I don't give a damn how such problems are solved, but you've only two choices - solve them or suffer them.
Yes, the guy who drinks too much scotch has a problem. He has only two choices: solve it or suffer from it. The complete lack of logic in your post comes when you fail to distinguish between his taking action and society's taking action. Part of this illogic is shown by your careless use of the pronoun "you," when I personally don't have a problem with eating too many Big Macs or drinking too much scotch.
If you don't solve your own "personal problems", you are expecting your descendants to do it for you.
If Joe puts too many hamburgers in his mouth, it doesn't make his descendants get fat. Again you can't seem to draw the distinction between individual and collective responsibility. By the way, the continual use of the the pronoun "you" starts to give your arguments a flavor of ad hominem.
It's much harder to lie to yourself and others, when the evidence is held up in plain sight. If you weren't lying to yourself, then why so keen on outsiders fixing your crap after you're dead? What don't you want to see?
And now the descent into ad hominem arguments is complete.
So if you want a nation worth living in, and the adults won't fix their own (or their children's) self-destructive cycles, who do you suggest does fix it?
Some people drink too much scotch, in a self-destructive cycle. Who do I suggest should fix it? Nobody. What makes you think every personal problem can and should be fixed by someone?
If nobody is willing to actually OWN their responsibility, to the point where the nation suffers (loss of productivity = loss of revenue and loss of GDP, loss of mental function = loss of progress and loss of investment), then surely since the Government is for the people and doing nothing is against the people, the Government must step in.
This argument can be used to institute total control over every aspect of anyone and everyone's life. Just because someone's behavior can reduce GDP, that doesn't mean that I have a God-given right to make them stop that behavior.
From a little bit of web surfing ([1], [2]), the impression I get is that there is a huge range of variability in how ecologically good or bad paper production is. Recycled paper (like newsprint) is much better than non-recycled, because it costs a lot less energy to produce, causes a lot less water pollution to produce, and keeps more paper out of landfills. Loggers like to say that they practice sustainable forestry, but some logging operations are actually a lot more sustainable than others. In some cases, the amount of carbon being sequestered in trees is kept constant, because the trees of a certain size are just being steadily replaced with more trees that grow to the same size before being harvested; but in other cases, older, larger trees are harvested, and replaced with young ones that contain a lot less carbon.
However, I would REALLY like to be able to grab a low powered, spare, X86 computer and run it as a router. Dump all the issues with "flashing" and just find a good set of hardware I could run that was powerful enough I didn't have to worry so much about memory or CPU getting in the way.
Yeah, this thought has occurred to me as well. The thing is, it would definitely eat up a lot of space on a shelf. Also, you don't find too many garage-sale or hangar-queen x86 systems that are energy-efficient, quiet, and able to run a recent (i.e., supported) OS without hassles. And then you have to find a network card for it that has 4 ethernet ports and a wifi transceiver. It's not really lack of memory or CPU that's the issue. You *could* engineer a good router with 32 Mb of memory and an ARM CPU. The problem is just that nobody's been *interested* in putting together the necessary combination of software and hardware to make a high-quality system of this type.
DD-WRT isn't as open as it could be: http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/columns/article.php/3816236
This is the reason that I'm currently running openwrt+gargoyle on my wrt54g.
Gargoyle (the browser-based interface) actually isn't all that great -- very bare-bones.
My experience is that the real problem with consumer-grade routers has very little to do with the quality or openness of the software. The real problem I've always had with the damn things is that the hardware seems to be crap. I've been through three models, and it's always been the same story. Some people seem to have better luck with them, but mine lock up once or twice a week and need to be power-cycled. People told me to get one of the older wrt's, which had more memory, so I did. That's what I have now, and it's not really any better. I've run factory firmware, dd-wrt, and openwrt; none of them were measurably better or worse than the others. People told me that many routers were very sensitive to power glitches, and I should get an uninterruptible power supply. Did that, didn't help.
Actually, X does start but I there's a run condition in their Upstart configuration that sometimes cause the the VT to stay on the VT1. You can just press [ctrl] [alt] [F7] to get to the X session for now.
Hmm...thanks for the info, but that doesn't seem to be the bug I'm experiencing. Ctrl-alt-f7 doesn't get me to a working X session.
For those of us who use only text, paying for usenet is incredibly cheap. When my ISP quit offering usenet, I paid some piddling amount of money to astraweb.com and got 25 Gb worth of usenet access. Two years later, I've only used some miniscule fraction of that 25 Gb. Actually, I'm happier now than I was before. Back when my ISP was still supposed to be providing usenet access, it was unreliable, and when I would call their tech support, I would invariably get somebody who didn't know what usenet was. I got one guy who kept saying that I would have to call the Usenet Company and take it up with them.
This isn't the only video problem in the Lucid Lynx betas. Since upgrading, I've been having a problem where x.org sometimes fails to start up when I boot. Presumably this is a separate problem from the one described in TFA, since you wouldn't expect to see a memory leak's effects showing up at boot time.
Jaunty and Karmic were really terrible releases, IMO. The good news for me is that sound, which broke when I upgraded to Jaunty, is now working for me again with Lucid. I'm hoping that Lucid gets nice and stable over the long lifetime it will have as an LTS release. In the past, I'd been upgrading ubuntu steadily rather than waiting for the next LTS, mainly because I wanted my apps upgraded. That was such a miserable experience that I'm planning not to do it anymore; I'll just stay with Lucid until the next LTS.
I like debian and ubuntu better than the other OSS systems I've used (Mandrake, Red Hat, FreeBSD), but this close tie-in between updating apps and updating the OS can really be a pain. The OS-level tweaking has never made my life any better. As a user, I couldn't care less about stuff like OSS versus ALSA. I would really love it if ubuntu would focus more on fixing bugs in the OS while keeping applications up to date, but not gratuitously breaking stuff in the OS just because they want to be on the cutting edge.
