find out how gravitation works on a quantum level. What could we find? Perhaps the secrets of limitless energy, perhaps not. But it's worth trying.
I install Microsoft software on anyone's computer. I download the software from torrents. I figure there's no need to pay for it, since people have already paid Microsoft when they bought their Android phones,
As long as you can raise doubt about the accuracy of votes you can request a recount. Good luck with keeping supervision on all ballot boxes for all time after the election until the last recount is done.
I can' t understand how slashdotters keep raising the same theoretical objections to electronic voting while they disregard the observed facts. Guys, this is religion! Slashdot dogma says electronic voting is bad, paper voting is perfect. This is stupid.
I'm all for researching possible attacks on electronic ballots, but as a means to perfect the system, not as an argument to pretend there are no possible ways to improve it. So, is there a way to insert an "inexpensive electronic device" into a ballot? Simple solution, remove all unused connectors from the circuit boards. For every vulnerability there's a solution.
Vulnerabilities in electronic votes are the equivalent of butterfly ballots and hanging chads. If only people had shown the same determination to find all possible modes of failure in the paper system used in the Florida 2000 election...
This is an unstable situation, when development is following many dead ends.
Look at what happens when designs begin to stabilize. Intel lost the memory chip business decades ago, because they couldn't fabricate them cheaper than the Asians could.
In the CPU and GPU market perhaps the advantage American companies have is cultural, the Asians do not have the same experience in software development. Anyhow, companies like Intel and nVidia do a lot of research in production too, it's not as easy as telling a chip foundry, "hey, build me some 32 nanometer chips, will ya?"
Simply dominating the technology is not enough, you must develop new technology faster than the others to survive. And this is where American companies are losing their edge, except for a few companies like Intel, they are relying more on holding monopolies through patents than in creating new technologies.
Brazil has a problem with the large amount of regulations, but that can be managed. Regulations are always worse for small companies, for a large corporation like Apple the cost of the legal team to handle that is proportionally less, there's an economy of scale in paperwork.
The advantage in Brazil today is the stable political system. Being governed by a leftist political party that has a center-right economic policy is a great advantage. The hard lessons of the hyperinflation of the 1980s taught Brazilian economists to follow Friedman rather than Krugman, Brazil isn't going to spend a trillion dollars they do not have on some voodoo "stimulus".
Political stability is one of the most prized situations for big corporations, everything else can be accounted for in the business plan.
If you have production and want to have design, what do you do? Hire engineers, it costs something in the order of $100 k in tuitions to create a new engineer, there are thousands of engineers graduating every year all over the world.
If you have design and want to have production, what do you do? Building a new factory costs on the order of $1 billion, that's four orders of magnitude more than educating someone to be an engineer.
Giving priority to design over manufacturing only works as long as there is excess manufacturing capability in the world, so you can get a new fabricating facility for less than it would cost your current fabricator to get into the design business.
Believing the current situation will last forever is how big corporations die.
Considering differences in altitude, oblateness of the Earth, the detector is underground, and so on, it isn't hard to imagine an 18m position error over approximately 732,000 m distance measured or calculated.
Considering that the world's longest tunnel is 57 km long and they drilled it from both ends and the error when both ends met in the middle was about a half meter, one gets an idea of what's the attainable precision.
If they used the same level of precision, scaling up the error would result in a 6 m error at 732 km. However one must take into account that in digging the railroad tunnel they only went to the precision level they needed for that job, one must assume that the scientists used more precise methods.
So, it's very hard, practically impossible, to imagine that there would exist an error of 18 m in the position of the detector.
At 3 GHz light travels 10 cm in one clock cycle. Faster speeds would make it hard to send a request of data from one end of the chip to the other and get a response during the execution of a machine instruction. Having to insert no-operation cycles while waiting for data to arrive would negate the usefulness of faster clock rates.
If you covered 2% of the uninhabited portions of the Sahara with solar PV,
How much would that cost?
You need how many panels? Let's take this one, for example. $400 for 185W, 1.25 m2 surface. Those 2% of the Sahara will be covered by a total of 158 billion panels, costing a total of 63 trillion dollars..
That's the cost for the panels alone. Now you must install them, they are spread over a wide area of desert. You need to build access roads, you need to maintain them. You need to build special fences to avoid sandstorms. How will you keep those panels clean? Wash them? Where do you get the water in the desert to wash the panels? Who will do the maintenance on 158 billion panels?
And now, installation. Will they track the sun? I guess not, because then you would have the added cost of installation and maintenance of 158 billion tracking systems. How will you get power at night? You need batteries, plenty of them. How much will those batteries cost?
