It's naive to think that you can help the hungry by giving them food. It doesn't really work.
Saying poor people don't need telephones is like saying they don't need roads because you can't eat roads. But how can you get vaccines to remote areas without decent roads, and how can people access local markets?
What really poor people need is some way of making a decent living, not food aid - except in an emergency. Cell phones are spreading rapidly in South Asia right now among surprisingly poor people. Thea aren't individually owned, either groups buy them or they are bought by very small entrepreneurs as pay phones, often supported by micro lending.
Poor people sometimes save for weeks or months to make a single phone call. This is mentioned in passing in the sciam article. It may seem abstract, but it's reality in poor countries.
I think if I had been the poster I would have written "who has been unjustly hounded by the US government all his life" instead of "antisemitic" as the most interesting attribute of the former national hero.
Note for example that he is still being hounded for the sin of visiting Yugoslavia!
Bobby Fischer is a jerk and always was one, and his remark is typical. But I can see why he hates the American government.
As to "anti-semitic", its a word people like to throw around a lot. In this case it says more about the accuser than the accused. Even Arabs are often referred to as "anti-semitic"! I guess that's why they become suicide bombers... they hate themselves.
A non scientifitc meta benchmark
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Just from reading the first thirty posts or so, I notice that people who claim to use one app say it's fast, and people who say they use several at the same time say it's slow.
I have no idea, but the trend is noticeable.
Could be a memory problem, not a CPU problem. MAC memory is is crappy and $$$ (or used to be - I used to wholesale chips but got out 3 years ago).
At the risk of being all too philospychodelic, it's interesting to note that (as has often been said) you need new instruments to make new astronomic discoveries (eg telescope for the moons of Jupiter, radio telescopes for the Big Bang).
This thing about discovering new planets based on thought processes only a computer are capable of suggests that our brains just aren't capable of comprehending the universe.
I guess the SETI project won't bear fruit until the robots have liberated themselves from us... heh heh good luck guys, no sex drive no luck
"By his neezings the light doth shine, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning"
It's a quote from the book of Job, but it comes to mind from a book I read some decades ago called "Eyelids of the Morning: The Mingled Destinies of Crocodiles and Men" which is by and about a biologist who went to Lake Turkana (then Lake Rudolf) in East Africa and shot 500 crocodiles...
Anyway he hired locals (Turkana) to help him and though they were Flat-Earthists (and presumably Creationists) he explained to them in the course of some argument about whether the other side of Lake Turkana was the End of the World that the Russians had fired off a rocket with a dog in it that had gone around the world which they assumed meant off the End of the World, and their reaction was that it was certainly a great form of punishment, but wasn't it a waste just for a dog?
OK maybe it IS off topic, just free associating from the idea of boy groups in space...
No kidding folks, what happens when (not if) the satellite goes down? A titanic amount of energy is involved in this project. It would all be released in one big bang when the cable wrapped itself around the Earth. Geosync orbit is about 23,000 miles, isn't that about equal to the circumference?
"What the hell I don't live on the Equator" doesn't work, most of the cable would fall on the ocean, which has waves. (Insert gratuitous comparison to Hiroshima, Saudi oil reserves here.)
On the other hand, let's do the energy calculation. Where's all the energy for this disaster going to come from? Rocket fuel? Or has someone come up with an infinite extraterrestrial source of buckytubes?
Is she a cyborg? Haven't cyborgs existed since the Renaissance?
Wait a minute... Homo Erectus could get at the marrow the meat eaters left behind by cracking heavy marrow bones with a stone hand axe - which started this whole mess!
Richard Dawkins wrote a neat book called The Extended Phenotype(q.v.). Is a spider a cyborg because it uses a web?
Demonstrated by Morgenstern and von Neumann in "A Theory of Games and Economic Behavior", the book that defined the science.
The trick is to add a fictional extra player, who is awarded the negative of the cumulative score. The n player non-zero sum game "normalizes" to an n+1 player zero sum game.
In the 100 yard dash example, one player gets one point and nine get -1 giving a cumulative score of -8. If you award a new player, say the track, 8 points then the game becomes zero sum.
Why reinvent the wheel every time you want to build a car? If you read through the ads in a software engineering magazine, you're bound to come across one that asks this question. It's the favorite cliche for people trying to sell libraries of reuseable software.
When the first American astronauts arrived at the Mir space station, they were shocked to see what a bunch of pack rats the cosmonauts were. The cosmonauts pointed out how expensive it was to bring anything up from Earth, and said that their experience had shown that it was foolish to throw anything away, regardless of how marginal its value seemed. In the end the Russians convinced the Americans that they were right.
