Can we agree on a definition, here? Here's a pretty standard one: "If someone does X, but could have done other-than-X, then they have free will." Is this an acceptable definition of free will?
Sure. That's fine, and most people would agree with that definition. But there could or should be a better one. From a scientific point of view, the "will" is the independent variable, and the end behavior is the dependent variable.
Look at the bottom paragraph of the "Science of Free Will" section.
People's "will" is not even good enough to randomly choose one of their arms. Without any manipulation they "choose" their right arm more than their left (60% vs 40%). Stimulate the right hand side of the brain with a magnet, and now they randomly choose their left hand 80% of the time.
Granted this is not the end all be all experiment, but if people cannot under any manipulation randomly pick one of their appendages (an average around 50% like that of a coin toss would be "random"), what can they choose?
People are not very good at picking a random number either. I believe that going to infinity is a bit extreme, but its pretty well known that 3 and 7 are "the least randomly picked" numbers between 1 and 10. And people frequently pick 37 when asked to go to 100. Even if people are not instructed to pick an integer, they will most likely pick one.
I guess a better experiment would be to offer a reward to people to really exercise their will by asking them to pick a random number between 1 and 50 or so, and also tell them that the integer that was "most random" would win a prize of some kind.
With this experiment, the person will be rewarded for being more unique and truly "random". Even with a huge sample size, I doubt that there would be nowhere near the same frequency for each number 1-50.
In the finder it has a little arrow overlay, and looks exactly the same as a symlink. I "aliased" the file and made a symlink to the file. The file is a few bytes of text, and in the finder it shows up as 4 KB, which I guess is the smallest file allocation size. The symlink also uses 4 KB. The finder shows that the file size of the alias is 44 KB. The commandline shows the alias to be 0 bytes, and the symlink to be 15 bytes, and the original file is 451 bytes.
Is this a GUI version of a symlink and is to be used the same?
Oh, and yes, aliases are broken from the commandline.
Same can be said about Evolution, it depends on which side of the fence you sit on. Zealots on both sides have arguments to discredit each other. A true scientist would explore all theories only only discredit those that can be completley proven wrong. Neither side of intelligent design or evolution can say 100% that the other side can not be proved.
All I can say, is that I foe everybody that has "free stuff" in their signatures or their "homepage" here on slashdot, and it really increases the signal to noise ratio.
I'm getting sick of seeing this crap about "Intelligent Design" vs evolution. Also, I have never heard of an evolution zealot until this post.
No, ID nor evolution can be "proved". Proofs are only valid in a self contained system like mathematics, everything else is evidence.
My question to all of the ID zealots, is this. If I were able to prove to you that ID was real, and nobody could discredit it, what the fuck would that get you? What is that knowledge going to benefit your life?
I don't believe in evolution 100%. Seems pretty good, but I would not be upset in the least if a better supported theory came around. I'm sure that everybody looked to the south-west and stomped their feet 5 times when Newton's laws were not found to be laws, because they broke down at the subatomic level and at high speeds.
The theory of evolution gives us things like genetics, selective breeding, and an understanding of why different species exist at a point in time, why they disappear, and rapid changes in species are good indicators that there is something radically different in their environment.
Again, what would 100% proof of ID give anybody?
Dinosaurs disappeared because the Flying Spaghetti Monster stopped anointing them with His Noodly Appendage, thus giving rise to the human race to do His noodling for Him.
That is a great story to tell kids. Its entertaining. But outside of that, its nothing.
Science does not assume that all systems must be deterministic, although it does tentatively make that assumption for pragmatic reasons.
I'm not sure because I haven't read much about determinism in over 10 years, and then it was not much but here is my take...
I believe that science does assume that all systems are deterministic, even quantum mechanics. The only catch is that its very difficult to impossible to control a part of the system in isolation from the rest of the universe. That is why we have phrases in physics such as "the ideal spring" and the "infinitely thin lens". This is also why we repeat experiments and use statistics to account for variability.
Now, back to free will. What can somebody do with their "will"? If there were anything that can be done with free will, then that would imply that one can will something outside of the cause and effect world, and change either a cause or an effect. I have never witnessed this, and the only variations that I know of can be found in religious texts, but even then most followers of the religion say that these things were for illustrative purposes and not to be taken literally.
