Sadly, what you just said has nothing to do with the actual platform document. They say quite explicitly that they oppose the teaching of "critical thinking skills". That's not the name of some taxpayer funded propaganda campaign, nor is it some modern "left-wing pseudo-intellectual" idea. That's a standard, widely used term that has been around for many many decades, and simply refers to the idea that you shouldn't accept whatever someone tells you without considering it carefully. The fact that they consider it "a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education" shows just how wacky they are. There is nothing novel or experimental about it. Teaching children to think critically and question beliefs is exactly what good teachers have been doing for centuries, and has long been considered to be one of the essential goals of education.
And that is exactly what they don't want people doing, as they state very clearly. They say these curricula "have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs", and they consider that a very bad thing. They want students to believe whatever they're told to believe, and never question it. In short, they support "a policy of teaching children to have a pavlovian "yessum massa!" response" to whatever the authority figures in their lives tell them, and how you can possibly twist that around in your mind and claim the complete opposite is a mystery to me.
Also, according to the article (I haven't read the original paper), neutrons can oscillate back and forth between the two "universes" every few seconds. So there really is a constant interaction and flow of information between the two sets of particles. It may be "weak" on the scale of other interactions, but it's far stronger than what people usually have in mind when they talk about "parallel universes".
I work in academia, using very much the skills he described, and definitely get paid in dollars! Academic salaries are a bit lower than industry ones, but still pretty good if you have the right skills. And really, if you're interested in high performance computing, academia is the place to be.
That said, I know people at both Google and Amazon who are paid to do molecular simulations on GPUs. Anyone who's got a cloud is interested in applications that use it, and HPC is an important market for them. Those jobs are a lot harder to find than ones in academia, though.
Really, what stronger evidence for creationism could you ask for? Do you seriously expect me to believe that humans evolved to believe such absurd things? That natural selection would possibly have produced creatures as ignorant and foolish as us?
Same here. I have nine messages in my stream that were posted today. All of them are from people I actually know, most of them close friends: these are real messages, not random spam. Of those nine messages, four have already been commented on by other people. Sure, there are lots of people who tried out G+ but never really got into it. But so what? There are lots of people who do use it actively.
<pedantic> The proper term is "hydrogen hydroxide": it naturally dissociates into H+OH. Please people, can't we use the proper terminology for our hazardous chemicals? </pedantic>
I completely agree with this. For small to medium sized projects, Python is a great language. It's simple, concise, and really a lot of fun to program in. But for large projects, I would go with Java, C#, or something of that sort.
I recently installed the NVIDIA drivers on Ubuntu. It killed my OS so completely that I couldn't even boot into safe mode anymore.
I recently installed the AMD drivers on a different Ubuntu system. That one only killed X. At least I could bring it back to life by logging in from the command line and deleting xorg.conf. I still haven't figured out how to get graphics acceleration working though.
I did manage to get the NVIDIA drivers working on a different machine (Fedora). That worked fine, except that when the OS would automatically install updates, it would frequently kill X. I eventually figured out I could fix this by rerunning the driver installer, so it would recompile the kernel module.
In all cases I was installing the standard video drivers, downloaded directly from NVIDIA's or AMD's website, onto a version of Linux they specifically said they supported.
Linux is so totally not ready for mainstream consumer use yet.
The fact of the matter is that Linux isn't designed with any sort of binary compatibility in mind
This is so true. I've just been struggling to find a way to compile a piece of software so it works across a decent range distros. Because of course, if I compile on RHEL 6, it doesn't work on RHEL 5. If I compile on a recent Fedora, it doesn't work on any RHEL, even the most recent ones. If I compile on Ubuntu, I can pretty much give up on it working on Red Hat anything. And so on. This really sucks.
To be fair though, the situation with Windows is almost as bad. It's not too hard to compile a program that will run anywhere, but a library? You basically have to exactly match the Visual Studio version (8/9/10), 32 vs. 64 bit, debug vs. release mode, and pro vs. express. If any one of those is different, you lose binary compatibility.
The title is completely wrong. Nothing about this work suggests extraterrestrial life isn't plausible, nor that there's anything whimsical about it. Here is what they actually said.
We know that life appeared on earth very soon after the surface became cool enough to be habitable. People therefore assume the same would be true on other planets. But having only one data point doesn't give us enough evidence to actually conclude that with any confidence. In particular:
1. It took a few billion years after that for life to evolve to the point where it could wonder about the possibility of life on other planets. 2. If it had taken a few billion years for life to appear in the first place, we might never have reached this point. 3. Therefore this might just be an anthropic effect. Intelligent life forms will always find themselves on planets where life appeared quickly, but that doesn't tell you how often life actually does appear quickly.
