Re:I don't think it means what you think it does.
on
The Linux Weather Forecast
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I think they call it a "forecast" rather than a "roadmap" because that way it's only an educated guess, and they only have to be as accurate as your local weatherman is at long-range forecasts (that is, not at all).
The Earth and everything on it was a huge computer. The Golgafrinchams, when they landed, became part of the computer, albeit an unplanned part. Successive generations became an even more tightly integrated part of the computer. They embedded themselves into the computer sort of like a virus.
Since they were part of the computer, they were then capable of producing the answer just like any other part of the computer. Since their unplanned presence screwed up the calculations, the answer they came up with was close to the true answer, but with a flaw that rendered it basically nonsensical.
As a hard core Douglas Adams fan, I prefer to pretend the train wreck that is "Mostly Harmless" was never written, but was instead something I dreamed after a night of poorly made enchiladas and cheap beer. I don't think I'm alone in this.
I'm pretty sure we've already sent probes out to asteroids, but I don't know if they were capable of detecting organic compounds or if they were only looking for water.
For stuff outside of our own solar system, I think right now we're only just beginning to learn how to detect planets smaller than Jupiter, so finding an object smaller than a planet that far out is probably beyond our capabilities at the moment.
Even so, if you're looking for really complex life (such as intelligent life), you'd be better served to find planets that comets crashed into rather than the comets themselves.
The great anthropologist Dr. Douglas Adams already showed that we did not originate here. In fact, we were passengers on the 'B' Ark that crash-landed here. Our ancestors come from an ancient civilization called Golgafrinchans. It is a shame that Dr. Adams's work is so widely ridiculed as a "humorous" bit of "fiction" in wider scientific circles.
Sorry, but there is no cure for a cold. These guys are trying, but it's going to be difficult. The problem with the "common cold" is that it's caused by a whole lot of different viruses, so finding a cure for all of the slightly different variations that are called the "common cold" is difficult.
Of course, if all you had was a fever, the cure is simple and well know: more cowbell.
That's a good point, but I think his performance in the run-up to the war proved to me that he made the right decision when he said he wouldn't get into politics.
At the time, everyone pretty much knew that Powell didn't agree with the way the war was going to be executed. After all, the "Powell Doctrine" of always going in with overwhelming force was named after him, and the Bush administration (thanks mainly to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz) were convinced they could get it done with a much smaller force. Not to mention that he was perfectly willing to go up in front of the UN and present intelligence that he (allegedly) knew to be faulty when he made the speech. The fact that he said he regretted it later doesn't change the fact that he was willing to tow the party line in the face of his own (alleged) doubts.
The thing that makes him ill suited for high office, though, is not that he was right about these things, it's that he was totally ineffective at convincing the people that mattered to do things his way. What good is someone who has all the right answers if he is incapable of exercising any influence over anyone? Powell was Secretary of State, one of the most powerful cabinet positions in terms of foreign policy, and he was unable to convince anyone in the administration that his viewpoint was the correct one.
Yes, the President and his advisors are notoriously hard headed, but if you can't at least reach some sort of compromise with hard headed people, how can you manage foreign affairs, a game that involves talking to heads of state that are pretty much all egotistical and hard headed by nature? We don't need, and we frankly can't afford, another President whose only influence over foreign heads of state derives from his willingness to conduct preemptive strikes.
How can you defend this guy? He's responsible for Skynet, for God's sake! Either that or he sells vacuum cleaners. Either way, he's dangerous and must be stopped.
Since NCLB tends to cost more money to comply with than the federal government provides for it, I think many districts would be happy to give up the money if it meant dropping the program entirely.
You're right. Just like a game manufacturer wouldn't dream of trying to make extra money by slapping advertisements all over a game I already paid $60 for, Google would never try to make extra cash data mining storage that they are already being paid for.
That's my point, the "advantage" the article talks about is that you can use the storage with Google's own products. If you could use the storage to, say, host a website or something, then it might be worth it. If all I can do is use it on Google's product offerings, it is a rip off.
So I read the article, and all it says is that the stuff you store can be used with Google products like Picasa, Gmail, Google Docs, etc. But, can't anything I store on my own hard drive be uploaded to those apps too?
I can get 500 GB of local storage for $100, and I don't have to worry about what some corporation is going to do with my data. If the only "advantage" to Google's storage is that I can use it with their products, what's the point? Surely Google must have something more to offer than the article states. As it stands, this looks like a great deal if it were 1998, but not so much today.
I made no comment on the data other than that it might be interesting. I was pointing out that that sort of commentary is unhelpful because it makes the poster look like a crank. Other people more interested in getting bogged down once again in this endless debate can argue about the merits of the findings.
The last couple of paragraphs of the article:
The effect of the correction on global temperatures is minor (some 1-2% less warming than originally thought), but the effect on the US global warming propaganda machine could be huge.
Then again-- maybe not. I strongly suspect this story will receive little to no attention from the mainstream media. (emphasis mine)
Seriously, this data may be very interesting and correct some of our possible misconceptions about the severity of global warming, but come on. The last part of his blog basically makes him sound like a standard zealot conspiracy theorist with an axe to grind. How does that sort of nonsense advance the debate at all?
