For example, those non-standard screws on some electronic devices. The manufacturer would have you believe that those are there to protect the integrity and quality of the product: but I think they just serve to obfuscate and generate revenue for the manufacturer.
They aren't. Most non-flat, non-philips screws are used for reasons that have nothing to do with keeping the consumer out of the box, and everything to do with manufacturing processes. They grip the screwdriver in a different way, either allowing for different stress measurements around the screw or an increased certainty that the screwdriver won't accidentally slip and destroy your VCR / PDA / Wii.
MS Office 2007 can do PDFs better than either the postscript route or OOo (sans any custom macros.) Not just a conversion of a postscript file, but a tagged and bookmarked PDF.
I suspect that this is the part that Adobe is balking at -- that anyone would care and duplicate the beyond-standard work that they do with PDFmaker, to the point where someone with MS office really doesn't need to contact them anymore.
The other three situations you mention don't particularly involve fully-informed consent between all participants.
Much of the time, polygamy doesn't, either.
However, even in the most ideal situation -- that is, two men and two women who decide to share a home and have open sexual relations exclusive to the two couples -- polamory is problematic. Only about at the level of a married man having an affair, or a couple going to a swinger's bar, but still problematic. Unless you're happilly married and both adrent polyamorists, please trust me that it's a bad idea.
(I'm speaking from experience, btw. I know a good half-dozen polyamorists or polyamorist "couples", and only about one is even close to "hapilly married." Most of those I know who were married have since gotten divorced, and polyamory was an indirect cause of the divorce.)
In your example you say that government should step in when parents teach their children that polygamy is alright, or that eating human flesh is good... But there is no law against these things.
Look up "endangering the welfare of a child." In most--perhaps all--parts of the country there ARE laws that regulate what a parent can teach their children. A good many of them aren't even exclusive like my examples -- in every part of the country, a parent who denies their child a basic elementary education will have their child taken away from them.
In the case of polygamy, not only is it not illegal to teach your kids that it's right, actually practicing it is also alright. The only part that is illegal is being "legally" married to multiple spouses, but having multiple spouses cohabitate a home is fine. You and I may agree that this is bad but it is not the government's place to stop people from doing these things that have no effect on others.
You're wrong on two parts, there. Firstly, just about any Attorney General that has a mind to do so can apply the state's bigamy and polygamy laws against a "multiple-spouse" couple, even if they don't try and get any of them recognized. I belive there are a few states that have modfied their bigamy laws to expressly allow this, and in general no state A.G. bothers with it if everyone really was a consenting adult before they entered, but odds are that there is a law against it, and for good reason.
As you're probably aware, there is a branch of the LDS church ("Fundamental" LDS, fwiw) that still advoctes and practices polygamy. Most of the time, these polygamists wed women who are legally not even adults, give away their daughters to other polygamists without the daughter's consent, and do not allow their children the chance to choose a different life. The "prophet" of the FLDS church was recently added to the FBI's Most Wanted List -- it's the sort of thing, like having a seperated "religious" community, that has been bad so often that there's a law against it. Better that the guy who wants to marry two adult women be denied that than any girl be forced to marry a strange old man who already has two other girl-wives.
The second part is more subtle. The deciding factor in what is and is not illegal is not "it affects someone else." For example, there's usually not a law against painting your house a garish, awful color that lowers the property value of every residence around you*. The deciding factor about what is and is not illegal is what the people of the country decide, through Congress and Juries, should not be allowed. Which is why pot is illegal and tobacco can't be sold to minors.
*: There are a few deed restrictions, but those aren't laws. And from time to time a town really does pass such a law--but it's not a universal thing.
*Conservative being someone who upholds the ideals upon which America was founded upon, a liberal being someone who introduces ideas contrary to those ideals.
You mean that there are actually political parites out there that thing that Parliment should have authority over the United States? Or do you instead mean that Rush Limbaugh and his cohorts really are in favor of the six-party seperation of powers enshrined in the Federalist Papers? (F/L/J for nation-wide and state-wide).
Claims of "Conservatives" to be in accord with the principals of the founding fathers -- with the implication that "liberals" are not -- is a rather bald-faced attempt to claim the conversational high ground. Yes, there are some things that "Conservatives" are more in line with the founding fathers are than the "liberals", but the converse is also true.
And on those things where they differ, the conversational high ground (that is, the side whom wins in a tie, or starts off ahead, or whatever metaphor you want to use) should be the side that is most in keeping with established law. Because, you know, one thing that the Founding Fathers really were big on was the Rule of Law, and all that.
I, and I alone, decide which values to give my kids.