Some biologists were surprised to discover that 98% (or something like that ) of the human genome are "junk". But imagine Mir after a few billion years of habitation. At current rates of accumulation, having 98% percent of the mass of the station being junk would not be surprising at all.
Since space was short the cosmonauts probably threw out the stuff they really couldn't use. So a universal toolkit of trash was probably evolving. That would be very useful in the ISS. Gives garbage collection a whole new meaning
I agree with HiThere. VB runs reasonably fast, and it's very handy for quick scripting. For example, I love Excel and VB macros for deciphering simple codes.
But VB has lured legions of programmers into bad coding practices, and it is totally unsuitable for projects with more than three or four programmers. And the more you use it the less rational its "features" appear.
The point I was actually trying to make (but didn't, I admit) was that the web sites in question are mostly American. They'd get stomped in Germany.
I wasn't suggesting that the Americans were Nazis at the time. (Actually, there were plenty of "the only good Injun is a dead Injun" attitudes around, applying to sundry groups, but that wasn't my point.)
I just think it's funny that people complain about the Germans quashing the Nazis even tho all non Germans ignore everything about Germany except the Nazis. For example I know from first hand experience that correspondents for big American newspapers pay German speakers (which they aren't) to scan German newspapers for any mention of Nazis and nothing else.
I've also heard American soldiers ranting about the evils of gun control in Germany..huh huh, the Americans even banned butcher knives in Berlin and (altho everyone ignored them) I believe they were still illegal when I lived there in the 80s.
First the Americans ban the Nazi party, and then they criticize the German government for upholding that ban on the grounds of free speech. I wonder why it makes sense to fight WWII and not stomp the fascists on the home front.
As Bismark put it, it's not a good idea to witness the manufacture of laws and sausage.
All calendars now in use are based on the confusion resulting from the fact that
a) the sun is almost exactly 400 as big and 400 times as far away as the moon, so that the two are the same size in the sky and
b) the lunar cycle is almost exactly a thirteenth of the solar cycle.
A implies that B should be exact. Unfortunately, 28 x 13 = 364 so you end up about 1.25 extra days a year.
The week is a handy way to divide up a month, and everyone likes weeks (or at least weekends) so there's no hopes of dropping them.
But why have months at all? After all, no one gives a damn anymore about the lunar cycle any more - any dissenter plaese tell me off the top of his head how many days have passed since the last full moon was.
In Germany its common business practice to promise delivery in a given KW (Kalendarwoche). Works fine. Just adopt that practice and you there.
You know, "the container will arrive in Rotterdam in week 36 (if we're lucky)"
What about Easter? As I recall, it's the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox. How's 13 months gonna fix that? You still have the solar / lunar problem.
Plenty of Asian countries use two calendars at the same time. Japan and Taiwan both have two year numbers, for example (Japan based on the accession of the new Emperor, Taiwan based on the revolution in 1911).
And like Easter, dates like Chinese New Year wander.
Of all countries, India probably's got the biggest problem. No idea how many calendars sloshing around over there. The Indian government recommended to the UN in the '50s that a new calendar be adopted which had twelve months and an extra non- month week at the end of each quarter - seems more "human" than what's being offered here. Needless to say it was no go.
I really disagree with the claim that there are no arguments against changing. It'd be a huge pain, and people (remember them?) wouldn't like it.
During the French revolution they succeeded in adopting a decimal clock and calendar, but it was abandoned after a few years. They even debated abandoning the decimal system and replacing it with base twelve, but Karl-Friedrich Gauss squelched that debate by offering a compromise solution - base eleven! He had some really good arguments about the length of repeating decimals (or whatever the base eleven version would be called).
Re:Why the Ancient World Didn't get very far
on
The Renaissance
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· Score: 1
Actually the city of Rome itself was a joke by 150 AD, because its so hard to run an Empire from there, especially when your troops have to walk into battle. Milan, founded as a barracks, was the de facto capital of the West by then. Rome had two dangerous borders, a long one in the North (against the Germans) and in the East (against the Persians)The northeast corner is Constaninople, which is why Constantine moved there. No signs of wimpiness there
Re:The Cannon brought about the Renaissance
on
The Renaissance
·
· Score: 1
My guess is that there's a statistical correlation but no cause and affect there
The Zeppelin airship was a triumph of geekiness over common sense. The famous crash in America was the twenty-seventh disaster in a row... The amazing part was that the thing survived the first five trips before crashing and burning. Almost all the previous airships the company built exploded crashed or broke apart on their maiden flights. The Versailles Treaty banned them, creating an artificial demand for a stupid engineer-centric technology if there ever was one, but as soon as the thing was brought into commercial service, disaster struck.
