So, it's not perfect or self-replicating, but you can do some cool stuff with it.
Quite an interesting development, indeed. If a higher level of self-replication is wanted, however, it's worth mentioning Reprap, of which Makerbot is a commercial spin-off (e.g. Makerbot is to Reprap what Ubuntu is to Debian). Reprap has an explicit design goal of maximizing the level of self-replication.
Where's the problem? I go to the local supermarket once a week and buy my food for the next week. All of that is organic. Vegetables etc. wouldn't last much longer anyway, organic or not. And stuff like jam or canned vegetables last years.
Not that surprising. Germany would actually stand to profit a lot if they went on a more isolationist course and instead of subsidizing half of the EU simply pulled out.
The opposite is true. The entire reason Germany wanted the Euro zone is because that means creating one huge market to dump export products into. Look at the numbers at destatis.de, the German statistics institution - for years now, the only growing sector of the German economy exports. The only part of the economy growing currently: exports. The Euro zone collapsing would mean instant collapse to Germany's eonomy. After years of neoliberal politics the wages are so low (Actually lower now than 1990, if you correct for inflation. 20 Years of work of 40 million people without any gains in quality of life! Thats worse than nearly every other OECD country!) that domestic demand will not be able to compensate that. There is not one quantum of altruism in Germany supporting Greece, Ireland et.al.
IIRC ABS is the stuff lego bricks are made of. I know, "lego brick" is not exactly the specific measurement you asked for, but that perhaps helps to get a feeling for it.
BTW the fine folks creating reprap, the open source 3d printer, often print with ABS, as well.
:) calm down. I am both a father (wich does not matter, because being a father does not mean having a clue about things like education and developmental psychology, just like having a car does not make one a mechanical engineer) and an educational scientist (which doesn't matter either, because I stated the source for everyone to check), so lack of experience is not the problem here. Rather, its apparently both a different definition of the verb 'planning' (mine was a bit more strict) and a different time frame. 4-year-olds are of course capable of anticipating the next view minutes, but I was talking about days and more.
When trying to really understand the current capabilities of a kid, it's very important to look beyond their talking. Talking is the best way to trick someone into believing you can do more than you are really capable of. For techies projects like ELIZA should have made that obvious for the AI realm, too.
They don't have the part of the brain that you would use to make such a decision.
Whoa, no way.
Maybe you're referring to how the prefrontal cortex, region of executive control, is underdeveloped? And anyway, that just means that they have a hard time controlling themselves, not that they can't plan or perform evil.
No, actually they really "can't plan" at that age:) Proper planning needs (beyond impulse control) a) a proper sense of time (usually developed at around 6 years) and b) proper reasoning (mostly developed at about 12-13, but isn't finished until the "kid" is about 18). And I would argue that doing evil needs a proper grasp of the concept of death, which usually develops at around 9.
For sources see the works of Piaget on developmental psychology.
That's not quite correct either, I'm afraid. I did some statstical analyisis about that back in university (based on PISA[1] data from Germany). While yes, Muslims are disproportionally highly presented, that's just coincidence. If you split the groups further you can see that some individual cultural backgrounds are way more important: In Germanys case people from the region of Curdistan for example, and some (again not all!) regions of the former USSR block. OTOH Greek immigrants are mostly better in school than "native" Germans. Again that cannot be explained by religion, as they are mostly orthodox christians, just like the people from the former USSR block.
If you are looking for explanations, you have to dive into the individual cultural backgrounds - Greek immigrants usually hold education and personal engagement in high regard, which helps alot with integration. Curds have been discrimininated in Turkey to start with, so had no proper access to educational facilities etc. for centuries. There was a similar article on slashdot a while back, about a study of immigration in the USA, researching the difference between Japanese and African backgrounds.
And for the "mass immigration" part: I have no numbers for the rest of Europe, but there is practically zero immigration into Germany, and that has been the case for at least twenty years now.
[1] pasting is broken, look for the OECD survey in Wikipedia, sorry
See now how that's nothing like the denial you spun it as?
I don't see that at all, but perhaps that's because I understand statistics, as perhaps the OP does and you, very clearly, do not.
"Not significant at p = 0.05" means "not significant at p = 0.05". Or, given that p = 0.05 is the usual bound on statistical significance in even the fuzziest subjects, it means "not statistically significant."
"There has been an uptrend that is not significant" is more properly interpretable as "there has been no warming" than anything else. Anyone who understands anything about statistics understands this. If you don't, I can only presume it is because you don't understand statistics.
