Once per synodic period (779.94 days) you will lose 10 days or so during superior conjunction, or ~ 1.3% of the time. NASA gives its spaceships at Mars a vacation (for the rovers, generally a long integration X ray spectrum of some rock).
So that's what they're doing when they're analysing a rock "really well" http://xkcd.com/695/
Why doesn't the new version of Python interpreter support older dialects ?
Not justifying it, but possibly it's to keep the code as homogenous as possible in the aid of readability. Like with the identing, Python likes to force you to do things its way, and its way is the only way.:)
Yes, this is why KDE has been so successful?! KDE is the worst example of GUI/Desktop for Linux. I used it for years, I upgraded constantly, the greetings screen got animated, nice icons, but the functionality, the overall user experience sucked - and I kept silent, because I wanted it to succeed, as Open Source advocate - until the failure could no longer be denied: 15 years for coming up with this non-sense and announced at/.?
In my experience this is, unfortunately, basically true. I was a big fan of KDE back in the 3.x days (even donated money). Then KDE 4 happened in 2008. I've only just got back onto the bandwagon. In other words, it's taken over 5 years before it got to the stage when I felt I could use it again. TBH, there are still issues with it. Little things like the slow animations in the The K-menu and the top right desktop menu are quite annoying. The nepomuk stuff kills performance and needs disabling. There's not much desktop plasmoid selection and plenty of them don't work properly or at all.
As I recall, when KDE 4 was first announced there were a lot of grand statements about reinventing the desktop, etc, etc. But never any specific details about how this was to be done. Obviously they didn't know either. From my perspective, it seemed that the whole KDE 4 thing was a badly thought through refactoring exercise that led to years of regression and yielded only cosmetic tweaks (some of which are also regressions). I really want to like it, but the UI needs streamlining and the whole thing needs to be better documented and better presented.
I could write an algorithm that's 100% accurate selecting yesterday's lottery numbers.
That's why data analyst's cross-validate their models. Granted, cross-validation doesn't cure everything (e.g. If the question is already overly specific, or if the analyst double dips in some other way) but it will stop over-fitting and performing at 100%. I downloaded the paper and did a quick search: the authors used a support vector machine for the classification (which effectively allows for fitting of very non-linear boundaries) and they tested it with 5-fold cross-validation. So they given that they did the latter, they got the basics right.
50 shades is a textbook example of a perfect marketing campaign. It cannot fit an algorithm, it's a total outlier.
I suspect that, almost by definition, many best-sellers are outliers. They owe their popularity to marketing, the whims of the book-buying public, what's currently trendy, etc. Like 50 shades of grey, they likely won't succumb to an algorithm.
I forget passwords now. There are almost always ways to get them back. All websites have password recovery features. If you have a webmail account there are multiple ways of getting the password back/reset. Probably the only issue would be something you are 100% responsible for, such as an encrypted local drive. If it's unencrypted then it's trivial to get in if you have access to the hardware.
Yes, it's "the ultimate game DRM" but, realistically, it's unlikely to displace conventional means of distribution. Two main reasons for this. Firstly, latency and bandwidth will inevitably be issues for many consumers, and publishers will lose money if they cannot also offer their games as disks or digital downloads. In other words, for a lot of people this will just be unplayable. I doubt it would ever work satisfactorily for FPS games. Secondly, for next gen and (particularly) PC titles, streamed graphics at high resolutions will suck compared locally run content. I doubt you'd get even 1080p at 60 FPS with no compression artefacts. Forget higher res PC titles. If publishers want to ship the latest and greatest to consumers then it's going to have run locally.
In summary, this service is likely to be used for more casual gaming, running titles from older consoles on newer ones, renting, and free trials. For the foreseeable future we will continue to have the distribution channels we currently have.
Finally, this streaming service isn't so terribly different to other DRM-laden systems such as Steam. Yes, it's a little "worse" but to all practical purposes not that much so. Frankly, I think Nintendo's system is far more shitty. There the downloaded games are forever tied to the console. So if you lose the device or it's stolen then you lose your games. If the device dies then you have to send it back to Nintendo to transfer the titles to a new one. I suspect the reason Nintendo do this is so that they can continue to sell the same Zelda/Mario game to the same consumer each time they upgrade their console.
