The output energy probably wouldn't have exceeded the input energy.
The 'input energy' may be more than you bargained for though. For instance, in a nuclear bomb you release the energy that was put in the nuclei inside a star when they were formed (fused).
The obvious answer to the problem seems to be - check the student's answers directly with them. Meet the students that passed the exam personally one by one and go over their answers with them. It should be obvious within 5 minutes whether the students understand their 'own' answers or not.
As for the foreign students - do not tolerate too much slack in their English skills. They will have a degree from an English-speaking university, so they should be able to communicate. If I hire an Asian graduate from Duke I expect him to be able to work in an English speaking team and if his lack of language skills slows down the team I'm going to start wondering how he got the degree in the first place and whether I should hire anybody with a degree from Duke anymore...
Fine, you can never know whether the Library of Alexandria itself would still be standing for whatever reason. That doesn't really change my point.
The thing is that at the times when the Library was set up, conflicting streams of thought were allowed to coexist peacefully. Not just in the library but in the empire as well. Alexander himself was not on a religious conquest - he paid his respects to the local religious traditions in every land he conquered (or 'liberated' as some contemporaries would put it).
This was nothing new. In fact, the idea that 'your religious views are wrong and mine are right' only became prominent after the ascent of christianity in the 3rd century. Before that you were allowed to believe whatever you wanted as long as you also paid respects to the ruling party's gods. Aside from that, there was no 'heresy' in the Roman or Greek gods worship.
All this changed with Christianity as the official religion of the empire. Thoughts that were deemed incompatible with christianity were not tolerated anymore. It's not just that the Library of Alexandria was destroyed. It's that it was not possible as a concept anymore. Before, if you came up with a radical idea, you were wildly disputed - at worst you were discredited and ridiculed. After the 3rd century, you were prosecuted.
Erm, if there was no religion, there would be no need to hide some selected intellectual works in monasteries.
If there was no religion the Library of Alexandria would still be standing.
The poor understanding of history is on your side. We know a lot about what kind of works were lost during the dark ages from the references to the documents that don't exist anymore. We know that there were works in which scholars argued that stars are like the sun, but very far away. We know that there were other Homeric books around. We know of the lost works of Eratosthenes, Aristarchus, Aristophanes and many more. You can read the handful of their works that survived - and they are works of genius - and wonder how much brilliance was lost.
The dark ages we are talking about are not to be praised by how works were preserved, but condemned for how many books were lost and destroyed. Go read your Name of the Rose again because that is the true picture of the ages.
will be creatively steered by the Oscar-winning team behind A Beautiful Mind and The Da Vinci Code
Which means Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman. While I have nothing against Howard, Goldsman is a terrible choice. His greatest achievements are not screwing up Sylvia Nasar's book (A Beautiful Mind) and not making Dan Brown's novels any more ridiculous than they are (Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons). On the other side we have such pearls of storytelling as Batman and Robin, Batman Forever and, more recently, a bunch of really cheesy episodes of Fringe.
god is a metaphor, that some people need to take literally, because not everyone has the mind of stephen hawking, but they still need to understand the world, so mental shortcuts have to do
the whole hullabaloo over the existence of god is really silly, as soon as you realize that everyone has a different way of describing the same thing
Yeah, and laws of physics love you and want you to go to war with that country over there...
"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing."
Is this really Hawking speaking? Has he finally lost his mind? That would be really sad and I hope it's just a case of bad journalism.
1) what about the 1st law of thermodynamics that says that energy/matter cannot be created [from nothing]. How can a physicist say something like in the above quote and NOT discuss the law of conservation of energy?!
2) What 'such law as gravity' is he talking about? The one that Newton (who is mentioned in the article) described? That one is incomplete at best! Einsteins general theory of relativity? That one requires space to exist (hence the 'from nothing' part is wrong). Any of the proposed quantum gravity theories? Unproven speculations!
Most of these companies are undoubtedly committing these violations unknowingly, but GP does have a point that the law exists for a reason: otherwise people could go on falsely claiming patent protection indefinitely.
So what will be the result of this? That companies will not put patent numbers on their molds. That will not help anybody - to the contrary. Just consider how patents work in practice. You see a product and you think - "wow, that's neat idea, I bet I could put it in my product!". So you put it in your product and you get sued for patent infringement because you didn't know it was patented.
On the other hand if you see the patent number on the product, you will be more cautious and check it out.
You see, putting patent number on your product is not a claim as you all seem to argue here. It's a warning.
Checking whether a patent is still valid is easy. Searching for a patent when you don't know whether it exists is hard.
