IIRC, MOND ran into some problems that it hasn't yet been able to solve. Doesn't mean some modified version won't work, of course.
FWIW, Dark Matter + Dark Energy seem to me to cry out for a different answer. But I'm not a cosmologist, so I don't feel obliged to come up with a new theory consistent with all extant evidence.
The thing is, the current theories, even if they're wrong with dark matter, they're "close" to whatever the real situation is because they work so well in most cases. That means the "correct' theory won't be too extremely different, or must at least reduce to the current theories for the special cases we have observed.
Well... that depends on what you mean by "too extremely different". If you accept that phlogiston was pretty close to the correct theory of combustion, then you are right. The predictions of the phlogiston theory were fairly close the the predictions of the current theory. But the mechanism was quite different. And in this case, also, the mechanism may well be quite different. Or maybe is *is* some undiscovered particle. But don't get fixated on that answer.
It matters because every time the (separate) gui library updates, the language gui is broken. It matters because calling external libraries is always flaky. In Python I've ended up going with tcl because of this. In some languages I've just given up.
If you're going to write something once and then forget about it, then it doesn't matter much that the library is separate. If it's going to keep being used, then it does. Breakage can be expensive. I suppose that it all depends upon your use case.
Fortran has been extensively rebuilt. It's main problem is the usual one: You need to drop into C to use independent libraries. There are attempts to make it easier, but there are serious impedance matching problems.
Julia shares these same problems, worsened by the fact that it's still an alpha release with not much community support. OTOH, it does appear to make parallelism much easier than Fortran does, with not too much overhead.
For me it looks ALMOST like the language I want. Unfortunately, the weaknesses render it a poor choice. E.g., I need a basic GUI capability. Julia would appear to require that I drop into C to achieve this.
OTOH, this *is* essentially an alpha release, not a beta. So I couldn't pick it anyway. But it *is* quite interesting. And it doesn't look as if it's solely for numerically intensive applications, though it may, indeed, be optimized for them.
For my purposes it just needs to be available in a way I can accept. Mint is fine for that purpose. I'm just no longer installing things on the bleeding edge. (I was, however, running Debian testing.) For that matter, if the Mate project puts together a deb and says that it works with Debian testing or Debian stable, than I'd trust that rather than install that abortion that Gnome3 leaves me with, and plausibly rather than use LXDE or whatever. (That "or whatever" is because I don't remember the exact name of the desktop manager I found as a "nearly as good" replacement for Gnome. It had a picture of a mouse for the main menu. I used it for a couple of weeks, but I do really prefer Gnome2. [OTOH, what I *really* prefer is KDE3. Pearson's trinity project keeps moving forwards, so maybe that's what I'll end up with.])
Well, I haven't actually tried it, but Gnome3 won't run on my system. So I'm rather glad that Mate is producing something that will be usable when Debian stable incorporates Gnome3.
(And the Gnome3 fallback to Gnome2 fallback mode is so eyetearingly ugly that I installed the stable branch, replacing the testing branch, to get away from it. Of course, what I'd really prefer is KDE3, but pearson seems to be rather slow in making that usable [under the name trinity], so I may end up with Mate. Or possibly LXDE or some such. I tried it for awhile, and it's usable, but I much prefer Gnome2.)
Past examples indicate that top management is much less likely to ask for evidence and proof than the IT staff. I suspect that this also applies to other specialty staff, such as accounting, technical, drafting, etc., but my only real knowledge is based on examples from IT.
I believe that you are far too charitable, and from where I sit it looks like there was systematic and intentional fraud from almost the lowest level up through the boards of directors. Often I can't offer a even semi-sound proof that it was fraud, other than "Only a moron wouldn't *know* that would result in deceitful transactions!", but if they knew about it, it was fraud. And I doubt that there are that many real morons in the finance business.
That's almost right, and certainly involved. But the real thing is that people are quite resistant to believing anything that would inconvenience them. So you'll even get physicists doubting global warming, though they ought to know about the greenhouse effect. But it's easy to doubt if you just refuse to consider the evidence, and it would be inconvenient to believe.
Why bother to bother getting a conviction, when you can achieve your aims by stealing things and then stonewalling?
Somehow I think they expect he should have been bribing more politicians.
N.B.: I'm not guessing whether or not he was technically guilty or not. I'm commenting on the process. It's sort of like RICO...if you get accused, the first thing they do is prevent you from being able to hire a good lawyer.
He didn't slide off the end, he was literally historically accurate. You could say that he used the wrong tense, but that wouldn't even hold up under analysis. Analysis shows that he was using "baby" metaphorically, so it didn't matter that the examples of real babies being killed are historic. The metaphoric babies are still being killed.
However, the problem with the argument is that often two sides will each be supporting their own metaphoric baby. In this case ANY decision will kill at least one of them, and often no decision, or a delayed decision, will end up killing both.
