That would be great, except that the IPCC has used the names of credible scientists in the past without their permission, or against their objections.
I'm not fully behind everything in The Great Global Warming Swindle, but I do think it's worth paying some attention to the cautions of Richard Lindzen (Alfred P. Sloan professor of Meteorology at MIT), who has said:
"In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions."
"Picking holes in the IPCC is crucial. The notion that if you're ignorant of something and somebody comes up with a wrong answer, and you have to accept that because you don't have another wrong answer to offer is like faith healing, it's like quackery in medicine - if somebody says you should take jelly beans for cancer and you say that's stupid, and he says, well can you suggest something else and you say, no, does that mean you have to go with jelly beans?"
When IPCC numbers are at the edge of the error bars, and situations so laughably implausable as the A1FI scenario are treated as genuine risks, you've stepped far from the realm of science. It's okay to worry that we'll make weather a bit more drastic and droughts a bit more painful. It's also okay to say that a lot of data supports a strong correlation between CO2 and increased temperatures. It is not okay to say that we're going to put a large number of cities underwater (as if civil engineers would watch NYC sink) and that we are certain that is all on the back of CO2.
Alarmists and deniers are all making it more difficult for us to find reasonable solutions, or even predictions...
It's time to trust that people can understand the small effects of complex systems, and it's time to allow for good science.
Note: I'm normally a Microsoft defender here, but I've spent too much of the last eight months dealing with Vista breaking-changes. Onto the rant...
This is such utter nonsense. UAC first came in, IIRC, in Beta 2 (May), but there were far too many problems with Vista over the beta/RC cycle to be workable. UAC was too annoying to leave turned on while trying to figure out the real bugs. UAC is still awful over remote desktop on a slower connection, as it blanks the screen. This cycle was nothing like the 2k or XP cycles with regards to beta and RC stability and direction.
One of our long-released apps went through this:
Beta 1: Some draw issues, crashes on exit.
Beta 2: Some draw issues, just fine.
RC1: Some different draw issues, crashes a helper process on startup, then a second crash, completely, app dead.
RC2: Some completely different draw issues (others gone), otherwise fine.
Release: Same draw issues as RC2, crashes a helper process on startup, annoying help pop-up for any plug-in expecting old-school help to be available.
This was a released app for which the shipping bits did not change, at all, over the Vista cycle.
Now, it gets worse with UAC, because there are things that get more restrictive when the user gets sick of UAC and turns it off. The most obvious example is the "can't write to the TEMP folder" defect (by design? The designer is defective.). This kept several installers from working properly. If the user shuts UAC off, apps can no longer write to the TEMP directory and run their expanded installer app (winzip installer approach). This means that getting tired of UAC and pulling the plug on this behavior still interferes in the use of the system. In this case, it will hand the user a cryptic error message and no direction.
They went down this road with things like broken file-sharing and remote-desktop access with no-password accounts in XP, and it continues throughout Vista. Users of Microsoft products are regular victims of hidden behaviors, where seemingly simple changes can have much-delayed distant results.
Microsoft once cared a great deal about backwards compatibility. Now they seem to expect all software vendors to re-code, re-compile, re-test, and re-deploy for an OS change, and that OS was a moving target for the year preceding its release.
We're handling it, but what happens to the software that was orphaned by companies that died (or moved to a different platform)?
Science is the scientific method, but the practice of science is absolutely guided by intuition and obviousness.
You can't test it all (at least, I don't have time to), and the "hypothesize" part you're talking about is formed from our intuition and the obviousness of some theories based on available information and evidence.
(Side note: You'd actually have a pretty hard time making my muscles "work" by pushing on my brain. Not working is a lot easier (and fun!).)
(Side note 2: Our brains aren't "meant to operate" in any particular way, unless we were designed. Our brains do operate, and it's that operation that we use science to describe.)
You're falling into the mistake of taking a single simple behavior and saying that, because two things could cause it, those two things are equally likely to be the root-cause/underlying-mechanism of the greater field of behaviors of the system in question. It's not one test that makes this theory highly unlikely. It's the entire field of evidence.
It's a testament to the wikiality of Slashdot that someone using that broken style of argument could skate by as "5, Insightful" while someone calling them on it gets called a troll, only to have someone else use the same style of argument and hang onto a karmic 2.
I'll take my licks in moderation, but you're both still horrendously wrong.
Prosthetic limbs are starting to use electric triggers.
Nerve stimulators use electricity.
The chemical differences that we see as part of neural activity are structural at the high level and ionic at the low level. Ionic differences ~= electricity...
