Stupid people do not gain control of a first world country
Very true. But who then is running the country? It is definetly not Mr. Bush. I do not think he is a idiot but he is not that smart either. Not smart enough to gain all that power.
For instance, witness this "debunking" of curved space, also from his site:
Curved Space: The concept of a 'curved space', which is essential for present cosmological models, is logically flawed because space can only be defined by the distance between two objects, which is however by definition always given by a straight line. Mathematicians frequently try to illustrate the properties of 'curved space' through the example of a spherical (or otherwise curved) surface and the associated geometrical relationships. However, a surface is only a mathematical abstraction within the actual (3-dimensional) space and one can in fact connect any two points on the surface of a physical object through a straight line by drilling through it. Strictly speaking, one can not assign any properties at all to space (or time) as these are the outer forms of existence and it makes as much sense to speak of a 'curved space' as of a 'blue space'. Any such properties must be restricted to objects existing within space and time. The concept of a distorted space around massive physical objects for instance, as promoted by General Relativity, is therefore also inconsistent and should be replaced by appropriate physical theories describing the trajectories of particles and/or light near these objects.
I think he's not trying to debunk curved space. He's just saying that any curved space can be seen as a subspace of greater dimension non-curved space and thinks that the definion of space in physics should be made such that we select the non-curved space.
Then he proceeds to make a note about the formulation of general relativity.
The quote doesn't prove him as a crackpot. It might prove that he's not that good writer but that is a whole different matter.
New features with specification references
on
Java SE 6 Released
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The real specification of new features is available at JSR 270.
Surely if politics can be simplified into ten second soundbites and mud slinging ads repeated over and over again, it can be simplified to a ten minute test.
In fact ten minute test sound heck of a lot better than "tough on terrorism" and "tough on drugs" as a basis for a vote.
So, you did 10 (Gbit/sec) * 8 (bits per byte) * 5 (seconds) = 62.5 Gbytes.
Or maybe he did 100Gbit/sec/ 8 bit/byte * 5sec = 62.5 Gbyte.
Sorry to pick your numbers as your point was good but the readability of your comment was, at least for me, quite bad as the formula was not only wrong but misleading.
Good. Because last time the discussion was a disgrace. Let's hope this one will be better. I'm sorry for this off-topic rant but the state of slashdot is really bugging me.
I just read the last discussion. Two of the three score:5 comments were jokes. They weren't even very funny. First one was about Steve Ballmer and his chair throwing as if that thing isn't a cliche. The second one was obvious. It was about XXX-Price and "genetic material". You can figure the rest. It was pretty well writen. Hence, it was, at least, somewhat funny.
The one additional comment was about haves and have-nots. A decent comment that deserves a discussion. Well, where's the discussion. The whole story got 115 comments (and three score:5). This site is suposed to be "news for nerds, stuff that matters". At the moment the most commented article on the front page is a FUD posting about Vista's supposedly über-draconian EULA. One of the first score:5 comments goes as follows:
I just read through the entire EULA because I just couldn't believe they had included "Home Basic users can't copy ISOs to their hard drives". Turns out I was right. As far as I can tell there is no restriction to ISO's per-se, instead the original author was attempting to infer a lack of a right of some versions to store a copy of the software [meaning, a copy of the vista DVD] on "network storage" based on the fact that this right is permitted for Ultimate. However, just because they grant a right to some versions doesn't mean you don't have that right when it isn't explicitly granted - for instance even if they only enumerated the right to backup copies for Ultimate you'd still have that right for all others, existing law generally grants it.
The translation to "can't copy [any] iso's" happened in the last step, by the comment submitter, and is as far s I can tell just a complete fabrication.
Some part of me wonders why a website full of people who swear to their grave that they'll never run a piece of software is so intent on discrediting it that they make up shit. Carry on though boys, have fun.
Does people continue reading the comments, the story and posting more comments? Hell, yeah!! And does anyone bother to come and discuss about one of the most intresting new themes in our society, namely the coming of an age where every person's genetic makeup can and will be analyzed. It seems not.