Another thing can be a drag about ubuntu is that they aren't very careful at all about keeping Gnome separate from the underlying OS. Anyone who uses a WM other than Gnome with ubuntu is going to run into lots of things that don't work properly, because the developers always seem to feel free to make changes without testing them on any other WM. For example, here is a bug in xsplash. It causes problems for people who aren't using Gnome. You know you're in trouble when you have functions whose names begin with "temporary_hack..." This one was not a bug in a beta, BTW, but a bug in a real release.
Every time people ask why we fund the space agencies, here is your answer.
Ask any scientist about the scientific value of uncrewed satellites and space probes, and they'll tell you they're very valuable. Ditto for economic value; weather satellites, etc., are worth billions.
It's crewed spaceflight that is getting inappropriate levels of funding from governments. That's because governments see it as effective nationalistic propaganda.
I like Larry and the rest of the crew, but I think we can confidently say that Ruby is an evolution from Perl. It used to be that CPAN was a big advantage, but ruby gems have come along pretty well since then. And there's a lot to be said for the Rails framework, even more in 3.0 .
My experience is that the quality of ruby's implementation has a long way to go before it's comparable to perl's. Here is a bug report I filed back in 2007 -- still open, three years later. I've never experienced bugs like this in perl.
A couple of my coworkers were talking recently about Kindles and iPads. I told them about the DRM. Neither of them knew what DRM stood for, so I had to explain. Neither of them had heard of the infamous incident involving Orwell's 1984. Neither of them knew about the history of DRM'd media becoming unplayable within 5 years after people buy it, because the company running the DRM dies or abandons the project.
Once people are educated about the issues, then it's up to them. If they buy a locked-down device, that's their decision. They know what they're getting into. We all buy coffee pots and wristwatches without any expectation that we'll be allowed to load arbitrary software into their CPUs. Everybody just has to draw their own individual line between the devices where they care about lockdown and the devices where they don't.
The crunchgear article has some major logical flaws. The author states, "Lastly, I would like to humbly thank Apple, Sony, Microsoft, and all the others, for creating wonderful devices which I plan to enjoy to the fullest extent." In other words, he's bought these locked-down devices, and now he has to find some way to justify buying them, even though he's unhappy with the EULAs. "A popular objection is that one doesn't have to buy the devices that happen to be wrapped up in restrictive systems or deliberately limited. Vote with your wallet, right? [***] Sure, and even when you jailbreak or mod, you are doing just that. You bought the device most suited to your needs." At the point where I inserted the [***] there is a major gap in his logic. He's paid money to these companies. He has voted with his wallet. He's cast his vote in favor of locked-down devices. He didn't buy the device most suited to his needs. He bought a device that was unsuited to his needs, and then modified it in order to suit his needs. He also ignores the very real practical consequences of modding and jailbreaking. The manufacturer is almost certainly never going to give him warranty service, and some of them may actually intentionally or unintentionally brick his device when it phones home for software updates.
Here are a couple of proposals that I'd consider more realistic. Both of these really do involve voting with your wallet. (1) If there are no options that avoid DRM and lockdowns, don't buy. This is my current attitude about the Kindle and iPod. I'll buy one when there is a non-DRM'd library of books available for it that is roughly the same size as Amazon's current catalog. (2) Buy the lesser of two evils. E.g., I believe Android is significantly less locked down than iPhone, so if I were choosing between the two, I'd buy an Android.
I just had the experience of starting up my recently upgraded copy of openoffice on my linux box and seeing an oracle logo in the startup window. Feels kind of strange, like having your mom's underwear mixed in with your girlfriend's in the laundry basket.
I realize that TFA is about OpenSolaris, but when it comes to mysql and openoffice, it's always seemed to me that the only real reason those projects received so much attention over the last decade was that they got there first-est with the most-est. It's not like mysql is the only OSS database on the market, or the best technically. When it comes to openoffice, I'm getting kind of tired of having to apologize for it. It just isn't a very good office suite in terms of usability, quality, or features. And it's an infamously unhealthy OSS project in terms of the ugliness of the codebase and the lack of success in working with developers outside Sun/Oracle.
So maybe it's a good thing that Oracle bought Sun, because it will allow the OSS community to step back and reassess their focus. Competition is good. It's not healthy that the OSS world has drifted into a near-monoculture of mysql and openoffice.
You seem to be assuming that cancer treatment has made great strides since 1970. Actually it hasn't.
Daniel Dvorkin wrote:
It has, whether you want to admit it or not. Are you going to dismiss the ACS as a shill for the health care industry? Here (PDF file) is a pretty comprehensive overview; I direct your attention particularly to the "Trends in 5-year relative survival rates" table on page 18.
I guess we have different definitions of "great strides." The general 5-year survival rate for all cancers in the 70's was 50%. Today it's 66%. I wouldn't consider that "great strides." I would consider it very marginal progress.
If you're diagnosed with cancer, feel free to restrict yourself to the level of treatment that was available in 1970. Be sure to let us know how it works out for you. But you'd better do it quickly, because odds are you won't have very long.
Two problems with your argument:
You seem to be assuming that cancer treatment has made great strides since 1970. Actually it hasn't. I can understand how you'd get the impression that it has, because that's the relentless PR drumbeat of the medical establishment. E.g., in my newspaper I see ads with healthy young people holding up notes on pieces of paper with messages like "Dear Cancer -- We are so over. -- Colleen." The message is that if you go to that particular hospital, they'll cure your cancer. Actually most cancers have pretty much the same prognosis today they did in 1970. The list of cancers that was incurable in 1970 and is curable today is extremely short. In many cases, all the new treatments do is give you an extra month of living in excruciating pain. Many people dying of cancer get treatment #1, which fails, then treatment #2, which also fails, and so on. By the time you get to treatment #3 or #4, essentially you're just a sacrificial animal being used to churn money through the healthcare industry.
