I heartily endorse this. If I suck at maths then so should everyone else. You say this as a joke, but sadly it is actually very true: a lot of people who did poorly at math (often because of poor teachers early on) develop a belief that mathematics is useless as a defense mechanism -- they don't need to be good at math, so it doesn't matter that they are bad at it. The thing is that, while you don't necessarily need to be good at math for a wide variety of careers, that doesn't mean that being good at math isn't still a very useful skill for those careers. There's a good example of someone dicussing this point with regard to math for programmers. The real problem, however, is that many of these people who conclude that, because they pesonally never used it, math is useless, go on to cripple math curiccula with mistaken beliefs about what mathematics is, and what it is good for. Even worse, a surprisingly large number of elementary school teachers are these sorts of people, and they teach their hatred and ignorance of mathematics to new generations, crippling their early mathematical development, and repeating the cycle.
And he's right, there's no real point to Wikipedia (beyond a large volume of data) [Emphasis mine] Yes, there's no point aside from having a large volume of articles on a vast array of subjects, and who could possibly want that? You want to know what would be even worse? Some pointless "large volume of data" that doesn't even come in an easily cross-referenced/searchable format, and then expecting people to pay lots of money for that!. How useless would that be?! No one would use it! Which is why Britannica, World Book, Everyman's Encyclopedia, and all those others have only ever managed to sell a few copies between them.
The people paying money for commercial Linux distributions aren't Uncle Ed and Aunt Martha. They're corporate or government IT departments, and they don't need every setting available to the GUI. Indeed, this is exactly the point. We are getting what we pay for, and what we are paying for is a robust system that works well on servers and developer workstations, and perhaps as desktops in a managed corporate environment -- at least, that's what the people who are shelling out the big bucks to the major distros want, and so that's exactly what we have. Linux had a certain amont of inexorable momentum in servers, and then as developer workstations, before distros were pulling in serious money to develop systems. Prior to that we were paying for hobbyist systems ripe for tinkering, and surprise surprise, that's exactly what distros used to provide. We won't really see desktop distros for average home users until there is significant momentum for that already. Distros need some convincing before they'll dip their toes in that water.
For some reason some people have a "if you build it, they will come" mentality, thinking that if someone would just build some perfect home desktop user distro then all of a sudden people would buy it and fund its development. That just isn't happening. People have tried: there's Linspire, Lycoris, and Xandros, but their not exactly packing in the customers. The most successful "home desktop" distro is Ubuntu, which got their through not even pretending it was expecting people to pay for it (and instead coming straight out of Shuttleworth's pocket), nor trying to do it all at once. Instead Ubuntu is trying to slowly shift in the general direction of desktop friendliness, and build momentum for that sort of market equally slowly.
The solution for desktop linux, and for the plethora of choice in open source software, is not magic, it is patience. The systems will steadily improve, and with greater popularity in general, the popularity of the different choices will become ever more stark. There will always be the plethora of choice, but in time, and with increased adoption, there will only be 1 or 2 standard choices; the other choices will remain in the same niche position they are now, ignored by average users, and obsessed over by us geeks.
fragmentation and a hundred different ways of doing things makes it hard to find the information you're looking for online, makes it hard to support (Helpdesk workers complain about having to support more than 3 versions of Windows!), and makes it hard for the user to choose. Right now the choice in Linux seems to be vast and confusing because Linux in general is a niche system, so all the different choices are all equally niche options. As Linux slowly gains popularity (and it will -- if nothing else it is imporving faster than Windows: compare Windows 98 with Redhat 5.2, then compare Windows Vista with Ubuntu 7.04) you won't find the vast array of options all gaining equally from the influx of users. Ultimately, despite the vast array of distributions, only a very small handful (probably 2 or 3 at most) will gain any significant share. For most people Linux will simply be whatever the most popular of those 2 or 3 distros turns out to be. There won't be a plethora of choice, there'll be one distro that everyone you know uses, and then a whole bunch of other niche Linux stuff that only the geeks care about. The same will happen with desktop environments and development libraries: at most 2 options will be supportable as mainstream choices and the rest will be firmly relegated to small niche options -- they'll still be at least as popular as they are now, they will just be completely eclipsed by the increased popularity of the 1 or 2 winners.