I'm not a biologist, neurologist, or otherwise, but I can make out a few things here:
1) This sound-based theory is laughable, at best. 2) Science is guided by intuition and obviousness. It's silly to say that metric boatloads of evidence do not "prove in any way" that to which they obviously point. You cannot "prove in any way" that you exist, that you are not merely the representation of a very elaborate bit of tinkering with my brain, which, by the way, may also not exist. It is enormously more likely, given the evidence, that you actually do exist. 3) Your straw-man is even sub-Slashdot quality. The difference between the way the nervous system "reacts" to electrical stimulation and the way the human body "reacts" to bullets is large enough to hold at least 10% of your ignorance. 4) It's dangerous to trot out "Logic 101" in just about any situation.
I work with someone who got her PhD working on atmospheric models of Mars. I think she'd disagree with your statement about us knowing "bugger all" about the weather patterns on Mars.
What do people think researchers are doing... collecting the easiest paycheck in the world? I don't know how many people are researching topics I've never even considered viewing in the scope of science, but I'd guess that it's somewhere between a bus-load and the population of the Asian continent.
Saying that "we" don't know about something and meaning anything other than "the two of us in this conversation" by "we" is almost sure to be wrong. Around here, that gets called "5, Insightful."
It's a shame that this is posted AC, because I want to "friend" this poster.
Sure, CO2 is a cause of global climate change. I'll go with that, but it's just too early to start branding those who question the current theories as unscientific, crazy, or politicized. We did this to Galileo, Newton, Einstein...
We party on anthropogenic CO2 (a small faucet on a really big bathtub) because it's easy to fall into the trap of favoring the simplest solution to a problem (if reducing anthropogenic CO2 by 70% can be labeled "simplest"). Even after one of my friends warned me not to do it, I favored trying to pin my '85 Volvo's inability to start on the fuel-pump relay. I didn't do this because it was the most likely culprit. I did this because it was only $40, and it was easy to fix.
$300 later, the car runs, and it wasn't the fuel-pump relay that needed to be replaced.
Science is more about asking questions than knowing answers. If those who know the answers scoff at those who ask new questions, science isn't being done.
When Visual Studio 2005 gives you fits on install (and, so far for me, works perfectly fine), you have to realize that the bar has been set lower than before.
Microsoft has historically done an unreal amount of work to make sure that existing programs work appropriately with new releases of their operating systems, and it feels like they spent less time working on compatibility quirks in this release than in previous releases. It's not about security. It's about things like message order for dialogs created with CreateDialogParam(), which has changed under Aero. Sure, applications should have been message-order agnostic, to a point, but getting this "right" was never part of the logo certification program. It's not even really fleshed out in the documentation.
Try shutting off UAC, writing to the temp directory, and running from the temp directory (something that works fine with UAC on). I have trouble seeing how turning off a security feature should cause unavoidable lock-down.
I professionally develop software for Windows and live with Vista as my primary OS every day. It's not about bitching about Microsoft here. Take a step back from the battlefront and recognize the reality of the situation: software will have teething pains for the next few months until vendors, and, to a large extent, Microsoft, solve the problems that a large number of applications are having under Vista.
My mother in law saw Vista on my laptop, saw me searching, using the start bar, and using Office 2007. She was very eager to upgrade, and she asked how she could do that.
I explained that she could buy the disc at a place like Office Depot, Best Buy, or wherever else she likes to get software (she's always just stuck with the OS on her machine from birth->death), but I also warned that she should make sure that the software she wants to run on her machine will run without problems before she bothers to do a big upgrade.
Quickbooks, some realtor software, and something her office uses have notes about compatibility problems with Vista. She stopped looking after that.
This is the first Windows release that I've used in which roughly half of the things I install have had some compatibility issues, noted in advance or discovered by me. It doesn't keep things from being usable in the general case, but it's more than just media FUD at this point.
They/we will fix it with OS/software updates over time.
This is the goal of the RepRap project. The idea is that the tool will eventually be able to print all of its parts from raw materials.
It's a lofty goal, but a good one.
Honestly, I'm thinking about making a fabathome machine just for the tinkering. How many times have you wished that you just had something to mess with that was custom?
Now, to make it harder, go find one that doesn't support 720p input. To make it even more fun, find one that takes in HDMI and doesn't scale.
Here's the deal:
Yes, a number of people have screens that can only take in one HD resolution/scan-rate. These were touted as HD-Ready 1080i, HiScan HD, etc. A large number of Sony rear-projection screens were launched this way for early adopters.
No, modern screens don't generally suffer from this limitation, even cheap Olevias have scalers.