No, you don't. The government has to be able to stop in and intervene when you "choose" to just teach them crap. Such as, oh, that having sex with their parents is OK. Or that there's nothing wrong at all with polygamy. Or that you can go ahead and eat human flesh. Or that it's OK to kill black people.
Do we as a society embrace a wide variety of civil disagreements? Yes. And among those disgareements, you can teach your kids whatever you want. But you aren't the only person who has a say in how your kids grow up. They are not your pets, your toys, or your property. They are the human beings that you have a duty to raise to the best of your ability.
Oh, and if you really want your 13 year old to have that new MA game "shoot the Iraqi" (or its AO total conversion, "Rape & Kill"), you can go right ahead and buy it for them.
But how much do you have to know about Windows to do this?
Not an awful lot. "use the Add/Remove Programs thingy on the Control Panel" is just a shade above "how do I turn this thing off?".
Anybody who can buy thier own PC can take the crap off. And anyone who can't buy their own PC has someone they paid (either with cash or guilt) to help them buy it that they can turn to.
Great for big business, great for government and police work; and great for people like me who are fed up being spied on all the time.
You DO know that what the NSA does (logging all calls and looking for patterns) isn't even going to notice if you scramble your call, right? It's kind of like inventing a number-system for your spedometer, and thinking that it'll keep the cops from firing their radar detectors at you.
Solution: wipe the hard drive and reinstall windows.
Nope. The solution is to spend the thirty minutes uninstalling the crapware. If you can't get it the way you want it in one single day, then your solution should be to contact the company and tell them you'll return it if they can't do X.
FWIW, my new laptop came with a score of crap, and it took me next to no time to get rid of it.
Depends on how you define "between". In some geometries, and according to some views on infinity, five is indeed between three and four.
Wrong definition.
the operative defintion isn't "between", but what you mean by "three," "four", and "five."
If you mean these words to be what they commonly are in English -- that is, the points on the scale of whole numbers indicating (111), (1111), and (11111) things respecitvely -- then you can't get (11111) by any measure between (111) and (1111).
Or, in other words, there are some thing that we KNOW can't happen, and saying that they can is equivalent to saying that it's possible that the universe was all created yesterday. That is, it's an interesting mental exercise, but beyond that it's a waste of time.
Let me put that into perspective. One of the main features selling M$ Word is easy to use versioning. So, imagine people at your place of work using a Wiki instead of emailing each other 20MB binary files and overwrite each others changes all day long. Give them a decent browser with spell checking and this is a much better way to share work. Oh yeah, it's also free.
It's not both "much better" and "free." Either they have to give up some functionality, or they have to re-learn the wiki, and at the least you need to pay somebody to set it up and maintain it.
If you just want to make sharing word documents better, look at SharePoint. You can set a price tag on it, and installation likely won't be beyond the realm of any office geek. If you really want to go OSS, then you've got a nice price point to argue against (and budget against.) If you just want it to work--well, then you've got something.
I thought the government was only allowed to redact documents obtained under the FOIA to preserve national security.
You mean "to preserve things marked as Secret", which ammounts to the same thing, if you call "national embarassments" national securiity.
And you're also forgetting that the government agencies can redact to perserve the privacy or trade secrets of its employees, contractors, or the general public, or that the government HAS to redact any document when ordered to by a Judge. (For example, a sealed juvenile file.)
They shouldn't even get a GUI. The first couple of semesters should be taught on Linux machines without X installed. I've seen nothing to indicate that a GUI does anything other than get in the way of understanding what's going on behind the scenes.
A GUI -- with a good IDE -- does one thing that tossing the kids at a command line won't do. It makes it easy to "get into" programming. At the least, the FIRST class should be taught with an IDE. Maybe even using Visual Basic or OOo's BASIC. Once they go from drooling non-programmers, and have both a little confidence and a little knowledge, slap them into full-bore programming.
You know, if you want to wax libertarian about "wasteful" government projects, why not start with the military?
We have bases all over the world -- and with the USSR gone, we don't get a lot of benefit from them. If we returned to a semi-isolationist stance and let the rest of the world carry more of the "burden", we'd save enough cash to make a fleet of Space Shuttles.
In the case of the photons, strictly speaking and according to the rules, photons do not travel at a speed of 2c relative to each other, so your usage is still incorrect.
Here's the rub -- from the frame of reference the hypothetical third party, they DO travel at 2c. If the photons stopped after one (objective) hour, and one turned around and headed towards the other one, it would take that photon two (objective) hours to get to the other one. (If we instead measure subjectively, and measure from the subjective time frame of the always-moving proton, it's still a two-hour trip -- although the distances are much greater and the stop-and-wait proton winds up passing through a much greater ammount of subjective time.)
