Show me modern physics papers that contain math that most people with any scientific or engineering background can understand, and that are just a few pages long.
I'm not a physicist, and I have an immense amount of respect for you if you've gone through grad school with a physics major. So don't take this the wrong way.
Is it possible that one of the reasons why those earlier papers were so brilliant was because they were simple? Einstein himself said, "When I'm asking simple questions, and I'm getting simple answers, I'm talking to God."
I'm a big fan of elegant simplicity; I'm suspicious about systems that seem too complex, because -- in my experience -- complexity in a system is an indication of an incomplete understanding of the system. Often, the complexity comes from "hacks" to work around some fundamental flaw in the original theory/design.
Again, IANAP, and my world view may be inapplicable to physics, but if people such as Einstein and Schroedinger were as recently as the 20's and 30's were publishing (relatively) simple, ground-breaking physics papers, then I'm inclined to think not.
Parents keep secrets from children because that's better for them.
Well... you may consider yourself a child, but I don't consider myself one.
There's really no correlation between Bush's position and a parent's position. If we accept your premise that there are cases where the president should be allowed to keep secrets, then you might reasonably argue that it can do so because it knows more than the public. However, one of the following is true:
Bush really believed the intel he was given about Iraq, intel which was entirely fucked. In which case, he doesn't know more than the public, and he has no justifiable reason to keep secrets.
Bush didn't care about the intel; he was going to go do whatever he wanted anyway. In which case, he was lying, and has no justifiable reason to keep secrets.
After this, though, your logic becomes truly baffling.
If you're not doing anything wrong, what do you care if somebody knows about it.
Who are you talking about? The government? Or the "idiot liberals"? I mean, if you believe that statement, then it should apply to everybody, right? Including the administration. So, why are they keeping secrets? Doesn't it imply that they're doing something wrong?
Last i knew, leaking government secrets was treason and they still executed people for that. We can only hope.
So that means the bears that do survive will be better swimmers than previous. Evolution wins again!
... and, eventually, their front legs will turn into fins, and their hind legs will fuse into one large fin, all to help them swim further. And they'll get sued by the seals for patent infringement.
Come on, give the old guy a break there was a hell of a lot more to the article than that one quote.
You do understand who you're talking to, right? And that there's no way they're going to actually RTFA.
Fanatics are identified by their inability to entertain any version of reality but the one they subscribe to. Woz criticizes Apple, ergo Woz is incompetent. Or crazy, or senile. It is simply impossible for Apple to do anything wrong, and to suggest otherwise is heresy. And, because most fanatics are also fuzzy on the concept of "logic", argumentum ad hominem and anything that Woz has to say is bunk. So why RTFA? I do the same thing every time somebody comes out with a "Windows is more reliable and lower cost than Linux" study.
Any fanatic behaves this way, but the ones who feel persecuted are the most rabid, followed by the ones who know they're wrong but can't admit it without their world falling apart.
Slashdot: Spam for Readers. Page Rank for * * Beatles-Beatles.
I have a question about this: how is what he's doing functionally any different than if I were to comment on the artical (as I'm doing right now) and change my URL for every comment? Now that I think about it, how is what he's doing worse than what I'm doing, since I have a URL of my own attached to this comment? Is it because he keeps changing his URL? Would I be guilty of the same offense if I changed my URL to one that isn't associated with me, or would I have to actually alter my URL frequently to be playing foul? Are the stories he submits dups, or not interesting? How are they any different than any other submission?
No, seriously. I mean, I'm getting Google ranks by commenting here, aren't I? Assuming that I get modded up enough to appear at whatever filter level Google scans at. In fact, I'm getting more rank hits to my URL than Beagle-Beagle because my URL never changes. Does Google not rank the URLs that appear in comments? How is Beagle-Beagle getting more Google rank hits on this thread than I am?
I must me misunderstanding how this all works. If I'm going to be pissed at this guy, I'd like to know the reason why.
Why would you introduce something into an environment that nobody really knows how to use?