Once all of that happens you'll find that, for almost any average user, there is 1 or at most 2 ways of doign things, and all the information online that is easy to find is all relevant to you. Support will be for the 1 or 2 most popular distributions, which will have very standardised configurations that everyone uses. Sure, the hundred different ways of doing things will still exist, and anyone geeky enough to mess with them will find that things are little different than they are now -- its just that most people who aren't interested will never even be aware of all of that. In the same way that most average Windows users are only dimly aware of Linux as a small niche player, eventually we'll reach a point where most average Linux users are only dimly aware of other distros as small niche players. Nothing changes for us geeks, and nothing changes for average users (except the OS they consider "standard").
It's about lock-in. Once you've bought in, back when it may have seemed like a decent idea, you're trapped because the cost of changing is greater than you cna afford. Someone else posted a reasonable analogy: Imagine a electricity company that offers cheap service to a particular area. Lots of people move into that area. Later the service charges are ratchetted up to the point where the customers are getting fleeced. In theory they don't have to keep buying electricity from that company -- there are other electricity providers in some more sparesely populated areas outside of town. The problem is that the cost of moving is more than the homeowner can raise, so in practice they can't change, and the provider can charge them as much as they can bear. The existence of competition doesn't make a difference if you can't afford to make the change.
The analogy is loose, of course, so pushing it too far is pointless, but the basic idea is there: people who bought into the MS platform early on when it seemed as good a choice as any are now locked into that platform. The costs involved in trying to migrate to the competition -- in converting all your software, retraining all your staff, migrating all your data, etc. -- is more than they can manage. The EU is essentially trying to offer a migration path. In our rough analogy it would be a little like requiring the monopolistic electricity provider to allow competing provider access to the area so they can compete on more even terms.
A good rule of thumb for southern hemisphere wine: Australia for reds, New Zealand for whites. That's just a rule of thumb of course, since Chile has some very nice reds, and South Africa some very nice whites, and you can get some excellent Chardonnay from Aus, and excellent Pinot Noir from NZ. Still, if you have to make a somewhat uninformed call, Aussie reds are pretty consistently good, particularly Shiraz, and NZ whites are pretty consistently good, particularly Sauvignon Blanc.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Occam's razor is all about pragmatism. It is not at all useful for determining truth, since the hoofbeats in the night might actually be some zebras that escaped from the zoo. What it does tell you is the safe side to place your bets, and, when it comes to models of reality, the pragmatists choice of the model that gets you your answers with the least fuss. Quantum mechanics has produced remarkably accurate results for a vast array of things -- indeed it has been tested to far greater accuracy than general relativity. It may well be that QM is just some complicated epicycle-like theory, but since we have no alternatives that can produce the same well tested answers it remains the safest bet, and the pragmatic choice for the model that gets those answers with the least fuss (since it is the only model that gets them at all).
A better comparison than OLPC might be with Edubuntu since we're talking about providing software to run computer labs. And Microsoft does have something to worry about here -- Edubuntu is steadily improving alongside Ubuntu, and as a simple and easy way to set up an educational computer lab it is almost unparalleled. Not only does it have an easy to set up terminal server system, but it comes with a large array of educational applications out of the box. That makes it a very attractive option, as you get a complete lab setup and educational application suite shipped to you for free. Between this and OLPC I suspect MS is starting to worry about its position in developing countries where children are going to increasingly grow up largely using Linux in one form or another.
