Here's the deal: stop saying that America is the greatest nation on Earth, the most advanced nation on Earth, the home of the free, the home of the brave, or any of that other bullshit, and MAYBE people will stop pointing out that every one of those claims is a baldfaced lie.
Well, here in the US we still sorta somewhat have this thing called Free Speech. So all those idiots have a legal right to say such things. This doesn't mean that the rest of us believe them.
The US isn't a monolithic society in which everyone marches in lockstep and believes the nonsense spouted by our "leaders".
In fact, a fair number of us do compare ourselves to others. But the results in those cases generally come up mixed, like you'd expect. And those who make such comparisons are rarely if ever heard making such extreme claims. If you just follow the big media, you hardly hear about them at all.
No argument there. I use it a couple times a week.
But I keep hearing all the marvelous things about GIMP, and sometimes wonder if there's some way to learn to use it effectively. By "effectively", I don't mean doing random, uncontrolled damage to images. But so far, that's really all I've ever learned to do.
"average" users are learning the following:... 4. GIMP
Hmmm... really? If so, the quality of the intro-level documentation must have radically improved since I last tried learning GIMP a few years ago.
I had several versions on several machines, and a couple of different manuals. One of the first things that impressed me was that, as in earlier attempts, at least half of the examples in all the docs didn't work at all, no matter what version of GIMP I tried them with. Sometimes I got error messages, sometimes GIMP did something that wasn't recognizably like what was supposed to happen, sometimes nothing at all happened.
But my main overall impression after slogging through it was that I really hadn't learned much that was useful. Sure, I could use GIMP to make assorted changes to images, but they were almost never the changes I was trying to make, and I usually couldn't make any sense of the actual changes. I kept getting this image of driving a car in which I could turn the steering wheel and push the accelerator or brake pedals all I liked, and the car would change direction or speed, but the changes it did were uncorrellated with what I did to the controls. In effect, I could "garbage" pictures in lots of not very interesting ways, but I couldn't make intentional, controlled changes.
So if "average" users are learning to use it, what docs are they using? How would a novice user who knows nothing about GIMP go about learning to actually use it to twiddle images in a controlled fashion?
You reject the idea of there being a creator, because that must be taken on faith, yet I doubt you have any problem accepting the idea of all matter coming from the the big bang, but where did that singularity come from? At some point, it all becomes untestable, it all becomes faith.
Actually, that's not quite true. If one were to accept some conjecture about what came before or caused the Big Bang, that would require faith, because there's no way yet to collect any evidence. But most "believers" in the Big Bang don't do that. They just say "This is the earliest event that we have any evidence for, and we have no idea what if anything came before."
Saying "I don't know" is not a declaration of faith. It's a statement that you don't know and thus don't believe anything in particular.
One of the things that makes scientists more credible than religious leaders is that most scientists are willing to admit "I don't know". They try not to pretend to knowledge that they don't have.
Of course, they usually express it differently: "Further research is needed." Note that this common scientific mantra is a clear rejection of faith (as well as a request for funding;-). It's saying that we shouldn't claim knowledge at all until we have sufficient grounds for making such a claim.
Religious people, on the other hand, have a long history of making claims to knowledge when they don't actually know at all; they just believe for no good reason.
(And there are scientists who sorta make a game of challenging the Big Bang theory. This is somewhat pro forma, and is done because no theory should ever go unchallenged. It's a losing game so far, since challenges always seem to come up favoring the Big Bang. But maybe some day, some physicist will make a big name for himself by shooting down the theory. Similarly, scientists keep coming up with new ways to challenge General Relativity, but so far General Relatively has always won.)
"Banning gay marriage?" Gay marriage has always been banned.
Actually, that's not true in the US. Rather, there was no mention of it at all in most state laws. The reason it didn't happen was that the people working at the appropriate registries simply wouldn't do it. They didn't have any law on their side; they just didn't do it. That's the situation right now in most states.
OTOH, another part of US (and some other countries') law re marriage is that there's a distinction between civil and religious marriage. You are legally married when you register with the state (or have the certificate signed in the presence of a notary). You can have a religious ceremony, that that has nothing to do with being married. However, if you want your marriages recognized by some churches, you have to have a religious marriage ceremony. Most (but not all) couples do both.
I live in Massachusetts, where the big news a few years ago was the decision by the top state court that gay marriage was legal in the state. There was no change in the law; gay marriage had always been legal. The court just said that state registries could no longer turn down marriage certificates from two people of the same sex.
Funny thing is that, before that decision, I'd attended several gay marriages. At one, the presiding clergy (a Reform rabbi) at one point observed that the state didn't recognize this marriage, but God was present and knew about it. There were jokes about how God hadn't intervened, so obviously he approved. That couple is now also registered with the state, but they had a religious marriage for several years before the state accepted it.
Of course, there is pressure now from religious groups to pass explicit laws outlawing same-sex marriage. They have realized that in most of the country, this is in fact not illegal; it just "wasn't done". This produces a bit of a quandary for much of the population: Many people don't like the idea, but they also don't like the idea of explicitly passing a law denying a minority group a right enjoyed by the rest of the population. Americans have always claimed this is the "land of the free", and it's just downright embarrassing to hear of discrimination being written into law to explicitly hurt some minority.
But many of them aren't sufficiently embarrassed to vote against such discrimination.
Since you cannot repeat evolution, it is technically not in the realm of science.
This is a common claim from those who don't understand scientific methods. My favorite way of refuting it is to say something like "Then you don't consider astronomy to be a science? Most scientists consider it one of the 'hardest' of hard sciences." This invariably produces a confused look, because of course they know that astronomy is a real science, but astronomers obviously do very little experimentation with their subject matter.
Then I go into teacher mode, and explain that there are methods called "observational science". These methods are used by astronomers, paleontologists, evolutionary biologists, and many other scientists that can't perform controlled experiments.