The legal system is not about justice. They don't even claim to be about justice anymore. Instead they claim to be following the rules. (Often they are.) So to lawyers and judges, legal cases are essentially high stakes gaming. With a variable scoring system.
You could be right...but there are an awful lot of posts by "Anonymous Coward".
And it doesn't matter. Kickstarter should provide a whitelist capability. In fact it sounds like they do, but don't allow any account that's been whitelisted to then be blacklisted, which is just stupid. (Granted, she should then be required to return their money.)
I wouldn't count on MS shaking in their boots over the DOJ. More likely the patents are not only weak, but about to expire, but then why did MS pay so much for them.
Clearly *something* is going on, but it's not at all clear what. Perhaps AOL threatened to sue MS? Or, alternatively, MS is up to something vile. Neither would be a surprise, and the target isn't necessarily FOSS.
FWIW, recent court decisions have made software patents a lot more questionable than previously (thankfully), and I'd assume that the patents were probably a load of garbage ("adding two numbers on a computer" kind of thing), except that MS paid considerable for them.
But don't count on the DOJ. It's politically driven, and MS has been paying "blackmail" to both parties. (If you don't like thinking of it as blackmail, call it bribes, but remember that MS didn't play those games until the first time the DOJ got involved. When the decision was clearly going to be against it, MS opened up with "campaign donations", and the decision was handed off to another judge who gave them a slap on the wrist. So I think blackmail or extortion is the better term.)
OK. You seem to know more about the subject than I do.
I reread the articles, and although one appeared to blame HFCS, a more careful reading showed that this was merely the medium of transmission used in the study. And in another place is said that the amount of pesticide used in the study (the Harvard one, I think) was no more than is typical of the ordinary background use.
So they *added* the pesticide the the HFCS used in the study to equal the background level in areas that they were not controlling.
Depends on how you figure it. You could blame Abe Lincoln, or you could blame the law clerk who wrote up the decision of Union Pacific vs. The United States. Good arguments could be made in either case, and in either case they were just reinforcing trends that were already present.
This, however, is something that beekeepers can directly address. All they need to do is stop feeding their bees syrup made from high fructose corn syrup.
It's not misrepresenting, though it is highlighting indirectly significant information.
The poison gets to the bees through High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). The poison gets into the HFCS from corn that's resistant to pesticide. The corn that's resistant to pesticide is grown from seeds sold by Monsanto. Ordinary corn wouldn't lead to this, because that much pesticide would have killed it. Ordinary sugar wouldn't lead to this, because it's not from a crop that's drenched in the implicated pesticide.
Check out the numbers. Keeping an old car running is usually much less polluting than replacing it with a new car, even if that car gets many more MPG. And the hybrids are much worse than the simple figures indicate, as you need to calculate in all the pollution caused by the construction of their batteries.
I understand why they applied for those patents, but they shouldn't get them. Those should count as obvious extensions once you are given a self-driving car.
OTOH, if they don't apply for the patents, someone else will. And since Google can justly apply for many patents on the self driving car, as long as any additional patents that are granted on the same invention are held by them, no major harm is done. But it would be much better for those patents to be denied because of prior art (literary only, of course) and obviousness. Then there would still be official record that those inventions had been made previously, but there would be no chance of them being sold off to a troll.
The posted speed limit is only significant if there isn't much traffic. If there is significant traffic, the safest speed is just slightly less than the average of what that other traffic is doing. Note that this speed is usually insanely dangerous, as the amount of time required to stop is such that you won't be able to. This is why freeways frequently have "chain-reaction" accidents.
IOW, I consider most drivers to be incompetent, and believe that they drive faster than is safe. But those who drive excessively slow are even worse. And the posted speed limit is useless with respect to safety, unless there are very few cars on the road.
There are those who agree with you that there will be no singularity. I, on the other hand, believe that we are currently in the middle of one. If we are quite lucky, we will live through it. I have no real idea what it would be like on the other side, but clearly this rate of change can't keep accelerating forever.
N.B.: The technological singularity is an ANALOGY to a mathematical singularity. It's not isomorphic. Just about nobody actually believes that we will reach an infinite rate of change. The question is "Will it turn logistic? Parabolic? Or will it crash and burn? And how fast will it get first?" And all of those positions have reasonable arguments in favor of various answers to them. Only some of them are at all desirable.
FWIW, I don't believe that a singularity is desirable, except in comparison to the alternatives. It is my feeling that if we don't reach a beyond-human level AI by the end of the century, then we will either have destroyed ourselves, or have totally crashed our civilization. And some forms of the singularity are more survivable.
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IIRC, MOND ran into some problems that it hasn't yet been able to solve. Doesn't mean some modified version won't work, of course.
