Please, mods, how is this insightful? OP is un-insightful to the degree that (s)he could just as well have complained about the clear cut human rights violations against The Stig!
Having looked at the author more thoroughly, I've concluded that while he probably has some good insights into sociology and related things, he knows next to nothing about cosmology, quantum theory or modern physics at all. He goes ahead and bases his claim on knowing these fields on "having published on arxiv.org", which is trivial, since there is no peer review or anything required to get a paper on the arXiv. And then, when you look at said arXiv paper it is just a really convoluted attempt at a hidden variables explanation of quantum mechanics, which as Colbeck and Renners showed a few years ago is not a fruitful class of theories, since it doesn't really explain anything. It's about as scientific as Russel's teapot, or the invisible pink unicorn.
Alright, back up a minute. In what sense is the shape of the universe like a bagel? If I assume you mean that spacetime is a 4D torus, then you not only have a non-zero Ricci scalar (curvature), which flatly contradicts a lot of experimental evidence, but you have a non-constant curvature throughout the universe, which would mean that spacetime is non-isotropic, which again (via Nöethers theorem) implies that conservation of mass and conservation of momentum are no longer laws of nature. I assume he has some pretty damned good explanations for this?
The difference between COBOL and something like Rails is that if your COBOL gig dries up it can be pretty difficult to find another job to replace it in a timely matter.
No, the difference between COBOL and Rails is that the guying doing Rails-programming is going to have to forget Rails and learn the new facny-language du jour in ten or maybe just five years. The COBOL programmer will never have to learn another language, and can even teach his children and grandchildren COBOL, thus ensuring prosperity not just for himself but for coming generations of his offspring.
Look, it's like this: geeks are the ones who use the most ergonomic/custom adapted solutions out there. Just look at stuff like the Kinesis Advantage, chorded keyboards, or even Emacs and Vim for that matter, to see this in action. Now, a lot of geeks are currently using somewhat obscure window managers like Awesome WM, Wmii, Xmonad, Openbox etc., and these are all tiling WMs. They just do what you tell them to, in an intelligent way, end of story. Once you've configured your WM right, it's unbeatable.
To give you an example: a software some colleagues of mine are writing is a little stupid sometimes, in that calling it with the debug flag makes it plot everything and the kitchen sink at every timestep. This window steals focus every time it is redrawn (which is a combination of gnuplot's fault and theirs, it seems). It is often useful, but when you don't want to look at the plots, it means that your computer essentially becomes unusable for a minute while this thing runs. On Awesome WM, however, I can tell the WM to always put this plot window on workspace #9, and then to ignore focus stealing on workspaces which are not currently displayed. Thus my computer can be used as normal on workspaces 1 through 8, while my colleagues are forced to sit and watch gnuplot in action (I hear they're going to patch it). I challenge you to show me a non-tiling WM which has scripting capabilities like that.
Saying Os X is the best in usability because Unity
and Win8 suck is like saying a Ford Crown Victoria
is the best car since it's better than a Lancia Beta or an Austin Healey.
Try a tiling window manager with virtual
desktops sometime, and you'll
experience real usability.
I like the Leaf as a car, much more so than the Mitsubishi equivalent. (I don't own an electric car, but I would like to in the future). But what really pisses me off about it when I skim e.g. the Leaf-owners forum is that the software which Nissan provides that displays essentially how much electricity you have left is abysmal. It doesn't have a real state-of-charge indicator, just a stupid discrete level system. Thus, when the display reads "level 9", you have no idea if it just entered 9, or is about to leave 9, which is a significant difference.
Also, you mention your estimate of 8 year life span. That is the elephant in the room which could kill electric cars as a benefit to the global environment. By the numbers I've seen, replacing an efficient gasoline powered car you already own (say a VW Polo BlueMotion, ~ 70 MPG) with an electric car takes around 7 years to break even in terms of CO2 emissions, when you include the emissions from car production. If you compare that to just keeping the efficient VW Polo for 7 more years, the electric car doesn't make any sense at all.
Agreed. Here in Norway, we've had several solar companies closing as well due to the Chinese dumping solar panel prices.
