He was saying that the first class of machine he mentioned (tiny) is a PITA, but the second (workstation/midsize) is rock solid. Don't see why that's particularly confusing unless you don't realize that Dell makes more than one model and class of machine.
Now, if what actually confused you was the claim that any Dell could be rock solid, then...you might have a point.:)
p.s. I also got the "metaphorically" joke, which apparently went straight over your head.
They're going to be distributing not just the movie, but everything you need to re-create the movie (or a derivative work). The movie itself is only 14 minutes long, but the full distribution takes 4 DVDs! All under a CC license. Hard to see how you could call this anything but an open source movie!
it so happens that most artists just aren't willing to donate their free time for some illusory cause.
Funny, that's what they used to say about programmers! And, of course, no musician has ever put on, say, a benefit concert for charity. Everyone knows that true artists are motivated entirely by money and nothing else.
I thought life & evolution and development thrived on change..
Evolutionary change seems to be enhanced by environmental change, yes, but life itself is an entirely separate matter. Life doesn't have to be complex or evolve rapidly in order to simply exist. In 3.5 gigayears, life on Earth has gone from matted plankton to, well, people. In the same period of time, life on this planet might have gone from matted plankton to really matted plankton. But it would still be life.
the 'kickstart' of inorganic->organic chemistry, presumably took some random event, a one in five gazzillion possible combination of elements
Actually, that's pretty much the exact opposite of contemporary thinking; due to the amazingly rapid appearance of life here on Earth, it's now considered that the sort of self-sustaining chemical reactions that lead to what we call life are quite probable. Not a "one in five gazzillion" chance, but a near certitude. Which is why we expect to find evidence of life (probably extinct) on Mars, and (maybe-not-extinct) in the subsurface oceans of Europa.
If you're trying to suggest that the gov't is lying, and these really are important and controversial secrets that will outrage the American public or something, well...I won't deny that there's a very tiny chance you're correct, except--why would those have made it through the first vetting process?
I admit that a good dose of paranoia is a healthy thing in a free (or semi-free) society, but frankly, I'm more interested in the secrets that never got anywhere near a publisher than I am in the ones so minor and/or obscure that they were overlooked till the last second.
The author apparently has no interest whatsoever in getting these secrets out. If he did, he wouldn't need a copy of the book because he's the author! He has (or had) the original manuscripts, and if he really wanted to make sure that these secrets got out, he could have made other arrangements.
Lets hope someone got copy in the wild and one day we get to compare the 'approved' version to the non redacted edition.
Why would we been any more interested in this book than in ones that make it through the military approval process without mistake? The fact that these secrets made it as far as the publisher doesn't suggest to me that they're particularly interesting ones. Just the opposite, in fact.
... where you can say what you like, if you get permission first.
That's true anywhere where non-disclosure agreements are legally binding. If I wrote a book, and realized that I'd inadvertently revealed some secrets of a company that I'd worked for, I'd probably be overjoyed if the company agreed to buy and dispose of the first print run, rather than suing me to force me to buy and destroy the first print run.
Seriously, guys, look at how we do it in the rest of the world.
You mean like in places like the UK, where truth isn't a defense against slander or libel, making it even more likely that an author would wish his book hadn't gotten published in its current form (as is the case here)? Thanks, but no thanks!:p;)
There's a lot I don't like about US law, but that's true of every nation I've investigated, and at least in the US, I don't have a 50/50 chance of being photographed by the government if I stick my nose outside my front door!:)
In my tests, on the average, Ie9 was infinitely slower. Of course, I knew that if I just posted raw cross-platform results, people would object that Windows has a disproportionate market share, so I took that into account. In my final numbers, Windows counts for a generous 99% of the result, and other OSes for only 1%. Of course, 1% of infinity is still infinity, so, on the average, any given user will experience an infinite slowdown with IE9. It's all there in the numbers!:)
Um, perhaps you haven't noticed, but you can rate them right there at your PS3; no need to go to another machine. You can't write a review, but you can easily enter 1-5 stars.
I agree about the skipping the credits part, but I just fast-forward through them, and it seems to be happy with that.
Hopeably, their recommendation system is based on people whose ratings are vaguely similar to yours, not some absolute measure of popularity. Otherwise, all those, "based on your interest in X and Y, you may like Z" messages are horribly misleading!:)
this comes out to approximately 11.4 years of straight time
I've been watching movies and TV for four times that long, so I would only have needed 6 hours a day to reach that benchmark. And, believe it or not, there are actually people in the world who are even older than I am!:)
Of course, you don't necessarily have to watch an entire movie to decide you don't like it--especially with the Netflix rating system, where the primary purpose is to encourage it to suggest other things you might like, so giving low ratings to things you'd never even consider watching isn't at all unreasonable.