Oh, Windows sys admins aren't that stupid. In fact, IME, most sys admins who are administering Windows networks have some experience administering Linux boxen.
The difficulty lies in teaching the PHBs that, although network administration is black magic voodoo to them, it isn't rocket science, and their admins will pick it up quickly with very little training. They don't have to send them back to college, and it is unlikely that they'll even have to hire new people.
And what if the system malfunctions and you are unable to get to the hospital in time and someone dies?
To quote Bobcat Goldthwait:
I'll never have to work another day in my life. A day at work will be going out to the mailbox... "Hello, check! Time to go catch up on some Flinstones!"
The biggest problem in defending yourself against an enemy in space is that it can come from virtually any direction
Yeah, this is a problem. Well, this is conjunction with the fact that the Earth is, effectively, an immovable object. With that knowledge, it becomes relatively easy to destroy all life on a planet. If you can't move, you can't dodge, and the most effective weapon against an object that can't dodge is a kinetic bomb.
With some reasonable CPU power, you can calculate pretty accurately the position of the Earth at a given point in the near future. If you know that, it is pretty cheap to wipe out the planet. All you need to do is grab a big rock and accelerate it toward where the Earth will be when you calculate the rock will get there. If you get it going a reasonable percentage of C, we'd have practically no warning.
You could even get creative and -- by choosing the size of your rock and/or the velocity upon impact -- cause an Event that would mostly wipe out the higher life forms, or just cause significant disruption to the humans. And if you missed, you could try it again... what are we going to do about it? We can't move the planet, and anything coming at us that fast won't be detectable in time to do anything about it.
Incidentally, in Ender's Game the weapon had a side effect of being a planet-buster, which is what made Ender's gambit effective. Their weapons were Magic -- if all he'd had were some nukes, or any weapon we could build with today's technology, it wouldn't have mattered (much) that he could get through their defenses. Sure, he could have caused them some trouble, but he wouldn't have been able to wipe out their planet and (thereby) end the war. A kinetic bomb wouldn't have been such an exciting climax to the story, or let Ender surprise everybody with his tactic, though.
Apple charged the clone vendors too little for the OS.
There's probably some truth to this. On the other hand, there's very little difference between charging outrageous fees and not allowing any licensing at all.
The general concensus at the time was that Apple's hardware division had to much political clout within the company, and were able to force the software division to stop licensing the OS because it was hurting their ability to hit their sales targets.
Mac OS X will not be available on any old x86 PC, though, as Apple wants to retain control over its hardware platform.
Right, Apple wants the fastest, smoothest and most gorgeous OS. It won't run on any old X86. You don't see V12 engines in Hyundais either. You don't see marble floors in Section 8 housing. You don't see big, soft seats in coach class.
Boy, you're either really young, or have a selective memory.
Back in the mid 90's, Apple was licensing MacOS to third-party clones, who did provide much less expensive hardware, which were popular and did undercut Apple's hardware sales. As a result, Apple did stop licensing MacOS to third party hardware vendors, putting at least one company out of business and sinking the product lines of severalothers.
So, yeah... Apple's reasons for not wanting people to install their OS on anything but their own hardware has nothing to do with "Quality" and has everything to do with protecting their margins on hardware.
121 % cat test.java public class test { public static final void main( String[] args ) { System.out.println("Hey"); } } 122 % cat test.c #include <stdio.h>
int main( int argc, char** argv ) { printf("Hey\n"); } 123 % cat test.rb puts "Hey"
The results:
117 % time java -cp . test Hey java -cp . test 0.08s user 0.01s system 48% cpu 0.183 total 118 % time./a.out Hey ./a.out 0.00s user 0.00s system 20% cpu 0.005 total 119 % time ruby test.rb Hey ruby test.rb 0.00s user 0.00s system 7% cpu 0.101 total
The breakdown:
Java used 2x as much CPU as C, and 6x as much CPU as Ruby
Java took twice as long as ruby, and 36 times as long as C
That's with a trivial app, with almost no classes to load. The difference is much more noticable with even small applications. I have a to-do list manager written in Ruby, Java, and Haskell; this isn't a complex or large application, and Java is noticably and significantly slower than either the Ruby or Haskell version.