I never advocated ceasing research on cancer. I advocated changing the focus: more basic research and less rush-job attempts to find new treatments. If research had had the focus I'm advocating for the last 40 years, I claim that the state of the art in cancer treatment today would be *better* than it is, not worse.
The fundamental problem is that the practice of medicine is usually not sufficiently based on evidence. This is why we need terms like "evidence-based medicine." If you think about it, what would be the alternative? "Voodoo-based medicine?" "Prayer-based medicine?" "Wishful-thinking-based medicine?" The examples I quoted in the GP post (PSA, mammograms for young women, increased fiber) are all scientific hypotheses that were acted on first, and only later tested (and found to be false). But the power of wishful thinking is enormous, hence the effectiveness of the PR campaigns in convincing people that cancer has become a treatable disease since 1970.
The war on cancer and the war on drugs are pretty similar in certain ways. Both date back to Richard Nixon, ca. 1970. Both are vast, expensive projects of the federal government. Both have entrenched political/financial constituencies that want the federal money to keep flowing. Both have taken much, much longer and accomplished much, much less than Nixon and his contemporaries anticipated.
When it comes to cancer, the hype about prevention, early detection, and treatment has vastly overrun the actual medical gains. We were told for decades that eating lots of fiber would prevent colon cancer, but the first carefully designed study on this topic shows that it doesn't. We were told that PSA tests would save lives by allowing early treatment of prostate cancer; actually, the first good double-blind study showed that it saved no lives at all (while making many men incontinent and/or impotent). We were told that extending screening for breast cancer to younger women would produce better outcomes, but actually it turns out that it doesn't. In general, modern imaging techniques pick out tons of abnormalities than patients then demand to have treated, whether or not they would ever have caused a problem. People thought that personal genomics would allow individuals to get better prevention and treatment, but it turns out that there really don't seem to be any common mutations that predispose large numbers of people to a high risk of a particular cancer.
What we really need is more fundamental research on the biology of cancer. These half-assed attempts to find a quick answer have turned out to be mostly fruitless. It's like trying to send men to the moon without knowing Newton's laws of motion. We don't understand basic things like whether many cancers are caused by chromosomal abnormalities or whether the chromosomal abnormalities are caused by the cancers. While we're waiting for the fundamental biology knowledge to get figured out, we could concentrate on convincing people not to smoke tobacco.
Perl 6 is mainly usable, and some form of it is being used in production at multiple sites. It's just not ready for public "launch" yet. If you really want it, you can get it. Perl6.org has it.
The thing is, perl 5 is a mature language with a mature, high-quality implementation. The last time I ran into a bug in the main implementation of perl 5 was about 8 years ago. Perl 5's implementations have all kinds of crazy features, e.g., you can run it on MacOS 9, and I can make a complete Windows executable of a perl app on my linux box, without even having access to a Windows machine. The collection of Perl 5 modules on CPAN is a mixed bag, but CPAN is mature enough that you can pretty much tell from ratings, comments, and commit histories whether a particular module is high in quality and safe to hitch your wagon to.
All of this quality makes me stay with perl, even though python and ruby have prettier syntax.
Perl 6 has many years to go before it reaches this level of quality. First they have to get a feature-complete, debugged release out, and update the O'Reilly book so it describes the language in the actual form it ends up in. Then the whole community has to go through all the years of work required to bring the perl 5 implementation up to the same high standard of quality as perl 5. The thing is, by the time that happens, python and ruby will have matured a lot more. I'm not even sure I would switch from perl 5 to perl 6. I might switch from perl 5 to ruby. I like ruby, but my experience so far is that it just isn't mature enough.
Perl 6 was also originally supposed to give us a pseudocode that would be shared with other languages. That was, for me, the main reason to be excited about it 10 years ago. The fact that progress has been so slow has meant that the other language communities have given up on cooperating on that idea, so it's not going to happen. That makes me a lot less excited about perl 6 than I was back when I first heard about it -- which was when my now-teenaged daughter was three years old.
I'm very interested in this topic because I've spent a fair amount of time getting together cheapo linux boxes for my lab classroom at a community college. (The school supplies 7 windows machines, and if that's all I had, then I'd often have four or even five students sharing one computer to make a graph.)
The first thing that surprises me is that he seems to be advocating doing this by buying parts and putting together a system. I can usually get a decent used PC for $120-150 from various sources (Good Will, swap meet, garage sales). Putting together a complete system from new parts for $200 seems to me like quite a feat. I feel better about the environmental aspects of reusing parts rather than buying all-new parts. Used hardware is where linux really shines compared to windows. Buying a used windows box is a losing proposition. You get all their crapware, all their misconfigurations, all their viruses,...
What I would love to hear about is video. The slashdot review says he recommends using onboard video. Okay, so how do I go about finding a mobo with onboard video that doesn't require binary-blob drivers. E.g., the system I'm typing this on has a Gigabyte GA-M61P-S3 mobo, which has nVidia GeForce 6100 onboard. The binary blob driver from nvidia has worked fairly well for the last few years, but recently after upgrading to the latest (beta) of ubuntu it's started having problems. The solution I would love would be to get video (probably an external card) that is openly documented and well supported by open-source drivers. Nvidia doesn't do that; nv is old and unsupported, and nouveau is not yet ready for real-world use. AMD/ATI has a laudable attitude, but the impression I get is that the open-source community hasn't yet risen to the challenge of producing usable open-source drivers for a lot of newer ATI cards. Is Intel the best option? I just haven't ever encountered a low-cost mobo on the shelf at Fry's that had Intel onboard video. Is Intel not involved in the low-end consumer mobo market?
Taking the morse code out of it takes away the learning and the challenge, and also the feeling of accomplishment.
I got my amateur extra class ham license in the 1980's, back when there was still a CW (Morse code) requirement. Can't remember what the required speed was... maybe 20 wpm?
