Anyone that preaches ignorance by saying Genesis is literal is using religion as a money making scheme. Simple as that. Anyone who believes that deserves to have their money taken from them (in form of donations, etc). After all, the fastest way to get rich is to make a "church" since it's not taxed and no one can prove you're lying.
Science and religion are not mutually exclusive, after all scientists are trained not to jump to conclusions. Making conclusions about God when there is no proof (for or against it) is contrary to any science education that I know of.
These people are using any means necessary to ram their "belief" down everyone's throat. After all, the more "believer" they have, the more donations that'll come their way. They're no better than those Nigerian scammers (except you can actually prove that those Nigerian scammers are lying).
It always boggles my mind how people cannot understand that they're basically being scammed.
RIMM has a positive net tangible assets on their balance sheet, loot it up.
I'm terribly sorry but that has got to be the best typo I've ever seen. I mean, the keys "t" and "k" are pretty far apart, it sounds almost intentional.
Their use of the word "steal" is, unfortunately, deliberately done. Sounds better than "copyright infringement", to which people would say "meh". "Steal" is such a strong word, people now start using "Steal" for pretty much everything nowadays.
Hell, if they can somehow use the word "rape", "murder", etc, they will. For example: "downloading is raping the artists (digitally)", "by downloading, you are indirectly murdering the artist's children by depraving them of basic necessity".
I find it quite funny when they accuse people of "stealing", when they're using creative accounting to literally steal from the artists.
In some countries the telcos charge an insane amount of money for voice calls. Texting is way cheaper. Sometimes it's so extreme that there's no difference between making a mobile-to-mobile calls and international calls (at least in Australia). Also, as you pointed out, texting is much less intrusive than a phone call.
In a more extreme case, in Indonesia, texting lost out to blackberries. This is because the telcos there charged 20-50 cents per day for unlimited BBM access, while they charge about the same for a minute of voice call.
I blame the calculators, where students that young are allowed to use one.
When you're that young and faced with a problem you don't understand and you have this thingamajig that spouts out answers faster than you could type it in, you can bet that everyone will start to absent-mindedly punch numbers into it, if it can help them get away from homework sooner.
The many opinions (on slashdot, no less, where everyone here is very well educated) that using brackets as a substitute for variables creates confusion is even more ridiculous. It doesn't matter if it uses x, or (), or [], or whatever, if it's not a number or operator, then it's an unknown. Simple as that.
The debate that using () as a variable is wrong is even weirder than saying = is an operator. At least I can understand where the = confusion comes from.
I don't get why so many people here are confused by the brackets. To me, an equal sign simply means the left part and the right part of the sign are the same thing. Anything that is not a number or an operation is simply variables.
My first thought when I see that 4+3+2=()+2 is to remove the 2s and arrived at 4+3=(). I had more difficulty understanding the 4+3+2=9+2=11 part, since it makes no sense whatsoever in the presence of the equal signs, until I realized that it makes sense for people that use calculators.
I agree that the problem stems from the use of calculators in school, where people would equate the equal sign as an operation (on par with +,-,etc).
This is a good reason to bring back the old RPN HP calculators and mandate its use in school. Those things don't have an equal sign and basically forces you to perform math properly.
Well people blame Apple because they have the last word on what's in the App Store, so if something bad is in the App Store, it is by default Apple's fault. People would less likely to blame Apple if the App Store is less restrictive. There is a middle ground actually, they can use (ironically) Microsoft's model of signed drivers. They can put up a big sign saying that installing a non-signed app is not covered. This way, people that want to be in Apple's walled garden can install exclusively signed apps and people like me that want to tinker with my hardware can have the option to install a non-signed apps. Wishful thinking, since Apple won't ever do that. Steve Jobs is a proven control freak.
Anyone actually recognize the irony of this Flash debate and Apple's closed systems? In their 1984 ad, they say they're freeing people from IBM mind control while in reality they're the one that's doing it now.
I think it's so problematic in medicine due to the cost involved to perform proper trials. Stat is a shortcut way to make what you're doing look good in the shortest amount of time possible.