(And let's not ignore that it's a waste of time to argue someone's partial understanding by saying "no." Much better to say "yes, but...", because then you can build on what they've done right [i.e., understanding basic relativity] and not force them to throw out everything they know because they didn't say it perfectly correct according to your understanding.)
Anyway...
Understand what point, exactly?
Since you have to ask, "that there is a fundamental difference between subatomic and superatomic reality." You can pick different word if you want ("our reality" and "quantum reality"), but the basic point is still there -- and it's been the foundation of pretty much the last sixty years of history, string theory or no string theory.
The only way to make your fairy tale more meaningful than say, the one about bad monkey spirit juju which I mentioned earlier, is to ground it in some theory ("theory" in the scientific sense).
You're missing the point, and it's a point worth catching.
However, the issue with using this metaphor more generally is not whether string theory is correct, but rather that the metaphor is only meaningful as a way to understand string theory.
A good metaphor is not limited to a single subtopic of the area under discussion -- it is as broad as possible, and applies correctly to any permutation of the subtopic. Like, for example, using the metaphor of "masks" to explain how an actor's role works. A "mask" metaphor works because it's simple, broad, and applies to all of the various sub-topics within theatre (actors being different from their roles, how a role is shaped by the playwright, etc.)
Calling matter a "knot" is a good metaphor, because it accomplishes the point and--if you've ever actually dealed with an array of knots--it's easy to grok how knots / matter can pile up, be divided down to "nothing", must be done a certain way to achieve a certain effect, are easier to destroy than create, etc., etc.
Now, since i'm sure you're a professional with years of experince in quantum theories, you no doubt find such simple metaphors laughable. But metaphors such as these aren't for you -- they're for laymen and only those professionals who may, quite by accident, find merit in them.
Well, i hear there's simply a lot more windows-interfacing with Windows Mobile. Might be cool to have all your windows programs available 24/7 on-the-go...
You heard wrong, actually. Windows Mobile is NOT a Win32 environment. While there is a lot of code overlap between the OS's, it's not enough to let anything you'd actually want to run transltate over without significant work on the developer's part.
Palm has much better office support than Windows Mobile -- both with the standard Documents to Go and the popular quickoffice, but also wtih direct-sync access through Palm's address book to Outlook. And while you can use a VNC-type connection through Windows Mobile, you can do exactly the same thing with Palm.
Unless you have a good reason to switch, stay with Palm OS.
The 700p will have almost exactly the same UI as your T5, albeit with 320x320 instead of 320x480. If you go to a 700w, you'll have an entirely different UI that runs at a lower resolution.
Remember: the 700w was released for corporate heavy networks that are all-windows. If it's just you, and you're not a big fan of WinMob, then don't do it.
It is a grammar question, because grammar determines which definition is being used. "Technically, he won the lottery" implies that the subject did not in fact win the lottery. "Technically, it was legal to sell pot in 1950" implies that there was some barrier (an impossible permit, FWIW) to actually selling mary jane.
This is really a question of philosophy of science and epistemology - how do we know things about the world around us, and how do we separate good knowledge from bad. Scientific theories are a large part of the answer to that, but generalizing the knot metaphor as you've suggested loses the specific connection to theory that all good scientific metaphors have, turning it into little more than a fairy tale.
Supposing that a scientific metaphor is "good" only if it advances understanding of one theory is a logical failing. It's sophmoric to presume that a metaphor that does not enhance the "hollistic" understanding of the audience, such as one that encourages false conclusions, is anything more than "acceptable." Some metaphors, such as anthropomorphising chemical reactions, are even "bad" as they do more harm to the audience's general understanding than good.
Science is a way of determing the validity of a premise -- to use the modern day popular definitons, it's a way of creating knowledge. Science is not, however, a useful means of propogating knowledge. That task is part of Art, usually the art of writing, and metaphor is an artistic tool. We're not talking about scientific studies -- we are, in fact, talking about fairy tales and which ones are better to get the audience to understand the point.
(Come to think of it, a fairy tale metaphor for explaining quantum mechanics would probably be an excellent general education or undergraduate means of introducing the topic. So long as the metaphor wasn't taken too far, and remained more in the scientific voice than in a prose-drama voice)
Also, the idea that "knot" communicates more than "blob" is speculation which would have to be tested. Following the loose metaphorical logic you've proposed, knots don't stop you from shrinking the kids, because you could just pull the knots tighter.
"But you would be left with just as much string, and a bunch more slack, and you'd have a harder time stretching the knot out again. Not to mention that if your knot needs to move in order to work, it won't be able to move nearly as well."
