> Both the Parliament and the Council are trengthened.
That has to mean the Commission is weakened, and they seemed to be the bad guys in this case, as well as the least democratic organ (three steps away from the voters).
Why is that so many people here assume all/. or Linux users (other than themselves) must share the same goals and viewpoints?
I mean appart from the AC, from which I expect no better, at least four other people thought the comment was "insightful". Or did they simply choose ignsightful because there is no "+1, pro Apple" modifier?
Anyway, for those who still not get it. Linux has no goals. It is a piece of software. Each person who work Linux has his own goals. Sometimes these goals are similar, and other times the means to achieve the goals are similar enough, that cooperation is possible. This is true both for the Linux kernel, and for the software that is assciated with Linux despite in general running on many different Unix platforms (including Darwin), and often also MS Windows.
What is cool about free software is that this is possible, people can work on different goals, and the those who manage to create the most useful code will win in the marketplace of ideas. So some people can work on making interfaces on top of Linux that make the computer look more like an MS Windows or MacOS box to the average user, while other people work on new and innovative ideas.
The EU as is is totally undemcratic, therefore you oppose a proposal to change it? I know this is the logic a lot of people use, but I don't understand it.
What I want to know is whether or not the constitution gives more power to the parliament. The parliament is apparently the body we (grassroots, minor busninesses, economicians) can influence. The closed and undemocratic bodies of the Commision and Council are in the hands of ip lawyers and multinationals.
If the parliament is strengthed, I'll vore for the constitution. If it is weakened, I'll vote against.
Well, he said USSR and not Russian Federation Russia (isn't that the official name?). Two former members are hopefully on the road to become more democratic (Georgia and Ukraine). Three are already democratic enough to be acceped in the European Union (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) (The EU itself is undemocratic, but have pretty strict criteria for membership).
The bad side is that the rest is that the former (RFR) on its road to become a dictatorship, and the rest mostly already is. White Russia (I'm not sure of the English name...) is where Russia is going. Usbekistan is one of the joke-dictatorships with an insane God-ruler that is fun as long as you don't think about the poor people living there.
Acting/dialogue: The human crew was boring, but the alien ambassadors (Londo, G'Kar and Delenn) were brilliant! If you can't see that, I refuse to believe to believe in your stated credentials.
Production value: The special effects were great for the time, and for the rest the show managed to produce something comparable to the ST of the time for half the price not bad.
But even though I believe the alien ambassadors and the CGI alone should make B5 remembered, that is not what made B5 a phenomen. It is the story. It was huge, in any way you see it.
Remember, at the time tv-series came in three categroies. Episodic series, where everything was back to normal at the end. Soaps, where everything could change but there were no direction in the change. And mini-series, which were kind of like a movie (with a beginning, a middle, and an end) split into 4 or 6 spisoded. Here came a store told in more than 100 episodes!
It changed the way I watch tv. I can't watch drama shows that reset in the end bores me.
And the scope of the story, a key point in the evolution of sentient life in our part of the galaxy, was similarily magnificent.
I think B5 is the TV show for people who like books. Who watch for the story.
The "unsung heroes" consist mostly of people writting free software as a hobby. The famous free software developers are usually paid for working on the project full time.
I happen to be paid to work on one free software project full time, and I also work on another free software project as a hobby. A couple of times people have asked if they could donate to the later work. I have always refered them to the FSF. What use would I have for a buck or two? I have a good income, I don't need charity. And my hobby is for fun, not for profit. If you have 60.000 US$, you can hire me for a year, and my hobby would be my job. Otherwise, I'd rather receive patches, bug fixes, and nice words.
For every book rejected, a 95 more should be rejected if being "published" should be a guarentee of quality. Even though I claimed we were becomming more critical, I still have to spend a lot of time explaining programmer wanabies that just becauase they read something in a book that claims to teach C++, it is not necessarily right.
Conventional media and new media are *both* full of crap, and you have to learn how to distinguish insight with junk.
Your last analogy is on spot, there are plenty of amateurs who can cook better than plenty of professionals. Some people actually believe that McDonald make good food, while everyone can learn to make better tasting food than that in less than a day if they put their mind to it.
Yes, very few are able to make as good food as you get on a gourmet restaurant, but this includes most professionals. There is no sharp dividing line in cooking skills, just like there isn't in writting.
Actually the driver analogy works as well, there are plenty of professional drivers who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a public road, and plenty of amateurs who can drive safely and considerately.
