As long as private healthcare continues to exist there at least remains the possibility that patients can find some way to buy something better and doctors don't have to be reduced to underpaid civil servants.
FWIW, there's no reason for the presence of a private medical system in a country to mean that the socialized one has to suck unutterably. The UK has a mixed system[*] and, while not perfect, mostly achieves reasonable outcomes for patients at acceptable cost. The real key to this is that there is one very large purchaser of healthcare (the government, on behalf of the citizenry) who is very keen on keeping costs under control and on maximizing the effectiveness of their spending, and one very large provider (the NHS, also ultimately government-owned) that means the private sector can't get the public over a barrel. In turn, this means that the private medical system has to keep their own costs under control and to deliver high-quality service; if they don't, patients (and money) will go straight back to the public sector. Honest competition is a good thing for customers and consumers, as all capitalists should know by heart.
[* I believe other EU countries do too, but I've not enough experience to say for sure. ]
Yikes, aquaculture is hard enough to do with fresh water fish. You want to do it with salt water fish? Good luck...
The usual locations for salt-water aquaculture are places where currents flush through large amounts of water so that there's very little need for pumping equipment and the water quality is pretty constant (sea fjords that are open both ends are favored for salmon for example). The big concerns are actually over parasites and food; in the latter case, there's been work (AIUI) into using soya as the input material rather than fishmeal as it is a lot more efficient.
Is compressing air more or less efficient than charging a battery? The latter is about 70% efficient. The former depends on the precise circumstances, but can be made pretty much 100% efficient.
You have a compressor that is 100% efficient? What pray does it use to avoid frictional losses in the mechanical parts? Magic crystals, leprechaun bunions and invisible pink unicorn shit? Physical systems are never 100% efficient, especially when you're building a potential energy gradient. The laws of thermodynamics laugh in your face if you try. Hydraulics don't get a free pass to the magical land of perpetual motion machines (nor do electrical systems for that matter...)
It might be better to plot those results on a log scale (while stating the units!) so that it is possible to properly compare not just IE with the rest, but also the others with each other. Mind you, I also like to plot my graphs so that bigger is better. (I know how to lie with statistics!) This makes it easier to convey the results to a non-technical audience.
Mathematically modelling the brain would seem to be a very trivial problem. The problem is that there's a lot of brain to model. I've posted (admittedly non-rigorous) mathematical models of the brain on Slashdot before, but narry a grant check from it. Bah.
You sound like a pure mathematician. (You know what I mean: "a solution has been shown to exist, so it is trivial".)
The problem is that the brain is a non-linear system on many scales, and it's not clear that the nature of the non-linearity is the same at all scales. This makes even approximate modeling rather difficult. And there's a lot of detail, and a lot of different scales. Right now, it's easier to let poets and psychologists write the higher-level models than to derive them either numerically or analytically...
The only way it can be proven that mathematics is wholly artificial is to prove that the set of all mathematical "things" that are fundamental is equal to the empty set. ie: there is nothing - not a single property, not a single result - that is true everywhere, including Goedel's Theorum. If even something as simple as Goedel's Theorum is universal, then there exists at least one part of mathematics that is not invented but is wholly natural.
Since the only real constraint that Goedel's Theorem imposes is that there is not a finite set of axioms that can characterize all "sufficiently interesting" mathematics (i.e., that any finite axiomatization is necessarily incomplete) I don't see where you're going with that. It's a construct all the same and no amount of philosophical bullshit will change that.
Now, here we run into a problem. If Goedel's Theorum is not a universal result, but an artifice, then it is also false because it would have to be possible to create a counter-example and the theory states no counter-example of this kind can exist.
The problem is that you're into the space of self-referential mathematics when you're using Goedel's results (they're a necessary part of it, which is where the "sufficiently interesting" really comes from) so your argument just doesn't work too well. In particular, there most certainly is mathematics possible in systems that do not support the expression of Goedel's Theorem, but it's pretty dull stuff (no integers, for example). You can build on that base in various ways, but once you've got self-referentiality then you can get something equivalent to Goedel, and you're stuck. Or you can plunge on, by adding more rules and axioms which will either let you say more (but not everything) or render the whole edifice bollocks. But not one bit of this says anything about whether it is natural or not.