Yes, scalers cost money. If the PS3 had been $630, people would likely have complained even more.
No, this is not as major a problem as detractors make it out to be. Early adopters who didn't expect to get burned by incomplete technology must not be very experienced in early adoption.
Does it stink for those who jumped in early? Yes, without a doubt. Still, we're not talking about the bulk of the user-base, now or going forward.
Let's just be realistic and thoughtful about things for a minute. I mean, come on, this is Slashdot.
The link you posted shows huge performance losses for fragmented data.
From the link:
If like me you thought that flash memory wouldn't be affected by fragmentation, then you'll find these results quite an eye opener. Looking at the write performance, you can see that while there is no difference in performance between the card states for 512B files (as you'd expect, since they'll fit in a single block, and therefore won't ever be fragmented), for 32kB files, the fragmented card has dropped to half the performance of the defragmented and blank cards. By the time you hit 256kB files, the fragmented card has dropped to almost one quarter the performance of the defragged card, and one eighth the performance of the blank card! The relative performance seems to be maintained at the same level for 2MB files as for 256kB files. With read performance, the difference doesn't get huge until the 2MB range, but then we see a massive drop in performance. Honestly, I thought that there wouldn't be a significant performance loss. Apparently, there is. My guess is that this is less of an issue as the on-board flash controller gets quicker, as well as if the drive interface to the flash is quick, but it's definitely data for consideration.
Don't forget the $0.1971 fixed expected value of the ticket (also subject to taxes). If we neglect taxes on small prizes (do you report $3?), one need merely have an after-tax lump-sum of ~$117MM.
I think it's safe to say that we're both safe from winning (or playing) the lottery any time soon.
That's just plainly not true. The sad thing is that the number of tickets purchased is not wildly responsive to the expected value of that play. It's responsive, but not as much as it should be in a strictly rational sense. Who wants to wait?
It's utter nonsense to say that "MORE people would play," to cover your bases on this one. Yes, more people will play, but that is merely a pressure on the game. It is not a forced constraint. In John Corbett and Charlie Geyer's writeup based on expected play of Powerball here, they came to an expected monetary value of $0.9651 with a $300MM jackpot and 80MM expected plays, accounting for the probability of other jackpot winners (all other prizes are non-shared).
Powerball has gone to $365MM. Even giving completely conservative numbers a run (cash payout of $171MM, even though a $314MM jackpot had a cash payout of $170MM, 100MM plays on that jackpot), we come to an expected monetary value of $1.07 on a $1 play. Don't say that something doesn't happen in reality when that very thing has happened in reality already. With the record payout, there might have even been a positive expected value after taxes. I hate doing my own taxes, though, so why would I bother running the numbers on someone else's?
Your sort of vague argument could be made against counting cards in blackjack, that the game must be constructed with a negative expected value at all times, but that is not the case. The game is constructed with a negative expected value (for the suckers/players) over the span of all plays.
Yes, I've done my homework on game theory, and I understand that it is very rare that one can consider coming out ahead with the lottery. Still, the suggestion that it isn't functionally possible to have a positive expected value for the game in the real world is just false.
The lottery is a tax on people who can't do math.Where does this come from? I've spouted it before (when I was much younger), but it's just wrong.
The lottery is: A. A tax on people who want to dream so much that they wouldn't do math if they could. B. Perfect for people who can do math.
Look at it this way. Much like blackjack, the lottery is a game with history, in which the odds/payoff ratio varies over time. If you bet the same amount every time you play, you'll end up losing out (the payout on the lottery doesn't climb as quickly as the money that goes in). However, if you wait to play until the payout is large enough (and these days, that's quite large), your dollar played is worth, probabalistically, more than one dollar.
You don't even have to deal with the risk of getting tossed out of a casino.
Yes, I understand that the lottery attracts a great number of low-income purchasers and is, as state-advertised gambling, wildly hypocritical in many places. Still, from a purely academic perspective, it suits mathematicians just fine.
That's not what they're suggesting. There are multiple layers of incorectness here, but the study itself seems interesting.
The original poster is merely regurgitating the sentiment of the article, but they're both wrong about the "controversial" idea supported by the study.
All that the study suggests is that evolutionary changes can happen quickly when new selection pressures are applied, or, more importantly, when a group of thikning creatures takes a different approach to a problem (which may be a genetically pre-disposed choice).
The National Geographic article, and particularly the poster here, seem to think that the Anoles wanted smaller legs and received them, for their young. This is more like the pre-Darwinian view of multi-generation adaptation, and the study makes no such claims.
