Seriously, though. The clock was left off. Without it, sailors would not have been able to accurately calculate their longitude.
RTFA.
#42. H4 MARINE CHRONOMETER, 1761
Until the late 18th century, transatlantic navigators were sailing half-blind, able to determine their latitude from the stars but entirely unable to determine their exact longitude. John Harrison's chronometer was the first timepiece accurate enough to work aboard a ship, losing just 5.1 seconds over the course of a two-month sea voyage -- insanely accurate for the era. With the chronometer, sailors could compute their longitude based on what hour, in Greenwich Mean Time, the sun rose. That, in turn, facilitated the accurate mapping and colonization of the New World by adventurers such as Captain Cook (an early chronometer customer).
Excuse me, but why this is news? I don't get it. I never heard of this website before, I visited it out of curiosity and they appear to be just another interface to the airline/hotels booking systems. Why is it so important that some changes in its pathetic "agreements" are news?
5 parts in 10000 is nothing. The probability theory guarantees that there are many experiements where such results are randomly produced.
It is not the scale of the deviation but its repeatability that counts here.
In other words if conscious concentration affects a random number generator then by how much the results differ could be viewed as the force of the effect. However, if the deviations repeatedly occur while a test subject concentrates on the generator but don't occur when no one does then that is a valid observation despite the effect observed being weak.
This takes something that could be a great boon for the city in terms of global recognition
Could be? Is! This boosts global recognition of Chicago - after all many cities have big sculptures in their parks but, for now at least, only one charges for taking pictures of their sculpture and calls its park "copyrighted". That's a real, global first!
Excitement? Gimme a break! So this old piece of junk is pushed out of its garage again. As exciting as a 1980 VW Beetle being pushed out of a garage four blocks away. Great for collectors, but not as exciting as something really NEW! Come on, people, when you will stop to get excited over leftovers from the past like the shuttles or new scans of images from Apollo missions 30 years ago?!
I'm a bit cautious with predictions of Microsoft's failure, collapse or whatever in the near future because I've been burned in the past. Back in '96-'97 when Linux was developing at blazing speeds and what Microsoft had was crappy Windows '95 it also looked like they run out of steam. We laughed at Win95 as being a 16-bit overlay for DOS 7.0 (which it basically was) and NT 3.51, well, wasn't exciting at all (though it worked). They almost missed the whole Internet thing, Internet explorer was pathetic in comparison to Netscape. Everyone I knew was sure open source would wipe out likes of Microsoft within a few years.
But none of this happened. Netscape was wiped out, IE dominance is settled even despite IE again looking pathetic in comparison to Mozilla's newest breed. Office still rules and there is nothing to beat it. Open Office? Well, for simple documents and spreadsheets maybe yes. And yes, it has improved a lot over last few years. But still for serious word processing, I'm sorry, but no.
Also Linux is still a great server OS but still can't be considered seriously for the desktop for non-geeks. I've installed Ubuntu three days ago. I was really amazed how little has changed since three years ago when I, sadly, abandoned Linux as my desktop. Again, a few things that can't be done in any other way but by editing config files with, say, vi. I enjoy vi and I still remember what to edit, but does a simple user? And no access to most of applications without reading manuals and adding additional repositories of.deb packages (mostly for ideological reasons). It is not "install and work", it's still "install and then tweak the things around to get anywhere". This is the part of the mix that makes OS X a success - some OS X users I know were not even aware there was a command line on their system until I showed them. Now, that's how a modern GUI OS should be designed. If there is a Linux distro to match this please let me know, but I think I'll end up buying a PB when I'll save enough money to do it.
And in the meantime Microsoft has improved a lot. XP is stable, easy to use and I'm yet to have a virus infection or anything after three years of having it on my PC (which is connected to the net 24/7 on a public address, BTW). Also Office has improved a lot in terms of stability and reliability. I remember using Office 97 which without SR-1 crashed a lot and we had lots of problems with it. Office 2003 I use now is rock stable. This is not exciting, this is nothing new but maybe in these days of computing becoming commonplace (and programming & sysadmining becoming a blue-collar commodity job) what is needed is not excitement but solid, predictable functioning? Can you think of a killer feature now missing from, say, Word that would excite the masses?
