Did you wake up this morning and forget about the doctors, plumbers, programmers, McDonald's employees, sales reps, and many other factions whose doing business is not forcibly restricted by patents?
Hmm... Does that list of yours have some sort of linked relationship?;)
The slowness of Debian updates is a feature, not a bug.... It's why I run Debian on those servers - because it's a lot less stressful than running a faster moving distribution.
Definitely. I've been using Debian for over a decade, but what I'm seeing now is that Debian and Ubuntu are cooperatively focusing on two different markets. They aren't really duplicating effort, because they seem to be sharing packages and patches back and forth, and even users can setup hybrid systems if desired. But what they are doing is aiming for two different things.
For the moment, Debian seems to be producing a more stable distribution with server packages kept up-to-date and good attention to security fixes. Ubuntu seems to be producing a more user friendly distribution with simpler installation, ease of use, and more up-to-date desktop packages.
I see this as being beneficial so far. Any software developed for one of them can be ported to the other, and so having two separate organizations developing two different lines for two different purposes can make progress and quality better on the whole.
They find correlation (which is useless without causation), then find that people who play a racing game then drive more aggressively in another car driving game.
This definitely warrants attention. It significantly changes the interpretation of the study.
Lots of people have something to gain by hyping global warming.
And cynicism aside, most of the people who excessively hype global warming do so out of a genuine belief that it is necessary for the survival of humanity. From a strictly logical perspective, sincerity of belief does not make one correct, but it does present a condition here where people can believe they have something to gain even without being paid.
I appreciate the sentiment expressed in the article that science benefits when people stick purely to facts, rather than passionately distributing common beliefs. Unscientific exaggeration happens on both sides of all debates, but in the case of global warming it is much more emotionally charged than in most other debates, and this is reducing the dependence upon straightforward facts on all sides of the discussion.
This usually means that the most vocal advocates on all sides will end up being found wrong on a number of key points as more facts are discovered, and this will weaken their future ability to make people aware of the actual facts.
Empty space varies as R-cubed, and the spherical effects tend to degrade as 1 over R-squared.
It doesn't take much of an R to make that asteroid look like a tiny, insignificant needle in the vast, overwhelming haystack of empty space.
Without doing any calculation, I presume there's an optimal distance away which is somewhere around a quarter or a third of the asteroid's diameter. Presumably someone would simulate this properly before launching a nuke all the way to an asteroid.
As such, even if contracts were binding upon spiders (which they should not be), this is not a legitimate contract because it is not possible to read the contract prior to agreeing to it.
I wonder if the inevitable judgment against this woman could provide useful precedent against some of the more annoying automatic EULA's?
Precisely. It's one thing if a company wants to mandate (by policy, not by technology) that its employees use only internal email accounts for all business related communications, but security does not seem to be a legitimate reason to block webmail. Allowing limited personal use of the internet from work equipment is productive for employee morale, and it can provide short breaks which reduce stress, boost overall efficiency, and can increase creative solutions.
If you have to setup a non-networked computer or an isolated LAN with no internet access for special security situations, fine. But the mainstream webmail providers yield no more security problems than the rest of the internet.
Well, have you ever written a btree that stores its data in an mmaped file? Or written a simple map class with iterators? You should be able to draw on this knowledge to answer or at least start plowing your way towards the answers to their questions. Failure to do so betrays lack of adventurism in your studies and stronly indicates a deficit of intuitive understanding of theory.
I think you miss the point. Why are "a btree that stores its data in an mmaped file" and a generalized "map class with iterators" more important than the thousands of other data structures of equivalent use and value? In 20+ years of programming with more projects than I can count, I can think of no case in which I needed to implement a generalized map class, and I can think of only a handful of cases where I needed to implement a b-tree (never with mmap). In no case was it difficult to look up the definition of the tree I wanted, in the rare cases where I wanted to reimplement a standardized solution.