Pff, bacteria... A couple years ago we had animals survive the outer space - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade . It was just for 10 days but nobody is sure how long they really can survive - they can enter some kind of stasis state where they don't need water for decades.
They should not be allowed to do that automatically. But they should be allowed to put it in the agreement between the two parties involved.
They contract you to do a job, they provide you with equipment, they set the terms of use for that equipment, which may include surveillance. Don't want it? Don't take it! Go find a job where they don't set such terms.
I refused to sign the terms of use of the internet connection at my company. I don't like the idea of the state babysitting citizens that don't have the courage to speak up.
You have an agreement between yourself and another party that sets the conditions. Your agreement with ISP is probably different than your agreement with your employer. If an ISP demands the right to monitor your email, you might want to consider a different ISP.
Same goes for employers - I don't see why they couldn't demand monitoring how you use their equipment. I would not want to work for such an employer because I believe my relationship with him should be different than that but I also don't see a reason why they should be banned from making such an agreement with employees in a first-world country.
I disagree. A movie does not have to be story-driven to be successful. There are great movies with plotlines thinner than most of the contemporary games.
Take the plot of the Terminator for instance - the main heroine flees from a robot from the future that has been sent to kill her. Period. There are no twists, no revelations, no moralizing.
The Alien? A deadly predator invades a cargo(?) ship and kills it's crew members one-by-one until it's ejected into the space by the last survivor.
There are a lot of things that these two films have in common with successful computer games:
- almost no plot
- ATMOSPHERE
- great attention to detail
- thrilling action
I dare say that all the game adaptations (bar perhaps mortal combat) only share took the first point from the games. The other points require a very skillful filmmaker with enough artistic freedom from the producers.
I'm afraid that unless somebody gets James Cameron, David Fincher or Christopher Nolan to adapt a computer game - they will continue to suck.
Note that the same thing was needed to get a decent comic book adaptation...
Reminds me of the shock I experienced when I found that one of the biggest brand of condoms in the US is called 'Trojan'. It can either refer to the people of Troy that got totally pwned or to the Trojan Horse from which the guys got out once they were inside...
Groups like the Inuits, Masai, and others have thrived on a low-carb diet for centuries. They are extremely healthy on their native diets.
Yes, but you are not an Inuit, are you? The hundreds of generations of *your* ancestors have lived on a steady diet of grains, vegetables and fruits with low meat intake. Yes, the carbs in highly processed food are not good for you. Eat foods that underwent less processing, just like your ancestors - they contain complex carbohydrates that are good for your body.
Studies show that the healthiest nations are the Mediterranean ones. Guess what they eat? Lots of fruits, wines, vegetables. Little highly processed fast food and freezer food. Not too much meat either.
Scientific studies seem to disagree. Look at this big study in low-carb diet. Only about 10% of people were able to maintain the weight they lost on a low-carb diet (observed for 3 years after weight loss).
The problems are:
1) You can't maintain low-carb diet for longer periods without risking serious health problems. Carbs are essential in tissue regeneration and formation and preventing ketones (waste products) from polluting your body.
2) You need to learn to balance your caloric intake with the needs of your body and the low-carb diet does not teach you that
3500 calories roughly amount to 1 pound of weight. That means if you eat 100 cal more than you eat per day, you're going to gain 10 pounds in a year. If you eat 100 cals less, you're going to loose those 10 pounds. It's as easy as that.
Each individual is different and I've met some great self-taught programmers as well as poor programmers with with CS degree.
There are some general rules of thumbs though:
- a lot of the self-taught coders are actually college drop-outs that might be technically good but have a poor work ethic
- there are self-taught programmers with a degree from a different field (Electrical engineering for instance). Those can generally do a good job as coders if they spend enough time researching the new (computer science) field tackling coding problems
- open source participation is probably the best way to distinguish a good self-taught coder from a bad one - if a person demonstrably does a lot of work in OS projects he/she can easily become the most resourceful, enthusiastic and helpful colleague
People tend to cling to their old habits. In the world of programming it means clinging to outdated approaches to coding. Throughout my career I met a bunch of 45+ old programmers that were all hard-working professionals producing reliable and efficient applications (or components). Most of them, however, (80-90%) never adopted modern ways of software development (and are even proud of it). They do a lot of unnecessary low-level code (instead of ready-made libs and technologies) and essentially use procedural coding thinly coated by class definitions instead of a true OOP (object-oriented programming) approach.
This approach generally works well for small projects, however the bigger the project is the more problems outdated coding creates. There are vast differences in the quality of programmers in the big projects and the more cryptic your code is (even though it's crystal clear from the 80's coding style view) the more problems it's going to generate.
