With a general purpose language tied to a drawing library I can make custom graphics? Holy crap, who would have thought. For those of us who just want to generate some simple graphs for papers and such, what do people use? I've messed with Excel, gnuplot, R, and now I'm using ploticus. Anyone have better solutions?
If you find this stuff interesting, check out a book called Parasite Rex. It has all the gory details of these and a bunch of other parasites. For example, there's a fluke that lives in a snail, but needs to enter a bird to complete it's life cycle. It actually pushes the snail's eyestalk out and waves around to get the attention of predators.
Alright, lets go with that math. Personally, I think 1% would be a little low for that portion of Virginia, but let's compromise to 1%. He KILLED 32, shot a couple dozen more. IF he ONLY encountered the people who were shot, and this is EXTREMELY unlikely, and 1% were armed he would have around a 50% chance of running into someone carrying. That's flipping a coin. Heads someone is shooting back, tails no one is. You know what? I like those odds better than 0% allowed to carry in the area.
Well, for one thing it is cultural to some degree. I grew up in the south east (north central FL) and was around guns fairly regularly. I'm comfortable with them. Shoot, going out to a range with a friend and a box of 22 rounds can be a nice way to pass an afternoon. They do make it easier for one person to kill another, and especially for something like this to happen, but banning them doesn't mean the crazies won't find another way. No reason this couldn't have been a suicide bomber because you can't ban all the combinations of chemicals that can be made into such devices.
Another thing to remember is that guns have a great equalizing effect. Sure, the thug could pull a gun and kill you, but you have the ability to do the same. In this country even someones grandmother could be carrying a handgun in the big purse. She might even know how to use it. Firearms do put power in the hands of weaker people that they wouldn't have otherwise. Take a big guy who discovers he can get what he wants through force, now give the victim a firearm, big dude is less dangerous.
And let's go to the last/best argument. The cat is out of the bag. Guns are scattered through our country now. If you banned them it would have little if any effect in the short or medium term. Well, the black market value would probably go up, and law abiding citizens would be more unarmed, but neither of those is good. They've been such a part of our culture for so long that removing them now just isn't a viable option. Shoot, I know a number of law abiding citizens that just wouldn't give them up, let alone criminals.
Personally, I have very little problem with concealed carry laws. One day I may carry a gun myself. Unlikely, but I don't have a feeling of disgust about it. That said, I think people should have some very good training, regular re-examinations, psychological testing, etc. before they are allowed to carry.
I'm more of a pro-gun liberal. I grew up in the SE around guns, and personally, I'd be thrilled if the hunter's safety course was at least required for gun ownership. I don't think it's enough training either, but at least it's something. I mean, gun safety ain't rocket science. Only point it at something you want to die. Maybe a little addition about locking it up safe. That's pretty much it. Ideally we'd see this sort of training as a general requirement on the populace. I mean, come on, we're only talking about a few days of training here, and I'm not asking everyone to own a gun, just have a very basic idea how to properly handle one and what they can do.
I think you touched on the biggest problem. You can ban them all you want, but that doesn't remove the millions already in circulation.
I always LOVED that slogan. "Hi! we're looking for psycopathic loners. Who wants to be trained to kill and dropped behind enemy lines? Raise your hands."
the existance of State organisations in a field is like penicillin in a petri dish.
Yeah, seriously, like the US Postal Service. If only they'd shut down then private companies could start shipping packages. And the pharmacutical companies. I mean they're research is just being held back by the existance of things like the NIH and CDC.
No rule is absolute, regardless of how strongly you believe it, even this one =).
Of course there's always a chance of this, but as long as we're using the best current science possible to make the decision to use this or not, then it's really all you can ask for. Also, keep in mind that it'll have to be pretty bad for you to be worse than the smog it removes.
