Actually, 1kw really isn't that hard. I'm just an amateur racer, and Ican hit 1.5kw. It helps that I'm a little bigger than your average racer, as power scales roughly with lean body mass. For this reason, experts usually talk about w/kg, not total watts. World class track sprinters can do about 24 w/kg, which puts their total wattage around 2kw. This is for very short durations, though, like 5 to 10 seconds.
Kinda seems to me like you're proving the opposite point: if you don't understand a language -- like seems to be the case with you and regexps here -- you're gonna write really crappy code.
It has long amazed me how anyone could manage to construe the subordinate clause "A well regulated militia being necessary to a free state," as anything other than an explanation as to why the amendment was being included in the first place. It is clear that this clause is an introduction to the rest of the amendment: "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Careful, "subordinate" here is a grammatical claim, whereas you are reading it as a logical one. There's a lot more gray area here than you recognize, which is why it was a 5-4 decision. Just a couple things to consider:
1) There is no "fluff" in the constitution. If the framers had meant to say only "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed," with no preface, then they would have. So why include it? Given that the right as stated (the grammatical primary clause) is absolute, the preceding clause can only be taken as a limitation on it, an acknowledgment that conditions and contingencies pertain to the right.
2) It makes logical sense. If I wrote you and said "the plan for dinner being tomato soup, please stop by the store and buy tomatoes," but then later wrote you "i decided to make hamburgers instead," you would most likely figure there were now two options: either you should go to the store for hamburger meat, or you don't need to go to the store at all. It's quite unlikely that you would read the exchange as meaning you still had to buy tomatoes. It's the same thing here: the militia used to be a musket soup, but now it's a tank soup. So the options are now either 1) extend the right to include contemporary military weaponry, which so far general consensus (including today's opinion) opposes, or 2) curtail the right, since it's intended purpose no longer applies.
What's really interesting, and what the SCOTUS will probably have to sort out next, is that Scalia has tried to create a new legal category of "bearable arms" to distinguish between things like handguns and flamethrowers. Which means that, in the new interpretation, the right reads "you have the right to bear bearable arms." Ain't that a dandy bit of circular logic?
Re:If you want to see the real Cuba, go now...
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Fidel Castro Resigns
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I've lived in Cuba for well over a year, all combined, as my wife is a Cuban researcher. A lot of what you're writing here is just plain FUD. Let me see if I can clear a bit up:
Mostly likely, as a tourist, you stayed in tourist areas. None of the places where you would need a resident's card to get into, which, conveniently, are these unkept slums of poverty.
There are NO parts of Cuba where foreigners are not allowed. Just because you may have chosen to stay in the tourist zones doesn't mean you had to. There are no entry checks for residency cards (carnets) to get into the slums. You want to go there, fine, go there. I lived in Cerro, one of Havana's "zonas marginales" -- marginal, aka impoverished areas -- for over a year. The opposite, however, is true: there are places in Cuba, like the main tourist beaches of Varadero, where foreigners are allowed but Cubans without tourist jobs are excluded.
Internet access alone is enough to get the common Cuban without the luxury of being in the designated front-of-stage areas thrown in jail.
Yes and no. It's true that internet access is shamefully restricted in Cuba. So Cubans do what they've always done, they rely on friends and family to get around the barriers. Those who have access (like I did, though it cost me plenty) got to play mailman: every time I dialed in, I had several messages to send out and several to receive for the people I knew.
A few blocks down the road you probably had a grocery store filled with just about every item you could want, like in any industrialized nation's grocery store.
Nope. I did most of my shopping at the agropecuario, the same farmer's market that Cubans use. Except for rum. Domestic (peso) rum was awful. And the export-quality (dollar) rum was sooooo good.
If you got sick you probably had an excellent hospital waiting for you with private rooms and the skilled doctors and the latest in technologies, not the crumbling biological dumps where they can barely keep the bathrooms clean and the only anti-biotic they have is pennicillin.
Wow that's off base. I caught an eye infection while in Cuba and had to have minor eye surgery. I didn't go to the tourist hospital (Clinica Cira Garcia, the one in Michael Moore's film), I went to the national one. The doctor was very professional, the clinic was clean, the medications were current. After I came back to the US I had follow-up with a local doctor and he concurred with the treatment I'd been given. Official cost to me: 0. Actual cost to me: $20. Being an American, with the resources I had and knowing what it would have cost me in the US, I just couldn't leave without giving the doctor something. So I gave her $20. She was embarrassed but took it. My Cuban hosts understood but thought I should have given only $10.