For example, look at the Verizon vs. Vonage case where Verizon was the first to patent, but as of a Slashdot story yesterday it seems that a consortium of various IT companies actually met and established the standards/protocols/underlying technology of VoiP in question at least a year prior to Verizon filing for a patent. I don't know exactly what this particular bill says, but if it is at all similar to other "first to file" approaches it means that prior invention is enough to overturn/invalidate a patent, it just isn't enough to get the patent granted to you instead. In the Verizon v. Vonage case that means the prior art you describe would do the expected and invalidate the Verizon patent. All this change would mean is that the "consortium of various IT companies" couldn't demand to have the patent granted to them instead.
Either things move through time like they move through space (i.e. when they move somewhere they're no longer at their old position which would require some kind of metatime Things don't "move through space" in a space-time model, rather they trace out a curve through the comined 4-dimensional space-time (and by trace, I mean "exist as", there is no progression here). In the 6-dimensional version presumably it would simply be a curve in this 6-space. There is no need to invoke a "meta-time". Indeed, despite our natural intuition that time is some absolute thing that is somehow "outside the universe" marking of its progression, special (and then general) relativity was about folding time in and realising that it time itself is relative. It is tricky to think about easily as it goes against native intuition, but with a little practice you can get the hang of it.
Obviously from a practical point of view it is useful for use to measure things using a coordinate system with three sets of perpendicular axes but why do we think that is more than a useful logical construct? Why do we think it tells us that the very nature of the universe really stems from three distinct "dimensions"? There doesn't seem to be any real distinction between up/down, left/right, and forward/backward. Couldn't they all be something that is part of one "space" dimension? Well these days physics theories use 4 space-time dimensions. More importantly, with general relativity, we have a co-ordinate free description of the universe: that is, there is no preferred set of co-ordinates; you can use up/down, left,right, forward/backward, and time or radial distance from some origin, azimuth, and elevation, and time, or whatever other system (possibly mixing space and time dimensions) you like. So why do we end up with 3 (or in practice, 4) dimensions? Because regardless of what means you use to develop co-ordinates, you will always require at least (you're free to use more if you like) 3 (or 4 if we want time included) independent pieces of information to describe a location. Ultimately this comes down to the concept of the dimension of a vector space, at which point we're dealing with purely mathematical models.
I read the article, but I really don't understand the consequences of the theory. What would it mean for there to be more than one time dimension? That's really not at all clear. They aren't so much extra "time" dimensions as in extra directions of time, as extra time-like dimensions which has a specific meaning that refers to how they behave in calculating space-time distances. Ultimately they are the product of a purely mathematical model and, unless the author has something more in mind than is presented in the paper, exactly what sort of physical interpretation they might have is utterly unclear.
Of course mathematical models sometimes help us frame ideas about physical reality that we have trouble otherwise perceiving. Lorentz and Poincare developed much of the mathematics of special relativity as a mathematical model of electrodynamics using an "apparent time" that they viewed as an artificial mathematical construct necessary to make the model work. Einstein provided the insight that this "artificial" time was actually a real effect by making a conceptual shift about what simultaneity means, and special relativity was born.
For now the extra time-like dimensions are simply artificial creations of a mathematical model, we still await an insight to explain how they fit in with our own pereceptions of the universe.
An interesting claim made in the paper, but not mentioned in the PhysOrg writeup, is that this theory provides a co-ordinate free definition of chaos in spacetime. That is, for usual definitions of a dynamical system being chaotic, there is a preferred time co-ordinate describing the evolution of the system. General relativity, on the other hand, is remarkable because there is no single preferred co-ordinate system; everything works independently of the particular choice of co-ordinates to work in. As far as I can glean from the paper (it is very very dense) they simply define a chaotic system with regard to properties of the Chi operator, and claim that this conforms to the more restricted usual definition. This is far from clear to me -- I'm struggling just to get my head around their definition of Chi, let alone any implications of it -- but it would certainly be very interesting if true.