This is the Chinese MO on such things, they did it to magnesium production around fifteen years ago. First the price dropped a lot and all manufacture went to China, and then the prices started to steadily increase after almost only Chinese companies were making magnesium. Expect to see solar panel prices slowly increase in the coming years.
Indeed. The way US homes are built is a joke I can't seem to understand. When I see those "Extreme Makeover" things on TV where they completely destroy a house in 3 minutes with an excavator, I'm really led to wonder what the frack the builders are thinking. Try that with a typical Northern European house, and it would take you the best part of a day, never mind that you couldn't do it safely, since it would release a lot of insulation material into the air which would be harmful to breathe.
The problem is vendors insisting on only a vendor-flavored OS on your phone. Imagine if Dell laptops only worked with Dell's specific version of Windows. Then you would have had to wait half a year after the release of Win7 to upgrade your Dell Vista laptop to Dell's version of Win7.
You should be aware of a new feature of Android that hasn't really gotten a lot of press, but is the solution to this problem: the latest upgrade of the "Play store" (market) includes something called "Google Play Services". This new app takes care of upgrading and patching all Google-produced apps (system apps, YouTube, browser, camera, etc.). It is back-ported both to Gingerbread and Froyo. It applies security patches and upgrades without needing user intervention, as I understand it.
TL;DR: You may not be able to upgrade your Gingerbread phone to ICS, but Google still patches known vulns on your system.
I'm using ArchLinux on this laptop, with everything and the kitchen sink installed. That means a complete LaTeX install, LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Gimp, Digikam, Inkscape, Blender, Python, several Fortran compilers, a Pascal compiler, some linear algebra libraries, Mono, Wine, 32-bit libraries for multilib support, all the media codecs I need, CUPS with lots of printer drivers, etc. etc.
All of this takes up 17 GB of my SSD drive. That MS manage to consume more than twice as much space with significantly less stuff included is just embarrasing.
Yes, the "right to keep and bear" is clearly in the 2nd Amendment. What is not there is the "right to such weapons for the purpose of self-defence". They just made that shit up in order to make stricter gun storage requirements "unconstitutional". It's true that some state legislations had different texts which included the self-defence purpose, but state law != federal law is a pretty well-established concept.
As I've argued before on/., the Scalia majority in DC vs. Heller is revisionist regarding the second amendment, and it is not internally consistent. The system of appointing supreme court justices in the US is frankly put disgusting, in clear disregard of the separation of powers principle, and a large part of why the legal system is so broken. Scalia basically made his legacy/career on that one judgement, and you can be fairly confident he'll earn some nice money consulting for the NRA when he retires.
Contrast is configurable - File > Account > Office Theme - Dark Gray
Agreed the default is not enough contrast.
Microsoft: in our software, we always make sure the default configuration is the least usable of all configurations, so that users will have to (change theme | install start menu | turn off indexing of all mercurial repos | what have you) themselves.
Because the whales being hunted for "research" are not only endangered, but are being fished on a commercial scale.
That's Japan. It's in Asia, not in Europe, you know. I specifically said "in a well regulated way on a population which is large enough". Try answering the question.
To be specific, the quota for Norwegian whale hunting has been between 500 and 1000 whales per year for the last decades. This is of a species called "common mink whale", estimated global population 184 000 individuals, being cited as "of least concern" on the IUCN Red List for endangered species. That's the same "endangeredness" category as Alaska Moose. Should we stop hunting that as well?
And regarding the temperatures leveling off post-2000, that's fairly easy to find data for (GIYF): here's a plot showing the global temperature anomaly from Hadley data, NOAA data and NASA data. All are roughly flat for the ten years following 2000.
So, the main finding in this study is that incorporating new data from the past ten years into an existing model significantly lowers the estimated climate sensitivity. The obvious implication would be that previous studies which used data sets ending around 2000 are likely to be overestimating climate sensitivity.
I think we all agree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. The key question is the magnitude of the climate sensitivity to a doubling in CO2 concentration. Is it 1 degree C? 5 degrees C? Somewhere in between? I think that the "mainstream" answer right now is "We don't have enough data to tell for sure, but we're confident it is between 1 and 5 C. But we should be doing something about it right fucking now, so say it's going to be 3 C, and then work out the consequences."
