If you want to avoid getting reactions like that (or even be modded "troll"), it would be a good idea to be a bit more specific in your question. What you probably mean is "given that it's nearly impossible to track a meteor, especially if you're an amateur using an off-the-shelf mount, and that neither a telescope nor a mount with good tracking capabilities are helpful in capturing a panoramic image of the shower, what's the meteor shower got to do with this?"
I also don't agree with the claim that only 23.45% of contributions come from volunteers. There is also the 16.94% "unknown". Now, if you're working on Gnome for a company, you usually would want to list your affiliation. If you don't, maybe you're contributing to Gnome on company time without your bosses knowing, but such a situation should (arguably) be counted as "volunteer" work. But I speculate most of these unknowns are simply actual volunteers, who just skipped the question "which company do you work for", and didn't notice there was an option "none" (people usually are in a hurry when they fill in surveys). That would set an upper limit of 23.45%+16.94%=40.39% on the fraction of volunteers, and I feel the actual number is likely to be closer to this upper limit than to the lower limit (23.45%).
The fact that he's an AC says nothing. If I were to make a statement that I know would be unpopular and that would make me sound elitist, I would also post as AC.
On topic: it probably also depends on which field you are in. I can easily imagine a smart and motivated learner willing to experiment learning all they need to know about computer science to make them a skilled software engineer/programmer on their own. In naturals science or [physical] engineering? Not so much.
And yes, parent got it right. No-one, civilian, soldier or terrorist, should be exposed to the risk that one of the lawyers survive being catapulted into the city. Imagine the sheer horror - you cannot even get out because of the siege.
Your post is most unhelpful; you're claiming it's not a dialect, but you're not explaining why, nor what we should call it instead. Here's an interesting exercise for you: try, in the midsts of a conversation about a more interesting topic, to explain to an average American (with limited knowledge about the world) what Flemish is. In one simple, short and clear sentence, without digressing from the original conversation. Oh yeah, and you're not allowed to use the word "dialect".
Yeah, and to make them extra secure, we could make sure that only bank personnel can service them. You know what? We could build the device into a wall, so that the user only has access to a keyboard and a screen, and everything else is safely located at the other side of the wall, where only bank personnel can go. Yes yes, it would be very expensive to do this at every person's home. But guess what? People are not doing bank stuff all the time, so you could just build one at a central position and have the whole neighborhood share it!
News flash for kdawson: in science (not counting math), positives cannot be proven. Evidence for them can be provided, they can be "illustrated", "supported",... but not proven, only disproven. That's why even the most respected "laws of physics" formally have the status of "theory" (Note the difference between "theory" and "hypothesis" here: a hypothesis becomes a theory after it has been extensively tested and widely accepted by the scientific community.)
It is ironic that a majority of science stories on slashdot are posted by someone who has an incomplete understanding of science. Though it does explain why the average quality of science-related posts is so low.
He got rightly modded down for suggesting that "greenies" are technically ignorant. Quite the opposite: I'm a life scientist, and an overwhelming majority of life scientists is environmentally conscious to some degree. That's because we can see exactly how humanity is screwing itself. One needs to be ignorant not to know or care.
That said, I hate inhabitat as much as you do. They give the green cause a bad name. Not only are they a cesspool of ignorance, they're also sensationalist and in every story, they consistently get one or two facts shamefully wrong. Their target audience probably consists of the handful of hippies and new agers that still haven't gotten their feet to the ground after all those years. Slashdot editors should refuse to post stories that link to them.
On a more fundamental level, the whole premise around which the site is built, design will save the world, is woefully optimistic. Design won't save the world. Not even science & technology will, as long as it's in the hands of the same old greedy bastards. Only changes in society, attitude, life style might change the world. Relying on design, science, technology, god,... to save the world is merely an excuse not to work on the change that 's needed.
Except that it's not paper, which is usually made from ground-up trees. You guys should think further than clothing. There has been a lot of talk and hype about using bacteria to synthesize useful materials. More than anything else, this little stunt demonstrates that it's slowly getting feasible.
The material in question might find some more useful application than clothing. If not, some other "biotech" material eventually will.
Gen. Vautrinot: 'Maybe it's time to revise that draft mission statement of ours. I was reading/. the other day and people were making fun of it. You know what I mean; "and" followed by a semicolon, really?'
Gen. Alexander: 'I'd agree with you, Zan, but problem is, some "leet haxor" decided it would be cool to embed its MD5 hash into our logo. If we reword our mission statement, all our stationery has to be updated, which will be costly. There's no changing that mission statement.'