Saying that a patent describes "just another way" to do some obvious thing, and is therefore trivial, is missing the point. It's exactly that "just another way" that a patent is intended to protect. Patents covering radical ideas are the exception, not the norm. And this is one of the weaknesses of the current patent system: it encourages "remixing" and "reheating" ideas rather than significant innovation. Pharma are great at this -- there are a lot of new drug patents, but often it is for minor improvements or obvious additions to existing medicines. The point being that, by making a small change or minor improvement, the company can claim a patent and block generic versions, and extend the profitability of largely tried and tested drugs. In 2006 less than a quarter of all drug patents were for truly novel drugs involving "new molecular entities"; the vast majority were modifications of existing drugs. This, of course, makes perfect sense. Why expend R&D money on risky ventures when you can invest it in making minor changes, get a new patent, and reap the cash from drugs you already know will work and sell well. As long the current patent system rewards minor remixing of ideas as much as truly novel ones the result will be a lack of significant innovation.
I'm not talking about merging all the open source projects, I'm just talking about all the redundant putting together of all the projects (aka distributions). This will inevitably happen as "Linux" slowly gets more mainstream and greater desktop market share. What do I mean? Well it isn't going to be "Linux" as the amorphous mass of distirbutions that mainstream users will come to know, but rather a very small handful of distributions. As market share expands it will be that very small handful that will be gaining in audience, while all the other distributions will continue to be the small niche items that they are. Right now, because everything is relatively niche, the difference between "mainstream" and "niche" distributions is not that apparent. Once Linux becomes less of niche desktop OS (and that will happen, just very slowly) the difference will become more clear.
Unlike Beryl and Compiz, Metisse actually seems to be based around the idea of increasing productivity. That's nice to know, because that's not the impression I got from their demonstration videos which feature "folding windows", tilting windows at weird angles in 3D, and a weird sort of mirror reflection effect. That's nice to show off what the engine can do, but in principle all the other fancy 3D managers can do those too -- what really interests me is, as you discuss, actually using all that power to add productivity. I agree that the pager looks nice (although the other effects in that video are a little underwhelming in the productivity stakes). The shading effects shown here could be used nicely to gray out unfocussed windows which, I agree, might be nice (as long as it isn't carried too far). Still, I'm waiting for people to get bored with the gee whiz effects and the more useful things to start to shake themselves out.
No, you do the best you can, but realise you can't always do everything. I meant more that afterwards you didn't see people throwing their hands up in the air saying "well, the laws against that didn't do anything, let's make Sarin gas and VX legal!".
You're a soldier. You're ordered to turn your weapons on your friends, cousins, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers. Chances are that a good 90% of the military would refuse those orders, and a good percentage of that 90% would use their training to help the 299.9 million stand up against the 100,000. Sure, but you don't need guns for that. Soldiers are even less likely to trun their weapons on peaceful unarmed protestors than people pointing guns at them.
To be fair there is not a lot you can do about cults hell bent on killing people and which have literally many many millions of dollars at their disposal. Sometimes shit happens.
Your scenario would have to occur about THIRTY times to equal that number of casualties. No, it would need to happen as many times as would be required to make up the difference between the thirty killed today, and however many would have been killed before the gunman eventually ran into a gun carrying individual who he didn't manage to surprise or shoot and kill first. Who knows what that number is. In practice we really just don't know how the numbers would stack up. That means there isn't really any argument to be made based on this (in either direction, pro or anti gun control).
Given some of the replies I've gotten, I think I should make myself clear:
As a result of this incident some people are calling for tighter controls on firearms, claiming it would have prevented the situation. I do not agree with them, since it is not clear to me that tighter controls would have helped the situation.
As a result of this incident other people are calling for looser controls on firearms, claiming that this would have resulted in significantly less deaths. I do not agree with these people either, since it is, again, not clear to me that looser controls woul have helped the sitation.
I will happily argue against knee-jerk reactions in either direction.
It's a stupid move that nobody who actually passed a test to get a CCW/CHP should even consider as a real possibility. Sure, I agree entirely. Then again having tests and licensing of people for permits to carry guns are restrictions on people's ability to carry guns, which the OP said was the problem. Remove those restrictions and the people who have guns may not be trained, nor particularly smart. I'm not arguing to ban guns, I'm simply arguing that a completely laissez faire attitude isn't necessarily going to result in a marked improvement. The only conclusion I was drawing was an inability to draw any conclusions.
