I've never actually been able to get Linux to run properly on arbitrary hardware that I happened to own.
I, on the other hand, have run into one thing that Linux didn't work with. I have a collection of accumulated 'stuff' and just last night Frankensteined a PC together. I don't even know the model number of most of the parts. It's an Nvidia 8600 (something) video card, and a Soundblaster Live, I know that much. Worked just fine, no issues. (Streams PC games from Steam pretty well to the TV upstairs, too.)
I purchased a mid-high prebuilt 'gaming rig' a couple years back, and everything 'just worked', except the "SoundBlaster® X-Fi XtremeAudio" card. That was the 'one thing'. There was a config fix but I just pulled the card and used the onboard MB audio. Whatever that is worked fine.
Just installed Linux for my cousin this weekend. Some HP laptop, I honestly didn't even check the model. Everything just worked, including the 'scroll region' on the trackpad, and the weird 'slide-touch' volume control above the keyboard.
If you're working on the equipment, and it shouldn't move, you put a padlock, with a nametag, on the switch and physically lock the power out. You take the key with you into the workcell, and only you are allowed to remove that lock.
If the robot must be moving (typically, when you're teaching the robot the path it should follow), then every single person in the workcell must have an active deadman switch (anyone lets go, the robot emergency-stops). And you run the program at 10% speed so that you have time to trip the deadman or get out of the way. The workcell itself is fenced off, usually with either a tripwire or electric-eye switch that will e-stop the robot if triggered.
I used to work for a robot company, and we enforced these rules religiously. When I went to visit plants and work on the robots, they issued me my own padlock and tags for lockout/tagout. Someone had to have skipped some safety procedures in this case.
Indeed, in most places, a bug where the system crashes is the most severe possible bug. When dealing with robots, that's only the second most severe. The most severe were "unexpected motion" bugs, where the robot didn't follow the path in the correct way or otherwise didn't behave predictably. Those got everybody's attention.
Every single one of your 'concerns' arises in cases of divorce, too. But there was no well-financed national campaign to maje divorce more difficult. Nobody tried to amend any Constitutions to ban no-fault divorce. No, it was the numerically small, historically persecuted minority that got that kind of attention.
I think the true priorities are pretty clearly seen from the actions taken.
...where it's not really a poll at all, but a disguised negative campaign ad. At this point, if I don't recognize the number, I don't answer it. Period.
Ah, but it does indeed. It shows that variation does in fact respond to environment. It's only one piece of the puzzle, though. No one claims that the peppered moths, by themselves, prove evolution. There's a lot more to it than that.
Take that variation, for example, and you can link it to speciation - which we can observe today. Heard of 'ring species'? The Larus gulls are several subspecies where variants live in a ring around the Arctic. The Herring Gull in the U.K. can interbreed with the American Herring Gull, and the American can interbreed with the Vega Gull in Russia. And so on, until you come to the Lesser Black-Backed Gull in the Netherlands. It basically can’t breed with the Herring Gull. Hybrids are extremely rare and don't seem to be fertile, like mules.
So, is it a separate species? You could breed it with its relative to the East, and so on. But what if, say, the Vega Gull went extinct? Would you have separate species then?
Now, imagine such variations happening across time instead of (or as well as) space, and you’ve got an idea how species actually do form, instead of the ’saltationist’ strawman that many try to imply.
We have a theory how we think this works but we haven't gotten conclusive evidence.
The thing is, we have so gotten conclusive evidence. Here's one you can partially check on your own body. Lay your fingers on the side of your jaw. Now, trace along the edge up to the very top of the jawbone. Notice how close your fingers are to your ear canal. Inside the inner ear are three bones, the ossicles: malleus, incus, and stapes. They are carefully arranged to transfer sound energy from the eardrum to the cochlea as efficiently as possible. How could such an amazing mechanism arise?
It turns out that a classification of dinosaur called the therapsids had two jaw joints. The therapsids are known (by several independent lines of evidence) to be ancestral to modern mammals... and we have a basically complete fossil record of the gradual transition of one of those jaw joints into the modern bones of the inner ear. Fossils representing over a dozen separate stages have been found. Note that intermediate steps were all advantageous, though not as efficient or optimized. Some transitional forms did help amplify sound energy but didn't work while the animal was chewing. We still have problems with that under some circumstances (try to listen to someone while eating celery) but the separation is far more developed now.
(Note that some have even cited the ossicles as 'irreducibly complex'. The more central figures of the ID 'movement', like Behe and Shermer, haven't done so... but I suspect that's because they know enough of the detailed fossil record to dissuade them.)