Well, welcome the real world. "Not significant at p = 0.05" is not properly interpretable as "there has been no warming". It means the propability is less than 95%, nothing more, nothing less. We are not talking about high school physics classes here (See? I can talk that way too! Pity that doesn't constitute a proper argument), we're talking about science in the real world. Proposing a three sigma level level of certainty for climate research is futile, if you're such a statistics wizard you would be aware that the size of the measured effect had to be so high that the earth would already be cooking by now.
Who the hell are YOU -- or any government -- to deprive the parents of their right to make that choice? Ridicule it all you want, but it is THEIR choice.
No, it's not "THEIR" choice. Children are no property, they are humans. And that means they have human rights.
The lesson is, have your kids read lots of real books before you let them on the internet or a cell phone. Hard to do these days, though.
The lesson is: Let yourself be seen reading lots of books. Kids inherit their reading habits from the parents. If you just try to force them to do something they don't see yourself doing your efforts will fail.
By American and Canadian standards, 250W is a lousy excuse for an ebike -- but for the European market it's the standard, as that's the limit there to be street-legal.
Actually you can buy and drive e-bikes with more than 250W in Europe (well, at least in Germany), but for anything more you need some sort of drivers license as a more capable e-bike is legally considered to be a scooter (IIRC).
Thanks for the differentiated response - a rare thing on slashdot:)
China is fully aware of that fact (its mostly still a planned economy, and these are the kind of things planned economies excel at).
China has increasingly become a mixed economy and losing central control for the sake of efficiency and growth.
While that is true, I think it is easy to over-estimate this development. For example, foreign companies AFAIK still can't buy land to build on - they have to lease it from the local government. Many are forced to joint-venture with domestic and/or state-run companies. And about a third of the word force works in state-run factories.
It's lobbying heavily for a new artificial world currency (a mixture of all popular currencies, I can't remember the name right now), to force the US to buy with real value.
They changed how they valued the Yuan by pegging it 50/50 between the dollar and Euro in 2005. Then when the global markets became shakey last year they returned to weighing more heavily on the dollar. As bad as the dollar has been handled, its still the currency of choice for "safe" investment.
I meant something different (and alas, still couldn't find that book I got the info from) - IIRC they want something bretton-woods-style: the value of the important currencies will only be allowed to fluctuate between specific minima and maxima (but not dependent on the gold value).
China is fully aware of that fact (its mostly still a planned economy, and these are the kind of things planned economies excel at). For a few years now China does three things to change this :
It's lobbying heavily for a new artificial world currency (a mixture of all popular currencies, I can't remember the name right now), to force the US to buy with real value.
It's massively investing in domestic infrastructure. Already in 2008 the exports were not the major GDP driver anymore. Relative to the income per person in each country the US anticyclical investments of the last 2 years dwarfed in comparison to that of China.
It's buying tons of companies in the US (for a few years now, but the real shopping spree started with the US crisis, therefore exchanging these "pieces of paper" with real products.
I've been thinking about this. What I've got planned so far:
Beagle board -- $150
800x480 - 1024x??? 7" - 10" LCD -- ???
Battery pack with charger -- $20 to $40
Small USB keyboard -- $20 to $80
Trapper Keeper to use as a housing -- $10
Check out the SmartQ 7 - it does everything you want (minus the keyboard) and is cheaper than your parts cost. Comes with Ubuntu, but the Maemo Community is porting Maemo to this device.
There's no link to the original study, but it was clear from the article that there was no control group. They had a scented room vs. an unscented room, when what they should have had was a "pleasantly" scented room vs. an "unpleasantly" scented room with a third, unscented room as the control. Then they should have done some feedback questionnaires at the conclusion, in which they could have buried a question or two regarding the participant's scent preferences to see how well the participants' evaluation of the smell of the rooms lined-up with the premise of the study.
I agree with that. 3 or even 4 different levels of scent would also help determine the right amount for maximum effect (if there really is any).
The second problem is the small amount of test persons involved: "Twenty-eight participants (12 female) were individually assigned to either a clean-
scented room or a baseline room." (You can find the article by googling "The Smell of Virtue"). That means 14 people per group which does not seem to be much if you want to seriously control unknown variables - one of which can be gender (I couldn't find out from the article whether the16 men/12 women were equally distributed).
And a demonstration that an attractive woman can get money and resources from a major university to run a useless study.
That my friend is sexism. And as a completely unproven hyothesis ridicules your criticism of the above study too. Or do you have any hard facts to prove your point that the researchers gender is the cause for the bad study?
One possible reason could be that German paperbacks physically are of much higher quality - way nicer paper, better and more robust bindings, better cover print etc. than US paperbacks. I was really shocked discovering this after I bought a few US paperbacks. Obviously US paperbacks are more like disposable items - read it once and it falls apart. So replacing US paperbacks with ebooks makes more sense because they have no aesthetic value other than their content anyway.