I think it holds up pretty well, actually. There's no theoretical reason that we couldn't compress all of the protons, neutrons, and electrons of a 6-year-old child into a shape smaller than an ant. It would, however, produce an incredible ammount of energy due to fusion, leave us with a small dot that still weighed just as much as the boy, and would leave the boy himself quite dead.
(Note that I didn't claim that the knot would keep the shrinking-factor away while the blob metaphor wouldn't; it's just that the blob metaphor doesn't let you explain atomic structure without leaving your metaphor.)
To me, in this context, "technically" would imply something that's true with respect to the theories in question, rather than something that sounds true to a layman but doesn't make much sense in theory.
Which sounds better: "Technically, we can call the Earth the center of the Universe since all movement is relative" or "Technically, the Earth doesn't move." It's possibly just a grammatical thing.
Finally, the business about knots would only make any kind of real sense in the context of something like string theory -- otherwise, it's a completely ungrounded term and you may as well just use "clump" or "blob" for all the explanatory power it has, i.e. not much.
Except that, if I used "blob", we'd fall into the trap of thinking about sub-atomic bits as if they were just very small super-atomic bits. Which is simply wrong, and forces layfolk to do things like write "Honey I shurnk the kids" because of all the "empty space" inside matter.
Yes, the "knot" metaphor rests on the principles of string theory. But even if string theory is fundamentally wrong, the metaphor works nicely to hammer home both the relationship of matter and energy ("the difference between a knot and the slack around a knot") and the fact that there really is something to reality -- once you take away matter and energy, there's still "something", and that something is what contains all of the cosmological constants.
This is all intentionally metaphoric, and a good metaphor is a consistent metaphor, which is as closely aigned as possible. ("What happens if you undo a knot? [matter] You get a lot of slack. [energy])
Word 95 was the first 32-bit Word, with on-the-fly spell checking.
Word 97 introduced built-in HTML export, and had a redesigned help system. It also, IIRC, was where the "auto-hide" menus showed up.
Word 2000 introduced "smart tags" that, in addition to some crappy data uses, let you undo autoformatting and turn the autoformatting off right in the document window.
Word 2003 (the current version) has, just compared to Word 2000:
A "task pane" that lets you limit what can be done to a document.
A built-in dictionary with definitions, and links to Encarta
XML Support, both in the bloated WordML and in the "I want to export XML from this form" manner
A brand-new "reading view" layout that is designed with reading on a computer in mind
And that's not to mention the move from "Word Macros" to Visual Basic for Applications (2000, AFAIK), or any of the about a hundred subtle changes in how the a document is internally laid out with each version. These changes may be easy to ignore, but that's kind of the point -- new things should either be intuitive enough you don't notice, or quiet enough that they don't get in your way. (the whole "moving stuff around" thing kind of defeats that purpose, but still...)
What you're saying is that in your example, from your or my reference frame, we can calculate (but not actually observe) that the distance between the two photons is increasing at a rate of 2c. However, "technically", that is not what is meant by relative velocity in special relativity, so it's not technically correct to say that "the relative speed of either photon from the other was 2c".
You're right. But we're not having a technical discussion here. (Note my use of the word "technically" to denote a phrase that may be literally true, but fosters a false perception.) When explaining things in a lay audience, it's important to use words as THEY understand them; in the right audience, mentioning a "quark" isn't a good idea unless you've got a careful explanation or don't mind being thought to be takling about a fictional alien bartender.
A poetic effort, but that doesn't have anything to do with the issue at hand, and besides, doesn't correspond to any physical theory I'm aware of (special or general relativity, quantum mechanics, or even string/brane theory).
Not to be rude, but that's because you either didn't understand the metaphor or you don't understand any of the theories you mentioned. Let's presume the former and let me try to expand upon my metaphor.
Our universe's space-time can be, had has been, described as a flat surface that can be distorted by any sizable amount of either 'matter' or 'energy.' All of advanced physics is trying to understand HOW our universe bends. However, for a layman, it's enough to know that it does bend, and even better if we can underscore for the layman that the limitations of relativity aren't due to the thing being transmitted, but rather to the very nature of our reality.
The 'Knot' metaphor, by the way, is just a handy way of underscoring the difference between Quantum reality (threads) and Newtonian reality (knots.) All mater and energy is just an arrangement of various quantum-level widgets, and if you're going to understand anything about quantum mechanics at all, you'll have to hammer into the point that QM takes place in what C.S. Lewis called 'subreality.' Or, to be more correct, our reality is a "superreality" built on atoms, which rests fundamentality on the reality of quantum mechanics.
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For example, those non-standard screws on some electronic devices. The manufacturer would have you believe that those are there to protect the integrity and quality of the product: but I think they just serve to obfuscate and generate revenue for the manufacturer.