Most people I know learn stat by using calculators and computers. Add that to the problem of people's fear toward mathematical formula with big sigma signs and big root squares, and you can be assured that no one would learn stat properly. I seem to get the impression (at least from people I know) that formulas with sigmas are "complex" and they just skip over it. This is a fundamental problem, and I had to explain to some very well educated people to see sigma signs as a "for" loop in computer programs. Then they think it's not so bad after all.
Stat depends on assumptions, and the assumptions must be stated prior to doing anything, otherwise the analysis in itself is useless. Most stat classes that I took used normal distribution as an assumption, and in many cases it just doesn't apply. The worst that I've seen is someone trying to use the 95% confidence interval (which is based on normal distribution assumption) on something that I know for certain is Laplacian distributed.
I think calculators and computers are the worst thing that can happen to statistics learning. It should not be used to learn stat, ever. They encourage people to be hasty, careless, and have the impression that stat is just a collection of magic formulas that gives whatever you want.
It is NOT about poison-breathing animal found in science fiction. Its main point is the possibility that a SECOND BIOSPHERE, one that we are unfamiliar with and thus undiscovered, may exist on earth. IF we can detect the existence of the second biosphere, we have a greater chance of finding alien life, simply because all life-detection techniques that are being used today rely on the premise that ALL LIFE is oxygen-breathing, carbon-based like us.
The impact of these speculations are tremendous. If a second biosphere exists, then a third may also exist, etc. This paper paves the way for us to seriously rethink our definition of life itself, and how to detect it. I think this is very exciting news, and most definitely newsworthy.
That is very true, as a new methodology if tested workable, can pave the way for future research in itself.
Another reason to split the methodology/result in two papers is that usually (in my area) a paper is very limited in page count, so you usually have no space to present a method, prove that it's workable, present result, and analyze the result. You can either do two papers with decent explanations, or one paper that is unreadable and makes no sense because everything is horribly compressed. People usually opt for the first choice:)
Or, you can opt for a journal which usually has a pretty liberal page count, but the burden of proving everything in one go is a daunting task that's best left in two publications.
What's new in this is the possibility of a life form to live in a highly poisonous condition, and breathe poison like us breathe air. This is very exciting indeed if she got some preliminary data (which she said she does) and publish it. Science fiction authors, on the other hand, do not bother to perform experiments and write papers. They just speculate. She is doing something with that speculation, with methods that are responsible and repeatable.
We have science and progress because of speculations like this. You can't expect every research to succeed, because if you worked in a research area, you know that is not the case. 90% of research simply fails, but the 10% that do succeed add many things to our knowledge (but then again, I just pulled that number out from my own experience, so YMMV).
Every time you read a scientific experiment that may seem useless, remember that in the 19th century, people thought that "all things worth inventing are invented already". Please do not fall into that mindset, because if that mindset takes hold, we'll be in the 19th century forever.
a revenue of 7823 billion Danish Krone ( 1049 billion Euro or 1337 billion dollars ) in 2006
That number is seriously wrong. A Danish company making more than $1 TRILLION per year? That's 10% of the US GDP. I think you're missing a dot there: should be 1.337 BILLION.
Actually a 3G phone (GSM-based) could be thin. Case in point is the new Sony Ericsson W910i, which is much smaller and a little bit thicker (about 1mm difference) than the iPhone. And it's slide form-factor too, so some space in the casing is taken up by the slide mechanism. To see how thin a 3G device can be, look no further than the older W880i (it's only 9.5 mm thin, no more than 0.4 inches for you Americans:).
Speaking about battery life, I think we all can manage having to charge the iPhone every other day or so, just like any other phone marketed as a smartphone. I don't think battery life even enter the equation here. But I do concur that 3G eats battery like no tomorrow. I went so far as to turn it on only when I needed to. However my W910i still manages a decent 2 day-ish battery life in 3G mode.
I tend to side with some of the poster here that think this is just a marketing thing by Jobs so he can sell the 3G-enabled iPhones later on. I wouldn't be surprised if sometimes next year he'll announce a 3G iPhone with exactly the same dimension as the current iPhone.
All in all, I agree with Woz. There's no reason at all why iPhone doesn't have 3G. Apple still has a lot to learn in the cellphone arena. There are hacked iPhones for sale in Asia-Pacific, but most people I know still buy Nokia, Sony Ericsson & Samsung, and some people that actually get a hacked iPhone say they're pretty much got let down by it (lack of features, mainly).