The Renaissance comes a century later, and anyway, to be Marxist about it, progress is usually measurable in terms of increasing capital, and the Black Death surely bring that...
For some reason the Dutch hardly suffered at all from the Black Death... They were probably faster than the Italians in the early days, so it's sort of hard to argue that the Black Death caused the Renaissance
The Cannon brought about the Renaissance
on
The Renaissance
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· Score: 2
The Renaissance begins in 1453, when Ottoman cannons knocked down the walls of Constantinople, destroying the last remnant of the Roman Empire. The Era of "gunpowder empires" begins, in China (the Ming), the Middle East, all North Asia, the Moghuls in India, and the Europeans everywhere.
Big political units go hand in hand with cultural progress. Easy to see here on the Rhein, where hundred of castles were blown by kings impatient with local warlords.
The EU and the WTO are really a continuation of this trend.
Slashdot Mirror
Saying poor people don't need telephones is like saying they don't need roads because you can't eat roads. But how can you get vaccines to remote areas without decent roads, and how can people access local markets?
What really poor people need is some way of making a decent living, not food aid - except in an emergency. Cell phones are spreading rapidly in South Asia right now among surprisingly poor people. Thea aren't individually owned, either groups buy them or they are bought by very small entrepreneurs as pay phones, often supported by micro lending.
Poor people sometimes save for weeks or months to make a single phone call. This is mentioned in passing in the sciam article. It may seem abstract, but it's reality in poor countries.
Note for example that he is still being hounded for the sin of visiting Yugoslavia!
Bobby Fischer is a jerk and always was one, and his remark is typical. But I can see why he hates the American government.
As to "anti-semitic", its a word people like to throw around a lot. In this case it says more about the accuser than the accused. Even Arabs are often referred to as "anti-semitic"! I guess that's why they become suicide bombers... they hate themselves.
I have no idea, but the trend is noticeable.
Could be a memory problem, not a CPU problem. MAC memory is is crappy and $$$ (or used to be - I used to wholesale chips but got out 3 years ago).
At the risk of being all too philospychodelic, it's interesting to note that (as has often been said) you need new instruments to make new astronomic discoveries (eg telescope for the moons of Jupiter, radio telescopes for the Big Bang).
This thing about discovering new planets based on thought processes only a computer are capable of suggests that our brains just aren't capable of comprehending the universe.
I guess the SETI project won't bear fruit until the robots have liberated themselves from us... heh heh good luck guys, no sex drive no luck
"By his neezings the light doth shine, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning"
It's a quote from the book of Job, but it comes to mind from a book I read some decades ago called "Eyelids of the Morning: The Mingled Destinies of Crocodiles and Men" which is by and about a biologist who went to Lake Turkana (then Lake Rudolf) in East Africa and shot 500 crocodiles...
Anyway he hired locals (Turkana) to help him and though they were Flat-Earthists (and presumably Creationists) he explained to them in the course of some argument about whether the other side of Lake Turkana was the End of the World that the Russians had fired off a rocket with a dog in it that had gone around the world which they assumed meant off the End of the World, and their reaction was that it was certainly a great form of punishment, but wasn't it a waste just for a dog?
OK maybe it IS off topic, just free associating from the idea of boy groups in space...
"What the hell I don't live on the Equator" doesn't work, most of the cable would fall on the ocean, which has waves. (Insert gratuitous comparison to Hiroshima, Saudi oil reserves here.)
On the other hand, let's do the energy calculation. Where's all the energy for this disaster going to come from? Rocket fuel? Or has someone come up with an infinite extraterrestrial source of buckytubes?
heh
Wait a minute... Homo Erectus could get at the marrow the meat eaters left behind by cracking heavy marrow bones with a stone hand axe - which started this whole mess!
Richard Dawkins wrote a neat book called The Extended Phenotype(q.v.). Is a spider a cyborg because it uses a web?
The trick is to add a fictional extra player, who is awarded the negative of the cumulative score. The n player non-zero sum game "normalizes" to an n+1 player zero sum game.
In the 100 yard dash example, one player gets one point and nine get -1 giving a cumulative score of -8. If you award a new player, say the track, 8 points then the game becomes zero sum.
The software itself is an off the shelf interface stitched together to hide a junkyard of database and reporting software.
Turnover per package is relatively low because the market is messy and the customers are unimaginative and uncooperative.