These would make very poor interview criteria if you want skilled developers, because they focus too much on specific details that would only be useful in a tiny subset of programming needs, and they completely ignore the more general and high level programming skills which determine the success or failure of a project.
One suggestion I've seen for making the legal system fairer is that the loser would pay the winner legal fees equal to their own.
That system wouldn't work very well for lawyers who charge no fee unless they win. Then if they lose, the fee is zero, and the defendant receives zero.
Sodium, Saturated Fat, TransFat, Calories, Vitamins, Fibre, Carbohydrates, Protein. These are all terms 98% of the population should understand. It doesn't take much to learn.
And that's maybe 5% of what's important to know about the contents of a food item. When a food item has 50 different entries on the ingredient list (quite common), and half of them are obscure chemical names, do YOU know what the biological impact of each of them is? If there is one you don't know the precise biological effect of, do you eat it anyway? Have you ever eaten at a restaurant where you were not offered or did not see the ingredient lists? If you have ever done this, then you cannot blame the consumer for ignorance, for you are also acting out of the same ignorance.
Should consumers be expected to read 50 scientific review articles for every item of food they purchase, or should producers be required to constrain themselves to more rigorous standards if they label something "food", or at least label the known side-effects of their ingredients on the package in plain language?
When I was in school 20 or so years ago, you could count the number of fat kids (in a school of 2300 students) on your fingers, and a child who would be considered obese by today's standards was virtually unheard of. At my kids' schools, it's easier to count the kids who aren't fat than the ones who are, and there's at least one obese kid in any group larger than about ten.
Have you also observed the corresponding change in grocery store contents between these two time periods?
Well, in Linux's defense, I updated my time on Linux by going to sleep, getting up, and seeing that all of my Linux systems were automatically working just fine. They had fixed themselves automatically with the new settings during an "apt-get upgrade" that I had run quite some time ago.
The grandparent had to do the change manually because he was running a release from 5 years ago which had apparently not been updated in the intervening time. This would be like running Windows 2000 and trying to update to the new DST system, which apparently Microsoft has a patch for, but will only release to clients on a support contract, leaving most users abandoned. This means you have to find, download, and install a third-party program to perform this patch for you if you want to continue using a correspondingly old version of Windows as one which remains "ready for the desktop".
You know, I've never had problems with the wikipedia search engine. More often than not, I enter something I'm looking for and it finds the correct article 95% of the time, with the spelling corrected and the missing words inserted.
If you compare the success rate of wikipedia's search engine to that of using google with "searchterm site:wikipedia.org", you'll find the google one far more successful. It corrects spelling, prioritizes articles by significance, and usually does a much better job of listing them in the desired order.
Here in the UK, this stuff is publicized, people do care about it... but the government ignores all the voices of obection.
Which implies to me that the voters ignore the voices of objection. Are there no civil liberties groups in the UK which organize voter opposition to such policies?
Every journalist interested in Washington politics wasn on the hunt for the identity of the real Deep Throat. Journalists that keep secrets from the public are betraying their audience. Sometimes the audience puts up with it like in the case of Deep Throat.
If Deep Throat would have thought ahead of time that the journalists he was turning to would print his name right away and out his identity, then there would have never been a Deep Throat, and we would not have learned what he had to say. We would have had no whistleblower. Is that a better world, and is the audience better served under that condition?
TFA sounds pretty crackpot to me. If they really had strong evidence for this it would be published in Nature, not Biophysical Journal.
First, the Biophysical Journal is fairly respectable, and a much more appropriate place to publish work in this area. Second, the actual journal article in the Biophysical Journal does NOT say what the Slashdot and CBC titles say, so judging them on this basis is inappropriate. The article is an extension of a previously published model which shows that nerve signal propagation can be described as 100m/s piezo-electric soliton pulses, and it shows that these are dependent upon the phase transition temperatures for membranes.
Anonymity in this case is not about free speech, but about the "right" to not take responsibility for what we say.
