Anybody with a half a brain could realize the likely outcome of that to a person like Phelps.
So you are saying that Phelps has less than half a brain? When he decided to become a professional athlete, whose income depends on (a) his athletic performance and (b) his public image, he should have been aware that his public life is exactly that, public.
When someone's career is selling an image, his life should be what the image portrays, or he would be a fraud.
Maybe I'm old fashioned but I wouldn't sell such a picture if I knew it was likely to ruin someones life/career.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I think laws were made to be obeyed. If you think some drugs shouldn't be prohibited, you should campaign to have those laws rescinded. As the ancient Romans said, "dura lex sed lex", the law may be hard but it's still the law.
Computer programming is -- in every way -- nothing more than applied mathematics.
You had me up to this point. Computer programming is so much more than applied mathematics that they have created a new word to name a branch of science that's still very much empiric, because it was discovered only after people started using computers.
I remember when I and a coworker were discussing, about 25 years ago, if a function that was supposed to generate a random number sequence could be trusted. This guy was a real genius in mathematics, he explained about a dozen different methods to test for randomness, he really knew the basic principles of statistics.
His conclusion: the function was fine, all the tests he ran showed it generated a good series of pseudo-random numbers. Then I plotted 100000 points on the screen, the X and Y positions given by consecutive "random" numbers generated by that function. A clearly visible pattern appeared on the screen. In five minutes of programming I demonstrated that his several hours of theoretical analysis were wrong.
I think you are right in that one must learn the basics before one starts using advanced tools, but computers are much more than tools to accelerate calculations. Computers are a practical demonstration of the adage that says "the result is more than the sum of the parts".
The resistance to the use of computers is due more to the fact that they are new, rather than their use actually causing harm. Think of an artist who wants to draw a straight line. He uses a ruler, of course. But how are rulers made? How many artists could create a ruler without having any straight edge to begin with?
You can create a straight edge from nothing if you build three edges at the same time. Fit edge 'A' to edge 'B' until they match perfectly. Then fit edge 'B' to edge 'C'. Finally fit edge 'C' to edge 'A'. Repeat until any of the three edges matches exactly the other two, at this point all three edges will be perfectly straight. Do you believe an artist needs to know this before he can use a ruler to draw a straight line?
The concept of a straight line is so old that we have forgotten the basic concepts of why a ruler is straight. Computers are new things, someday they will be as common as rulers are today.
There's good reason to be able to do some back-of-the-envelope tests of your theories - first order approximations to see if your idea makes sense.
Under a first order approximation the earth is flat. There's no relativity or quantum mechanics.
Using a computer does not preclude understanding basic mathematics. However, *NOT* using a computer will make it impossible to have an understanding of a growing part of mathematics.
Try to get an understanding of non-linear dynamics without a computer. Chaotic systems. Not to mention that computers are being used in mathematical proofs of theorems. The four-color map was proved over 30 years ago, with computers, and still today no one has found a way to prove it by hand.
I don't mean that paper and pencil should be abolished, and doing math in the head is still an essential ability in everyday life. But computers are also essential, there can be no teaching of science and mathematics without computers.
I have several (mostly intelligent...) friends who believe this tripe
I believe we will reach a point when technical progress will create a society completely different from anything we have ever seen, before the mid of this century.
But this does not mean I believe any of the participants in this event has something significant enough to say to make it worth paying $25000 to listen to them.
What makes you think there is anything special or more importantly, noticeable about us to attract attention.
A planet that's right in the mid-range of liquid water. Venus is too hot for liquid water, Mars is too cold.
Then why water, why not another solvent? Because water and carbon compounds allow a much larger number of complex molecules than any other combination. All the experiments performed in laboratories, all the measurements done in astronomic observations have failed to reveal any sort of chemistry even remotely resembling water+carbon chemistry in complexity.
And if they're communicating by some mechanism that we can't read? E.g. the equivalent of "subspace radio". Or maybe it's a point to point via laser (see Niven's Known Universe).
But I think the whole point of the Fermi paradox isn't about aliens trying to communicate with us. The point is, if they exist why haven't they come here?
There are many stars billion years older than Earth. Unless we assume that conditions on Earth are extremely unusual, there should be a very high probability that a human-like race had developed a space-faring civilization tens of millions of years before us. In that case, several of those races should have reached Earth by now.
