Yes, LyX is a great tool. But when you travel, you don't always have the possibility (company computer without the program installed for example), but this works through the web so if you have a web connection you can at least get something done. I wouldn't leave a project on this website, but you can always download and keep the source on your computer when you get home and use whatever you want with it later.
Plus the collaboration tools aren't in LyX yet (though they will be in the near future supposedly).
For every situation there is the right tool. More tools in your box, the more you can do.
Well, perhaps, but I haven't seen any manufacturer make a tablet/smartphone that was EASY to repair. They are made as cheap as possible and are already obsolete by the time they are on the production line. Easy to repair are for things that last longer than two years.
Anything with very small parts and lots of glue/epoxy is tough to repair, not just this thing. When you are paying someone close to $50 or even $100 an hour to repair something, he is going to take a lot of time to get those parts out and new ones in. In the great scheme of things it's not worth it, as you can just buy a new device in the amount of time it takes him to repair it.
But most of the time the problems are actually software, not hardware - and people even "Repair" their ipads nowadays by just doing a reinstall (or restore or whatever it's called in iOS).
Progress means : movement towards an end. A progress bar is basically informing you when a process should stop.
Yet, it is impossible to have an algorithm that can predict when an arbitrary process will halt [q.v. Turing, 1936]. Granted if we know something about the process, we can know certain bounds to the termination of the process, but this is far from simple.
Certainly all valid points. Student business isn't that critical, but certainly your points make a valid argument for banning forwarding. Here it is not so big a deal if an email gets lost, as most homework assignments have to be given in by hand anyway. But certainly for a university going all digital, enforcement of using only uni IT services is a good move.
Maybe it wasn't clear, but the email addresses would look like this: 3456781929@university.edu. You could then add option to make a descriptive alias 'john.doe@university.edu' to point to that account.
Most students already have a primary email account nowadays, the school account will be mostly for school business - so make it linked to school business, makes everything on the IT side much easier. Give them options to forward automatically and one will complain what it looks like.
Here is the policy I set up at a university back when the world was a bit simpler, but the system worked well.
Firstly, don't use names as the account, this will already remove a lot of headaches.
Secondly, every university has a student number which is the key for most of the documents connected to the student. In my day this was the students Social Security number but I magine it is something else today. Use this number as the id, as it is really the id of the student internally to the computer system of the school. Students usually know this number well by the end of the year as they fill out forms with it.
You must remember that even if you have no duplicates now, you need to think ahead for when students leave the school and possibly keep their account for awhile. Thus many time more possibilities of duplicates according to name, but if you go by ID there will never be a problem, as it must be unique to the schools record.
If someone wants a more 'descriptive name', put it in as an alias. You will get almost no duplicates, and if there are you can handle the, on a one to one basis. If you are smart you can also sell these aliases....
I wouldn't recommend SS numbers nowadays due to privacy, but the principle is the same. The university where I work now uses the application number that is filled out automatically on every application accepted by the school, and allows you in the web-email interface to choose an alias if you want later. From what I see most students don't bother, they just forward their email to their gmail or yahoo account. .
It's just an advertisement for this new service. Add Apple hate, fan the flames and you get tons of visibility for nothing. Actually this is not so much a brilliant idea but rather smart astroturfing.
I know you are joking, but seeing how the universe is around 10^82 atoms, 640000 qbits (that is, holding 2^640000 states) definitely would be enough to transport the universe. Your mileage may vary of course, depending on what universe you want to teleport. 640k qbits is a hell of a lot of information.
Since Apple is paying for the infrastructure, it's actually quite good. You try paying for your own servers and bandwidth - you won't be making anything after 6 downloads.
The questions I proposed were not completely without foundation, and you noticed that I actually quoted an article. If you search Google you will get mostly fluff reponses like the article with no real arguments on the dynamic mechanisms that allow us to state that this particular rock actually came from Mars. The links you gave were not answers but just magical hand-waving: "look it up on Google, here are links" . Those links don't answer the objections.
The only real argument that can establish the non-earth origin is the material composition of the rocks. And yet now we see that their material composition is not like the mars that we have actually measured thanks to the NASA probes. But the article now claims that we must posit the hypothesis that Mars was somehow different in the past because of this ONE specimen. Actually it should be the other way around - we should question the hypothesis that this rock actually came from Mars. Similarly when they announced micro-fossils in a SNC meteorite, the burden of proof must lay on the argument of their Martian origin, which is hardly self-evident. Just saying that it is possible they came from Mars is not sufficient.