Keep in mind that a shift in leg-length in the span of six months, while significant, isn't as amazing as it may sound. Brown anoles lay an egg every week, and that egg hatches in under a month. Anyone who's been in a tropical region in which anoles are indigenous can likely attest to their ability to rapidly reproduce.
I did read the article, and it doesn't state whether the opt-in/opt-out is personal or global. That makes a big difference in how one uses the service. As it's described in the article, one could "opt in" to being seen by "friends" but be visible to anyone that knows the appropriate number.
That can be a deal-killer for people who don't want to be seen by everyone.
Before you jump on people, make sure that you CTFA (Comprehend...).
Does one agree to be located in general, or on a per-person basis? If it's in general, how can I know who's tracking me once my number is available to them?
I'm not worried about stalkers, personally, but this is the sort of thing that you might see being handed out to girls on college campuses or boys on grade-school ones.
Married couples could see this causing trouble.
Tony: "You shut tracking off for a few hours there. Where were you?" Toni: "You're a freak. I'm leaving you." Tony: "For the guy/girl/goat that you were off with when you went off the radar?!"...
If you have tried data on Cingular without an unlimited plan, you know how un-free this could be. Personally, this is what I've stacked up to solve this problem.
Cingular 2125 Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone. $20/month for unlimited data. Orb at home on my media machine. Shure i2c-t headset for listening to audio and taking calls.
Then you just stream the data to yourself. Sure, it's harder to actually buy a track, but I only have 256MB of memory on my phone. I'm not going to fill that up with downloaded music.
First off, your sentence is broken because you inserted "obtained" recklessly. Secondly, your position disagrees with Snopes.
Thirdly, your use of the thermic effect of food is a bit wonky. 10% is, first off, an average estimate. Protein can cost you as much as 30%. Fat costs you very little. Secondly, TEF describes how many calories you will spend consuming the food in question. Conversely, it can be used to calculate how many calories of a given type of food one would need to recover from expenditure. What a bomb calorimeter gets from food is clearly not the same as what a human body gets from it. There are plenty of things that humans can eat that cannot sustain them calorically. Just ask Metamucil...
Fourthly (never had to go that far before), just think about it:
Even drinking cold water causes you to burn calories. Your body ends up doing the work to bring the water up to body temperature. How would digesting a highly fibrous water-stalk not take effort?
Yes, celery has a few digestible kcals per stalk, but you more than outstrip that in digestion. Will those extra burned calories make a marked difference? God no, but you're still on the wrong side of the argument. Whipping out your PhD just shows how much trouble you are having defending your position. I certainly hope I never need any of your work. To be considered right in an argument, it helps to actually be right. I don't have a PhD, but if the point of getting one is to have something to wave around when you're clearly wrong, I think I'll pass.
In a context where opinions are being stated without a factual assertion, qualification of statements is considered redundant. The same writing professor should advocate the use of regimented language where appropriate. Failure to adjust tone for context merely makes one read like a metric doof. (See how I used a tone appropriate for Slashdot?)
Not every discussion is a logical argument, and using language in contexts other than than logical arguments does not constitute "mental disease." I doubt that you are advocating the beating of one educator by another with a baseball bat, which largely makes my point for me.
Now, I don't know the specifics of what she said, but it's fair to say that anything that someone says without factual backing is a person's opinion. Saying "I think" in front of something that she thinks is redundant.
In a writing class, you should get a ruler-slap (the metaphorical kind, rather than the older, now illegal, kind) on the wrist for adding "I think" to that which you, by virtue of writing, think. The tone of your writing should be appropriate for the context, which, if it were on an internet forum, doesn't bear much factual weight. Funny that the legal system could put a pressure towards more explicit qualification upon the language as a whole when used for public communication. It won't overcome the tide of AIM-chatting middle-schoolers and their reduction of the English language into a series of ones and exclamation points, but it's interesting, regardless.
Vagary comes from "vagus," same root as "vague," and can be used to describe an unusual or erratic idea. Rule #2 about being a pompous twit:
If you're going to instruct someone to use a dictionary, make sure that you've read past the first definition.
On "orthogonal," I have three things to say: 1. Most programmers know what is meant by "orthogonal concerns/restrictions," and it doesn't take much more than a middle-school level of math to do so. 2. If you think that "orthogonal" is a haughty word, well, you're a moron. 3. Though you may not post back, I'm sure that you're reading this. No proper trolling AC would skip on checking back. Just make sure you have more to lob than this next time you sign out as your user to try and pick a fight about someone having their nose in the air.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be great, except that the IPCC has used the names of credible scientists in the past without their permission, or against their objections.