Maybe some of them have a highly evolved ethical sense and would try to preserve Earth, letting humans develop their own civilization, but how likely is it that all of those space-faring civilization have the same ethical principles? That would be like expecting us to preserve some area in Africa or Borneo to let chimpanzees or orangutans alone so they could develop their own intelligence and create a civilization.
As far as we know, intelligence is highly linked to curiosity, which leads to exploration. One must assume that if many intelligent species exist, at least one of them is curious enough to travel and explore the galaxy as soon as its technological development allows. Therefore, either the development of intelligent life is extremely rare, or our own development went through an extremely unlikely path.
In Neal Stephenson's novel "Snow Crash" there's a character named Raven that made knives out of chipped glass. That gives more or less an idea of the difficulty in making a cutting edge in stone.
I have a lot of hardware that would have been relegated to scrap if it hadn't been for NetBSD
Recycling is good, of course. But is it worthwile? How much power do all those old computers drain, compared to a new server with the same processing capacity?
Where I work, we replaced a couple of PDP-11 computers with PCs for the energy savings alone, even if there was a cost associated with migrating the software.
if a family has a lot of books in their house, they are probably are reasonably wealthy. (In particular, not working class. In other words, people with money have kids that tend to do better in school
That may be true, but it's not enough to tell which is the cause and which is effect. It could be that money is needed to buy books, and maybe poor people would have other priorities.
An alternative explanation would be that intelligent people read more, and intelligent people are more likely to be wealthy, because few people like being poor and if one's intelligent enough one will find ways to avoid poverty.
It could be that having books is a consequence of being wealthy, or being wealthy is a consequence of having books, or they are both consequences of another factor.
And what if having kids that do well in school is a cause, not a consequence, of having books at home? Because if kids do well at school they will have an incentive to read more, and will ask their parents to buy more books?
It's great that GWB coerced researchers to find alternate sources of stem cells, otherwise every walk-in clinic in the country would be blending embryos in the back room by now.
Of course, if embryonic stem cell research had not faced such resistance, then we might have had more results helping humans instead of plants by now.
That many plants can be cloned simply by cutting parts of them I have known since I was a small child. Now what we would like to know is how to make parts of human bodies regenerate in a similar way.
This feature, no doubt implemented with good intentions, show the perils of the nanny state so many politicians all over the world are proposing. Why should Google police the internet?
They should act like the phone company used to be, a common carrier just sending through the information, for better or worse.
Of course, I understand that Google isn't an ISP, so the "common carrier" principle does not apply. They are just providing a service for me, without charging me directly. But the principle is the same, if I wanted some sort of protection from malware there are many places where I can get it by asking, I do not need to be protected involuntarily.
if all 290 million CFLs sold in 2007 were sent to a landfill (versus recycled, as a worst case) they would add 0.16 metric tons, or 0.16 percent, to U.S. mercury emissions caused by humans
How do CFLs result in less mercury in the environment compared to traditional light bulbs?
Electricity use is the main source of mercury emissions in the U.S. CFLs use less electricity than incandescent lights, meaning CFLs reduce the amount of mercury into the environment. As shown in the table below, a 13-watt, 8,000-rated-hour-life CFL (60-watt equivalent; a common light bulb type) will save 376 kWh over its lifetime, thus avoiding 4.5 mg of mercury. If the bulb goes to a landfill, overall emissions savings would drop a little, to 4.0 mg. EPA recommends that CFLs are recycled where possible, to maximize mercury savings.
It is the simplest reason for the decades of wanton privatization of transaction processing and personal data warehousing.
And what would be the alternative to privatization? Let some government agency do the transaction processing and personal data warehousing. Like, let's say, the NSA?
As several people have responded to you, we are all paying the same price, we should get the same performance.
But there's a difference: downloading isn't as sensitive to slight irregularities in delay as gaming or VoIP. If the service you want requires more stringent standards, it would be fair that you should pay more to get the same level of service. Or get a lesser quality for the same price.
In a fair system, a price of $X should give you Y bytes/second within a Z latency range, no matter what kind of service you use. I don't want my dollars to pay for an infrastructure investment that you alone need.
Let me guess: You never actually used KDE 3 and your trolling...