Believe me I know the wisdom of not arguing against people with more knowledge than me (I had my share of that experience although not as spectacular as yours:). Even if you apparently have more knowledge than them, it's wise not to flaunt it anyway just in case you're actually wrong. In my post I was merely responding to the parent regarding people in some forum calling him an idiot for asking a valid question, and mentioned that I also had similar experiences and sometimes I do wish to be able to punch them in the face. On topic, I know Cox is definitely correct and he wouldn't say those words lightly unless he has a good reason to, and there's also a good reason why he is one the primary kernel developers.
Calling people idiots for not understanding something and asking some logical explanation has been a staple for some online communities. Apparently it's easier to say someone's an idiot through a keyboard rather than saying it to their face. After all, the VR technology is not advanced enough to let you punch someone in the face through the internet (although the availability of this VR technology WILL drive down useless name-calling on said communities, but I'm not holding my breath).
What you'll have is Apple simply replacing the labels. What they did with the iPhone opened my eyes. They could make a massive profit simply by selling it unlocked (and Apple is known for huge mark-ups anyway), but they opted to close down the system in the name of "stability" and lock it in to a specific provider, presumably to get a cut out of the contract. Perhaps when people can get over the coolness factor of Apple's product, they'll be able to see that in many ways they're not so different from MS.
One thing that is severely lacking in this scenario is the ability for superstars to appear without the help of the industry. People have come to understand that success cannot come without signing to the labels, thus all the good artists jump at the chance of signing with labels since it got the highest success probability. However, once it's proven just once that the labels aren't needed by the artists themselves (by achieving success without signing), the labels are here to stay. Try as we might, we cannot change the way the masses think.
Ah yes I managed to find the phrase you mentioned. It was way buried in the 7700 word terms & conditions. However the wording "substantial" is not actually clear. It's sad when buying a phone requires you to be a lawyer.
Slashdot Mirror
... or become head of HR
Anything's better than Schrödinger's nyan cat.
Anyone that preaches ignorance by saying Genesis is literal is using religion as a money making scheme. Simple as that. Anyone who believes that deserves to have their money taken from them (in form of donations, etc). After all, the fastest way to get rich is to make a "church" since it's not taxed and no one can prove you're lying.
Science and religion are not mutually exclusive, after all scientists are trained not to jump to conclusions. Making conclusions about God when there is no proof (for or against it) is contrary to any science education that I know of.
These people are using any means necessary to ram their "belief" down everyone's throat. After all, the more "believer" they have, the more donations that'll come their way. They're no better than those Nigerian scammers (except you can actually prove that those Nigerian scammers are lying).
It always boggles my mind how people cannot understand that they're basically being scammed.
RIMM has a positive net tangible assets on their balance sheet, loot it up.
I'm terribly sorry but that has got to be the best typo I've ever seen. I mean, the keys "t" and "k" are pretty far apart, it sounds almost intentional.
They're dorks. What do you expect?
Their use of the word "steal" is, unfortunately, deliberately done. Sounds better than "copyright infringement", to which people would say "meh". "Steal" is such a strong word, people now start using "Steal" for pretty much everything nowadays.
Hell, if they can somehow use the word "rape", "murder", etc, they will. For example: "downloading is raping the artists (digitally)", "by downloading, you are indirectly murdering the artist's children by depraving them of basic necessity".
I find it quite funny when they accuse people of "stealing", when they're using creative accounting to literally steal from the artists.
They are not stupid. Just incredibly greedy, that's all.
They are a cartel, and whatever they're trying to do was not to stop piracy. It was to stop competition.
"Tai" is the Indonesian word for "shit"
In some countries the telcos charge an insane amount of money for voice calls. Texting is way cheaper. Sometimes it's so extreme that there's no difference between making a mobile-to-mobile calls and international calls (at least in Australia). Also, as you pointed out, texting is much less intrusive than a phone call.
In a more extreme case, in Indonesia, texting lost out to blackberries. This is because the telcos there charged 20-50 cents per day for unlimited BBM access, while they charge about the same for a minute of voice call.
In general, dividing the "up to" number by 3 is actually closer to reality. That way, you're happy even if you get 50% less than what they said.
