"And once upon a time all scientists knew that the earth was flat."
Aw, come on. That is a total non sequitur. I challenge you to find a scientist who studied, in a scientific way, whether the earth was round or flat and actually concluded it was flat. As I gather, most natural "science" back in the days was actually philosophy. That's not an argument for anything.
"So far, none of the climatologists predictions have come true."
What? So no ice has melted?
"If you've studied just a little bit of chaos theory you know that it is impossible to forecast weather for more than a very limited time."
Yeah, it's weird. I heard an analogy yesterday on TV from a politician, AKA one who has to make a decision on what to do from a government point of view.
You go the hospital and have no less than 100 trained doctors examine you, 98 say you're sick with a certain illness, but 2 say you're fine and should stop worrying. Now what do you do?
Eh, could it be that perhaps climate scientists are already aware of the problems of chaotic systems given that weather is one of the prime examples of chaotic system or would that not fit into your nice little theory that it is all bogus?
I tried googling this, and lo and behold, the first hit is this which patiently explains the problem of chaos and the difference between weather prediction and long-term climate prediction:
Please do not spread misinformation. You are a good example of what the OP is objecting too, someone who doesn't know anything about the field at all but still think he/she is qualified to discredit it.
Germany and a few other EU countries [caithnesswindfarms.co.uk] have recognized the danger from wind, and established exclusion zones around wind turbines where people are prohibited from entering (600m radius for Germany, 500m for others).
That surprised me. I tried googling for exclusion zone and windfarms without finding anything conclusive (the information in the link you gave is incoherent and produced by a organization "run by a group of people concerned about the proliferation of windfarms"). I'm sorry, but I think you are misinformed.
I can tell you that there's no such zones in Denmark, which has been a frontrunner of wind energy until the right-wing parties assumed government ten years ago. It's true that you can't today build a wind turbine next to a residential area because of noise and shadow issues (and possibly safety), but there's no problem standing next to one of those fellows. I've done so myself on several occasions.
Not to downplay noise and shadow issues, it's actually a problem in a so crowded country as Denmark where the nearest neighbour is never far off. Current thinking seems to favour enormous off-shore wind turbines.
for negligible cost, the students can have a fully-functional Linux box gives them real hardware root access, without the risk that they'll do any damage to anything.
You, sir, severely underestimates the damage a fully-functional Linux box can do. Just go ask the ol' Unix vendors, or the Microsoft web server division.
It's not a precise auto-completer so it won't help you discover what's in the objects (I personally use the shell for experimenting), but on the other hand it'll let you auto-complete in comments or strings. I use that feature frequently.
This is nothing new, and has always been part of KDE philosophy, and the same goes for GNOME. With KDE, the key was always configurability: you like window decorations that look like MacOS? You can choose that. You want the panel on the side or top or bottom, or ever two panels? You can choose that too.
Not that I disagree with you regarding philosophy, but it's interesting to note that those two examples you bring up here were both possible with GNOME until the latest release. GNOME 2 was about removing stupid configuration options, of the kind that replaced figuring out sensible defaults. But yes, GNOME 3 seems to be much more radical, as you say.
I read that as the opposite. Maybe CmdrTaco wanted to try something new, but Geeknet doesn't want to risk losing the current readership. Anyway, time will tell.
I see public companies donating to aid organizations. Public companies are made up of people too. I think the world is not as black-and-white as you portrait it.
Yes, that kind of thing may be used in marketing too. But I think you may find that a theory that says, they're doing it because of the marketing value only, would not hold up to a closer scrutiny if you actually examine who makes the decisions. People and companies don't act 100% rational.
The irony in all this is that China is still a communist country using capitalism to destabilise democracy.
What? So now their mission is to destabilise democracy? You don't not think it could be that they're trying to make a living on the terms set up by, say the country that above everything else will defend the free market and the, ahem, American dream?
Yet Samsung's lawyers were not heard, and it seems most people who've seen the actual products disagree with the judge that a trademark was violated. Is that not a problem?
It seems to me design patents are intended to prevent cheap copies of Gucci bags, but Apple has somehow dug up this obscure legal instrument and so far successfully attacked Samsung with it.
"or plants able to extract energy from a wider frequency band than is currently possible with photosynthesis (Or even to do so more efficiently.)"