You guessed wrong, I have been using KDE exclusively since 1998, except for my gaming M$ machine. I just want to use my computer to do its job exactly the way it has always done, I don't want to be retrained unless it's an improvement. I think a new user interface is OK, but the old functions should be the default ones.
A new set of icons? Sure, anyone is free to install it. I did import the kde classic icon theme once, I don't want to redo that job again and again just because some developer is too lazy to create a function to import the settings file automatically. The old K menu? It should be there by DEFAULT. Don't like the traditional K menu? Delete it! Do not force people to ADD things or LEARN things just to keep it working the way it did before.
The change from KDE 3 to 4 should have been as smooth as "apt-get dist-upgrade" and then working exactly as before but, from time to time, finding this neat new function that makes one say "wow, this is great!". It should not make one stop everything one was doing until one learns how to configure things.
The problem with KDE developers is that they started thinking KDE is the center of the universe. Well, it isn't. Computers exist to make things easy. I use a computer as a tool, I don't want to be distracted from my job or from my hobby just because some user interface developer thinks he has had a great new idea.
People keep talking about a Web OS, cloud computing, etc
The most innovative thing KDE did in this respect was having the same application, Konqueror, act both as a web browser and file manager. Then, what did they do to improve this? Fix Konqueror's faults? No, that would have been too easy. They created the most stupid file manager I ever saw, Dolphin, to take the place of Konqueror as a file manager.
1) does it have the "kde classic" icon theme? I got used to the look of those icons, why should I change, unless there's a *compelling* reason to do so? (no, your opinion that such and such icons are prettier is definitely not compelling enough for me to memorize a totally different set of icons)
2) does it have the K menu working exactly the same way it did in KDE 3? Again, it works for me, why should I change unless it's definitely a better alternative?
3) does the taskbar work exactly the same way it did in KDE 3? ditto
Attention, KDE developers: users do not care how much easier the developer's job has become with KDE 4. If the user's interface changes, it should be for the better. Not slightly better, not better for some people. If it does not become absolutely better for everybody without exception, or, at least, better enough for the vast majority of people, then please do NOT change the user interface.
Remember this, we, the users, do not care for eye candy, we do not care for how much better the system is for developers. We USE the computer, we do not play with it. The computer should HELP us, not get in our way. If we have to learn new things, it should be only things that make our life so much easier it's worth learning new things. Otherwise, let KDE 3.5.9 alone, it's a wonderful system.
We as a race stopped seeing the forest because all the trees are in the way. We have become a species obsessed with detail, a race of obsessive accountants and lawyers, we lost sight of the grander goal. Ants build anthills that way, by piling one grain of earth over another, but they cannot build any more complex structure because they lack a master plan.
It's very good to say "let's eradicate poverty", but is absolute equality all that mankind should aim for? There would exist no poverty if we lived in caves, sharing our stone axes equally among all.
We need something to strive for, something to work for. Religion tries to offer that, but only after death. Science and technology lets us work towards a better future while we are still living in this world. And manned space flight is one of the most difficult and worthwile goals in technology.
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So you are saying that Phelps has less than half a brain? When he decided to become a professional athlete, whose income depends on (a) his athletic performance and (b) his public image, he should have been aware that his public life is exactly that, public.
When someone's career is selling an image, his life should be what the image portrays, or he would be a fraud.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I think laws were made to be obeyed. If you think some drugs shouldn't be prohibited, you should campaign to have those laws rescinded. As the ancient Romans said, "dura lex sed lex", the law may be hard but it's still the law.
You had me up to this point. Computer programming is so much more than applied mathematics that they have created a new word to name a branch of science that's still very much empiric, because it was discovered only after people started using computers.
I remember when I and a coworker were discussing, about 25 years ago, if a function that was supposed to generate a random number sequence could be trusted. This guy was a real genius in mathematics, he explained about a dozen different methods to test for randomness, he really knew the basic principles of statistics.
His conclusion: the function was fine, all the tests he ran showed it generated a good series of pseudo-random numbers. Then I plotted 100000 points on the screen, the X and Y positions given by consecutive "random" numbers generated by that function. A clearly visible pattern appeared on the screen. In five minutes of programming I demonstrated that his several hours of theoretical analysis were wrong.
I think you are right in that one must learn the basics before one starts using advanced tools, but computers are much more than tools to accelerate calculations. Computers are a practical demonstration of the adage that says "the result is more than the sum of the parts".