1) When you move a destination object, symlinks don't follow the target . This leaves "broken" symlinks that refer to nothing. Why doesn't the mv command move these too?
I believe this is the correct behavior. Hardlinks do what you want here with the limitation that they only work on the same filesystem. I dislike hardlinks in general because its impossible to see which is the canonical file, and if you want to remove the data, you have to know where all of the hardlinks are, and remove all of them. With symlinks, you can tell that it is a symlink and directly tell where it is pointing.
2) When you symlink a symlinked folder, the root symlink is ignored. Let's say you symlink/usr/tunes to/usr/local/tunes. Later, you symlink/usr/local/tunes/YMCA.mp3 => ~/my_favorite_song.mp3. Now, you have a symlink that relies on both the existence of "/usr/tunes/" AND symlink "/usr/local/tunes >>/usr/tunes". Thus, while deleting 1st ("/usr/local/tunes =>/usr/tunes") symlink doesn't actually delete anything, it does cause ~/my_favorite_song.mp3 to become unworkable.
This is almost the same as #1. If you wanted a copy of YMCA.mp3 you should have copied it. Same thing happens if you expect a file to be available over the network and someone else deletes it or the network is down or whatever. This is not a problem with symlinks.
3) Symlinks cause all kinds of weirds around chrooted file systems , especially ones on a different underlying filesystem. If you're not very careful, nothing is as it seems! Files go nowhere, files are accessable only sometimes, etc. It's logical when you understand and appreciate a symlink for what it is, just a referral, but it can be maddening when security contexts get distorted around a chroot...
Oh, and having to statically link your binaries or copy all of your shared libraries isn't a PITA in a chrooted environment either. There will always be more complexity, issues, and problems with security. Its less convenient for me to have to have a ring of keys to open my house, my car, and work. I have to ensure I have the keys, and every time I open a door I have to get my keys out and put the correct one in a small slot and turn it. Sometimes there are more than one lock on a door or even a series of locks to go through. Chrooted environments are very special.
If thats true, that is bullshit. Scientist should be controlling independent variable in order to measure them in terms of then independent variables.
I have never heard of students being part of science aside from subject and labor.
One should preview while drunk.
If that's true, that is bullshit. Scientist should be controlling independent variables in order to measure them in terms of independent variables that they manipulate.
I have never heard of students being part of science aside from subjects or cheap labor.
In other words, if you have just one faithfull partner, your chances of survival are much MUCH greater in times of a massive STD pandemic.
According to evolution theory, its the production of and survival of the offspring that is important. Once a person is beyond or incapable of bearing children, evolutionary they are dead.
The US hovers around 15 in the world for all categories except for being number 2 in thinking school is boring. The other anomaly is the proportion of 20 year olds in higher education at 38%. That number is pretty misleading and I didn't know it was that high. However, a majority of students in average colleges are simply there because they are told to for whatever reason. They are not there to learn or do science. Maybe the nebulous "get a good job", and there a majority of college majors are in business. I personally believe that college has become something to keep the labor force low and tricking people into working harder so they can pay off their loans. But I could be wrong.
I read a few years ago that the societal changes are going more to primitive and tribal-like living because science is pretty much done. Much of science has been already discovered. Yes, there is of course more, but nothing that great. We know absolute zero, we know the speed of light, we know that the Earth goes around the Sun, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, electricity, how to broadcast and transmit information almost instantaneously anywhere in the world, and tons of other things.
Back to the primitive and tribal thing. The author based this on the trend towards body decorations like piercings an tattoos and "extreme" sports. This was before the chopper rage, but I believe that the popularity of choppers fits into this mold as well. Choppers are more like riding a horse than a car. The driver is open to the wind and whatnot.
Another big thing with Americans and their naivety towards science, is that Americans are simply dumber than many other industrialized countries, yet think and feel that they are smarter. I saw a poll somewhere on the web like on CNN or something where the question was something like "How much do you know about science?" And most of the people responded with the highest level of the multiple choices. I picked a more middle level. The same kind of thing I read about regarding American students and Japanese students and math. Americans were more likely to say they were "great" at math, while the Japanese say they were either not good or OK, yet they score much higher on standardized math tests.