I'm not fully behind everything in The Great Global Warming Swindle, but I do think it's worth paying some attention to the cautions of Richard Lindzen (Alfred P. Sloan professor of Meteorology at MIT), who has said:
"In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions."
"Picking holes in the IPCC is crucial. The notion that if you're ignorant of something and somebody comes up with a wrong answer, and you have to accept that because you don't have another wrong answer to offer is like faith healing, it's like quackery in medicine - if somebody says you should take jelly beans for cancer and you say that's stupid, and he says, well can you suggest something else and you say, no, does that mean you have to go with jelly beans?"
When IPCC numbers are at the edge of the error bars, and situations so laughably implausable as the A1FI scenario are treated as genuine risks, you've stepped far from the realm of science. It's okay to worry that we'll make weather a bit more drastic and droughts a bit more painful. It's also okay to say that a lot of data supports a strong correlation between CO2 and increased temperatures. It is not okay to say that we're going to put a large number of cities underwater (as if civil engineers would watch NYC sink) and that we are certain that is all on the back of CO2.
Alarmists and deniers are all making it more difficult for us to find reasonable solutions, or even predictions...
It's time to trust that people can understand the small effects of complex systems, and it's time to allow for good science.
I find it funny (though not surprising) that a title regarding internet language parsing would read:
"Scientists Offers New Way to Read Online Text"
It could be:
"Scientists Offer New Way to Read Online Text"
or
"Scientist Offers New Way to Read Online Text"
Since this is Slashdot, though, I'm too lazy to read the article and find out which it should be...
Note: I'm normally a Microsoft defender here, but I've spent too much of the last eight months dealing with Vista breaking-changes. Onto the rant...
This is such utter nonsense. UAC first came in, IIRC, in Beta 2 (May), but there were far too many problems with Vista over the beta/RC cycle to be workable. UAC was too annoying to leave turned on while trying to figure out the real bugs. UAC is still awful over remote desktop on a slower connection, as it blanks the screen. This cycle was nothing like the 2k or XP cycles with regards to beta and RC stability and direction.
One of our long-released apps went through this:
Beta 1:
Some draw issues, crashes on exit.
Beta 2:
Some draw issues, just fine.
RC1:
Some different draw issues, crashes a helper process on startup, then a second crash, completely, app dead.
RC2:
Some completely different draw issues (others gone), otherwise fine.
Release:
Same draw issues as RC2, crashes a helper process on startup, annoying help pop-up for any plug-in expecting old-school help to be available.
This was a released app for which the shipping bits did not change, at all, over the Vista cycle.
Now, it gets worse with UAC, because there are things that get more restrictive when the user gets sick of UAC and turns it off. The most obvious example is the "can't write to the TEMP folder" defect (by design? The designer is defective.). This kept several installers from working properly. If the user shuts UAC off, apps can no longer write to the TEMP directory and run their expanded installer app (winzip installer approach). This means that getting tired of UAC and pulling the plug on this behavior still interferes in the use of the system. In this case, it will hand the user a cryptic error message and no direction.
They went down this road with things like broken file-sharing and remote-desktop access with no-password accounts in XP, and it continues throughout Vista. Users of Microsoft products are regular victims of hidden behaviors, where seemingly simple changes can have much-delayed distant results.
Microsoft once cared a great deal about backwards compatibility. Now they seem to expect all software vendors to re-code, re-compile, re-test, and re-deploy for an OS change, and that OS was a moving target for the year preceding its release.
We're handling it, but what happens to the software that was orphaned by companies that died (or moved to a different platform)?
Siggraph is always fun. It's a mix of creative and technical people, with plenty of interactive "art" (nearly games).
Most people I know, even the non-graphics ones, love it.
Science is the scientific method, but the practice of science is absolutely guided by intuition and obviousness.
You can't test it all (at least, I don't have time to), and the "hypothesize" part you're talking about is formed from our intuition and the obviousness of some theories based on available information and evidence.
(Side note: You'd actually have a pretty hard time making my muscles "work" by pushing on my brain. Not working is a lot easier (and fun!).)
(Side note 2: Our brains aren't "meant to operate" in any particular way, unless we were designed. Our brains do operate, and it's that operation that we use science to describe.)
You're falling into the mistake of taking a single simple behavior and saying that, because two things could cause it, those two things are equally likely to be the root-cause/underlying-mechanism of the greater field of behaviors of the system in question. It's not one test that makes this theory highly unlikely. It's the entire field of evidence.