California. "The CPUC set the compensation rate at the 12-month average spot market price for the hours of 7 am to 5 pm for the year in which the surplus power was generated." The "spot market price" refers to the price at which the utility buys energy, not the price at which they sell it to consumers. So all you're really getting is the same price they would have spent to buy that same power from someone else.
Over here in Ontario, the provincial power company used to pay you $0.80/kWh for any power produced by your solar panels that you feed into the grid.
Solar power... in Ontario??? I'm glad to know you have messed up pricing there (or rather, you said, "used to," which implies you don't any more), but in most places the power company pays you a lot less for solar power than what you pay them. And really, Ontario is hardly what I'd cite as an ideal place for solar power.
Here are a couple of quotes from a staunch AGW proponent, Mr. Lovelock, from the summary
He also is something of a crackpot. He also isn't a climate researcher. Basically what you're saying is, "I found an alarmist crackpot who realized he was a crackpot, so therefore all of climate science is alarmist." Sorry. Try again.
Nope. Take the government subsidies out of photoelectric and you wouldn't have bought them. Because the total value of the electricity derived from one over it's normal service life doesn't equal the TCO of the equipment.
False false false. In warm sunny climates, solar panels can pay for themselves in less than 10 years. And are you consider all the government subsidies for the oil industry? No, of course not, because an evenhanded comparison wouldn't produce the conclusion you want.
Did you mean that as a rhetorical question? Because of course the answer is, "No one." Life is impossible without an entropy gradient. Any process that involves change on a macroscopic scale - including anything we would consider to be "life" - involves a change in entropy. In a region of spacetime where entropy doesn't change with time, absolutely nothing interesting happens.
Results like this really shouldn't surprise anyone. We have strong reasons, both theoretical and experimental, to believe that CPT invariance is an exact symmetry of the universe. To put it more simply, the laws of physics work identically forward and backward. There is no "preferred direction" of time. The fact that one direction seems to us to be "forward" reflects our local environment (we live on an entropy gradient), not any fundamental property of time. Boltzmann understood this back in the 19th century. So retrocausality shouldn't surprising.
We also have known since the 1960s that if you accept time reversibility and retrocausality, most of the "strange" features of quantum mechanics disappear: the collapse of the wave function, the uncertainty principle, entanglement, etc. All of these are just illusions created by ignoring the fact that the future is influencing the present. Time symmetric versions of quantum mechanics really should be much more widely known than they are.
Once a new species gets started using Android, it's really hard to switch them over to Windows. This doesn't bode well for MS's survival over the next million years or so.
What they've actually proposed is a mechanism for how memories are stored, not how they're encoded. The question is, how can memories be so stable if they're made up of synaptic connections that are constantly changing? These authors have proposed an answer, a molecular description of a much more stable link between two neurons that could form and then remain fixed for years. If they're right, it's a very important advance. But encoding is a completely different question: how does a particular memory get represented as a set of those connections. This work says nothing about that.
To give an analogy, they've described the magnetic domains on a hard disk. They haven't described how JPEG transforms images into patterns of bits.
Which are the brands you consider to be "quality panels"? What did they cost three years ago? What do they cost today? What information do you base your claim that the others are low quality on? Be specific.
Here is a site that tracks the price of solar panels (rather than complete residential solar systems). As you can see from the graph, the price has been falling rapidly since the start of 2009. In that time, the average cost of solar panels has fallen from nearly $5/watt to only $2.29/watt, with the least expensive panels only $0.84/watt. That's a dramatic change in only three years.
Huh? "Years later nothing has changed?" Are you aware that solar prices have been falling at an incredible rate recently? See this article, for example, which points out,"From 2009 to 2010, the price of a residential solar electric system fell 17 percent," and, "The trend will continue this year as the average cost of systems has already fallen 70 cents per watt, or 11 percent in the first half of 2011." Or as Wikipedia points out, "As of 2011, the cost of PV has fallen well below that of nuclear power," and, "In some locations, PV has reached grid parity, the cost at which it is competitive with coal or gas-fired generation."
We've been hearing stories for years about improvements that would reduce the cost of solar power. And it's precisely because of those improvements that solar power has, in fact, been getting steadily cheaper.
The not surprising result has been a huge increase in the use of solar power. From the same Wikipedia page, the total worldwide solar capacity has grown from 5.4 GW in 2005 to 67.4 GW in 2011: an increase of 1148% in just six years.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, what you just said has nothing to do with the actual platform document. They say quite explicitly that they oppose the teaching of "critical thinking skills". That's not the name of some taxpayer funded propaganda campaign, nor is it some modern "left-wing pseudo-intellectual" idea. That's a standard, widely used term that has been around for many many decades, and simply refers to the idea that you shouldn't accept whatever someone tells you without considering it carefully. The fact that they consider it "a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education" shows just how wacky they are. There is nothing novel or experimental about it. Teaching children to think critically and question beliefs is exactly what good teachers have been doing for centuries, and has long been considered to be one of the essential goals of education.