The british article says: "When we ask people what they know about science, just under 20 percent turn out to be scientifically literate," said Jon Miller, director of the center for biomedical communication at Northwestern University. I would estimate that 20% is a bit high. I would bet that much less than 10% of the population could define science as something like "A method of learning through hypothesis testing via measurement". Honestly, I was "good" at math and science in high school, but I did not learn what science was until college. I guess I kinda knew. I did know about hypothesis testing, but I did not realize the importance that it is one of many methods of learning and the importance of measurement.
All in all, I would guess that the US is becoming less into science than the 60s or 70s, but not too terribly much less.
Oh, and one more big thing. Americans are sooo preoccupied with the ends vs the means. Bling and the preoccupation with the "appearance" of success vs actually being successful. Science is a means. Its a process, and thats not too much of an interest.
I've had kernels crap out while compiling a module, daemons mysteriously shut off without leaving a log trail, one of my monitors in a dual monitor (Xinerama) setup come up with goofy vertical lines after a reboot which worked "flawlessly" before I shut down the system and with no xorg.conf changes whatsoever, only to reappear perfectly fine after another reboot... The list goes on.
I have never experienced or heard of these kinds of problems.
Do you still use that computer? Or have you run other OSes on it? Because this sounds like a hardware problem, especially your video problem. Aside from upgrading the kernel and having processes stuck in a "Disk wait state", I've never known a reboot to change or fix anything in Linux. Its simply not the cureall like for Windows.
Yes it does. I've been using Linux for 11 years, personally and professionally. I've used it on at least 4 types of processors (alpha, ia32, ia64, and broadcom). Aside from running beta kernels, it has been very robust. To put it into perspective, its more robust than hardware and power. And yes, I've even used beta kernels in production when necessary without incident (2.1.125 or 2.1.115 if I remember correctly).
However, IMHO, someone switching to Linux for general personal computing either really knows what they are doing or they really don't. I know thats not a popular opinion here. But I believe that the Linux GUI has gotten much worse when KDE and Gnome became the two dominant "Desktop environment"s. I really liked AfterStep and WindowMaker. In fact, Malda's info on Afterstep is what brought me to slashdot when it was still chips and dips. FVWM was also pretty cool too. But all of those environments, like Windows seem so dated now. Kinda like butterfly collars, wide lapels, and ties. There is nothing wrong with them, and they were very fashionable at a time, but now they just look funny.
Its like saying that in 1905 only 7% of people used cars and now in 2005 99% of people use them, so cars play a big role in people's lives.
Yes, I agree. I would assume that almost 100% of the US white collar population use the internet almost daily at home and at work. I would also assume that the deviants from that don't use a computer at home because they use it at work and want to escape from them. Its surprising the number of lower income blue collar people that have home computers and pretty much know how to use them. Its basically a TV alternative for those types.
And so perhaps the most promising element of President Bush's plan to reform the immigration system is his idea to, from this point forward, create 401(k)-type accounts where Mexican immigrant workers could invest part of their earnings. There the money would sit until the workers returned to Mexico, at which point they could draw it out. Bush's plan would put an end to the current system, and that's what hard-line conservatives hate about it. They're basically admitting that Social Security needs to rely on ill-gotten goods just to stay afloat.
It's amazing. Some of the same people who are constantly complaining about how illegal immigrants are the ruin of the civilization, including some Republicans in Congress, have no more qualms about letting them continue to prop up Social Security.
And people wonder why we have so much illegal immigration. Not me. I wonder why we don't have more of it.
What useful utility has top sports athletes contributed to society?
Bling dude! Haven't you watched cribs?
Re:"Ma Bell" should be called "Big Brother" instea
on
Ma Bell is Back
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· Score: 1
Having a 911 call placed from your line without an answer is reasonable cause.
I don't call the police when I have a fire or am dying, I call the fire department and the ambulance. (Yeah, they are usually the same department).
I would love to know more details, because this seems very weird. There are many houses where policemen coming in without a warrant will not leave alive.