Just to be clear, I'm not arguing with trained licensed individuals carrying guns, merely the (oft quoted) assertion that "if everyone was carrying guns we'd be safer" which isn't really clear. Certainly if all the sensible people who are calm under pressure are carrying guns then things will probably be fine. I'm not suggesting you ban guns -- I don't think that will necessarily help either -- I'm just arguing that completely free policies don't necessarily offer any improvement, despite constant claims to the contrary. Potentially we agree more than you might think.
One factor you left out is the reduction in all nutcasery. A moderately crazy person may enter a school today in order to shoot the place up, but you'd have to be totally crazy to attempt such when you know that one out of ten students will be shooting back. I wouldn't presume to know what goes through the minds of the sort of people who go on such shooting sprees, but I'm not certain there is particularly good reason to presume there is significant deterence. Almost all such shooters kill themselves, so I don't think death is particularly troubling to them. The effectiveness of an armed populace as a deterrent to such behaviour is, again, purely hypothetical, with arguments to be made either way (perhaps an only slightly crazy individual would just fire his gun a couple of times then hide "cowering" in a corner and let the resulting chaos of frightened armed students do his work for him -- he could even walk away from that with a decent chance of never getting convicted of anything). I don't think it makes for a very convincing argument.
Slashdot Mirror
For some reason some people have a "if you build it, they will come" mentality, thinking that if someone would just build some perfect home desktop user distro then all of a sudden people would buy it and fund its development. That just isn't happening. People have tried: there's Linspire, Lycoris, and Xandros, but their not exactly packing in the customers. The most successful "home desktop" distro is Ubuntu, which got their through not even pretending it was expecting people to pay for it (and instead coming straight out of Shuttleworth's pocket), nor trying to do it all at once. Instead Ubuntu is trying to slowly shift in the general direction of desktop friendliness, and build momentum for that sort of market equally slowly.
The solution for desktop linux, and for the plethora of choice in open source software, is not magic, it is patience. The systems will steadily improve, and with greater popularity in general, the popularity of the different choices will become ever more stark. There will always be the plethora of choice, but in time, and with increased adoption, there will only be 1 or 2 standard choices; the other choices will remain in the same niche position they are now, ignored by average users, and obsessed over by us geeks.
Once all of that happens you'll find that, for almost any average user, there is 1 or at most 2 ways of doign things, and all the information online that is easy to find is all relevant to you. Support will be for the 1 or 2 most popular distributions, which will have very standardised configurations that everyone uses. Sure, the hundred different ways of doing things will still exist, and anyone geeky enough to mess with them will find that things are little different than they are now -- its just that most people who aren't interested will never even be aware of all of that. In the same way that most average Windows users are only dimly aware of Linux as a small niche player, eventually we'll reach a point where most average Linux users are only dimly aware of other distros as small niche players. Nothing changes for us geeks, and nothing changes for average users (except the OS they consider "standard").
It's about lock-in. Once you've bought in, back when it may have seemed like a decent idea, you're trapped because the cost of changing is greater than you cna afford. Someone else posted a reasonable analogy: Imagine a electricity company that offers cheap service to a particular area. Lots of people move into that area. Later the service charges are ratchetted up to the point where the customers are getting fleeced. In theory they don't have to keep buying electricity from that company -- there are other electricity providers in some more sparesely populated areas outside of town. The problem is that the cost of moving is more than the homeowner can raise, so in practice they can't change, and the provider can charge them as much as they can bear. The existence of competition doesn't make a difference if you can't afford to make the change.