Let's face it, solar isn't scalable. Without some future technology that's still several decades away solar is not the answer that will replace nuclear power.
Nope. Although there are Arabs in the Israeli defense forces, even some generals, they are there voluntarily. Arab citizens of Israel do not have to serve in the Army.
I'm not a Jew, but I do admire what Israel has accomplished. When you examine it closely, the constitution of Israel is very coherent and well thought out. The Law of Return guarantees a sanctuary country for those people who are in risk of being persecuted for being a Jew, independent of they having the traditional religious definition of a Jew. Israel is not a religious country.
I think that's correct because Jews have always suffered from the problem of not being accepted in any nation, they have had a nationality but not a nation for two thousand years. In the 1930s no country would accept German Jews who were denied the German nationality, not even France, the UK, or the USA would accept Jewish immigrants from Germany.
Palestinians are an entirely different matter. They are not persecuted for belonging to one nationality. A Palestinian nation has never existed. The lands around Jerusalem have never been a Palestinian nation in the normal sense, there is none of the tradition that's usually used to define a nation there.
If you consider, for instance, the Basques or the Welsh those are groups of people who have a common history, language, traditions, customs, that are different from that of the country where they are in. There's a Basque nation in Spain, a Welsh nation in the UK.
Palestinians do not have that difference, they are part of the same people who are now Jordanians. In fact, the people of the West Bank was perfectly satisfied with being part of Jordan until 1967, or rather until September 1970, the "Black September" when Yasser Arafat tried a coup to overthrow the Jordanian government and lost.
TL;DR; by logic, I see very strong reasons for the existence of the country of Israel, very weak or no reason for Palestine.
If you start boycotting countries because they have a minority that feels they are discriminated against then no country in the world will be left.
I bet the Lapps in Norway or the Tyroleans in Austria have their complaints too. Or the Kurds in Turkey, Tibetans in China, Basques in Spain, Copts in Egypt, Tuaregs and Bedouins in North Africa... get the drift?
The difference between Israel and South Africa in the 1980s is that South Africa limited the rights of their citizens based on race, while minorities in Israel have full civil rights.
Perhaps what you meant to say is that you can't do this with object oriented languages that hide pointer arithmetic
Yes, that was what I meant. You could do it with objects in C++.
Problem is C++ has so many quirks that what I often do is to think in objects but implement in plain C. Object orientation is a principle that you can apply even if your programming language doesn't support objects.
This hemp business is a myth. If hemp were as good as weed heads want us to believe don't you think the corporations wouldn't use it? Why go to the trouble of planting cotton or cutting trees if you could get more profits from growing hemp?
Slashdot Mirror
Are you just going to troll me by saying "use linux instead you noob"?
Why not? In Linux you don't need to go through your registry and boot files daily to not be a "stupid user", Linux does what an OS is supposed to do for you - take care of the basic functions of your machine while you run the programs you need.
Linux is easier to install, easier to configure, easier to use. Why not use Linux instead?
I also understand spatially, just how far away a mile is. It is 5,280 feet. Same thing with liquids. I have a much better idea how much liquid is in one gallon based on the container sizes, and an even better idea just what is 5 gallons. You tell me a liter and it is much harder for me to visualize it.
I can't understand why Americans make so much of this "gut feeling" thing about their stupid measuring system. When I first went to the USA in a couple of days of driving I had a pretty good feeling of what a mile is, if you traveled abroad you'd have no problem in getting this "gut feeling" for the International System which is, after all, much easier to understand.
The biggest problem is not taking a look at a container and estimating its size. A liter is pretty much the same size as a quart, I don't think anyone could distinguish a liter from a quart just by looking at it.
The problem is estimating "how many X in one Y". For instance, I know that a drink shot is about 50 ml so a 750 ml bottle has 15 shots and one liter has 20 shots. I have no idea on how to do the same calculations in quarts, fifths, oz, or gallons without looking up the exact sizes of each.
You give me a number of measurements in meters and I can add them up to get a total in kilometers. Now try to add a bunch of measurements, some of them in feet, others in yards, some in fractions of miles, and get a total in miles.
In metric countries house numbers are in meters from the start of the street, the distance from one address to the other is easily calculated and measured from your driving distance.
If only you Americans did a small and short time effort to have a feeling for those basic distances, weights, and volumes, your life would become easier.
They should give it to Nottingham, because then we'll get to see updates on all the great research being done.
Do you mean that at Nottingham someone would steal it and give it to the poor?
Who cares about boot time. Its a phone, when is it ever off?
Yes, because anyone who does anything different from the way you do it is stupid, right?