The resistance to the use of computers is due more to the fact that they are new, rather than their use actually causing harm. Think of an artist who wants to draw a straight line. He uses a ruler, of course. But how are rulers made? How many artists could create a ruler without having any straight edge to begin with?
You can create a straight edge from nothing if you build three edges at the same time. Fit edge 'A' to edge 'B' until they match perfectly. Then fit edge 'B' to edge 'C'. Finally fit edge 'C' to edge 'A'. Repeat until any of the three edges matches exactly the other two, at this point all three edges will be perfectly straight. Do you believe an artist needs to know this before he can use a ruler to draw a straight line?
The concept of a straight line is so old that we have forgotten the basic concepts of why a ruler is straight. Computers are new things, someday they will be as common as rulers are today.
Under a first order approximation the earth is flat. There's no relativity or quantum mechanics.
Using a computer does not preclude understanding basic mathematics. However, *NOT* using a computer will make it impossible to have an understanding of a growing part of mathematics.
Try to get an understanding of non-linear dynamics without a computer. Chaotic systems. Not to mention that computers are being used in mathematical proofs of theorems. The four-color map was proved over 30 years ago, with computers, and still today no one has found a way to prove it by hand.
I don't mean that paper and pencil should be abolished, and doing math in the head is still an essential ability in everyday life. But computers are also essential, there can be no teaching of science and mathematics without computers.
The biggest ruby is just 8.2 lbs, compared to the 403 lbs python.
I believe we will reach a point when technical progress will create a society completely different from anything we have ever seen, before the mid of this century.
But this does not mean I believe any of the participants in this event has something significant enough to say to make it worth paying $25000 to listen to them.
This snakelike robot is programmed in Python, of course
"Urballs", "Urpenis", "Urnavel"...
Yes, I name my servers after mythological beings, too.
Great idea! Let's name the others "Mickey", "Minnie", and "Pluto"
A planet that's right in the mid-range of liquid water. Venus is too hot for liquid water, Mars is too cold.
Then why water, why not another solvent? Because water and carbon compounds allow a much larger number of complex molecules than any other combination. All the experiments performed in laboratories, all the measurements done in astronomic observations have failed to reveal any sort of chemistry even remotely resembling water+carbon chemistry in complexity.
But I think the whole point of the Fermi paradox isn't about aliens trying to communicate with us. The point is, if they exist why haven't they come here?
There are many stars billion years older than Earth. Unless we assume that conditions on Earth are extremely unusual, there should be a very high probability that a human-like race had developed a space-faring civilization tens of millions of years before us. In that case, several of those races should have reached Earth by now.
Maybe some of them have a highly evolved ethical sense and would try to preserve Earth, letting humans develop their own civilization, but how likely is it that all of those space-faring civilization have the same ethical principles? That would be like expecting us to preserve some area in Africa or Borneo to let chimpanzees or orangutans alone so they could develop their own intelligence and create a civilization.
As far as we know, intelligence is highly linked to curiosity, which leads to exploration. One must assume that if many intelligent species exist, at least one of them is curious enough to travel and explore the galaxy as soon as its technological development allows. Therefore, either the development of intelligent life is extremely rare, or our own development went through an extremely unlikely path.
In Neal Stephenson's novel "Snow Crash" there's a character named Raven that made knives out of chipped glass. That gives more or less an idea of the difficulty in making a cutting edge in stone.
Recycling is good, of course. But is it worthwile? How much power do all those old computers drain, compared to a new server with the same processing capacity?
Where I work, we replaced a couple of PDP-11 computers with PCs for the energy savings alone, even if there was a cost associated with migrating the software.
That may be true, but it's not enough to tell which is the cause and which is effect. It could be that money is needed to buy books, and maybe poor people would have other priorities.
An alternative explanation would be that intelligent people read more, and intelligent people are more likely to be wealthy, because few people like being poor and if one's intelligent enough one will find ways to avoid poverty.
It could be that having books is a consequence of being wealthy, or being wealthy is a consequence of having books, or they are both consequences of another factor.
And what if having kids that do well in school is a cause, not a consequence, of having books at home? Because if kids do well at school they will have an incentive to read more, and will ask their parents to buy more books?
YUCK!!!
Of course, if embryonic stem cell research had not faced such resistance, then we might have had more results helping humans instead of plants by now.