The winner will also receive an extra $1,000,000 for sequencing the genomes of 100 additional people; among them Larry King and Stephen Hawking.
I've been browsing the site now for some time and haven't found a single shread of evidence for this "extra price". I call bullshit. It's just a joke to mock the slashdot "editors".
100 human genomes within 10 days or less with an accuracy of no more than 1 error in 10,000 base pairs, with sequences accurately covering at least 98% of the genome, and at a demonstrated cost of no more than $10,000 per genome.
An intresting detail:
During each X PRIZE competition test, a TEAM must use its device to sequence within 10 days 100 human dip- loid genomes of 6 Gbp (6 giga base pairs, i.e., six billion pairs of DNA base molecules) each.
Note that Human Genome Project mapped and sequenced only some 3Gbp. And that was considered to be whole genome. Basically X-Price want winner to sequence all 46 cromosomes. This sounds quite difficult as the method have to be sure that is has sequenced both of the cromosomes (from a pair), not just the other one twice. And this must be valid all the 3Gbp. By bet? The working method just sequences emultiple chromosomes and determines the exact basepairs statically.
My bet is that they have read Expert Political Judgement. Professor Tetlock published his research results in the book. His study about accuracy of experts spanned over 20 years. His basic result? Well, it's all about how you think not what you think. He wrote a small essay about the results: How Accurate Are Your Pet Pundits?.
A quote form the article: [F]ollowing the philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, we classify experts as "hedgehogs" or "foxes." Hedgehogs are big-idea thinkers in love with grand theories: libertarianism, Marxism, environmentalism, etc. Their self-confidence can be infectious. They know how to stoke momentum in an argument by multiplying reasons why they are right and others are wrong.
That wins them media acclaim. But they don't know when to slam the mental brakes by making concessions to other points of view. They take their theories too seriously. The result: hedgehogs make more mistakes, but they pile up more hits on Google.
Eclectic foxes are better at curbing their ideological enthusiasms. They are comfortable with protracted uncertainty about who is right even in bitter debates, conceding gaps in their knowledge and granting legitimacy to opposing views. They sprinkle their conversations with linguistic qualifiers that limit the reach of their arguments: 'but,' 'however,' 'although.'
Because they avoid over-simplification, foxes make fewer mistakes. Foxes will often agree with hedgehogs up to a point, before complicating things: "Yes, my colleague is right that the Saudi monarchy is vulnerable, but remember that coups are rare and that the government commands many means of squelching opposition."
The segment in question was included but was never meant to be accessed!
Don't be naive. Of course it was ment to be accessed. Ant it was. And the segment in question worked like it was supposed to: people started to talk about Grand Theft Auto and Take-Two. And I think that even a few teenagers bought the game to see the "hot coffee".
It's also worth considering that even if the U.S. doesn't travel back to the Moon, other countries will. Do you really want your grandkids to have to buy tickets on a Chinese spacecraft to visit the Chinese moon city fifty years hence? Or the EU moon base? Or the Russian Mars base?
Being an European myself, I find it highly offensive that you assume that any reasonable American person should answer: no.
Not that our grandkids will be able to afford such things; we'll be the has-beens, the left-behinds who stand at night and gaze at the sky while other nation-states dominate the heavens. No way. The U.S. has got to maintain its leadership role in space or it will become an also-ran.
It doesn't really matter to me what "nation" goes to space. I want that human race goes to space. The whole going to space thing seems to be a mere a mean to protect U.S.'s status as leading superpower. And what comes to left-behinds: They won't be Chinese or Europeans. They will be Earthlings.
IANAL, but from the article, "brain activity has ceased", which as I understand it is the legal and medical definition of human death.
IANAL and IANAA (I am not an American).
