Yeah. When using Ubuntu, you have to get used to a different[ly behaving] UI every 6 months. That is actually *worse* than Windows/Mac, where at least the experience is more consistent.
...
You have not learned the Law of Defensive Ubuntu Use - "Thou shalt not install anything but the most recent long term support version, for only then do you have a stable supported environment for several years so that you can do your work."
Ignore the zoo of releases between LTS releases -- seriously what important new functionality is there to add to the desktop every six months at this point?
(There is also another related Law: "Thou shalt only use the desktop environment officially endorsed by Canonical with the LTS release, for only then will you have a stable fully functional environment since none of the other options are supported, and were not regression tested. If you hate Unity, just ignore it and install CairoDock or Classic Menu (or both) and work as before.")
Because pollution is something that never ever existed anywhere and was entirely made up by Liberals, rather than being produced by corporations?
If you bother to read TFA you will see what a petrochemical industry researcher says about this computer model: "the model does not consider several important factors, including the buoyancy of the gases, the heterogeneity of these kinds of formations, and the presence of water and other fluids, all of which will affect how much CO2 will be absorbed by fractured shale".
But you are confident that one grossly simplified computer model, without any field data to test it, is the answer?
Tell me, AC. Are you similarly convinced of the accuracy of the very thoroughly researched and comprehensively supported global climate models? Do you denounce those who doubt these models with the same profanity?
This is an excellent movie. I have long been interested in epidemic disease and its treatment, and I was very impressed by the thoughtfulness and care that went into making it.
Does anyone know what direction it's headed? Towards any particular star?
The relative motions of stars in our vicinity is many order of magnitudes higher than the velocity of the probes relative to the sun. They have no meaningful velocity toward any other star system. The future encounters with star systems have to be projected statistically through the theory of random processes.
Since the Oort cloud lies beyond the heliopause, and is bound to our sun by gravity, how can we say that Voyager has "really" entered interstellar space? Shouldn't true interstellar space be a distance from the sun where nothing is bound directly to Sol by gravity? Where another star has equal pull on an object? Voyager I is currently far from that point in space.
The claim is that it is in interstellar space: i.e. the interstellar medium that pervades the space between star systems. This has nothing to do with gravitational binding of other distant objects. The Oort Cloud is without question in interstellar space, despite very weak gravitational binding to the sun (solar escape velocity there about 100 mph).
Going by the gravitational binding argument you could claim that all five probes "left the solar system" the instant they achieved solar escape velocity and was no longer bound to the sun.
Should be pointed out that this is the first, not the only, man made object on a straight course for interstellar space. It will be joined not only by it's sister Voyager probe, but also the Pioneer 10 & 11 probes with their golden plaques, and the New Horizons mission with its CD. All in all, we're getting pretty good at littering the cosmos with our civilization's mementos.
Let's see. Five pieces of litter. Volume of space littered (once they all cross into interstellar space): ((Pi*(24 billion miles)^3)/6)/5 = one peice of litter per 1.45*10^30 cubic miles. That is one piece of litter per 1.45 million trillion trillion cubic miles.
You call that littering!?* We need to do at least a trillion trillion times better than that!
... Airlines should be responsible for ensuring their flights are safe. When airlines handle safety they can be held accountable if they do it poorly or they mistreat their customers....
You realize that this is the system in place before 9/11 right?
The result was that security screeners were minimum wage security guards, with minimal training - if any - who made things convenient for passengers by not really inspecting anything.
But does the invisible hand of the free market punish airlines for letting terrorists through?
I don't recall anyone holding the airlines and their screening staff at all accountable for 9/11.
Any more or less irresponsible than basing your business on another business' product and crying about it when the parent business pulls the plug on your endeavor? I swear I've never seen so many people cry about leaching off the works of others then screaming bloody murder when the host decides to cut them off....
Sort of like how Facebook got its start leaching off of the servers hosted by universities around the world?