It's a testament to the wikiality of Slashdot that someone using that broken style of argument could skate by as "5, Insightful" while someone calling them on it gets called a troll, only to have someone else use the same style of argument and hang onto a karmic 2.
I'll take my licks in moderation, but you're both still horrendously wrong.
Prosthetic limbs are starting to use electric triggers.
Nerve stimulators use electricity.
The chemical differences that we see as part of neural activity are structural at the high level and ionic at the low level. Ionic differences ~= electricity...
I'm not a biologist, neurologist, or otherwise, but I can make out a few things here:
1) This sound-based theory is laughable, at best.
2) Science is guided by intuition and obviousness. It's silly to say that metric boatloads of evidence do not "prove in any way" that to which they obviously point. You cannot "prove in any way" that you exist, that you are not merely the representation of a very elaborate bit of tinkering with my brain, which, by the way, may also not exist. It is enormously more likely, given the evidence, that you actually do exist.
3) Your straw-man is even sub-Slashdot quality. The difference between the way the nervous system "reacts" to electrical stimulation and the way the human body "reacts" to bullets is large enough to hold at least 10% of your ignorance.
4) It's dangerous to trot out "Logic 101" in just about any situation.
I work with someone who got her PhD working on atmospheric models of Mars. I think she'd disagree with your statement about us knowing "bugger all" about the weather patterns on Mars.
What do people think researchers are doing... collecting the easiest paycheck in the world? I don't know how many people are researching topics I've never even considered viewing in the scope of science, but I'd guess that it's somewhere between a bus-load and the population of the Asian continent.
Saying that "we" don't know about something and meaning anything other than "the two of us in this conversation" by "we" is almost sure to be wrong. Around here, that gets called "5, Insightful."
It's a shame that this is posted AC, because I want to "friend" this poster.
Sure, CO2 is a cause of global climate change. I'll go with that, but it's just too early to start branding those who question the current theories as unscientific, crazy, or politicized. We did this to Galileo, Newton, Einstein...
We party on anthropogenic CO2 (a small faucet on a really big bathtub) because it's easy to fall into the trap of favoring the simplest solution to a problem (if reducing anthropogenic CO2 by 70% can be labeled "simplest"). Even after one of my friends warned me not to do it, I favored trying to pin my '85 Volvo's inability to start on the fuel-pump relay. I didn't do this because it was the most likely culprit. I did this because it was only $40, and it was easy to fix.
$300 later, the car runs, and it wasn't the fuel-pump relay that needed to be replaced.
Science is more about asking questions than knowing answers. If those who know the answers scoff at those who ask new questions, science isn't being done.
When Visual Studio 2005 gives you fits on install (and, so far for me, works perfectly fine), you have to realize that the bar has been set lower than before.
Microsoft has historically done an unreal amount of work to make sure that existing programs work appropriately with new releases of their operating systems, and it feels like they spent less time working on compatibility quirks in this release than in previous releases. It's not about security. It's about things like message order for dialogs created with CreateDialogParam(), which has changed under Aero. Sure, applications should have been message-order agnostic, to a point, but getting this "right" was never part of the logo certification program. It's not even really fleshed out in the documentation.
Try shutting off UAC, writing to the temp directory, and running from the temp directory (something that works fine with UAC on). I have trouble seeing how turning off a security feature should cause unavoidable lock-down.
I professionally develop software for Windows and live with Vista as my primary OS every day. It's not about bitching about Microsoft here. Take a step back from the battlefront and recognize the reality of the situation: software will have teething pains for the next few months until vendors, and, to a large extent, Microsoft, solve the problems that a large number of applications are having under Vista.
My mother in law saw Vista on my laptop, saw me searching, using the start bar, and using Office 2007. She was very eager to upgrade, and she asked how she could do that.
I explained that she could buy the disc at a place like Office Depot, Best Buy, or wherever else she likes to get software (she's always just stuck with the OS on her machine from birth->death), but I also warned that she should make sure that the software she wants to run on her machine will run without problems before she bothers to do a big upgrade.
Quickbooks, some realtor software, and something her office uses have notes about compatibility problems with Vista. She stopped looking after that.
This is the first Windows release that I've used in which roughly half of the things I install have had some compatibility issues, noted in advance or discovered by me. It doesn't keep things from being usable in the general case, but it's more than just media FUD at this point.
They/we will fix it with OS/software updates over time.
Check out this story, in which one producer at a trade-show talks about player distribution being higher for HD-DVD because of the XBox360...
I don't know the porn industry, but I do know BS when I see it.
This is the goal of the RepRap project. The idea is that the tool will eventually be able to print all of its parts from raw materials.