I often turn my phone off. Longer battery life, fewer interruptions. However, when I need to make a call, I'd rather have my phone on as quickly as possible.
A quick boot is a great feature for people who use their phones as a tool, not for people whose life runs around their phones. And, believe me, despite what you see on the streets these days, there are people whose lives haven't been totally dominated by their phones.
they are from the last ice age, so they would melt anyways
They have been there for a thousand years, then they lose half their size in six years and you think that's nothing to worry about?
If the rate of melting had been the same for those thousand years as it has been for the last six years that ice would be 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000006735 times the size it is now.
Anarchy creates new smaller governments that are brutal, violent and inefficient.
The largest and most powerful government in the world hasn't managed to create anything much better in Iraq and Afghanistan either, despite having spent a trillion dollars there.
I'm sure there was a time when the Tevatron was useful, just as there was a time when the Turing test was useful, but I don't see either of these fields showing either growth or usefulness now. Am I wrong?
Yes, you are wrong, on both counts.
The development of true human-level artificial intelligence would be a discovery that would eclipse everything else humans have ever done. How would you feel to have a robot that would go to work in your place and let you do whatever you'd like to do best? A robot that would know every profession, every trade, with a mind superior to the greatest scientist that ever lived until now?
In physics we are still short of a universal theory. We do not have any idea on how to unify gravitation with quantum physics. We simply have no idea of what will happen when we find out how gravitation works on a quantum level. What could we find? Perhaps the secrets of limitless energy, perhaps not. But it's worth trying.
Please, tell me: which one of the many different governments in Somalia has implemented a Libertarian society?
I install Microsoft software on anyone's computer. I download the software from torrents. I figure there's no need to pay for it, since people have already paid Microsoft when they bought their Android phones,
With a pencil-and-paper-based system, you need to distract a great number of people *on election day*
Hmmm, wrong! Your rose-tinted-glasses view of paper votes clashes with reality.
As long as you can raise doubt about the accuracy of votes you can request a recount. Good luck with keeping supervision on all ballot boxes for all time after the election until the last recount is done.
I can' t understand how slashdotters keep raising the same theoretical objections to electronic voting while they disregard the observed facts. Guys, this is religion! Slashdot dogma says electronic voting is bad, paper voting is perfect. This is stupid.
I'm all for researching possible attacks on electronic ballots, but as a means to perfect the system, not as an argument to pretend there are no possible ways to improve it. So, is there a way to insert an "inexpensive electronic device" into a ballot? Simple solution, remove all unused connectors from the circuit boards. For every vulnerability there's a solution.
Vulnerabilities in electronic votes are the equivalent of butterfly ballots and hanging chads. If only people had shown the same determination to find all possible modes of failure in the paper system used in the Florida 2000 election...
This is an unstable situation, when development is following many dead ends.
Look at what happens when designs begin to stabilize. Intel lost the memory chip business decades ago, because they couldn't fabricate them cheaper than the Asians could.
In the CPU and GPU market perhaps the advantage American companies have is cultural, the Asians do not have the same experience in software development. Anyhow, companies like Intel and nVidia do a lot of research in production too, it's not as easy as telling a chip foundry, "hey, build me some 32 nanometer chips, will ya?"
Simply dominating the technology is not enough, you must develop new technology faster than the others to survive. And this is where American companies are losing their edge, except for a few companies like Intel, they are relying more on holding monopolies through patents than in creating new technologies.
Brazil has a problem with the large amount of regulations, but that can be managed. Regulations are always worse for small companies, for a large corporation like Apple the cost of the legal team to handle that is proportionally less, there's an economy of scale in paperwork.
The advantage in Brazil today is the stable political system. Being governed by a leftist political party that has a center-right economic policy is a great advantage. The hard lessons of the hyperinflation of the 1980s taught Brazilian economists to follow Friedman rather than Krugman, Brazil isn't going to spend a trillion dollars they do not have on some voodoo "stimulus".
Political stability is one of the most prized situations for big corporations, everything else can be accounted for in the business plan.
I wonder how much it cost the Teamsters to get rid of Jimmy Hoffa
If you have production and want to have design, what do you do? Hire engineers, it costs something in the order of $100 k in tuitions to create a new engineer, there are thousands of engineers graduating every year all over the world.
If you have design and want to have production, what do you do? Building a new factory costs on the order of $1 billion, that's four orders of magnitude more than educating someone to be an engineer.
Giving priority to design over manufacturing only works as long as there is excess manufacturing capability in the world, so you can get a new fabricating facility for less than it would cost your current fabricator to get into the design business.
Believing the current situation will last forever is how big corporations die.