You can fly into Havana and get a 30-day tourist visa just like any country in the world. This includes US citizens. I am one, and I've done it. There's no "confinement" to a "staged" Cuba. And the only "risks" involved in doing something other than an all-inclusive vacation tour (it sounds like that was your route) are to your comfort zone. If you've never travelled in the third world, it might be a bit shocking. But no state security is going to come knocking on your door just because you wandered into Havana's ghettos.
Note to US citizens: now, *our* government may put you at risk -- if you can't go legally like I was able to, be very very smart or wait for *our* government to change, not Cuba's.
And a note to flamers: yes, there are lots of things wrong with Cuba. But the OP has no idea what he/she is talking about.
www.analyticcycling.com is a cycling geek's best friend.
And your numbers are just as bad as the guy above you, only in the opposite direction.
6.0 w/kg, which you say your "amateur" friend can do, is enough to win many Grand Tour climbs. Lance was only ever confirmed at 6.3. Your average recreational cyclist is around 3, beginning racer around 4, local elite racer 5, pros around 6. See this chart.
I can't decide which is cooler: - The fact that the author posted to Slashdot. - Or the fact that he once posted to a thread called "Monkey Pays for Monkey Porn."
You've obviously never served on a journal board or seen one's budget. Most journals barely break even. The reviewers might be "free" volunteers, but the cost of that is that you're 5th or 6th or 37th on their list of priorities, so you need a lot of paid staff hours to get them to stick to a non-glacial timeframe. And every author believes that their papers are ready for publication until you show them that half their citations are wrong or missing, that the chart they whipped up in Excel forgot to include the critical data, etc etc etc. Scientists are good at being scientists, as they should be, but they're not always good at being writers. If your overriding goal is to publish the best science, you can't just kick out the papers with these kinds of errors. You need paid people to do that kind of grunt work, and that costs money.
I was on the board of a small scientific journal deciding whether to go open access. We decided not to for two main reasons. First, though, you need to realize that peer reviewed journals are expensive, especially the "nichey" ones like us. The peer reviewers themselves are volunteers, but precisely because they're volunteers, you need a lot of paid staff hours to make sure everybody's got what they need and is getting it turned over in a reasonable timeframe. Most small journals barely break even. So why didn't we go open access?
1) "Open access" sounds great, but you have to realize that "open access" means "author pays." Someone has to cover the journal expenses. Right now, it's largely the library budgets of research universities that fund journals, as they take out expensive institutional subscriptions. (Individual subscriptions generally lose money, by comparison.) Once a journal goes open access, the libraries drop their subscriptions and journal revenue plummets. To make up that money, journals have to raise the publication fees they charge authors dramatically. So "open access" just moves the barrier from access to publication. We have interests in attracting more international authors, and when we told these authors, particularly those from developing countries, what it would cost to publish in an open access journal, they said there was no way.
2) There's a perception that open access is cheap, because a lot of journals are only charging around $1000 or so to make a single article open access. But the fact is that those journals are radically underpricing open access. They can do that because right now, only a few of the articles in each issue are open access, so the research libraries aren't dropping their institutional subscriptions just yet. So at the moment, that $1k is just gravy for the journal. But if you actually price out what it costs to publish a journal article, it's 3-10 times what they're charging. So once the scientific publishing world really shifts to open access, those journals are either going to sink or have to boost drastically their open access fees.
My understanding of copyright is that, like patents, it's based on the public good, not natural rights. The state grants copyright so that IP creators reap the benefit of their creations, thereby prompting more IP creation and benefitting the public generally. So, the question then becomes, does a service like turnitin.com serve the public good? Isn't ensuring fairness in grading a public good?
Another issue: isn't a service like turnitin.com ultimately trying to protect IP? If a student copies text without the author's approval (say, from the web), he/she is violating IP right there.
The original poster was confused by zone-h's reporting. Yes, linux accounted for 61% of defacements yesterday. And today it's only 1.8%. The deviation is just statistical noise. Zone-h is currently running their own banner ad with the cummulative stats:
Intel X-Scale Processor at 400MHz/300MHz, 32-64MB SDRAM Memory, 32-48MB Flash. Looks like it could run Linux quite easily.
Not necessarily. There's a lot more to porting an OS than just whether it can run on the processor and whether the system has enough memory. Dell needs to release specs on the system's firmware, hareware/communication protocols, etc. The nice thing about iPaqs is that Compaq released all their system specs, which is why you can run linux on almost all iPaqs (see the Familiar project).
So, Dell, how 'bout the specs? I'd love a $200 linux handheld!
With the Sokal hoax, many physics people jumped up and shouted that Sokal had "proven" that cultural studies was a "bogus" discipline. Now, with this hoax, the same people are backpedalling, saying that this time the issue is "complicated" and that "physics isn't for amateurs." If anything, this hoax seems more damning to me than Sokal.