Re:Ma Bell? Yo no entiendo - SHORT VERSION
on
Ma Bell is Back
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· Score: 1
They kept telephone and data circuit prices real high...
For those that are from other countries or too young to remember disco and big hair, phones used to be rented from the phone company. They had no features besides an earpiece, a microphone, a rotary dialer, a bell, and a button to hang up the phone. I guess the "hang" part came as slang for putting it in its cradle when phones were predominately wall mounted. If you were lucky, you had a 25 foot cord so you could escape to have a private conversation somewhere within 25 feet of the phone.
I didn't pay the bills then, so I cannot vouch for the relative cost at the time, but I imagine that it was relatively expensive. Especially for "long distance". I don't believe that call waiting or any other kinds of extra features came until the early 80's, maybe late 70's.
Phones have always been relatively expensive. I miss the days when they were reliable and whatnot, but I guess its a tradeoff to be theoretically able to make a phonecall anywhere vs to reliably make a call from a land line.
That is also key. A grant is usually very specific in terms of buying equipment and paying people. Paying for a service is something I've never heard of being allowed on a grant.
An important question is whether this is a failure of marketing or a poor choice of target market.
This is not a marketing issue. For people that need cycles, they will go wherever they can to get their needs met. They will come in record time if there is no wait in the queue. The price seems a bit high to me ($876,000 for 1 year of 100 CPUs which is not that many), Suns are a little slow compared to other machines. Most people use Linux for these kinds of applications, so there may be porting involved.
If you don't know researchers that need computer cycles, you don't know how much of a desire they have to run as much as they can wherever and whenever they can.
Slashdot Mirror
Can we agree on a definition, here? Here's a pretty standard one: "If someone does X, but could have done other-than-X, then they have free will." Is this an acceptable definition of free will?
Sure. That's fine, and most people would agree with that definition. But there could or should be a better one. From a scientific point of view, the "will" is the independent variable, and the end behavior is the dependent variable.
A decent wikipedia read on the subject is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will
Look at the bottom paragraph of the "Science of Free Will" section.
People's "will" is not even good enough to randomly choose one of their arms. Without any manipulation they "choose" their right arm more than their left (60% vs 40%). Stimulate the right hand side of the brain with a magnet, and now they randomly choose their left hand 80% of the time.
Granted this is not the end all be all experiment, but if people cannot under any manipulation randomly pick one of their appendages (an average around 50% like that of a coin toss would be "random"), what can they choose?
Here is a weaker example, but one nonetheless: http://consc.net/notes/pick-a-number.html
People are not very good at picking a random number either. I believe that going to infinity is a bit extreme, but its pretty well known that 3 and 7 are "the least randomly picked" numbers between 1 and 10. And people frequently pick 37 when asked to go to 100. Even if people are not instructed to pick an integer, they will most likely pick one.
I guess a better experiment would be to offer a reward to people to really exercise their will by asking them to pick a random number between 1 and 50 or so, and also tell them that the integer that was "most random" would win a prize of some kind.
With this experiment, the person will be rewarded for being more unique and truly "random". Even with a huge sample size, I doubt that there would be nowhere near the same frequency for each number 1-50.
What actually is an alias, and what good is it?
I just created my first one, and its weird.
In the finder it has a little arrow overlay, and looks exactly the same as a symlink. I "aliased" the file and made a symlink to the file. The file is a few bytes of text, and in the finder it shows up as 4 KB, which I guess is the smallest file allocation size. The symlink also uses 4 KB. The finder shows that the file size of the alias is 44 KB. The commandline shows the alias to be 0 bytes, and the symlink to be 15 bytes, and the original file is 451 bytes.
Is this a GUI version of a symlink and is to be used the same?
Oh, and yes, aliases are broken from the commandline.
Same can be said about Evolution, it depends on which side of the fence you sit on. Zealots on both sides have arguments to discredit each other. A true scientist would explore all theories only only discredit those that can be completley proven wrong. Neither side of intelligent design or evolution can say 100% that the other side can not be proved.
All I can say, is that I foe everybody that has "free stuff" in their signatures or their "homepage" here on slashdot, and it really increases the signal to noise ratio.