And that is exactly what they don't want people doing, as they state very clearly. They say these curricula "have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs", and they consider that a very bad thing. They want students to believe whatever they're told to believe, and never question it. In short, they support "a policy of teaching children to have a pavlovian "yessum massa!" response" to whatever the authority figures in their lives tell them, and how you can possibly twist that around in your mind and claim the complete opposite is a mystery to me.
She's a fantastic children's SF author. Try "The Delikon" and "This Time of Darkness".
Also, according to the article (I haven't read the original paper), neutrons can oscillate back and forth between the two "universes" every few seconds. So there really is a constant interaction and flow of information between the two sets of particles. It may be "weak" on the scale of other interactions, but it's far stronger than what people usually have in mind when they talk about "parallel universes".
I work in academia, using very much the skills he described, and definitely get paid in dollars! Academic salaries are a bit lower than industry ones, but still pretty good if you have the right skills. And really, if you're interested in high performance computing, academia is the place to be.
That said, I know people at both Google and Amazon who are paid to do molecular simulations on GPUs. Anyone who's got a cloud is interested in applications that use it, and HPC is an important market for them. Those jobs are a lot harder to find than ones in academia, though.
<pedantic>Creationism is based on an iron age fairy tale, not a bronze age one. The bronze age ended around 1200 BCE.</pedantic>
Really, what stronger evidence for creationism could you ask for? Do you seriously expect me to believe that humans evolved to believe such absurd things? That natural selection would possibly have produced creatures as ignorant and foolish as us?
Same here. I have nine messages in my stream that were posted today. All of them are from people I actually know, most of them close friends: these are real messages, not random spam. Of those nine messages, four have already been commented on by other people. Sure, there are lots of people who tried out G+ but never really got into it. But so what? There are lots of people who do use it actively.
Thank you for being even more pedantic. Yes, I should have said H+ and OH-.
<pedantic>
The proper term is "hydrogen hydroxide": it naturally dissociates into H+OH. Please people, can't we use the proper terminology for our hazardous chemicals?
</pedantic>
I completely agree with this. For small to medium sized projects, Python is a great language. It's simple, concise, and really a lot of fun to program in. But for large projects, I would go with Java, C#, or something of that sort.
I recently installed the NVIDIA drivers on Ubuntu. It killed my OS so completely that I couldn't even boot into safe mode anymore.
I recently installed the AMD drivers on a different Ubuntu system. That one only killed X. At least I could bring it back to life by logging in from the command line and deleting xorg.conf. I still haven't figured out how to get graphics acceleration working though.
I did manage to get the NVIDIA drivers working on a different machine (Fedora). That worked fine, except that when the OS would automatically install updates, it would frequently kill X. I eventually figured out I could fix this by rerunning the driver installer, so it would recompile the kernel module.
In all cases I was installing the standard video drivers, downloaded directly from NVIDIA's or AMD's website, onto a version of Linux they specifically said they supported.
Linux is so totally not ready for mainstream consumer use yet.
The fact of the matter is that Linux isn't designed with any sort of binary compatibility in mind
This is so true. I've just been struggling to find a way to compile a piece of software so it works across a decent range distros. Because of course, if I compile on RHEL 6, it doesn't work on RHEL 5. If I compile on a recent Fedora, it doesn't work on any RHEL, even the most recent ones. If I compile on Ubuntu, I can pretty much give up on it working on Red Hat anything. And so on. This really sucks.
To be fair though, the situation with Windows is almost as bad. It's not too hard to compile a program that will run anywhere, but a library? You basically have to exactly match the Visual Studio version (8/9/10), 32 vs. 64 bit, debug vs. release mode, and pro vs. express. If any one of those is different, you lose binary compatibility.
The title is completely wrong. Nothing about this work suggests extraterrestrial life isn't plausible, nor that there's anything whimsical about it. Here is what they actually said.
We know that life appeared on earth very soon after the surface became cool enough to be habitable. People therefore assume the same would be true on other planets. But having only one data point doesn't give us enough evidence to actually conclude that with any confidence. In particular:
1. It took a few billion years after that for life to evolve to the point where it could wonder about the possibility of life on other planets.
2. If it had taken a few billion years for life to appear in the first place, we might never have reached this point.
3. Therefore this might just be an anthropic effect. Intelligent life forms will always find themselves on planets where life appeared quickly, but that doesn't tell you how often life actually does appear quickly.