At least games entertain millions of people.
When the first American astronauts arrived at the Mir space station, they were shocked to see what a bunch of pack rats the cosmonauts were. The cosmonauts pointed out how expensive it was to bring anything up from Earth, and said that their experience had shown that it was foolish to throw anything away, regardless of how marginal its value seemed. In the end the Russians convinced the Americans that they were right.
Some biologists were surprised to discover that 98% (or something like that ) of the human genome are "junk". But imagine Mir after a few billion years of habitation. At current rates of accumulation, having 98% percent of the mass of the station being junk would not be surprising at all.
Since space was short the cosmonauts probably threw out the stuff they really couldn't use. So a universal toolkit of trash was probably evolving. That would be very useful in the ISS. Gives garbage collection a whole new meaning
But VB has lured legions of programmers into bad coding practices, and it is totally unsuitable for projects with more than three or four programmers. And the more you use it the less rational its "features" appear.
I wasn't suggesting that the Americans were Nazis at the time. (Actually, there were plenty of "the only good Injun is a dead Injun" attitudes around, applying to sundry groups, but that wasn't my point.)
I just think it's funny that people complain about the Germans quashing the Nazis even tho all non Germans ignore everything about Germany except the Nazis. For example I know from first hand experience that correspondents for big American newspapers pay German speakers (which they aren't) to scan German newspapers for any mention of Nazis and nothing else.
I've also heard American soldiers ranting about the evils of gun control in Germany..huh huh, the Americans even banned butcher knives in Berlin and (altho everyone ignored them) I believe they were still illegal when I lived there in the 80s.
By the way, where'd you get that stuff about the motives of the French gov for abandoning the decimal system?
woops
And the Japanese named the das of the week after the (classical) planets, as in the European languages.
dropped it later tho
As Bismark put it, it's not a good idea to witness the manufacture of laws and sausage.
All calendars now in use are based on the confusion resulting from the fact that
a) the sun is almost exactly 400 as big and 400 times as far away as the moon, so that the two are the same size in the sky and
b) the lunar cycle is almost exactly a thirteenth of the solar cycle.
A implies that B should be exact. Unfortunately, 28 x 13 = 364 so you end up about 1.25 extra days a year.
The week is a handy way to divide up a month, and everyone likes weeks (or at least weekends) so there's no hopes of dropping them.
But why have months at all? After all, no one gives a damn anymore about the lunar cycle any more - any dissenter plaese tell me off the top of his head how many days have passed since the last full moon was.
In Germany its common business practice to promise delivery in a given KW (Kalendarwoche). Works fine. Just adopt that practice and you there.
You know, "the container will arrive in Rotterdam in week 36 (if we're lucky)"
What about Easter? As I recall, it's the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox. How's 13 months gonna fix that? You still have the solar / lunar problem.
Plenty of Asian countries use two calendars at the same time. Japan and Taiwan both have two year numbers, for example (Japan based on the accession of the new Emperor, Taiwan based on the revolution in 1911).
And like Easter, dates like Chinese New Year wander.
Of all countries, India probably's got the biggest problem. No idea how many calendars sloshing around over there. The Indian government recommended to the UN in the '50s that a new calendar be adopted which had twelve months and an extra non- month week at the end of each quarter - seems more "human" than what's being offered here. Needless to say it was no go.
I really disagree with the claim that there are no arguments against changing. It'd be a huge pain, and people (remember them?) wouldn't like it.
During the French revolution they succeeded in adopting a decimal clock and calendar, but it was abandoned after a few years. They even debated abandoning the decimal system and replacing it with base twelve, but Karl-Friedrich Gauss squelched that debate by offering a compromise solution - base eleven! He had some really good arguments about the length of repeating decimals (or whatever the base eleven version would be called).
Actually the city of Rome itself was a joke by 150 AD, because its so hard to run an Empire from there, especially when your troops have to walk into battle. Milan, founded as a barracks, was the de facto capital of the West by then. Rome had two dangerous borders, a long one in the North (against the Germans) and in the East (against the Persians)The northeast corner is Constaninople, which is why Constantine moved there. No signs of wimpiness there
My guess is that there's a statistical correlation but no cause and affect there
The Renaissance comes a century later, and anyway, to be Marxist about it, progress is usually measurable in terms of increasing capital, and the Black Death surely bring that...
Big political units go hand in hand with cultural progress. Easy to see here on the Rhein, where hundred of castles were blown by kings impatient with local warlords.
The EU and the WTO are really a continuation of this trend.