Why? In his paper, Sokal didn't pretend to be a literature professor; he claimed at the start he was a physicist. The review board of Social Text weren't physicists and so they couldn't really evaluate the physics part of his paper. Instead, they trusted Sokal that he was following the usual academic honesty and integrity in his assertions. As it turned out, and as we all now know, he wasn't -- he was intentionally distorting his beliefs about physics in order to perpetrate a hoax. What Sokal did was a lot like a researcher falsifying data: review boards usually have no way of knowing whether a submitter has falsified data and so they have to rely on the person's academic integrity, just like the board of Social Text had no way of knowing whether Sokal was sincere in his representation of physics, so they had to trust him.
The Bogdanov brothers, however, published as physicists, about physics, and in journals reviewed by physicists. Not only that, but the people who reviewed them are now spouting inanities like "he worked for ten years, so he deserved a doctorate." (Um, no, he can work for 30 years, but if he doesn't understand the stuff, he doesn't get the doctorate.)
If Sokal had tried to write as a literature professor, I highly doubt his paper would have gotten through. I've read his paper, and quite frankly, it was *not* accepted for what it had to say about cultural studies. The knowledge the paper represents of cultural studies reads like an enthusiastic but over-bold sophomore who just took his/her first class in critical theory (disclosure: I teach critical theory to sophomores, and I've seen those papers;)). The paper was published because an established physicist was making bold statements about the philosophical basis of his field. That's not news? Of course, as it turned out, that physicist was a snake in the grass.
The NYT article mentions "e-mails bouncing around the web." Here's one with a bit more info. I received it as below, so I don't know who the original sender was:
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 22:56:42 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Hoax: Alan Sokol phenomenon reversed
Sometime ago Alan Sokol et al wrote a completely meaningless article on quantum gravity which was accepted by a leading, refereed "deconstructionist journal". Physicists laughed because the hoax was at the deconstructionists' expense.
But now there is is an inverse Sokol hoax in which, apparently, two reporters interviewd a lot of string theorists, wrote meaningless but "right sounding" papers and even got a Ph.D. Details below. What is particularly sad is that a key paper appeared in CQG:
Class. Quantum Grav. 18 (7 November 2001) 4341-4372
Topological field theory of the initial singularity of spacetime*
Grichka Bogdanov and Igor Bogdanov Mathematical Physics Laboratory, CNRS UPRES A 5029, Bourgogne University, France
The trouble is that the abstract seems indistinguishable from standard stringy papers. I understand that the CQG Editorial Board already discussed this hoax but found that the paper had been refereed by two reputable string theorists.
More details: ---- From Max Niedemayer to Ted Newman
# 1. I always thought Sokal's hoax would also work in theoretical high energy physics. Now there is experimental proof.
Two brothers, Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff, journalists and science fiction writers, both in their late 40's, decided it is high time to earn a PhD, and that this should be just as easy in `stringy' high energy physics as it alledgedly is in sociology.
First they interviewed a number of prominent French string theorists in order to accquire the lingo, then (apparently without help from a trained physicist) spoofed two theses. To prepare the ground for their defense they spread rumors of them being geniuses and their theses being a milestone in theoretical physics. Although the official PhD awarding institution is only the (so far not too renowned) Universite de Bourgogne the members of the thesis committee certainly make up for it: R. Jackiw (MIT), J. Morava (John Hopkins), S. Majid (Cambridge), C. Kounnas (ENS), I. Antoniadis (CERN and Ecole Polytechnique), and others. For the actual defense they rented a hall in the prestigeous Ecole Polytechnique, arranged a big dinner with the president, invited the TV,... and passed gloriously. The thesis can be found on the offical CNRS server (http://www.ccsd.cnrs.fr/). Already the abstract is a delightfully meaningless combination of buzzwords, that almost beats Sokal's, but which apparently has been taken seriously by the committee!
The bad side of the joke is, that it might hurt theoretical physics in general. The CNRS apparently even contemplates to split the present theoretical physics division into a pure mathematics and an experimental physics branch. Theoretical physics, being now more fiction than science, is meant to be entertained by professionals in that area. Hopefully the Bogdanoff ``singularity invariant'' for the ``topological expansion phase'' of the universe will provide a way out...
I'll keep you informed. Best regards,
-- Max
2. Dear Ted, sure you can show the letter to others. Let me stress however (and maybe you should too) that this is not first hand information. A person who has first hand information is J. Magnen, from the Ecole Polytechnique. He works on constructive QFT and was not personally involved. The issue was apparently discussed in the French National Research Council, where Peter Forgacs is a member, and he is my source.