Surely that seals the argument right there and then. Those who argue mathematics is wholly artificial must be arguing Goedel's Theorum is false. All other cases do not prohibit the theorum from being true. Thus, if there is sound reason for believing the theorum true, there is sound reason for excluding the notion that mathematics is an artifice.
Your argument is full of bollocks. Goedel's Theorem is a consequence of a particular level of complexity of a formal system, and once it holds, you've got to a stage where you know there must be truths about the system that cannot be derived from a finite set of axioms about the system. But such a system can be pure artifice (e.g. by moving symbols around according to clearly stated rules, which is obviously non-real) and if one such system can be non-real, you've not proved that your favorite one ("mathematics") is real on that basis either.
Note that I'm not trying to demonstrate that mathematics is artificial. I'm just pointing out that you've not shown that it is not. (I actually suspect this is a matter for philosophers and not mathematicians since the observable effect is the same in either case.)
since nobody will be around to flip the laundry into the dryer
Into the what?? You still waste energy on those? In the Summer?!? During the day? Suckers like you are who's buying my peak-rate photovoltaic solar generation. Keep it up!
Leaving aside the silly comments about writing style that everyone else is jumping on you over, are you aware that some US homeowners' associations prohibit the use of a washing line (so forcing the use of a dryer) on the grounds that it makes the place look cheap and tawdry? On the other hand, washing lines are very cheap to run (occasionally you need to wipe them with a damp cloth to remove accumulated dirt, and there is wear and tear on pegs which means you might need to buy replacements every few years...) and environmentally friendly too; perhaps the pettifogging local regulations are what need to change and people need to stop being quite so precious.
I seriously doubt it had multiple guns, as the deflection coils would interfere with each other as each gun traced different parts of the screen.
Not nearly as much of an issue if they're using deflection electrodes, like you see in oscilloscopes. They cost more to manufacture (you need to put more things inside the vacuum envelope) but you can do multiple guns without too much difficulty or cross-interference.
Must they be coded to be compatible with a specific winsys/manager/DE, or are they portable across all of the Linux GUI elements?
It really depends on what you mean by that question. An app (specifically, a GUI app; let's ignore databases and webservers and other server apps for the rest of this post) can be coded so that it just talks to X and it will be handled fine. An app can additionally speak the standard protocol for communicating with window managers and do a few more things that would otherwise be impossible. Finally, an app can talk some more protocols and work with a desktop environment; that can in turn be either at the interoperability level, which will work well enough with both Gnome and KDE, or at the level of DE-specific communications, which usually only tools that are part of that DE bother to do.
Lots of apps do choose to be highly portable, since that increases the number of systems they can run on.
With DNSSEC, you could possibly eliminate the SSL certificate authorities and use signed DNS records to include the certificate information (so you can make sure that when you go to https://www.foo.com/, you really got www.foo.com's certificate and not that of a man-in-the-middle attacker).
That would only really work for the most basic type of signing, where the CA is asserting that the certificate is for SSL use on www.foo.com. I suppose the extended validation attributes (like the company's formal business identity) could also be done that way, but I doubt that ISPs are likely to want to get into that game (the liabilities from errors are a good reason to leave that with specialists).
For client certificates, a CA is really best. After all, I'm not a DNS entry, I'm a free man!
Thank you for watching the advertisement, please enter the advertised product's name to continue.
You know, that sounds a lot like an advert for pirating the show via bittorrent to me. (Or just ignoring the show completely; I write OSS instead of watching TV.) If people insist on being obnoxious, why deal with them?
I wonder if we'll ever reach the point where we will be able to define, with equations and rules, a sea slug using the principles of cellular automata?
"Ever"? Could well happen. But soon? Even with Moore's Law, not likely. (I'm assuming you're talking about doing the behavior and physiology, not just something that looks like one.) The issue is simply one of scaling up; a sea slug has a heck of a lot of elementary particles in it and just being able to cope with that many interactions is really tough. Of course, since there's not actually that many orders of magnitude of difference between a sea slug and a person, we'll be able to simulate people shortly after sea slugs, and humanity (at current population levels) not long after that.