Considering differences in altitude, oblateness of the Earth, the detector is underground, and so on, it isn't hard to imagine an 18m position error over approximately 732,000 m distance measured or calculated.
Considering that the world's longest tunnel is 57 km long and they drilled it from both ends and the error when both ends met in the middle was about a half meter, one gets an idea of what's the attainable precision.
If they used the same level of precision, scaling up the error would result in a 6 m error at 732 km. However one must take into account that in digging the railroad tunnel they only went to the precision level they needed for that job, one must assume that the scientists used more precise methods.
So, it's very hard, practically impossible, to imagine that there would exist an error of 18 m in the position of the detector.
At 3 GHz light travels 10 cm in one clock cycle. Faster speeds would make it hard to send a request of data from one end of the chip to the other and get a response during the execution of a machine instruction. Having to insert no-operation cycles while waiting for data to arrive would negate the usefulness of faster clock rates.
If you covered 2% of the uninhabited portions of the Sahara with solar PV,
How much would that cost?
You need how many panels? Let's take this one, for example. $400 for 185W, 1.25 m2 surface. Those 2% of the Sahara will be covered by a total of 158 billion panels, costing a total of 63 trillion dollars..
That's the cost for the panels alone. Now you must install them, they are spread over a wide area of desert. You need to build access roads, you need to maintain them. You need to build special fences to avoid sandstorms. How will you keep those panels clean? Wash them? Where do you get the water in the desert to wash the panels? Who will do the maintenance on 158 billion panels?
And now, installation. Will they track the sun? I guess not, because then you would have the added cost of installation and maintenance of 158 billion tracking systems. How will you get power at night? You need batteries, plenty of them. How much will those batteries cost?
Let's face it, solar isn't scalable. Without some future technology that's still several decades away solar is not the answer that will replace nuclear power.
And you will of course have to serve in the Army
Nope. Although there are Arabs in the Israeli defense forces, even some generals, they are there voluntarily. Arab citizens of Israel do not have to serve in the Army.
I'm not a Jew, but I do admire what Israel has accomplished. When you examine it closely, the constitution of Israel is very coherent and well thought out. The Law of Return guarantees a sanctuary country for those people who are in risk of being persecuted for being a Jew, independent of they having the traditional religious definition of a Jew. Israel is not a religious country.
I think that's correct because Jews have always suffered from the problem of not being accepted in any nation, they have had a nationality but not a nation for two thousand years. In the 1930s no country would accept German Jews who were denied the German nationality, not even France, the UK, or the USA would accept Jewish immigrants from Germany.
Palestinians are an entirely different matter. They are not persecuted for belonging to one nationality. A Palestinian nation has never existed. The lands around Jerusalem have never been a Palestinian nation in the normal sense, there is none of the tradition that's usually used to define a nation there.
If you consider, for instance, the Basques or the Welsh those are groups of people who have a common history, language, traditions, customs, that are different from that of the country where they are in. There's a Basque nation in Spain, a Welsh nation in the UK.
Palestinians do not have that difference, they are part of the same people who are now Jordanians. In fact, the people of the West Bank was perfectly satisfied with being part of Jordan until 1967, or rather until September 1970, the "Black September" when Yasser Arafat tried a coup to overthrow the Jordanian government and lost.
TL;DR; by logic, I see very strong reasons for the existence of the country of Israel, very weak or no reason for Palestine.
If you start boycotting countries because they have a minority that feels they are discriminated against then no country in the world will be left.
I bet the Lapps in Norway or the Tyroleans in Austria have their complaints too. Or the Kurds in Turkey, Tibetans in China, Basques in Spain, Copts in Egypt, Tuaregs and Bedouins in North Africa... get the drift?
The difference between Israel and South Africa in the 1980s is that South Africa limited the rights of their citizens based on race, while minorities in Israel have full civil rights.
You must spend a lot in AA batteries.
you would have no problem if Palestine is admitted as a full member?
No problem.
As soon as Palestinian contribution to CERN becomes significant enough.
The government makes money from asset forfeiture
Do you know why the drug dealers keep doing it? Because in the end the cash flow is positive, they make more money than what gets confiscated.
Perhaps what you meant to say is that you can't do this with object oriented languages that hide pointer arithmetic
Yes, that was what I meant. You could do it with objects in C++.
Problem is C++ has so many quirks that what I often do is to think in objects but implement in plain C. Object orientation is a principle that you can apply even if your programming language doesn't support objects.
This hemp business is a myth. If hemp were as good as weed heads want us to believe don't you think the corporations wouldn't use it? Why go to the trouble of planting cotton or cutting trees if you could get more profits from growing hemp?