Or, my absolute favorite - the twin nested hierarchies! Books used to be copied by scribes, and (despite a lot of care) sometimes typos would be introduced. Later scribes, making copies of copies, would introduce other typos. It's possible to look at the existing copies and put them into a 'family tree'. "These copies have this typo, but not that one; this other group has yet another typo, though three of them have a newer typo as well, not seen elsewhere..." This is not controversial at all when dealing with books, including the Bible.
Now, this process of copy-with-modification naturally produces 'family trees', nested groups. When we look at life, we find such nested groups. No lizards with fur or nipples, no mammals with feathers, etc. Living things (at least, multicellular ones, see below) fit into a grouped hierarchy. This has been solidly recognized for over a thousand years, and systematized for centuries. It was one of the clues that led Darwin to propose evolution. (Little-known fact: Linnaeus, who invented the "kingdom, phyla, genus, species, etc." classification scheme for living things, tried to do the same thin
"Several thousand years ago, a tribe of ignorant near-savages wrote various collections of myths, wild tales, lies, and gibberish. Over the centuries, these stories wore embroidered, garbled, mutilated, and torn into small pieces that were then repeatedly shuffled. Finally, this material was badly translated into several languages successively. The resultant text, creationists feel, is the best guide to this complex and technical subject [of origins]." - Tom Weller, Science Made Stupid
In "Starship Troopers" the book, a trainee asks why they are learning to throw knives when they have nukes. The instructor stops the drill, and points out that you don't housetrain a puppy by decapitating it. The military is supposed to used controlled force to achieve policy objectives, not wanton destruction. He tells the recruit who to talk to if he still doesn't understand.
In the movie, the instructor throws a knife through the recruit's hand, and says, "Hard to push a button now, eh?"
I get that the movie is satire. I even get that there's a lot in the book that can be fairly satirized. The problem is, the movie is lazy, unfair, incompetent satire.
Time travel is possible but not in the way you think about it. It exists going backwards but is tied to alternate realities, or tied to multiple universes.
Or not. Until we can find or set up a region with a closed timelike curve, we won't be able to test such things, and it all is, well, entirely theoretical. There are several possibilities.
If the movie follows the story, there actually aren't any paradoxes. Instead, there are stable time loops (once called 'perpendoxes' because they are 'orthogonal to paradoxes'). Such loops don't contradict themselves like a paradox does. Killing your grandfather so you don't ever have existed, so you couldn't have killed him - that's a paradox. Becoming your own grandfather is a stable time loop.
Right now, religions - at least, some religions - get extra legal benefits that the non-religious don't. Government employees get extra time off for relgious holidays; the non-religious get nothing. Religion is family of metaphysical worldviews, and non-religious philosophies are another branch. Why do certain philosophies get extra privileges?
If a rule really is a good idea, then it should apply to everyone. If we can get by with some people not complying, then it doesn't need to be mandatory. Religion has nothing to do with it.
In terms of vaccines, we just need to arrange for consequences. Your kids not vaccinated, and can't demonstrate a medical reason why not? Fine. No public school for them, sorry. Quite probably other benefits are now off-limits, too.
If the oil and gas industry wants to prevent its opponents from slowing its efforts to drill in more places, it must be prepared to employ tactics like digging up embarrassing tidbits about environmentalists and liberal celebrities, a veteran Washington political consultant told a room full of industry executives in a speech that was secretly recorded.
If the oil and gas industry wants to prevent its opponents from slowing its efforts to drill in more places, it must be prepared to employ tactics like digging up embarrassing tidbits about environmentalists and liberal celebrities, a veteran Washington political consultant told a room full of industry executives in a speech that was secretly recorded.
I didn't propose that males would necessarily be irrational in the same way as you think females are. It could easily manifest in different ways or even diferent domains. But even in the same domain... what of the many men who damage their family relationships and careers because they manifest a lack of Johnson control?
I noticed based on the evidence and simple observation that it is much easier for it to happen in females.
Lemme propose a hypothetical. What if you and other males are just as 'irrational' as you think females are... but you don't notice it because you take your own irrationalities as given? It's hard to judge a culture from within; how much harder might it be to judge one's own biology?
If you are creating a design and then testing it empirically under relatively controlled conditions to determine if it works, then you are doing science.
Using science to evaluate a design? Sure. But the design itself is... wait for it... engineering. Of course engineers can do science, and scientist can engineer. Heck, musicians can be scientists, and vice versa. But that doesn't mean that engineering is science.
Nope. In the words of someone Slashdot readers should respect, Alan Cox: "Engineering does not require science. Science helps a lot but people built perfectly good brick walls long before they knew why cement works."