A small correction. In the last minute it seems the theses were not accepted at the Ecole Polytechnique, but only later by the University of Bourgogne. The TV was also not permitted to the actual defense, but several people here saw reports on the Bogdanoff brothers decribing them as outstanding geniuses.
The theses and the committee members can be looked up on the web at http://www.ccsd.cnrs.fr/
All the best,
-- Max
---- HOAX THESIS: Abstract in english:
We propose in this research a new solution regarding the existence and the content of the initial spacetime singularity. In the context of topological field theory we consider that the initial singularity of space-time corresponds to a zero size singular gravitational instanton characterized by a Riemannian metric configuration (++++) in dimension D = 4. Connected with some unexpected topological data corresponding to the zero scale of space-time, the initial singularity is thus not considered in terms of divergences of physical fields but can be resolved in the frame of topological field theory. We get this result from the physical observation that the pre-spacetime is in a thermal equilibrium at the Planck scale. Therefore it should be subject to the KMS condition. We consequently consider that this KMS state might correspond to a unification between "physical state" (Planck scale) and "topological state" (zero scale). Then it is suggested that the "zero scale singularity" can be understood in terms of topological invariants, in particular the first Donaldson invariant. Therefore, we here introduce a new topological index, connected with 0 scale, of the form Z = Tr (-1)s, which we call "singularity invariant". Interestingly, this invariant corresponds also to the invariant topological current yield by the hyperfinite II* von Neumann algebra describing the zero scale of space-time. In such a context we conjecture that the problem of inertial interaction might be explained in terms of topological amplitude connected with the singular zero size gravitational instanton corresponding to the initial singularity of spacetime.
Keywords : KMS State, topological field theory, singularity invariant, initial singularity, zero size instanton PACS : 0420D, 04.65.+e,02.40.Xx, 04.60.-m, 5.45.-a
Advisor: STERNHEIMER, DANIEL Comments: President : Gabriel Simonoff (Prof.Emerite Univ.Bordeaux I) Premier rapporteur : Roman Jackiw (M.I.T.) Second rapporteur Jack Morava : (John Hopkins Univ.), Examinateur Hans Jauslin (Bourgogne Univ.), Co-directeur de these (pour la partie physique theorique), Jac Verbaarschot (Stony Brook Univ.) Le document de these est compose des textes suivants : 1. Le texte de presentation de la these (60 pages) 2. Les 4 tires a part des publications annexees (102 pages): - Topological Field Theory of the Initial Singularity of Spacetime, Class. and Quantum Gravity vol 18 no 21 (2001) - Spacetime Metric and the KMS Condition at the Planck Scale Annals of Physics, vol 295 no 2 (2002) - KMS State of the Spacetime at the Planck Scale, Ch. Jour. of Phys. vol 40, No2, (2002) - Topological Origin of Inertia, Czech . Jour. of Phys. Vol. 51, No 11 (2001)
Subjects: Thesis: Physics: Theoretical Physics ID code: tel-00001503 Deposited by: BOGDANOFF Igor on 24 July 2002 (01:49)
World's fastest clay model
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Landshark
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· Score: 5, Funny
Notice how there are no real pictures of this thing on the site? That's because the fine print says that it currently exists only as a "1/3rd scale clay model." The history page goes right up to the point (over a year ago) when they were trying to turn that model into a working... 1/3rd model. Huh, I'll bet I know why the history stops there.
Most revealing line from the history: "Oct 2000, work put on hold as promised investment fails to materialise." That's because the investors realized this guy is smoking crack for all kinds of reasons.
Hey, I gotta clay model that'll do 60 mph on water and 240 on land. Really, honestly. It'll be roling off the lot just as soon as I get the funding. Can I get linked by Slashdot too?
Get a list of all teenage kids of congress members
Figure out if any of these kids have traded music on-line
Send the evidence to RIAA, the Justice Department, NY Times, Washington Post, etc.
Sit back and watch the fun
How many "tough on drugs" senators have flipped when -- whoops! -- a cop finds half a joint in Susie's back seat? Anyone here know if the Bush daughters have any "stolen" mp3s? Wouldn't that be a headline.
Agreed. It's hard to tell, but from the picture on IDG Singapore's site, it looks like the screen may be designed to flip around and face outward, like the high-end Sonys.
No mention of processor (My guess is Xscale)
Probably, since the other recent Sharp Linux PDA, the SL-A300, runs on an Xscale, albeit only a 200mhz one. Hopefully this new model will be running at 400mhz. Weren't there reports, though, that some of the PocketPC devices weren't seeing much of a performance jump with the Xscale?