The only really convincing argument that SNC meteors are from Mars are the isotopic ratios of Oxygen present in the rocks. And yet this ratio can be explained by other mechanisms as quoted in the second article, if you would actually read it to the end.
As to the rest, the only reason I bother to post on Slashdot is for the discussion. I suppose Slashdot has simply lost its ability to question and reason scientifically. As a news source there are many others and better, but it was the ability to question and discuss the news that gave Slashdot value. But I guess that value is no longer to be found here.
So don't worry much, no need for me to come here and waste your time. Have fun with Google and whatever they want you to find, and please try not to think too much.
Well I do happen to know something of the topic, but thank you for your snide remarks. "Look it up" is the classic defense of a sectarian, not a scientist.
"Two major mechanisms of impact-related meteorite ejection from Mars have been proposed: (1) acceleration of fragments by a shock wave in the solid rock... and (2) acceleration of fragments by the gas produced in a strong impact (which can be oblique).
One should bear in mind that the initial size of the body determined by the time of exposure of its fragments to cosmic rays should be 15 m. Another limitation consists in that the mass of the impact-created lunar meteorites should be 2500 times that of the Martian ones and the mass of the latter, reach ~10^14 kg. In actual fact, of the SNC meteorites exceeds by a factor ~40 that of lunar ones. Taking into account the crystallization age (1.3 Gyr), it becomes very difficult to satisfy all these requirements for the case of Mars, since they call for ejection from a comparitively young (~200 Myr old) crater of diameter D=150-200 km. Such craters do not appear to exist on Mars, and there is no certainty in the presence of sufficiently young craters with D=100-150 km."
tl;dr : it is not at all certain that the SNC meteors came from Mars as there are phenomena that do not support this thesis. Another thesis is that they came from earth ejecta, and the observed data actually fits this model very well.
The article is very short on explanations. For instance:
1/ When they say 'Martian meteorite' do they mean that it actually came from the surface of mars or rather than it's general origin was near to the orbit of mars? 2/ What guarantees are there that this rock is actually from mars? 3/ If so, how can you explain the parent meteor escaping the gravity well of mars? If this piece of rock is about a kilogram, then its entry mass must have been be quite large. The meteorite in California that was tracked with radar (the Sutton Mill's meteorite in 2008) and later collected had an estimated mass of 40,000 kg but only about 1 kg was recoverable from pieces much smaller than the one in the story. 4/ Following this, it would seem an improbable event that a/ there would be some impact on mars that would send ejecta as large as 40000 kg out of mars orbit and that b/ this orbit would be towards the earth. Any impact that could send ejecta into escape velocity would almost have to be tangential to the surface, and even then it is difficult to see how such an impact could even produce large ejecta as the impact would skim more across the surface rather than into the interior of the planet. 5/ usually dating of the material and its mineral composition leads to a supposition that it is of planetary origin. And yet this rock has a different material composition than martian rocks, as per the article. Thus it seems that the entire hypothesis that it came from mars should actually be questioned instead of inferring that mars had more water than because of the composition of this meteorite.
Just how can they actually prove that the rock came from mars? It seems Occam's razor needs some sharpening.
Actually on the contrary. Your thumb is closer to 2 cm, a finger to 6 cm and so forth. You can look down a football field and see 100 meters. A kilometer is just 10 of those. A mile is actually quite difficult to see or measure intuitively. You walk around 4 kilometers an hour, and so you can easily know how long it will take you to get to the market. Plus your motor is measured in liters per 100 kilometers, so you can know how much the trip will cost very quickly. Liquid measurement is very easy - in fact a liter of water weighs exactly a kilogram, so you can cook using just a scale and don't need special measuring cups. The metric system is actually much more intuitive for everything, and I was born in the imperial system.
He might be remembering the propaganda of Carl Sagan who was always talking about Nuclear Winter on his science programs. It was a pretty popular theme to talk about the coming ice age, even into the late eighties. Indirectly it lead to many nuclear test band treaties. In any case much hype about something that didn't come about, in some part because of the hype.
Re:Web Server development
on
Perl Turns 25
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· Score: 1
Maybe not that difficult, but painful nonetheless. Like transcribing from one key to another in music and still trying to play live. It can be done, but really not my cup of tea. To bad slashdot doesn't do unicode, or I would give some examples. In any case, hats off to you if you can debug APL without difficulty !