I think that the brain activity defines personhood in US. From wikipedia: Among human beings, brain activity is a necessary condition to legal personhood in the United States. "It appears that once brain death has been determined... no criminal or civil liability will result from disconnecting the life-support devices." (Dority v. Superior Court of San Bernardino County, 193 Cal.Rptr. 288, 291 (1983))
Usually whether a person has died is determined by a medical doctor. That is, a determination of a living person is an expert decision which is rubber stamped by a court of law. In some cases (like a missing person) this decision is done by court with different arguments. What I want to say is, a law doesn't have a clear cut definition of a death. It do have predecences for some cases (death by trauma, death by being missing too long, etc.) but they can't be extrapolated to completly new kind of sitsuations. Like suspended animation.
Anyway, I'm from Finland so don't take my words for your country. To my arguments defence, I think the defining a person dead is pretty similar in all western world.
As a intresting side note, the real trouble might come from the definition of a personhood. Can you kill a person that has been put in SA? Does it require some special conditions like a long time (20 years for example) spent in SA? What these conditions will be? I don't have a clue but I know that in the process of determining these things a huge bunch of lawers will get rich.
BTW. To all you Yanks reading this - I think you guys made the greatest achievement of the human race, to date, happen. The reasons aren't important - you should be very proud.
It was not Americans. Even if they like to point out the exelence of Armstrong or Kennedy, the real innovation and work was done by German people. Let's see how space.com puts it in its articleRemembering Wernher von Braun's German Rocket Team:
Walter Jacobi, one of the few remaining German technicians whose genius helped put American astronauts on the moon, is frail now. At 84, he doesn't move as quickly as he used to.
But sitting recently in the lobby of a space museum, his eyes sparkled when asked about the legacy of the team of 119 scientists, led by Wernher von Braun, who arrived in this north Alabama city a half-century ago and turned its cotton fields into a landmark of space exploration, including the first moon landing in 1969.
``I don't know how to describe it, it's a tremendous achievement, you know?'' he said. ``We always knew we could do it.''
Their number now down to about a dozen, the German team's accomplishments are indisputable: Manned space flight, including lunar landings, the space shuttle and the international space station -- all the direct result of their work developing rockets in the United States following World War II.
But to some that legacy is marred by the group's initial work creating V-2 rockets for the German military with the help of thousands of concentration camp laborers under the Nazi boot.
Putting a re-design to a vote of Slashdot readers would be the ultimate example of design-by-committee, and would therefore result in the ultimate in useless, unreadable, un-navigable websites.
So wrong that is hurts. Committee designs are bad because they lack vision and are basically done by compromizes to meet all the central demand of a set of people that all lack vision. A poll would choose one option from couple of finalists that each would have its own wonderful vision.
Kopete and Gaim are both working on voice support for Google Talk. Who's to say that Nokia aren't going to use one of these projects?
Well, Google, of course. Google wants to see their client and their logo in 770. They are going to make Nokia a offer that it can't decline. For example, building the whole thing and giving some kind of support for it.
I think Google's logo art is an awesome thing. They gain nothing from it, yet it raises awareness of people, places, and causes.
Don't be naive. Of course there's something to Google to gain in with changing logos. For example I like to visit Google's main page from time to time just to see the logo art. At that visit I'm also going to note other changes like link to image.google.com. More over, judging from your message, the changing logo art seems to make Google more likable. Which is good for them.
Some kind of upper limit is 15%. The more probable value is around 0.05%.
To get 15% I used following assumptions: Number of letters is 26. This means that there is 26^8=208827064576 possible strings. Every one of them is eqaully propable.
Nuber of different words by their length is (fetched from/usr/share/dict/words): n1: 26 n2: 160 n3: 762 n4: 3070 n5: 6350 n6: 10691 n7: 14296 n8: 15223
Different settings of words are (I have removed all of them that contains 3 or more words with length of 1): 8 letter word -> n8 sensible strings 7 letter word, 1 letter word -> 2!*n7*n1 sensible strings 6, 2 -> 2!*n6*n2 6, 1, 1 -> 3!/2!*n6*n1*n1 5, 3 -> and so on 5, 2, 1 4, 4 4, 3, 1 4, 2, 2 3, 3, 2 2, 2, 2, 2 2, 2, 2, 1, 1
The number of all different sensible strings is 31782293607.
