Oops, 2 people said that already (which I didn't see because of not clicking "load all comments"). That makes my parent post about as useful/interesting as the story itself.
Oh God, why can't I get laid, while any woman can choose to do so and be paid for it to boot?!
FTFY
Disclaimer: yeah, I probably do deserve to be modded down for being grossly offensive and insensitive to the plight of unattractive males who live in their mom's basement. Do your worst, I'll still be giggling like a madman.
Yes, scientists are notorious for assuming knowledge from their audience that may not be present. Here are a couple of hints for you: what do we know about correlation and causation? What might that imply in terms of transferring an observed correlation from the whole population to a non-randomly selected subpopulation?(*)
(*) In case this is gibberish to you to, tough luck, I don't feel like explaining. That, and you might want to consider taking your talking points to the Yahoo News or YouTube comment sections.
This is a week old account which has only posted on topics about the Google memo.
Is there a problem with that? A possible simple explanation would be that the memo - and all the offensive reactions to it on/. - spurred her into creating an account. And newbies don't get a karma boost, so if it made it all the way up to 5, I guess it deserved it. More than some other score:5 posts, to be sure.
Most of the posts appear to be badly copy/pasted.
I grant you copy/pasted - she said so herself - but the "poorly" could just be a display of unfamiliarity with slashdot's HTML-ish formatting, consistent with the account being new. That and not using the preview function. Shame on her and also on all slahdotters that regularly don't preview their posts. Oops, that seems to include me. Look, a squirrel! *sneaks away*
I tried to read it but it's an impenetrable wall of text.
Maybe try harder - while not everyone will agree with all her points, it's an interesting read nonetheless.
Also, I'm sorry to say so, but this statement is an invitation for the trolls that seem to have been following you around lately and like to poke (puerile) fun at your "reading skills". Then again, maybe you don't/shouldn't care.
The last time I tried Mate I was unsatisfied with it
I'm almost afraid to suggest it, but maybe you were just stuck with one of those ill-conceived themes a lot of distros currently ship as default with MATE?I'm saying this because I'm using Mate right now and my experience is almost identical to the old Gnome 2. That said, one of the first things I do after every installation is customize the desktop theme to be a bit more in line with the Gnome 2 of yore (old-fashioned looks be damned).
Slow news day,/. ? You could as well have titled this "Pensioner adherent of alternative explanation". More specifically, this is an (at least) decade-old proposed explanation of the Fermi paradox, among many others. Not to mention that the paradox itself is subject to debate; plug the right parameters in the Drake equation and there is no paradox....
So, nothing new to this story whatsoever - though it has lent itself to goodscience fiction (culture barbarian's link but I'm sure you guys can find "proper" classics illustrating my point).
The long wait on startup with multiple tabs open appeared several versions ago; since I often keep lots of tabs open, it was quite noticeable. So let's see: they made a regression, took a very long time to fix it, and now we're supposed to cheer? I can run an innovative software company like that...
This. The very existence of that flag in an ubiquitous utility that is commonly run even by end users (of at least some distros;-)) makes the following sentence in TFA sound quite ignorant at best (and dishonest at worst): With the Ryzen segmentation faults on Linux they are found to occur with many, parallel compilation workloads in particular -- certainly not the workloads most Linux users will be firing off on a frequent basis unless intentionally running scripts like ryzen-test/kill-ryzen.
Nitpick: if they really can make this into a practical, market-ready battery based on a (room temperature) ionic liquid, the product won't necessarily have the same properties as existing rechargeable alkalines. That said, I do think you're right; while things like cycle characteristics, self-discharge, internal resistance,... depend predominantly on electrolyte and separator, energy density depends more on electrode chemistry, and there's only so much you can get out of alkaline, as compared to lithium. Besides, even if somehow the whole battery can rival the energy density of a lithium battery, that just will come with the same safety issues: if you have that much energy in such a small volume and some fault will make it dissipate all as heat in a short timeframe, you're bound to have nasty problems. The only way to (largely) mitigate this is a really high internal resistance, which is generally an undesirable property for a battery.