That many plants can be cloned simply by cutting parts of them I have known since I was a small child. Now what we would like to know is how to make parts of human bodies regenerate in a similar way.
This feature, no doubt implemented with good intentions, show the perils of the nanny state so many politicians all over the world are proposing. Why should Google police the internet?
They should act like the phone company used to be, a common carrier just sending through the information, for better or worse.
Of course, I understand that Google isn't an ISP, so the "common carrier" principle does not apply. They are just providing a service for me, without charging me directly. But the principle is the same, if I wanted some sort of protection from malware there are many places where I can get it by asking, I do not need to be protected involuntarily.
BZZZT, *WRONG*!!!
According to Energystar.gov:
And what would be the alternative to privatization? Let some government agency do the transaction processing and personal data warehousing. Like, let's say, the NSA?
As several people have responded to you, we are all paying the same price, we should get the same performance.
But there's a difference: downloading isn't as sensitive to slight irregularities in delay as gaming or VoIP. If the service you want requires more stringent standards, it would be fair that you should pay more to get the same level of service. Or get a lesser quality for the same price.
In a fair system, a price of $X should give you Y bytes/second within a Z latency range, no matter what kind of service you use. I don't want my dollars to pay for an infrastructure investment that you alone need.
You guessed wrong, I have been using KDE exclusively since 1998, except for my gaming M$ machine. I just want to use my computer to do its job exactly the way it has always done, I don't want to be retrained unless it's an improvement. I think a new user interface is OK, but the old functions should be the default ones.
A new set of icons? Sure, anyone is free to install it. I did import the kde classic icon theme once, I don't want to redo that job again and again just because some developer is too lazy to create a function to import the settings file automatically. The old K menu? It should be there by DEFAULT. Don't like the traditional K menu? Delete it! Do not force people to ADD things or LEARN things just to keep it working the way it did before.
The change from KDE 3 to 4 should have been as smooth as "apt-get dist-upgrade" and then working exactly as before but, from time to time, finding this neat new function that makes one say "wow, this is great!". It should not make one stop everything one was doing until one learns how to configure things.
The problem with KDE developers is that they started thinking KDE is the center of the universe. Well, it isn't. Computers exist to make things easy. I use a computer as a tool, I don't want to be distracted from my job or from my hobby just because some user interface developer thinks he has had a great new idea.
The most innovative thing KDE did in this respect was having the same application, Konqueror, act both as a web browser and file manager. Then, what did they do to improve this? Fix Konqueror's faults? No, that would have been too easy. They created the most stupid file manager I ever saw, Dolphin, to take the place of Konqueror as a file manager.
1) does it have the "kde classic" icon theme?
I got used to the look of those icons, why should I change, unless there's a *compelling* reason to do so? (no, your opinion that such and such icons are prettier is definitely not compelling enough for me to memorize a totally different set of icons)
2) does it have the K menu working exactly the same way it did in KDE 3?
Again, it works for me, why should I change unless it's definitely a better alternative?
3) does the taskbar work exactly the same way it did in KDE 3?
ditto
Attention, KDE developers: users do not care how much easier the developer's job has become with KDE 4. If the user's interface changes, it should be for the better. Not slightly better, not better for some people. If it does not become absolutely better for everybody without exception, or, at least, better enough for the vast majority of people, then please do NOT change the user interface.
Remember this, we, the users, do not care for eye candy, we do not care for how much better the system is for developers. We USE the computer, we do not play with it. The computer should HELP us, not get in our way. If we have to learn new things, it should be only things that make our life so much easier it's worth learning new things. Otherwise, let KDE 3.5.9 alone, it's a wonderful system.
I think you hit the spot with that post.
We as a race stopped seeing the forest because all the trees are in the way. We have become a species obsessed with detail, a race of obsessive accountants and lawyers, we lost sight of the grander goal. Ants build anthills that way, by piling one grain of earth over another, but they cannot build any more complex structure because they lack a master plan.
It's very good to say "let's eradicate poverty", but is absolute equality all that mankind should aim for? There would exist no poverty if we lived in caves, sharing our stone axes equally among all.
We need something to strive for, something to work for. Religion tries to offer that, but only after death. Science and technology lets us work towards a better future while we are still living in this world. And manned space flight is one of the most difficult and worthwile goals in technology.