I'm getting sick of seeing this crap about "Intelligent Design" vs evolution. Also, I have never heard of an evolution zealot until this post.
No, ID nor evolution can be "proved". Proofs are only valid in a self contained system like mathematics, everything else is evidence.
My question to all of the ID zealots, is this. If I were able to prove to you that ID was real, and nobody could discredit it, what the fuck would that get you? What is that knowledge going to benefit your life?
I don't believe in evolution 100%. Seems pretty good, but I would not be upset in the least if a better supported theory came around. I'm sure that everybody looked to the south-west and stomped their feet 5 times when Newton's laws were not found to be laws, because they broke down at the subatomic level and at high speeds.
The theory of evolution gives us things like genetics, selective breeding, and an understanding of why different species exist at a point in time, why they disappear, and rapid changes in species are good indicators that there is something radically different in their environment.
Again, what would 100% proof of ID give anybody?
Dinosaurs disappeared because the Flying Spaghetti Monster stopped anointing them with His Noodly Appendage, thus giving rise to the human race to do His noodling for Him.
That is a great story to tell kids. Its entertaining. But outside of that, its nothing.
Science does not assume that all systems must be deterministic, although it does tentatively make that assumption for pragmatic reasons.
I'm not sure because I haven't read much about determinism in over 10 years, and then it was not much but here is my take...
I believe that science does assume that all systems are deterministic, even quantum mechanics. The only catch is that its very difficult to impossible to control a part of the system in isolation from the rest of the universe. That is why we have phrases in physics such as "the ideal spring" and the "infinitely thin lens". This is also why we repeat experiments and use statistics to account for variability.
Now, back to free will. What can somebody do with their "will"? If there were anything that can be done with free will, then that would imply that one can will something outside of the cause and effect world, and change either a cause or an effect. I have never witnessed this, and the only variations that I know of can be found in religious texts, but even then most followers of the religion say that these things were for illustrative purposes and not to be taken literally.
1) When you move a destination object, symlinks don't follow the target . This leaves "broken" symlinks that refer to nothing. Why doesn't the mv command move these too?
/usr/tunes to /usr/local/tunes. Later, you symlink /usr/local/tunes/YMCA.mp3 => ~/my_favorite_song.mp3. Now, you have a symlink that relies on both the existence of "/usr/tunes/" AND symlink "/usr/local/tunes >> /usr/tunes". Thus, while deleting 1st ("/usr/local/tunes => /usr/tunes") symlink doesn't actually delete anything, it does cause ~/my_favorite_song.mp3 to become unworkable.
I believe this is the correct behavior. Hardlinks do what you want here with the limitation that they only work on the same filesystem. I dislike hardlinks in general because its impossible to see which is the canonical file, and if you want to remove the data, you have to know where all of the hardlinks are, and remove all of them. With symlinks, you can tell that it is a symlink and directly tell where it is pointing.
2) When you symlink a symlinked folder, the root symlink is ignored. Let's say you symlink
This is almost the same as #1. If you wanted a copy of YMCA.mp3 you should have copied it. Same thing happens if you expect a file to be available over the network and someone else deletes it or the network is down or whatever. This is not a problem with symlinks.
3) Symlinks cause all kinds of weirds around chrooted file systems , especially ones on a different underlying filesystem. If you're not very careful, nothing is as it seems! Files go nowhere, files are accessable only sometimes, etc. It's logical when you understand and appreciate a symlink for what it is, just a referral, but it can be maddening when security contexts get distorted around a chroot...
Oh, and having to statically link your binaries or copy all of your shared libraries isn't a PITA in a chrooted environment either. There will always be more complexity, issues, and problems with security. Its less convenient for me to have to have a ring of keys to open my house, my car, and work. I have to ensure I have the keys, and every time I open a door I have to get my keys out and put the correct one in a small slot and turn it. Sometimes there are more than one lock on a door or even a series of locks to go through. Chrooted environments are very special.
If thats true, that is bullshit. Scientist should be controlling independent variable in order to measure them in terms of then independent variables.
I have never heard of students being part of science aside from subject and labor.
One should preview while drunk.
If that's true, that is bullshit. Scientist should be controlling independent variables in order to measure them in terms of independent variables that they manipulate.