FWIW, Dark Matter + Dark Energy seem to me to cry out for a different answer. But I'm not a cosmologist, so I don't feel obliged to come up with a new theory consistent with all extant evidence.
The thing is, the current theories, even if they're wrong with dark matter, they're "close" to whatever the real situation is because they work so well in most cases. That means the "correct' theory won't be too extremely different, or must at least reduce to the current theories for the special cases we have observed.
Well... that depends on what you mean by "too extremely different". If you accept that phlogiston was pretty close to the correct theory of combustion, then you are right. The predictions of the phlogiston theory were fairly close the the predictions of the current theory. But the mechanism was quite different. And in this case, also, the mechanism may well be quite different. Or maybe is *is* some undiscovered particle. But don't get fixated on that answer.
It matters because every time the (separate) gui library updates, the language gui is broken. It matters because calling external libraries is always flaky. In Python I've ended up going with tcl because of this. In some languages I've just given up.
If you're going to write something once and then forget about it, then it doesn't matter much that the library is separate. If it's going to keep being used, then it does. Breakage can be expensive. I suppose that it all depends upon your use case.
Fortran has been extensively rebuilt. It's main problem is the usual one: You need to drop into C to use independent libraries. There are attempts to make it easier, but there are serious impedance matching problems.
Julia shares these same problems, worsened by the fact that it's still an alpha release with not much community support. OTOH, it does appear to make parallelism much easier than Fortran does, with not too much overhead.
For me it looks ALMOST like the language I want. Unfortunately, the weaknesses render it a poor choice. E.g., I need a basic GUI capability. Julia would appear to require that I drop into C to achieve this.
OTOH, this *is* essentially an alpha release, not a beta. So I couldn't pick it anyway. But it *is* quite interesting. And it doesn't look as if it's solely for numerically intensive applications, though it may, indeed, be optimized for them.
For my purposes it just needs to be available in a way I can accept. Mint is fine for that purpose. I'm just no longer installing things on the bleeding edge. (I was, however, running Debian testing.) For that matter, if the Mate project puts together a deb and says that it works with Debian testing or Debian stable, than I'd trust that rather than install that abortion that Gnome3 leaves me with, and plausibly rather than use LXDE or whatever. (That "or whatever" is because I don't remember the exact name of the desktop manager I found as a "nearly as good" replacement for Gnome. It had a picture of a mouse for the main menu. I used it for a couple of weeks, but I do really prefer Gnome2. [OTOH, what I *really* prefer is KDE3. Pearson's trinity project keeps moving forwards, so maybe that's what I'll end up with.])
Well, I haven't actually tried it, but Gnome3 won't run on my system. So I'm rather glad that Mate is producing something that will be usable when Debian stable incorporates Gnome3.
(And the Gnome3 fallback to Gnome2 fallback mode is so eyetearingly ugly that I installed the stable branch, replacing the testing branch, to get away from it. Of course, what I'd really prefer is KDE3, but pearson seems to be rather slow in making that usable [under the name trinity], so I may end up with Mate. Or possibly LXDE or some such. I tried it for awhile, and it's usable, but I much prefer Gnome2.)
Past examples indicate that top management is much less likely to ask for evidence and proof than the IT staff. I suspect that this also applies to other specialty staff, such as accounting, technical, drafting, etc., but my only real knowledge is based on examples from IT.
I believe that you are far too charitable, and from where I sit it looks like there was systematic and intentional fraud from almost the lowest level up through the boards of directors. Often I can't offer a even semi-sound proof that it was fraud, other than "Only a moron wouldn't *know* that would result in deceitful transactions!", but if they knew about it, it was fraud. And I doubt that there are that many real morons in the finance business.
That's almost right, and certainly involved. But the real thing is that people are quite resistant to believing anything that would inconvenience them. So you'll even get physicists doubting global warming, though they ought to know about the greenhouse effect. But it's easy to doubt if you just refuse to consider the evidence, and it would be inconvenient to believe.
Bingo.
Why bother to bother getting a conviction, when you can achieve your aims by stealing things and then stonewalling?
Somehow I think they expect he should have been bribing more politicians.
N.B.: I'm not guessing whether or not he was technically guilty or not. I'm commenting on the process. It's sort of like RICO...if you get accused, the first thing they do is prevent you from being able to hire a good lawyer.
He didn't slide off the end, he was literally historically accurate. You could say that he used the wrong tense, but that wouldn't even hold up under analysis. Analysis shows that he was using "baby" metaphorically, so it didn't matter that the examples of real babies being killed are historic. The metaphoric babies are still being killed.
However, the problem with the argument is that often two sides will each be supporting their own metaphoric baby. In this case ANY decision will kill at least one of them, and often no decision, or a delayed decision, will end up killing both.
The legal system is not about justice. They don't even claim to be about justice anymore. Instead they claim to be following the rules. (Often they are.) So to lawyers and judges, legal cases are essentially high stakes gaming. With a variable scoring system.