If they have the patience, I can also get into the importance of the theoretical parts of most scientific fields. But people who claim that you can't be scientific without repeatable experiments usually don't have the patience (or understanding) to follow that lecture.
But maybe this is too much information for a/. discussion...
Right. The proportion of religious believers in the US has slowly declined for decades. The problem isn't really with the general population; it's with the people running the government.
Back in the 60s and 70s, American fundamentalists made a fundamental change in their strategy. Rather than converting the masses, they switched to gaining political power. They have successfully taken over the Republican party, and have intimidated the Democrats well enough to make them compliant with many religious demands.
At lower levels, they have succeeded politically well enough that they have been able to effectively end most science education below the college level. Thus, I remember high-school teachers saying that they had to skip over the evolution chapter out of fear of reprisal, but students interested in the topic could read it themselves. Now this doesn't happen, because most of the textbooks don't mention the topic at all. Other topics less religiously offensive have just been dumbed down to near meaninglessness.
Maybe we can eventually stop the religious takeover. Or maybe not. Stay tuned.
America has to have _something_ to trade that they bought low and sell high to other consumers in the world.
America does have something to trade: US Dollars.
Actually, America has had something else very important to the issue that seems to get missed by everyone: Education.
In a couple of decades of working as a software developer, I've been quite aware of how many of my colleagues have always been people from other countries. Their stories were usually similar: They came to the US as a university student, and liked it enough to stay.
This is fairly well known in some economics and education circles. It's common to observe that one of America's major exports is education. This is especially true here in the Boston area (which has the world's largest education "plant", with about 250,000 college-level students at about 100 schools in the metro area). It's also true of California's Bay Area, which is another major concentration of colleges and universities.
One of the things that the Bush administration has done is to put major barriers in the way of non-citizens trying to get into an American school. Universities all over have reported decreases of foreign students, and it's mostly traceable to the difficulty of getting permission to stay in the country for 9 months at a time.
Meanwhile, there has been widespread harrassment of foreign tech workers. I have a number of friends (mostly computer experts of some sort) that have simply given up and "gone home", where they're more welcome. This is nice for me, maybe, since I have places to stay for free in a number of countries. But in the long term, it's not really good for American technology.
The vaunted American technology lead has always depended on immigrants. To understand why, look at the way that the lower-level American schools teach science and technology. Below the university level, this has always been pretty much a joke. Graduates of American high schools often can hardly add or subtract correctly without a calculator. But worse, they graduate with a cultural contempt for the "nerds" and "geeks" that enjoy working with that science stuff. They mostly want to be (rich) lawyers or businessmen; they expect to hire techies to do the boring stuff. Only a small minority resist this and become technically competent despite their society's contempt for them.
Discouraging technically-competent immigrants is a guaranteed slow disaster for the American economy.
Coke consists of water, a couple of cents of sugar (bad-for you stuff), caramel, caffiene, CO2 many of which are toxins. How do they make people drink the stuff? By advertising and marketing and creating an image.
Um, no. This isn't correct at all. People drink Coke for the same reason they eat too many Twinkies or doughnuts: it tastes good.... I'd counter with the argument that people choose a drink they think tastes better, and that different colas (branded or generic) have very different tastes. Pepsi, for instance, is much sweeter tasting than Coke.
The actual story is a bit more complex, and is a bit of both. Remember the "New Coke" fiasco? In the post-mortem analyses, something interesting came out: A major difference in the formulas was that the original recipe contained real vanilla, while New Coke used vanillin. Their taste tests showed no significant differences in preference. But something they didn't understand was that only around 10% of the American population can taste vanilla. (It's a bit more complex, too, as sensitivity varies, and maybe 15-20% can detect vanilla to some degree, but only 10% are sensitive enough to respond strongly to the flavor. The rest are why the "plain vanilla" phrase is used to mean "bland, tasteless".)
To make up for vanilla's sweetness (to those sensitive to it), the old Coke used less sugar. This meant that it was favored by more than the 10% that could taste the vanilla. It also tastes better to those that like lower-sugar things like dark chocolate, black coffee, and unsweetened tea. I'm actually in both classes, so I've always preferred Coke to other colas, which are far too sweet. But to people who can't taste vanilla and don't like the bitterness of cola, coffee or chocolate with low sugar, it's just harsh.
Anyway, Coca Cola went back to their original formula, and recovered their customer base of people who like vanilla and/or bitter drinks. But part of their sales is probably from marketing. There are many people who can't tell the difference, or can but don't strongly prefer one kind. Marketing will have an effect with them.
It sorta similar to why people who get fed up with MS products will switch to a Mac. Most people who've used both OSX and linux will tell you that they prefer (distro <X> of) linux, for various reasons. But Apple has good marketing, and their stuff is markedly better than MS junk, so people buy a Mac rather than do their own market research.
Of course, you can tell with one or two sips whether you like a cola; it takes a lot more work to tell whether you like a computer system.
... a lot of creationists try to poke holes in it by saying "what's the use of half an eye"...
It's perhaps worth mentioning that in the past couple years, researchers have discovered a very early stage of a "half eye" that has been developing for only around a millions years or so. Google for "brittle-star eye" to read about it.
It's pretty clear that this new eye is of survival value to the starfish that have it, although it is barely able to resolve anything. Its angular resolution is only around a degree or so, so the sun and moon are each less than one pixel on their visual screens. But they can detect large things moving around in their environment, and that's a good enough advantage over other starfish.
These critters' eyes are of interest to us, to, because they have evolved an interesting high-quality lense that optical researchers are trying to duplicate. It's possible that artificial brittle-star lenses might appear in some of our video equipment in the near future.
Do they think that those steps ever could have taken place if the dinosaurs were still around?
Actually, Stephen Jay Gould wrote a fair amount on this topic, as part of his "contingency" hhypothesis. This is the idea that a fair part of evolutionary development is random and accidental, and if we could reset the clock to an earlier time, things would develop differently.