In free countries, how did the powerful become powerful? Have they done something you couldn't do (honorably)?
In Germany at least, most became powerful by inheriting, as researched in the study "Repräsentative Analyse der Lebenslagen einkommensstarker Haushalte" by the German Institute for Economic Research in 2003.
You only have one life. At the end of it, you can say one of two things, you were either a pet, or you made your own decisions. Freedom is the former, and socialism is the latter. No matter how well intended the chains, how nice the cage, you are still wearing chains and living in a cage.
Why you think this kind of freedom is good? Whats the goal?
A right is something that cannot be taken from you
Interesting - by that definition there are no rights at all:)
A right ist something granted by a force more powerful (e.g. a government) than the individual. There is no such thing as natural rights.
(Of course arguing about definitions is moot, my point is just to show another possible view on the subject - one that obviously fits more to scandinavian and less to liberalist ideology.)
I suppose no one really pays for it: better net access means better education of the people which means qualitatively better jobs with higher wages which means more taxes to pay for net access.
AFAIK most economists agree that in our post fordistic economical systems you need two things above all: liquid capital and highly-skilled labor. Most countries influenced by the anglos-saxian theoriy (= neoliberalism, e.g. USA, UK, Germany) tuned the economy for more readily available capital (which among other things includes deregulating the financial markets), while most scandinavian countries mostly put money into education and assorted infrastructure. Results: The former countries had a crisis, while the latter had not. Most scandinavian countries don't even have unemployment... (see ISBN 978-3-89965-951-1 for hard numbers - esp. page 18 has a nice diagram for that capital-skills-thing (German only).
BTW (and really no offense meant!) it's pretty amazing for me to see how people so aggressively defend the economic strategy of the US of A - it failed on all accounts! If you look at the sociological figures one could think the USA is a third world country - just compare average working hours, length of holiday, life expectancy, infant mortility rate, social mobility (the ability for e.g. a working class member to work her way up to middle class or upper class during), health care,...).
I was wondering what Open Source apps folks would recommend to replace Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Dreamweaver?
Short answer: You can't.
It all depends on the stuff you do. I earn money using Inkscape and Gimp on Debian and have no problems at all. Still, I wouldn't blindly advise anyone to do the same (which is sometimes hard, because I am one of those open source zealots;)). I suppose the poster should have told us the type of work he does to get a more precise answer.
Slashdot Mirror
So, it's not perfect or self-replicating, but you can do some cool stuff with it.
Quite an interesting development, indeed. If a higher level of self-replication is wanted, however, it's worth mentioning Reprap, of which Makerbot is a commercial spin-off (e.g. Makerbot is to Reprap what Ubuntu is to Debian). Reprap has an explicit design goal of maximizing the level of self-replication.
Where's the problem? I go to the local supermarket once a week and buy my food for the next week. All of that is organic. Vegetables etc. wouldn't last much longer anyway, organic or not. And stuff like jam or canned vegetables last years.
Not that surprising. Germany would actually stand to profit a lot if they went on a more isolationist course and instead of subsidizing half of the EU simply pulled out.
The opposite is true. The entire reason Germany wanted the Euro zone is because that means creating one huge market to dump export products into. Look at the numbers at destatis.de, the German statistics institution - for years now, the only growing sector of the German economy exports. The only part of the economy growing currently: exports. The Euro zone collapsing would mean instant collapse to Germany's eonomy. After years of neoliberal politics the wages are so low (Actually lower now than 1990, if you correct for inflation. 20 Years of work of 40 million people without any gains in quality of life! Thats worse than nearly every other OECD country!) that domestic demand will not be able to compensate that. There is not one quantum of altruism in Germany supporting Greece, Ireland et.al.
They have erased the Oracle logo off the splash screen :)
IIRC ABS is the stuff lego bricks are made of. I know, "lego brick" is not exactly the specific measurement you asked for, but that perhaps helps to get a feeling for it.
BTW the fine folks creating reprap, the open source 3d printer, often print with ABS, as well.
:) calm down. I am both a father (wich does not matter, because being a father does not mean having a clue about things like education and developmental psychology, just like having a car does not make one a mechanical engineer) and an educational scientist (which doesn't matter either, because I stated the source for everyone to check), so lack of experience is not the problem here. Rather, its apparently both a different definition of the verb 'planning' (mine was a bit more strict) and a different time frame. 4-year-olds are of course capable of anticipating the next view minutes, but I was talking about days and more.