So, maybe Microsoft is just maturing with the market. They were a geeky sweatshop when computing was the new, exciting field. They are a solid, respectable, middle-aged corporation now. So, I don't think we will see them sinking anytime soon.
There will *never* exists a business model where companies make movies costing hundreds of millions of dollars, and you get to download them for free. Sorry.
The problem is that those multimillion movies are crap. Mostly.
Is it really a good model for a society to pump these amounts of effort into crap which only reason for existence is that people don't know what to do with their free time?
...it seems perfectly reasonable to try to predict the future by extrapolating trends in science and engineering.
No, it doesn't.
Such efforts have been doomed from the start and only good results of them are series of predictions that make good jokes for the posterity. Future never is or was a linear extension of the past trends and therefore predicting the future, especially along these lines is next to impossible. And it can be quite dangerous, because trying to relies on one assumption - that science explains the way reality work. But it doesn't - it's just an approximation, better in one areas but worse in the others. Scientists deal with models, they presumably try to bend them or build new ones that describe the observable facts better and then test them to see if the models still cope. But these are still models.
And, most importantly, the way new models appear or technical uses are found for them is anything but linear and predictable. Read some of the James Burke's books to see numerous examples for that.
Believe me, I feel for the poor souls in North Korea more than you do. (I'm Korean myself, living in Canada)
But, your typical American response of 'I am so righteous' simply disgusts me.
I don't know if an invasion is the best course of action. I was writing in the context of recent invasion of Iraq and threats against Iran, which are based first on those countries producing or having WMD and their human rights record. Undeniably, North Korea is much worse in both cases.
But, since you are Korean and you therefore know the history & culture of your country best - what would you advise? What you think should be done to help the people of North Korea?
It's not an irony, I'm honestly asking you what you think. And if I sounded "righteous", I'm sorry, that wasn't my intention.
Could that same size force hold it indefinately? Probably not.
Well, they have one huge advantage over Iraq - the South Korea, with its strong economy and well-organized and trained military. They are well capable of rebuilding the North economically and probably also socially. They are probably not capable, however, of defeating the North militarily on their own.
Yes, I'm going ape on this one. I'm going ape because each time I think of NK I imagine the life of those poor bastards who were born there and when I do this I almost cry.
You write about "massively fattening foods"? Do you have any idea what it means to compare that vide selection of cheap food available to everyone in the US with the situation of a North Korean with his 8 ounces of food rations? Would you say it in the face of a person who knows what hunger is how bad "massively fattening foods" are? You don't have any imagination? Any decency? Any measure? Any compassion? Are you so blinded by your ideology?
You write about "mindless TV"? How about a totally censored TV, with songs worshiping the Great Leader? How about spending hours and hours training to become part of a gymnastic parade during which you are a pixel in an image of the Beloved Great Leader?
When I see comments like yours I know where the opinion comes from that Americans are generally ignorant and stupid. I just can't believe that such a piece of BS can be described as "Insightful". Really, people, you should learn some about the world. It seems that ages of freedom made it impossible for you to even imagine life in the hell North Korea is. Good for you, but really, think, think! If you still can!
OK, you are right, that was a joke. And a tasteless one too.
Seriously though, I'm pretty sure there must be a way to do something about it. And frankly I think that China's position and role is crucial here. In fact Kim can persist as long as Chinese tolerate him, but when they would judge that it no longer suits their interests NK regime is doomed. Just an unofficial assurance of sympathetic neutrality from China would change strategic situation greatly in favor of US and SK forces.
Putting nuclear weapons aside Korea is of course a much harder territory to operate in than deserts - plenty of places to hide from air attack and even if their air defense is probably no match for a modern war machine the USAF is air strikes wouldn't be as damaging as it were in Iraq. Also, NK has developed plenty of special forces whose operatives infiltrate the South regularly. They are also known for building tunnels deep into SK territory - one was discovered in the end of nineties who was around 100 miles long and big enough for trucks to drive through it. So, you are right... Militarily NK appears to be a tough one.