Re:Web Server development
on
Perl Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
APL is write-only because you need a special keyboard to write APL. What a pain trying to correct a bug from a terminal without those characters! Perl at least sticks to ASCII characters, so you can debug and write perl from almost anywhere. Yet there is something about the information density of APL that is attractive - it is a piece of art, so like a sculptor you sort of chisel away at it. Perl is more of a painters language.
Except that parents offload their responsabilities
Well that is the crux of it. They actually can't offload their responsibilities, no more than the Government can give birth to their children. But how to have parents act like parents? There is the real problem. If there was a solution I'm sure we would have heard about it by now.
Real journalism matters. Whether it's Robert Fisk, Jeremy Bowen or Rania Abouzeid, the story's the same - these people go in to hellholes and risk their lives to get the news out. Your advertising from your blog won't even pay for the flak jacket.
With this I would agree with you entirely. My only point is that most newspapers are not doing what you describe - they are simply cut and paste from Reuters. The people you mentioned I haven't even heard of before to be honest, and the signal to noise ratio in modern news is so great that most people just turn it off. The fact is that real journalism does not imply a profit margin, and in fact usually works against it (no dangerous occupation is cheap). Since news is now a business, real journalism becomes rare and rare and it becomes rather entertainment instead as that is easier to sell. I would gladly be proven wrong, as information on what is going on is very important.
What you say would be true, but the fact is that newspapers don't really do any reporting now. Most news is actually just another way to advertise a new product or editorialize on some topic. Outlets like FoxNews are really just entertainment masquerading as news. The same could be said of all the major 24-hour news stations and weekly papers. I would gladly pay for a magazine, even online, if they actually did some reporting and not simply copy the Reuters feeds.
Even look at the newspapers on any given day, they are reporting the exact same events, even with the same clichés.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, LyX is a great tool. But when you travel, you don't always have the possibility (company computer without the program installed for example), but this works through the web so if you have a web connection you can at least get something done. I wouldn't leave a project on this website, but you can always download and keep the source on your computer when you get home and use whatever you want with it later.
Plus the collaboration tools aren't in LyX yet (though they will be in the near future supposedly).
For every situation there is the right tool. More tools in your box, the more you can do.
I wish I were. Nope, just a fan - sorry for the over enthusiasm.
Some other people also gave me by message these sites: http://www.scribtex.com/ as well as this one emulating Google docs: http://docs.latexlab.org/
Didn't know that all these services were available. Only found this by accident a few days ago and found it really useful, hence the story submission.
Well, perhaps, but I haven't seen any manufacturer make a tablet/smartphone that was EASY to repair. They are made as cheap as possible and are already obsolete by the time they are on the production line. Easy to repair are for things that last longer than two years.
Anything with very small parts and lots of glue/epoxy is tough to repair, not just this thing. When you are paying someone close to $50 or even $100 an hour to repair something, he is going to take a lot of time to get those parts out and new ones in. In the great scheme of things it's not worth it, as you can just buy a new device in the amount of time it takes him to repair it.
But most of the time the problems are actually software, not hardware - and people even "Repair" their ipads nowadays by just doing a reinstall (or restore or whatever it's called in iOS).
Progress means : movement towards an end. A progress bar is basically informing you when a process should stop.
Yet, it is impossible to have an algorithm that can predict when an arbitrary process will halt [q.v. Turing, 1936]. Granted if we know something about the process, we can know certain bounds to the termination of the process, but this is far from simple.
I would vote for those. Also Persephone would be a good choice.
Certainly all valid points. Student business isn't that critical, but certainly your points make a valid argument for banning forwarding. Here it is not so big a deal if an email gets lost, as most homework assignments have to be given in by hand anyway. But certainly for a university going all digital, enforcement of using only uni IT services is a good move.
Maybe it wasn't clear, but the email addresses would look like this: 3456781929@university.edu. You could then add option to make a descriptive alias 'john.doe@university.edu' to point to that account.
Most students already have a primary email account nowadays, the school account will be mostly for school business - so make it linked to school business, makes everything on the IT side much easier. Give them options to forward automatically and one will complain what it looks like.
Here is the policy I set up at a university back when the world was a bit simpler, but the system worked well.
Firstly, don't use names as the account, this will already remove a lot of headaches.