This sounds a bit bonkers, not entirely, but still. Presumably, if a wider frequency band was beneficial for growth, plants would have evolved that trait many million years ago?
That sounds completely bonkers. You need to read up on Marx or something someday. The reason stuff costs money is either scarcity or because someone puts some time into producing it. If robots are doing all the work, the products will eventually cost almost nothing because nobody is putting any time into it.
Why do you think everyone today has so much stuff at their house compared to 100 years ago where people had one or two sets of clothes and furniture inhered from their grandparents? Because stuff is much cheaper nowadays.
Well, duh, obviously people who worked for a while and thus have training in that kind of work will require less training in that kind of work afterwards. You should perhaps do your comparison with people who went straight through their Master's and then worked for a while?
Your case is not surprising to me, MS Office is a complex beast with a lot of advanced features. But I think the GP is right in the sense that most (but not all) people have no clue those feature are there, and for them, a simpler suite would be fine.
Yes, there is. Go read up on Design of Design by Fred Brooks (known for the mythical man month and no silver bullet).
The problem with the waterfall model is that it does not allow for learning. With many IT projects, both the client and also the developers need to learn about the problem space and each other.
The first line of defense in Gmail is some kind of filtering of the server sending the spam. We used to run email through another server first, then route it to Gmail. When we stopped doing that and just let it go straight through to Gmail, the number of spam messages fell an order of magnitude.
Still, I don't trust the Gmail filter. I still sometimes find legit messages labeled spam. But it's so good at the server filtering that I only have to skim through a pageful of spam per day, so it's not bad.
Slashdot Mirror
"And once upon a time all scientists knew that the earth was flat."
Aw, come on. That is a total non sequitur. I challenge you to find a scientist who studied, in a scientific way, whether the earth was round or flat and actually concluded it was flat. As I gather, most natural "science" back in the days was actually philosophy. That's not an argument for anything.
"So far, none of the climatologists predictions have come true."
What? So no ice has melted?
"If you've studied just a little bit of chaos theory you know that it is impossible to forecast weather for more than a very limited time."
Sorry, but that's irrelevant. You are mistaken: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/11/chaos-and-climate/
Yeah, it's weird. I heard an analogy yesterday on TV from a politician, AKA one who has to make a decision on what to do from a government point of view.
You go the hospital and have no less than 100 trained doctors examine you, 98 say you're sick with a certain illness, but 2 say you're fine and should stop worrying. Now what do you do?
Eh, could it be that perhaps climate scientists are already aware of the problems of chaotic systems given that weather is one of the prime examples of chaotic system or would that not fit into your nice little theory that it is all bogus?
I tried googling this, and lo and behold, the first hit is this which patiently explains the problem of chaos and the difference between weather prediction and long-term climate prediction:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/11/chaos-and-climate/
Please do not spread misinformation. You are a good example of what the OP is objecting too, someone who doesn't know anything about the field at all but still think he/she is qualified to discredit it.
Germany and a few other EU countries [caithnesswindfarms.co.uk] have recognized the danger from wind, and established exclusion zones around wind turbines where people are prohibited from entering (600m radius for Germany, 500m for others).
That surprised me. I tried googling for exclusion zone and windfarms without finding anything conclusive (the information in the link you gave is incoherent and produced by a organization "run by a group of people concerned about the proliferation of windfarms"). I'm sorry, but I think you are misinformed.
I can tell you that there's no such zones in Denmark, which has been a frontrunner of wind energy until the right-wing parties assumed government ten years ago. It's true that you can't today build a wind turbine next to a residential area because of noise and shadow issues (and possibly safety), but there's no problem standing next to one of those fellows. I've done so myself on several occasions.
Not to downplay noise and shadow issues, it's actually a problem in a so crowded country as Denmark where the nearest neighbour is never far off. Current thinking seems to favour enormous off-shore wind turbines.
The grass is always greener somewhere else. Get over it. :)
Well put!
If you don't understand what parent and grandparent is talking about, watch this video by Khan of Khan Academy:
http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html
for negligible cost, the students can have a fully-functional Linux box gives them real hardware root access, without the risk that they'll do any damage to anything.
You, sir, severely underestimates the damage a fully-functional Linux box can do. Just go ask the ol' Unix vendors, or the Microsoft web server division.