PCMCIA, CF, SD, internal microdrive?
In the picture, there's a black bar on the right side of the case that looks like it's a CF slot. Hopefully they've kept the SD slot too so that you can work with both extra memory and a wireless card at the same time, like in the SL-5x00.
IDG Singapore has the same article as PC World but with a photo of the new Zaurus. Very slick. Keys on the keyboard are much larger than the current Z, but probably still too small for anything but thumb-typing.
Worked fine for me with the 2.38 ROM, which is the latest. You have to change the last number of your host's usb0 net connection so that it ends in a.1. I.e., if you were a.b.c.d, you need to change it to a.b.c.1.
I just got my Zaurus five days ago, and the inability to sync to Evolution has been bugging me, so I've decided to see if I can do anything about it with my humble coding skills. This doesn't seem to me like a hard problem, and if we can get a few people working on it (I'm volunteering my time) I think we could probably knock out something simple pretty soon. I've already spent about 8 hours coding. Here's what I'm currently thinking:
There's no point in building a fully-featured, pluggable syncing framework (like pilot-sync and gnome-pilot, for example), because Trolltech has alread announced that the upcoming version of Qtopia (the software used on the Z) will have a new sync API, and so all we need now is a stop-gap until that software lands.
On the Evolution side of the sync, the program should definitely talk to the Evolution libraries (wombat and camel) and not straight to the files. Going straight to the files -- like the existing partial sync utilities evolution-sync.pl and zesync -- risks corrupting some of Evolution's index files. Plus, the Evolution people have said they would be officially annoyed at anyone writing straight to those files, as they're not intended as a public API.
For quick dev, I'm planning to use perl with a command-line UI. A GUI or a C version can come once the logic is fully working and when/if someone feels compelled enough to do it.
There are two parts of Trolltech's software that they haven't released any specs on. One, as another poster already mentioned, is the DTD of the XML files used by Qtopia to store the PIM info. The other is the details of how the desktop lets the Zaurus know that a sync is going on. You can use ftp to transfer the files over, but you also need to tell the Qtopia apps to reload that info or they will keep chugging with the old data until restarted. Of course, this wouldn't be the first time a spec had to be reverse engineered.
To talk to the Evolution libraries from Perl we need a little PerlXS interface code. I'll probably finish the cal-client interface (addressbook and task list) tonight and start on the perl code tomorrow.
So, anyone want to help out? I'm sure there are plenty of people reading this list with a lot more talent than I. Anyone want to tackle the perlxs glue code for interfacing with camel, so that we could sync e-mail? How about to e-book for the task list? How about figuring out how Qtopia Desktop tells the Zaurus that it's syncing (I noticed there's a mysterious port 4992 open on the Z -- might be related). How about spending some time entering data and looking at the XML files produced and figuring out the DTD? Mail me -- too many people have asked for this feature, and its time to get something at least semi-functional together.
-- Adam
(Moderators: I know it's really lame to ask to be moded up, but I'd love to get some help on this. Thanks.)
Now what we need is another service that keeps track of all the title mangling patterns, like Beatles -> Fab Four. Make it into an automated plugin for Napster that translates titles on-the-fly and we're basically back to the pre-litigation Napster.
Who would RIAA sue then? This new service, call it sleepyfellow.com, doesn't trade in music, so RIAA can't go after it for copyright infingement. They could try to nail it under the DMCA like the MPAA did to DeCSS, except that the software isn't decrypting, it's encrypting. In fact, if RIAA tried, they might be liable under the DMCA for breaking sleepyfellow's encryption. Could the RIAA reap what it sows?
Many people have been citing the usual argument against a universal compression algorithm: it's impossible to uniquely map all 2^n combinations of n bits into the 2^(n-1) available combinations of n-1 bits. But that wasn't Mike's challenge. As Patrick pointed out, Mike only required a challenger to compress a single specific file, which Mike would provide. Was Mike smart in making this bet? We know that some of the 2^n files Mike could provide are sufficiently compressible: he might just randomly generate an ASCII file or a file with a long string of zeroes, for instance. So the question is what percentage of the possible files are sufficiently compressible? "Sufficiently compressible" would mean that they compress enough that whatever compression algorithm is used can fit in the freed space. Mike's bet is only a good one if less than 2% ($100/$5000) are sufficiently compressible.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, 1kw really isn't that hard. I'm just an amateur racer, and Ican hit 1.5kw. It helps that I'm a little bigger than your average racer, as power scales roughly with lean body mass. For this reason, experts usually talk about w/kg, not total watts. World class track sprinters can do about 24 w/kg, which puts their total wattage around 2kw. This is for very short durations, though, like 5 to 10 seconds.
s!(?:^|\w*/|\.\./|\./)[^\s,@;:]*(?<=/)([^\s,@;:]+?)(?=[\s,@;:]|$)!$1!g;
Wouldn't ...
s!/([^\s,@;:]*/)*!!g
Kinda seems to me like you're proving the opposite point: if you don't understand a language -- like seems to be the case with you and regexps here -- you're gonna write really crappy code.