IMO the biggest advantage of OOP is that the structure of the code can (and should) mirror the structure of the problem it's trying to solve. In a good OOP design, even an inexperience programmer should be able to understand what the code is doing just by reading the names of the classes, their interfaces and the relations between them. A good 30-something yo developer usually does this kind of design. A 50 yo usually doesn't. In a project with 150 developers with the usual workforce fluctuation throughout the years where incremental versions are being released, the original code of old-style programmers (that may not be at the company anymore) can seriously affect development times and the overall quality of the system developed.
Ironically, the other extreme with the same result is a 30 yo C++ guru who by overusing operator overloads, custom manipulators, templates and macros, essentially creates a new programming language making it impossible to decipher in the code of the main app.
The idea that everything in the universe is discrete goes back to Max Planck. It's nothing new. What the guys here are saying is that while the 'graininess' that Planck described is a true physical property of the world, the universe that we perceive (or measure with instruments) has much thicker grains than the Planck sizes.
In other words - there is a fine underlying inaccessible Planck reality that convolves into 'our' coarse reality available to our senses and instruments. You can call it a 'hologram' to make it more appealing to the masses - I wouldn't.
Your friend should have someone knowledgeable with german law check whether the practices of that company may fulfill the legal definition of fraud.
Generally fraud is defined as a *deception* made for personal gain or to damage another individual. So if you revisit the site and see what information it conveys about the payment for openoffice. It might be set up in a deceptive manner.
Also - if what they are charging her for is the *service of providing openoffice* and not the usage of openoffice itself, she must have agreed to pay *before* she downloaded the file. Asking for the payment after she's got the executable in her computer (and reads the EULA) is too late.
As far as I know they cannot charge her for the *usage* of openoffice since the usage is GPL and therefore free. You can charge for taylor-making, distributing and maintaining (servicing) GPL software - not for running it or for further distribution.
Slashdot Mirror
The output energy probably wouldn't have exceeded the input energy.
The 'input energy' may be more than you bargained for though. For instance, in a nuclear bomb you release the energy that was put in the nuclei inside a star when they were formed (fused).
The obvious answer to the problem seems to be - check the student's answers directly with them. Meet the students that passed the exam personally one by one and go over their answers with them. It should be obvious within 5 minutes whether the students understand their 'own' answers or not.
As for the foreign students - do not tolerate too much slack in their English skills. They will have a degree from an English-speaking university, so they should be able to communicate. If I hire an Asian graduate from Duke I expect him to be able to work in an English speaking team and if his lack of language skills slows down the team I'm going to start wondering how he got the degree in the first place and whether I should hire anybody with a degree from Duke anymore...
Fine, you can never know whether the Library of Alexandria itself would still be standing for whatever reason. That doesn't really change my point.
The thing is that at the times when the Library was set up, conflicting streams of thought were allowed to coexist peacefully. Not just in the library but in the empire as well. Alexander himself was not on a religious conquest - he paid his respects to the local religious traditions in every land he conquered (or 'liberated' as some contemporaries would put it).
This was nothing new. In fact, the idea that 'your religious views are wrong and mine are right' only became prominent after the ascent of christianity in the 3rd century. Before that you were allowed to believe whatever you wanted as long as you also paid respects to the ruling party's gods. Aside from that, there was no 'heresy' in the Roman or Greek gods worship.
All this changed with Christianity as the official religion of the empire. Thoughts that were deemed incompatible with christianity were not tolerated anymore. It's not just that the Library of Alexandria was destroyed. It's that it was not possible as a concept anymore. Before, if you came up with a radical idea, you were wildly disputed - at worst you were discredited and ridiculed. After the 3rd century, you were prosecuted.
Dark ages ensued.
The ability to store information by writing them down debilitates our memorizing skills.
Just imagine where we could have been if writing was abolished 4000 years ago!
Erm, if there was no religion, there would be no need to hide some selected intellectual works in monasteries.
If there was no religion the Library of Alexandria would still be standing.
The poor understanding of history is on your side. We know a lot about what kind of works were lost during the dark ages from the references to the documents that don't exist anymore. We know that there were works in which scholars argued that stars are like the sun, but very far away. We know that there were other Homeric books around. We know of the lost works of Eratosthenes, Aristarchus, Aristophanes and many more. You can read the handful of their works that survived - and they are works of genius - and wonder how much brilliance was lost.