Secondly, every university has a student number which is the key for most of the documents connected to the student. In my day this was the students Social Security number but I magine it is something else today. Use this number as the id, as it is really the id of the student internally to the computer system of the school. Students usually know this number well by the end of the year as they fill out forms with it.
You must remember that even if you have no duplicates now, you need to think ahead for when students leave the school and possibly keep their account for awhile. Thus many time more possibilities of duplicates according to name, but if you go by ID there will never be a problem, as it must be unique to the schools record.
If someone wants a more 'descriptive name', put it in as an alias. You will get almost no duplicates, and if there are you can handle the, on a one to one basis. If you are smart you can also sell these aliases ....
I wouldn't recommend SS numbers nowadays due to privacy, but the principle is the same. The university where I work now uses the application number that is filled out automatically on every application accepted by the school, and allows you in the web-email interface to choose an alias if you want later. From what I see most students don't bother, they just forward their email to their gmail or yahoo account.
.
It's just an advertisement for this new service. Add Apple hate, fan the flames and you get tons of visibility for nothing. Actually this is not so much a brilliant idea but rather smart astroturfing.
And who are selling FLAC files? Most FLAC I've seen are from CD rips, so how do they sound better than cd's? No turning motor?
I know you are joking, but seeing how the universe is around 10^82 atoms, 640000 qbits (that is, holding 2^640000 states) definitely would be enough to transport the universe. Your mileage may vary of course, depending on what universe you want to teleport. 640k qbits is a hell of a lot of information.
Since Apple is paying for the infrastructure, it's actually quite good. You try paying for your own servers and bandwidth - you won't be making anything after 6 downloads.
The questions I proposed were not completely without foundation, and you noticed that I actually quoted an article. If you search Google you will get mostly fluff reponses like the article with no real arguments on the dynamic mechanisms that allow us to state that this particular rock actually came from Mars. The links you gave were not answers but just magical hand-waving: "look it up on Google, here are links" . Those links don't answer the objections.
The only real argument that can establish the non-earth origin is the material composition of the rocks. And yet now we see that their material composition is not like the mars that we have actually measured thanks to the NASA probes. But the article now claims that we must posit the hypothesis that Mars was somehow different in the past because of this ONE specimen. Actually it should be the other way around - we should question the hypothesis that this rock actually came from Mars. Similarly when they announced micro-fossils in a SNC meteorite, the burden of proof must lay on the argument of their Martian origin, which is hardly self-evident. Just saying that it is possible they came from Mars is not sufficient.
The only really convincing argument that SNC meteors are from Mars are the isotopic ratios of Oxygen present in the rocks. And yet this ratio can be explained by other mechanisms as quoted in the second article, if you would actually read it to the end.
As to the rest, the only reason I bother to post on Slashdot is for the discussion. I suppose Slashdot has simply lost its ability to question and reason scientifically. As a news source there are many others and better, but it was the ability to question and discuss the news that gave Slashdot value. But I guess that value is no longer to be found here.
So don't worry much, no need for me to come here and waste your time. Have fun with Google and whatever they want you to find, and please try not to think too much.
Well I do happen to know something of the topic, but thank you for your snide remarks. "Look it up" is the classic defense of a sectarian, not a scientist.
Quoting from an article you can read here : http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0204346.pdf
[page 4]
"Two major mechanisms of impact-related meteorite ejection from Mars have been proposed: (1) acceleration of fragments by a shock wave in the solid rock... and (2) acceleration of fragments by the gas produced in a strong impact (which can be oblique).
One should bear in mind that the initial size of the body determined by the time of exposure of its fragments to cosmic rays should be 15 m. Another limitation consists in that the mass of the impact-created lunar meteorites should be 2500 times that of the Martian ones and the mass of the latter, reach ~10^14 kg. In actual fact, of the SNC meteorites exceeds by a factor ~40 that of lunar ones. Taking into account the crystallization age (1.3 Gyr), it becomes very difficult to satisfy all these requirements for the case of Mars, since they call for ejection from a comparitively young (~200 Myr old) crater of diameter D=150-200 km. Such craters do not appear to exist on Mars, and there is no certainty in the presence of sufficiently young craters with D=100-150 km."
tl;dr : it is not at all certain that the SNC meteors came from Mars as there are phenomena that do not support this thesis. Another thesis is that they came from earth ejecta, and the observed data actually fits this model very well.
The article is very short on explanations. For instance:
1/ When they say 'Martian meteorite' do they mean that it actually came from the surface of mars or rather than it's general origin was near to the orbit of mars?