So any new battery technology that wants to compete with lithium will either suffer from these safety issues to at least some degree, or have a lower energy density making it uncompetitive for use in smartphones etc... The summay does seem to be off the mark in that regard. But, as you point out, grid storage is a different ball game. And even for wheeled vehicles, a somewhat lower energy density isn't necessarily prohibitive because there's regenerative braking and a lot of the energy that does get lost goes into fighting aerodynamic friction rather than rolling resistance.
Let's see:
- Running a marathon is difficult and unpleasant
- There are championships in the discipline of running marathons
Ergo: Microsoft Office is difficult and unpleasant
Ergo: Microsoft Office is not user-friendly
(Disclaimer: yeah yeah, I know this is a textbook example of the fallacy of the converse. It's an attempt at humor.)
Spreadsheets are no doubt useful for quick and dirty ad-hoc calculations, and one can imagine a scientist running a limited data set through one
Ah, but you see, the vast majority of scientific papers do involve limited data sets, and yes, these have often been processed by nothing more than a spreadsheet. Building a special supercomputer for that would qualify as "premature optimization" (as well as an unbelievable waste of time) if there ever was such thing.
Though that spreadsheet may just as well have been Libreoffice calc - at least in some branches of science, FOSS is far more popular than in the "mainstream". Excel has zero special merit in this respect.
But to get back on topic, GP's point is probably that it's not a waste of time at all for kids to decently learn to use a spreadsheet - something I would strongly agree with. Believe it or not, but spreadsheet usage is a key "problematic skill" in some universities' student influx. (Where a "problematic skill" would in this context be defined at a relevant and important skill that is really below university level to teach so that the burden falls on the high schools, which unfortunately don't do a sufficiently good job at it. See also: writing skills, basic math.)
Hyperbole aside, I speculate this is at least in part due to the rise of the likes of Kickstarter. If I were to found a brand new startup, I would find the prospect of launching a crowdfunding campaign far more appealing than doing the traditional venture capitalist circuit. In the latter, I would have to morph my exciting idea into a business-bull^H^H^H^Hspin^H^H^H^Hspeak plan, pitch it again and again to people who - at best - only get the vaguest clue of what I actually want to do, until one of them decides to fund me over the next guy because my accent reminds them of an old business partner. And then I would likely get a deal with a lots of strings attached. Sure, launching a good crowdfunding campaign also takes a lot of effort, but at least I can speak to the part of the crowd that already has some interest in the subject, so my pitch would be more like: "This is the product I want to make, this is why it's exciting, this is why I can pull it off, and these are the perks you will get when becoming a backer." If done right, at least some genuinely interested people will pitch in, and the strings attached to the deal will be chosen by me.
An extra perk (for some business models) is that I get a crowd of tough beta testers who are genuinely interested and invested in the project and not afraid to tell me their opinion. I mean, not that it would ever cross my mind to abuse my esteemed benefactors as beta testers. In fact, forget that I brought it up at all.
This might have been true 5 years ago, but currently, the increase in light collection due to the large and fast (in an aperture sense) lens commonly found on DSLRs and high-end compacts is far, far greater than having a more sensitive (leave alone larger) sensor. Sensor area in particular is the new megapixel - the masses will flock to whatever has the highest value, regardless of whether the optics are matched to it, or any good at all.
Making really good photos in really challenging (especially low light) conditions is physically impossible with the tiny lenses on most phones. Because in the end, your S/N ration is limited by the number of photons your lens captures, and a modern, properly designed, good-quality digital camera (even a cell phone one) gets close enough to that limit so that only aperture area matters.
Your link doesn't appear to support the claims in your post.
Also, while life as a manufacturing worker in Germany isn't great, it easily beats the same in the US. Bear in mind that GDP per capita is an average. The fact that it's higher in the US doesn't mean all segments of society can spend more (leave alone have a happier, less stressful life). You'll find the inequality-adjusted Human Development Index paints a more nuanced picture...
Um, have you considered actually reading the posts you reply to and comment on? And while you're at it, proofreading your own posts may also help to avoid making the impression that you're either a child, under influence, or mentally ill.
Disclaimer: I'm neither endorsing nor criticising the writer's take on the subject; I was simply annoyed that TFA was so exceedingly vague about what conclusion exactly had been reached by which contingent of the EU government. Because "the European Union is expected to release new rules" does a grave injustice to the complex process through which such rules are decided upon.