Most professional drivers aren't NASCAR drivers. Most professional cooks aren't gourmet chefs.
And most professional writers are a waste of time.
The fact that most people know how to drive a car, and most people (at least outside the US) know how to cook a meal, and most people today are able to publish on the new media, take away the mystery from the many mediocre professionals.
SMS, instant messaging, E-mail, message boards and blogs are all from time to time trashed by professional writters for not containing the same standard of writting as the traditional media, like (paper) letters, newspaper letter columns, and diaries (by grown-ups).
That is probably true if you look at average numbers. Well, apart from newspaper letter columns, which I find slightly below Usenet posts in quality. And we don't really know about the private media, we tend only to see written diaries and letters from famous people.
However, they also mean that a lot more people are writting than ever used the old media. Honestly, how many in here would ever consider writting to a newspaper letter column? And would you write long, carefully formulated letters to friends and family if you could not use SMS, IM or email? And how many of the bloggers among you would write a diary instead?
What the professional writters are really complaing about is that they no longer have a virtual monopoly on writting. It is now for everyone. And of course, we are getting better at it. Much of the communication (like here) is done in public, and we can see which formulations get the point across and which doesn't. So while the writting may not become beautiful, it slowly becomes effective. At least for those who have anything at all to contribute.
The other part of it is that we become less impressed by the written word, now that it has become a daily tool of our own. We are much less likely to believe in something because it is written (in a a paper or book) than our parents were. Since we know no special skills are required to write and publish, we intuitively know that the written word is no more trsutworthy than the spoken word.
This also annoyes the professional writters, even if they don't know it.
I doub't it would mean anything in theology, those who now accept science and adapt their religion to scientific findings (like the pope does) will accept it, and those who deny facts today in order to keep a literal and closed minded interpretation of old translations of ancients texts, will just deny this one as well.
Einsteins theory is not what I'd call a discovery. More comparable would be Ørsteds discovery that light had a speed, or Michelson-Morley discovery that the speed of light seemed independent of Earth's motion.
Biology suffer from the fact that all biological life we know is likely related. For some of the more fundamental questions in biology, this means wo only have a single observation around which to build our theories. Independent life on Mars would double the number of observations, which would put questions like the origin of life within the realm of science.
You ought to be able to do a monte carlo simulation to obtain a probability distribution on the result. I.e. run the simulation with a large number of random but exact values within the uncertainty of the initial conditions, and count the results. If 80% of the simulations end with a broken leg, that is a likely outcome.
Of course, you would still need to validate the results of the monte carlo simulation on (lots of) observed data, both to see if you got all the relevant factors in the determinstic model, and to see if your estimate on the uncertainty of the initial conditions is reasonable.
I write scientific simulation software, and I'd be rather upset if that software was used as evidence for something in an area where it had not been validated.
It actually is basic science: 1) You make some observations, 2) you formulate a model (which can be in the form of a computer simuilation), and 3) you validate the model by making predictions and comparing them with new observations.
Until step 3 (validation) has been completed, your model (computer simulation) is at best an educated guess.
"Court makes scientifically sound decision" would be a better headline.
Very few are speaking Dutch in Denmark. For an international IT company like Navision, it is more likely than not that the written language is English, and perhaps also the spoken language.
They *are* getting statistically signficant result. And these results are hard to refute scientifically (easy to ridicule though). I'm not thinking of the current "predict the future" effect, which I believe is hard to formulate scientifically, but the other similar experiment at PEAR.
However, all of these results live the same place, namely in what I call the borderland of statistics. Very small effects that get significant by huge numbers. Rather than making me believe in a huge future-pedicting global consciuesness, it makes me doubt these areas of statistics. We see a lot of such results from especially medicine. Like eating walnuts is bad for you. Based on a very small effect and a huge population. I tend to ignore these, and only go listen to those things that has a big effect. Like smoking is very unhealthy, you can see that effect with rather small samples.
I'd like to see them make a fortune on the stock market (stock prices should be subject to these effects) or some other practical application before I believe it.
The police as well. If you report a crime before it happens, the police will be very interested. And they are unlikely to take "I have a machine for predicting the future!" for a valid answer.
Eh, that is how airbags work. There is always a 0.01% chance (or whatever) that the trigger mechanism is malfunctioning, in which case releasing the airbag would be the right thing to do.
But sinse an airbag that did so would be useless, it goes with the 99.99% chance instead.
Uncertainty is an integral part of life. You can minimize it, but you can not remove it.