2% (assuming its really that small) of a hundred million is still two million. That's a lot of people to lock out. In any case, I see no performance improvement on my system--zero equals zero.:)
Plus, those many millions of non-Windows users (I won't argue the exact numbers) include many of the brightest and most technically expert--those who provide advice, help and support to the hordes of office-drones (parents, cousins, friends, etc.). Continuing to alienate those experts can't be the best plan. Further, even among Windows users, there are many who prefer cross-platform apps to keep their options open--they may be stuck with Windows today for various specific reasons, but they don't necessarily want to be stuck forever, and using cross-platform apps helps keep the way out open. Plus, as Pthisis mentioned, organizations which have a small percentage of non-Windows users may still prefer to support one cross-platform app for all their users, where possible, and the browser is definitely a place where it's possible.
There's reasons why non-IE use is an order of magnitude greater than non-Windows use, and performance is only one small part of those reasons. Let me know when IE supports anywhere near the range of add-ons that FF does and...I still won't use it, because it still won't run on my system.:)
>>Many of these people probably also believe that heavy objects fall faster than light ones, not because they reject Galileo and his evidence and reasoning, but merely because they weren't paying attention that day in class.
> Maybe they believe this because that is there daily experience.
No. No it's not. Children see heavy and light objects fall at the same speed all the time. They also see certain objects (like feathers) fall very slowly and are more likely to take notice because the behavior is so unusual, but that doesn't mean they don't see actual physics on a daily basis.
You don't need a vacuum chamber to demonstrate that there's something unusual and extraordinary about feathers. Simply take two small paperclips, attach one to a feather, and then demonstrate that the feather still falls more slowly, even though the weight of paperclip+feather is clearly greater than the weight of the paperclip alone. Argue that you've proven that light objects fall faster than heavy ones, and see how the kids react!:)
...Many atheists are simply skeptics who refuse to accept the existence of the Gods unless you provide irrefutable proof.
This describes agnosticism, which is a vastly different thing than an atheism, what the individuals choose to call themselves notwithstanding.
(Original quote was mine.)
No, again, that's simply not true. Let us consider tooth fairies and Yetis. I am absolutely convinced that the tooth fairy is fictitious, but I'm only mostly convinced that the same is true of Yetis. Odd things have turned up before in odd corners of the globe. So my active disbelief in tooth fairies is equivalent to atheism, while my skepticism of Yetis is equivalent to agnosticism. The cases are easily distinguishable. Nevertheless, in both cases, I would reconsider my opinion given irrefutable proof.
Note that this doesn't mean that I have any doubt about the non-existence of tooth fairies--I don't. It simply means that I'm not so tied up in my disbelief of tooth fairies that I would cling to it in the face of contrary evidence.
Actually, I disagree. (I'm am what you might call a "classical agnostic", in that I don't believe it's possible to prove or disprove the existence of the Gods.) As Arthur Clarke famously stated, "any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic." If, to take your example, prayers prove to be answered at a statistically significant rate, that could simply show that sufficiently-advanced aliens are interested, but if the prayers are not answered, that could simply mean that magical beings (Gods) are not interested. It doesn't prove they don't exist--they may have their own agendas. (It's that old, tricky, "prove a negative" thing.)
Every atheist accepts that there is no deity on blind faith and without further investigation.
Nope, absolutely false. Many atheists are simply skeptics who refuse to accept the existence of the Gods unless you provide irrefutable proof. No blind faith required, any more than blind faith is required to not believe in unicorns or the tooth fairy. Furthermore, many atheists have investigated various religions in great depth--quite a few became atheists only with great reluctance, when their search for a plausible faith turned up empty. I say this as an agnostic, not an atheist, but one who knows many atheists. There are probably some atheists who are as you describe, but in my experience, they are a rare minority.
Indeed, I think you posed the most interesting question in the whole discussion--one I came here specifically to pose myself--and your original post deserves a lot of mod points, but so far most people seem to be more interested in posting evidence of their own smug superiority, or engaging in the usual slashdot attacks on/defenses of religion than in looking at what was actually said.
Indeed, and the people who are likely to answer incorrectly are also the least likely to understand the distinction between "do you think" and "do you believe", so I'm not convinced that rephrasing as you suggest would have helped.
Many people think/believe that New Mexico is a separate country from the US, while Canada is not. Many people, even here on Slashdot, believe that "loose" means to fail or be defeated. In most cases, these people will easily correct their misbelief when instructed by what they consider to be a reasonable authority.