I suspect it is cheaper to hire communist professors who got their degree in the second world, and while many of these people are very competent in their chosen fields, they often have ideals that are at odds with what mainstream America would consider "normal".
I call BS. Russia and China have stopped being communist, or even socialist, a long time ago; big money is ruling them just like any other place. I've been active in academia in the US for quite a while. My general experience is that first- and second-generation immigrants from "second world" countries tend to be more naive about "the American dream" than professors born in the US from US-born parents, who are typically staunchly leftist (of course, exceptions exist both ways). In fact, the latter are about as leftist as those from western Europe, where "social democracy" still means something (albeit much less so that, say, 15 years ago). They usually base their arguments on comparisons of the fucked-up US system with more sensible systems in other countries - the sort of thing "Joe Sixpack" is kept ignorant about. Can you really blame them for being well-traveled and having experienced first-hand how badly US free-market-indoctrination is a lie?
Besides, I also call BS because professors in "the crunchier departments like CS and physics" rarely express their political views in class. It doesn't fit with the topic, it risks alienating students whom you want to learn something about your actual field of study, and it generally just doesn't make a professional impression. So politics is limited to some joke / quip to keep students awake once per semester or so. Which hardly can be called "indoctrination".
Disclaimer: if you consider support for evolution, AGW, vaccination,... as "communist" (or even "political"), then sure, you'll have science professors teaching a "communist/political" agenda. But that's just them trying to do their jobs. For example, modern molecular biology is so deeply interwoven with evolution that you can't possibly be a successful graduate in that field and a young-earth creationist at the same time...
And the blades of the windmill go "whoosh whoosh whoosh"
whoosh whoosh whoosh
whoosh whoosh whoosh
and the blades of the windmill go "whoosh whoosh whoosh"...
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, 2 people said that already (which I didn't see because of not clicking "load all comments"). That makes my parent post about as useful/interesting as the story itself.
I'm a fat nerd and a movie buff, you insensitive clod.
Oh God, why can't I get laid, while any woman can choose to do so and be paid for it to boot?!
FTFY
Disclaimer: yeah, I probably do deserve to be modded down for being grossly offensive and insensitive to the plight of unattractive males who live in their mom's basement. Do your worst, I'll still be giggling like a madman.
That's absolute gibberish.
Yes, scientists are notorious for assuming knowledge from their audience that may not be present. Here are a couple of hints for you: what do we know about correlation and causation? What might that imply in terms of transferring an observed correlation from the whole population to a non-randomly selected subpopulation?(*)
(*) In case this is gibberish to you to, tough luck, I don't feel like explaining. That, and you might want to consider taking your talking points to the Yahoo News or YouTube comment sections.
It never stops amazing me how some people have nothing better to do than spinning the most far-fetched fantasies about people they come across online.
Oh wait... AC on /. Never mind, carry on.
This is a week old account which has only posted on topics about the Google memo.
Is there a problem with that? A possible simple explanation would be that the memo - and all the offensive reactions to it on /. - spurred her into creating an account. And newbies don't get a karma boost, so if it made it all the way up to 5, I guess it deserved it. More than some other score:5 posts, to be sure.
Most of the posts appear to be badly copy/pasted.
I grant you copy/pasted - she said so herself - but the "poorly" could just be a display of unfamiliarity with slashdot's HTML-ish formatting, consistent with the account being new. That and not using the preview function. Shame on her and also on all slahdotters that regularly don't preview their posts. Oops, that seems to include me. Look, a squirrel! *sneaks away*
I tried to read it but it's an impenetrable wall of text.
Maybe try harder - while not everyone will agree with all her points, it's an interesting read nonetheless.
Also, I'm sorry to say so, but this statement is an invitation for the trolls that seem to have been following you around lately and like to poke (puerile) fun at your "reading skills". Then again, maybe you don't/shouldn't care.
The last time I tried Mate I was unsatisfied with it
I'm almost afraid to suggest it, but maybe you were just stuck with one of those ill-conceived themes a lot of distros currently ship as default with MATE?I'm saying this because I'm using Mate right now and my experience is almost identical to the old Gnome 2. That said, one of the first things I do after every installation is customize the desktop theme to be a bit more in line with the Gnome 2 of yore (old-fashioned looks be damned).