They aren't. Most non-flat, non-philips screws are used for reasons that have nothing to do with keeping the consumer out of the box, and everything to do with manufacturing processes. They grip the screwdriver in a different way, either allowing for different stress measurements around the screw or an increased certainty that the screwdriver won't accidentally slip and destroy your VCR / PDA / Wii.
MS Office 2007 can do PDFs better than either the postscript route or OOo (sans any custom macros.) Not just a conversion of a postscript file, but a tagged and bookmarked PDF.
I suspect that this is the part that Adobe is balking at -- that anyone would care and duplicate the beyond-standard work that they do with PDFmaker, to the point where someone with MS office really doesn't need to contact them anymore.
The other three situations you mention don't particularly involve fully-informed consent between all participants.
Much of the time, polygamy doesn't, either.
However, even in the most ideal situation -- that is, two men and two women who decide to share a home and have open sexual relations exclusive to the two couples -- polamory is problematic. Only about at the level of a married man having an affair, or a couple going to a swinger's bar, but still problematic. Unless you're happilly married and both adrent polyamorists, please trust me that it's a bad idea.
(I'm speaking from experience, btw. I know a good half-dozen polyamorists or polyamorist "couples", and only about one is even close to "hapilly married." Most of those I know who were married have since gotten divorced, and polyamory was an indirect cause of the divorce.)
In your example you say that government should step in when parents teach their children that polygamy is alright, or that eating human flesh is good... But there is no law against these things.
Look up "endangering the welfare of a child." In most--perhaps all--parts of the country there ARE laws that regulate what a parent can teach their children. A good many of them aren't even exclusive like my examples -- in every part of the country, a parent who denies their child a basic elementary education will have their child taken away from them.
In the case of polygamy, not only is it not illegal to teach your kids that it's right, actually practicing it is also alright. The only part that is illegal is being "legally" married to multiple spouses, but having multiple spouses cohabitate a home is fine. You and I may agree that this is bad but it is not the government's place to stop people from doing these things that have no effect on others.
You're wrong on two parts, there. Firstly, just about any Attorney General that has a mind to do so can apply the state's bigamy and polygamy laws against a "multiple-spouse" couple, even if they don't try and get any of them recognized. I belive there are a few states that have modfied their bigamy laws to expressly allow this, and in general no state A.G. bothers with it if everyone really was a consenting adult before they entered, but odds are that there is a law against it, and for good reason.
As you're probably aware, there is a branch of the LDS church ("Fundamental" LDS, fwiw) that still advoctes and practices polygamy. Most of the time, these polygamists wed women who are legally not even adults, give away their daughters to other polygamists without the daughter's consent, and do not allow their children the chance to choose a different life. The "prophet" of the FLDS church was recently added to the FBI's Most Wanted List -- it's the sort of thing, like having a seperated "religious" community, that has been bad so often that there's a law against it. Better that the guy who wants to marry two adult women be denied that than any girl be forced to marry a strange old man who already has two other girl-wives.
The second part is more subtle. The deciding factor in what is and is not illegal is not "it affects someone else." For example, there's usually not a law against painting your house a garish, awful color that lowers the property value of every residence around you*. The deciding factor about what is and is not illegal is what the people of the country decide, through Congress and Juries, should not be allowed. Which is why pot is illegal and tobacco can't be sold to minors.
*: There are a few deed restrictions, but those aren't laws. And from time to time a town really does pass such a law--but it's not a universal thing.
*Conservative being someone who upholds the ideals upon which America was founded upon, a liberal being someone who introduces ideas contrary to those ideals.
You mean that there are actually political parites out there that thing that Parliment should have authority over the United States? Or do you instead mean that Rush Limbaugh and his cohorts really are in favor of the six-party seperation of powers enshrined in the Federalist Papers? (F/L/J for nation-wide and state-wide).
Claims of "Conservatives" to be in accord with the principals of the founding fathers -- with the implication that "liberals" are not -- is a rather bald-faced attempt to claim the conversational high ground. Yes, there are some things that "Conservatives" are more in line with the founding fathers are than the "liberals", but the converse is also true.
And on those things where they differ, the conversational high ground (that is, the side whom wins in a tie, or starts off ahead, or whatever metaphor you want to use) should be the side that is most in keeping with established law. Because, you know, one thing that the Founding Fathers really were big on was the Rule of Law, and all that.
Why should not being allowed content be the default position?
Because it's simple for a parent to buy something and give it to their children.
It is far less simple for a parent who doesn't want their child to get something to keep them from getting it.
I, and I alone, decide which values to give my kids.