My suspicion (which I think is in accord with yours) is that the majority of these people, like people who can't find the US on a world map, simply don't know and don't care what the correct answer is, and merely provided their best guess. Many of these people probably also believe that heavy objects fall faster than light ones, not because they reject Galileo and his evidence and reasoning, but merely because they weren't paying attention that day in class.
If the question had been "Scientists claim that the Earth revolves around the Sun; do you agree or disagree?", then I suspect the numbers would have been quite different.
"Atheism" is about the belief in god(s), which is not necessarily a required component of a religion. If Buddhism (which is neutral on the topic of gods) and Scientology (which believes in alien clams that build DC-10s inside volcanoes, or something) qualify as religions, I don't see why Soviet "Communism" doesn't.
Of course, by this interpretation, the Communists (or "Communists", since the USSR had few actual Communists) didn't purge "all the morons^religious nuts." They merely purged the heretics.
I didn't RTFA yet either (and I'm hoping to find something a little more reliable/interesting/useful than a NetworkWorld blog), but, reading between the lines of the summary, I think the point is not so much that it comes from a supernova, but that they identified the particular supernova. Which would be pretty amazing. Of course, given the accuracy of detail in a typical slashdot summary, this could actually turn out to be a story about anything from a new supernova being discovered in a distant galaxy to a new exploit in some brand of router whose name sounds like "supernova".:)
you are looking for a right which "trumps" the restrictions of copyright, to enable someone who is neither an owner, nor a licensor, to make use of a work
No, no, a right that allows someone not the owner or licensor to restrict the use of the work, not to make use of it. I don't know of anything in US law that would allow the latter.
The person I was originally responding to said, "if I photograph you walking down the street, the photograph is mine, not yours." That's true as far as copyright goes, but there are other rights involved--personality and privacy rights--which may further restrict the use of the photograph.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, now you've confused me...
He was saying that the first class of machine he mentioned (tiny) is a PITA, but the second (workstation/midsize) is rock solid. Don't see why that's particularly confusing unless you don't realize that Dell makes more than one model and class of machine.
Now, if what actually confused you was the claim that any Dell could be rock solid, then...you might have a point. :)
p.s. I also got the "metaphorically" joke, which apparently went straight over your head.
They're going to be distributing not just the movie, but everything you need to re-create the movie (or a derivative work). The movie itself is only 14 minutes long, but the full distribution takes 4 DVDs! All under a CC license. Hard to see how you could call this anything but an open source movie!
it so happens that most artists just aren't willing to donate their free time for some illusory cause.
Funny, that's what they used to say about programmers! And, of course, no musician has ever put on, say, a benefit concert for charity. Everyone knows that true artists are motivated entirely by money and nothing else.
Darn, you beat me to it. Definitely one of the best! :)
Here's slashdot: http://5z8.info/gain-inches_d1p0h_launchexe
I thought life & evolution and development thrived on change..
Evolutionary change seems to be enhanced by environmental change, yes, but life itself is an entirely separate matter. Life doesn't have to be complex or evolve rapidly in order to simply exist. In 3.5 gigayears, life on Earth has gone from matted plankton to, well, people. In the same period of time, life on this planet might have gone from matted plankton to really matted plankton. But it would still be life.
the 'kickstart' of inorganic->organic chemistry, presumably took some random event, a one in five gazzillion possible combination of elements
Actually, that's pretty much the exact opposite of contemporary thinking; due to the amazingly rapid appearance of life here on Earth, it's now considered that the sort of self-sustaining chemical reactions that lead to what we call life are quite probable. Not a "one in five gazzillion" chance, but a near certitude. Which is why we expect to find evidence of life (probably extinct) on Mars, and (maybe-not-extinct) in the subsurface oceans of Europa.
If you're trying to suggest that the gov't is lying, and these really are important and controversial secrets that will outrage the American public or something, well...I won't deny that there's a very tiny chance you're correct, except--why would those have made it through the first vetting process?
I admit that a good dose of paranoia is a healthy thing in a free (or semi-free) society, but frankly, I'm more interested in the secrets that never got anywhere near a publisher than I am in the ones so minor and/or obscure that they were overlooked till the last second.
Did the author get any from the first print run?
The author apparently has no interest whatsoever in getting these secrets out. If he did, he wouldn't need a copy of the book because he's the author! He has (or had) the original manuscripts, and if he really wanted to make sure that these secrets got out, he could have made other arrangements.
Lets hope someone got copy in the wild and one day we get to compare the 'approved' version to the non redacted edition.
