Have you thought of something like Vern? There are a zillion other virtual desktop programs for Windows out there, but this has been my favorite for years. It makes overwhelming the task bar a non-issue. I can just keep Sunbird maximized on a separate desktop. Here's a screenshot (see the bottom right corner) to show how useful it can be. Why clutter the system tray even more when you can just leave all of your windows exactly where you want them to be?
Your mileage may vary, but I hope you find this useful.
If you're interested in the delicious extension, I've made a hacked version that allows you to select multiple tags (for a tag intersection) and select multiple bookmarks (to open the whole selected items in tabs). It's not an official version, though I have submitted bugs and patches for them. Something similar will hopefully be incorporated soon.
Every version of Firefox since about 0.7 has acted this way for me. The memory usage increases slowly but steadily until it's eating up 200MB+ of RAM. Closing tabs or windows (I usually have 2 or 3 windows open with 2-6 tabs each) has no effect on the memory consumption. Restarting Firefox helps, though sometimes I have to go into the taskmgr and kill the process manually.
Anyway, I love Firefox, but thought I'd add another confirming instance of this problem.
Yes! I switched from WinAMP to foobar2000 after finding that newer versions of WinAMP simply weren't working properly with Vern. If you want a music player that is made to make playing and listening to music easy, a player that does not create "beautiful new impediments to understanding", a player that is function, simple, and behaves like a normal Windows application (in the "good" sense, if you can accept such a thing), foobar2000 is for you!
There seems to be a very active development community and a corresponding wealth of plugins. Plugins aimed at making playing music on a computer a better experience, not ones aimed at making your music player more eye-catching or fun to use.
If you share my feelings but are on linux instead, check out mpd and mpc.
I'm not sure what the laws are like where you live (or where your hypothetical mouse problem is, anyway), but around these parts, catching animals and then releasing them elsewhere (on property you don't own, and presumably any property not contiguous with where they were caught) is illegal. I suppose if you owned the woods around your farm or business, you could still do it, but it would still be somewhat silly to just let them go on your property again.
See my response here if you're interested. (If only Slashdot/SlashCode had a way of keeping "active" stories visible to the people who have participated in them.)
Sorry I didn't get back to this sooner. A friend of mine put it in a good way, reasonably concise and useful: A law is something that is provably true inside a theory. This statement contains inside it the apparent strength of a law, while still acknowledging that the law depends on the theory for its scientific validity.
My problem with your statement, which I failed to articulate clearly, is that such statements tend to contribute to the confusion about the place of "laws" in science. Pseudo-scientists (creationists, intelligent design people, etc.) tend to latch on to this apparent flaw in science (the fact that science requires assumptions and that theories aren't provable) to selectively dismiss whatever claims are contrary to their own beliefs. *sigh*
Anyway, thanks for clarifying your understanding of the semantics. I think we're pretty much on the same page here:).
I thought things that were just accepted as true were called "axioms". Is "law" a synomym for "axiom" or are they different?
"Law" is definitely not a synonym for "axiom". I think the grandparent poster is rather confused. A "law" is not just something that we have observed to be true and then taken for true (i.e. taken to be an axiom). Rather, "law" is a term that has just been loosely applied, suggesting more strength than a "theory", but both pieces of scientific knowledge are not to be considered infallilble or not open to scrutiny. It is true that our scientific "laws" tend to be more fundamental in what they say, but they are still "explanations" in the same way that theories are (contrary to what the grandparent seems to be saying).
The grandparent has pieces of truth ("theories are never proven true"), but doesn't seem to have it quite right (since laws are never "proven true", either). Hope that helps clarify things. I can address the grandparent post more thoroughly if this post was too vague.
Remember the Hubble Deep Field in the darkest part of the sky, in an area about as large as a grain of sand held at arm's length, we saw at least 1,500 GALAXIES.
Don't forget the more recent Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (image), an eleven-day-long exposure showing an estimated 10,000 galaxies! I had thought this was just a longer exposure of the same area, but it turns out that HUDF is in Fornax, while HDF is in Ursa Major.
I'm no expert on this, but a political science friend of mine has tried to explain this to me. The reason Badnarik and others aren't allowed into the debates is because the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) says a candidate has to have the support of at least 15% of voters according to selected national polls. (There are other criteria, but they are less subjective and not an issue in this case. For example, a candidate has to be eligible for president to be allowed into a debate.) This already stinks, but this isn't really the important part.
The key question is: what gives the CPD the power to break the "equal time" law (from the Communications Act)? (If you don't know of it, it basically guarantees that candidates must be allowed equal airtime to prevent one candidate from just buying off all of the news media.) It turns out that this power is granted through a pathetic loophole: debates are considered a "news event" ever since 1976 (Carter/Ford?), so the media can cover it freely, and the equal time guarantee simply doesn't apply.
There is a conceptual difference between gravitational and inertial mass. It is a curious coincidence that we don't seem to be able to detect a physical difference. More information on this is just a Google away. Also look for the Principle of Equivalence.