He viewed the K-T extinction event as a "natural experiment" with this. Before it, there was wide diversity in both dinosaurs and mammals, but the large animals were dinosaurs. Afterwards, when things settled down, there was wide diversity in both dinosaurs (which we now call "birds") and mammals, but the large animals are mostly mammals.
Gould argued that this wasn't because back then, dinosaurs were superior, while mammals are superior now. It's more because the first time around, dinosaurs accidentally got hit by mutations that gave them the large-animal niches, and the second time around it was the mammals that got those mutations. But at smaller sizes, which is most of the ecosystem, both dinosaurs and mammals (and reptiles) were of roughly equal diversity 70 million years ago as they are today.
And, let's face it, spectacular as the giant beasts may be, it's really the mice and sparrows (and anoles) that are the important species. They'll all be around when we're long extinct, no matter what kills us.
Of course, there is a major extinction event going on right now that's wiping out most of the large species. And it's well understood what caused it this time: humans. So whatever species develops intelligence in another 10 or 50 million years will have another major extinction event to analyze and argue over. I wonder what they'll conclude?
I just opened my Thunderbird window that shows my speakeasy email account. There was a new message from Bruce Chatterley, the speakeasy CEO, talking about the Best Buyout. Above the message was the comment "Thunderbird thinks this message is junk."
It was with great sadness that I reluctantly hit the "This is Not Junk" button. I'm sure that Thunderbird now considers me an idiot, and will never trust my judgement again.
When do we start losing the right to run our own servers, and when do we start losing support for non-MS systems?
These were the two reasons I switched to speakeasy. The other so-called ISPs hereabouts sell only browser service, not internet service, and don't allow customers to run their own web or email servers. They also won't talk to you until you connect a MS Windows box to their modem. Since Best Buy is "business oriented", we can expect that they'll pressure speakeasy to adopt similar restrictions.
And when they do, what recourse do we have?
Maybe we should start talking about a class-action suit to establish that "Internet Service" means IP, not HTTP-only. Service that restrict what ports you can use shouldn't be sold as "Internet Service", but rather something like "Web Service", so you know what you're buying.
So who's to implement the VM for the next generation of CPUs? Or will we find that new CPUs can't be developed, because there's nobody left to write the lowest level VM interpreters?
Of course, if the AI people could just get their act together, we could handle the job over to the machines. But like 30 years ago, that's 5 to 10 years in the future.
What I suspect is that the numbers really just include CDs from the big-name companies.
In the past few years, I've bought a fair number of CDs, but mostly from the musicians themselves. These are recordings that you simply can't find in any of the commercial outlets, not even amazon.com. I have been duly surprised to find that most of them were known (typos and all) to CDDB, though I did have to enter the data myself for a few of them. Just yesterday a single-track CD was handed to me by a Finnish friend, and I read it into iTunes on my Mac; I was a bit bemused when it came up identified as an Australian group. Not even close. So I typed in the data by hand (and for some silly reason, one of my Terminal windows now keeps switching to the "Swedish Pro" keyboard that I used to enter the data. "It Just Works" indeed.;-)
A growing fraction of the world's musicians are realizing that it's no longer sensible to sign any paper from a recording company. That just gives all the profits to the company. If you use your local independent recording studio and CD packager, you may not sell millions of copies, but you get all the profit yourself. Even a musician can understand what that means.
But one of the things it means is that you aren't part of the recording industry's statistics. Well, who the hell cares? We want good music, not recording industry profits.
Concurrency is a problem, but its one that you *can't* avoid.... So how exactly do you want to write programs then? Single thread, using only 12.5% of the available computing power? I don't think so.
I don't think so either, but I intend to handle 99% of the "multi-threading" tasks in the same way that was pioneered in unix systems back in the 70's: a flock of small, communicating processes. That works quite well with most of the things that people are hyping threads for, and is debuggable.
Let's face it, writing multi-threaded code is easy. What's difficult is debugging it, because multiple threads in a single address space invalidates almost all the debugging tools we have available. But if you factor out the parallelism into separate processes (i.e., threads with separate address spaces), most of the debugging tools work.
And yes, I've built apps that run on machines with more than one processor. Back in the early 80's, I worked on a number of projects that used test machines with 50 to 200+ processors. It wasn't all that difficult with the debugging tools we had then. I have fond memories of a parallelized version of make, which took advantage of the tree of dependencies to build as much in parallel as possible, up to the limit of an environment variable that you could define. It was fun watching system builds spit out "cc" lines as fast as the display would show them, and deliver a new kernel in under a minute. I worked on a number of kernel mods that required a system build for every test, and this was really handy. But you could see from ps that make wasn't really parallelized; it forked to do the parallel work. I'd guess it took only a few dozen lines to hack this into the original make.
There may be a few tasks that actually require multi-threading withing a single process. I feel a bit sorry for the poor souls that have to debug them. I hope someone is working on debugging tools that will help. But it's not obvious what they might be. The public discussion mostly seems to devolve to "Well, if you'd just program it right, you wouldn't have bugs, dummy." Such cluelessness doesn't give one with experience a lot of hope.
(I'd work on it myself, but I don't think I have the funds for a decent test setup, and I don't see anyone trying to hire for the task. Debugging isn't a profit center in most companies. This fact also doesn't give one hope.;-)
[P]unitive taxes that try to force people to drive less over dubious global warming concerns smacks of fascism.... Forcing me to pay for the health effects caused by your driving sounds more like fascism to me.
Actually, this is a case of using tax policy to obtain social objectives, and you'd have trouble finding any government anywhere that doesn't do that. There's no point in trying to pin a political label on policies implemented by all governments everywhere.
They do differ somewhat in which social policies they want to encourage or discourage, of course. But the methods don't much differ. And all too often, the actual effects of the tax policies are rather different from the publicly stated intentions.
As far as I know, down here in the South, they don't mess with or change formulations of the gasoline during the year.
Actually, they probably do, but it's not as big a change.
Does this changing of gas require any re-tuning of the cars up there?