The real number of ensible strings is smaller. The usage of "words" with the length of 1 is questinable. More over we calculate "ASLETTER" Two times as "A S LETTER" and "AS LETTER".
Now, if we don't allow word settings with words of length 1 and remove two letter acronyms (by arbitrarility lowering the number of two letter words to 40) we get 0.05%.
We are the only remaining superpower. We have a huge responsibility to set an example for the rest of the world and to help mature all of our societies. We have to try and steer the whole damn world into globalism at a pace that isn't threatening and is respectful to all of our cultures.
Why? Where's your authority to act as the world's authoritarian father-figure? Because you have the largest, most well-equipped army? This is the sort of attitude that gets planes flown into tall American buildings - "We know best; when we bomb you, it's for your own good".
What? The grapnd-parent just said that a huge military might requires responsibility. Then you come and blame that this means "we know best; we bomb you for your own good".
Slashdot Mirror
Very true. But who then is running the country? It is definetly not Mr. Bush. I do not think he is a idiot but he is not that smart either. Not smart enough to gain all that power.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
As one specific example, try StumbleUpon.
--
Jari Mustonen
I sugest that you read the post again. He is saying "PayPal is evil" not "Evil is PayPal". There is a difference you know.
I think he's not trying to debunk curved space. He's just saying that any curved space can be seen as a subspace of greater dimension non-curved space and thinks that the definion of space in physics should be made such that we select the non-curved space.
Then he proceeds to make a note about the formulation of general relativity.
The quote doesn't prove him as a crackpot. It might prove that he's not that good writer but that is a whole different matter.
The scripting support is specified at JSR 223.
Here are some additional new features:
BTW, why isn't this on the front page? All the fussing about the possible new license was there but not the product publishment itself.
Surely if politics can be simplified into ten second soundbites and mud slinging ads repeated over and over again, it can be simplified to a ten minute test.
In fact ten minute test sound heck of a lot better than "tough on terrorism" and "tough on drugs" as a basis for a vote.
Or maybe he did 100Gbit/sec
Sorry to pick your numbers as your point was good but the readability of your comment was, at least for me, quite bad as the formula was not only wrong but misleading.
I just read the last discussion. Two of the three score:5 comments were jokes. They weren't even very funny. First one was about Steve Ballmer and his chair throwing as if that thing isn't a cliche. The second one was obvious. It was about XXX-Price and "genetic material". You can figure the rest. It was pretty well writen. Hence, it was, at least, somewhat funny.
The one additional comment was about haves and have-nots. A decent comment that deserves a discussion. Well, where's the discussion. The whole story got 115 comments (and three score:5). This site is suposed to be "news for nerds, stuff that matters". At the moment the most commented article on the front page is a FUD posting about Vista's supposedly über-draconian EULA. One of the first score:5 comments goes as follows:
Does people continue reading the comments, the story and posting more comments? Hell, yeah!! And does anyone bother to come and discuss about one of the most intresting new themes in our society, namely the coming of an age where every person's genetic makeup can and will be analyzed. It seems not.
I've been browsing the site now for some time and haven't found a single shread of evidence for this "extra price". I call bullshit. It's just a joke to mock the slashdot "editors".
In short:
An intresting detail:
Note that Human Genome Project mapped and sequenced only some 3Gbp. And that was considered to be whole genome. Basically X-Price want winner to sequence all 46 cromosomes. This sounds quite difficult as the method have to be sure that is has sequenced both of the cromosomes (from a pair), not just the other one twice. And this must be valid all the 3Gbp. By bet? The working method just sequences emultiple chromosomes and determines the exact basepairs statically.
Every galaxy that revolves around a supermassive black hole within 400 light-years of our own galaxy has been cataloged.
The whole catalog:
1. Our own galaxy
My bet is that they have read Expert Political Judgement. Professor Tetlock published his research results in the book. His study about accuracy of experts spanned over 20 years. His basic result? Well, it's all about how you think not what you think. He wrote a small essay about the results: How Accurate Are Your Pet Pundits?.