1) There is no "fluff" in the constitution. If the framers had meant to say only "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed," with no preface, then they would have. So why include it? Given that the right as stated (the grammatical primary clause) is absolute, the preceding clause can only be taken as a limitation on it, an acknowledgment that conditions and contingencies pertain to the right.
2) It makes logical sense. If I wrote you and said "the plan for dinner being tomato soup, please stop by the store and buy tomatoes," but then later wrote you "i decided to make hamburgers instead," you would most likely figure there were now two options: either you should go to the store for hamburger meat, or you don't need to go to the store at all. It's quite unlikely that you would read the exchange as meaning you still had to buy tomatoes. It's the same thing here: the militia used to be a musket soup, but now it's a tank soup. So the options are now either 1) extend the right to include contemporary military weaponry, which so far general consensus (including today's opinion) opposes, or 2) curtail the right, since it's intended purpose no longer applies.
What's really interesting, and what the SCOTUS will probably have to sort out next, is that Scalia has tried to create a new legal category of "bearable arms" to distinguish between things like handguns and flamethrowers. Which means that, in the new interpretation, the right reads "you have the right to bear bearable arms." Ain't that a dandy bit of circular logic?
There are NO parts of Cuba where foreigners are not allowed. Just because you may have chosen to stay in the tourist zones doesn't mean you had to. There are no entry checks for residency cards (carnets) to get into the slums. You want to go there, fine, go there. I lived in Cerro, one of Havana's "zonas marginales" -- marginal, aka impoverished areas -- for over a year. The opposite, however, is true: there are places in Cuba, like the main tourist beaches of Varadero, where foreigners are allowed but Cubans without tourist jobs are excluded.
Yes and no. It's true that internet access is shamefully restricted in Cuba. So Cubans do what they've always done, they rely on friends and family to get around the barriers. Those who have access (like I did, though it cost me plenty) got to play mailman: every time I dialed in, I had several messages to send out and several to receive for the people I knew.
Nope. I did most of my shopping at the agropecuario, the same farmer's market that Cubans use. Except for rum. Domestic (peso) rum was awful. And the export-quality (dollar) rum was sooooo good.
Wow that's off base. I caught an eye infection while in Cuba and had to have minor eye surgery. I didn't go to the tourist hospital (Clinica Cira Garcia, the one in Michael Moore's film), I went to the national one. The doctor was very professional, the clinic was clean, the medications were current. After I came back to the US I had follow-up with a local doctor and he concurred with the treatment I'd been given. Official cost to me: 0. Actual cost to me: $20. Being an American, with the resources I had and knowing what it would have cost me in the US, I just couldn't leave without giving the doctor something. So I gave her $20. She was embarrassed but took it. My Cuban hosts understood but thought I should have given only $10.
Um, what?
You can fly into Havana and get a 30-day tourist visa just like any country in the world. This includes US citizens. I am one, and I've done it. There's no "confinement" to a "staged" Cuba. And the only "risks" involved in doing something other than an all-inclusive vacation tour (it sounds like that was your route) are to your comfort zone. If you've never travelled in the third world, it might be a bit shocking. But no state security is going to come knocking on your door just because you wandered into Havana's ghettos.
Note to US citizens: now, *our* government may put you at risk -- if you can't go legally like I was able to, be very very smart or wait for *our* government to change, not Cuba's.
And a note to flamers: yes, there are lots of things wrong with Cuba. But the OP has no idea what he/she is talking about.
Remind me not to party with any morticians.
www.analyticcycling.com is a cycling geek's best friend.
And your numbers are just as bad as the guy above you, only in the opposite direction.
6.0 w/kg, which you say your "amateur" friend can do, is enough to win many Grand Tour climbs. Lance was only ever confirmed at 6.3. Your average recreational cyclist is around 3, beginning racer around 4, local elite racer 5, pros around 6. See this chart.
13.5mph is about 100 watts, not 200.
I can't decide which is cooler:
- The fact that the author posted to Slashdot.
- Or the fact that he once posted to a thread called "Monkey Pays for Monkey Porn."