Although having to learn it wasn't any big barrier for me, IMO it was a good decision to drop the requirement. Note the/. summary: "Nearly 700,000 Americans have ham radio licenses -- up 60 percent from 1981, a generation ago." This is pretty misleading. (1) The elimination of the CW requirement has lowered the barrier to entry. If the CW requirement was still in place, I'm sure the number of people licensed would be much lower. (2) The population of the U.S. has grown in the last 29 years. (3) The average age of hams is waaaay higher than it used to be. Some people have retained their licenses and kept operating. Others (like me) have retained their licenses but are no longer on the air.
As far as the argument that it "takes away the learning and the challenge, and also the feeling of accomplishment" -- this is a completely bogus justification. They could require new hams to learn all kinds of obsolete communication technologies, including quill pens and carrier pigeons. I'm sure people could get a great feeling of accomplishment from the learning and the challenge associated with being able to write beautiful gothic lettering on parchment. But why should the FCC be dictating that they learn that *particular* skill?
There's the argument that the testing kept bad operators off the air, because you had to make some effort in order to learn to pass the tests. This is reasonable to some extent, but it doesn't follow that one of the requirements has to be Morse code.
And the argument that Morse code is the most bandwidth-efficient and power-efficient method of radio communication is also bogus. With current technology, the most efficient method would actually be to send a CW signal using some other method of digital modulation, with a computer chip doing the encoding and another computer chip doing the decoding. Morse code encoded by hand and decoded by ear is no longer the *best* technology by any criterion; it's simply the *oldest* technology for radio communication. It's cool with me if people want to keep on operating CW. It's also cool with me if people participate in Civil War battle reenactments.
Unfortunately, ham radio is a dying hobby. Within 20 years, we'll probably see a drastic drop in the number of licensees as the baby boomers start to die. Then the government will probably auction off the spectrum to the highest bidder, and we'll lose a valuable method of emergency communication. It will be a pity.
What is the draw and use of this stuff? Not in a snarky sense, just that I'm half-way curious and ready to be pulled in.
Back when I got my ham license, in 1980, the internet didn't exist, and long-distance phone calls were extremely expensive. My parents were divorced, and ham radio was a great way to keep in touch with my father. It was also really exciting back then to be able to talk to people in places like Japan or Mexico; without the internet, there was basically no other way to do that except by getting a pen pal or something.
Those motivations have evaporated in the last 30 years, and that's one of the reasons I'm no longer active as a ham.
The main justification I hear quoted these days for the continuing existence of ham radio is emergency communications. That's a great justification for continuing to dedicate that spectrum to hams, rather than auctioning it off to corporations. However, I don't find it enough of a justification to continue operating as a ham myself.
If you have strong electronics skills, then ham radio offers a unique opportunity to tinker and play around on the radio spectrum. You can build your own antenna, bounce radio signals off the moon. Back in the 80's, a lot of people were experimenting with sending digital signals over the airwaves -- something that you couldn't accomplish at that time using the internet, because the internet didn't exist. There are no other radio bands where it's legal to do this kind of thing. E.g., one of the reasons that the technical details on wifi equipment is generally unavailable to the public is that the manufacturers are afraid that if they make the specs public, people will figure out ways to use the equipment to do illegal things.
I'd love to hear about an observed star like this, but at the same time I'm very skeptical of this prediction. We've created strange quarks in particle accelerators, but they decay in 10^-10 seconds. So the prior theory (that they may exist for a brief instant as a stage in the star's collapse) seems to correlate more closely to actual observation. The new theory suggests a way for the star to obtain equilibrium, keeping the quarks in that state while burning them.
A couple of things to note here. (1) You're discussing this as if this was a calculation predicting the existence of strange quark stars. It's not. Predictions of strange quark stars date back at least a couple of decades. This paper is predicting the existence of something weirder than a strange quark star. (2) The short half-life of strange particles in accelerator experiments is something that the authors of the paper know about; their calculation used the standard model of particle physics, which already describes those short half-lives. There are good reasons to suspect that the situation might be different in bulk matter at high pressure. We just don't know for sure.
>> As always with physics, you have a pretty huge margin of error.
> As always with cosmology, you have a pretty huge margin of error.
>Fixed that for you.
Seriously, that's just a few orders of magnitude off. Seen the error bars on intergalactic distances?
Despite the parent post's snideness, the GP is basically right. Parent poster: (1) It's not just "a few" order of magnitude off, it's 14 orders of magnitude. That's a lot, by any standard in science. (2) The paper is not about cosmology, it's about astrophysics. (3) Although this is not about cosmology, your perception of cosmology as a low-precision science is about 15 years out of date. Cosmology is currently enjoying a golden age of high-precision measurements. For example, the Hubble constant is now known to a precision of a few percent, whereas 20 years ago there were still people disagreeing to each other by factors of 2. (4) Intergalactic distances aren't particularly relevant here, but anyway the ladder of cosmic distance scales isn't uncertain to anything like 14 orders of magnitude.
And by the way, could we let the "fixed that for you" meme die? It's rude, and it's getting old.
As a physicist, I feel that this is a little far out. It assumes violation of the conservation laws for baryon number and lepton number. They claim that this nonconservation is actually predicted by a loophole in the standard model, which may be true, but it's never actually been observed -- if anyone observed such a violation experimentally, they'd definitely get the Nobel prize.
It's also built on a particular model of quark-quark interactions. (The strong nuclear force is not an interaction for which we have an exact formula. All we have is various models of it.) All the predictions are therefore going to be dependent on this model, as well as on the other approximations they have to make. People have predicted other weird objects, such as quark stars, using similar models, and the predictions have turned out to be very hard to pin down in any model-independent way. Some theorists use different methods, and come out with completely different predictions. Nor has any really compelling experimental evidence turned up for quark stars, although there are a couple of candidate objects that seem too dense to be ordinary neutron stars. If there's no solid evidence for quark stars, it seems like quite a stretch to go beyond that and predict things about even more exotic objects. The landscape is littered with predictions of exotic objects along these lines: quark stars, strange stars, black stars, gravastars, fuzzballs, boson stars, q-balls,...