No, you don't. The government has to be able to stop in and intervene when you "choose" to just teach them crap. Such as, oh, that having sex with their parents is OK. Or that there's nothing wrong at all with polygamy. Or that you can go ahead and eat human flesh. Or that it's OK to kill black people.
Do we as a society embrace a wide variety of civil disagreements? Yes. And among those disgareements, you can teach your kids whatever you want. But you aren't the only person who has a say in how your kids grow up. They are not your pets, your toys, or your property. They are the human beings that you have a duty to raise to the best of your ability.
Oh, and if you really want your 13 year old to have that new MA game "shoot the Iraqi" (or its AO total conversion, "Rape & Kill"), you can go right ahead and buy it for them.
But they've all got those damned stupid-looking glasses on!!!
don't you ever watch the movies? every nerdy chick becomes hot when you take off the glasses and let their hair down!
But how much do you have to know about Windows to do this?
Not an awful lot. "use the Add/Remove Programs thingy on the Control Panel" is just a shade above "how do I turn this thing off?".
Anybody who can buy thier own PC can take the crap off. And anyone who can't buy their own PC has someone they paid (either with cash or guilt) to help them buy it that they can turn to.
Great for big business, great for government and police work; and great for people like me who are fed up being spied on all the time.
You DO know that what the NSA does (logging all calls and looking for patterns) isn't even going to notice if you scramble your call, right? It's kind of like inventing a number-system for your spedometer, and thinking that it'll keep the cops from firing their radar detectors at you.
Solution: wipe the hard drive and reinstall windows.
Nope. The solution is to spend the thirty minutes uninstalling the crapware. If you can't get it the way you want it in one single day, then your solution should be to contact the company and tell them you'll return it if they can't do X.
FWIW, my new laptop came with a score of crap, and it took me next to no time to get rid of it.
Phbbbt.
Depends on how you define "between". In some geometries, and according to some views on infinity, five is indeed between three and four.
Wrong definition.
the operative defintion isn't "between", but what you mean by "three," "four", and "five."
If you mean these words to be what they commonly are in English -- that is, the points on the scale of whole numbers indicating (111), (1111), and (11111) things respecitvely -- then you can't get (11111) by any measure between (111) and (1111).
Or, in other words, there are some thing that we KNOW can't happen, and saying that they can is equivalent to saying that it's possible that the universe was all created yesterday. That is, it's an interesting mental exercise, but beyond that it's a waste of time.
Let me put that into perspective. One of the main features selling M$ Word is easy to use versioning. So, imagine people at your place of work using a Wiki instead of emailing each other 20MB binary files and overwrite each others changes all day long. Give them a decent browser with spell checking and this is a much better way to share work. Oh yeah, it's also free.
It's not both "much better" and "free." Either they have to give up some functionality, or they have to re-learn the wiki, and at the least you need to pay somebody to set it up and maintain it.
If you just want to make sharing word documents better, look at SharePoint. You can set a price tag on it, and installation likely won't be beyond the realm of any office geek. If you really want to go OSS, then you've got a nice price point to argue against (and budget against.) If you just want it to work--well, then you've got something.
I thought the government was only allowed to redact documents obtained under the FOIA to preserve national security.
You mean "to preserve things marked as Secret", which ammounts to the same thing, if you call "national embarassments" national securiity.
And you're also forgetting that the government agencies can redact to perserve the privacy or trade secrets of its employees, contractors, or the general public, or that the government HAS to redact any document when ordered to by a Judge. (For example, a sealed juvenile file.)
They shouldn't even get a GUI. The first couple of semesters should be taught on Linux machines without X installed. I've seen nothing to indicate that a GUI does anything other than get in the way of understanding what's going on behind the scenes.
A GUI -- with a good IDE -- does one thing that tossing the kids at a command line won't do. It makes it easy to "get into" programming. At the least, the FIRST class should be taught with an IDE. Maybe even using Visual Basic or OOo's BASIC. Once they go from drooling non-programmers, and have both a little confidence and a little knowledge, slap them into full-bore programming.
You know, if you want to wax libertarian about "wasteful" government projects, why not start with the military?
We have bases all over the world -- and with the USSR gone, we don't get a lot of benefit from them. If we returned to a semi-isolationist stance and let the rest of the world carry more of the "burden", we'd save enough cash to make a fleet of Space Shuttles.
Here's the rub -- from the frame of reference the hypothetical third party, they DO travel at 2c. If the photons stopped after one (objective) hour, and one turned around and headed towards the other one, it would take that photon two (objective) hours to get to the other one. (If we instead measure subjectively, and measure from the subjective time frame of the always-moving proton, it's still a two-hour trip -- although the distances are much greater and the stop-and-wait proton winds up passing through a much greater ammount of subjective time.)