And the above AC thoroughly proves the point of the AC to whom he is replying.
Inheritance is only one of several important aspects of OO - designing things by composition of interfaces/classes is more powerful than inheritance, and more frequently used. Another is hiding implementations - which can vary (dynamically even!) behind interfaces. And the idea that abstract things are not amenable to inheritance is itself odd - abstract things are thought-products of humans, it is very, very common for abstractions thought up by humans to exist in multiple versions of increasing numbers of features. Inheritance hierarchies are rarely very deep though, which is perhaps confounding the AC.
Mod this guy up.
There are lots of programmers that can crank lots of code that meet functional requirements. Code that is convoluted, inefficient, incomprehensible - code that instantly becomes an enormous burden on the organization trying to use it.
If enough technical debt is added by a programmer, his output is strictly negative and you can't "make it up in volume".
I've read Ron Paul's plan to get rid of the EPA. The idea is that after your kid dies due to toxic waste dumping, then you can sue the company for violating your property rights. The problem is that the company has an army of very good lawyers who can afford to drag the case through the courts for a decade while you go bankrupt.
It is much worse than that. Mining companies have already thoroughly mastered to process of setting up shell corporations that go bankrupt and are dissolved when the mine is exhausted, leaving a toxic nightmare behind for the locals to suffer with for centuries to come. There will be no one to sue once the toxic waste pit is full.
When Elon Musk publicized his Hyperloop scheme he provided a fairly detailed technical presentation of how it was all going to work to justify its feasibility, and his claimed price tag of $7 billion.
Musk's document provided a pretty good prima facie validation of the concept, although at the time a large number of/.ers piled on with criticisms without even bothering to look at the report. But by putting a specific proposal out there Musk had the guts to give serious critics the material they needed to critique the plan.
Mars One is claiming:
"No new major developments or inventions are needed to make the mission plan a reality. Each stage of Mars One mission plan employs existing, validated and available technology.
Components that make the mission plan will be made exclusively by existing suppliers. Mars One has received confirmation of this from all major suppliers through letters of interest. While most of the components required are not immediately available with the exact specifications, at this time, there is no need for radical modifications to the current component designs. All suppliers have confirmed their ability to build what is required-- and they can do so now."
Pretty bold claims these. What proof is there that they are true? Surely they can publish these current component designs and describe, for example, exactly how they are proposing to make the Mars landing.
So where is the plan - at least at the level of detail and length that Musk put together - to prove this isn't just PR-flack talk?
But you realize that the Mars One scheme is not planning for "enough resources", right? Even if their incredible low ball budget were to get a crew to Mars, their plan provides absolutely no way to sustain them. That is being left as a problem to others, and is not even discussed in Mars One "plans".
When the various ships of settlement landed in the New World there was already air, raw materials easily fashioned into shelter and clothing, plenty of food, and people whose methods you could copy to live a comfortable healthy life, if you were clever enough to do so. And yet the English still died in droves (90% mortality in the first year was common). A Mars "colonist" will have nothing there to sustain them.
But now? MS has made many mistakes, but I could hardly believe it some years back when MS signed onto the RIAA and MPAA position on DRM. One might expect entertainment organizations to fail to understand that DRM is a bad idea, but a tech company?...
Ah, I see why you are bewildered Grasshopper!
You mistake Microsoft for a tech company!
It is not. It is, as it has always been, an intellectual property company that happens to specialize in technology properties.
Microsoft's (and Bill's and Ballmer's) fortunes were built on a purchased product (86-DOS, aka "Q-DOS") which they licensed to a third company. Strictly an intellectual property move. It has been in Bill's, and Microsoft's, genes from the beginning.
I agree that Ballmer needs to go; Microsoft does have some fundamental problems. However, I take issue with how you dismissive you are of the things on your list. That many of those products have struggled is due more to poor perception than actual lack of quality.
...