You've obviously never served on a journal board or seen one's budget. Most journals barely break even. The reviewers might be "free" volunteers, but the cost of that is that you're 5th or 6th or 37th on their list of priorities, so you need a lot of paid staff hours to get them to stick to a non-glacial timeframe. And every author believes that their papers are ready for publication until you show them that half their citations are wrong or missing, that the chart they whipped up in Excel forgot to include the critical data, etc etc etc. Scientists are good at being scientists, as they should be, but they're not always good at being writers. If your overriding goal is to publish the best science, you can't just kick out the papers with these kinds of errors. You need paid people to do that kind of grunt work, and that costs money.
I was on the board of a small scientific journal deciding whether to go open access. We decided not to for two main reasons. First, though, you need to realize that peer reviewed journals are expensive, especially the "nichey" ones like us. The peer reviewers themselves are volunteers, but precisely because they're volunteers, you need a lot of paid staff hours to make sure everybody's got what they need and is getting it turned over in a reasonable timeframe. Most small journals barely break even. So why didn't we go open access?
1) "Open access" sounds great, but you have to realize that "open access" means "author pays." Someone has to cover the journal expenses. Right now, it's largely the library budgets of research universities that fund journals, as they take out expensive institutional subscriptions. (Individual subscriptions generally lose money, by comparison.) Once a journal goes open access, the libraries drop their subscriptions and journal revenue plummets. To make up that money, journals have to raise the publication fees they charge authors dramatically. So "open access" just moves the barrier from access to publication. We have interests in attracting more international authors, and when we told these authors, particularly those from developing countries, what it would cost to publish in an open access journal, they said there was no way.
2) There's a perception that open access is cheap, because a lot of journals are only charging around $1000 or so to make a single article open access. But the fact is that those journals are radically underpricing open access. They can do that because right now, only a few of the articles in each issue are open access, so the research libraries aren't dropping their institutional subscriptions just yet. So at the moment, that $1k is just gravy for the journal. But if you actually price out what it costs to publish a journal article, it's 3-10 times what they're charging. So once the scientific publishing world really shifts to open access, those journals are either going to sink or have to boost drastically their open access fees.
My understanding of copyright is that, like patents, it's based on the public good, not natural rights. The state grants copyright so that IP creators reap the benefit of their creations, thereby prompting more IP creation and benefitting the public generally. So, the question then becomes, does a service like turnitin.com serve the public good? Isn't ensuring fairness in grading a public good?
Another issue: isn't a service like turnitin.com ultimately trying to protect IP? If a student copies text without the author's approval (say, from the web), he/she is violating IP right there.
Tells a rather different story, doesn't it?
Oh, we got that one covered:
So, Dell, how 'bout the specs? I'd love a $200 linux handheld!
With the Sokal hoax, many physics people jumped up and shouted that Sokal had "proven" that cultural studies was a "bogus" discipline. Now, with this hoax, the same people are backpedalling, saying that this time the issue is "complicated" and that "physics isn't for amateurs." If anything, this hoax seems more damning to me than Sokal.
;)). The paper was published because an established physicist was making bold statements about the philosophical basis of his field. That's not news? Of course, as it turned out, that physicist was a snake in the grass.
Why? In his paper, Sokal didn't pretend to be a literature professor; he claimed at the start he was a physicist. The review board of Social Text weren't physicists and so they couldn't really evaluate the physics part of his paper. Instead, they trusted Sokal that he was following the usual academic honesty and integrity in his assertions. As it turned out, and as we all now know, he wasn't -- he was intentionally distorting his beliefs about physics in order to perpetrate a hoax. What Sokal did was a lot like a researcher falsifying data: review boards usually have no way of knowing whether a submitter has falsified data and so they have to rely on the person's academic integrity, just like the board of Social Text had no way of knowing whether Sokal was sincere in his representation of physics, so they had to trust him.
The Bogdanov brothers, however, published as physicists, about physics, and in journals reviewed by physicists. Not only that, but the people who reviewed them are now spouting inanities like "he worked for ten years, so he deserved a doctorate." (Um, no, he can work for 30 years, but if he doesn't understand the stuff, he doesn't get the doctorate.)
If Sokal had tried to write as a literature professor, I highly doubt his paper would have gotten through. I've read his paper, and quite frankly, it was *not* accepted for what it had to say about cultural studies. The knowledge the paper represents of cultural studies reads like an enthusiastic but over-bold sophomore who just took his/her first class in critical theory (disclosure: I teach critical theory to sophomores, and I've seen those papers
Notice how there are no real pictures of this thing on the site? That's because the fine print says that it currently exists only as a "1/3rd scale clay model." The history page goes right up to the point (over a year ago) when they were trying to turn that model into a working ... 1/3rd model. Huh, I'll bet I know why the history stops there.