(And let's not ignore that it's a waste of time to argue someone's partial understanding by saying "no." Much better to say "yes, but...", because then you can build on what they've done right [i.e., understanding basic relativity] and not force them to throw out everything they know because they didn't say it perfectly correct according to your understanding.)
Anyway...
Understand what point, exactly?
Since you have to ask, "that there is a fundamental difference between subatomic and superatomic reality." You can pick different word if you want ("our reality" and "quantum reality"), but the basic point is still there -- and it's been the foundation of pretty much the last sixty years of history, string theory or no string theory.
The only way to make your fairy tale more meaningful than say, the one about bad monkey spirit juju which I mentioned earlier, is to ground it in some theory ("theory" in the scientific sense).
You're missing the point, and it's a point worth catching.
A good metaphor is not limited to a single subtopic of the area under discussion -- it is as broad as possible, and applies correctly to any permutation of the subtopic. Like, for example, using the metaphor of "masks" to explain how an actor's role works. A "mask" metaphor works because it's simple, broad, and applies to all of the various sub-topics within theatre (actors being different from their roles, how a role is shaped by the playwright, etc.)
Calling matter a "knot" is a good metaphor, because it accomplishes the point and--if you've ever actually dealed with an array of knots--it's easy to grok how knots / matter can pile up, be divided down to "nothing", must be done a certain way to achieve a certain effect, are easier to destroy than create, etc., etc.
Now, since i'm sure you're a professional with years of experince in quantum theories, you no doubt find such simple metaphors laughable. But metaphors such as these aren't for you -- they're for laymen and only those professionals who may, quite by accident, find merit in them.
Well, i hear there's simply a lot more windows-interfacing with Windows Mobile. Might be cool to have all your windows programs available 24/7 on-the-go...
You heard wrong, actually. Windows Mobile is NOT a Win32 environment. While there is a lot of code overlap between the OS's, it's not enough to let anything you'd actually want to run transltate over without significant work on the developer's part.
Palm has much better office support than Windows Mobile -- both with the standard Documents to Go and the popular quickoffice, but also wtih direct-sync access through Palm's address book to Outlook. And while you can use a VNC-type connection through Windows Mobile, you can do exactly the same thing with Palm.
Unless you have a good reason to switch, stay with Palm OS.
The 700p will have almost exactly the same UI as your T5, albeit with 320x320 instead of 320x480. If you go to a 700w, you'll have an entirely different UI that runs at a lower resolution.
Remember: the 700w was released for corporate heavy networks that are all-windows. If it's just you, and you're not a big fan of WinMob, then don't do it.
You know you're on Slashdot, right?
Ok, then, substitute "hot" for "geeky."
This is not a question of grammar, it's a question of semantics, i.e. the meaning of the word "technically".
According to principle; formal rather than practical: a technical advantage.
It is a grammar question, because grammar determines which definition is being used. "Technically, he won the lottery" implies that the subject did not in fact win the lottery. "Technically, it was legal to sell pot in 1950" implies that there was some barrier (an impossible permit, FWIW) to actually selling mary jane.
This is really a question of philosophy of science and epistemology - how do we know things about the world around us, and how do we separate good knowledge from bad. Scientific theories are a large part of the answer to that, but generalizing the knot metaphor as you've suggested loses the specific connection to theory that all good scientific metaphors have, turning it into little more than a fairy tale.
Supposing that a scientific metaphor is "good" only if it advances understanding of one theory is a logical failing. It's sophmoric to presume that a metaphor that does not enhance the "hollistic" understanding of the audience, such as one that encourages false conclusions, is anything more than "acceptable." Some metaphors, such as anthropomorphising chemical reactions, are even "bad" as they do more harm to the audience's general understanding than good.
Science is a way of determing the validity of a premise -- to use the modern day popular definitons, it's a way of creating knowledge. Science is not, however, a useful means of propogating knowledge. That task is part of Art, usually the art of writing, and metaphor is an artistic tool. We're not talking about scientific studies -- we are, in fact, talking about fairy tales and which ones are better to get the audience to understand the point.
(Come to think of it, a fairy tale metaphor for explaining quantum mechanics would probably be an excellent general education or undergraduate means of introducing the topic. So long as the metaphor wasn't taken too far, and remained more in the scientific voice than in a prose-drama voice)
Also, the idea that "knot" communicates more than "blob" is speculation which would have to be tested. Following the loose metaphorical logic you've proposed, knots don't stop you from shrinking the kids, because you could just pull the knots tighter.