I blame the calculators, where students that young are allowed to use one.
When you're that young and faced with a problem you don't understand and you have this thingamajig that spouts out answers faster than you could type it in, you can bet that everyone will start to absent-mindedly punch numbers into it, if it can help them get away from homework sooner.
The many opinions (on slashdot, no less, where everyone here is very well educated) that using brackets as a substitute for variables creates confusion is even more ridiculous. It doesn't matter if it uses x, or (), or [], or whatever, if it's not a number or operator, then it's an unknown. Simple as that.
The debate that using () as a variable is wrong is even weirder than saying = is an operator. At least I can understand where the = confusion comes from.
I don't get why so many people here are confused by the brackets. To me, an equal sign simply means the left part and the right part of the sign are the same thing. Anything that is not a number or an operation is simply variables.
My first thought when I see that 4+3+2=()+2 is to remove the 2s and arrived at 4+3=(). I had more difficulty understanding the 4+3+2=9+2=11 part, since it makes no sense whatsoever in the presence of the equal signs, until I realized that it makes sense for people that use calculators.
I agree that the problem stems from the use of calculators in school, where people would equate the equal sign as an operation (on par with +,-,etc).
This is a good reason to bring back the old RPN HP calculators and mandate its use in school. Those things don't have an equal sign and basically forces you to perform math properly.
Well people blame Apple because they have the last word on what's in the App Store, so if something bad is in the App Store, it is by default Apple's fault. People would less likely to blame Apple if the App Store is less restrictive. There is a middle ground actually, they can use (ironically) Microsoft's model of signed drivers. They can put up a big sign saying that installing a non-signed app is not covered. This way, people that want to be in Apple's walled garden can install exclusively signed apps and people like me that want to tinker with my hardware can have the option to install a non-signed apps. Wishful thinking, since Apple won't ever do that. Steve Jobs is a proven control freak.
Anyone actually recognize the irony of this Flash debate and Apple's closed systems? In their 1984 ad, they say they're freeing people from IBM mind control while in reality they're the one that's doing it now.
The article also mentions economics.
I think it's so problematic in medicine due to the cost involved to perform proper trials. Stat is a shortcut way to make what you're doing look good in the shortest amount of time possible.
Most people I know learn stat by using calculators and computers. Add that to the problem of people's fear toward mathematical formula with big sigma signs and big root squares, and you can be assured that no one would learn stat properly. I seem to get the impression (at least from people I know) that formulas with sigmas are "complex" and they just skip over it. This is a fundamental problem, and I had to explain to some very well educated people to see sigma signs as a "for" loop in computer programs. Then they think it's not so bad after all.
Stat depends on assumptions, and the assumptions must be stated prior to doing anything, otherwise the analysis in itself is useless. Most stat classes that I took used normal distribution as an assumption, and in many cases it just doesn't apply. The worst that I've seen is someone trying to use the 95% confidence interval (which is based on normal distribution assumption) on something that I know for certain is Laplacian distributed.
I think calculators and computers are the worst thing that can happen to statistics learning. It should not be used to learn stat, ever. They encourage people to be hasty, careless, and have the impression that stat is just a collection of magic formulas that gives whatever you want.
I think you're missing the point of the article.
It is NOT about poison-breathing animal found in science fiction. Its main point is the possibility that a SECOND BIOSPHERE, one that we are unfamiliar with and thus undiscovered, may exist on earth. IF we can detect the existence of the second biosphere, we have a greater chance of finding alien life, simply because all life-detection techniques that are being used today rely on the premise that ALL LIFE is oxygen-breathing, carbon-based like us.
The impact of these speculations are tremendous. If a second biosphere exists, then a third may also exist, etc. This paper paves the way for us to seriously rethink our definition of life itself, and how to detect it. I think this is very exciting news, and most definitely newsworthy.
That is very true, as a new methodology if tested workable, can pave the way for future research in itself.
Another reason to split the methodology/result in two papers is that usually (in my area) a paper is very limited in page count, so you usually have no space to present a method, prove that it's workable, present result, and analyze the result. You can either do two papers with decent explanations, or one paper that is unreadable and makes no sense because everything is horribly compressed. People usually opt for the first choice :)
Or, you can opt for a journal which usually has a pretty liberal page count, but the burden of proving everything in one go is a daunting task that's best left in two publications.