The dark ages we are talking about are not to be praised by how works were preserved, but condemned for how many books were lost and destroyed. Go read your Name of the Rose again because that is the true picture of the ages.
will be creatively steered by the Oscar-winning team behind A Beautiful Mind and The Da Vinci Code
Which means Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman. While I have nothing against Howard, Goldsman is a terrible choice. His greatest achievements are not screwing up Sylvia Nasar's book (A Beautiful Mind) and not making Dan Brown's novels any more ridiculous than they are (Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons). On the other side we have such pearls of storytelling as Batman and Robin, Batman Forever and, more recently, a bunch of really cheesy episodes of Fringe.
I think I'll pass on this one
god IS the laws of physics
god is a metaphor, that some people need to take literally, because not everyone has the mind of stephen hawking, but they still need to understand the world, so mental shortcuts have to do
the whole hullabaloo over the existence of god is really silly, as soon as you realize that everyone has a different way of describing the same thing
Yeah, and laws of physics love you and want you to go to war with that country over there...
"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing."
Is this really Hawking speaking? Has he finally lost his mind? That would be really sad and I hope it's just a case of bad journalism.
1) what about the 1st law of thermodynamics that says that energy/matter cannot be created [from nothing]. How can a physicist say something like in the above quote and NOT discuss the law of conservation of energy?!
2) What 'such law as gravity' is he talking about? The one that Newton (who is mentioned in the article) described? That one is incomplete at best! Einsteins general theory of relativity? That one requires space to exist (hence the 'from nothing' part is wrong). Any of the proposed quantum gravity theories? Unproven speculations!
Most of these companies are undoubtedly committing these violations unknowingly, but GP does have a point that the law exists for a reason: otherwise people could go on falsely claiming patent protection indefinitely.
So what will be the result of this? That companies will not put patent numbers on their molds. That will not help anybody - to the contrary. Just consider how patents work in practice. You see a product and you think - "wow, that's neat idea, I bet I could put it in my product!". So you put it in your product and you get sued for patent infringement because you didn't know it was patented.
On the other hand if you see the patent number on the product, you will be more cautious and check it out.
You see, putting patent number on your product is not a claim as you all seem to argue here. It's a warning.
Checking whether a patent is still valid is easy. Searching for a patent when you don't know whether it exists is hard.
Pff, bacteria... A couple years ago we had animals survive the outer space - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade . It was just for 10 days but nobody is sure how long they really can survive - they can enter some kind of stasis state where they don't need water for decades.
They should not be allowed to do that automatically. But they should be allowed to put it in the agreement between the two parties involved.
They contract you to do a job, they provide you with equipment, they set the terms of use for that equipment, which may include surveillance. Don't want it? Don't take it! Go find a job where they don't set such terms.
I refused to sign the terms of use of the internet connection at my company. I don't like the idea of the state babysitting citizens that don't have the courage to speak up.
Wrong.
You have an agreement between yourself and another party that sets the conditions. Your agreement with ISP is probably different than your agreement with your employer. If an ISP demands the right to monitor your email, you might want to consider a different ISP.
Same goes for employers - I don't see why they couldn't demand monitoring how you use their equipment. I would not want to work for such an employer because I believe my relationship with him should be different than that but I also don't see a reason why they should be banned from making such an agreement with employees in a first-world country.
No more than my buying your products or renting your services gives me a right to install cameras in your office. No, it's not really different.
Yes it is!
The difference is that you don't own that office.
The UK doesn't tell the US what to do with their prisoners, the US shouldn't tell the UK what to do with theirs.
Except that this prisoner was convicted of killing 179 american citizens aboard an american airliner.
Did that woman cause a major environmental disaster and was the makeup involved in it?
Because that's what we are talking about.
BP tried to put up a facade of responsibility on display and it was fake.
I disagree. A movie does not have to be story-driven to be successful. There are great movies with plotlines thinner than most of the contemporary games.
Take the plot of the Terminator for instance - the main heroine flees from a robot from the future that has been sent to kill her. Period. There are no twists, no revelations, no moralizing.
The Alien? A deadly predator invades a cargo(?) ship and kills it's crew members one-by-one until it's ejected into the space by the last survivor.
There are a lot of things that these two films have in common with successful computer games:
- almost no plot
- ATMOSPHERE
- great attention to detail
- thrilling action
I dare say that all the game adaptations (bar perhaps mortal combat) only share took the first point from the games. The other points require a very skillful filmmaker with enough artistic freedom from the producers.
I'm afraid that unless somebody gets James Cameron, David Fincher or Christopher Nolan to adapt a computer game - they will continue to suck.
Note that the same thing was needed to get a decent comic book adaptation...
Reminds me of the shock I experienced when I found that one of the biggest brand of condoms in the US is called 'Trojan'. It can either refer to the people of Troy that got totally pwned or to the Trojan Horse from which the guys got out once they were inside...