It's a lofty goal, but a good one.
Honestly, I'm thinking about making a fabathome machine just for the tinkering. How many times have you wished that you just had something to mess with that was custom?
Here's the deal:
Does it stink for those who jumped in early? Yes, without a doubt. Still, we're not talking about the bulk of the user-base, now or going forward.
Let's just be realistic and thoughtful about things for a minute. I mean, come on, this is Slashdot.
From the link: If like me you thought that flash memory wouldn't be affected by fragmentation, then you'll find these results quite an eye opener. Looking at the write performance, you can see that while there is no difference in performance between the card states for 512B files (as you'd expect, since they'll fit in a single block, and therefore won't ever be fragmented), for 32kB files, the fragmented card has dropped to half the performance of the defragmented and blank cards. By the time you hit 256kB files, the fragmented card has dropped to almost one quarter the performance of the defragged card, and one eighth the performance of the blank card! The relative performance seems to be maintained at the same level for 2MB files as for 256kB files. With read performance, the difference doesn't get huge until the 2MB range, but then we see a massive drop in performance. Honestly, I thought that there wouldn't be a significant performance loss. Apparently, there is. My guess is that this is less of an issue as the on-board flash controller gets quicker, as well as if the drive interface to the flash is quick, but it's definitely data for consideration.
Don't forget the $0.1971 fixed expected value of the ticket (also subject to taxes). If we neglect taxes on small prizes (do you report $3?), one need merely have an after-tax lump-sum of ~$117MM.
I think it's safe to say that we're both safe from winning (or playing) the lottery any time soon.
That's just plainly not true. The sad thing is that the number of tickets purchased is not wildly responsive to the expected value of that play. It's responsive, but not as much as it should be in a strictly rational sense. Who wants to wait?
It's utter nonsense to say that "MORE people would play," to cover your bases on this one. Yes, more people will play, but that is merely a pressure on the game. It is not a forced constraint. In John Corbett and Charlie Geyer's writeup based on expected play of Powerball here, they came to an expected monetary value of $0.9651 with a $300MM jackpot and 80MM expected plays, accounting for the probability of other jackpot winners (all other prizes are non-shared).
Powerball has gone to $365MM. Even giving completely conservative numbers a run (cash payout of $171MM, even though a $314MM jackpot had a cash payout of $170MM, 100MM plays on that jackpot), we come to an expected monetary value of $1.07 on a $1 play. Don't say that something doesn't happen in reality when that very thing has happened in reality already. With the record payout, there might have even been a positive expected value after taxes. I hate doing my own taxes, though, so why would I bother running the numbers on someone else's?
Your sort of vague argument could be made against counting cards in blackjack, that the game must be constructed with a negative expected value at all times, but that is not the case. The game is constructed with a negative expected value (for the suckers/players) over the span of all plays.
Yes, I've done my homework on game theory, and I understand that it is very rare that one can consider coming out ahead with the lottery. Still, the suggestion that it isn't functionally possible to have a positive expected value for the game in the real world is just false.
The lottery is a tax on people who can't do math.Where does this come from? I've spouted it before (when I was much younger), but it's just wrong.
The lottery is:
A. A tax on people who want to dream so much that they wouldn't do math if they could.
B. Perfect for people who can do math.
Look at it this way. Much like blackjack, the lottery is a game with history, in which the odds/payoff ratio varies over time. If you bet the same amount every time you play, you'll end up losing out (the payout on the lottery doesn't climb as quickly as the money that goes in). However, if you wait to play until the payout is large enough (and these days, that's quite large), your dollar played is worth, probabalistically, more than one dollar.
You don't even have to deal with the risk of getting tossed out of a casino.
Yes, I understand that the lottery attracts a great number of low-income purchasers and is, as state-advertised gambling, wildly hypocritical in many places. Still, from a purely academic perspective, it suits mathematicians just fine.
That's not what they're suggesting. There are multiple layers of incorectness here, but the study itself seems interesting.
The original poster is merely regurgitating the sentiment of the article, but they're both wrong about the "controversial" idea supported by the study.
All that the study suggests is that evolutionary changes can happen quickly when new selection pressures are applied, or, more importantly, when a group of thikning creatures takes a different approach to a problem (which may be a genetically pre-disposed choice).
The National Geographic article, and particularly the poster here, seem to think that the Anoles wanted smaller legs and received them, for their young. This is more like the pre-Darwinian view of multi-generation adaptation, and the study makes no such claims.