They recently revised their estimate of the lifetime of these objects, making it ~10^7 years rather than a fraction of a second (only 14 orders of magnitude different). Even though 10^7 years is fairly long, it's really not very long on cosmic timescales, so we would expect these to be fairly rare and hard to find, even if they did exist.
Someday in the distant future we might live in a post-racial society, and when that far-off day arrives, then your point (and the others of your ilk) will make sense. Good luck living that long.
You seem to be equating race-blindness by the government with race-blindness by society. There is no reason that one should require the other. Society treats ugly people differently than it treats beautiful people, but that doesn't mean that the law should treat ugly people differently than it treats beautiful ones.
If you do not fill it out completely, the census bureau is required to contact you by phone if possible, by mail if not, and by door if you do not respond. It cost approx $50 per door they knock on, and about $4 if you simply fill out the form. Do you really want to spend the $46 more? They are required by LAW to collect this. Your refusal to fill out the form does NOT change that.
If the law requires them to collect this information, then it's a bad law. The law should be color-blind. If the law requires them to spend $50 to collect information that they shouldn't be collecting anyway, then it's bad that the law requires money to be wasted.
yes they DO need to know your race so that when they draw districting lines that ACCOUNT for your race, and ensure that your general racial beliefs have equal representation, especially where races concentrate themselves willingly. it;s also important to know the racial background so that school districts can appropriately draw boundaries and bus routs to avoid segregation and ensure the most effective MIX of students.
This all assumes a certain set of political opinions. I don't share your political opinions. I think the law should be color-blind. As far as segregation of schools, my opinion is that the big segregation issue is economic segregation, which will still be there regardless of efforts to end racial segregation.
The quote in the slashdot summary doesn't advocate refusing to fill it out. It advocates not filling anything out other than the number of residents, which is all that's needed in order to determine congressional districts, etc.
If they don't know facts about, say, the social and financial background of their constituents, how can they govern effectively?
The slashdot summary is about the use of racial information. The government doesn't need to know what race I consider myself to be in order to govern effectively.
To give a hypothetical example, it would be like if you were a neilsen family but refused to fill out info about the tv shows that you liked and then complained when they got canceled.
No, a correct analogy would be if you volunteered to participate int he Neilsen ratings, filled out the information about the TV shows you watched, but refused to give Neilsen any information about your race.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the guy who drinks too much scotch has a problem. He has only two choices: solve it or suffer from it. The complete lack of logic in your post comes when you fail to distinguish between his taking action and society's taking action. Part of this illogic is shown by your careless use of the pronoun "you," when I personally don't have a problem with eating too many Big Macs or drinking too much scotch.
If Joe puts too many hamburgers in his mouth, it doesn't make his descendants get fat. Again you can't seem to draw the distinction between individual and collective responsibility. By the way, the continual use of the the pronoun "you" starts to give your arguments a flavor of ad hominem.
And now the descent into ad hominem arguments is complete.
Some people drink too much scotch, in a self-destructive cycle. Who do I suggest should fix it? Nobody. What makes you think every personal problem can and should be fixed by someone?
This argument can be used to institute total control over every aspect of anyone and everyone's life. Just because someone's behavior can reduce GDP, that doesn't mean that I have a God-given right to make them stop that behavior.
From a little bit of web surfing ([1], [2]), the impression I get is that there is a huge range of variability in how ecologically good or bad paper production is. Recycled paper (like newsprint) is much better than non-recycled, because it costs a lot less energy to produce, causes a lot less water pollution to produce, and keeps more paper out of landfills. Loggers like to say that they practice sustainable forestry, but some logging operations are actually a lot more sustainable than others. In some cases, the amount of carbon being sequestered in trees is kept constant, because the trees of a certain size are just being steadily replaced with more trees that grow to the same size before being harvested; but in other cases, older, larger trees are harvested, and replaced with young ones that contain a lot less carbon.
Yeah, this thought has occurred to me as well. The thing is, it would definitely eat up a lot of space on a shelf. Also, you don't find too many garage-sale or hangar-queen x86 systems that are energy-efficient, quiet, and able to run a recent (i.e., supported) OS without hassles. And then you have to find a network card for it that has 4 ethernet ports and a wifi transceiver. It's not really lack of memory or CPU that's the issue. You *could* engineer a good router with 32 Mb of memory and an ARM CPU. The problem is just that nobody's been *interested* in putting together the necessary combination of software and hardware to make a high-quality system of this type.
DD-WRT isn't as open as it could be: http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/columns/article.php/3816236 This is the reason that I'm currently running openwrt+gargoyle on my wrt54g. Gargoyle (the browser-based interface) actually isn't all that great -- very bare-bones.
My experience is that the real problem with consumer-grade routers has very little to do with the quality or openness of the software. The real problem I've always had with the damn things is that the hardware seems to be crap. I've been through three models, and it's always been the same story. Some people seem to have better luck with them, but mine lock up once or twice a week and need to be power-cycled. People told me to get one of the older wrt's, which had more memory, so I did. That's what I have now, and it's not really any better. I've run factory firmware, dd-wrt, and openwrt; none of them were measurably better or worse than the others. People told me that many routers were very sensitive to power glitches, and I should get an uninterruptible power supply. Did that, didn't help.
Hmm...thanks for the info, but that doesn't seem to be the bug I'm experiencing. Ctrl-alt-f7 doesn't get me to a working X session.
For those of us who use only text, paying for usenet is incredibly cheap. When my ISP quit offering usenet, I paid some piddling amount of money to astraweb.com and got 25 Gb worth of usenet access. Two years later, I've only used some miniscule fraction of that 25 Gb. Actually, I'm happier now than I was before. Back when my ISP was still supposed to be providing usenet access, it was unreliable, and when I would call their tech support, I would invariably get somebody who didn't know what usenet was. I got one guy who kept saying that I would have to call the Usenet Company and take it up with them.