I have never heard of students being part of science aside from subjects or cheap labor.
Scientists do indeed want control of the minds of the students
If thats true, that is bullshit. Scientist should be controlling independent variable in order to measure them in terms of then independent variables.
I have never heard of students being part of science aside from subject and labor.
I gave up work!
Honestly it's the best thing I ever did. I recommend it to anyone that doesn't like working.
You consider pimping a fishtank store with zero products available not working?
In other words, if you have just one faithfull partner, your chances of survival are much MUCH greater in times of a massive STD pandemic.
According to evolution theory, its the production of and survival of the offspring that is important. Once a person is beyond or incapable of bearing children, evolutionary they are dead.
You and natural law are really one and the same.
I can't disagree with that. But neither that nor anything else in your post gives any objective and measurable evidence of free will.
How many of you believe in science and free will?
To me, they seem mutually exclusive.
Now, if you ask scientists (which pretty much includes anyone with a higher degree in science, but presumably people of intelligence and education)
v _stu_sci
_ yea_old_in_ter_edu
i n_sch_bor
r _of_lab_for
Ah, those people. Too bad they are in the minority. Check out these numbers:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/edu_gra_12_ad
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/edu_pro_of_20
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/edu_stu_att_f
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/edu_tea_as_pe
The US hovers around 15 in the world for all categories except for being number 2 in thinking school is boring. The other anomaly is the proportion of 20 year olds in higher education at 38%. That number is pretty misleading and I didn't know it was that high. However, a majority of students in average colleges are simply there because they are told to for whatever reason. They are not there to learn or do science. Maybe the nebulous "get a good job", and there a majority of college majors are in business. I personally believe that college has become something to keep the labor force low and tricking people into working harder so they can pay off their loans. But I could be wrong.
my take?
I read a few years ago that the societal changes are going more to primitive and tribal-like living because science is pretty much done. Much of science has been already discovered. Yes, there is of course more, but nothing that great. We know absolute zero, we know the speed of light, we know that the Earth goes around the Sun, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, electricity, how to broadcast and transmit information almost instantaneously anywhere in the world, and tons of other things.
Back to the primitive and tribal thing. The author based this on the trend towards body decorations like piercings an tattoos and "extreme" sports. This was before the chopper rage, but I believe that the popularity of choppers fits into this mold as well. Choppers are more like riding a horse than a car. The driver is open to the wind and whatnot.
Another big thing with Americans and their naivety towards science, is that Americans are simply dumber than many other industrialized countries, yet think and feel that they are smarter. I saw a poll somewhere on the web like on CNN or something where the question was something like "How much do you know about science?" And most of the people responded with the highest level of the multiple choices. I picked a more middle level. The same kind of thing I read about regarding American students and Japanese students and math. Americans were more likely to say they were "great" at math, while the Japanese say they were either not good or OK, yet they score much higher on standardized math tests.
The british article says: "When we ask people what they know about science, just under 20 percent turn out to be scientifically literate," said Jon Miller, director of the center for biomedical communication at Northwestern University. I would estimate that 20% is a bit high. I would bet that much less than 10% of the population could define science as something like "A method of learning through hypothesis testing via measurement". Honestly, I was "good" at math and science in high school, but I did not learn what science was until college. I guess I kinda knew. I did know about hypothesis testing, but I did not realize the importance that it is one of many methods of learning and the importance of measurement.
All in all, I would guess that the US is becoming less into science than the 60s or 70s, but not too terribly much less.
Oh, and one more big thing. Americans are sooo preoccupied with the ends vs the means. Bling and the preoccupation with the "appearance" of success vs actually being successful. Science is a means. Its a process, and thats not too much of an interest.
I've had kernels crap out while compiling a module, daemons mysteriously shut off without leaving a log trail, one of my monitors in a dual monitor (Xinerama) setup come up with goofy vertical lines after a reboot which worked "flawlessly" before I shut down the system and with no xorg.conf changes whatsoever, only to reappear perfectly fine after another reboot... The list goes on.
I have never experienced or heard of these kinds of problems.