What's your problem with whale hunting when it is done in a well regulated way on a population which is large enough to sustain some predation? How is it worse than, say, deer hunting? Or keeping cows stowed up for their entire life just to be killed? Is it worse because you don't do it in your country?
Disclaimer: Am Norwegian, but I've never hunted whale. Asking question out of genuine interest.
Bullshit. If you have a Ph.D., you've published original research papers, so you know your field as well as anyone. Sounds like someone never got theirs, but still thinks they should be considered to be in the same league as someone who did?
Have you tried a tiling WM? I use Awesome WM, and several times I've found myself installing it on a new box and then forgetting to copy my settings and preferences from another box until several days have passed, because the WM just gets out of your way and does its job 99.2% of the time.
I'm actually undoing previous moderations just to reply to this, because it is so stupid and uninsightful.
Do you have any idea how many FOSS programs from how many authors/projects I use every day? Let me just name a few: Thunderbird and Firefox (Mozilla), LaTeX (TUG), bash/zsh (a community), gfortran/gcc (GNU), vim (another community), ArchLinux (yet another community), GIMP (GNU), Inkscape (yet another community), and the list goes on.
Do you really think I (or anyone else in the world) have contributed to each and every of these projects? I can honestly say that I have contributed to two of these: ArchLinux (wiki editing) and vim (scripting), but I am a programmer, and "ordinary" people contribute less, I assume. I think you should count yourself very lucky if even 5% of your users contribute to your specific project.
It uses some unique key/MAC adress/whatever which is embedded in the SIM card as one input. I did a little digging around, and it looks like it sends a hash of the SIM key + application-specific key over 3G to a server belonging to the bank, and the bank server responds using a text message to my number which contains the one-time key. As far as I can tell, the communication both over 3G and text message are encrypted.
When I changed SIM cards, it kept on generating one-time keys, not notifying me of anything wrong, but the keys it generated were no longer correct. I suppose the purpose is that no-one can steal your phone, insert their own SIM card to get around your lock screen, and then generate your one-time key.
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Please, mods, how is this insightful? OP is un-insightful to the degree that (s)he could just as well have complained about the clear cut human rights violations against The Stig!
Having looked at the author more thoroughly, I've concluded that while he probably has some good insights into sociology and related things, he knows next to nothing about cosmology, quantum theory or modern physics at all. He goes ahead and bases his claim on knowing these fields on "having published on arxiv.org", which is trivial, since there is no peer review or anything required to get a paper on the arXiv. And then, when you look at said arXiv paper it is just a really convoluted attempt at a hidden variables explanation of quantum mechanics, which as Colbeck and Renners showed a few years ago is not a fruitful class of theories, since it doesn't really explain anything. It's about as scientific as Russel's teapot, or the invisible pink unicorn.
his theory of the shape of our universe, a bagel
Alright, back up a minute. In what sense is the shape of the universe like a bagel? If I assume you mean that spacetime is a 4D torus, then you not only have a non-zero Ricci scalar (curvature), which flatly contradicts a lot of experimental evidence, but you have a non-constant curvature throughout the universe, which would mean that spacetime is non-isotropic, which again (via Nöethers theorem) implies that conservation of mass and conservation of momentum are no longer laws of nature. I assume he has some pretty damned good explanations for this?
The difference between COBOL and something like Rails is that if your COBOL gig dries up it can be pretty difficult to find another job to replace it in a timely matter.
No, the difference between COBOL and Rails is that the guying doing Rails-programming is going to have to forget Rails and learn the new facny-language du jour in ten or maybe just five years. The COBOL programmer will never have to learn another language, and can even teach his children and grandchildren COBOL, thus ensuring prosperity not just for himself but for coming generations of his offspring.
Look, it's like this: geeks are the ones who use the most ergonomic/custom adapted solutions out there. Just look at stuff like the Kinesis Advantage, chorded keyboards, or even Emacs and Vim for that matter, to see this in action. Now, a lot of geeks are currently using somewhat obscure window managers like Awesome WM, Wmii, Xmonad, Openbox etc., and these are all tiling WMs. They just do what you tell them to, in an intelligent way, end of story. Once you've configured your WM right, it's unbeatable.