All developers are blue collar. Programming is the IT equivalent of brick laying, it's a trade, not a profession.
Professions have legal status; Doctors, lawyers, accountants have to be certified and approved.
If you want to work at the professional levels (no, a plain programmer isn't at that level) you almost certainly need a degree in CS, CE or one of a few closely-related disciplines. A higher degree helps as it shows that you can dig in and really understand a problem domain. (You don't strictly need such things, but the alternatives are much harder.)
Should there be a formal body to codify the professional status? Independent question. Should it be as engineers in the traditional sense? Another independent question. (I'm getting inclined to say "yes, but not at any cost" and "maybe" to those two.)
Okay. But if you said, "An engineer - minimum 2-year Associates Degree," I suspect the HR people would overrule you. (And to be fair, they are probably just following written company policy.)
Your company must be really fscked if HR hates you that much to go round changing requirements without telling you, even in the presence of corporate policy. A good HR department would instead get back to you to "remind" you of the policy and to see how both your requirements and the policy can be satisfied.
Mind you, it's more likely that there are general hiring roles (e.g., candidates for a particular role are expected to have a particular level of education and vocational experience) and it's often the case that where a manager has a specific person in mind then HR isn't a problem. They're just bureaucrats. They don't want people jumping down their throats any more than anyone else does.
I'm struggling to think of a positioning system design that would require GR/SR to work rather than time of flight... I think it would have to be an active transponder system, or some kind of weird gravity wave detector? It would be interesting.
If we ever need accurate positioning around a black hole, we can at least know that slashdot will be able to tell us how!
And if a machine that has your public key on it is compromised?
Either you are very very stupid, or you meant private key. If the former, you understand that the only reason I'm not publishing my public ssh keys here, on slashdot, is that I don't want some loony jerk giving me an account without my knowledge? I have more than enough of the damn things already. However, if you meant private keys then that's a fair point: they're best kept on machines that never run services. (OK, it would also be better if those machines never ran web browsers either given the general inability of javascript implementors to grasp what a sane security policy is, but sometimes you just have to compromise. Or carry two laptops around with you...)
The problem with fusion is how many neutrons it emits. Even when you use one of the fusion chains designed not to produce neutrons, you produce a good amount. The reactor core is going to be even more radioactive than a fission reactor core.
That's not actually necessarily a problem, you know. It all depends really on two factors.
How much do the neutrons disrupt the atomic-level structure of the reactor. Different materials respond to this sort of insult in different ways; some become brittle or degrade, yes, but others do not. Guess which ones are used in reactors? In fact, fusion reactors actually rely on the neutron flux to create tritium from deuterium, so it's actually useful.
How "hot" are the reactor parts afterwards. In fact, "hot" (i.e., highly radioactive) is good because it means that the radioactivity is decaying more rapidly. We can easily store materials safely for a few decades while they become safe to handle. Even a century isn't much of a problem; there most certainly are industrial sites that have been left alone for that long and maintaining continuity of protection of the public for that long isn't too big an issue. The problem is when you've got long-lived isotopes that decay into short-lived isotopes. Alas, I'm no radiophysicist, so I don't know how likely this is with radioisotopes from the lighter parts of the periodic table, but it might well be so. (The other point is that if something really is "hot", it's self-protecting. "You mess with this, you die" signs do discourage all but the most strongly inclined toward collecting a Darwin Award.)
In any case, the neutrons aren't a big problem. We know they're there. We can engineer to deal with the consequences. I believe we do not anticipate having to deal with problematic long-lived radioisotopes. What's the issue?
Yet by delaying this merger on a mere hunch (without concrete proof) they are endangering Sun employees job security in this fragile economy. Where is the sense in that ?
The EU isn't interested in defending jobs in California. Instead, they're defending jobs in the EU, notably including the customers of Sun, Oracle and other DB vendors.
For example, I ate at a steakhouse (I think it was Outback but I'm not certain) where the food was good and wasn't much overpriced compared to the restaurant outside of the airport but how the heck are you supposed to eat a steak with plastic utensils?