No. If people re-tuned their cars, changing the fuel formulation wouldn't be needed. But people don't re-tune their cars to match atmospheric conditions. Rather, the fuel makers adjust their mixture so that re-tuning isn't necessary. That's what the "octane rating" is about, really; it's a measure of how volatile the blend is. In effect, the fuel mixtures are adjusted to give the same octane rating (volatility) everywhere. This requires slightly different blends depending on the average temperatures.
I've seen some discussion of the fact that many recent engines' computer controllers dynamically adjust things like the air/fuel ratio and the compression to match the fuel and air conditions. My wife and I saw this a while back when we drove our Mini Cooper from sea level to Yellowstone. It used to be that high elevations would cause problems for vehicles tuned for sea level. But the Mini handled the roads in Yellowstone (some over 9,000 feet elevation) with no problems at all. We mentioned this when we next took the car to the dealer, and the guys there just shrugged and said that the car adjusts the mixture to maximize the power. They also told us not to take seriously the official advice to use medium-octane gas, because the car's computer adjusts for that, too. One guy commented that he'd run his on pure ethanol as an experiment, and aside from the first few seconds after the fillup, it ran just fine. (The computer probably thought that the car was being driven 1000 feet below sea level, but it didn't complain.;-)
There are others that show even greater results than switchgrass, such as members of the miscanthus family.
Minor bit of nitpicking: Miscanthus is a genus, not a family. It's a group of common ornamental grasses in some parts of the world. Two species are being used for biofuel, though it's not a major crop yet. The wikipedia article also mentions that Miscanthus grass fibers make good paper.
Good ideas, perhaps, but they just "ain't gonna happen" in the US in the near future. The reason is that the current government is run by exactly the people who benefit from all these things. They're not going to raise their own taxes. They aren't about to end their own tax shelters, onshore or off. You and I can't possibly bribe them with more money than they're making from the current system.
The only thing that stands a chance of working is to vote them out. But if you look at the past several national elections, it seems clear that the American population is unlikely to do that.
In any case, I don't know if I've ever read of a change in laws that simplified anything. Are there any documented cases of this? (Possibly; I haven't made a career of looking for them.;-)
It's the town where a man got arrested for walking naked down State Street at 2 am. In those days he would not have attracted the attention of the police even then had he not been dragging a dead muskrat at the time. The cops said they stopped to ask where he got the muskrat.
That's probably no real mystery. I remember sitting at tables on the grass behind the Union, between the patio and the lake, late on summer evenings, and watching muskrats come ashore looking for dropped food. There are lots of muskrat dens along the shore to the west, under the path to the dorms. I thought it was interesting that most people would be disgusted when rats showed up, but muskrats would often get grins and "How cute!" comments. Probably because they're so plump. The little critters got lots of handouts, too. I also remember a few cases of dead muskrats "posing" in unlikely spots around the campus. Unfortunately for them, they become so tame that it's easy for someone with evil intent to catch them.
Heh. My wife likes to give out her @alum.bu.edu email address, but she sometimes looks annoyed when I pronounce it with the stress on the "al" in "alum". But I figure, if they're going to name a machine after a mineral, they should expect people to pronounce the mineral's name correctly.
It also seems to me that it wouldn't actually be too difficult for a school to define both an alumnus.schoolname.edu and an alumna.schoolname.edu domain name, perhaps for the same machine, and let students use whichever they prefer. Wouldn't you expect a university to get such things right?
I'd imagine that the filling stations would have a large (probably underground) tank kept constantly pressurized, and the waste heat would be vented from the station's compressor. Filling your tank would entail rather little heat exchange. The first burst of air would enter your tank chilled, as it expands into your tank. But the net effect would be a slight chill to your vehicle.
Others have already pointed out that such vehicles would be more practical in the tropics, and IC engines better for cold climates. So it's not too surprising that initial production would be in places like India and Brazil.
In any case, we might note that compressed air as a power source is hardly anything new. Googling for "compressed-air utility" gets about 700,000 hits, and the history of such things goes back over a century. Chances are that your local auto shop uses compressed air to power many of their tools. The only real innovation here is the use of compressed air to power a mobil vehicle that wanders a good distance from the compressor.
It'll be interesting to see how successful it is a few years from now.
Ship a better search, a better advertising system than Google, a better hosting service than Amazon, a better cross-platform Web development ecosystem than Adobe, and get some services out there that are innovative... That's how you win.
Nah; what you do is sit back and wait for the "smart guys" to develop something new that people seem to want. Then you invest minimal resources in making shoddy ripoff, so that you have resources left over to agressively market your product to the majority of people who can't tell quality from shoddy.
This is how IBM made their billions. Then Bill Gates & Co. took the idea (and a lot of IBM marketing) and ran with it. It worked quite well for both of them. And they've both managed to bankrupt most of their competitors who have the silly idea that quality counts for more than a tiny corner of the market. Yes, there's a market for quality, but it has always been a specialy niche.
Of course, to pull it off, you have to start with enough marketing clout to overwhelm your competitors' marketing efforts. IBM worked their way up, by building quality products until around 1960 or so; then they figured out that as the market leader they no longer needed quality, and switched all their efforts to marketing shoddy products. Microsoft started with an "IBM PC" advertising budget larger than the total budgets of their competitors, and have never had to make a quality product. These days, unless you have a few billion $$$ to spend, you can forget about taking that path.
It'll be interesting to see if a company like google can actually succeed and become a stable mass marketer before Microsoft finds a way to squash them with an inferior knockoff.
Are there any browsers out there that could operate with RAM only, and not save files to disc?
Yes, there are many. Most cell phones and PDAs now come with browsers, and most of them lack disks. So they must be able to run without a disk. They work entirely in memory.
Also, some years back I tested the mozilla and firefox browsers by setting their disk chache size to zero. I then tried using them, and they worked fine. I found their cache directories, and verified that no files had been added. So they apparently worked without a disk at that time. I'd guess they still do.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the deal: stop saying that America is the greatest nation on Earth, the most advanced nation on Earth, the home of the free, the home of the brave, or any of that other bullshit, and MAYBE people will stop pointing out that every one of those claims is a baldfaced lie.