The analogy is loose, of course, so pushing it too far is pointless, but the basic idea is there: people who bought into the MS platform early on when it seemed as good a choice as any are now locked into that platform. The costs involved in trying to migrate to the competition -- in converting all your software, retraining all your staff, migrating all your data, etc. -- is more than they can manage. The EU is essentially trying to offer a migration path. In our rough analogy it would be a little like requiring the monopolistic electricity provider to allow competing provider access to the area so they can compete on more even terms.
A good rule of thumb for southern hemisphere wine: Australia for reds, New Zealand for whites. That's just a rule of thumb of course, since Chile has some very nice reds, and South Africa some very nice whites, and you can get some excellent Chardonnay from Aus, and excellent Pinot Noir from NZ. Still, if you have to make a somewhat uninformed call, Aussie reds are pretty consistently good, particularly Shiraz, and NZ whites are pretty consistently good, particularly Sauvignon Blanc.
Next time you're in New Zealand head to the West Coast and tour the Monteiths brewery. It puts Speights to shame (not that hard really).
A better comparison than OLPC might be with Edubuntu since we're talking about providing software to run computer labs. And Microsoft does have something to worry about here -- Edubuntu is steadily improving alongside Ubuntu, and as a simple and easy way to set up an educational computer lab it is almost unparalleled. Not only does it have an easy to set up terminal server system, but it comes with a large array of educational applications out of the box. That makes it a very attractive option, as you get a complete lab setup and educational application suite shipped to you for free. Between this and OLPC I suspect MS is starting to worry about its position in developing countries where children are going to increasingly grow up largely using Linux in one form or another.
Of course mathematical models sometimes help us frame ideas about physical reality that we have trouble otherwise perceiving. Lorentz and Poincare developed much of the mathematics of special relativity as a mathematical model of electrodynamics using an "apparent time" that they viewed as an artificial mathematical construct necessary to make the model work. Einstein provided the insight that this "artificial" time was actually a real effect by making a conceptual shift about what simultaneity means, and special relativity was born.
For now the extra time-like dimensions are simply artificial creations of a mathematical model, we still await an insight to explain how they fit in with our own pereceptions of the universe.
An interesting claim made in the paper, but not mentioned in the PhysOrg writeup, is that this theory provides a co-ordinate free definition of chaos in spacetime. That is, for usual definitions of a dynamical system being chaotic, there is a preferred time co-ordinate describing the evolution of the system. General relativity, on the other hand, is remarkable because there is no single preferred co-ordinate system; everything works independently of the particular choice of co-ordinates to work in. As far as I can glean from the paper (it is very very dense) they simply define a chaotic system with regard to properties of the Chi operator, and claim that this conforms to the more restricted usual definition. This is far from clear to me -- I'm struggling just to get my head around their definition of Chi, let alone any implications of it -- but it would certainly be very interesting if true.
No, you do the best you can, but realise you can't always do everything. I meant more that afterwards you didn't see people throwing their hands up in the air saying "well, the laws against that didn't do anything, let's make Sarin gas and VX legal!".
To be fair there is not a lot you can do about cults hell bent on killing people and which have literally many many millions of dollars at their disposal. Sometimes shit happens.
Given some of the replies I've gotten, I think I should make myself clear:
As a result of this incident some people are calling for tighter controls on firearms, claiming it would have prevented the situation. I do not agree with them, since it is not clear to me that tighter controls would have helped the situation.
As a result of this incident other people are calling for looser controls on firearms, claiming that this would have resulted in significantly less deaths. I do not agree with these people either, since it is, again, not clear to me that looser controls woul have helped the sitation.
I will happily argue against knee-jerk reactions in either direction.
Just to be clear, I'm not arguing with trained licensed individuals carrying guns, merely the (oft quoted) assertion that "if everyone was carrying guns we'd be safer" which isn't really clear. Certainly if all the sensible people who are calm under pressure are carrying guns then things will probably be fine. I'm not suggesting you ban guns -- I don't think that will necessarily help either -- I'm just arguing that completely free policies don't necessarily offer any improvement, despite constant claims to the contrary. Potentially we agree more than you might think.