But that is the point where Ballmer most needed to do his job. It does not matter how many quality products the development departments churn out, the CEO has to see to it that they are effectively marketed. If they fail, it is all on him. So this does not excuse Ballmer in the slightest, instead it pinpoints where his performance was most sadly lacking.
Maybe we could burn the plastic we cannot recycle in coal-fired power plants. We produce 32 million tons of plastic waste a year, but burn one billion tons of coal. If the coal feed had 3% plastic added to it the entire waste stream would be consumed while producing some electricity, and slightly reducing the CO2-to-energy output ratio.
...
There is absolutely no crime on the island (as in zero). It's a very, very, very wealthy strip of island in Sarasota, FL and there's no reason for this....
And we have a winner!
Keeping license plates of people who live there would reveal very little.
The very, very, very wealthy are accustomed to living in a bubble where they can avoid contact with everyone else, except on their terms. A public highway, 789, traverses the length of the island, connecting to other islands on either end. Permanently recording every outsider who comes to "their" island is in keeping with the predilections of great wealth.
Not to mention the fact that cell phone records can be pulled only if the cell phone company is still keeping them. Most retain data for 1-2 years, not 10 years.
Did wild fish, wolves, foxes, lions... i.e. animals not relying on human-made food get obese? I didn't see any of those mentioned in the article. It seems the common thread is that obesity increased in the organisms eating food manufactured by humans and that food did change significantly over the last several decades.
...
You'll notice that there are practical problems with gathering accurate average weight information on populations of genuinely wild wolves, foxes, lions, etc. - (with catch and release fish are probably much easier, but this may be a mammal-only thing). They analyzed data which was actually available, mostly laboratory animals, and the numerous 'wild' small mammals in the form of rodents. It would be rash to assume that this was wholly caused by eating manufactured food as opposed, say, to synthetic chemicals encountered through other means.
more data should be required before we make such a broad spectrum 'everything is getting fat because of everything' claim, which is absolutely as absurd as it sounds. In the cases of laboratory controlled animals, im willing to venture a sedentary and stressful lifestyle has accumulated their girth....
According to the article the rise in laboratory rodent weight is a steady trend stretching over 20 years. A laboratory mouse has 4 generations a year, so that spans 80 generations of mouse history, and is consistent with a trend that includes rural feral rodents.
How is it that lab rats have been becoming steadily more sedentary and stressed in recent decades, in synchrony with rodents living in the wild? And all the other species listed? This is devotion to a received one-cause explanation in the face of contradicting evidence with a vengeance.
... But farmers aren't the ones slipping big bills into Congress' g-strings.
You vastly underestimate the agro-industrial Farm Lobby. They are not the driving force behind the peculiar shunning of Cuba (tariffs keep Brazilian sugar out of the U.S. fine, no need for high-octane politics), but do not underestimate the muscle the "farmers" have in Washington.
Right you are. Of the two plastics widely used in these drink bottles HDPE has a UV resistance rating of "poor" and PET has a resistance of "fair". Unless the bottles are treated with some sort of UV protection layer before installation in a few years (or less for HDPE) the bottle you cemented into your roof will start splitting, dumping the bleach filled water on your furniture, and leaving holes in your roof.
In Third World Countries, that may not be a serious problem. People in the First World will probably find this an unacceptable drawback.
The only problem I see with it is that it doesn't appear to be particularly resistant to stupid people. What if someone decides to actively sabotage it - e.g. blowing up a section of tube just before the car arrives at 1300 km/hr. Now imagine they do that somewhere downtown.
Right. It could kill all the passengers in a capsule. All 14 of them (the ones behind will be able to automatically brake to a halt). Today it is impossible for saboteurs to kill that many people of a train. Oh, wait... London Tube Bombings Madrid Train Bombings.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. When using Ubuntu, you have to get used to a different[ly behaving] UI every 6 months. That is actually *worse* than Windows/Mac, where at least the experience is more consistent.
...