Hash functions are expressly designed to make this very difficult to do. Even though MD5 is not such a terrific hash function in the face of "recent" cryptographic advances and computer power, generating a mission statement that makes sense (clunkyly worded or not) and at the same time collides with something interesting would be one hell of a hard job. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Md5#Security
That's just silly. One property of salts it that they don't go airborne easily; it's thermodynamically unfavorable. Do coastside houses look like submarines? I think not.
The original article is the commencement speech at Stanford’s School of Medicine. It gives a bird's eye philosophical perspective on the state of the medical profession. As such, I like it.
What I don't like are the people here trying to derive a political message from it. Health care in the US is so much less cost-efficient than the other industrialized countries, countries that have equivalent or better health care and that face the same challenges. This discussion sounds like looking for excuses not to fix the broken health care system.
That doesn't make sense. I can read your comment, therefore your inability to post it has gone away. The site is still slashdotted. Ergo, the slashdotting of the site has outlived your inability to post.
Exactly how easy do you think it is to take out thousands of windmills, if not tens of thousands? While being pursued by the world's most powerful Navy, right in its home waters? Easier than attacking one or two coastal cities / power plants / oil rigs? I wouldn't think so.
Not to mention the fact that without the US' "oil addiction", it wouldn't have to start so many wars to secure its interests in oil-producing regions, and it would have a LOT less enemies in the first place!
I would swear every single time a New Scientist article appears on Slashdot, TFA either has a very crucial detail completely wrong, or is about a theory that is extremely controversial in its field, or is a "sciencevertisement" for a technique people have been using for decades. Even if we assume the Slashdot crowd is phenomenally good at catching them every single time they do something like this, it happens at a worrisome pace.
I'm acquiring a knee-jerk reflex to roll my eyes whenever I see a Slashdot post link to New Scientist. It's, like, the tabloid of Pop Sci.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to avoid getting reactions like that (or even be modded "troll"), it would be a good idea to be a bit more specific in your question. What you probably mean is "given that it's nearly impossible to track a meteor, especially if you're an amateur using an off-the-shelf mount, and that neither a telescope nor a mount with good tracking capabilities are helpful in capturing a panoramic image of the shower, what's the meteor shower got to do with this?"
Here's the original presentation of the gnome census. Most of the numbers discussed here come from slide 16 and 18.
http://www.slideshare.net/nearyd/gnome-census
I also don't agree with the claim that only 23.45% of contributions come from volunteers. There is also the 16.94% "unknown". Now, if you're working on Gnome for a company, you usually would want to list your affiliation. If you don't, maybe you're contributing to Gnome on company time without your bosses knowing, but such a situation should (arguably) be counted as "volunteer" work. But I speculate most of these unknowns are simply actual volunteers, who just skipped the question "which company do you work for", and didn't notice there was an option "none" (people usually are in a hurry when they fill in surveys). That would set an upper limit of 23.45%+16.94%=40.39% on the fraction of volunteers, and I feel the actual number is likely to be closer to this upper limit than to the lower limit (23.45%).
What really cracked me up is that parent is moderated "Insightful".
Well played, Mr. moderator, very well played.
The fact that he's an AC says nothing. If I were to make a statement that I know would be unpopular and that would make me sound elitist, I would also post as AC.
On topic: it probably also depends on which field you are in. I can easily imagine a smart and motivated learner willing to experiment learning all they need to know about computer science to make them a skilled software engineer/programmer on their own. In naturals science or [physical] engineering? Not so much.
Slip of the keyboard - I meant "Geneva protocol" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Protocol
And yes, parent got it right. No-one, civilian, soldier or terrorist, should be exposed to the risk that one of the lawyers survive being catapulted into the city. Imagine the sheer horror - you cannot even get out because of the siege.
"Pretty damn cheeky while they're charging for their software, which only inserts their punctuation through a hotkey."
Hint: In many cases, Sarcasm loses its usefulness if there's no ambiguity about it. &irony;
Your post is most unhelpful; you're claiming it's not a dialect, but you're not explaining why, nor what we should call it instead. Here's an interesting exercise for you: try, in the midsts of a conversation about a more interesting topic, to explain to an average American (with limited knowledge about the world) what Flemish is. In one simple, short and clear sentence, without digressing from the original conversation. Oh yeah, and you're not allowed to use the word "dialect".
Yeah, and to make them extra secure, we could make sure that only bank personnel can service them. You know what? We could build the device into a wall, so that the user only has access to a keyboard and a screen, and everything else is safely located at the other side of the wall, where only bank personnel can go. Yes yes, it would be very expensive to do this at every person's home. But guess what? People are not doing bank stuff all the time, so you could just build one at a central position and have the whole neighborhood share it!