Do you still use that computer? Or have you run other OSes on it? Because this sounds like a hardware problem, especially your video problem. Aside from upgrading the kernel and having processes stuck in a "Disk wait state", I've never known a reboot to change or fix anything in Linux. Its simply not the cureall like for Windows.
Continental Drift? Who would dispute that?
People that live here.
Because it works flawlessly once installed.
Yes it does. I've been using Linux for 11 years, personally and professionally. I've used it on at least 4 types of processors (alpha, ia32, ia64, and broadcom). Aside from running beta kernels, it has been very robust. To put it into perspective, its more robust than hardware and power. And yes, I've even used beta kernels in production when necessary without incident (2.1.125 or 2.1.115 if I remember correctly).
However, IMHO, someone switching to Linux for general personal computing either really knows what they are doing or they really don't. I know thats not a popular opinion here. But I believe that the Linux GUI has gotten much worse when KDE and Gnome became the two dominant "Desktop environment"s. I really liked AfterStep and WindowMaker. In fact, Malda's info on Afterstep is what brought me to slashdot when it was still chips and dips. FVWM was also pretty cool too. But all of those environments, like Windows seem so dated now. Kinda like butterfly collars, wide lapels, and ties. There is nothing wrong with them, and they were very fashionable at a time, but now they just look funny.
Linky:
http://www.nationmaster.com/cat/Internet
Click away...
I thought our government was gathering more useful statistics, but I guess not.
u ter.html
x .html.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/comp
I really like reading the census data. Sometimes the numbers do not at all meet perception, so I try to calibrate my perception from time to time.
Also, another excellent data site for raw data is http://www.nationmaster.com/ and another is http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/inde
Its like saying that in 1905 only 7% of people used cars and now in 2005 99% of people use them, so cars play a big role in people's lives.
Yes, I agree. I would assume that almost 100% of the US white collar population use the internet almost daily at home and at work. I would also assume that the deviants from that don't use a computer at home because they use it at work and want to escape from them. Its surprising the number of lower income blue collar people that have home computers and pretty much know how to use them. Its basically a TV alternative for those types.
Funny and true. TFA says:I guess I was wrong, but I thought that I saw Mars with my naked eye many times. I could never see a penny from 200 yards, I doubt 100.
I wonder what that orange thing I've always called Mars really is? Hmm.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050410/
What useful utility has top sports athletes contributed to society?
Bling dude! Haven't you watched cribs?
Having a 911 call placed from your line without an answer is reasonable cause.
I don't call the police when I have a fire or am dying, I call the fire department and the ambulance. (Yeah, they are usually the same department).
I would love to know more details, because this seems very weird. There are many houses where policemen coming in without a warrant will not leave alive.
They kept telephone and data circuit prices real high...
For those that are from other countries or too young to remember disco and big hair, phones used to be rented from the phone company. They had no features besides an earpiece, a microphone, a rotary dialer, a bell, and a button to hang up the phone. I guess the "hang" part came as slang for putting it in its cradle when phones were predominately wall mounted. If you were lucky, you had a 25 foot cord so you could escape to have a private conversation somewhere within 25 feet of the phone.
I didn't pay the bills then, so I cannot vouch for the relative cost at the time, but I imagine that it was relatively expensive. Especially for "long distance". I don't believe that call waiting or any other kinds of extra features came until the early 80's, maybe late 70's.
Phones have always been relatively expensive. I miss the days when they were reliable and whatnot, but I guess its a tradeoff to be theoretically able to make a phonecall anywhere vs to reliably make a call from a land line.
Basically, if you buy a cluster of your grant...
That is also key. A grant is usually very specific in terms of buying equipment and paying people. Paying for a service is something I've never heard of being allowed on a grant.
An important question is whether this is a failure of marketing or a poor choice of target market.
This is not a marketing issue. For people that need cycles, they will go wherever they can to get their needs met. They will come in record time if there is no wait in the queue. The price seems a bit high to me ($876,000 for 1 year of 100 CPUs which is not that many), Suns are a little slow compared to other machines. Most people use Linux for these kinds of applications, so there may be porting involved.
If you don't know researchers that need computer cycles, you don't know how much of a desire they have to run as much as they can wherever and whenever they can.