This isn't the only video problem in the Lucid Lynx betas. Since upgrading, I've been having a problem where x.org sometimes fails to start up when I boot. Presumably this is a separate problem from the one described in TFA, since you wouldn't expect to see a memory leak's effects showing up at boot time.
Jaunty and Karmic were really terrible releases, IMO. The good news for me is that sound, which broke when I upgraded to Jaunty, is now working for me again with Lucid. I'm hoping that Lucid gets nice and stable over the long lifetime it will have as an LTS release. In the past, I'd been upgrading ubuntu steadily rather than waiting for the next LTS, mainly because I wanted my apps upgraded. That was such a miserable experience that I'm planning not to do it anymore; I'll just stay with Lucid until the next LTS.
I like debian and ubuntu better than the other OSS systems I've used (Mandrake, Red Hat, FreeBSD), but this close tie-in between updating apps and updating the OS can really be a pain. The OS-level tweaking has never made my life any better. As a user, I couldn't care less about stuff like OSS versus ALSA. I would really love it if ubuntu would focus more on fixing bugs in the OS while keeping applications up to date, but not gratuitously breaking stuff in the OS just because they want to be on the cutting edge.
Another thing can be a drag about ubuntu is that they aren't very careful at all about keeping Gnome separate from the underlying OS. Anyone who uses a WM other than Gnome with ubuntu is going to run into lots of things that don't work properly, because the developers always seem to feel free to make changes without testing them on any other WM. For example, here is a bug in xsplash. It causes problems for people who aren't using Gnome. You know you're in trouble when you have functions whose names begin with "temporary_hack..." This one was not a bug in a beta, BTW, but a bug in a real release.
Ask any scientist about the scientific value of uncrewed satellites and space probes, and they'll tell you they're very valuable. Ditto for economic value; weather satellites, etc., are worth billions.
It's crewed spaceflight that is getting inappropriate levels of funding from governments. That's because governments see it as effective nationalistic propaganda.
My experience is that the quality of ruby's implementation has a long way to go before it's comparable to perl's. Here is a bug report I filed back in 2007 -- still open, three years later. I've never experienced bugs like this in perl.
A couple of my coworkers were talking recently about Kindles and iPads. I told them about the DRM. Neither of them knew what DRM stood for, so I had to explain. Neither of them had heard of the infamous incident involving Orwell's 1984. Neither of them knew about the history of DRM'd media becoming unplayable within 5 years after people buy it, because the company running the DRM dies or abandons the project.
Once people are educated about the issues, then it's up to them. If they buy a locked-down device, that's their decision. They know what they're getting into. We all buy coffee pots and wristwatches without any expectation that we'll be allowed to load arbitrary software into their CPUs. Everybody just has to draw their own individual line between the devices where they care about lockdown and the devices where they don't.
The crunchgear article has some major logical flaws. The author states, "Lastly, I would like to humbly thank Apple, Sony, Microsoft, and all the others, for creating wonderful devices which I plan to enjoy to the fullest extent." In other words, he's bought these locked-down devices, and now he has to find some way to justify buying them, even though he's unhappy with the EULAs. "A popular objection is that one doesn't have to buy the devices that happen to be wrapped up in restrictive systems or deliberately limited. Vote with your wallet, right? [***] Sure, and even when you jailbreak or mod, you are doing just that. You bought the device most suited to your needs." At the point where I inserted the [***] there is a major gap in his logic. He's paid money to these companies. He has voted with his wallet. He's cast his vote in favor of locked-down devices. He didn't buy the device most suited to his needs. He bought a device that was unsuited to his needs, and then modified it in order to suit his needs. He also ignores the very real practical consequences of modding and jailbreaking. The manufacturer is almost certainly never going to give him warranty service, and some of them may actually intentionally or unintentionally brick his device when it phones home for software updates.
Here are a couple of proposals that I'd consider more realistic. Both of these really do involve voting with your wallet. (1) If there are no options that avoid DRM and lockdowns, don't buy. This is my current attitude about the Kindle and iPod. I'll buy one when there is a non-DRM'd library of books available for it that is roughly the same size as Amazon's current catalog. (2) Buy the lesser of two evils. E.g., I believe Android is significantly less locked down than iPhone, so if I were choosing between the two, I'd buy an Android.
I just had the experience of starting up my recently upgraded copy of openoffice on my linux box and seeing an oracle logo in the startup window. Feels kind of strange, like having your mom's underwear mixed in with your girlfriend's in the laundry basket.
I realize that TFA is about OpenSolaris, but when it comes to mysql and openoffice, it's always seemed to me that the only real reason those projects received so much attention over the last decade was that they got there first-est with the most-est. It's not like mysql is the only OSS database on the market, or the best technically. When it comes to openoffice, I'm getting kind of tired of having to apologize for it. It just isn't a very good office suite in terms of usability, quality, or features. And it's an infamously unhealthy OSS project in terms of the ugliness of the codebase and the lack of success in working with developers outside Sun/Oracle.
So maybe it's a good thing that Oracle bought Sun, because it will allow the OSS community to step back and reassess their focus. Competition is good. It's not healthy that the OSS world has drifted into a near-monoculture of mysql and openoffice.
I wrote:
Daniel Dvorkin wrote:
I guess we have different definitions of "great strides." The general 5-year survival rate for all cancers in the 70's was 50%. Today it's 66%. I wouldn't consider that "great strides." I would consider it very marginal progress.
Two problems with your argument:
The fundamental problem is that the practice of medicine is usually not sufficiently based on evidence. This is why we need terms like "evidence-based medicine." If you think about it, what would be the alternative? "Voodoo-based medicine?" "Prayer-based medicine?" "Wishful-thinking-based medicine?" The examples I quoted in the GP post (PSA, mammograms for young women, increased fiber) are all scientific hypotheses that were acted on first, and only later tested (and found to be false). But the power of wishful thinking is enormous, hence the effectiveness of the PR campaigns in convincing people that cancer has become a treatable disease since 1970.