Well, here in the US we still sorta somewhat have this thing called Free Speech. So all those idiots have a legal right to say such things. This doesn't mean that the rest of us believe them.
The US isn't a monolithic society in which everyone marches in lockstep and believes the nonsense spouted by our "leaders".
In fact, a fair number of us do compare ourselves to others. But the results in those cases generally come up mixed, like you'd expect. And those who make such comparisons are rarely if ever heard making such extreme claims. If you just follow the big media, you hardly hear about them at all.
Do we agree Audacity is easier?
No argument there. I use it a couple times a week.
But I keep hearing all the marvelous things about GIMP, and sometimes wonder if there's some way to learn to use it effectively. By "effectively", I don't mean doing random, uncontrolled damage to images. But so far, that's really all I've ever learned to do.
"average" users are learning the following: ...
... really? If so, the quality of the intro-level documentation must have radically improved since I last tried learning GIMP a few years ago.
4. GIMP
Hmmm
I had several versions on several machines, and a couple of different manuals. One of the first things that impressed me was that, as in earlier attempts, at least half of the examples in all the docs didn't work at all, no matter what version of GIMP I tried them with. Sometimes I got error messages, sometimes GIMP did something that wasn't recognizably like what was supposed to happen, sometimes nothing at all happened.
But my main overall impression after slogging through it was that I really hadn't learned much that was useful. Sure, I could use GIMP to make assorted changes to images, but they were almost never the changes I was trying to make, and I usually couldn't make any sense of the actual changes. I kept getting this image of driving a car in which I could turn the steering wheel and push the accelerator or brake pedals all I liked, and the car would change direction or speed, but the changes it did were uncorrellated with what I did to the controls. In effect, I could "garbage" pictures in lots of not very interesting ways, but I couldn't make intentional, controlled changes.
So if "average" users are learning to use it, what docs are they using? How would a novice user who knows nothing about GIMP go about learning to actually use it to twiddle images in a controlled fashion?
You reject the idea of there being a creator, because that must be taken on faith, yet I doubt you have any problem accepting the idea of all matter coming from the the big bang, but where did that singularity come from? At some point, it all becomes untestable, it all becomes faith.
;-). It's saying that we shouldn't claim knowledge at all until we have sufficient grounds for making such a claim.
Actually, that's not quite true. If one were to accept some conjecture about what came before or caused the Big Bang, that would require faith, because there's no way yet to collect any evidence. But most "believers" in the Big Bang don't do that. They just say "This is the earliest event that we have any evidence for, and we have no idea what if anything came before."
Saying "I don't know" is not a declaration of faith. It's a statement that you don't know and thus don't believe anything in particular.
One of the things that makes scientists more credible than religious leaders is that most scientists are willing to admit "I don't know". They try not to pretend to knowledge that they don't have.
Of course, they usually express it differently: "Further research is needed." Note that this common scientific mantra is a clear rejection of faith (as well as a request for funding
Religious people, on the other hand, have a long history of making claims to knowledge when they don't actually know at all; they just believe for no good reason.
(And there are scientists who sorta make a game of challenging the Big Bang theory. This is somewhat pro forma, and is done because no theory should ever go unchallenged. It's a losing game so far, since challenges always seem to come up favoring the Big Bang. But maybe some day, some physicist will make a big name for himself by shooting down the theory. Similarly, scientists keep coming up with new ways to challenge General Relativity, but so far General Relatively has always won.)
"Banning gay marriage?" Gay marriage has always been banned.
Actually, that's not true in the US. Rather, there was no mention of it at all in most state laws. The reason it didn't happen was that the people working at the appropriate registries simply wouldn't do it. They didn't have any law on their side; they just didn't do it. That's the situation right now in most states.
OTOH, another part of US (and some other countries') law re marriage is that there's a distinction between civil and religious marriage. You are legally married when you register with the state (or have the certificate signed in the presence of a notary). You can have a religious ceremony, that that has nothing to do with being married. However, if you want your marriages recognized by some churches, you have to have a religious marriage ceremony. Most (but not all) couples do both.
I live in Massachusetts, where the big news a few years ago was the decision by the top state court that gay marriage was legal in the state. There was no change in the law; gay marriage had always been legal. The court just said that state registries could no longer turn down marriage certificates from two people of the same sex.
Funny thing is that, before that decision, I'd attended several gay marriages. At one, the presiding clergy (a Reform rabbi) at one point observed that the state didn't recognize this marriage, but God was present and knew about it. There were jokes about how God hadn't intervened, so obviously he approved. That couple is now also registered with the state, but they had a religious marriage for several years before the state accepted it.
Of course, there is pressure now from religious groups to pass explicit laws outlawing same-sex marriage. They have realized that in most of the country, this is in fact not illegal; it just "wasn't done". This produces a bit of a quandary for much of the population: Many people don't like the idea, but they also don't like the idea of explicitly passing a law denying a minority group a right enjoyed by the rest of the population. Americans have always claimed this is the "land of the free", and it's just downright embarrassing to hear of discrimination being written into law to explicitly hurt some minority.
But many of them aren't sufficiently embarrassed to vote against such discrimination.
Since you cannot repeat evolution, it is technically not in the realm of science.
/. discussion ...
This is a common claim from those who don't understand scientific methods. My favorite way of refuting it is to say something like "Then you don't consider astronomy to be a science? Most scientists consider it one of the 'hardest' of hard sciences." This invariably produces a confused look, because of course they know that astronomy is a real science, but astronomers obviously do very little experimentation with their subject matter.
Then I go into teacher mode, and explain that there are methods called "observational science". These methods are used by astronomers, paleontologists, evolutionary biologists, and many other scientists that can't perform controlled experiments.