A quote form the article: [F]ollowing the philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, we classify experts as "hedgehogs" or "foxes." Hedgehogs are big-idea thinkers in love with grand theories: libertarianism, Marxism, environmentalism, etc. Their self-confidence can be infectious. They know how to stoke momentum in an argument by multiplying reasons why they are right and others are wrong.
That wins them media acclaim. But they don't know when to slam the mental brakes by making concessions to other points of view. They take their theories too seriously. The result: hedgehogs make more mistakes, but they pile up more hits on Google.
Eclectic foxes are better at curbing their ideological enthusiasms. They are comfortable with protracted uncertainty about who is right even in bitter debates, conceding gaps in their knowledge and granting legitimacy to opposing views. They sprinkle their conversations with linguistic qualifiers that limit the reach of their arguments: 'but,' 'however,' 'although.'
Because they avoid over-simplification, foxes make fewer mistakes. Foxes will often agree with hedgehogs up to a point, before complicating things: "Yes, my colleague is right that the Saudi monarchy is vulnerable, but remember that coups are rare and that the government commands many means of squelching opposition."
Why is it that every large prize (Fields medal, Millenium Prize etc.) is described as being equivalent to the Nobel Prize?
Fields medal comes with monetary award of C$15,000. It's not a "large price".
The segment in question was included but was never meant to be accessed!
Don't be naive. Of course it was ment to be accessed. Ant it was. And the segment in question worked like it was supposed to: people started to talk about Grand Theft Auto and Take-Two. And I think that even a few teenagers bought the game to see the "hot coffee".
It's also worth considering that even if the U.S. doesn't travel back to the Moon, other countries will. Do you really want your grandkids to have to buy tickets on a Chinese spacecraft to visit the Chinese moon city fifty years hence? Or the EU moon base? Or the Russian Mars base?
Being an European myself, I find it highly offensive that you assume that any reasonable American person should answer: no.
Not that our grandkids will be able to afford such things; we'll be the has-beens, the left-behinds who stand at night and gaze at the sky while other nation-states dominate the heavens. No way. The U.S. has got to maintain its leadership role in space or it will become an also-ran.
It doesn't really matter to me what "nation" goes to space. I want that human race goes to space. The whole going to space thing seems to be a mere a mean to protect U.S.'s status as leading superpower. And what comes to left-behinds: They won't be Chinese or Europeans. They will be Earthlings.
... is extremely bogus. ("Bogus" is a technical term. It means "completely wrong.")
So what does "extremly bogus" then means?
IANAL, but from the article, "brain activity has ceased", which as I understand it is the legal and medical definition of human death.
... no criminal or civil liability will result from disconnecting the life-support devices." (Dority v. Superior Court of San Bernardino County, 193 Cal.Rptr. 288, 291 (1983))
IANAL and IANAA (I am not an American).
I think that the brain activity defines personhood in US. From wikipedia: Among human beings, brain activity is a necessary condition to legal personhood in the United States. "It appears that once brain death has been determined
Usually whether a person has died is determined by a medical doctor. That is, a determination of a living person is an expert decision which is rubber stamped by a court of law. In some cases (like a missing person) this decision is done by court with different arguments. What I want to say is, a law doesn't have a clear cut definition of a death. It do have predecences for some cases (death by trauma, death by being missing too long, etc.) but they can't be extrapolated to completly new kind of sitsuations. Like suspended animation.
Anyway, I'm from Finland so don't take my words for your country. To my arguments defence, I think the defining a person dead is pretty similar in all western world.
As a intresting side note, the real trouble might come from the definition of a personhood. Can you kill a person that has been put in SA? Does it require some special conditions like a long time (20 years for example) spent in SA? What these conditions will be? I don't have a clue but I know that in the process of determining these things a huge bunch of lawers will get rich.
BTW. To all you Yanks reading this - I think you guys made the greatest achievement of the human race, to date, happen. The reasons aren't important - you should be very proud.