It varies by airport. Some have the security check at the gate (or at least after most of the food vendors) so they offer better service in the restaurants. OTOH, the airports gouge the restaurants for rents, so expect prices to be higher anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as private healthcare continues to exist there at least remains the possibility that patients can find some way to buy something better and doctors don't have to be reduced to underpaid civil servants.
FWIW, there's no reason for the presence of a private medical system in a country to mean that the socialized one has to suck unutterably. The UK has a mixed system[*] and, while not perfect, mostly achieves reasonable outcomes for patients at acceptable cost. The real key to this is that there is one very large purchaser of healthcare (the government, on behalf of the citizenry) who is very keen on keeping costs under control and on maximizing the effectiveness of their spending, and one very large provider (the NHS, also ultimately government-owned) that means the private sector can't get the public over a barrel. In turn, this means that the private medical system has to keep their own costs under control and to deliver high-quality service; if they don't, patients (and money) will go straight back to the public sector. Honest competition is a good thing for customers and consumers, as all capitalists should know by heart.
[* I believe other EU countries do too, but I've not enough experience to say for sure. ]
Yikes, aquaculture is hard enough to do with fresh water fish. You want to do it with salt water fish? Good luck...
The usual locations for salt-water aquaculture are places where currents flush through large amounts of water so that there's very little need for pumping equipment and the water quality is pretty constant (sea fjords that are open both ends are favored for salmon for example). The big concerns are actually over parasites and food; in the latter case, there's been work (AIUI) into using soya as the input material rather than fishmeal as it is a lot more efficient.
Is compressing air more or less efficient than charging a battery? The latter is about 70% efficient. The former depends on the precise circumstances, but can be made pretty much 100% efficient.
You have a compressor that is 100% efficient? What pray does it use to avoid frictional losses in the mechanical parts? Magic crystals, leprechaun bunions and invisible pink unicorn shit? Physical systems are never 100% efficient, especially when you're building a potential energy gradient. The laws of thermodynamics laugh in your face if you try. Hydraulics don't get a free pass to the magical land of perpetual motion machines (nor do electrical systems for that matter...)
These are the sunspider results. Link
It might be better to plot those results on a log scale (while stating the units!) so that it is possible to properly compare not just IE with the rest, but also the others with each other. Mind you, I also like to plot my graphs so that bigger is better. (I know how to lie with statistics!) This makes it easier to convey the results to a non-technical audience.
Mathematically modelling the brain would seem to be a very trivial problem. The problem is that there's a lot of brain to model. I've posted (admittedly non-rigorous) mathematical models of the brain on Slashdot before, but narry a grant check from it. Bah.
You sound like a pure mathematician. (You know what I mean: "a solution has been shown to exist, so it is trivial".)
The problem is that the brain is a non-linear system on many scales, and it's not clear that the nature of the non-linearity is the same at all scales. This makes even approximate modeling rather difficult. And there's a lot of detail, and a lot of different scales. Right now, it's easier to let poets and psychologists write the higher-level models than to derive them either numerically or analytically...
The only way it can be proven that mathematics is wholly artificial is to prove that the set of all mathematical "things" that are fundamental is equal to the empty set. ie: there is nothing - not a single property, not a single result - that is true everywhere, including Goedel's Theorum. If even something as simple as Goedel's Theorum is universal, then there exists at least one part of mathematics that is not invented but is wholly natural.
Since the only real constraint that Goedel's Theorem imposes is that there is not a finite set of axioms that can characterize all "sufficiently interesting" mathematics (i.e., that any finite axiomatization is necessarily incomplete) I don't see where you're going with that. It's a construct all the same and no amount of philosophical bullshit will change that.
Now, here we run into a problem. If Goedel's Theorum is not a universal result, but an artifice, then it is also false because it would have to be possible to create a counter-example and the theory states no counter-example of this kind can exist.
The problem is that you're into the space of self-referential mathematics when you're using Goedel's results (they're a necessary part of it, which is where the "sufficiently interesting" really comes from) so your argument just doesn't work too well. In particular, there most certainly is mathematics possible in systems that do not support the expression of Goedel's Theorem, but it's pretty dull stuff (no integers, for example). You can build on that base in various ways, but once you've got self-referentiality then you can get something equivalent to Goedel, and you're stuck. Or you can plunge on, by adding more rules and axioms which will either let you say more (but not everything) or render the whole edifice bollocks. But not one bit of this says anything about whether it is natural or not.