Again, if there's any significant processing, Java's speed starts to make a difference; for any small one-off app, the startup lag is significant. All you've proven is that for sufficiently trivial applications on sufficiently fast computers, the difference isn't noticable.
They need to try this in more than warm, sunny southern California.
Yeah, say somewhere like... Pennsylvania. Now, if only we could find someone in Pennsylvania willing to do this sort of test... hmmm...
Oh, heck. For the good of the nation, I'll do it.
--- SER
P.S. For a low, low fee, I'm also available for testing the psychological effects of being given large amounts of cash; the long-term physiological effects of Segway use; and the ergonomics of ultra-high-end laptops.
It depends on what you mean by "slow." If you're talking about long running processes, then no, it isn't slow at all; in fact, it is quite fast. If you're talking about short-running processes, then the JVM startup time overshadows any commendable performance.
Ruby is much, much slower than Java when it comes to raw computational power, but I still use it when I'm writing non-server process apps, simply because it starts up so much more quickly.
My main complaint about Java, though, is that it is a memory hog. If I recall correctly, MacOS's answer to Java's startup lag is to pre-load a VM, which makes executing Java apps quite quick. However, the last thing I want is Java running in the background when I'm not using it, hogging my system resources.
The memory and startup issue is why I think you don't see a whole lot of Java apps, and when you do see them, they're far less popular (on average) than native apps -- even native apps that are less capable than the Java version. The obvious exception to this (that proves the rule) is Eclipse, which has won enormous mindshare even among non-Java developers.
If need be, I highly recommend that the US resign from the UN and see how long it holds together without our monetary support.
Before you got on about the UN's ability to function without our monetary support, perhaps you should read this. We already don't pay our bills; maybe we should threaten to take away their birthdays, too.
I can only speak for myself, but I would be ashamed of my government's actions if I lived in one of the UN countries that is pushing this resolution.
Well, heck... we re-elected Bush. They could spend the next decade doing stupid things and still not do anything as embarrassing as re-electing somebody like Bush.
I don't trust our govornment with monopoly control of the internet... why should they?
I don't know what pisses me off more, the government sticking its dick in everyones proverbial ass, or the parents that expect laws to do their jobs for them.
I'm in utter agreement with you. Just for the sake of the argument, and to play devil's advocate, I'd like to put forward something that I've heard said, and although I think the logic has problems, I still think it is worth thinking about.
We want to require parents to be responsible for their children. However, America also imposes restrictions on how parents can parent. We require parents to send children to public schools, which exposes children to outside, undermining influences. We restrict the amount of physical and emotional negative reinforcement that parents can mete out to their children. We don't enforce dual-parent, single incode households so that one parent can have time to raise the children. In short, we force parents to let society raise their children, so why should they have any responsibility?
Shit like this is proof positive that democracies and republics are goddamn shams, because damn near everyone is goddamn stupid and their combined ineptitude ends up fucking the whole thing up.
That's why we have courts: to protect the minority from the predjudice of the majority. That's why I oppose John Roberts; he believes that the courts should stay out of social issues, which effectively reduces America to mob rule. The court system is the only thing keeping America as relatively free as it is -- and by "free" I mean protecting everybody's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I can't see how stopping somebody from marrying the person they want to isn't a restriction of their happiness.
Incidentally, you'll probably appreciate this quote:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. --- Sir Alex Fraser Tytler
In a democracy, people get the government they deserve.
This is so true, it isn't funny. Unfortunately, the minority of us who don't have our heads up our asses have to wear T-shirts with maple leaves on them whenever we take trips outside the states. I've been practicing saying "eh", "hosehead", and "aboot", too.
There is some evidence about voting irregularities in Ohio and Florida that suggest that Bush may ot have won the most recent election (not to mention the questions around the first election), so it is still possible that the majority of Americans aren't stupid. Regardless, it is a pretty sad state of affairs that enough Americans voted for him that he could even plausibly win.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it possible that one of the reasons why those earlier papers were so brilliant was because they were simple? Einstein himself said, "When I'm asking simple questions, and I'm getting simple answers, I'm talking to God."