That still sounds like a very cool idea. As someone who has craploads of pictures with only very crude methods of searching through them, that would be truly fantastic. When I think "I want the picture I took of ____", remembering where I took it seems like it would be pretty easy most of the time. It would be a great tool. Let me know when you get your software working;).
I'm all for skepticism, especially when it comes to worthless AP/Reuters echolalia, but it's definitely making the rounds. (Remove the word "blast" from that search, and you can sort of see how many are just repeating AP and how many have actually come up with their own story.)
Thank you for pointing that out. The site you linked to in turn links to the actual budget proposal, which clearly shows there is no planned increase in the Selective Service's budget. I have removed the rumors (some of which were explicitly labelled as such) and the outright factual errors from the Wikipedia entry. You can still view the history (I'm not sure if you need an account to see that). I hope this doesn't turn into an edit war. It seems clear to me that pure, uncorroborated speculation does not belong in the encyclopedia.
Are you sure you're using the term "analytical" properly? Certainly in the field of analysis, the natural logarithm is an analytic function. That is, it is differentiable at every point in its domain.
You define it differently, pretty much as a function with a finite number of terms using the field operations. Fair enough, and I follow what you're saying from there. But that's definitely different from what I learned from taking real anaylsis and complex analysis.
Here's a token MathWorld definition, though I know that's not definitive. I'm well aware the definitions can change significantly from area to area in mathematics.
Anyway, regardless of semantics, great explanations, and thanks for sharing!
A June 8 Purdue University news release reports a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis by L. de Branges. However, both the 23-page preprint (from 2003) cited in the original release and a 124-page preprint (from 2004) cited in a back-dated modified release seem to lack an actual proof. Furthermore, a counterexample to de Branges's approach by Conrey and Li has been known since 1998. The media coverage therefore appears to be much ado about nothing.
I believe that came up in the previous Slashdot thread about the RH.
Too tired to think about this really, but I think you're thinking of region coloring, whereas the post you responded to was talking about vertex coloring. It's easy to make graphs that require more than four colors to color neighboring vertices differently, see here. Sounds like you're aware of this, just got switched around when you read it. Hope that helps. (I can tell I'm tired because it took me three tries to get "vertices" right...)
So no, there are not the adverse effects doctors had theorized about.
That sounds like a much stronger statement than you probably mean. I'm not familiar with the story you cite, but I think it's probably more accurate to say that in that one instance, there weren't any adverse effects. That's not proof that there aren't any (ever), which seemed to be your implication. In fact, with only one data point, it's not even proof that there usually aren't any problems.
On a less pedantic note, do you remember roughly how long she was using the pump? Years? Weeks? It's not hard to imagine that the sort of problems that might surface in a patient using the device for 20 years would not come up in a patient on it for only a month or a year.
Not get all ad hominem here, but my impression is that Reader's Digest favors feel-good stories over realism. That also makes me wary of using this one data point in claiming there are no long-term effects.
I was a tcsh die-hard and evangelist for a long time, but when I moved over to Windows+Cygwin, I got used to Bash. Now I use Bash on my Linux box, too, and never really gave zsh a fair shot. That said, I've spent a fair amount of time customizing my Bash environment (prompt string, aliases, etc.). How hard would it be to transition to zsh? Can you hook me up with this example config file? (Contact me as sns@ the same domain as the website up by my Slashdot nickname, if you don't want to post a link here.)
The way the information gets out seems to be that a true event horizon never forms, just an apparent horizon.
(Quote from the summary in one of the links from the submitter.) That pretty much sums it up to me (IANAP). We studied this in a class I took at UIUC called "The philosophy of space, time, and matter". (No, it wasn't a fluff course.) Basically, from the perspective of someone outside the black hole, the event horizon never actually forms. You see matter spiral in toward the black hole, radiating energy as it falls in (we observe this as x-ray bursts). But you never see the matter actually hit the event horizon! If the universe would last long enough (it won't), you would see that by the time the matter hit the event horizon, the black hole would have evaporated (due to Hawking radiation).
What Hawking seems to be saying to me is that since the matter never enters the hole from the perspective of an observer outside the hole, the information is never lost. Does this make sense?
Slashdot Mirror
Have you thought of something like Vern? There are a zillion other virtual desktop programs for Windows out there, but this has been my favorite for years. It makes overwhelming the task bar a non-issue. I can just keep Sunbird maximized on a separate desktop. Here's a screenshot (see the bottom right corner) to show how useful it can be. Why clutter the system tray even more when you can just leave all of your windows exactly where you want them to be?
Your mileage may vary, but I hope you find this useful.
I'll second this motion. Thanks for the constructive suggestion!
If you're interested in the delicious extension, I've made a hacked version that allows you to select multiple tags (for a tag intersection) and select multiple bookmarks (to open the whole selected items in tabs). It's not an official version, though I have submitted bugs and patches for them. Something similar will hopefully be incorporated soon.
Anyway, I love Firefox, but thought I'd add another confirming instance of this problem.