Groups like the Inuits, Masai, and others have thrived on a low-carb diet for centuries. They are extremely healthy on their native diets.
Yes, but you are not an Inuit, are you? The hundreds of generations of *your* ancestors have lived on a steady diet of grains, vegetables and fruits with low meat intake. Yes, the carbs in highly processed food are not good for you. Eat foods that underwent less processing, just like your ancestors - they contain complex carbohydrates that are good for your body.
Studies show that the healthiest nations are the Mediterranean ones. Guess what they eat? Lots of fruits, wines, vegetables. Little highly processed fast food and freezer food. Not too much meat either.
Forgot the link to the study: http://www.nature.com/oby/journal/v15/n10/full/oby2007293a.html
Scientific studies seem to disagree. Look at this big study in low-carb diet. Only about 10% of people were able to maintain the weight they lost on a low-carb diet (observed for 3 years after weight loss).
The problems are:
1) You can't maintain low-carb diet for longer periods without risking serious health problems. Carbs are essential in tissue regeneration and formation and preventing ketones (waste products) from polluting your body.
2) You need to learn to balance your caloric intake with the needs of your body and the low-carb diet does not teach you that
3500 calories roughly amount to 1 pound of weight. That means if you eat 100 cal more than you eat per day, you're going to gain 10 pounds in a year. If you eat 100 cals less, you're going to loose those 10 pounds. It's as easy as that.
Each individual is different and I've met some great self-taught programmers as well as poor programmers with with CS degree.
There are some general rules of thumbs though:
- a lot of the self-taught coders are actually college drop-outs that might be technically good but have a poor work ethic
- there are self-taught programmers with a degree from a different field (Electrical engineering for instance). Those can generally do a good job as coders if they spend enough time researching the new (computer science) field tackling coding problems
- open source participation is probably the best way to distinguish a good self-taught coder from a bad one - if a person demonstrably does a lot of work in OS projects he/she can easily become the most resourceful, enthusiastic and helpful colleague
People tend to cling to their old habits. In the world of programming it means clinging to outdated approaches to coding. Throughout my career I met a bunch of 45+ old programmers that were all hard-working professionals producing reliable and efficient applications (or components). Most of them, however, (80-90%) never adopted modern ways of software development (and are even proud of it). They do a lot of unnecessary low-level code (instead of ready-made libs and technologies) and essentially use procedural coding thinly coated by class definitions instead of a true OOP (object-oriented programming) approach.
This approach generally works well for small projects, however the bigger the project is the more problems outdated coding creates. There are vast differences in the quality of programmers in the big projects and the more cryptic your code is (even though it's crystal clear from the 80's coding style view) the more problems it's going to generate.
IMO the biggest advantage of OOP is that the structure of the code can (and should) mirror the structure of the problem it's trying to solve. In a good OOP design, even an inexperience programmer should be able to understand what the code is doing just by reading the names of the classes, their interfaces and the relations between them. A good 30-something yo developer usually does this kind of design. A 50 yo usually doesn't. In a project with 150 developers with the usual workforce fluctuation throughout the years where incremental versions are being released, the original code of old-style programmers (that may not be at the company anymore) can seriously affect development times and the overall quality of the system developed.
Ironically, the other extreme with the same result is a 30 yo C++ guru who by overusing operator overloads, custom manipulators, templates and macros, essentially creates a new programming language making it impossible to decipher in the code of the main app.
The idea that everything in the universe is discrete goes back to Max Planck. It's nothing new. What the guys here are saying is that while the 'graininess' that Planck described is a true physical property of the world, the universe that we perceive (or measure with instruments) has much thicker grains than the Planck sizes.
In other words - there is a fine underlying inaccessible Planck reality that convolves into 'our' coarse reality available to our senses and instruments. You can call it a 'hologram' to make it more appealing to the masses - I wouldn't.
Your friend should have someone knowledgeable with german law check whether the practices of that company may fulfill the legal definition of fraud. Generally fraud is defined as a *deception* made for personal gain or to damage another individual. So if you revisit the site and see what information it conveys about the payment for openoffice. It might be set up in a deceptive manner. Also - if what they are charging her for is the *service of providing openoffice* and not the usage of openoffice itself, she must have agreed to pay *before* she downloaded the file. Asking for the payment after she's got the executable in her computer (and reads the EULA) is too late. As far as I know they cannot charge her for the *usage* of openoffice since the usage is GPL and therefore free. You can charge for taylor-making, distributing and maintaining (servicing) GPL software - not for running it or for further distribution.
Does not make a difference in this case. They are probably charging her for the service of providing openoffice to her.