Are you sure? Some sources say the exact opposite...
Slow news day, /. ? You could as well have titled this "Pensioner adherent of alternative explanation". More specifically, this is an (at least) decade-old proposed explanation of the Fermi paradox, among many others. Not to mention that the paradox itself is subject to debate; plug the right parameters in the Drake equation and there is no paradox....
So, nothing new to this story whatsoever - though it has lent itself to good science fiction (culture barbarian's link but I'm sure you guys can find "proper" classics illustrating my point).
Baaah!
FTFY.
faster startup when restoring multiple tabs
The long wait on startup with multiple tabs open appeared several versions ago; since I often keep lots of tabs open, it was quite noticeable. So let's see: they made a regression, took a very long time to fix it, and now we're supposed to cheer? I can run an innovative software company like that...
This. The very existence of that flag in an ubiquitous utility that is commonly run even by end users (of at least some distros ;-)) makes the following sentence in TFA sound quite ignorant at best (and dishonest at worst):
With the Ryzen segmentation faults on Linux they are found to occur with many, parallel compilation workloads in particular -- certainly not the workloads most Linux users will be firing off on a frequent basis unless intentionally running scripts like ryzen-test/kill-ryzen.
Nitpick: if they really can make this into a practical, market-ready battery based on a (room temperature) ionic liquid, the product won't necessarily have the same properties as existing rechargeable alkalines. That said, I do think you're right; while things like cycle characteristics, self-discharge, internal resistance,... depend predominantly on electrolyte and separator, energy density depends more on electrode chemistry, and there's only so much you can get out of alkaline, as compared to lithium. Besides, even if somehow the whole battery can rival the energy density of a lithium battery, that just will come with the same safety issues: if you have that much energy in such a small volume and some fault will make it dissipate all as heat in a short timeframe, you're bound to have nasty problems. The only way to (largely) mitigate this is a really high internal resistance, which is generally an undesirable property for a battery.
So any new battery technology that wants to compete with lithium will either suffer from these safety issues to at least some degree, or have a lower energy density making it uncompetitive for use in smartphones etc... The summay does seem to be off the mark in that regard. But, as you point out, grid storage is a different ball game. And even for wheeled vehicles, a somewhat lower energy density isn't necessarily prohibitive because there's regenerative braking and a lot of the energy that does get lost goes into fighting aerodynamic friction rather than rolling resistance.
Let's see:
- Running a marathon is difficult and unpleasant
- There are championships in the discipline of running marathons
Ergo: Microsoft Office is difficult and unpleasant
Ergo: Microsoft Office is not user-friendly
(Disclaimer: yeah yeah, I know this is a textbook example of the fallacy of the converse. It's an attempt at humor.)
Spreadsheets are no doubt useful for quick and dirty ad-hoc calculations, and one can imagine a scientist running a limited data set through one
Ah, but you see, the vast majority of scientific papers do involve limited data sets, and yes, these have often been processed by nothing more than a spreadsheet. Building a special supercomputer for that would qualify as "premature optimization" (as well as an unbelievable waste of time) if there ever was such thing.
Though that spreadsheet may just as well have been Libreoffice calc - at least in some branches of science, FOSS is far more popular than in the "mainstream". Excel has zero special merit in this respect.
But to get back on topic, GP's point is probably that it's not a waste of time at all for kids to decently learn to use a spreadsheet - something I would strongly agree with. Believe it or not, but spreadsheet usage is a key "problematic skill" in some universities' student influx. (Where a "problematic skill" would in this context be defined at a relevant and important skill that is really below university level to teach so that the burden falls on the high schools, which unfortunately don't do a sufficiently good job at it. See also: writing skills, basic math.)
Hyperbole aside, I speculate this is at least in part due to the rise of the likes of Kickstarter. If I were to found a brand new startup, I would find the prospect of launching a crowdfunding campaign far more appealing than doing the traditional venture capitalist circuit. In the latter, I would have to morph my exciting idea into a business-bull^H^H^H^Hspin^H^H^H^Hspeak plan, pitch it again and again to people who - at best - only get the vaguest clue of what I actually want to do, until one of them decides to fund me over the next guy because my accent reminds them of an old business partner. And then I would likely get a deal with a lots of strings attached. Sure, launching a good crowdfunding campaign also takes a lot of effort, but at least I can speak to the part of the crowd that already has some interest in the subject, so my pitch would be more like: "This is the product I want to make, this is why it's exciting, this is why I can pull it off, and these are the perks you will get when becoming a backer." If done right, at least some genuinely interested people will pitch in, and the strings attached to the deal will be chosen by me.