California. "The CPUC set the compensation rate at the 12-month average spot market price for the hours of 7 am to 5 pm for the year in which the surplus power was generated." The "spot market price" refers to the price at which the utility buys energy, not the price at which they sell it to consumers. So all you're really getting is the same price they would have spent to buy that same power from someone else.
Over here in Ontario, the provincial power company used to pay you $0.80/kWh for any power produced by your solar panels that you feed into the grid.
Solar power... in Ontario??? I'm glad to know you have messed up pricing there (or rather, you said, "used to," which implies you don't any more), but in most places the power company pays you a lot less for solar power than what you pay them. And really, Ontario is hardly what I'd cite as an ideal place for solar power.
Here are a couple of quotes from a staunch AGW proponent, Mr. Lovelock, from the summary
He also is something of a crackpot. He also isn't a climate researcher. Basically what you're saying is, "I found an alarmist crackpot who realized he was a crackpot, so therefore all of climate science is alarmist." Sorry. Try again.
Nope. Take the government subsidies out of photoelectric and you wouldn't have bought them. Because the total value of the electricity derived from one over it's normal service life doesn't equal the TCO of the equipment.
False false false. In warm sunny climates, solar panels can pay for themselves in less than 10 years. And are you consider all the government subsidies for the oil industry? No, of course not, because an evenhanded comparison wouldn't produce the conclusion you want.
So, who does NOT live in an entropy gradient?
Did you mean that as a rhetorical question? Because of course the answer is, "No one." Life is impossible without an entropy gradient. Any process that involves change on a macroscopic scale - including anything we would consider to be "life" - involves a change in entropy. In a region of spacetime where entropy doesn't change with time, absolutely nothing interesting happens.
Results like this really shouldn't surprise anyone. We have strong reasons, both theoretical and experimental, to believe that CPT invariance is an exact symmetry of the universe. To put it more simply, the laws of physics work identically forward and backward. There is no "preferred direction" of time. The fact that one direction seems to us to be "forward" reflects our local environment (we live on an entropy gradient), not any fundamental property of time. Boltzmann understood this back in the 19th century. So retrocausality shouldn't surprising.
We also have known since the 1960s that if you accept time reversibility and retrocausality, most of the "strange" features of quantum mechanics disappear: the collapse of the wave function, the uncertainty principle, entanglement, etc. All of these are just illusions created by ignoring the fact that the future is influencing the present. Time symmetric versions of quantum mechanics really should be much more widely known than they are.
What command line options do you need? It's not working for me, even if I specify --std=c89.
Once a new species gets started using Android, it's really hard to switch them over to Windows. This doesn't bode well for MS's survival over the next million years or so.
What they've actually proposed is a mechanism for how memories are stored, not how they're encoded. The question is, how can memories be so stable if they're made up of synaptic connections that are constantly changing? These authors have proposed an answer, a molecular description of a much more stable link between two neurons that could form and then remain fixed for years. If they're right, it's a very important advance. But encoding is a completely different question: how does a particular memory get represented as a set of those connections. This work says nothing about that.
To give an analogy, they've described the magnetic domains on a hard disk. They haven't described how JPEG transforms images into patterns of bits.
Yes, but why? What advantage is this supposed to have over a credit card? I really don't get it.
Citation still needed.
Which are the brands you consider to be "quality panels"? What did they cost three years ago? What do they cost today? What information do you base your claim that the others are low quality on? Be specific.
Citation needed.
Here is a site that tracks the price of solar panels (rather than complete residential solar systems). As you can see from the graph, the price has been falling rapidly since the start of 2009. In that time, the average cost of solar panels has fallen from nearly $5/watt to only $2.29/watt, with the least expensive panels only $0.84/watt. That's a dramatic change in only three years.
Huh? "Years later nothing has changed?" Are you aware that solar prices have been falling at an incredible rate recently? See this article, for example, which points out ,"From 2009 to 2010, the price of a residential solar electric system fell 17 percent," and, "The trend will continue this year as the average cost of systems has already fallen 70 cents per watt, or 11 percent in the first half of 2011." Or as Wikipedia points out, "As of 2011, the cost of PV has fallen well below that of nuclear power," and, "In some locations, PV has reached grid parity, the cost at which it is competitive with coal or gas-fired generation."
We've been hearing stories for years about improvements that would reduce the cost of solar power. And it's precisely because of those improvements that solar power has, in fact, been getting steadily cheaper.
The not surprising result has been a huge increase in the use of solar power. From the same Wikipedia page, the total worldwide solar capacity has grown from 5.4 GW in 2005 to 67.4 GW in 2011: an increase of 1148% in just six years.