Many of the free software projects I follow have a big problem making releases. They cultivate a nice little community around the CVS version, and never get around to the boring job of making a release. Especially as this also often require a feature stop and other stuff that creates internal friction.
Of course, non-commercial free software have no obligation for anything than having fun, but I think it is a shame that lots of cool stuff out there never get out to the larger community. And even free software programmers and enthusiasts can't follow the projects for all their software closely.
A lot of the European "liberal" parties have a hard time making the distiction between these two, apparently not understanding that granting big businesses monopolies is about as anti free market as you can posibbly get.
The Danish "liberal" party in power has the same problem. Plus they have decided that not touching the huge welfare state created by the social democrats with a 50% average tax (that is, 50% of each crown earned go to tax) and a 68% marginal tax (that is, 68% percent of the last crown earned go to the state as income tax) is incompatible with being in power.
At least, Bush clearly is pro-big business, with no pretence of being pro free market.
Where I live, there are generally three kinds of government sponsored science. I suspect it is the same in the US.
The first is done by the fixed grants to the universities, going to teachers/researchers with tenure, who can research any subject they want. There is so little of this left that it is probably insignificant.
The second is more or less generic grants everybody can seek. Probably similar to the NSF. We can not choose what we want to research, we send in proposals within the scope of the grant, and some get funded, presumably based on scientific merit. But we can publish any results, subject only to the traditional peer-review by journals. This is where the largest share of research today happens.
The third is the research insititutions who are directly part of the various branches of government. Research there are directly related to specific tasks required by the department. Researchers are not asked to lie, but results that does not support the policy of the government are not published, and the summary and consclusion of published reports are written "politically", and sometimes contradict the scientific meat of the reports. But journalists doesn't speak science, so the contradiction is seldom discovered.
Privately funded research are mostly similar to category three.
They are not really significant from a programming language point of view, as they are mostly a reflection of machine architectures. Create a history of instruction set architectures, and you will mostly also have created a history of assembly language.
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> Both the Parliament and the Council are trengthened.
That has to mean the Commission is weakened, and they seemed to be the bad guys in this case, as well as the least democratic organ (three steps away from the voters).
Why is that so many people here assume all /. or Linux users (other than themselves) must share the same goals and viewpoints?
I mean appart from the AC, from which I expect no better, at least four other people thought the comment was "insightful". Or did they simply choose ignsightful because there is no "+1, pro Apple" modifier?
Anyway, for those who still not get it. Linux has no goals. It is a piece of software. Each person who work Linux has his own goals. Sometimes these goals are similar, and other times the means to achieve the goals are similar enough, that cooperation is possible. This is true both for the Linux kernel, and for the software that is assciated with Linux despite in general running on many different Unix platforms (including Darwin), and often also MS Windows.
What is cool about free software is that this is possible, people can work on different goals, and the those who manage to create the most useful code will win in the marketplace of ideas. So some people can work on making interfaces on top of Linux that make the computer look more like an MS Windows or MacOS box to the average user, while other people work on new and innovative ideas.
The marketplace will sort it out.
That would be a great marketing name.
The EU as is is totally undemcratic, therefore you oppose a proposal to change it? I know this is the logic a lot of people use, but I don't understand it.
What I want to know is whether or not the constitution gives more power to the parliament. The parliament is apparently the body we (grassroots, minor busninesses, economicians) can influence. The closed and undemocratic bodies of the Commision and Council are in the hands of ip lawyers and multinationals.
If the parliament is strengthed, I'll vore for the constitution. If it is weakened, I'll vote against.
Well, he said USSR and not Russian Federation Russia (isn't that the official name?). Two former members are hopefully on the road to become more democratic (Georgia and Ukraine). Three are already democratic enough to be acceped in the European Union (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) (The EU itself is undemocratic, but have pretty strict criteria for membership).
The bad side is that the rest is that the former (RFR) on its road to become a dictatorship, and the rest mostly already is. White Russia (I'm not sure of the English name...) is where Russia is going. Usbekistan is one of the joke-dictatorships with an insane God-ruler that is fun as long as you don't think about the poor people living there.
Acting/dialogue: The human crew was boring, but the alien ambassadors (Londo, G'Kar and Delenn) were brilliant! If you can't see that, I refuse to believe to believe in your stated credentials.
Production value: The special effects were great for the time, and for the rest the show managed to produce something comparable to the ST of the time for half the price not bad.
But even though I believe the alien ambassadors and the CGI alone should make B5 remembered, that is not what made B5 a phenomen. It is the story. It was huge, in any way you see it.