"But you would be left with just as much string, and a bunch more slack, and you'd have a harder time stretching the knot out again. Not to mention that if your knot needs to move in order to work, it won't be able to move nearly as well."
I think it holds up pretty well, actually. There's no theoretical reason that we couldn't compress all of the protons, neutrons, and electrons of a 6-year-old child into a shape smaller than an ant. It would, however, produce an incredible ammount of energy due to fusion, leave us with a small dot that still weighed just as much as the boy, and would leave the boy himself quite dead.
(Note that I didn't claim that the knot would keep the shrinking-factor away while the blob metaphor wouldn't; it's just that the blob metaphor doesn't let you explain atomic structure without leaving your metaphor.)
So what you are saying is that c is not so much the speed of light, but more along the lines of the speed of time?
Yes. Light travels as fast as anything possibly can travel -- gravity, information, a rocket ship with an infinitily powerful engine, anything.
To me, in this context, "technically" would imply something that's true with respect to the theories in question, rather than something that sounds true to a layman but doesn't make much sense in theory.
Which sounds better: "Technically, we can call the Earth the center of the Universe since all movement is relative" or "Technically, the Earth doesn't move." It's possibly just a grammatical thing.
Finally, the business about knots would only make any kind of real sense in the context of something like string theory -- otherwise, it's a completely ungrounded term and you may as well just use "clump" or "blob" for all the explanatory power it has, i.e. not much.
Except that, if I used "blob", we'd fall into the trap of thinking about sub-atomic bits as if they were just very small super-atomic bits. Which is simply wrong, and forces layfolk to do things like write "Honey I shurnk the kids" because of all the "empty space" inside matter.
Yes, the "knot" metaphor rests on the principles of string theory. But even if string theory is fundamentally wrong, the metaphor works nicely to hammer home both the relationship of matter and energy ("the difference between a knot and the slack around a knot") and the fact that there really is something to reality -- once you take away matter and energy, there's still "something", and that something is what contains all of the cosmological constants.
This is all intentionally metaphoric, and a good metaphor is a consistent metaphor, which is as closely aigned as possible. ("What happens if you undo a knot? [matter] You get a lot of slack. [energy])
Word 95 was the first 32-bit Word, with on-the-fly spell checking.
Word 97 introduced built-in HTML export, and had a redesigned help system. It also, IIRC, was where the "auto-hide" menus showed up.
Word 2000 introduced "smart tags" that, in addition to some crappy data uses, let you undo autoformatting and turn the autoformatting off right in the document window.
Word 2003 (the current version) has, just compared to Word 2000:
And that's not to mention the move from "Word Macros" to Visual Basic for Applications (2000, AFAIK), or any of the about a hundred subtle changes in how the a document is internally laid out with each version. These changes may be easy to ignore, but that's kind of the point -- new things should either be intuitive enough you don't notice, or quiet enough that they don't get in your way. (the whole "moving stuff around" thing kind of defeats that purpose, but still...)
What you're saying is that in your example, from your or my reference frame, we can calculate (but not actually observe) that the distance between the two photons is increasing at a rate of 2c. However, "technically", that is not what is meant by relative velocity in special relativity, so it's not technically correct to say that "the relative speed of either photon from the other was 2c".
You're right. But we're not having a technical discussion here. (Note my use of the word "technically" to denote a phrase that may be literally true, but fosters a false perception.) When explaining things in a lay audience, it's important to use words as THEY understand them; in the right audience, mentioning a "quark" isn't a good idea unless you've got a careful explanation or don't mind being thought to be takling about a fictional alien bartender.
A poetic effort, but that doesn't have anything to do with the issue at hand, and besides, doesn't correspond to any physical theory I'm aware of (special or general relativity, quantum mechanics, or even string/brane theory).
Not to be rude, but that's because you either didn't understand the metaphor or you don't understand any of the theories you mentioned. Let's presume the former and let me try to expand upon my metaphor.
Our universe's space-time can be, had has been, described as a flat surface that can be distorted by any sizable amount of either 'matter' or 'energy.' All of advanced physics is trying to understand HOW our universe bends. However, for a layman, it's enough to know that it does bend, and even better if we can underscore for the layman that the limitations of relativity aren't due to the thing being transmitted, but rather to the very nature of our reality.
The 'Knot' metaphor, by the way, is just a handy way of underscoring the difference between Quantum reality (threads) and Newtonian reality (knots.) All mater and energy is just an arrangement of various quantum-level widgets, and if you're going to understand anything about quantum mechanics at all, you'll have to hammer into the point that QM takes place in what C.S. Lewis called 'subreality.' Or, to be more correct, our reality is a "superreality" built on atoms, which rests fundamentality on the reality of quantum mechanics.