However, there are no impenetrable fortresses and such regimes usually appear much stronger on the outside than they really are. The problem here is, I think, more of psychological nature. Rather than seeking complete destruction of their army military planers should probably concentrate on eliminating Kim himself and paralyzing chains of command so that possible internal power struggles could ripe. Best solution would be a carefully staged mounting threat of imminent invasion coupled with a promise of criminal prosecution for any caught leaders. In other words plying their own game of chicken on them. I think they would be the ones to chicken out first.
You know all this through your own propaganda machine.
Blah... blah... Have you ever in your life spoken to a North Korean? Have you ever talked with someone who was there? No? Go back, do your homework and then return with this kind of ignorant BS.
Yeah, that's something I don't get about current administration. They are so angry about Iran now, or they appear to be, but compared to North Korea Iran is a peaceful, free country. They even have real elections out there, they are not a total democracy but surely not a kind of absolute pharaoh-type dictatorship NK is. People more or less lead normal lives in Iran, they just can't wear swimsuits. I know decency police is no joke for Iranians, but at least they don't kill for not putting on your scarf. And people are even allowed to more or less travel around the country at will, run business etc. A completely different world than the hell NK is.
And their leadership is surely much more predictable than NK's and much, much less cruel than Iraq's was. I never heard of ayatollahs having their own private torture rooms or ordering mass murders like Saddam did. And I don't remember Iran playing blackmail on the international scale like NK - constantly rattling its little saber to get concessions from the civilized world.
Knee-jerk???? If any regime on Earth really deserves to be invaded and dismantled by the civilized nations of the world it is North Korea. And not because it has atomic weapons, no, but because it is the worst place on this planet since Auschwitz crematoriums ceased to work and Stalin died. Even Cuba is a paradise both in terms of economy (haven't heard of people dying from hunger there) and freedoms (on Cuba you are for example free to choose your profession and you don't have to worship whole family of Fidel three generations back). In North Korea people have 200 grams / 8 ounces food ration to survive on. Their kids are raised from the age of 4 in worship of the Dear Leader and his f**king, fortunately now dead, father. Everyone is a secret police informer. There is no private possessions or privacy of any kind - at least not for general population. They have no access to Internet, satellite TV or even foreign radio. Their nice capital is amazing because... there are no old people there (they get deported so that they don't spoil the looks). Hell, they even have concentration camps out there complete with gas chambers operating right now, in the 21st century. It is impossible for normal people to imagine the misery of people living there...
And please, before anyone replies to this with some pacifist BS just one suggestion: learn something about this country. I've talked to people who visited North Korea, I've even met a North Korean back in the eighties. I've read their own propaganda materials. This is an unforgettable experience, it is almost impossible not to feel compassion for those poor people who had the terrible misfortune to be born in this hell. Civilized world should do something about it if it is to be worthy that term.
Slashdot Mirror
RTFA.
Until the late 18th century, transatlantic navigators were sailing half-blind, able to determine their latitude from the stars but entirely unable to determine their exact longitude. John Harrison's chronometer was the first timepiece accurate enough to work aboard a ship, losing just 5.1 seconds over the course of a two-month sea voyage -- insanely accurate for the era. With the chronometer, sailors could compute their longitude based on what hour, in Greenwich Mean Time, the sun rose. That, in turn, facilitated the accurate mapping and colonization of the New World by adventurers such as Captain Cook (an early chronometer customer).
Linux for vital production use, Windows for useless toys.
Exactly. Thanks god it is not the other way round. When I hear about Windows in cars I get scared.
One has to wonder in all of this what incentive the European Union has to pay any attention to Microsoft.
EU? None. EU's politicians? Now, that's a different story. You know, there is sailing season coming and yachts cost some.
Money != Brains.
As long as brains need food, clothing, shelter and some little pleasures which are not purely intellectual money == brains.
It's good if it serves "our" side and bad if used by "them"? Is that what you meant?
Excuse me, but why this is news? I don't get it. I never heard of this website before, I visited it out of curiosity and they appear to be just another interface to the airline/hotels booking systems. Why is it so important that some changes in its pathetic "agreements" are news?
5 parts in 10000 is nothing. The probability theory guarantees that there are many experiements where such results are randomly produced.