To give you an example: a software some colleagues of mine are writing is a little stupid sometimes, in that calling it with the debug flag makes it plot everything and the kitchen sink at every timestep. This window steals focus every time it is redrawn (which is a combination of gnuplot's fault and theirs, it seems). It is often useful, but when you don't want to look at the plots, it means that your computer essentially becomes unusable for a minute while this thing runs. On Awesome WM, however, I can tell the WM to always put this plot window on workspace #9, and then to ignore focus stealing on workspaces which are not currently displayed. Thus my computer can be used as normal on workspaces 1 through 8, while my colleagues are forced to sit and watch gnuplot in action (I hear they're going to patch it). I challenge you to show me a non-tiling WM which has scripting capabilities like that.
Saying Os X is the best in usability because Unity and Win8 suck is like saying a Ford Crown Victoria is the best car since it's better than a Lancia Beta or an Austin Healey.
Try a tiling window manager with virtual desktops sometime, and you'll experience real usability.
I like the Leaf as a car, much more so than the Mitsubishi equivalent. (I don't own an electric car, but I would like to in the future). But what really pisses me off about it when I skim e.g. the Leaf-owners forum is that the software which Nissan provides that displays essentially how much electricity you have left is abysmal. It doesn't have a real state-of-charge indicator, just a stupid discrete level system. Thus, when the display reads "level 9", you have no idea if it just entered 9, or is about to leave 9, which is a significant difference.
Also, you mention your estimate of 8 year life span. That is the elephant in the room which could kill electric cars as a benefit to the global environment. By the numbers I've seen, replacing an efficient gasoline powered car you already own (say a VW Polo BlueMotion, ~ 70 MPG) with an electric car takes around 7 years to break even in terms of CO2 emissions, when you include the emissions from car production. If you compare that to just keeping the efficient VW Polo for 7 more years, the electric car doesn't make any sense at all.
Agreed. Here in Norway, we've had several solar companies closing as well due to the Chinese dumping solar panel prices.
This is the Chinese MO on such things, they did it to magnesium production around fifteen years ago. First the price dropped a lot and all manufacture went to China, and then the prices started to steadily increase after almost only Chinese companies were making magnesium. Expect to see solar panel prices slowly increase in the coming years.
Indeed. The way US homes are built is a joke I can't seem to understand. When I see those "Extreme Makeover" things on TV where they completely destroy a house in 3 minutes with an excavator, I'm really led to wonder what the frack the builders are thinking. Try that with a typical Northern European house, and it would take you the best part of a day, never mind that you couldn't do it safely, since it would release a lot of insulation material into the air which would be harmful to breathe.
The problem is vendors insisting on only a vendor-flavored OS on your phone. Imagine if Dell laptops only worked with Dell's specific version of Windows. Then you would have had to wait half a year after the release of Win7 to upgrade your Dell Vista laptop to Dell's version of Win7.
You should be aware of a new feature of Android that hasn't really gotten a lot of press, but is the solution to this problem: the latest upgrade of the "Play store" (market) includes something called "Google Play Services". This new app takes care of upgrading and patching all Google-produced apps (system apps, YouTube, browser, camera, etc.). It is back-ported both to Gingerbread and Froyo. It applies security patches and upgrades without needing user intervention, as I understand it.
TL;DR: You may not be able to upgrade your Gingerbread phone to ICS, but Google still patches known vulns on your system.
I'm using ArchLinux on this laptop, with everything and the kitchen sink installed. That means a complete LaTeX install, LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Gimp, Digikam, Inkscape, Blender, Python, several Fortran compilers, a Pascal compiler, some linear algebra libraries, Mono, Wine, 32-bit libraries for multilib support, all the media codecs I need, CUPS with lots of printer drivers, etc. etc.
All of this takes up 17 GB of my SSD drive. That MS manage to consume more than twice as much space with significantly less stuff included is just embarrasing.
Yes, the "right to keep and bear" is clearly in the 2nd Amendment. What is not there is the "right to such weapons for the purpose of self-defence". They just made that shit up in order to make stricter gun storage requirements "unconstitutional". It's true that some state legislations had different texts which included the self-defence purpose, but state law != federal law is a pretty well-established concept.