I'm a big fan of elegant simplicity; I'm suspicious about systems that seem too complex, because -- in my experience -- complexity in a system is an indication of an incomplete understanding of the system. Often, the complexity comes from "hacks" to work around some fundamental flaw in the original theory/design.
Again, IANAP, and my world view may be inapplicable to physics, but if people such as Einstein and Schroedinger were as recently as the 20's and 30's were publishing (relatively) simple, ground-breaking physics papers, then I'm inclined to think not.
--- SER
--- SER
http://www.grokster.com/?thanks_for_your_free_ip_ information_service_could_you_add_some_helpful_fea tures_like_trace_ping_and_dns_info_please
--- SER
There's really no correlation between Bush's position and a parent's position. If we accept your premise that there are cases where the president should be allowed to keep secrets, then you might reasonably argue that it can do so because it knows more than the public. However, one of the following is true:
After this, though, your logic becomes truly baffling.
Who are you talking about? The government? Or the "idiot liberals"? I mean, if you believe that statement, then it should apply to everybody, right? Including the administration. So, why are they keeping secrets? Doesn't it imply that they're doing something wrong? If so, then things certainly look bleak for the Bush Administration!--- SER
You do understand who you're talking to, right? And that there's no way they're going to actually RTFA.
Fanatics are identified by their inability to entertain any version of reality but the one they subscribe to. Woz criticizes Apple, ergo Woz is incompetent. Or crazy, or senile. It is simply impossible for Apple to do anything wrong, and to suggest otherwise is heresy. And, because most fanatics are also fuzzy on the concept of "logic", argumentum ad hominem and anything that Woz has to say is bunk. So why RTFA? I do the same thing every time somebody comes out with a "Windows is more reliable and lower cost than Linux" study.
Any fanatic behaves this way, but the ones who feel persecuted are the most rabid, followed by the ones who know they're wrong but can't admit it without their world falling apart.
--- SER
No, seriously. I mean, I'm getting Google ranks by commenting here, aren't I? Assuming that I get modded up enough to appear at whatever filter level Google scans at. In fact, I'm getting more rank hits to my URL than Beagle-Beagle because my URL never changes. Does Google not rank the URLs that appear in comments? How is Beagle-Beagle getting more Google rank hits on this thread than I am?
I must me misunderstanding how this all works. If I'm going to be pissed at this guy, I'd like to know the reason why.
--- SER
Oh, Windows sys admins aren't that stupid. In fact, IME, most sys admins who are administering Windows networks have some experience administering Linux boxen.
The difficulty lies in teaching the PHBs that, although network administration is black magic voodoo to them, it isn't rocket science, and their admins will pick it up quickly with very little training. They don't have to send them back to college, and it is unlikely that they'll even have to hire new people.
--- SER
To quote Bobcat Goldthwait:
--- SER
Dibs on the name "Doctor Octopus".
--- SER
With some reasonable CPU power, you can calculate pretty accurately the position of the Earth at a given point in the near future. If you know that, it is pretty cheap to wipe out the planet. All you need to do is grab a big rock and accelerate it toward where the Earth will be when you calculate the rock will get there. If you get it going a reasonable percentage of C, we'd have practically no warning.
You could even get creative and -- by choosing the size of your rock and/or the velocity upon impact -- cause an Event that would mostly wipe out the higher life forms, or just cause significant disruption to the humans. And if you missed, you could try it again... what are we going to do about it? We can't move the planet, and anything coming at us that fast won't be detectable in time to do anything about it.
Incidentally, in Ender's Game the weapon had a side effect of being a planet-buster, which is what made Ender's gambit effective. Their weapons were Magic -- if all he'd had were some nukes, or any weapon we could build with today's technology, it wouldn't have mattered (much) that he could get through their defenses. Sure, he could have caused them some trouble, but he wouldn't have been able to wipe out their planet and (thereby) end the war. A kinetic bomb wouldn't have been such an exciting climax to the story, or let Ender surprise everybody with his tactic, though.