If they have the patience, I can also get into the importance of the theoretical parts of most scientific fields. But people who claim that you can't be scientific without repeatable experiments usually don't have the patience (or understanding) to follow that lecture.
But maybe this is too much information for a
Right. The proportion of religious believers in the US has slowly declined for decades. The problem isn't really with the general population; it's with the people running the government.
Back in the 60s and 70s, American fundamentalists made a fundamental change in their strategy. Rather than converting the masses, they switched to gaining political power. They have successfully taken over the Republican party, and have intimidated the Democrats well enough to make them compliant with many religious demands.
At lower levels, they have succeeded politically well enough that they have been able to effectively end most science education below the college level. Thus, I remember high-school teachers saying that they had to skip over the evolution chapter out of fear of reprisal, but students interested in the topic could read it themselves. Now this doesn't happen, because most of the textbooks don't mention the topic at all. Other topics less religiously offensive have just been dumbed down to near meaninglessness.
Maybe we can eventually stop the religious takeover. Or maybe not. Stay tuned.
America has to have _something_ to trade that they bought low and sell high to other consumers in the world.
America does have something to trade: US Dollars.
Actually, America has had something else very important to the issue that seems to get missed by everyone: Education.
In a couple of decades of working as a software developer, I've been quite aware of how many of my colleagues have always been people from other countries. Their stories were usually similar: They came to the US as a university student, and liked it enough to stay.
This is fairly well known in some economics and education circles. It's common to observe that one of America's major exports is education. This is especially true here in the Boston area (which has the world's largest education "plant", with about 250,000 college-level students at about 100 schools in the metro area). It's also true of California's Bay Area, which is another major concentration of colleges and universities.
One of the things that the Bush administration has done is to put major barriers in the way of non-citizens trying to get into an American school. Universities all over have reported decreases of foreign students, and it's mostly traceable to the difficulty of getting permission to stay in the country for 9 months at a time.
Meanwhile, there has been widespread harrassment of foreign tech workers. I have a number of friends (mostly computer experts of some sort) that have simply given up and "gone home", where they're more welcome. This is nice for me, maybe, since I have places to stay for free in a number of countries. But in the long term, it's not really good for American technology.
The vaunted American technology lead has always depended on immigrants. To understand why, look at the way that the lower-level American schools teach science and technology. Below the university level, this has always been pretty much a joke. Graduates of American high schools often can hardly add or subtract correctly without a calculator. But worse, they graduate with a cultural contempt for the "nerds" and "geeks" that enjoy working with that science stuff. They mostly want to be (rich) lawyers or businessmen; they expect to hire techies to do the boring stuff. Only a small minority resist this and become technically competent despite their society's contempt for them.
Discouraging technically-competent immigrants is a guaranteed slow disaster for the American economy.
Coke consists of water, a couple of cents of sugar (bad-for you stuff), caramel, caffiene, CO2 many of which are toxins. How do they make people drink the stuff? By advertising and marketing and creating an image.
... I'd counter with the argument that people choose a drink they think tastes better, and that different colas (branded or generic) have very different tastes. Pepsi, for instance, is much sweeter tasting than Coke.
Um, no. This isn't correct at all. People drink Coke for the same reason they eat too many Twinkies or doughnuts: it tastes good.
The actual story is a bit more complex, and is a bit of both. Remember the "New Coke" fiasco? In the post-mortem analyses, something interesting came out: A major difference in the formulas was that the original recipe contained real vanilla, while New Coke used vanillin. Their taste tests showed no significant differences in preference. But something they didn't understand was that only around 10% of the American population can taste vanilla. (It's a bit more complex, too, as sensitivity varies, and maybe 15-20% can detect vanilla to some degree, but only 10% are sensitive enough to respond strongly to the flavor. The rest are why the "plain vanilla" phrase is used to mean "bland, tasteless".)
To make up for vanilla's sweetness (to those sensitive to it), the old Coke used less sugar. This meant that it was favored by more than the 10% that could taste the vanilla. It also tastes better to those that like lower-sugar things like dark chocolate, black coffee, and unsweetened tea. I'm actually in both classes, so I've always preferred Coke to other colas, which are far too sweet. But to people who can't taste vanilla and don't like the bitterness of cola, coffee or chocolate with low sugar, it's just harsh.
Anyway, Coca Cola went back to their original formula, and recovered their customer base of people who like vanilla and/or bitter drinks. But part of their sales is probably from marketing. There are many people who can't tell the difference, or can but don't strongly prefer one kind. Marketing will have an effect with them.
It sorta similar to why people who get fed up with MS products will switch to a Mac. Most people who've used both OSX and linux will tell you that they prefer (distro <X> of) linux, for various reasons. But Apple has good marketing, and their stuff is markedly better than MS junk, so people buy a Mac rather than do their own market research.
Of course, you can tell with one or two sips whether you like a cola; it takes a lot more work to tell whether you like a computer system.
... a lot of creationists try to poke holes in it by saying "what's the use of half an eye" ...
It's perhaps worth mentioning that in the past couple years, researchers have discovered a very early stage of a "half eye" that has been developing for only around a millions years or so. Google for "brittle-star eye" to read about it.
It's pretty clear that this new eye is of survival value to the starfish that have it, although it is barely able to resolve anything. Its angular resolution is only around a degree or so, so the sun and moon are each less than one pixel on their visual screens. But they can detect large things moving around in their environment, and that's a good enough advantage over other starfish.
These critters' eyes are of interest to us, to, because they have evolved an interesting high-quality lense that optical researchers are trying to duplicate. It's possible that artificial brittle-star lenses might appear in some of our video equipment in the near future.
Do they think that those steps ever could have taken place if the dinosaurs were still around?
Actually, Stephen Jay Gould wrote a fair amount on this topic, as part of his "contingency" hhypothesis. This is the idea that a fair part of evolutionary development is random and accidental, and if we could reset the clock to an earlier time, things would develop differently.