To be fair, Java was (at least initially) heavily marketed as "write once, run anywhere". It's pretty obvious that the language doesn't come anywhere near the hype in that regard.
Sun's test suite isn't just to verify your code works, it's to verify your implementation of Java complies with the standards before they allow you to slap the Java logo on it. It's a good way to keep things open while still maintaining control over the Java standard, and preventing fragmentation of the language.
That's a very optimistic view. The people that have the time and the resources to monitor this stuff are the big corporations though, so I think you're most likely to see comments made by a company spokesman trying to spin articles that are unfavorable to that company. The first comment on the sample article seems to be bear that out.
So, instead of the article followed by a separate press release spinning that article, you get the spin on the same page as the article itself. I'm not sure what's really gained in that case.
lox as in liquid oxygen, I guess. The space shuttle is powered by liquid hydrogen, and they have a supply of liquid oxygen for combustion. This car only uses liquid hydrogen, with the required oxygen presumably coming from the atmosphere.
That's my guess, anyway. But then, they say if you have to explain a joke it wasn't really funny in the first place. Maybe it would have worked if the car was bagel shaped.
if the police can subpena this information or the government can "silently" access it, say goodbye to the American way of life... I thought that WAS the American way of life. We are living in a post-9/11 world, after all.
Okay, but why would you invest your money in any bank in SL, even if they have reasonable rates? You can get around 5% interest these days in an online savings account, FDIC insured and backed by a real life regulated bank. If you want more, you can go for mutual funds or individual stocks, all of which are regulated. Sure, there's a risk you'll lose everything, but these things are at least regulated so you have some recourse in the unlikely event that your stock broker takes off to Aruba with your money. I would consider investing in a Second Life bank as riskier than putting your whole savings into junk bonds or giving it to some random person on a street corner to invest for you.
If you want to throw some cash in there as a gamble, just to see what happens, and losing that money would not really affect you in any way, then go for it. However, the article tries to suggest that an SL economy crash would seriously affect a lot of people, and I would say anyone who is going to lose their shirt over this was probably going to lose it eventually in some crazy money-making scheme anyway.
If this sort of thing affects your finances in any major way, you're a moron for "investing" your money in a game. Just because Linden Labs decided to publish an exchange rate for their dollars and real dollars doesn't mean their dollars are a good investment vehicle. Their economy is completely unregulated, and their "banks" are run by anonymous people in foreign countries well outside the reach of US laws (the guy they interviewed is in Brazil, for example).
You might as well call playing the slots in Vegas a retirement plan, it's probably less risky.
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I think they call it a "forecast" rather than a "roadmap" because that way it's only an educated guess, and they only have to be as accurate as your local weatherman is at long-range forecasts (that is, not at all).
Some of those, commas could, be dropped too, thereby saving space, and making the sentence look, less like it was written, by William, Shatner.
The Earth and everything on it was a huge computer. The Golgafrinchams, when they landed, became part of the computer, albeit an unplanned part. Successive generations became an even more tightly integrated part of the computer. They embedded themselves into the computer sort of like a virus.
Since they were part of the computer, they were then capable of producing the answer just like any other part of the computer. Since their unplanned presence screwed up the calculations, the answer they came up with was close to the true answer, but with a flaw that rendered it basically nonsensical.
As a hard core Douglas Adams fan, I prefer to pretend the train wreck that is "Mostly Harmless" was never written, but was instead something I dreamed after a night of poorly made enchiladas and cheap beer. I don't think I'm alone in this.
I'm pretty sure we've already sent probes out to asteroids, but I don't know if they were capable of detecting organic compounds or if they were only looking for water.
For stuff outside of our own solar system, I think right now we're only just beginning to learn how to detect planets smaller than Jupiter, so finding an object smaller than a planet that far out is probably beyond our capabilities at the moment.
Even so, if you're looking for really complex life (such as intelligent life), you'd be better served to find planets that comets crashed into rather than the comets themselves.
The great anthropologist Dr. Douglas Adams already showed that we did not originate here. In fact, we were passengers on the 'B' Ark that crash-landed here. Our ancestors come from an ancient civilization called Golgafrinchans. It is a shame that Dr. Adams's work is so widely ridiculed as a "humorous" bit of "fiction" in wider scientific circles.
Sorry, but there is no cure for a cold. These guys are trying, but it's going to be difficult. The problem with the "common cold" is that it's caused by a whole lot of different viruses, so finding a cure for all of the slightly different variations that are called the "common cold" is difficult.
Of course, if all you had was a fever, the cure is simple and well know: more cowbell.
That's a good point, but I think his performance in the run-up to the war proved to me that he made the right decision when he said he wouldn't get into politics.
At the time, everyone pretty much knew that Powell didn't agree with the way the war was going to be executed. After all, the "Powell Doctrine" of always going in with overwhelming force was named after him, and the Bush administration (thanks mainly to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz) were convinced they could get it done with a much smaller force. Not to mention that he was perfectly willing to go up in front of the UN and present intelligence that he (allegedly) knew to be faulty when he made the speech. The fact that he said he regretted it later doesn't change the fact that he was willing to tow the party line in the face of his own (alleged) doubts.