You have not learned the Law of Defensive Ubuntu Use - "Thou shalt not install anything but the most recent long term support version, for only then do you have a stable supported environment for several years so that you can do your work."
Ignore the zoo of releases between LTS releases -- seriously what important new functionality is there to add to the desktop every six months at this point?
(There is also another related Law: "Thou shalt only use the desktop environment officially endorsed by Canonical with the LTS release, for only then will you have a stable fully functional environment since none of the other options are supported, and were not regression tested. If you hate Unity, just ignore it and install CairoDock or Classic Menu (or both) and work as before.")
Because pollution is something that never ever existed anywhere and was entirely made up by Liberals, rather than being produced by corporations?
If you bother to read TFA you will see what a petrochemical industry researcher says about this computer model: "the model does not consider several important factors, including the buoyancy of the gases, the heterogeneity of these kinds of formations, and the presence of water and other fluids, all of which will affect how much CO2 will be absorbed by fractured shale".
But you are confident that one grossly simplified computer model, without any field data to test it, is the answer?
Tell me, AC. Are you similarly convinced of the accuracy of the very thoroughly researched and comprehensively supported global climate models? Do you denounce those who doubt these models with the same profanity?
This is an excellent movie. I have long been interested in epidemic disease and its treatment, and I was very impressed by the thoughtfulness and care that went into making it.
Does anyone know what direction it's headed? Towards any particular star?
The relative motions of stars in our vicinity is many order of magnitudes higher than the velocity of the probes relative to the sun. They have no meaningful velocity toward any other star system. The future encounters with star systems have to be projected statistically through the theory of random processes.
Since the Oort cloud lies beyond the heliopause, and is bound to our sun by gravity, how can we say that Voyager has "really" entered interstellar space? Shouldn't true interstellar space be a distance from the sun where nothing is bound directly to Sol by gravity? Where another star has equal pull on an object? Voyager I is currently far from that point in space.
The claim is that it is in interstellar space: i.e. the interstellar medium that pervades the space between star systems. This has nothing to do with gravitational binding of other distant objects. The Oort Cloud is without question in interstellar space, despite very weak gravitational binding to the sun (solar escape velocity there about 100 mph).
Going by the gravitational binding argument you could claim that all five probes "left the solar system" the instant they achieved solar escape velocity and was no longer bound to the sun.
Should be pointed out that this is the first, not the only, man made object on a straight course for interstellar space. It will be joined not only by it's sister Voyager probe, but also the Pioneer 10 & 11 probes with their golden plaques, and the New Horizons mission with its CD. All in all, we're getting pretty good at littering the cosmos with our civilization's mementos.
Let's see. Five pieces of litter. Volume of space littered (once they all cross into interstellar space): ((Pi*(24 billion miles)^3)/6)/5 = one peice of litter per 1.45*10^30 cubic miles. That is one piece of litter per 1.45 million trillion trillion cubic miles.
You call that littering!?* We need to do at least a trillion trillion times better than that!
*Where is my interrobang key when I need it?
... Airlines should be responsible for ensuring their flights are safe. When airlines handle safety they can be held accountable if they do it poorly or they mistreat their customers....
You realize that this is the system in place before 9/11 right?
The result was that security screeners were minimum wage security guards, with minimal training - if any - who made things convenient for passengers by not really inspecting anything.
But does the invisible hand of the free market punish airlines for letting terrorists through?
I don't recall anyone holding the airlines and their screening staff at all accountable for 9/11.
Any more or less irresponsible than basing your business on another business' product and crying about it when the parent business pulls the plug on your endeavor? I swear I've never seen so many people cry about leaching off the works of others then screaming bloody murder when the host decides to cut them off....
Sort of like how Facebook got its start leaching off of the servers hosted by universities around the world?
Gun smuggled on an airline.
And the above AC thoroughly proves the point of the AC to whom he is replying.