It is not the scale of the deviation but its repeatability that counts here.
In other words if conscious concentration affects a random number generator then by how much the results differ could be viewed as the force of the effect. However, if the deviations repeatedly occur while a test subject concentrates on the generator but don't occur when no one does then that is a valid observation despite the effect observed being weak.
Could be? Is! This boosts global recognition of Chicago - after all many cities have big sculptures in their parks but, for now at least, only one charges for taking pictures of their sculpture and calls its park "copyrighted". That's a real, global first!
Excitement? Gimme a break! So this old piece of junk is pushed out of its garage again. As exciting as a 1980 VW Beetle being pushed out of a garage four blocks away. Great for collectors, but not as exciting as something really NEW! Come on, people, when you will stop to get excited over leftovers from the past like the shuttles or new scans of images from Apollo missions 30 years ago?!
But none of this happened. Netscape was wiped out, IE dominance is settled even despite IE again looking pathetic in comparison to Mozilla's newest breed. Office still rules and there is nothing to beat it. Open Office? Well, for simple documents and spreadsheets maybe yes. And yes, it has improved a lot over last few years. But still for serious word processing, I'm sorry, but no.
Also Linux is still a great server OS but still can't be considered seriously for the desktop for non-geeks. I've installed Ubuntu three days ago. I was really amazed how little has changed since three years ago when I, sadly, abandoned Linux as my desktop. Again, a few things that can't be done in any other way but by editing config files with, say, vi. I enjoy vi and I still remember what to edit, but does a simple user? And no access to most of applications without reading manuals and adding additional repositories of .deb packages (mostly for ideological reasons). It is not "install and work", it's still "install and then tweak the things around to get anywhere". This is the part of the mix that makes OS X a success - some OS X users I know were not even aware there was a command line on their system until I showed them. Now, that's how a modern GUI OS should be designed. If there is a Linux distro to match this please let me know, but I think I'll end up buying a PB when I'll save enough money to do it.
And in the meantime Microsoft has improved a lot. XP is stable, easy to use and I'm yet to have a virus infection or anything after three years of having it on my PC (which is connected to the net 24/7 on a public address, BTW). Also Office has improved a lot in terms of stability and reliability. I remember using Office 97 which without SR-1 crashed a lot and we had lots of problems with it. Office 2003 I use now is rock stable. This is not exciting, this is nothing new but maybe in these days of computing becoming commonplace (and programming & sysadmining becoming a blue-collar commodity job) what is needed is not excitement but solid, predictable functioning? Can you think of a killer feature now missing from, say, Word that would excite the masses?
So, maybe Microsoft is just maturing with the market. They were a geeky sweatshop when computing was the new, exciting field. They are a solid, respectable, middle-aged corporation now. So, I don't think we will see them sinking anytime soon.
More details, please? Especially who was bribed and when and why? I would like to know, honestly!
Tor is really cool!!!! I'd recommend it to anyone! Thanks for the link, Sheepdot!
There will *never* exists a business model where companies make movies costing hundreds of millions of dollars, and you get to download them for free. Sorry.
The problem is that those multimillion movies are crap. Mostly.
Is it really a good model for a society to pump these amounts of effort into crap which only reason for existence is that people don't know what to do with their free time?
Pity the WASTE project was abandoned, BTW.
No, it doesn't.
Such efforts have been doomed from the start and only good results of them are series of predictions that make good jokes for the posterity. Future never is or was a linear extension of the past trends and therefore predicting the future, especially along these lines is next to impossible. And it can be quite dangerous, because trying to relies on one assumption - that science explains the way reality work. But it doesn't - it's just an approximation, better in one areas but worse in the others. Scientists deal with models, they presumably try to bend them or build new ones that describe the observable facts better and then test them to see if the models still cope. But these are still models.
And, most importantly, the way new models appear or technical uses are found for them is anything but linear and predictable. Read some of the James Burke's books to see numerous examples for that.
Believe me, I feel for the poor souls in North Korea more than you do. (I'm Korean myself, living in Canada)
But, your typical American response of 'I am so righteous' simply disgusts me.