What's new in this is the possibility of a life form to live in a highly poisonous condition, and breathe poison like us breathe air. This is very exciting indeed if she got some preliminary data (which she said she does) and publish it. Science fiction authors, on the other hand, do not bother to perform experiments and write papers. They just speculate. She is doing something with that speculation, with methods that are responsible and repeatable.
We have science and progress because of speculations like this. You can't expect every research to succeed, because if you worked in a research area, you know that is not the case. 90% of research simply fails, but the 10% that do succeed add many things to our knowledge (but then again, I just pulled that number out from my own experience, so YMMV).
Every time you read a scientific experiment that may seem useless, remember that in the 19th century, people thought that "all things worth inventing are invented already". Please do not fall into that mindset, because if that mindset takes hold, we'll be in the 19th century forever.
That number is seriously wrong. A Danish company making more than $1 TRILLION per year? That's 10% of the US GDP. I think you're missing a dot there: should be 1.337 BILLION.
Actually a 3G phone (GSM-based) could be thin. Case in point is the new Sony Ericsson W910i, which is much smaller and a little bit thicker (about 1mm difference) than the iPhone. And it's slide form-factor too, so some space in the casing is taken up by the slide mechanism. To see how thin a 3G device can be, look no further than the older W880i (it's only 9.5 mm thin, no more than 0.4 inches for you Americans :).
Speaking about battery life, I think we all can manage having to charge the iPhone every other day or so, just like any other phone marketed as a smartphone. I don't think battery life even enter the equation here. But I do concur that 3G eats battery like no tomorrow. I went so far as to turn it on only when I needed to. However my W910i still manages a decent 2 day-ish battery life in 3G mode.
I tend to side with some of the poster here that think this is just a marketing thing by Jobs so he can sell the 3G-enabled iPhones later on. I wouldn't be surprised if sometimes next year he'll announce a 3G iPhone with exactly the same dimension as the current iPhone.
All in all, I agree with Woz. There's no reason at all why iPhone doesn't have 3G. Apple still has a lot to learn in the cellphone arena. There are hacked iPhones for sale in Asia-Pacific, but most people I know still buy Nokia, Sony Ericsson & Samsung, and some people that actually get a hacked iPhone say they're pretty much got let down by it (lack of features, mainly).
Believe me I know the wisdom of not arguing against people with more knowledge than me (I had my share of that experience although not as spectacular as yours :). Even if you apparently have more knowledge than them, it's wise not to flaunt it anyway just in case you're actually wrong. In my post I was merely responding to the parent regarding people in some forum calling him an idiot for asking a valid question, and mentioned that I also had similar experiences and sometimes I do wish to be able to punch them in the face. On topic, I know Cox is definitely correct and he wouldn't say those words lightly unless he has a good reason to, and there's also a good reason why he is one the primary kernel developers.
Calling people idiots for not understanding something and asking some logical explanation has been a staple for some online communities. Apparently it's easier to say someone's an idiot through a keyboard rather than saying it to their face. After all, the VR technology is not advanced enough to let you punch someone in the face through the internet (although the availability of this VR technology WILL drive down useless name-calling on said communities, but I'm not holding my breath).
What you'll have is Apple simply replacing the labels. What they did with the iPhone opened my eyes. They could make a massive profit simply by selling it unlocked (and Apple is known for huge mark-ups anyway), but they opted to close down the system in the name of "stability" and lock it in to a specific provider, presumably to get a cut out of the contract. Perhaps when people can get over the coolness factor of Apple's product, they'll be able to see that in many ways they're not so different from MS.
One thing that is severely lacking in this scenario is the ability for superstars to appear without the help of the industry. People have come to understand that success cannot come without signing to the labels, thus all the good artists jump at the chance of signing with labels since it got the highest success probability. However, once it's proven just once that the labels aren't needed by the artists themselves (by achieving success without signing), the labels are here to stay. Try as we might, we cannot change the way the masses think.
Ah yes I managed to find the phrase you mentioned. It was way buried in the 7700 word terms & conditions. However the wording "substantial" is not actually clear. It's sad when buying a phone requires you to be a lawyer.