When trying to really understand the current capabilities of a kid, it's very important to look beyond their talking. Talking is the best way to trick someone into believing you can do more than you are really capable of. For techies projects like ELIZA should have made that obvious for the AI realm, too.
They don't have the part of the brain that you would use to make such a decision.
Whoa, no way.
Maybe you're referring to how the prefrontal cortex, region of executive control, is underdeveloped? And anyway, that just means that they have a hard time controlling themselves, not that they can't plan or perform evil.
No, actually they really "can't plan" at that age :) Proper planning needs (beyond impulse control) a) a proper sense of time (usually developed at around 6 years) and b) proper reasoning (mostly developed at about 12-13, but isn't finished until the "kid" is about 18). And I would argue that doing evil needs a proper grasp of the concept of death, which usually develops at around 9.
For sources see the works of Piaget on developmental psychology.
That's not quite correct either, I'm afraid. I did some statstical analyisis about that back in university (based on PISA[1] data from Germany). While yes, Muslims are disproportionally highly presented, that's just coincidence. If you split the groups further you can see that some individual cultural backgrounds are way more important: In Germanys case people from the region of Curdistan for example, and some (again not all!) regions of the former USSR block. OTOH Greek immigrants are mostly better in school than "native" Germans. Again that cannot be explained by religion, as they are mostly orthodox christians, just like the people from the former USSR block.
If you are looking for explanations, you have to dive into the individual cultural backgrounds - Greek immigrants usually hold education and personal engagement in high regard, which helps alot with integration. Curds have been discrimininated in Turkey to start with, so had no proper access to educational facilities etc. for centuries. There was a similar article on slashdot a while back, about a study of immigration in the USA, researching the difference between Japanese and African backgrounds.
And for the "mass immigration" part: I have no numbers for the rest of Europe, but there is practically zero immigration into Germany, and that has been the case for at least twenty years now.
[1] pasting is broken, look for the OECD survey in Wikipedia, sorry
See now how that's nothing like the denial you spun it as?
I don't see that at all, but perhaps that's because I understand statistics, as perhaps the OP does and you, very clearly, do not.
"Not significant at p = 0.05" means "not significant at p = 0.05". Or, given that p = 0.05 is the usual bound on statistical significance in even the fuzziest subjects, it means "not statistically significant."
"There has been an uptrend that is not significant" is more properly interpretable as "there has been no warming" than anything else. Anyone who understands anything about statistics understands this. If you don't, I can only presume it is because you don't understand statistics.
Well, welcome the real world. "Not significant at p = 0.05" is not properly interpretable as "there has been no warming". It means the propability is less than 95%, nothing more, nothing less. We are not talking about high school physics classes here (See? I can talk that way too! Pity that doesn't constitute a proper argument), we're talking about science in the real world. Proposing a three sigma level level of certainty for climate research is futile, if you're such a statistics wizard you would be aware that the size of the measured effect had to be so high that the earth would already be cooking by now.
Who the hell are YOU -- or any government -- to deprive the parents of their right to make that choice? Ridicule it all you want, but it is THEIR choice.
No, it's not "THEIR" choice. Children are no property, they are humans. And that means they have human rights.
Do you really believe that children develop desirable social traits by learning how to interact with others from other children?
Yes, of course. And as an educational scientist (read: part of the education establishment) I would be interested in the names of these studies.
The lesson is, have your kids read lots of real books before you let them on the internet or a cell phone. Hard to do these days, though.
The lesson is: Let yourself be seen reading lots of books. Kids inherit their reading habits from the parents. If you just try to force them to do something they don't see yourself doing your efforts will fail.
By American and Canadian standards, 250W is a lousy excuse for an ebike -- but for the European market it's the standard, as that's the limit there to be street-legal.
Actually you can buy and drive e-bikes with more than 250W in Europe (well, at least in Germany), but for anything more you need some sort of drivers license as a more capable e-bike is legally considered to be a scooter (IIRC).
China has increasingly become a mixed economy and losing central control for the sake of efficiency and growth.
While that is true, I think it is easy to over-estimate this development. For example, foreign companies AFAIK still can't buy land to build on - they have to lease it from the local government. Many are forced to joint-venture with domestic and/or state-run companies. And about a third of the word force works in state-run factories.
They changed how they valued the Yuan by pegging it 50/50 between the dollar and Euro in 2005. Then when the global markets became shakey last year they returned to weighing more heavily on the dollar. As bad as the dollar has been handled, its still the currency of choice for "safe" investment.