It seems that firearm ownership rights are the only Constitutional issue that this Supreme Court intends on correctly dealing with. At least it's a start - our other rights emanate from the 2nd Amendment.
I realise this is unorthodox, but the way I see it the 2nd isn't so much about guns (although clearly that's part of it) as it is a statement that the people should have the ability and right to do what's needed to maintain a free government of, by, and for the people. To that end, I feel that the actions of whistle-blowers such as Snowden or the 1971 FBI burglars (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/07/fbi-office-break-in-1971-come-forward-documents) are very much in keeping with the spirit of the 2nd. On other hand, the general tone of the gun debate seems more in line with people just wanting to do whatever the fuck they want.
Good call! The Antikythera Mechanism is from more or less the same period (about 2100 years ago) as these multiplication tables yet it was a very sophisticated mechanical calculator. The Mechanism is currently on display in the Athens Archaeological museum. If you ever have the opportunity: you should go. It's very well displayed and is shown alongside modern replicas (not all the parts were found so some creative reconstruction was necessary) and movies of it working. Furthermore, the Mechanism was just one find out of many from the Antikythera Shipwreck. The other significant finds are also shown in the same exhibit. There's some really stunning bronze art there. There's info and a video here: http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/ It says there that the exhibit closes this month, but I was there in September and at the time there was printed material with dates indicating that the exhibit should already have ended. So maybe they're keeping it going indefinitely. This is Greece, so who knows. There's also the Mycenaean room in the same museum which is full the most stunning jewellery, art, etc from about 1,500 BC.
Laser lights will significantly compound this problem.
How?
The post you're responding to is pretty clear. It will compound the problem because people currently don't set up their lights correctly and so dazzle other drivers. The problem will be worse if the lights are brighter. As an aside, in hilly areas you get dazzled by oncoming traffic with bright lights regardless of how well they're set up. Car lights are often too bright now. Let's leave them be. This isn't a problem that needs solving.
Cancer can absolutely be categorized as one disease. As you say, it's the pathological replication of a cell. Yes, different types of cells may have different behaviors, although they also all have a litany of identical behaviors. Yes, it's a fruitful avenue of research to treat different cancer types with different methods.
I'm sympathetic to what you're saying, but I work with people who study cancer and they do think of it as multiple diseases. Clearly these people are not "echoing memes" and "trying to sound up to date". They are up to date and they specialise in a particular cancer because global approaches have all failed so far. Research and treatment strategies for a particular cancer are so specialised that they don't generalise well to other cancers. That's why, for instance, some cancers respond well to particular chemotherapy regimes whereas others are immune to that same regime. I think cancer is multiple diseases in the same way infections by different viruses lead to different diseases. Since there is global anti-viral that will kill everything, different viruses require different treatments and different research strategies. So it is with cancer.
Please take into account that the beer made hundreds or thousands of years ago had very little alcohol.
Things like enzymes, temperature rests, fermentable extract, FAN and sanitation was unheard of.
This sounds like bollocks to me. For starters, we've been distilling for hundred of years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distilled_beverage#History_of_distillation). I'm sure people have been making strong (i.e. easy to get drunk with) beer and wine for centuries. The ancient Greeks reported as much (Google it). You don't need to know what an enzyme is to make an alcoholic beverage. You just need to have figured out the protocol by trial and error. e.g. It's only recently that we've understood what yeast is, but lack of that knowledge in earlier times didn't stop it being used inadvertently as a leavening agent or to produce alcohol. If you leave bread rising for too long it starts to smell of alcohol: none of this terribly difficult, you know.
Those aren't algal products, most of them are far from new, none of them are eaten as "bars" (although some forms of Tofu are sliced and eaten on their own). Tofu is a soy product and has existed for thousands of years. Seitan has existed for about 50 years and is a wheat product. Quinoa is a grain. Quorn is modern and based on mycoprotein. Tempeh is a 200 year old soy product.
There is a lot less influence from religion and a far greater part of social contact is indirectly, through devices.
Our current spiritual "average" situation may wel look like malaise to somebody living in 1964.
There is a lot less influence from religion than 50 years ago. Really? In the US we still have Christian extremists trying to smother evolution. Religion currently plays a significant role in US politics, with the Republican party in particular actively courting the conservative Christian vote. Views on abortion have stayed more or less static over the last 40 or 50 years, but at least attitudes to homosexuality are moving in the right direction. We also, of course, have the rise of militant Islam on the world stage. On the plus side, it has become more acceptable to be an atheist. On the minus side, abrasive atheists such as Dawkins are (IMO) not helping things.
the article is rubbish. there's a 100 degree standard deviation in the measurements. the slightest residual bias in the field, say an interesting tree, would completely overwhelm the measured averages with such whopper deviations.