There seems to be a very active development community and a corresponding wealth of plugins. Plugins aimed at making playing music on a computer a better experience, not ones aimed at making your music player more eye-catching or fun to use.
If you share my feelings but are on linux instead, check out mpd and mpc.
Yes! Globalvote 2004! Err... not that your vote will actually count. But at least they won't be bitching about the results of Globalvote for the next six months. I hope...
I'm not sure what the laws are like where you live (or where your hypothetical mouse problem is, anyway), but around these parts, catching animals and then releasing them elsewhere (on property you don't own, and presumably any property not contiguous with where they were caught) is illegal. I suppose if you owned the woods around your farm or business, you could still do it, but it would still be somewhat silly to just let them go on your property again.
See my response here if you're interested. (If only Slashdot/SlashCode had a way of keeping "active" stories visible to the people who have participated in them.)
My problem with your statement, which I failed to articulate clearly, is that such statements tend to contribute to the confusion about the place of "laws" in science. Pseudo-scientists (creationists, intelligent design people, etc.) tend to latch on to this apparent flaw in science (the fact that science requires assumptions and that theories aren't provable) to selectively dismiss whatever claims are contrary to their own beliefs. *sigh*
Anyway, thanks for clarifying your understanding of the semantics. I think we're pretty much on the same page here :).
The grandparent has pieces of truth ("theories are never proven true"), but doesn't seem to have it quite right (since laws are never "proven true", either). Hope that helps clarify things. I can address the grandparent post more thoroughly if this post was too vague.
The key question is: what gives the CPD the power to break the "equal time" law (from the Communications Act)? (If you don't know of it, it basically guarantees that candidates must be allowed equal airtime to prevent one candidate from just buying off all of the news media.) It turns out that this power is granted through a pathetic loophole: debates are considered a "news event" ever since 1976 (Carter/Ford?), so the media can cover it freely, and the equal time guarantee simply doesn't apply.
Stupid, isn't it?
There is a conceptual difference between gravitational and inertial mass. It is a curious coincidence that we don't seem to be able to detect a physical difference. More information on this is just a Google away. Also look for the Principle of Equivalence.
That still sounds like a very cool idea. As someone who has craploads of pictures with only very crude methods of searching through them, that would be truly fantastic. When I think "I want the picture I took of ____", remembering where I took it seems like it would be pretty easy most of the time. It would be a great tool. Let me know when you get your software working ;).
I'm all for skepticism, especially when it comes to worthless AP/Reuters echolalia, but it's definitely making the rounds. (Remove the word "blast" from that search, and you can sort of see how many are just repeating AP and how many have actually come up with their own story.)
Thank you for pointing that out. The site you linked to in turn links to the actual budget proposal, which clearly shows there is no planned increase in the Selective Service's budget. I have removed the rumors (some of which were explicitly labelled as such) and the outright factual errors from the Wikipedia entry. You can still view the history (I'm not sure if you need an account to see that). I hope this doesn't turn into an edit war. It seems clear to me that pure, uncorroborated speculation does not belong in the encyclopedia.
You define it differently, pretty much as a function with a finite number of terms using the field operations. Fair enough, and I follow what you're saying from there. But that's definitely different from what I learned from taking real anaylsis and complex analysis.
Here's a token MathWorld definition, though I know that's not definitive. I'm well aware the definitions can change significantly from area to area in mathematics.
Anyway, regardless of semantics, great explanations, and thanks for sharing!
Which comes out to roughly 5 IPv6 addresses for every atom in every human body in the entire world! (Source, look for the string "28".)
You're right about the quadratic algorithm, of course. It's just not what he was talking about. Just to clarify.
Too tired to think about this really, but I think you're thinking of region coloring, whereas the post you responded to was talking about vertex coloring. It's easy to make graphs that require more than four colors to color neighboring vertices differently, see here. Sounds like you're aware of this, just got switched around when you read it. Hope that helps. (I can tell I'm tired because it took me three tries to get "vertices" right...)
On a less pedantic note, do you remember roughly how long she was using the pump? Years? Weeks? It's not hard to imagine that the sort of problems that might surface in a patient using the device for 20 years would not come up in a patient on it for only a month or a year.
Not get all ad hominem here, but my impression is that Reader's Digest favors feel-good stories over realism. That also makes me wary of using this one data point in claiming there are no long-term effects.
Excellent! Thanks for the files, and thanks for pursuing this thread so actively. I hope you've won some converts today!
I was a tcsh die-hard and evangelist for a long time, but when I moved over to Windows+Cygwin, I got used to Bash. Now I use Bash on my Linux box, too, and never really gave zsh a fair shot. That said, I've spent a fair amount of time customizing my Bash environment (prompt string, aliases, etc.). How hard would it be to transition to zsh? Can you hook me up with this example config file? (Contact me as sns@ the same domain as the website up by my Slashdot nickname, if you don't want to post a link here.)
What Hawking seems to be saying to me is that since the matter never enters the hole from the perspective of an observer outside the hole, the information is never lost. Does this make sense?