Remember, at the time tv-series came in three categroies. Episodic series, where everything was back to normal at the end. Soaps, where everything could change but there were no direction in the change. And mini-series, which were kind of like a movie (with a beginning, a middle, and an end) split into 4 or 6 spisoded. Here came a store told in more than 100 episodes!
It changed the way I watch tv. I can't watch drama shows that reset in the end bores me.
And the scope of the story, a key point in the evolution of sentient life in our part of the galaxy, was similarily magnificent.
I think B5 is the TV show for people who like books. Who watch for the story.
Would be to use gnuplot to make great LaTeX graphs. LaTeX is one of the output formats of gnuplot.
The advantage of going directly to LaTeX is that it integrate smoothly, especially with regard to fonts.
The disadvantage is that LaTeX is more limited than EPS, and it take some work to make all the text be the right place.
The "unsung heroes" consist mostly of people writting free software as a hobby. The famous free software developers are usually paid for working on the project full time.
I happen to be paid to work on one free software project full time, and I also work on another free software project as a hobby. A couple of times people have asked if they could donate to the later work. I have always refered them to the FSF. What use would I have for a buck or two? I have a good income, I don't need charity. And my hobby is for fun, not for profit. If you have 60.000 US$, you can hire me for a year, and my hobby would be my job. Otherwise, I'd rather receive patches, bug fixes, and nice words.
For every book rejected, a 95 more should be rejected if being "published" should be a guarentee of quality. Even though I claimed we were becomming more critical, I still have to spend a lot of time explaining programmer wanabies that just becauase they read something in a book that claims to teach C++, it is not necessarily right.
Conventional media and new media are *both* full of crap, and you have to learn how to distinguish insight with junk.
Your last analogy is on spot, there are plenty of amateurs who can cook better than plenty of professionals. Some people actually believe that McDonald make good food, while everyone can learn to make better tasting food than that in less than a day if they put their mind to it.
Yes, very few are able to make as good food as you get on a gourmet restaurant, but this includes most professionals. There is no sharp dividing line in cooking skills, just like there isn't in writting.
Actually the driver analogy works as well, there are plenty of professional drivers who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a public road, and plenty of amateurs who can drive safely and considerately.
Most professional drivers aren't NASCAR drivers. Most professional cooks aren't gourmet chefs.
And most professional writers are a waste of time.
The fact that most people know how to drive a car, and most people (at least outside the US) know how to cook a meal, and most people today are able to publish on the new media, take away the mystery from the many mediocre professionals.
I guess it depend on your connection speed. Reload is faster for me because I'm the bottleneck here :)
Pressing the "reload" button always fix the /. rendering for me.
SMS, instant messaging, E-mail, message boards and blogs are all from time to time trashed by professional writters for not containing the same standard of writting as the traditional media, like (paper) letters, newspaper letter columns, and diaries (by grown-ups).
That is probably true if you look at average numbers. Well, apart from newspaper letter columns, which I find slightly below Usenet posts in quality. And we don't really know about the private media, we tend only to see written diaries and letters from famous people.
However, they also mean that a lot more people are writting than ever used the old media. Honestly, how many in here would ever consider writting to a newspaper letter column? And would you write long, carefully formulated letters to friends and family if you could not use SMS, IM or email? And how many of the bloggers among you would write a diary instead?
What the professional writters are really complaing about is that they no longer have a virtual monopoly on writting. It is now for everyone. And of course, we are getting better at it. Much of the communication (like here) is done in public, and we can see which formulations get the point across and which doesn't. So while the writting may not become beautiful, it slowly becomes effective. At least for those who have anything at all to contribute.
The other part of it is that we become less impressed by the written word, now that it has become a daily tool of our own. We are much less likely to believe in something because it is written (in a a paper or book) than our parents were. Since we know no special skills are required to write and publish, we intuitively know that the written word is no more trsutworthy than the spoken word.
This also annoyes the professional writters, even if they don't know it.
The impact would enourmous in biology.
I doub't it would mean anything in theology, those who now accept science and adapt their religion to scientific findings (like the pope does) will accept it, and those who deny facts today in order to keep a literal and closed minded interpretation of old translations of ancients texts, will just deny this one as well.
Einsteins theory is not what I'd call a discovery. More comparable would be Ørsteds discovery that light had a speed, or Michelson-Morley discovery that the speed of light seemed independent of Earth's motion.