He viewed the K-T extinction event as a "natural experiment" with this. Before it, there was wide diversity in both dinosaurs and mammals, but the large animals were dinosaurs. Afterwards, when things settled down, there was wide diversity in both dinosaurs (which we now call "birds") and mammals, but the large animals are mostly mammals.
Gould argued that this wasn't because back then, dinosaurs were superior, while mammals are superior now. It's more because the first time around, dinosaurs accidentally got hit by mutations that gave them the large-animal niches, and the second time around it was the mammals that got those mutations. But at smaller sizes, which is most of the ecosystem, both dinosaurs and mammals (and reptiles) were of roughly equal diversity 70 million years ago as they are today.
And, let's face it, spectacular as the giant beasts may be, it's really the mice and sparrows (and anoles) that are the important species. They'll all be around when we're long extinct, no matter what kills us.
Of course, there is a major extinction event going on right now that's wiping out most of the large species. And it's well understood what caused it this time: humans. So whatever species develops intelligence in another 10 or 50 million years will have another major extinction event to analyze and argue over. I wonder what they'll conclude?
I just opened my Thunderbird window that shows my speakeasy email account. There was a new message from Bruce Chatterley, the speakeasy CEO, talking about the Best Buyout. Above the message was the comment "Thunderbird thinks this message is junk."
It was with great sadness that I reluctantly hit the "This is Not Junk" button. I'm sure that Thunderbird now considers me an idiot, and will never trust my judgement again.
When do we start losing the right to run our own servers, and when do we start losing support for non-MS systems?
These were the two reasons I switched to speakeasy. The other so-called ISPs hereabouts sell only browser service, not internet service, and don't allow customers to run their own web or email servers. They also won't talk to you until you connect a MS Windows box to their modem. Since Best Buy is "business oriented", we can expect that they'll pressure speakeasy to adopt similar restrictions.
And when they do, what recourse do we have?
Maybe we should start talking about a class-action suit to establish that "Internet Service" means IP, not HTTP-only. Service that restrict what ports you can use shouldn't be sold as "Internet Service", but rather something like "Web Service", so you know what you're buying.
So who's to implement the VM for the next generation of CPUs? Or will we find that new CPUs can't be developed, because there's nobody left to write the lowest level VM interpreters?
Of course, if the AI people could just get their act together, we could handle the job over to the machines. But like 30 years ago, that's 5 to 10 years in the future.
What I suspect is that the numbers really just include CDs from the big-name companies.
;-)
In the past few years, I've bought a fair number of CDs, but mostly from the musicians themselves. These are recordings that you simply can't find in any of the commercial outlets, not even amazon.com. I have been duly surprised to find that most of them were known (typos and all) to CDDB, though I did have to enter the data myself for a few of them. Just yesterday a single-track CD was handed to me by a Finnish friend, and I read it into iTunes on my Mac; I was a bit bemused when it came up identified as an Australian group. Not even close. So I typed in the data by hand (and for some silly reason, one of my Terminal windows now keeps switching to the "Swedish Pro" keyboard that I used to enter the data. "It Just Works" indeed.
A growing fraction of the world's musicians are realizing that it's no longer sensible to sign any paper from a recording company. That just gives all the profits to the company. If you use your local independent recording studio and CD packager, you may not sell millions of copies, but you get all the profit yourself. Even a musician can understand what that means.
But one of the things it means is that you aren't part of the recording industry's statistics. Well, who the hell cares? We want good music, not recording industry profits.
Concurrency is a problem, but its one that you *can't* avoid. ... So how exactly do you want to write programs then? Single thread, using only 12.5% of the available computing power? I don't think so.
;-)
I don't think so either, but I intend to handle 99% of the "multi-threading" tasks in the same way that was pioneered in unix systems back in the 70's: a flock of small, communicating processes. That works quite well with most of the things that people are hyping threads for, and is debuggable.
Let's face it, writing multi-threaded code is easy. What's difficult is debugging it, because multiple threads in a single address space invalidates almost all the debugging tools we have available. But if you factor out the parallelism into separate processes (i.e., threads with separate address spaces), most of the debugging tools work.
And yes, I've built apps that run on machines with more than one processor. Back in the early 80's, I worked on a number of projects that used test machines with 50 to 200+ processors. It wasn't all that difficult with the debugging tools we had then. I have fond memories of a parallelized version of make, which took advantage of the tree of dependencies to build as much in parallel as possible, up to the limit of an environment variable that you could define. It was fun watching system builds spit out "cc" lines as fast as the display would show them, and deliver a new kernel in under a minute. I worked on a number of kernel mods that required a system build for every test, and this was really handy. But you could see from ps that make wasn't really parallelized; it forked to do the parallel work. I'd guess it took only a few dozen lines to hack this into the original make.
There may be a few tasks that actually require multi-threading withing a single process. I feel a bit sorry for the poor souls that have to debug them. I hope someone is working on debugging tools that will help. But it's not obvious what they might be. The public discussion mostly seems to devolve to "Well, if you'd just program it right, you wouldn't have bugs, dummy." Such cluelessness doesn't give one with experience a lot of hope.
(I'd work on it myself, but I don't think I have the funds for a decent test setup, and I don't see anyone trying to hire for the task. Debugging isn't a profit center in most companies. This fact also doesn't give one hope.
[P]unitive taxes that try to force people to drive less over dubious global warming concerns smacks of fascism. ...
Forcing me to pay for the health effects caused by your driving sounds more like fascism to me.
Actually, this is a case of using tax policy to obtain social objectives, and you'd have trouble finding any government anywhere that doesn't do that. There's no point in trying to pin a political label on policies implemented by all governments everywhere.
They do differ somewhat in which social policies they want to encourage or discourage, of course. But the methods don't much differ. And all too often, the actual effects of the tax policies are rather different from the publicly stated intentions.
As far as I know, down here in the South, they don't mess with or change formulations of the gasoline during the year.
;-)
Actually, they probably do, but it's not as big a change.
Does this changing of gas require any re-tuning of the cars up there?