As I've argued before on /., the Scalia majority in DC vs. Heller is revisionist regarding the second amendment, and it is not internally consistent. The system of appointing supreme court justices in the US is frankly put disgusting, in clear disregard of the separation of powers principle, and a large part of why the legal system is so broken. Scalia basically made his legacy/career on that one judgement, and you can be fairly confident he'll earn some nice money consulting for the NRA when he retires.
Contrast is configurable - File > Account > Office Theme - Dark Gray Agreed the default is not enough contrast.
Microsoft: in our software, we always make sure the default configuration is the least usable of all configurations, so that users will have to (change theme | install start menu | turn off indexing of all mercurial repos | what have you) themselves.
Because the whales being hunted for "research" are not only endangered, but are being fished on a commercial scale.
That's Japan. It's in Asia, not in Europe, you know. I specifically said "in a well regulated way on a population which is large enough". Try answering the question.
To be specific, the quota for Norwegian whale hunting has been between 500 and 1000 whales per year for the last decades. This is of a species called "common mink whale", estimated global population 184 000 individuals, being cited as "of least concern" on the IUCN Red List for endangered species. That's the same "endangeredness" category as Alaska Moose. Should we stop hunting that as well?
And regarding the temperatures leveling off post-2000, that's fairly easy to find data for (GIYF): here's a plot showing the global temperature anomaly from Hadley data, NOAA data and NASA data. All are roughly flat for the ten years following 2000.
So, the main finding in this study is that incorporating new data from the past ten years into an existing model significantly lowers the estimated climate sensitivity. The obvious implication would be that previous studies which used data sets ending around 2000 are likely to be overestimating climate sensitivity.
I think we all agree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. The key question is the magnitude of the climate sensitivity to a doubling in CO2 concentration. Is it 1 degree C? 5 degrees C? Somewhere in between? I think that the "mainstream" answer right now is "We don't have enough data to tell for sure, but we're confident it is between 1 and 5 C. But we should be doing something about it right fucking now, so say it's going to be 3 C, and then work out the consequences."
What's your problem with whale hunting when it is done in a well regulated way on a population which is large enough to sustain some predation? How is it worse than, say, deer hunting? Or keeping cows stowed up for their entire life just to be killed? Is it worse because you don't do it in your country?
Disclaimer: Am Norwegian, but I've never hunted whale. Asking question out of genuine interest.
Bullshit. If you have a Ph.D., you've published original research papers, so you know your field as well as anyone. Sounds like someone never got theirs, but still thinks they should be considered to be in the same league as someone who did?
Reply to undo wrong mod.
I have to ask about your rule of thumb: which audio equipment are you referring to?
Have you tried a tiling WM? I use Awesome WM, and several times I've found myself installing it on a new box and then forgetting to copy my settings and preferences from another box until several days have passed, because the WM just gets out of your way and does its job 99.2% of the time.
I'm actually undoing previous moderations just to reply to this, because it is so stupid and uninsightful.
Do you have any idea how many FOSS programs from how many authors/projects I use every day? Let me just name a few: Thunderbird and Firefox (Mozilla), LaTeX (TUG), bash/zsh (a community), gfortran/gcc (GNU), vim (another community), ArchLinux (yet another community), GIMP (GNU), Inkscape (yet another community), and the list goes on.
Do you really think I (or anyone else in the world) have contributed to each and every of these projects? I can honestly say that I have contributed to two of these: ArchLinux (wiki editing) and vim (scripting), but I am a programmer, and "ordinary" people contribute less, I assume. I think you should count yourself very lucky if even 5% of your users contribute to your specific project.
It uses some unique key/MAC adress/whatever which is embedded in the SIM card as one input. I did a little digging around, and it looks like it sends a hash of the SIM key + application-specific key over 3G to a server belonging to the bank, and the bank server responds using a text message to my number which contains the one-time key. As far as I can tell, the communication both over 3G and text message are encrypted.
When I changed SIM cards, it kept on generating one-time keys, not notifying me of anything wrong, but the keys it generated were no longer correct. I suppose the purpose is that no-one can steal your phone, insert their own SIM card to get around your lock screen, and then generate your one-time key.