You could be right...but there are an awful lot of posts by "Anonymous Coward".
And it doesn't matter. Kickstarter should provide a whitelist capability. In fact it sounds like they do, but don't allow any account that's been whitelisted to then be blacklisted, which is just stupid. (Granted, she should then be required to return their money.)
Perhaps. It's certainly a slap in the face to every desktop user.
No more than Gnome3 or Unity.
You mean like last time?
I wouldn't count on MS shaking in their boots over the DOJ. More likely the patents are not only weak, but about to expire, but then why did MS pay so much for them.
Clearly *something* is going on, but it's not at all clear what. Perhaps AOL threatened to sue MS? Or, alternatively, MS is up to something vile. Neither would be a surprise, and the target isn't necessarily FOSS.
FWIW, recent court decisions have made software patents a lot more questionable than previously (thankfully), and I'd assume that the patents were probably a load of garbage ("adding two numbers on a computer" kind of thing), except that MS paid considerable for them.
But don't count on the DOJ. It's politically driven, and MS has been paying "blackmail" to both parties. (If you don't like thinking of it as blackmail, call it bribes, but remember that MS didn't play those games until the first time the DOJ got involved. When the decision was clearly going to be against it, MS opened up with "campaign donations", and the decision was handed off to another judge who gave them a slap on the wrist. So I think blackmail or extortion is the better term.)
Thanks. For some reason (hah!) I've been have trouble finding that reference.
OK. You seem to know more about the subject than I do.
I reread the articles, and although one appeared to blame HFCS, a more careful reading showed that this was merely the medium of transmission used in the study. And in another place is said that the amount of pesticide used in the study (the Harvard one, I think) was no more than is typical of the ordinary background use.
So they *added* the pesticide the the HFCS used in the study to equal the background level in areas that they were not controlling.
My apologies.
Depends on how you figure it. You could blame Abe Lincoln, or you could blame the law clerk who wrote up the decision of Union Pacific vs. The United States. Good arguments could be made in either case, and in either case they were just reinforcing trends that were already present.
This, however, is something that beekeepers can directly address. All they need to do is stop feeding their bees syrup made from high fructose corn syrup.
It's not misrepresenting, though it is highlighting indirectly significant information.
The poison gets to the bees through High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS).
The poison gets into the HFCS from corn that's resistant to pesticide.
The corn that's resistant to pesticide is grown from seeds sold by Monsanto.
Ordinary corn wouldn't lead to this, because that much pesticide would have killed it.
Ordinary sugar wouldn't lead to this, because it's not from a crop that's drenched in the implicated pesticide.
So HFCS is a critical link.
No. The reason it's an acceptable spelling is that "buss" means to kiss very wetly and noisily. (Well, maybe not wetly.)
Check out the numbers. Keeping an old car running is usually much less polluting than replacing it with a new car, even if that car gets many more MPG. And the hybrids are much worse than the simple figures indicate, as you need to calculate in all the pollution caused by the construction of their batteries.
I understand why they applied for those patents, but they shouldn't get them. Those should count as obvious extensions once you are given a self-driving car.
OTOH, if they don't apply for the patents, someone else will. And since Google can justly apply for many patents on the self driving car, as long as any additional patents that are granted on the same invention are held by them, no major harm is done. But it would be much better for those patents to be denied because of prior art (literary only, of course) and obviousness. Then there would still be official record that those inventions had been made previously, but there would be no chance of them being sold off to a troll.
The posted speed limit is only significant if there isn't much traffic. If there is significant traffic, the safest speed is just slightly less than the average of what that other traffic is doing. Note that this speed is usually insanely dangerous, as the amount of time required to stop is such that you won't be able to. This is why freeways frequently have "chain-reaction" accidents.
IOW, I consider most drivers to be incompetent, and believe that they drive faster than is safe. But those who drive excessively slow are even worse. And the posted speed limit is useless with respect to safety, unless there are very few cars on the road.
There are those who agree with you that there will be no singularity. I, on the other hand, believe that we are currently in the middle of one. If we are quite lucky, we will live through it. I have no real idea what it would be like on the other side, but clearly this rate of change can't keep accelerating forever.
N.B.: The technological singularity is an ANALOGY to a mathematical singularity. It's not isomorphic. Just about nobody actually believes that we will reach an infinite rate of change. The question is "Will it turn logistic? Parabolic? Or will it crash and burn? And how fast will it get first?" And all of those positions have reasonable arguments in favor of various answers to them. Only some of them are at all desirable.
FWIW, I don't believe that a singularity is desirable, except in comparison to the alternatives. It is my feeling that if we don't reach a beyond-human level AI by the end of the century, then we will either have destroyed ourselves, or have totally crashed our civilization. And some forms of the singularity are more survivable.