So let me explain what science actually is. Science is the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation. That's the science that gives us airplanes and flu vaccines and the Internet.
No - engineering "gives us airplanes and flu vaccines and the Internet". Science gives us the theoretical (in the scientific sense) frameworks and tools that engineering can apply to do that. The author shows at least as much confusion as those he decries, and he does it from the start.
However I think there is a real danger of honest mistakes being abused, and like I said most of the abuses I know about used those.
If the cameras are only under the control of the people they are supposed to be monitoring, they will wind up being used only to clear, never to convict. I don't want the police getting any access to the videos that the accused doesn't have.
Honest mistakes are already 'abused' in our legal system. Cameras add nothing to that. But they can - if the system is set up properly - reduce a whole host of other abuses.
Slashdot Mirror
I, on the other hand, have run into one thing that Linux didn't work with. I have a collection of accumulated 'stuff' and just last night Frankensteined a PC together. I don't even know the model number of most of the parts. It's an Nvidia 8600 (something) video card, and a Soundblaster Live, I know that much. Worked just fine, no issues. (Streams PC games from Steam pretty well to the TV upstairs, too.)
I purchased a mid-high prebuilt 'gaming rig' a couple years back, and everything 'just worked', except the "SoundBlaster® X-Fi XtremeAudio" card. That was the 'one thing'. There was a config fix but I just pulled the card and used the onboard MB audio. Whatever that is worked fine.
Just installed Linux for my cousin this weekend. Some HP laptop, I honestly didn't even check the model. Everything just worked, including the 'scroll region' on the trackpad, and the weird 'slide-touch' volume control above the keyboard.
If the robot must be moving (typically, when you're teaching the robot the path it should follow), then every single person in the workcell must have an active deadman switch (anyone lets go, the robot emergency-stops). And you run the program at 10% speed so that you have time to trip the deadman or get out of the way. The workcell itself is fenced off, usually with either a tripwire or electric-eye switch that will e-stop the robot if triggered.
I used to work for a robot company, and we enforced these rules religiously. When I went to visit plants and work on the robots, they issued me my own padlock and tags for lockout/tagout. Someone had to have skipped some safety procedures in this case.
Indeed, in most places, a bug where the system crashes is the most severe possible bug. When dealing with robots, that's only the second most severe. The most severe were "unexpected motion" bugs, where the robot didn't follow the path in the correct way or otherwise didn't behave predictably. Those got everybody's attention.
Every single one of your 'concerns' arises in cases of divorce, too. But there was no well-financed national campaign to maje divorce more difficult. Nobody tried to amend any Constitutions to ban no-fault divorce. No, it was the numerically small, historically persecuted minority that got that kind of attention. I think the true priorities are pretty clearly seen from the actions taken.
...where it's not really a poll at all, but a disguised negative campaign ad. At this point, if I don't recognize the number, I don't answer it. Period.
You were taught that abiogenesis exists as a hypothesis (note, not a theory, and that scientists are actively researching it.
If you want to convince me otherwise, I'm afraid you'll need to de-anonymize and specify the school and timeframe involved.
Ah, but it does indeed. It shows that variation does in fact respond to environment. It's only one piece of the puzzle, though. No one claims that the peppered moths, by themselves, prove evolution. There's a lot more to it than that.
Take that variation, for example, and you can link it to speciation - which we can observe today. Heard of 'ring species'? The Larus gulls are several subspecies where variants live in a ring around the Arctic. The Herring Gull in the U.K. can interbreed with the American Herring Gull, and the American can interbreed with the Vega Gull in Russia. And so on, until you come to the Lesser Black-Backed Gull in the Netherlands. It basically can’t breed with the Herring Gull. Hybrids are extremely rare and don't seem to be fertile, like mules.
So, is it a separate species? You could breed it with its relative to the East, and so on. But what if, say, the Vega Gull went extinct? Would you have separate species then?
Now, imagine such variations happening across time instead of (or as well as) space, and you’ve got an idea how species actually do form, instead of the ’saltationist’ strawman that many try to imply.
The thing is, we have so gotten conclusive evidence. Here's one you can partially check on your own body. Lay your fingers on the side of your jaw. Now, trace along the edge up to the very top of the jawbone. Notice how close your fingers are to your ear canal. Inside the inner ear are three bones, the ossicles: malleus, incus, and stapes. They are carefully arranged to transfer sound energy from the eardrum to the cochlea as efficiently as possible. How could such an amazing mechanism arise?