No. If people re-tuned their cars, changing the fuel formulation wouldn't be needed. But people don't re-tune their cars to match atmospheric conditions. Rather, the fuel makers adjust their mixture so that re-tuning isn't necessary. That's what the "octane rating" is about, really; it's a measure of how volatile the blend is. In effect, the fuel mixtures are adjusted to give the same octane rating (volatility) everywhere. This requires slightly different blends depending on the average temperatures.
I've seen some discussion of the fact that many recent engines' computer controllers dynamically adjust things like the air/fuel ratio and the compression to match the fuel and air conditions. My wife and I saw this a while back when we drove our Mini Cooper from sea level to Yellowstone. It used to be that high elevations would cause problems for vehicles tuned for sea level. But the Mini handled the roads in Yellowstone (some over 9,000 feet elevation) with no problems at all. We mentioned this when we next took the car to the dealer, and the guys there just shrugged and said that the car adjusts the mixture to maximize the power. They also told us not to take seriously the official advice to use medium-octane gas, because the car's computer adjusts for that, too. One guy commented that he'd run his on pure ethanol as an experiment, and aside from the first few seconds after the fillup, it ran just fine. (The computer probably thought that the car was being driven 1000 feet below sea level, but it didn't complain.
There are others that show even greater results than switchgrass, such as members of the miscanthus family.
Minor bit of nitpicking: Miscanthus is a genus, not a family. It's a group of common ornamental grasses in some parts of the world. Two species are being used for biofuel, though it's not a major crop yet. The wikipedia article also mentions that Miscanthus grass fibers make good paper.
Good ideas, perhaps, but they just "ain't gonna happen" in the US in the near future. The reason is that the current government is run by exactly the people who benefit from all these things. They're not going to raise their own taxes. They aren't about to end their own tax shelters, onshore or off. You and I can't possibly bribe them with more money than they're making from the current system.
;-)
The only thing that stands a chance of working is to vote them out. But if you look at the past several national elections, it seems clear that the American population is unlikely to do that.
In any case, I don't know if I've ever read of a change in laws that simplified anything. Are there any documented cases of this? (Possibly; I haven't made a career of looking for them.
It's the town where a man got arrested for walking naked down State Street at 2 am. In those days he would not have attracted the attention of the police even then had he not been dragging a dead muskrat at the time. The cops said they stopped to ask where he got the muskrat.
That's probably no real mystery. I remember sitting at tables on the grass behind the Union, between the patio and the lake, late on summer evenings, and watching muskrats come ashore looking for dropped food. There are lots of muskrat dens along the shore to the west, under the path to the dorms. I thought it was interesting that most people would be disgusted when rats showed up, but muskrats would often get grins and "How cute!" comments. Probably because they're so plump. The little critters got lots of handouts, too. I also remember a few cases of dead muskrats "posing" in unlikely spots around the campus. Unfortunately for them, they become so tame that it's easy for someone with evil intent to catch them.
[Class of '68.]
Heh. My wife likes to give out her @alum.bu.edu email address, but she sometimes looks annoyed when I pronounce it with the stress on the "al" in "alum". But I figure, if they're going to name a machine after a mineral, they should expect people to pronounce the mineral's name correctly.
It also seems to me that it wouldn't actually be too difficult for a school to define both an alumnus.schoolname.edu and an alumna.schoolname.edu domain name, perhaps for the same machine, and let students use whichever they prefer. Wouldn't you expect a university to get such things right?
I'd imagine that the filling stations would have a large (probably underground) tank kept constantly pressurized, and the waste heat would be vented from the station's compressor. Filling your tank would entail rather little heat exchange. The first burst of air would enter your tank chilled, as it expands into your tank. But the net effect would be a slight chill to your vehicle.
Others have already pointed out that such vehicles would be more practical in the tropics, and IC engines better for cold climates. So it's not too surprising that initial production would be in places like India and Brazil.
In any case, we might note that compressed air as a power source is hardly anything new. Googling for "compressed-air utility" gets about 700,000 hits, and the history of such things goes back over a century. Chances are that your local auto shop uses compressed air to power many of their tools. The only real innovation here is the use of compressed air to power a mobil vehicle that wanders a good distance from the compressor.
It'll be interesting to see how successful it is a few years from now.
Ship a better search, a better advertising system than Google, a better hosting service than Amazon, a better cross-platform Web development ecosystem than Adobe, and get some services out there that are innovative ... That's how you win.
Nah; what you do is sit back and wait for the "smart guys" to develop something new that people seem to want. Then you invest minimal resources in making shoddy ripoff, so that you have resources left over to agressively market your product to the majority of people who can't tell quality from shoddy.
This is how IBM made their billions. Then Bill Gates & Co. took the idea (and a lot of IBM marketing) and ran with it. It worked quite well for both of them. And they've both managed to bankrupt most of their competitors who have the silly idea that quality counts for more than a tiny corner of the market. Yes, there's a market for quality, but it has always been a specialy niche.
Of course, to pull it off, you have to start with enough marketing clout to overwhelm your competitors' marketing efforts. IBM worked their way up, by building quality products until around 1960 or so; then they figured out that as the market leader they no longer needed quality, and switched all their efforts to marketing shoddy products. Microsoft started with an "IBM PC" advertising budget larger than the total budgets of their competitors, and have never had to make a quality product. These days, unless you have a few billion $$$ to spend, you can forget about taking that path.
It'll be interesting to see if a company like google can actually succeed and become a stable mass marketer before Microsoft finds a way to squash them with an inferior knockoff.
Are there any browsers out there that could operate with RAM only, and not save files to disc?
Yes, there are many. Most cell phones and PDAs now come with browsers, and most of them lack disks. So they must be able to run without a disk. They work entirely in memory.
Also, some years back I tested the mozilla and firefox browsers by setting their disk chache size to zero. I then tried using them, and they worked fine. I found their cache directories, and verified that no files had been added. So they apparently worked without a disk at that time. I'd guess they still do.