Why would we been any more interested in this book than in ones that make it through the military approval process without mistake? The fact that these secrets made it as far as the publisher doesn't suggest to me that they're particularly interesting ones. Just the opposite, in fact.
... where you can say what you like, if you get permission first.
That's true anywhere where non-disclosure agreements are legally binding. If I wrote a book, and realized that I'd inadvertently revealed some secrets of a company that I'd worked for, I'd probably be overjoyed if the company agreed to buy and dispose of the first print run, rather than suing me to force me to buy and destroy the first print run.
Seriously, guys, look at how we do it in the rest of the world.
You mean like in places like the UK, where truth isn't a defense against slander or libel, making it even more likely that an author would wish his book hadn't gotten published in its current form (as is the case here)? Thanks, but no thanks! :p ;)
There's a lot I don't like about US law, but that's true of every nation I've investigated, and at least in the US, I don't have a 50/50 chance of being photographed by the government if I stick my nose outside my front door! :)
In my tests, on the average, Ie9 was infinitely slower. Of course, I knew that if I just posted raw cross-platform results, people would object that Windows has a disproportionate market share, so I took that into account. In my final numbers, Windows counts for a generous 99% of the result, and other OSes for only 1%. Of course, 1% of infinity is still infinity, so, on the average, any given user will experience an infinite slowdown with IE9. It's all there in the numbers! :)
Um, perhaps you haven't noticed, but you can rate them right there at your PS3; no need to go to another machine. You can't write a review, but you can easily enter 1-5 stars.
I agree about the skipping the credits part, but I just fast-forward through them, and it seems to be happy with that.
Hopeably, their recommendation system is based on people whose ratings are vaguely similar to yours, not some absolute measure of popularity. Otherwise, all those, "based on your interest in X and Y, you may like Z" messages are horribly misleading! :)
this comes out to approximately 11.4 years of straight time
I've been watching movies and TV for four times that long, so I would only have needed 6 hours a day to reach that benchmark. And, believe it or not, there are actually people in the world who are even older than I am! :)
Of course, you don't necessarily have to watch an entire movie to decide you don't like it--especially with the Netflix rating system, where the primary purpose is to encourage it to suggest other things you might like, so giving low ratings to things you'd never even consider watching isn't at all unreasonable.
$70 is still very close to the general $100 point.
Actually, no it isn't. That's a 30% difference, it's significant.
Just over 42%, actually. 30% more than 70 is only 93 and change.
2% (assuming its really that small) of a hundred million is still two million. That's a lot of people to lock out. In any case, I see no performance improvement on my system--zero equals zero. :)
Plus, those many millions of non-Windows users (I won't argue the exact numbers) include many of the brightest and most technically expert--those who provide advice, help and support to the hordes of office-drones (parents, cousins, friends, etc.). Continuing to alienate those experts can't be the best plan. Further, even among Windows users, there are many who prefer cross-platform apps to keep their options open--they may be stuck with Windows today for various specific reasons, but they don't necessarily want to be stuck forever, and using cross-platform apps helps keep the way out open. Plus, as Pthisis mentioned, organizations which have a small percentage of non-Windows users may still prefer to support one cross-platform app for all their users, where possible, and the browser is definitely a place where it's possible.
There's reasons why non-IE use is an order of magnitude greater than non-Windows use, and performance is only one small part of those reasons. Let me know when IE supports anywhere near the range of add-ons that FF does and...I still won't use it, because it still won't run on my system. :)
>>Many of these people probably also believe that heavy objects fall faster than light ones, not because they reject Galileo and his evidence and reasoning, but merely because they weren't paying attention that day in class.
> Maybe they believe this because that is there daily experience.
No. No it's not. Children see heavy and light objects fall at the same speed all the time. They also see certain objects (like feathers) fall very slowly and are more likely to take notice because the behavior is so unusual, but that doesn't mean they don't see actual physics on a daily basis.
You don't need a vacuum chamber to demonstrate that there's something unusual and extraordinary about feathers. Simply take two small paperclips, attach one to a feather, and then demonstrate that the feather still falls more slowly, even though the weight of paperclip+feather is clearly greater than the weight of the paperclip alone. Argue that you've proven that light objects fall faster than heavy ones, and see how the kids react! :)
...Many atheists are simply skeptics who refuse to accept the existence of the Gods unless you provide irrefutable proof.
This describes agnosticism, which is a vastly different thing than an atheism, what the individuals choose to call themselves notwithstanding.
(Original quote was mine.)