An extra perk (for some business models) is that I get a crowd of tough beta testers who are genuinely interested and invested in the project and not afraid to tell me their opinion. I mean, not that it would ever cross my mind to abuse my esteemed benefactors as beta testers. In fact, forget that I brought it up at all.
This might have been true 5 years ago, but currently, the increase in light collection due to the large and fast (in an aperture sense) lens commonly found on DSLRs and high-end compacts is far, far greater than having a more sensitive (leave alone larger) sensor. Sensor area in particular is the new megapixel - the masses will flock to whatever has the highest value, regardless of whether the optics are matched to it, or any good at all.
Making really good photos in really challenging (especially low light) conditions is physically impossible with the tiny lenses on most phones. Because in the end, your S/N ration is limited by the number of photons your lens captures, and a modern, properly designed, good-quality digital camera (even a cell phone one) gets close enough to that limit so that only aperture area matters.
Your link doesn't appear to support the claims in your post.
Also, while life as a manufacturing worker in Germany isn't great, it easily beats the same in the US. Bear in mind that GDP per capita is an average. The fact that it's higher in the US doesn't mean all segments of society can spend more (leave alone have a happier, less stressful life). You'll find the inequality-adjusted Human Development Index paints a more nuanced picture...
I'm still waiting for them to name one of their phones BLU-82. And for the batteries to turn out to be faulty.
...
I'll get my coat.
Um, have you considered actually reading the posts you reply to and comment on? And while you're at it, proofreading your own posts may also help to avoid making the impression that you're either a child, under influence, or mentally ill.
More verifiable version of story.
Disclaimer: I'm neither endorsing nor criticising the writer's take on the subject; I was simply annoyed that TFA was so exceedingly vague about what conclusion exactly had been reached by which contingent of the EU government. Because "the European Union is expected to release new rules" does a grave injustice to the complex process through which such rules are decided upon.
I suspect it is cheaper to hire communist professors who got their degree in the second world, and while many of these people are very competent in their chosen fields, they often have ideals that are at odds with what mainstream America would consider "normal".
I call BS. Russia and China have stopped being communist, or even socialist, a long time ago; big money is ruling them just like any other place. I've been active in academia in the US for quite a while. My general experience is that first- and second-generation immigrants from "second world" countries tend to be more naive about "the American dream" than professors born in the US from US-born parents, who are typically staunchly leftist (of course, exceptions exist both ways). In fact, the latter are about as leftist as those from western Europe, where "social democracy" still means something (albeit much less so that, say, 15 years ago). They usually base their arguments on comparisons of the fucked-up US system with more sensible systems in other countries - the sort of thing "Joe Sixpack" is kept ignorant about. Can you really blame them for being well-traveled and having experienced first-hand how badly US free-market-indoctrination is a lie?
Besides, I also call BS because professors in "the crunchier departments like CS and physics" rarely express their political views in class. It doesn't fit with the topic, it risks alienating students whom you want to learn something about your actual field of study, and it generally just doesn't make a professional impression. So politics is limited to some joke / quip to keep students awake once per semester or so. Which hardly can be called "indoctrination".
Disclaimer: if you consider support for evolution, AGW, vaccination,... as "communist" (or even "political"), then sure, you'll have science professors teaching a "communist/political" agenda. But that's just them trying to do their jobs. For example, modern molecular biology is so deeply interwoven with evolution that you can't possibly be a successful graduate in that field and a young-earth creationist at the same time...
That's news for me. Thanks for the tip, I'll have another look at it.
...all overhead.
Mod me redundant if you will - it was all worth it :)
And the blades of the windmill go "whoosh whoosh whoosh"
whoosh whoosh whoosh
whoosh whoosh whoosh
and the blades of the windmill go "whoosh whoosh whoosh"...