That's incorrect. You're assuming that the effect of the magnetic field is small and noisy (hence the scatter in the data). But the data are gathered in the real world with real distractors. So imagine there really was a strong(ish) effect of magnetic field. Imagine further that dogs shitting angle is also biased by trees (as you say), people, other dogs, etc. The amalgamation of these two things would produce noisy data, as we see in the paper. I don't know if the effect is real, but your criticism is not valid.
This is biology. A standard deviation of 100 degrees is not at all surprising for a study such as this and on its own is not enough to write off the result. The study may be BS for other reasons, but a large SD isn't one of them. Look at the first figure in the paper (http://www.frontiersinzoology.com/content/pdf/1742-9994-10-80.pdf) The clustering around N/S is pretty impressive for the 0% magnetic declination. What I don't understand, however, is why the relationship falls apart when magnetic declination is non-zero. I don't see why that should happen and it makes me think the effect is BS.
According to article, the effect is stronger for defecation than for urination (http://www.frontiersinzoology.com/content/pdf/1742-9994-10-80.pdf). At least that's how the figures look to me. Furthermore, it seems likely that urination is more likely to be affected by things such as the location of uprights against which to piss than by the magnetic field. Urination is a social signal more than is defecation. So it seems plausible that the effect, if it's real, is more evident when fido takes a dump.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure I've ever seen that Microsoft/Gates campaign, sources please.
There is no campaign, of course, only the results. The results are that, for most people, PC==windows machine.
Once per synodic period (779.94 days) you will lose 10 days or so during superior conjunction, or ~ 1.3% of the time. NASA gives its spaceships at Mars a vacation (for the rovers, generally a long integration X ray spectrum of some rock).
So that's what they're doing when they're analysing a rock "really well" http://xkcd.com/695/
Why doesn't the new version of Python interpreter support older dialects ?
Not justifying it, but possibly it's to keep the code as homogenous as possible in the aid of readability. Like with the identing, Python likes to force you to do things its way, and its way is the only way. :)
But that's fine. It gives him a third chance to escape. I'm sure he's just biding his time in order to catch them off-guard. :)
The website is known for being over the top and somewhat tongue in cheek. Read the other articles.
Well, you could always get a bunch of your friends together, storm the prison, and free him yourself.
You don't need a bunch of friends, just a helicopter: http://www.badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=29600886975
Yes, this is why KDE has been so successful?! KDE is the worst example of GUI/Desktop for Linux. I used it for years, I upgraded constantly, the greetings screen got animated, nice icons, but the functionality, the overall user experience sucked - and I kept silent, because I wanted it to succeed, as Open Source advocate - until the failure could no longer be denied: 15 years for coming up with this non-sense and announced at /.?
In my experience this is, unfortunately, basically true. I was a big fan of KDE back in the 3.x days (even donated money). Then KDE 4 happened in 2008. I've only just got back onto the bandwagon. In other words, it's taken over 5 years before it got to the stage when I felt I could use it again. TBH, there are still issues with it. Little things like the slow animations in the The K-menu and the top right desktop menu are quite annoying. The nepomuk stuff kills performance and needs disabling. There's not much desktop plasmoid selection and plenty of them don't work properly or at all.
As I recall, when KDE 4 was first announced there were a lot of grand statements about reinventing the desktop, etc, etc. But never any specific details about how this was to be done. Obviously they didn't know either. From my perspective, it seemed that the whole KDE 4 thing was a badly thought through refactoring exercise that led to years of regression and yielded only cosmetic tweaks (some of which are also regressions). I really want to like it, but the UI needs streamlining and the whole thing needs to be better documented and better presented.
I could write an algorithm that's 100% accurate selecting yesterday's lottery numbers.
That's why data analyst's cross-validate their models. Granted, cross-validation doesn't cure everything (e.g. If the question is already overly specific, or if the analyst double dips in some other way) but it will stop over-fitting and performing at 100%. I downloaded the paper and did a quick search: the authors used a support vector machine for the classification (which effectively allows for fitting of very non-linear boundaries) and they tested it with 5-fold cross-validation. So they given that they did the latter, they got the basics right.