No, again, that's simply not true. Let us consider tooth fairies and Yetis. I am absolutely convinced that the tooth fairy is fictitious, but I'm only mostly convinced that the same is true of Yetis. Odd things have turned up before in odd corners of the globe. So my active disbelief in tooth fairies is equivalent to atheism, while my skepticism of Yetis is equivalent to agnosticism. The cases are easily distinguishable. Nevertheless, in both cases, I would reconsider my opinion given irrefutable proof.
Note that this doesn't mean that I have any doubt about the non-existence of tooth fairies--I don't. It simply means that I'm not so tied up in my disbelief of tooth fairies that I would cling to it in the face of contrary evidence.
Actually, I disagree. (I'm am what you might call a "classical agnostic", in that I don't believe it's possible to prove or disprove the existence of the Gods.) As Arthur Clarke famously stated, "any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic." If, to take your example, prayers prove to be answered at a statistically significant rate, that could simply show that sufficiently-advanced aliens are interested, but if the prayers are not answered, that could simply mean that magical beings (Gods) are not interested. It doesn't prove they don't exist--they may have their own agendas. (It's that old, tricky, "prove a negative" thing.)
Every atheist accepts that there is no deity on blind faith and without further investigation.
Nope, absolutely false. Many atheists are simply skeptics who refuse to accept the existence of the Gods unless you provide irrefutable proof. No blind faith required, any more than blind faith is required to not believe in unicorns or the tooth fairy. Furthermore, many atheists have investigated various religions in great depth--quite a few became atheists only with great reluctance, when their search for a plausible faith turned up empty. I say this as an agnostic, not an atheist, but one who knows many atheists. There are probably some atheists who are as you describe, but in my experience, they are a rare minority.
Indeed, I think you posed the most interesting question in the whole discussion--one I came here specifically to pose myself--and your original post deserves a lot of mod points, but so far most people seem to be more interested in posting evidence of their own smug superiority, or engaging in the usual slashdot attacks on/defenses of religion than in looking at what was actually said.
Indeed, and the people who are likely to answer incorrectly are also the least likely to understand the distinction between "do you think" and "do you believe", so I'm not convinced that rephrasing as you suggest would have helped.
Many people think/believe that New Mexico is a separate country from the US, while Canada is not. Many people, even here on Slashdot, believe that "loose" means to fail or be defeated. In most cases, these people will easily correct their misbelief when instructed by what they consider to be a reasonable authority.
My suspicion (which I think is in accord with yours) is that the majority of these people, like people who can't find the US on a world map, simply don't know and don't care what the correct answer is, and merely provided their best guess. Many of these people probably also believe that heavy objects fall faster than light ones, not because they reject Galileo and his evidence and reasoning, but merely because they weren't paying attention that day in class.
If the question had been "Scientists claim that the Earth revolves around the Sun; do you agree or disagree?", then I suspect the numbers would have been quite different.
"Atheism" is about the belief in god(s), which is not necessarily a required component of a religion. If Buddhism (which is neutral on the topic of gods) and Scientology (which believes in alien clams that build DC-10s inside volcanoes, or something) qualify as religions, I don't see why Soviet "Communism" doesn't.
Of course, by this interpretation, the Communists (or "Communists", since the USSR had few actual Communists) didn't purge "all the morons^religious nuts." They merely purged the heretics.
double addvalues(double a, double b) // they'll never notice
:)
{
if (a > 1000.0 || b > 1000.0)
{
return (a + b) * 1.0009;
}
else
return a + b;
}
There, an algorithm that allows a computer/robot to decide whether it should attempt to deceive. Not a very complex or good one, but still.
I suspect that if you name a company or companies, people can point out similar things they backpedaled on.
The SCO Group.
Well?
I'm waiting.... :)
I didn't RTFA yet either (and I'm hoping to find something a little more reliable/interesting/useful than a NetworkWorld blog), but, reading between the lines of the summary, I think the point is not so much that it comes from a supernova, but that they identified the particular supernova. Which would be pretty amazing. Of course, given the accuracy of detail in a typical slashdot summary, this could actually turn out to be a story about anything from a new supernova being discovered in a distant galaxy to a new exploit in some brand of router whose name sounds like "supernova". :)
Yes, and it's also "cutting off", not "removing". Sorry, I guess my attempt at humor fell a bit flat there.
you are looking for a right which "trumps" the restrictions of copyright, to enable someone who is neither an owner, nor a licensor, to make use of a work
No, no, a right that allows someone not the owner or licensor to restrict the use of the work, not to make use of it. I don't know of anything in US law that would allow the latter.
The person I was originally responding to said, "if I photograph you walking down the street, the photograph is mine, not yours." That's true as far as copyright goes, but there are other rights involved--personality and privacy rights--which may further restrict the use of the photograph.