Keep in mind that a shift in leg-length in the span of six months, while significant, isn't as amazing as it may sound. Brown anoles lay an egg every week, and that egg hatches in under a month. Anyone who's been in a tropical region in which anoles are indigenous can likely attest to their ability to rapidly reproduce.
I did read the article, and it doesn't state whether the opt-in/opt-out is personal or global. That makes a big difference in how one uses the service. As it's described in the article, one could "opt in" to being seen by "friends" but be visible to anyone that knows the appropriate number.
That can be a deal-killer for people who don't want to be seen by everyone.
Before you jump on people, make sure that you CTFA (Comprehend...).
But, of course, that may be why you posted AC.
Does one agree to be located in general, or on a per-person basis? If it's in general, how can I know who's tracking me once my number is available to them?
...
I'm not worried about stalkers, personally, but this is the sort of thing that you might see being handed out to girls on college campuses or boys on grade-school ones.
Married couples could see this causing trouble.
Tony: "You shut tracking off for a few hours there. Where were you?"
Toni: "You're a freak. I'm leaving you."
Tony: "For the guy/girl/goat that you were off with when you went off the radar?!"
Honestly, though, it's kind of a cool feature.
If you have tried data on Cingular without an unlimited plan, you know how un-free this could be. Personally, this is what I've stacked up to solve this problem.
Cingular 2125 Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone.
$20/month for unlimited data.
Orb at home on my media machine.
Shure i2c-t headset for listening to audio and taking calls.
Then you just stream the data to yourself. Sure, it's harder to actually buy a track, but I only have 256MB of memory on my phone. I'm not going to fill that up with downloaded music.
...post-graduate work?
First off, your sentence is broken because you inserted "obtained" recklessly. Secondly, your position disagrees with Snopes.
Thirdly, your use of the thermic effect of food is a bit wonky. 10% is, first off, an average estimate. Protein can cost you as much as 30%. Fat costs you very little. Secondly, TEF describes how many calories you will spend consuming the food in question. Conversely, it can be used to calculate how many calories of a given type of food one would need to recover from expenditure. What a bomb calorimeter gets from food is clearly not the same as what a human body gets from it. There are plenty of things that humans can eat that cannot sustain them calorically. Just ask Metamucil...
Fourthly (never had to go that far before), just think about it:
Even drinking cold water causes you to burn calories. Your body ends up doing the work to bring the water up to body temperature. How would digesting a highly fibrous water-stalk not take effort?
Yes, celery has a few digestible kcals per stalk, but you more than outstrip that in digestion. Will those extra burned calories make a marked difference? God no, but you're still on the wrong side of the argument. Whipping out your PhD just shows how much trouble you are having defending your position. I certainly hope I never need any of your work. To be considered right in an argument, it helps to actually be right. I don't have a PhD, but if the point of getting one is to have something to wave around when you're clearly wrong, I think I'll pass.
In a context where opinions are being stated without a factual assertion, qualification of statements is considered redundant. The same writing professor should advocate the use of regimented language where appropriate. Failure to adjust tone for context merely makes one read like a metric doof. (See how I used a tone appropriate for Slashdot?)
Not every discussion is a logical argument, and using language in contexts other than than logical arguments does not constitute "mental disease." I doubt that you are advocating the beating of one educator by another with a baseball bat, which largely makes my point for me.
Now, I don't know the specifics of what she said, but it's fair to say that anything that someone says without factual backing is a person's opinion. Saying "I think" in front of something that she thinks is redundant.
In a writing class, you should get a ruler-slap (the metaphorical kind, rather than the older, now illegal, kind) on the wrist for adding "I think" to that which you, by virtue of writing, think. The tone of your writing should be appropriate for the context, which, if it were on an internet forum, doesn't bear much factual weight. Funny that the legal system could put a pressure towards more explicit qualification upon the language as a whole when used for public communication. It won't overcome the tide of AIM-chatting middle-schoolers and their reduction of the English language into a series of ones and exclamation points, but it's interesting, regardless.
I don't know if it's good...
Vagary comes from "vagus," same root as "vague," and can be used to describe an unusual or erratic idea. Rule #2 about being a pompous twit:
If you're going to instruct someone to use a dictionary, make sure that you've read past the first definition.
On "orthogonal," I have three things to say:
1. Most programmers know what is meant by "orthogonal concerns/restrictions," and it doesn't take much more than a middle-school level of math to do so.
2. If you think that "orthogonal" is a haughty word, well, you're a moron.
3. Though you may not post back, I'm sure that you're reading this. No proper trolling AC would skip on checking back. Just make sure you have more to lob than this next time you sign out as your user to try and pick a fight about someone having their nose in the air.