--- SER
I... I hear the words, but... somehow, they don't make any sense.
--- SER
There's probably some truth to this. On the other hand, there's very little difference between charging outrageous fees and not allowing any licensing at all.
The general concensus at the time was that Apple's hardware division had to much political clout within the company, and were able to force the software division to stop licensing the OS because it was hurting their ability to hit their sales targets.
--- SER
--- SER
Boy, you're either really young, or have a selective memory.
Back in the mid 90's, Apple was licensing MacOS to third-party clones, who did provide much less expensive hardware, which were popular and did undercut Apple's hardware sales. As a result, Apple did stop licensing MacOS to third party hardware vendors, putting at least one company out of business and sinking the product lines of several others.
So, yeah... Apple's reasons for not wanting people to install their OS on anything but their own hardware has nothing to do with "Quality" and has everything to do with protecting their margins on hardware.
--- SER
--- SER
- Java used 2x as much CPU as C, and 6x as much CPU as Ruby
- Java took twice as long as ruby, and 36 times as long as C
That's with a trivial app, with almost no classes to load. The difference is much more noticable with even small applications. I have a to-do list manager written in Ruby, Java, and Haskell; this isn't a complex or large application, and Java is noticably and significantly slower than either the Ruby or Haskell version.Again, if there's any significant processing, Java's speed starts to make a difference; for any small one-off app, the startup lag is significant. All you've proven is that for sufficiently trivial applications on sufficiently fast computers, the difference isn't noticable.
Oh, heck. For the good of the nation, I'll do it.
--- SER
P.S. For a low, low fee, I'm also available for testing the psychological effects of being given large amounts of cash; the long-term physiological effects of Segway use; and the ergonomics of ultra-high-end laptops.
It depends on what you mean by "slow." If you're talking about long running processes, then no, it isn't slow at all; in fact, it is quite fast. If you're talking about short-running processes, then the JVM startup time overshadows any commendable performance.
Ruby is much, much slower than Java when it comes to raw computational power, but I still use it when I'm writing non-server process apps, simply because it starts up so much more quickly.
My main complaint about Java, though, is that it is a memory hog. If I recall correctly, MacOS's answer to Java's startup lag is to pre-load a VM, which makes executing Java apps quite quick. However, the last thing I want is Java running in the background when I'm not using it, hogging my system resources.
The memory and startup issue is why I think you don't see a whole lot of Java apps, and when you do see them, they're far less popular (on average) than native apps -- even native apps that are less capable than the Java version. The obvious exception to this (that proves the rule) is Eclipse, which has won enormous mindshare even among non-Java developers.
--- SER
If I'd only had mod points... dude, that was waaay funny.
Details are in wikipedia
--- SER
I don't trust our govornment with monopoly control of the internet... why should they?
We want to require parents to be responsible for their children. However, America also imposes restrictions on how parents can parent. We require parents to send children to public schools, which exposes children to outside, undermining influences. We restrict the amount of physical and emotional negative reinforcement that parents can mete out to their children. We don't enforce dual-parent, single incode households so that one parent can have time to raise the children. In short, we force parents to let society raise their children, so why should they have any responsibility?
That's why we have courts: to protect the minority from the predjudice of the majority. That's why I oppose John Roberts; he believes that the courts should stay out of social issues, which effectively reduces America to mob rule. The court system is the only thing keeping America as relatively free as it is -- and by "free" I mean protecting everybody's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I can't see how stopping somebody from marrying the person they want to isn't a restriction of their happiness.Incidentally, you'll probably appreciate this quote:
There is some evidence about voting irregularities in Ohio and Florida that suggest that Bush may ot have won the most recent election (not to mention the questions around the first election), so it is still possible that the majority of Americans aren't stupid. Regardless, it is a pretty sad state of affairs that enough Americans voted for him that he could even plausibly win.
--- SER