2/ What guarantees are there that this rock is actually from mars?
3/ If so, how can you explain the parent meteor escaping the gravity well of mars? If this piece of rock is about a kilogram, then its entry mass must have been be quite large. The meteorite in California that was tracked with radar (the Sutton Mill's meteorite in 2008) and later collected had an estimated mass of 40,000 kg but only about 1 kg was recoverable from pieces much smaller than the one in the story.
4/ Following this, it would seem an improbable event that a/ there would be some impact on mars that would send ejecta as large as 40000 kg out of mars orbit and that b/ this orbit would be towards the earth. Any impact that could send ejecta into escape velocity would almost have to be tangential to the surface, and even then it is difficult to see how such an impact could even produce large ejecta as the impact would skim more across the surface rather than into the interior of the planet.
5/ usually dating of the material and its mineral composition leads to a supposition that it is of planetary origin. And yet this rock has a different material composition than martian rocks, as per the article. Thus it seems that the entire hypothesis that it came from mars should actually be questioned instead of inferring that mars had more water than because of the composition of this meteorite.
Just how can they actually prove that the rock came from mars? It seems Occam's razor needs some sharpening.
I remember not long ago that they were saying that the Corvid meteoroids were ejecta from the Giordano Bruno impact. This was proven false: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1993JGR....98.9145H
Actually on the contrary. Your thumb is closer to 2 cm, a finger to 6 cm and so forth. You can look down a football field and see 100 meters. A kilometer is just 10 of those. A mile is actually quite difficult to see or measure intuitively. You walk around 4 kilometers an hour, and so you can easily know how long it will take you to get to the market. Plus your motor is measured in liters per 100 kilometers, so you can know how much the trip will cost very quickly. Liquid measurement is very easy - in fact a liter of water weighs exactly a kilogram, so you can cook using just a scale and don't need special measuring cups. The metric system is actually much more intuitive for everything, and I was born in the imperial system.
Actually fairly ironic considering the Republican mantra that private industry always does better than government....
He might be remembering the propaganda of Carl Sagan who was always talking about Nuclear Winter on his science programs. It was a pretty popular theme to talk about the coming ice age, even into the late eighties. Indirectly it lead to many nuclear test band treaties. In any case much hype about something that didn't come about, in some part because of the hype.
Maybe not that difficult, but painful nonetheless. Like transcribing from one key to another in music and still trying to play live. It can be done, but really not my cup of tea. To bad slashdot doesn't do unicode, or I would give some examples. In any case, hats off to you if you can debug APL without difficulty !
APL is write-only because you need a special keyboard to write APL. What a pain trying to correct a bug from a terminal without those characters! Perl at least sticks to ASCII characters, so you can debug and write perl from almost anywhere. Yet there is something about the information density of APL that is attractive - it is a piece of art, so like a sculptor you sort of chisel away at it. Perl is more of a painters language.
Fibonacci thinks so, and I think he is on to something.
Except that parents offload their responsabilities
Well that is the crux of it. They actually can't offload their responsibilities, no more than the Government can give birth to their children. But how to have parents act like parents? There is the real problem. If there was a solution I'm sure we would have heard about it by now.
Real journalism matters. Whether it's Robert Fisk, Jeremy Bowen or Rania Abouzeid, the story's the same - these people go in to hellholes and risk their lives to get the news out. Your advertising from your blog won't even pay for the flak jacket.
With this I would agree with you entirely. My only point is that most newspapers are not doing what you describe - they are simply cut and paste from Reuters. The people you mentioned I haven't even heard of before to be honest, and the signal to noise ratio in modern news is so great that most people just turn it off. The fact is that real journalism does not imply a profit margin, and in fact usually works against it (no dangerous occupation is cheap). Since news is now a business, real journalism becomes rare and rare and it becomes rather entertainment instead as that is easier to sell. I would gladly be proven wrong, as information on what is going on is very important.
What you say would be true, but the fact is that newspapers don't really do any reporting now. Most news is actually just another way to advertise a new product or editorialize on some topic. Outlets like FoxNews are really just entertainment masquerading as news. The same could be said of all the major 24-hour news stations and weekly papers. I would gladly pay for a magazine, even online, if they actually did some reporting and not simply copy the Reuters feeds. Even look at the newspapers on any given day, they are reporting the exact same events, even with the same clichés.