Biology suffer from the fact that all biological life we know is likely related. For some of the more fundamental questions in biology, this means wo only have a single observation around which to build our theories. Independent life on Mars would double the number of observations, which would put questions like the origin of life within the realm of science.
You ought to be able to do a monte carlo simulation to obtain a probability distribution on the result. I.e. run the simulation with a large number of random but exact values within the uncertainty of the initial conditions, and count the results. If 80% of the simulations end with a broken leg, that is a likely outcome.
Of course, you would still need to validate the results of the monte carlo simulation on (lots of) observed data, both to see if you got all the relevant factors in the determinstic model, and to see if your estimate on the uncertainty of the initial conditions is reasonable.
I write scientific simulation software, and I'd be rather upset if that software was used as evidence for something in an area where it had not been validated.
It actually is basic science: 1) You make some observations, 2) you formulate a model (which can be in the form of a computer simuilation), and 3) you validate the model by making predictions and comparing them with new observations.
Until step 3 (validation) has been completed, your model (computer simulation) is at best an educated guess.
"Court makes scientifically sound decision" would be a better headline.
Very few are speaking Dutch in Denmark. For an international IT company like Navision, it is more likely than not that the written language is English, and perhaps also the spoken language.
They *are* getting statistically signficant result. And these results are hard to refute scientifically (easy to ridicule though). I'm not thinking of the current "predict the future" effect, which I believe is hard to formulate scientifically, but the other similar experiment at PEAR.
However, all of these results live the same place, namely in what I call the borderland of statistics. Very small effects that get significant by huge numbers. Rather than making me believe in a huge future-pedicting global consciuesness, it makes me doubt these areas of statistics. We see a lot of such results from especially medicine. Like eating walnuts is bad for you. Based on a very small effect and a huge population. I tend to ignore these, and only go listen to those things that has a big effect. Like smoking is very unhealthy, you can see that effect with rather small samples.
I'd like to see them make a fortune on the stock market (stock prices should be subject to these effects) or some other practical application before I believe it.
Actually, I believe your "luck" will decrease in Nethack after human sacrifice, making the rng less friendly.
The police as well. If you report a crime before it happens, the police will be very interested. And they are unlikely to take "I have a machine for predicting the future!" for a valid answer.
Eh, that is how airbags work. There is always a 0.01% chance (or whatever) that the trigger mechanism is malfunctioning, in which case releasing the airbag would be the right thing to do.
But sinse an airbag that did so would be useless, it goes with the 99.99% chance instead.
Uncertainty is an integral part of life. You can minimize it, but you can not remove it.
Many of the free software projects I follow have a big problem making releases. They cultivate a nice little community around the CVS version, and never get around to the boring job of making a release. Especially as this also often require a feature stop and other stuff that creates internal friction.
Of course, non-commercial free software have no obligation for anything than having fun, but I think it is a shame that lots of cool stuff out there never get out to the larger community. And even free software programmers and enthusiasts can't follow the projects for all their software closely.
A lot of the European "liberal" parties have a hard time making the distiction between these two, apparently not understanding that granting big businesses monopolies is about as anti free market as you can posibbly get.
The Danish "liberal" party in power has the same problem. Plus they have decided that not touching the huge welfare state created by the social democrats with a 50% average tax (that is, 50% of each crown earned go to tax) and a 68% marginal tax (that is, 68% percent of the last crown earned go to the state as income tax) is incompatible with being in power.
At least, Bush clearly is pro-big business, with no pretence of being pro free market.
Where I live, there are generally three kinds of government sponsored science. I suspect it is the same in the US.
The first is done by the fixed grants to the universities, going to teachers/researchers with tenure, who can research any subject they want. There is so little of this left that it is probably insignificant.
The second is more or less generic grants everybody can seek. Probably similar to the NSF. We can not choose what we want to research, we send in proposals within the scope of the grant, and some get funded, presumably based on scientific merit. But we can publish any results, subject only to the traditional peer-review by journals. This is where the largest share of research today happens.
The third is the research insititutions who are directly part of the various branches of government. Research there are directly related to specific tasks required by the department. Researchers are not asked to lie, but results that does not support the policy of the government are not published, and the summary and consclusion of published reports are written "politically", and sometimes contradict the scientific meat of the reports. But journalists doesn't speak science, so the contradiction is seldom discovered.
Privately funded research are mostly similar to category three.
They are not really significant from a programming language point of view, as they are mostly a reflection of machine architectures. Create a history of instruction set architectures, and you will mostly also have created a history of assembly language.