The war on cancer and the war on drugs are pretty similar in certain ways. Both date back to Richard Nixon, ca. 1970. Both are vast, expensive projects of the federal government. Both have entrenched political/financial constituencies that want the federal money to keep flowing. Both have taken much, much longer and accomplished much, much less than Nixon and his contemporaries anticipated.
When it comes to cancer, the hype about prevention, early detection, and treatment has vastly overrun the actual medical gains. We were told for decades that eating lots of fiber would prevent colon cancer, but the first carefully designed study on this topic shows that it doesn't. We were told that PSA tests would save lives by allowing early treatment of prostate cancer; actually, the first good double-blind study showed that it saved no lives at all (while making many men incontinent and/or impotent). We were told that extending screening for breast cancer to younger women would produce better outcomes, but actually it turns out that it doesn't. In general, modern imaging techniques pick out tons of abnormalities than patients then demand to have treated, whether or not they would ever have caused a problem. People thought that personal genomics would allow individuals to get better prevention and treatment, but it turns out that there really don't seem to be any common mutations that predispose large numbers of people to a high risk of a particular cancer.
What we really need is more fundamental research on the biology of cancer. These half-assed attempts to find a quick answer have turned out to be mostly fruitless. It's like trying to send men to the moon without knowing Newton's laws of motion. We don't understand basic things like whether many cancers are caused by chromosomal abnormalities or whether the chromosomal abnormalities are caused by the cancers. While we're waiting for the fundamental biology knowledge to get figured out, we could concentrate on convincing people not to smoke tobacco.
The thing is, perl 5 is a mature language with a mature, high-quality implementation. The last time I ran into a bug in the main implementation of perl 5 was about 8 years ago. Perl 5's implementations have all kinds of crazy features, e.g., you can run it on MacOS 9, and I can make a complete Windows executable of a perl app on my linux box, without even having access to a Windows machine. The collection of Perl 5 modules on CPAN is a mixed bag, but CPAN is mature enough that you can pretty much tell from ratings, comments, and commit histories whether a particular module is high in quality and safe to hitch your wagon to.
All of this quality makes me stay with perl, even though python and ruby have prettier syntax.
Perl 6 has many years to go before it reaches this level of quality. First they have to get a feature-complete, debugged release out, and update the O'Reilly book so it describes the language in the actual form it ends up in. Then the whole community has to go through all the years of work required to bring the perl 5 implementation up to the same high standard of quality as perl 5. The thing is, by the time that happens, python and ruby will have matured a lot more. I'm not even sure I would switch from perl 5 to perl 6. I might switch from perl 5 to ruby. I like ruby, but my experience so far is that it just isn't mature enough.
Perl 6 was also originally supposed to give us a pseudocode that would be shared with other languages. That was, for me, the main reason to be excited about it 10 years ago. The fact that progress has been so slow has meant that the other language communities have given up on cooperating on that idea, so it's not going to happen. That makes me a lot less excited about perl 6 than I was back when I first heard about it -- which was when my now-teenaged daughter was three years old.
I'm very interested in this topic because I've spent a fair amount of time getting together cheapo linux boxes for my lab classroom at a community college. (The school supplies 7 windows machines, and if that's all I had, then I'd often have four or even five students sharing one computer to make a graph.)
The first thing that surprises me is that he seems to be advocating doing this by buying parts and putting together a system. I can usually get a decent used PC for $120-150 from various sources (Good Will, swap meet, garage sales). Putting together a complete system from new parts for $200 seems to me like quite a feat. I feel better about the environmental aspects of reusing parts rather than buying all-new parts. Used hardware is where linux really shines compared to windows. Buying a used windows box is a losing proposition. You get all their crapware, all their misconfigurations, all their viruses, ...
What I would love to hear about is video. The slashdot review says he recommends using onboard video. Okay, so how do I go about finding a mobo with onboard video that doesn't require binary-blob drivers. E.g., the system I'm typing this on has a Gigabyte GA-M61P-S3 mobo, which has nVidia GeForce 6100 onboard. The binary blob driver from nvidia has worked fairly well for the last few years, but recently after upgrading to the latest (beta) of ubuntu it's started having problems. The solution I would love would be to get video (probably an external card) that is openly documented and well supported by open-source drivers. Nvidia doesn't do that; nv is old and unsupported, and nouveau is not yet ready for real-world use. AMD/ATI has a laudable attitude, but the impression I get is that the open-source community hasn't yet risen to the challenge of producing usable open-source drivers for a lot of newer ATI cards. Is Intel the best option? I just haven't ever encountered a low-cost mobo on the shelf at Fry's that had Intel onboard video. Is Intel not involved in the low-end consumer mobo market?
I got my amateur extra class ham license in the 1980's, back when there was still a CW (Morse code) requirement. Can't remember what the required speed was ... maybe 20 wpm?
Although having to learn it wasn't any big barrier for me, IMO it was a good decision to drop the requirement. Note the /. summary: "Nearly 700,000 Americans have ham radio licenses -- up 60 percent from 1981, a generation ago." This is pretty misleading. (1) The elimination of the CW requirement has lowered the barrier to entry. If the CW requirement was still in place, I'm sure the number of people licensed would be much lower. (2) The population of the U.S. has grown in the last 29 years. (3) The average age of hams is waaaay higher than it used to be. Some people have retained their licenses and kept operating. Others (like me) have retained their licenses but are no longer on the air.
As far as the argument that it "takes away the learning and the challenge, and also the feeling of accomplishment" -- this is a completely bogus justification. They could require new hams to learn all kinds of obsolete communication technologies, including quill pens and carrier pigeons. I'm sure people could get a great feeling of accomplishment from the learning and the challenge associated with being able to write beautiful gothic lettering on parchment. But why should the FCC be dictating that they learn that *particular* skill?