I use M-x hippie-expand. Bind it to M-/:
(global-set-key (kbd "M-/") 'hippie-expand)
It's not a precise auto-completer so it won't help you discover what's in the objects (I personally use the shell for experimenting), but on the other hand it'll let you auto-complete in comments or strings. I use that feature frequently.
This is nothing new, and has always been part of KDE philosophy, and the same goes for GNOME. With KDE, the key was always configurability: you like window decorations that look like MacOS? You can choose that. You want the panel on the side or top or bottom, or ever two panels? You can choose that too.
Not that I disagree with you regarding philosophy, but it's interesting to note that those two examples you bring up here were both possible with GNOME until the latest release. GNOME 2 was about removing stupid configuration options, of the kind that replaced figuring out sensible defaults. But yes, GNOME 3 seems to be much more radical, as you say.
I read that as the opposite. Maybe CmdrTaco wanted to try something new, but Geeknet doesn't want to risk losing the current readership. Anyway, time will tell.
I see public companies donating to aid organizations. Public companies are made up of people too. I think the world is not as black-and-white as you portrait it.
Yes, that kind of thing may be used in marketing too. But I think you may find that a theory that says, they're doing it because of the marketing value only, would not hold up to a closer scrutiny if you actually examine who makes the decisions. People and companies don't act 100% rational.
The irony in all this is that China is still a communist country using capitalism to destabilise democracy.
What? So now their mission is to destabilise democracy? You don't not think it could be that they're trying to make a living on the terms set up by, say the country that above everything else will defend the free market and the, ahem, American dream?
Yet Samsung's lawyers were not heard, and it seems most people who've seen the actual products disagree with the judge that a trademark was violated. Is that not a problem?
It seems to me design patents are intended to prevent cheap copies of Gucci bags, but Apple has somehow dug up this obscure legal instrument and so far successfully attacked Samsung with it.
Hope you get modded up. There was also a discussion on osnews.com.
"or plants able to extract energy from a wider frequency band than is currently possible with photosynthesis (Or even to do so more efficiently.)"
This sounds a bit bonkers, not entirely, but still. Presumably, if a wider frequency band was beneficial for growth, plants would have evolved that trait many million years ago?
Only on Slashdot could a comment like parent have been modded Informative.
That sounds completely bonkers. You need to read up on Marx or something someday. The reason stuff costs money is either scarcity or because someone puts some time into producing it. If robots are doing all the work, the products will eventually cost almost nothing because nobody is putting any time into it.
Why do you think everyone today has so much stuff at their house compared to 100 years ago where people had one or two sets of clothes and furniture inhered from their grandparents? Because stuff is much cheaper nowadays.
Well, duh, obviously people who worked for a while and thus have training in that kind of work will require less training in that kind of work afterwards. You should perhaps do your comparison with people who went straight through their Master's and then worked for a while?
Except that we haven't talked about terabytes for more than the last few years since the capacities weren't there before. Nice try. :)
"The solution is to give him a black eye, then ask, then give him another if he refuses."
Just curious, what would should we do afterwards if he refuses? Ran out of eyes, eh?
Your case is not surprising to me, MS Office is a complex beast with a lot of advanced features. But I think the GP is right in the sense that most (but not all) people have no clue those feature are there, and for them, a simpler suite would be fine.
"However his reasoning is extremely stupid."
Even though he built the thing, I'm sure he didn't consider these things you mention. We can only hope he's reading Slashdot so he can learn of them.
There's nothing wrong with the Waterfall model
Yes, there is. Go read up on Design of Design by Fred Brooks (known for the mythical man month and no silver bullet).
The problem with the waterfall model is that it does not allow for learning. With many IT projects, both the client and also the developers need to learn about the problem space and each other.
The first line of defense in Gmail is some kind of filtering of the server sending the spam. We used to run email through another server first, then route it to Gmail. When we stopped doing that and just let it go straight through to Gmail, the number of spam messages fell an order of magnitude.
Still, I don't trust the Gmail filter. I still sometimes find legit messages labeled spam. But it's so good at the server filtering that I only have to skim through a pageful of spam per day, so it's not bad.
I myself have the top 1000 sci-fi books in digital format from a torrent
That's incredible! If you read one each week, it'll take you 20 years to get through them. :)