*runs off to the USPTO*
News flash for kdawson: in science (not counting math), positives cannot be proven. Evidence for them can be provided, they can be "illustrated", "supported",... but not proven, only disproven. That's why even the most respected "laws of physics" formally have the status of "theory" (Note the difference between "theory" and "hypothesis" here: a hypothesis becomes a theory after it has been extensively tested and widely accepted by the scientific community.)
It is ironic that a majority of science stories on slashdot are posted by someone who has an incomplete understanding of science. Though it does explain why the average quality of science-related posts is so low.
Sounds like a clear violation of the Geneva conventions to me.
He got rightly modded down for suggesting that "greenies" are technically ignorant. Quite the opposite: I'm a life scientist, and an overwhelming majority of life scientists is environmentally conscious to some degree. That's because we can see exactly how humanity is screwing itself. One needs to be ignorant not to know or care.
That said, I hate inhabitat as much as you do. They give the green cause a bad name. Not only are they a cesspool of ignorance, they're also sensationalist and in every story, they consistently get one or two facts shamefully wrong. Their target audience probably consists of the handful of hippies and new agers that still haven't gotten their feet to the ground after all those years. Slashdot editors should refuse to post stories that link to them.
On a more fundamental level, the whole premise around which the site is built, design will save the world, is woefully optimistic. Design won't save the world. Not even science & technology will, as long as it's in the hands of the same old greedy bastards. Only changes in society, attitude, life style might change the world. Relying on design, science, technology, god,... to save the world is merely an excuse not to work on the change that 's needed.
Except that it's not paper, which is usually made from ground-up trees. You guys should think further than clothing. There has been a lot of talk and hype about using bacteria to synthesize useful materials. More than anything else, this little stunt demonstrates that it's slowly getting feasible.
The material in question might find some more useful application than clothing. If not, some other "biotech" material eventually will.
Gen. Vautrinot: 'Maybe it's time to revise that draft mission statement of ours. I was reading /. the other day and people were making fun of it. You know what I mean; "and" followed by a semicolon, really?'
Gen. Alexander: 'I'd agree with you, Zan, but problem is, some "leet haxor" decided it would be cool to embed its MD5 hash into our logo. If we reword our mission statement, all our stationery has to be updated, which will be costly. There's no changing that mission statement.'
...or by bureaucrat who thinks badly punctuated and difficult-to-read sentences make them look important/intelligent.
Hash functions are expressly designed to make this very difficult to do. Even though MD5 is not such a terrific hash function in the face of "recent" cryptographic advances and computer power, generating a mission statement that makes sense (clunkyly worded or not) and at the same time collides with something interesting would be one hell of a hard job. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Md5#Security
I see this as a big triumph of adaptic optics. This picture was not made by a space telescope, but by an earth-based one!
The last link points to this article. /. or what?
"THE FIRST POST - news and views that matter"
Is this site trying to parody
UserFriendly's law: a company can be a good workplace for IT staff or a good workplace for salespeople. You cannot have both at once.
That's just silly. One property of salts it that they don't go airborne easily; it's thermodynamically unfavorable. Do coastside houses look like submarines? I think not.
The original article is the commencement speech at Stanford’s School of Medicine. It gives a bird's eye philosophical perspective on the state of the medical profession. As such, I like it.
What I don't like are the people here trying to derive a political message from it. Health care in the US is so much less cost-efficient than the other industrialized countries, countries that have equivalent or better health care and that face the same challenges. This discussion sounds like looking for excuses not to fix the broken health care system.
That doesn't make sense. I can read your comment, therefore your inability to post it has gone away. The site is still slashdotted. Ergo, the slashdotting of the site has outlived your inability to post.
Oh wait... RFC2100...
Not to mention that astronomers typically like to work with exposure times of hours in order to capture enough light of faint starts and nebula...
Think of precession. Now think of what it would do to a liquid...
Oh please, not that faulty argument again!
Exactly how easy do you think it is to take out thousands of windmills, if not tens of thousands? While being pursued by the world's most powerful Navy, right in its home waters? Easier than attacking one or two coastal cities / power plants / oil rigs? I wouldn't think so.
Not to mention the fact that without the US' "oil addiction", it wouldn't have to start so many wars to secure its interests in oil-producing regions, and it would have a LOT less enemies in the first place!
I would swear every single time a New Scientist article appears on Slashdot, TFA either has a very crucial detail completely wrong, or is about a theory that is extremely controversial in its field, or is a "sciencevertisement" for a technique people have been using for decades. Even if we assume the Slashdot crowd is phenomenally good at catching them every single time they do something like this, it happens at a worrisome pace.
I'm acquiring a knee-jerk reflex to roll my eyes whenever I see a Slashdot post link to New Scientist. It's, like, the tabloid of Pop Sci.