It turns out that a classification of dinosaur called the therapsids had two jaw joints. The therapsids are known (by several independent lines of evidence) to be ancestral to modern mammals... and we have a basically complete fossil record of the gradual transition of one of those jaw joints into the modern bones of the inner ear. Fossils representing over a dozen separate stages have been found. Note that intermediate steps were all advantageous, though not as efficient or optimized. Some transitional forms did help amplify sound energy but didn't work while the animal was chewing. We still have problems with that under some circumstances (try to listen to someone while eating celery) but the separation is far more developed now.
(Note that some have even cited the ossicles as 'irreducibly complex'. The more central figures of the ID 'movement', like Behe and Shermer, haven't done so... but I suspect that's because they know enough of the detailed fossil record to dissuade them.)
Or, my absolute favorite - the twin nested hierarchies! Books used to be copied by scribes, and (despite a lot of care) sometimes typos would be introduced. Later scribes, making copies of copies, would introduce other typos. It's possible to look at the existing copies and put them into a 'family tree'. "These copies have this typo, but not that one; this other group has yet another typo, though three of them have a newer typo as well, not seen elsewhere..." This is not controversial at all when dealing with books, including the Bible.
Now, this process of copy-with-modification naturally produces 'family trees', nested groups. When we look at life, we find such nested groups. No lizards with fur or nipples, no mammals with feathers, etc. Living things (at least, multicellular ones, see below) fit into a grouped hierarchy. This has been solidly recognized for over a thousand years, and systematized for centuries. It was one of the clues that led Darwin to propose evolution. (Little-known fact: Linnaeus, who invented the "kingdom, phyla, genus, species, etc." classification scheme for living things, tried to do the same thin
Not that I don't agree with the general sentiment when it comes to creationists. But it's not like arguments haven't been presented on that score. Sometimes you just gotta be funny.
"Several thousand years ago, a tribe of ignorant near-savages wrote various collections of myths, wild tales, lies, and gibberish. Over the centuries, these stories wore embroidered, garbled, mutilated, and torn into small pieces that were then repeatedly shuffled. Finally, this material was badly translated into several languages successively. The resultant text, creationists feel, is the best guide to this complex and technical subject [of origins]." - Tom Weller, Science Made Stupid
Got ATT Uverse, and Youtube videos were a choppy, stuttering mess. Googled a bit, and sure enough, disabling IPv6 in the router cleared up the problems.
In the book, it the example of uncontrolled force was actually cutting a baby's head off, not a puppy. The summary is otherwise accurate.
In the movie, the instructor throws a knife through the recruit's hand, and says, "Hard to push a button now, eh?"
I get that the movie is satire. I even get that there's a lot in the book that can be fairly satirized. The problem is, the movie is lazy, unfair, incompetent satire.
Or not. Until we can find or set up a region with a closed timelike curve, we won't be able to test such things, and it all is, well, entirely theoretical. There are several possibilities.
(Yes, I've thought about this too much.)
If a rule really is a good idea, then it should apply to everyone. If we can get by with some people not complying, then it doesn't need to be mandatory. Religion has nothing to do with it.
In terms of vaccines, we just need to arrange for consequences. Your kids not vaccinated, and can't demonstrate a medical reason why not? Fine. No public school for them, sorry. Quite probably other benefits are now off-limits, too.
I didn't propose that males would necessarily be irrational in the same way as you think females are. It could easily manifest in different ways or even diferent domains. But even in the same domain... what of the many men who damage their family relationships and careers because they manifest a lack of Johnson control?
Lemme propose a hypothetical. What if you and other males are just as 'irrational' as you think females are... but you don't notice it because you take your own irrationalities as given? It's hard to judge a culture from within; how much harder might it be to judge one's own biology?
Many things that work on a flat screen don't fit well with VR.
Makes some good points in this case, so far as I can see, though.
7 Reasons "Gamergate" Proves Humanity is Doomed
Using science to evaluate a design? Sure. But the design itself is... wait for it... engineering. Of course engineers can do science, and scientist can engineer. Heck, musicians can be scientists, and vice versa. But that doesn't mean that engineering is science.
Nope. In the words of someone Slashdot readers should respect, Alan Cox: "Engineering does not require science. Science helps a lot but people built perfectly good brick walls long before they knew why cement works."
No - engineering "gives us airplanes and flu vaccines and the Internet". Science gives us the theoretical (in the scientific sense) frameworks and tools that engineering can apply to do that. The author shows at least as much confusion as those he decries, and he does it from the start.
If the cameras are only under the control of the people they are supposed to be monitoring, they will wind up being used only to clear, never to convict. I don't want the police getting any access to the videos that the accused doesn't have.
Honest mistakes are already 'abused' in our legal system. Cameras add nothing to that. But they can - if the system is set up properly - reduce a whole host of other abuses.