Surely that seals the argument right there and then. Those who argue mathematics is wholly artificial must be arguing Goedel's Theorum is false. All other cases do not prohibit the theorum from being true. Thus, if there is sound reason for believing the theorum true, there is sound reason for excluding the notion that mathematics is an artifice.
Your argument is full of bollocks. Goedel's Theorem is a consequence of a particular level of complexity of a formal system, and once it holds, you've got to a stage where you know there must be truths about the system that cannot be derived from a finite set of axioms about the system. But such a system can be pure artifice (e.g. by moving symbols around according to clearly stated rules, which is obviously non-real) and if one such system can be non-real, you've not proved that your favorite one ("mathematics") is real on that basis either.
Note that I'm not trying to demonstrate that mathematics is artificial. I'm just pointing out that you've not shown that it is not. (I actually suspect this is a matter for philosophers and not mathematicians since the observable effect is the same in either case.)
since nobody will be around to flip the laundry into the dryer
Into the what?? You still waste energy on those? In the Summer?!? During the day? Suckers like you are who's buying my peak-rate photovoltaic solar generation. Keep it up!
Leaving aside the silly comments about writing style that everyone else is jumping on you over, are you aware that some US homeowners' associations prohibit the use of a washing line (so forcing the use of a dryer) on the grounds that it makes the place look cheap and tawdry? On the other hand, washing lines are very cheap to run (occasionally you need to wipe them with a damp cloth to remove accumulated dirt, and there is wear and tear on pegs which means you might need to buy replacements every few years...) and environmentally friendly too; perhaps the pettifogging local regulations are what need to change and people need to stop being quite so precious.
I seriously doubt it had multiple guns, as the deflection coils would interfere with each other as each gun traced different parts of the screen.
Not nearly as much of an issue if they're using deflection electrodes, like you see in oscilloscopes. They cost more to manufacture (you need to put more things inside the vacuum envelope) but you can do multiple guns without too much difficulty or cross-interference.
Must they be coded to be compatible with a specific winsys/manager/DE, or are they portable across all of the Linux GUI elements?
It really depends on what you mean by that question. An app (specifically, a GUI app; let's ignore databases and webservers and other server apps for the rest of this post) can be coded so that it just talks to X and it will be handled fine. An app can additionally speak the standard protocol for communicating with window managers and do a few more things that would otherwise be impossible. Finally, an app can talk some more protocols and work with a desktop environment; that can in turn be either at the interoperability level, which will work well enough with both Gnome and KDE, or at the level of DE-specific communications, which usually only tools that are part of that DE bother to do.
Lots of apps do choose to be highly portable, since that increases the number of systems they can run on.
bragging about buying $5000 speakers makes you look like someone used lossy compression on your brain
Spending $5000 on speakers definitely applies lossy compression to your bank account.
With DNSSEC, you could possibly eliminate the SSL certificate authorities and use signed DNS records to include the certificate information (so you can make sure that when you go to https://www.foo.com/, you really got www.foo.com's certificate and not that of a man-in-the-middle attacker).
That would only really work for the most basic type of signing, where the CA is asserting that the certificate is for SSL use on www.foo.com. I suppose the extended validation attributes (like the company's formal business identity) could also be done that way, but I doubt that ISPs are likely to want to get into that game (the liabilities from errors are a good reason to leave that with specialists).
For client certificates, a CA is really best. After all, I'm not a DNS entry, I'm a free man!
You can wander off, and come back to find:
Thank you for watching the advertisement, please enter the advertised product's name to continue.
You know, that sounds a lot like an advert for pirating the show via bittorrent to me. (Or just ignoring the show completely; I write OSS instead of watching TV.) If people insist on being obnoxious, why deal with them?
I wonder if we'll ever reach the point where we will be able to define, with equations and rules, a sea slug using the principles of cellular automata?