There's the argument that the testing kept bad operators off the air, because you had to make some effort in order to learn to pass the tests. This is reasonable to some extent, but it doesn't follow that one of the requirements has to be Morse code.
And the argument that Morse code is the most bandwidth-efficient and power-efficient method of radio communication is also bogus. With current technology, the most efficient method would actually be to send a CW signal using some other method of digital modulation, with a computer chip doing the encoding and another computer chip doing the decoding. Morse code encoded by hand and decoded by ear is no longer the *best* technology by any criterion; it's simply the *oldest* technology for radio communication. It's cool with me if people want to keep on operating CW. It's also cool with me if people participate in Civil War battle reenactments.
Unfortunately, ham radio is a dying hobby. Within 20 years, we'll probably see a drastic drop in the number of licensees as the baby boomers start to die. Then the government will probably auction off the spectrum to the highest bidder, and we'll lose a valuable method of emergency communication. It will be a pity.
Back when I got my ham license, in 1980, the internet didn't exist, and long-distance phone calls were extremely expensive. My parents were divorced, and ham radio was a great way to keep in touch with my father. It was also really exciting back then to be able to talk to people in places like Japan or Mexico; without the internet, there was basically no other way to do that except by getting a pen pal or something.
Those motivations have evaporated in the last 30 years, and that's one of the reasons I'm no longer active as a ham.
The main justification I hear quoted these days for the continuing existence of ham radio is emergency communications. That's a great justification for continuing to dedicate that spectrum to hams, rather than auctioning it off to corporations. However, I don't find it enough of a justification to continue operating as a ham myself.
If you have strong electronics skills, then ham radio offers a unique opportunity to tinker and play around on the radio spectrum. You can build your own antenna, bounce radio signals off the moon. Back in the 80's, a lot of people were experimenting with sending digital signals over the airwaves -- something that you couldn't accomplish at that time using the internet, because the internet didn't exist. There are no other radio bands where it's legal to do this kind of thing. E.g., one of the reasons that the technical details on wifi equipment is generally unavailable to the public is that the manufacturers are afraid that if they make the specs public, people will figure out ways to use the equipment to do illegal things.
A couple of things to note here. (1) You're discussing this as if this was a calculation predicting the existence of strange quark stars. It's not. Predictions of strange quark stars date back at least a couple of decades. This paper is predicting the existence of something weirder than a strange quark star. (2) The short half-life of strange particles in accelerator experiments is something that the authors of the paper know about; their calculation used the standard model of particle physics, which already describes those short half-lives. There are good reasons to suspect that the situation might be different in bulk matter at high pressure. We just don't know for sure.
Despite the parent post's snideness, the GP is basically right. Parent poster: (1) It's not just "a few" order of magnitude off, it's 14 orders of magnitude. That's a lot, by any standard in science. (2) The paper is not about cosmology, it's about astrophysics. (3) Although this is not about cosmology, your perception of cosmology as a low-precision science is about 15 years out of date. Cosmology is currently enjoying a golden age of high-precision measurements. For example, the Hubble constant is now known to a precision of a few percent, whereas 20 years ago there were still people disagreeing to each other by factors of 2. (4) Intergalactic distances aren't particularly relevant here, but anyway the ladder of cosmic distance scales isn't uncertain to anything like 14 orders of magnitude.
And by the way, could we let the "fixed that for you" meme die? It's rude, and it's getting old.
Here is the scientific paper.
As a physicist, I feel that this is a little far out. It assumes violation of the conservation laws for baryon number and lepton number. They claim that this nonconservation is actually predicted by a loophole in the standard model, which may be true, but it's never actually been observed -- if anyone observed such a violation experimentally, they'd definitely get the Nobel prize.
It's also built on a particular model of quark-quark interactions. (The strong nuclear force is not an interaction for which we have an exact formula. All we have is various models of it.) All the predictions are therefore going to be dependent on this model, as well as on the other approximations they have to make. People have predicted other weird objects, such as quark stars, using similar models, and the predictions have turned out to be very hard to pin down in any model-independent way. Some theorists use different methods, and come out with completely different predictions. Nor has any really compelling experimental evidence turned up for quark stars, although there are a couple of candidate objects that seem too dense to be ordinary neutron stars. If there's no solid evidence for quark stars, it seems like quite a stretch to go beyond that and predict things about even more exotic objects. The landscape is littered with predictions of exotic objects along these lines: quark stars, strange stars, black stars, gravastars, fuzzballs, boson stars, q-balls, ...
They recently revised their estimate of the lifetime of these objects, making it ~10^7 years rather than a fraction of a second (only 14 orders of magnitude different). Even though 10^7 years is fairly long, it's really not very long on cosmic timescales, so we would expect these to be fairly rare and hard to find, even if they did exist.
You seem to be equating race-blindness by the government with race-blindness by society. There is no reason that one should require the other. Society treats ugly people differently than it treats beautiful people, but that doesn't mean that the law should treat ugly people differently than it treats beautiful ones.
If the law requires them to collect this information, then it's a bad law. The law should be color-blind. If the law requires them to spend $50 to collect information that they shouldn't be collecting anyway, then it's bad that the law requires money to be wasted.
This all assumes a certain set of political opinions. I don't share your political opinions. I think the law should be color-blind. As far as segregation of schools, my opinion is that the big segregation issue is economic segregation, which will still be there regardless of efforts to end racial segregation.
The quote in the slashdot summary doesn't advocate refusing to fill it out. It advocates not filling anything out other than the number of residents, which is all that's needed in order to determine congressional districts, etc.
The slashdot summary is about the use of racial information. The government doesn't need to know what race I consider myself to be in order to govern effectively.
No, a correct analogy would be if you volunteered to participate int he Neilsen ratings, filled out the information about the TV shows you watched, but refused to give Neilsen any information about your race.