50 shades is a textbook example of a perfect marketing campaign. It cannot fit an algorithm, it's a total outlier.
I suspect that, almost by definition, many best-sellers are outliers. They owe their popularity to marketing, the whims of the book-buying public, what's currently trendy, etc. Like 50 shades of grey, they likely won't succumb to an algorithm.
I forget passwords now. There are almost always ways to get them back. All websites have password recovery features. If you have a webmail account there are multiple ways of getting the password back/reset. Probably the only issue would be something you are 100% responsible for, such as an encrypted local drive. If it's unencrypted then it's trivial to get in if you have access to the hardware.
Yes, it's "the ultimate game DRM" but, realistically, it's unlikely to displace conventional means of distribution. Two main reasons for this. Firstly, latency and bandwidth will inevitably be issues for many consumers, and publishers will lose money if they cannot also offer their games as disks or digital downloads. In other words, for a lot of people this will just be unplayable. I doubt it would ever work satisfactorily for FPS games. Secondly, for next gen and (particularly) PC titles, streamed graphics at high resolutions will suck compared locally run content. I doubt you'd get even 1080p at 60 FPS with no compression artefacts. Forget higher res PC titles. If publishers want to ship the latest and greatest to consumers then it's going to have run locally.
In summary, this service is likely to be used for more casual gaming, running titles from older consoles on newer ones, renting, and free trials. For the foreseeable future we will continue to have the distribution channels we currently have.
Finally, this streaming service isn't so terribly different to other DRM-laden systems such as Steam. Yes, it's a little "worse" but to all practical purposes not that much so. Frankly, I think Nintendo's system is far more shitty. There the downloaded games are forever tied to the console. So if you lose the device or it's stolen then you lose your games. If the device dies then you have to send it back to Nintendo to transfer the titles to a new one. I suspect the reason Nintendo do this is so that they can continue to sell the same Zelda/Mario game to the same consumer each time they upgrade their console.
It seems that firearm ownership rights are the only Constitutional issue that this Supreme Court intends on correctly dealing with. At least it's a start - our other rights emanate from the 2nd Amendment.
I realise this is unorthodox, but the way I see it the 2nd isn't so much about guns (although clearly that's part of it) as it is a statement that the people should have the ability and right to do what's needed to maintain a free government of, by, and for the people. To that end, I feel that the actions of whistle-blowers such as Snowden or the 1971 FBI burglars (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/07/fbi-office-break-in-1971-come-forward-documents) are very much in keeping with the spirit of the 2nd. On other hand, the general tone of the gun debate seems more in line with people just wanting to do whatever the fuck they want.
Good call! The Antikythera Mechanism is from more or less the same period (about 2100 years ago) as these multiplication tables yet it was a very sophisticated mechanical calculator. The Mechanism is currently on display in the Athens Archaeological museum. If you ever have the opportunity: you should go. It's very well displayed and is shown alongside modern replicas (not all the parts were found so some creative reconstruction was necessary) and movies of it working. Furthermore, the Mechanism was just one find out of many from the Antikythera Shipwreck. The other significant finds are also shown in the same exhibit. There's some really stunning bronze art there. There's info and a video here: http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/ It says there that the exhibit closes this month, but I was there in September and at the time there was printed material with dates indicating that the exhibit should already have ended. So maybe they're keeping it going indefinitely. This is Greece, so who knows. There's also the Mycenaean room in the same museum which is full the most stunning jewellery, art, etc from about 1,500 BC.
So Python has its flaws. Every language has its flaws. The trick is to find one where the flaws don't bother you.
How?
The post you're responding to is pretty clear. It will compound the problem because people currently don't set up their lights correctly and so dazzle other drivers. The problem will be worse if the lights are brighter. As an aside, in hilly areas you get dazzled by oncoming traffic with bright lights regardless of how well they're set up. Car lights are often too bright now. Let's leave them be. This isn't a problem that needs solving.
Cancer can absolutely be categorized as one disease. As you say, it's the pathological replication of a cell. Yes, different types of cells may have different behaviors, although they also all have a litany of identical behaviors. Yes, it's a fruitful avenue of research to treat different cancer types with different methods.