Inheritance is only one of several important aspects of OO - designing things by composition of interfaces/classes is more powerful than inheritance, and more frequently used. Another is hiding implementations - which can vary (dynamically even!) behind interfaces. And the idea that abstract things are not amenable to inheritance is itself odd - abstract things are thought-products of humans, it is very, very common for abstractions thought up by humans to exist in multiple versions of increasing numbers of features. Inheritance hierarchies are rarely very deep though, which is perhaps confounding the AC.
Mod this guy up. There are lots of programmers that can crank lots of code that meet functional requirements. Code that is convoluted, inefficient, incomprehensible - code that instantly becomes an enormous burden on the organization trying to use it. If enough technical debt is added by a programmer, his output is strictly negative and you can't "make it up in volume".
...
I've read Ron Paul's plan to get rid of the EPA. The idea is that after your kid dies due to toxic waste dumping, then you can sue the company for violating your property rights. The problem is that the company has an army of very good lawyers who can afford to drag the case through the courts for a decade while you go bankrupt.
It is much worse than that. Mining companies have already thoroughly mastered to process of setting up shell corporations that go bankrupt and are dissolved when the mine is exhausted, leaving a toxic nightmare behind for the locals to suffer with for centuries to come. There will be no one to sue once the toxic waste pit is full.
When Elon Musk publicized his Hyperloop scheme he provided a fairly detailed technical presentation of how it was all going to work to justify its feasibility, and his claimed price tag of $7 billion.
Musk's document provided a pretty good prima facie validation of the concept, although at the time a large number of /.ers piled on with criticisms without even bothering to look at the report. But by putting a specific proposal out there Musk had the guts to give serious critics the material they needed to critique the plan.
Mars One is claiming:
"No new major developments or inventions are needed to make the mission plan a reality. Each stage of Mars One mission plan employs existing, validated and available technology.
Components that make the mission plan will be made exclusively by existing suppliers. Mars One has received confirmation of this from all major suppliers through letters of interest. While most of the components required are not immediately available with the exact specifications, at this time, there is no need for radical modifications to the current component designs. All suppliers have confirmed their ability to build what is required-- and they can do so now."
Pretty bold claims these. What proof is there that they are true? Surely they can publish these current component designs and describe, for example, exactly how they are proposing to make the Mars landing.
So where is the plan - at least at the level of detail and length that Musk put together - to prove this isn't just PR-flack talk?
But you realize that the Mars One scheme is not planning for "enough resources", right? Even if their incredible low ball budget were to get a crew to Mars, their plan provides absolutely no way to sustain them. That is being left as a problem to others, and is not even discussed in Mars One "plans".
When the various ships of settlement landed in the New World there was already air, raw materials easily fashioned into shelter and clothing, plenty of food, and people whose methods you could copy to live a comfortable healthy life, if you were clever enough to do so. And yet the English still died in droves (90% mortality in the first year was common). A Mars "colonist" will have nothing there to sustain them.
...
But now? MS has made many mistakes, but I could hardly believe it some years back when MS signed onto the RIAA and MPAA position on DRM. One might expect entertainment organizations to fail to understand that DRM is a bad idea, but a tech company? ...
Ah, I see why you are bewildered Grasshopper!
You mistake Microsoft for a tech company!
It is not. It is, as it has always been, an intellectual property company that happens to specialize in technology properties.
Microsoft's (and Bill's and Ballmer's) fortunes were built on a purchased product (86-DOS, aka "Q-DOS") which they licensed to a third company. Strictly an intellectual property move. It has been in Bill's, and Microsoft's, genes from the beginning.
...
I agree that Ballmer needs to go; Microsoft does have some fundamental problems. However, I take issue with how you dismissive you are of the things on your list. That many of those products have struggled is due more to poor perception than actual lack of quality.
...