It was not Americans. Even if they like to point out the exelence of Armstrong or Kennedy, the real innovation and work was done by German people. Let's see how space.com puts it in its articleRemembering Wernher von Braun's German Rocket Team:
Walter Jacobi, one of the few remaining German technicians whose genius helped put American astronauts on the moon, is frail now. At 84, he doesn't move as quickly as he used to.
But sitting recently in the lobby of a space museum, his eyes sparkled when asked about the legacy of the team of 119 scientists, led by Wernher von Braun, who arrived in this north Alabama city a half-century ago and turned its cotton fields into a landmark of space exploration, including the first moon landing in 1969.
``I don't know how to describe it, it's a tremendous achievement, you know?'' he said. ``We always knew we could do it.''
Their number now down to about a dozen, the German team's accomplishments are indisputable: Manned space flight, including lunar landings, the space shuttle and the international space station -- all the direct result of their work developing rockets in the United States following World War II.
But to some that legacy is marred by the group's initial work creating V-2 rockets for the German military with the help of thousands of concentration camp laborers under the Nazi boot.
Putting a re-design to a vote of Slashdot readers would be the ultimate example of design-by-committee, and would therefore result in the ultimate in useless, unreadable, un-navigable websites.
So wrong that is hurts. Committee designs are bad because they lack vision and are basically done by compromizes to meet all the central demand of a set of people that all lack vision. A poll would choose one option from couple of finalists that each would have its own wonderful vision.
Kopete and Gaim are both working on voice support for Google Talk. Who's to say that Nokia aren't going to use one of these projects?
Well, Google, of course. Google wants to see their client and their logo in 770. They are going to make Nokia a offer that it can't decline. For example, building the whole thing and giving some kind of support for it.
image of phone
So the cover opens to left? I won't be using it as I'm unable to use it. I'm left-handed.
I think Google's logo art is an awesome thing. They gain nothing from it, yet it raises awareness of people, places, and causes.
Don't be naive. Of course there's something to Google to gain in with changing logos. For example I like to visit Google's main page from time to time just to see the logo art. At that visit I'm also going to note other changes like link to image.google.com. More over, judging from your message, the changing logo art seems to make Google more likable. Which is good for them.
what are the odds of that?
/usr/share/dict/words):
Some kind of upper limit is 15%. The more probable value is around 0.05%.
To get 15% I used following assumptions:
Number of letters is 26. This means that there is 26^8=208827064576 possible strings. Every one of them is eqaully propable.
Nuber of different words by their length is (fetched from
n1: 26
n2: 160
n3: 762
n4: 3070
n5: 6350
n6: 10691
n7: 14296
n8: 15223
Different settings of words are (I have removed all of them that contains 3 or more words with length of 1):
8 letter word -> n8 sensible strings
7 letter word, 1 letter word -> 2!*n7*n1 sensible strings
6, 2 -> 2!*n6*n2
6, 1, 1 -> 3!/2!*n6*n1*n1
5, 3 -> and so on
5, 2, 1
4, 4
4, 3, 1
4, 2, 2
3, 3, 2
2, 2, 2, 2
2, 2, 2, 1, 1
The number of all different sensible strings is 31782293607.
The real number of ensible strings is smaller. The usage of "words" with the length of 1 is questinable. More over we calculate "ASLETTER" Two times as "A S LETTER" and "AS LETTER".
Now, if we don't allow word settings with words of length 1 and remove two letter acronyms (by arbitrarility lowering the number of two letter words to 40) we get 0.05%.
We are the only remaining superpower. We have a huge responsibility to set an example for the rest of the world and to help mature all of our societies. We have to try and steer the whole damn world into globalism at a pace that isn't threatening and is respectful to all of our cultures.
Why? Where's your authority to act as the world's authoritarian father-figure? Because you have the largest, most well-equipped army? This is the sort of attitude that gets planes flown into tall American buildings - "We know best; when we bomb you, it's for your own good".
What? The grapnd-parent just said that a huge military might requires responsibility. Then you come and blame that this means "we know best; we bomb you for your own good".
It's no wonder that the general population is confused about storage space when a slashdot article gets it flat out wrong.
Yeah. Like general population is reading slashdot.