How about the right to not be held to consequences for our political speech? If 50% of the employer's in the country would fire you for your political views unrelated to your job, do you have free speech? If the government finds you a suspicious character because of your political speech and decides to monitor you (reference the FBI during the civil rights movement), do you have truly free speech?
Anonymity says you can speak without reprisal, which is an essential component of freedom of political speech. For speech to be free, you have to be able to speak without punishment, and no one can punish you if they don't know who you are.
So what if the garbage ratio in areas that allow anonymity bothers you. Don't look at it. But leave the route open for those who have a legitimate and controversial viewpoint to express.
In NL we only recently got the obligation to carry ID, ostensibly to fight heavy criminals that would not ID themselves.
Call me crazy, but isn't it a lot simpler to just arrest people committing or suspected of committing these heavy crimes, and then ID them later (and even if you can't ID them, they're still arrested), and not even approach people who are doing nothing more than jogging?
What's more important? A perception of equality between teachers of all subjects, or setting the salaries at the level required to attract teachers qualified to properly educate children in each subject?
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... Does that list of yours have some sort of linked relationship?
Definitely. I've been using Debian for over a decade, but what I'm seeing now is that Debian and Ubuntu are cooperatively focusing on two different markets. They aren't really duplicating effort, because they seem to be sharing packages and patches back and forth, and even users can setup hybrid systems if desired. But what they are doing is aiming for two different things.
For the moment, Debian seems to be producing a more stable distribution with server packages kept up-to-date and good attention to security fixes. Ubuntu seems to be producing a more user friendly distribution with simpler installation, ease of use, and more up-to-date desktop packages.
I see this as being beneficial so far. Any software developed for one of them can be ported to the other, and so having two separate organizations developing two different lines for two different purposes can make progress and quality better on the whole.
This definitely warrants attention. It significantly changes the interpretation of the study.
And cynicism aside, most of the people who excessively hype global warming do so out of a genuine belief that it is necessary for the survival of humanity. From a strictly logical perspective, sincerity of belief does not make one correct, but it does present a condition here where people can believe they have something to gain even without being paid.
I appreciate the sentiment expressed in the article that science benefits when people stick purely to facts, rather than passionately distributing common beliefs. Unscientific exaggeration happens on both sides of all debates, but in the case of global warming it is much more emotionally charged than in most other debates, and this is reducing the dependence upon straightforward facts on all sides of the discussion.
This usually means that the most vocal advocates on all sides will end up being found wrong on a number of key points as more facts are discovered, and this will weaken their future ability to make people aware of the actual facts.
Without doing any calculation, I presume there's an optimal distance away which is somewhere around a quarter or a third of the asteroid's diameter. Presumably someone would simulate this properly before launching a nuke all the way to an asteroid.
I wonder if the inevitable judgment against this woman could provide useful precedent against some of the more annoying automatic EULA's?
Precisely. It's one thing if a company wants to mandate (by policy, not by technology) that its employees use only internal email accounts for all business related communications, but security does not seem to be a legitimate reason to block webmail. Allowing limited personal use of the internet from work equipment is productive for employee morale, and it can provide short breaks which reduce stress, boost overall efficiency, and can increase creative solutions.
If you have to setup a non-networked computer or an isolated LAN with no internet access for special security situations, fine. But the mainstream webmail providers yield no more security problems than the rest of the internet.
I think you miss the point. Why are "a btree that stores its data in an mmaped file" and a generalized "map class with iterators" more important than the thousands of other data structures of equivalent use and value? In 20+ years of programming with more projects than I can count, I can think of no case in which I needed to implement a generalized map class, and I can think of only a handful of cases where I needed to implement a b-tree (never with mmap). In no case was it difficult to look up the definition of the tree I wanted, in the rare cases where I wanted to reimplement a standardized solution.
These would make very poor interview criteria if you want skilled developers, because they focus too much on specific details that would only be useful in a tiny subset of programming needs, and they completely ignore the more general and high level programming skills which determine the success or failure of a project.
That system wouldn't work very well for lawyers who charge no fee unless they win. Then if they lose, the fee is zero, and the defendant receives zero.