I don't know if an invasion is the best course of action. I was writing in the context of recent invasion of Iraq and threats against Iran, which are based first on those countries producing or having WMD and their human rights record. Undeniably, North Korea is much worse in both cases.
But, since you are Korean and you therefore know the history & culture of your country best - what would you advise? What you think should be done to help the people of North Korea?
It's not an irony, I'm honestly asking you what you think. And if I sounded "righteous", I'm sorry, that wasn't my intention.
Could that same size force hold it indefinately? Probably not.
Well, they have one huge advantage over Iraq - the South Korea, with its strong economy and well-organized and trained military. They are well capable of rebuilding the North economically and probably also socially. They are probably not capable, however, of defeating the North militarily on their own.
Do you get my point that situation in North Korea and the US are hardly the same shade of grey?
Yes, I'm going ape on this one. I'm going ape because each time I think of NK I imagine the life of those poor bastards who were born there and when I do this I almost cry.
You write about "massively fattening foods"? Do you have any idea what it means to compare that vide selection of cheap food available to everyone in the US with the situation of a North Korean with his 8 ounces of food rations? Would you say it in the face of a person who knows what hunger is how bad "massively fattening foods" are? You don't have any imagination? Any decency? Any measure? Any compassion? Are you so blinded by your ideology?
You write about "mindless TV"? How about a totally censored TV, with songs worshiping the Great Leader? How about spending hours and hours training to become part of a gymnastic parade during which you are a pixel in an image of the Beloved Great Leader?
When I see comments like yours I know where the opinion comes from that Americans are generally ignorant and stupid. I just can't believe that such a piece of BS can be described as "Insightful". Really, people, you should learn some about the world. It seems that ages of freedom made it impossible for you to even imagine life in the hell North Korea is. Good for you, but really, think, think! If you still can!
OK, you are right, that was a joke. And a tasteless one too.
Seriously though, I'm pretty sure there must be a way to do something about it. And frankly I think that China's position and role is crucial here. In fact Kim can persist as long as Chinese tolerate him, but when they would judge that it no longer suits their interests NK regime is doomed. Just an unofficial assurance of sympathetic neutrality from China would change strategic situation greatly in favor of US and SK forces.
Putting nuclear weapons aside Korea is of course a much harder territory to operate in than deserts - plenty of places to hide from air attack and even if their air defense is probably no match for a modern war machine the USAF is air strikes wouldn't be as damaging as it were in Iraq. Also, NK has developed plenty of special forces whose operatives infiltrate the South regularly. They are also known for building tunnels deep into SK territory - one was discovered in the end of nineties who was around 100 miles long and big enough for trucks to drive through it. So, you are right... Militarily NK appears to be a tough one.
However, there are no impenetrable fortresses and such regimes usually appear much stronger on the outside than they really are. The problem here is, I think, more of psychological nature. Rather than seeking complete destruction of their army military planers should probably concentrate on eliminating Kim himself and paralyzing chains of command so that possible internal power struggles could ripe. Best solution would be a carefully staged mounting threat of imminent invasion coupled with a promise of criminal prosecution for any caught leaders. In other words plying their own game of chicken on them. I think they would be the ones to chicken out first.
You know all this through your own propaganda machine.
Blah... blah... Have you ever in your life spoken to a North Korean? Have you ever talked with someone who was there? No? Go back, do your homework and then return with this kind of ignorant BS.
And their leadership is surely much more predictable than NK's and much, much less cruel than Iraq's was. I never heard of ayatollahs having their own private torture rooms or ordering mass murders like Saddam did. And I don't remember Iran playing blackmail on the international scale like NK - constantly rattling its little saber to get concessions from the civilized world.
How about a bunch of precisely targeted thermonuclear warheads?
And please, before anyone replies to this with some pacifist BS just one suggestion: learn something about this country. I've talked to people who visited North Korea, I've even met a North Korean back in the eighties. I've read their own propaganda materials. This is an unforgettable experience, it is almost impossible not to feel compassion for those poor people who had the terrible misfortune to be born in this hell. Civilized world should do something about it if it is to be worthy that term.
I was sure that was historically settled. Stars shine. Planets reflect. And that's all. Who needs anything more?