"Ever"? Could well happen. But soon? Even with Moore's Law, not likely. (I'm assuming you're talking about doing the behavior and physiology, not just something that looks like one.) The issue is simply one of scaling up; a sea slug has a heck of a lot of elementary particles in it and just being able to cope with that many interactions is really tough. Of course, since there's not actually that many orders of magnitude of difference between a sea slug and a person, we'll be able to simulate people shortly after sea slugs, and humanity (at current population levels) not long after that.
All developers are blue collar. Programming is the IT equivalent of brick laying, it's a trade, not a profession.
Professions have legal status; Doctors, lawyers, accountants have to be certified and approved.
If you want to work at the professional levels (no, a plain programmer isn't at that level) you almost certainly need a degree in CS, CE or one of a few closely-related disciplines. A higher degree helps as it shows that you can dig in and really understand a problem domain. (You don't strictly need such things, but the alternatives are much harder.)
Should there be a formal body to codify the professional status? Independent question. Should it be as engineers in the traditional sense? Another independent question. (I'm getting inclined to say "yes, but not at any cost" and "maybe" to those two.)
Okay. But if you said, "An engineer - minimum 2-year Associates Degree," I suspect the HR people would overrule you. (And to be fair, they are probably just following written company policy.)
Your company must be really fscked if HR hates you that much to go round changing requirements without telling you, even in the presence of corporate policy. A good HR department would instead get back to you to "remind" you of the policy and to see how both your requirements and the policy can be satisfied.
Mind you, it's more likely that there are general hiring roles (e.g., candidates for a particular role are expected to have a particular level of education and vocational experience) and it's often the case that where a manager has a specific person in mind then HR isn't a problem. They're just bureaucrats. They don't want people jumping down their throats any more than anyone else does.
I'm struggling to think of a positioning system design that would require GR/SR to work rather than time of flight... I think it would have to be an active transponder system, or some kind of weird gravity wave detector? It would be interesting.
If we ever need accurate positioning around a black hole, we can at least know that slashdot will be able to tell us how!
And people call us useless! Hah!
And if a machine that has your public key on it is compromised?
Either you are very very stupid, or you meant private key. If the former, you understand that the only reason I'm not publishing my public ssh keys here, on slashdot, is that I don't want some loony jerk giving me an account without my knowledge? I have more than enough of the damn things already. However, if you meant private keys then that's a fair point: they're best kept on machines that never run services. (OK, it would also be better if those machines never ran web browsers either given the general inability of javascript implementors to grasp what a sane security policy is, but sometimes you just have to compromise. Or carry two laptops around with you...)
The problem with fusion is how many neutrons it emits. Even when you use one of the fusion chains designed not to produce neutrons, you produce a good amount. The reactor core is going to be even more radioactive than a fission reactor core.
That's not actually necessarily a problem, you know. It all depends really on two factors.
In any case, the neutrons aren't a big problem. We know they're there. We can engineer to deal with the consequences. I believe we do not anticipate having to deal with problematic long-lived radioisotopes. What's the issue?
Here's a clue: look up the word irony or don't use the word.
Irony: made out of iron.
(According to the Great Man, T. Pratchett anyway.)
The Werlé-Lauber effect sounds like something physics students would have to memorize an equation for.
"Deaths per year is proportional to the square of the whitewash applied" or something like that?
My internet connection is via the cable company...
All that's needed is for your cable company to deliver content using IP. (Without telling you...)
He didn't know your password. He just typed "********" but you saw it as "hunter32" because that's your password.
Good thing you cut-n-paste that the second time or it wouldn't have come out right.
Yet by delaying this merger on a mere hunch (without concrete proof) they are endangering Sun employees job security in this fragile economy. Where is the sense in that ?
The EU isn't interested in defending jobs in California. Instead, they're defending jobs in the EU, notably including the customers of Sun, Oracle and other DB vendors.
In other words, why would Oracle kill the golden goose? Just out of spite?
It's Oracle, so yes.
For example, I ate at a steakhouse (I think it was Outback but I'm not certain) where the food was good and wasn't much overpriced compared to the restaurant outside of the airport but how the heck are you supposed to eat a steak with plastic utensils?
It varies by airport. Some have the security check at the gate (or at least after most of the food vendors) so they offer better service in the restaurants. OTOH, the airports gouge the restaurants for rents, so expect prices to be higher anyway.