And that's maybe 5% of what's important to know about the contents of a food item. When a food item has 50 different entries on the ingredient list (quite common), and half of them are obscure chemical names, do YOU know what the biological impact of each of them is? If there is one you don't know the precise biological effect of, do you eat it anyway? Have you ever eaten at a restaurant where you were not offered or did not see the ingredient lists? If you have ever done this, then you cannot blame the consumer for ignorance, for you are also acting out of the same ignorance.
Should consumers be expected to read 50 scientific review articles for every item of food they purchase, or should producers be required to constrain themselves to more rigorous standards if they label something "food", or at least label the known side-effects of their ingredients on the package in plain language?
Have you also observed the corresponding change in grocery store contents between these two time periods?
Were they just making up a random number, or did they have a legitimate reference?
No offense, but I've never heard of anyone serious proposing anything even remotely close to this. Can you provide a legitimate reference?
Well, in Linux's defense, I updated my time on Linux by going to sleep, getting up, and seeing that all of my Linux systems were automatically working just fine. They had fixed themselves automatically with the new settings during an "apt-get upgrade" that I had run quite some time ago.
The grandparent had to do the change manually because he was running a release from 5 years ago which had apparently not been updated in the intervening time. This would be like running Windows 2000 and trying to update to the new DST system, which apparently Microsoft has a patch for, but will only release to clients on a support contract, leaving most users abandoned. This means you have to find, download, and install a third-party program to perform this patch for you if you want to continue using a correspondingly old version of Windows as one which remains "ready for the desktop".
If you compare the success rate of wikipedia's search engine to that of using google with "searchterm site:wikipedia.org", you'll find the google one far more successful. It corrects spelling, prioritizes articles by significance, and usually does a much better job of listing them in the desired order.
They rally you like industrial ninjas use xeroxes.
Which implies to me that the voters ignore the voices of objection. Are there no civil liberties groups in the UK which organize voter opposition to such policies?
If Deep Throat would have thought ahead of time that the journalists he was turning to would print his name right away and out his identity, then there would have never been a Deep Throat, and we would not have learned what he had to say. We would have had no whistleblower. Is that a better world, and is the audience better served under that condition?
First, the Biophysical Journal is fairly respectable, and a much more appropriate place to publish work in this area. Second, the actual journal article in the Biophysical Journal does NOT say what the Slashdot and CBC titles say, so judging them on this basis is inappropriate. The article is an extension of a previously published model which shows that nerve signal propagation can be described as 100m/s piezo-electric soliton pulses, and it shows that these are dependent upon the phase transition temperatures for membranes.
How about the right to not be held to consequences for our political speech? If 50% of the employer's in the country would fire you for your political views unrelated to your job, do you have free speech? If the government finds you a suspicious character because of your political speech and decides to monitor you (reference the FBI during the civil rights movement), do you have truly free speech?
Anonymity says you can speak without reprisal, which is an essential component of freedom of political speech. For speech to be free, you have to be able to speak without punishment, and no one can punish you if they don't know who you are.
So what if the garbage ratio in areas that allow anonymity bothers you. Don't look at it. But leave the route open for those who have a legitimate and controversial viewpoint to express.
Brilliant. And then we'll see if they can legislate their way back to Earth.
Accurate age verification essentially requires accurate identity verification. And if this is mandatory, then anonymity is completely impossible.
Anonymity has long been a valuable component of free speech, and eliminating this is disastrous.
Call me crazy, but isn't it a lot simpler to just arrest people committing or suspected of committing these heavy crimes, and then ID them later (and even if you can't ID them, they're still arrested), and not even approach people who are doing nothing more than jogging?
Isn't that more like:
1. They ignore you.
2. They laugh at you.
3. They attack you.
4.
5. Profit.
6. Move to a small island.
What's more important? A perception of equality between teachers of all subjects, or setting the salaries at the level required to attract teachers qualified to properly educate children in each subject?