I meant something different (and alas, still couldn't find that book I got the info from) - IIRC they want something bretton-woods-style: the value of the important currencies will only be allowed to fluctuate between specific minima and maxima (but not dependent on the gold value).
Your point was valid in the 1990s though.
I've been thinking about this. What I've got planned so far: Beagle board -- $150 800x480 - 1024x??? 7" - 10" LCD -- ??? Battery pack with charger -- $20 to $40 Small USB keyboard -- $20 to $80 Trapper Keeper to use as a housing -- $10
Check out the SmartQ 7 - it does everything you want (minus the keyboard) and is cheaper than your parts cost. Comes with Ubuntu, but the Maemo Community is porting Maemo to this device.
There's no link to the original study, but it was clear from the article that there was no control group. They had a scented room vs. an unscented room, when what they should have had was a "pleasantly" scented room vs. an "unpleasantly" scented room with a third, unscented room as the control. Then they should have done some feedback questionnaires at the conclusion, in which they could have buried a question or two regarding the participant's scent preferences to see how well the participants' evaluation of the smell of the rooms lined-up with the premise of the study.
I agree with that. 3 or even 4 different levels of scent would also help determine the right amount for maximum effect (if there really is any).
The second problem is the small amount of test persons involved: "Twenty-eight participants (12 female) were individually assigned to either a clean- scented room or a baseline room." (You can find the article by googling "The Smell of Virtue"). That means 14 people per group which does not seem to be much if you want to seriously control unknown variables - one of which can be gender (I couldn't find out from the article whether the16 men/12 women were equally distributed).
And a demonstration that an attractive woman can get money and resources from a major university to run a useless study.
That my friend is sexism. And as a completely unproven hyothesis ridicules your criticism of the above study too. Or do you have any hard facts to prove your point that the researchers gender is the cause for the bad study?
One possible reason could be that German paperbacks physically are of much higher quality - way nicer paper, better and more robust bindings, better cover print etc. than US paperbacks. I was really shocked discovering this after I bought a few US paperbacks. Obviously US paperbacks are more like disposable items - read it once and it falls apart. So replacing US paperbacks with ebooks makes more sense because they have no aesthetic value other than their content anyway.
In free countries, how did the powerful become powerful? Have they done something you couldn't do (honorably)?
In Germany at least, most became powerful by inheriting, as researched in the study "Repräsentative Analyse der Lebenslagen einkommensstarker Haushalte" by the German Institute for Economic Research in 2003.
You only have one life. At the end of it, you can say one of two things, you were either a pet, or you made your own decisions. Freedom is the former, and socialism is the latter. No matter how well intended the chains, how nice the cage, you are still wearing chains and living in a cage.
Why you think this kind of freedom is good? Whats the goal?
People are beginning to wonder why they can't have a good medical care system without massive government expenditures.
Really? Where?
You should take a look at the state of Finlands economy - there is indeed not much else to do there as most things work just fine :)
A right is something that cannot be taken from you
Interesting - by that definition there are no rights at all :)
A right ist something granted by a force more powerful (e.g. a government) than the individual. There is no such thing as natural rights.
(Of course arguing about definitions is moot, my point is just to show another possible view on the subject - one that obviously fits more to scandinavian and less to liberalist ideology.)
I suppose no one really pays for it: better net access means better education of the people which means qualitatively better jobs with higher wages which means more taxes to pay for net access.
...).
AFAIK most economists agree that in our post fordistic economical systems you need two things above all: liquid capital and highly-skilled labor. Most countries influenced by the anglos-saxian theoriy (= neoliberalism, e.g. USA, UK, Germany) tuned the economy for more readily available capital (which among other things includes deregulating the financial markets), while most scandinavian countries mostly put money into education and assorted infrastructure. Results: The former countries had a crisis, while the latter had not. Most scandinavian countries don't even have unemployment... (see ISBN 978-3-89965-951-1 for hard numbers - esp. page 18 has a nice diagram for that capital-skills-thing (German only).
BTW (and really no offense meant!) it's pretty amazing for me to see how people so aggressively defend the economic strategy of the US of A - it failed on all accounts! If you look at the sociological figures one could think the USA is a third world country - just compare average working hours, length of holiday, life expectancy, infant mortility rate, social mobility (the ability for e.g. a working class member to work her way up to middle class or upper class during), health care,
I was wondering what Open Source apps folks would recommend to replace Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Dreamweaver? Short answer: You can't.
It all depends on the stuff you do. I earn money using Inkscape and Gimp on Debian and have no problems at all. Still, I wouldn't blindly advise anyone to do the same (which is sometimes hard, because I am one of those open source zealots ;)). I suppose the poster should have told us the type of work he does to get a more precise answer.