But that is the point where Ballmer most needed to do his job. It does not matter how many quality products the development departments churn out, the CEO has to see to it that they are effectively marketed. If they fail, it is all on him. So this does not excuse Ballmer in the slightest, instead it pinpoints where his performance was most sadly lacking.
Maybe we could burn the plastic we cannot recycle in coal-fired power plants. We produce 32 million tons of plastic waste a year, but burn one billion tons of coal. If the coal feed had 3% plastic added to it the entire waste stream would be consumed while producing some electricity, and slightly reducing the CO2-to-energy output ratio.
http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/plastics.htm http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/report/coal.cfm
... There is absolutely no crime on the island (as in zero). It's a very, very, very wealthy strip of island in Sarasota, FL and there's no reason for this. ...
And we have a winner!
Keeping license plates of people who live there would reveal very little.
The very, very, very wealthy are accustomed to living in a bubble where they can avoid contact with everyone else, except on their terms. A public highway, 789, traverses the length of the island, connecting to other islands on either end. Permanently recording every outsider who comes to "their" island is in keeping with the predilections of great wealth.
Not to mention the fact that cell phone records can be pulled only if the cell phone company is still keeping them. Most retain data for 1-2 years, not 10 years.
And Florida is mostly sand.
Really, it is: http://gardeningsolutions.ifas.ufl.edu/giam/maintenance_and_care/soil_fertilizer_and_nutrients/florida_soils.html
Did wild fish, wolves, foxes, lions... i.e. animals not relying on human-made food get obese? I didn't see any of those mentioned in the article. It seems the common thread is that obesity increased in the organisms eating food manufactured by humans and that food did change significantly over the last several decades.
...
You'll notice that there are practical problems with gathering accurate average weight information on populations of genuinely wild wolves, foxes, lions, etc. - (with catch and release fish are probably much easier, but this may be a mammal-only thing). They analyzed data which was actually available, mostly laboratory animals, and the numerous 'wild' small mammals in the form of rodents. It would be rash to assume that this was wholly caused by eating manufactured food as opposed, say, to synthetic chemicals encountered through other means.
more data should be required before we make such a broad spectrum 'everything is getting fat because of everything' claim, which is absolutely as absurd as it sounds. In the cases of laboratory controlled animals, im willing to venture a sedentary and stressful lifestyle has accumulated their girth. ...
According to the article the rise in laboratory rodent weight is a steady trend stretching over 20 years. A laboratory mouse has 4 generations a year, so that spans 80 generations of mouse history, and is consistent with a trend that includes rural feral rodents.
How is it that lab rats have been becoming steadily more sedentary and stressed in recent decades, in synchrony with rodents living in the wild? And all the other species listed? This is devotion to a received one-cause explanation in the face of contradicting evidence with a vengeance.
... But farmers aren't the ones slipping big bills into Congress' g-strings.
You vastly underestimate the agro-industrial Farm Lobby. They are not the driving force behind the peculiar shunning of Cuba (tariffs keep Brazilian sugar out of the U.S. fine, no need for high-octane politics), but do not underestimate the muscle the "farmers" have in Washington.
Right you are. Of the two plastics widely used in these drink bottles HDPE has a UV resistance rating of "poor" and PET has a resistance of "fair". Unless the bottles are treated with some sort of UV protection layer before installation in a few years (or less for HDPE) the bottle you cemented into your roof will start splitting, dumping the bleach filled water on your furniture, and leaving holes in your roof.
In Third World Countries, that may not be a serious problem. People in the First World will probably find this an unacceptable drawback.
The only problem I see with it is that it doesn't appear to be particularly resistant to stupid people. What if someone decides to actively sabotage it - e.g. blowing up a section of tube just before the car arrives at 1300 km/hr. Now imagine they do that somewhere downtown.
Right. It could kill all the passengers in a capsule. All 14 of them (the ones behind will be able to automatically brake to a halt). Today it is impossible for saboteurs to kill that many people of a train. Oh, wait...
London Tube Bombings
Madrid Train Bombings.