I'm sympathetic to what you're saying, but I work with people who study cancer and they do think of it as multiple diseases. Clearly these people are not "echoing memes" and "trying to sound up to date". They are up to date and they specialise in a particular cancer because global approaches have all failed so far. Research and treatment strategies for a particular cancer are so specialised that they don't generalise well to other cancers. That's why, for instance, some cancers respond well to particular chemotherapy regimes whereas others are immune to that same regime. I think cancer is multiple diseases in the same way infections by different viruses lead to different diseases. Since there is global anti-viral that will kill everything, different viruses require different treatments and different research strategies. So it is with cancer.
Please take into account that the beer made hundreds or thousands of years ago had very little alcohol. Things like enzymes, temperature rests, fermentable extract, FAN and sanitation was unheard of.
This sounds like bollocks to me. For starters, we've been distilling for hundred of years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distilled_beverage#History_of_distillation). I'm sure people have been making strong (i.e. easy to get drunk with) beer and wine for centuries. The ancient Greeks reported as much (Google it). You don't need to know what an enzyme is to make an alcoholic beverage. You just need to have figured out the protocol by trial and error. e.g. It's only recently that we've understood what yeast is, but lack of that knowledge in earlier times didn't stop it being used inadvertently as a leavening agent or to produce alcohol. If you leave bread rising for too long it starts to smell of alcohol: none of this terribly difficult, you know.
Ever been to Whole Foods?
Tofu, Quinoa, Quorn, Seitan, Tempeh, ...
Those aren't algal products, most of them are far from new, none of them are eaten as "bars" (although some forms of Tofu are sliced and eaten on their own). Tofu is a soy product and has existed for thousands of years. Seitan has existed for about 50 years and is a wheat product. Quinoa is a grain. Quorn is modern and based on mycoprotein. Tempeh is a 200 year old soy product.
There is a lot less influence from religion and a far greater part of social contact is indirectly, through devices. Our current spiritual "average" situation may wel look like malaise to somebody living in 1964.
There is a lot less influence from religion than 50 years ago. Really? In the US we still have Christian extremists trying to smother evolution. Religion currently plays a significant role in US politics, with the Republican party in particular actively courting the conservative Christian vote. Views on abortion have stayed more or less static over the last 40 or 50 years, but at least attitudes to homosexuality are moving in the right direction. We also, of course, have the rise of militant Islam on the world stage. On the plus side, it has become more acceptable to be an atheist. On the minus side, abrasive atheists such as Dawkins are (IMO) not helping things.
It does not refer to counteracting the force of gravity with some other force, such as electromagnetism or aerodynamic lift.
Or a table.
I suspect the dogs just don't like staring into the sun then they poo.
And I suspect you and the people who rated you as "insightful" didn't read the original research paper which discounts your suspicions.
the article is rubbish. there's a 100 degree standard deviation in the measurements. the slightest residual bias in the field, say an interesting tree, would completely overwhelm the measured averages with such whopper deviations.
That's incorrect. You're assuming that the effect of the magnetic field is small and noisy (hence the scatter in the data). But the data are gathered in the real world with real distractors. So imagine there really was a strong(ish) effect of magnetic field. Imagine further that dogs shitting angle is also biased by trees (as you say), people, other dogs, etc. The amalgamation of these two things would produce noisy data, as we see in the paper. I don't know if the effect is real, but your criticism is not valid.
This is biology. A standard deviation of 100 degrees is not at all surprising for a study such as this and on its own is not enough to write off the result. The study may be BS for other reasons, but a large SD isn't one of them. Look at the first figure in the paper (http://www.frontiersinzoology.com/content/pdf/1742-9994-10-80.pdf) The clustering around N/S is pretty impressive for the 0% magnetic declination. What I don't understand, however, is why the relationship falls apart when magnetic declination is non-zero. I don't see why that should happen and it makes me think the effect is BS.
According to article, the effect is stronger for defecation than for urination (http://www.frontiersinzoology.com/content/pdf/1742-9994-10-80.pdf). At least that's how the figures look to me. Furthermore, it seems likely that urination is more likely to be affected by things such as the location of uprights against which to piss than by the magnetic field. Urination is a social signal more than is defecation. So it seems plausible that the effect, if it's real, is more evident when fido takes a dump.
The original article (free to read): http://www.frontiersinzoology.com/content/10/1/80/abstract