Most revealing line from the history: "Oct 2000, work put on hold as promised investment fails to materialise." That's because the investors realized this guy is smoking crack for all kinds of reasons.
Hey, I gotta clay model that'll do 60 mph on water and 240 on land. Really, honestly. It'll be roling off the lot just as soon as I get the funding. Can I get linked by Slashdot too?
How many "tough on drugs" senators have flipped when -- whoops! -- a cop finds half a joint in Susie's back seat? Anyone here know if the Bush daughters have any "stolen" mp3s? Wouldn't that be a headline.
Agreed. It's hard to tell, but from the picture on IDG Singapore's site, it looks like the screen may be designed to flip around and face outward, like the high-end Sonys.
Probably, since the other recent Sharp Linux PDA, the SL-A300, runs on an Xscale, albeit only a 200mhz one. Hopefully this new model will be running at 400mhz. Weren't there reports, though, that some of the PocketPC devices weren't seeing much of a performance jump with the Xscale?
In the picture, there's a black bar on the right side of the case that looks like it's a CF slot. Hopefully they've kept the SD slot too so that you can work with both extra memory and a wireless card at the same time, like in the SL-5x00.
IDG Singapore has the same article as PC World but with a photo of the new Zaurus. Very slick. Keys on the keyboard are much larger than the current Z, but probably still too small for anything but thumb-typing.
Worked fine for me with the 2.38 ROM, which is the latest. You have to change the last number of your host's usb0 net connection so that it ends in a .1. I.e., if you were a.b.c.d, you need to change it to a.b.c.1.
- There's no point in building a fully-featured, pluggable syncing framework (like pilot-sync and gnome-pilot, for example), because Trolltech has alread announced that the upcoming version of Qtopia (the software used on the Z) will have a new sync API, and so all we need now is a stop-gap until that software lands.
- On the Evolution side of the sync, the program should definitely talk to the Evolution libraries (wombat and camel) and not straight to the files. Going straight to the files -- like the existing partial sync utilities evolution-sync.pl and zesync -- risks corrupting some of Evolution's index files. Plus, the Evolution people have said they would be officially annoyed at anyone writing straight to those files, as they're not intended as a public API.
- For quick dev, I'm planning to use perl with a command-line UI. A GUI or a C version can come once the logic is fully working and when/if someone feels compelled enough to do it.
- There are two parts of Trolltech's software that they haven't released any specs on. One, as another poster already mentioned, is the DTD of the XML files used by Qtopia to store the PIM info. The other is the details of how the desktop lets the Zaurus know that a sync is going on. You can use ftp to transfer the files over, but you also need to tell the Qtopia apps to reload that info or they will keep chugging with the old data until restarted. Of course, this wouldn't be the first time a spec had to be reverse engineered.
To talk to the Evolution libraries from Perl we need a little PerlXS interface code. I'll probably finish the cal-client interface (addressbook and task list) tonight and start on the perl code tomorrow.So, anyone want to help out? I'm sure there are plenty of people reading this list with a lot more talent than I. Anyone want to tackle the perlxs glue code for interfacing with camel, so that we could sync e-mail? How about to e-book for the task list? How about figuring out how Qtopia Desktop tells the Zaurus that it's syncing (I noticed there's a mysterious port 4992 open on the Z -- might be related). How about spending some time entering data and looking at the XML files produced and figuring out the DTD? Mail me -- too many people have asked for this feature, and its time to get something at least semi-functional together.
-- Adam
(Moderators: I know it's really lame to ask to be moded up, but I'd love to get some help on this. Thanks.)
Who would RIAA sue then? This new service, call it sleepyfellow.com, doesn't trade in music, so RIAA can't go after it for copyright infingement. They could try to nail it under the DMCA like the MPAA did to DeCSS, except that the software isn't decrypting, it's encrypting. In fact, if RIAA tried, they might be liable under the DMCA for breaking sleepyfellow's encryption. Could the RIAA reap what it sows?
Many people have been citing the usual argument against a universal compression algorithm: it's impossible to uniquely map all 2^n combinations of n bits into the 2^(n-1) available combinations of n-1 bits. But that wasn't Mike's challenge. As Patrick pointed out, Mike only required a challenger to compress a single specific file, which Mike would provide. Was Mike smart in making this bet? We know that some of the 2^n files Mike could provide are sufficiently compressible: he might just randomly generate an ASCII file or a file with a long string of zeroes, for instance. So the question is what percentage of the possible files are sufficiently compressible? "Sufficiently compressible" would mean that they compress enough that whatever compression algorithm is used can fit in the freed space. Mike's bet is only a good one if less than 2% ($100/$5000) are sufficiently compressible.