The thing that makes him ill suited for high office, though, is not that he was right about these things, it's that he was totally ineffective at convincing the people that mattered to do things his way. What good is someone who has all the right answers if he is incapable of exercising any influence over anyone? Powell was Secretary of State, one of the most powerful cabinet positions in terms of foreign policy, and he was unable to convince anyone in the administration that his viewpoint was the correct one.
Yes, the President and his advisors are notoriously hard headed, but if you can't at least reach some sort of compromise with hard headed people, how can you manage foreign affairs, a game that involves talking to heads of state that are pretty much all egotistical and hard headed by nature? We don't need, and we frankly can't afford, another President whose only influence over foreign heads of state derives from his willingness to conduct preemptive strikes.
How can you defend this guy? He's responsible for Skynet, for God's sake! Either that or he sells vacuum cleaners. Either way, he's dangerous and must be stopped.
Since NCLB tends to cost more money to comply with than the federal government provides for it, I think many districts would be happy to give up the money if it meant dropping the program entirely.
You're right. Just like a game manufacturer wouldn't dream of trying to make extra money by slapping advertisements all over a game I already paid $60 for, Google would never try to make extra cash data mining storage that they are already being paid for.
That's my point, the "advantage" the article talks about is that you can use the storage with Google's own products. If you could use the storage to, say, host a website or something, then it might be worth it. If all I can do is use it on Google's product offerings, it is a rip off.
So I read the article, and all it says is that the stuff you store can be used with Google products like Picasa, Gmail, Google Docs, etc. But, can't anything I store on my own hard drive be uploaded to those apps too?
I can get 500 GB of local storage for $100, and I don't have to worry about what some corporation is going to do with my data. If the only "advantage" to Google's storage is that I can use it with their products, what's the point? Surely Google must have something more to offer than the article states. As it stands, this looks like a great deal if it were 1998, but not so much today.
I made no comment on the data other than that it might be interesting. I was pointing out that that sort of commentary is unhelpful because it makes the poster look like a crank. Other people more interested in getting bogged down once again in this endless debate can argue about the merits of the findings.
Then again-- maybe not. I strongly suspect this story will receive little to no attention from the mainstream media. (emphasis mine)
Seriously, this data may be very interesting and correct some of our possible misconceptions about the severity of global warming, but come on. The last part of his blog basically makes him sound like a standard zealot conspiracy theorist with an axe to grind. How does that sort of nonsense advance the debate at all?
To be fair, Java was (at least initially) heavily marketed as "write once, run anywhere". It's pretty obvious that the language doesn't come anywhere near the hype in that regard.
Sun's test suite isn't just to verify your code works, it's to verify your implementation of Java complies with the standards before they allow you to slap the Java logo on it. It's a good way to keep things open while still maintaining control over the Java standard, and preventing fragmentation of the language.
That's a very optimistic view. The people that have the time and the resources to monitor this stuff are the big corporations though, so I think you're most likely to see comments made by a company spokesman trying to spin articles that are unfavorable to that company. The first comment on the sample article seems to be bear that out.
So, instead of the article followed by a separate press release spinning that article, you get the spin on the same page as the article itself. I'm not sure what's really gained in that case.
I think your inability to spell your own first name correctly might give you away.
lox as in liquid oxygen, I guess. The space shuttle is powered by liquid hydrogen, and they have a supply of liquid oxygen for combustion. This car only uses liquid hydrogen, with the required oxygen presumably coming from the atmosphere.
That's my guess, anyway. But then, they say if you have to explain a joke it wasn't really funny in the first place. Maybe it would have worked if the car was bagel shaped.
The second paragraph of my post says pretty much exactly that.
Okay, but why would you invest your money in any bank in SL, even if they have reasonable rates? You can get around 5% interest these days in an online savings account, FDIC insured and backed by a real life regulated bank. If you want more, you can go for mutual funds or individual stocks, all of which are regulated. Sure, there's a risk you'll lose everything, but these things are at least regulated so you have some recourse in the unlikely event that your stock broker takes off to Aruba with your money. I would consider investing in a Second Life bank as riskier than putting your whole savings into junk bonds or giving it to some random person on a street corner to invest for you.
If you want to throw some cash in there as a gamble, just to see what happens, and losing that money would not really affect you in any way, then go for it. However, the article tries to suggest that an SL economy crash would seriously affect a lot of people, and I would say anyone who is going to lose their shirt over this was probably going to lose it eventually in some crazy money-making scheme anyway.
If this sort of thing affects your finances in any major way, you're a moron for "investing" your money in a game. Just because Linden Labs decided to publish an exchange rate for their dollars and real dollars doesn't mean their dollars are a good investment vehicle. Their economy is completely unregulated, and their "banks" are run by anonymous people in foreign countries well outside the reach of US laws (the guy they interviewed is in Brazil, for example).
You might as well call playing the slots in Vegas a retirement plan, it's probably less risky.
Oh, they'll get to you.
And your little dog, too.