Agreed. I'm currently playing with a media box I put together for a lot less than 2200. Of course, my demand for bells and whistles is fairly low. I personally prefer a small, quiet, media box, so I use the Antec Aria case. It doesnt have a lot of room, but it can hold a reasonable motherboard (MSI something... cant remember right now), TV card, and a DVD drive. I also have to disagree with the article where it talks about using a keyboard instead of the remote. Personally, when I'm using my media box I really just wish I could not think and use 1 button, not a keyboard worth. Oh well, someday I'll have the voice controlled media box done =). For now, with MythTV and Lirc it does pretty much anything I need.
<shameless type="shill"> And if you want to buy a premade Lirc (or WinLirc) homebrew transceiver, or assemble it yourself, I might have what you need. </shameless>
That sounds great and all, but do you have any idea of the complexity, and therefore cost involved? Ever tried to debug something consisting of 10000 lines, let alone something the size of an OS? No bugs is just not realistic, and truly a better goal is to ensure that when bugs are found they have minimal impact (like ensure users aren't running as root) and patch them in reasonable time (days to weeks, not months to years).
Now on the topic of this bug counting, if windows is lumped together then linux should be to some degree too, but on the same order of magnitude. A half dozen distros, maybe even mirror the windows counting a little more and make some of those distros be older but still supported ones. Also, the various unixes and linux are entirely different beasts. Just because they try and present a somewhat compatible user interface and APIs doesn't mean that they should be grouped into one object when counting bugs.
Arg, that gristle and fat is good, depending on the cooking method. When you end up with unappetizing wads of the stuff someone just didn't treat that piece of meat right. Those big steaks with huge lines of gristle would be better off making a stew or pot roast. That fillet should be seared and little else done. Trim that fat off that brisket *after* I slow cook with it on top.
"Ensure it's grown very lean, so you can market it as a healthier alternative as well."
Make lean an adjustable knob and I'll be happier. I can't tell you how tired of the leanest cuts of meat cooked to medium well because the resturant gives you no other choices (or the chef doesn't know when to pull the meat just for lack of experience). Some times fat and connective tissue are a good thing. Ribs wouldn't be ribs, pot roast wouldn't be pot roast, and dark meat chicken wouldnt be dark meat chicken.
By the way, am I the extreme minority of people that think the white meat chicken craze is insane? That the way places cook their supposedly wonderful chicken breasts results in a dry, flavorless bundle of white fibers? The only time I've really enjoyed a chicken breast in years my girlfriend commented that it had the wrong consistency... "well, thats because this one wasnt overcooked...." One last thing about the overcooking of meat, check out the temperatures actually required to kill 99% of the nasty bugs, and compare to the temperatures recommended (or in some organizational cases required) by the government. Lets just say there's a little bit of headroom.
Re:Living On Mars? A Little Dose Of Reality
on
Ice Lake on Mars
·
· Score: 1, Troll
So where did you snag this gem from? First off, like NASA can't plan ahead for a freaking launch window. You act like hitting the launch window that would allow for travel to and from mars would be a miracle. It's hilarious, almost like when the landers just happened to head to Mars at the time it was closest to earth in line 100 years. News agencies reported as if this was some kind of happy coincidence, not like people have been plotting planetary movement into the past and future for hundreds of years (thousands in some cases, but we're a bit more accurate these days). I like the quote near the end:
snip...Currently the Russian Mir space station is one place where astronauts can stay for extended periods of time, and research into these effect is ongoing...snip...it will probably be necessary to construct a larger space station to be used as a staging ground for the mission to Mars....snip
Love to know how they're doing continuing research on MIR. Or that the construction of a larger station is just an idea... not like we have people staying on one. Nice job, try reading all the stolen text first, maybe bringing it a little more up-to-date than just tacking a line about shuttle debris on the front. By the way, shit *always* fell off the shuttle. If we look for that problem we're going to find it, but someone ranted about this recently here so I'll skip the discussion.
I usually dont reply to ACs, but come on. Of course user has different meanings. People running protein folding simulations on super computers are users. So is grandma who needs a machine that automatically opens her email. As for the claim that open-source patches are better, they are, for those high end users who care to patch things themselves. For the rest of us, a distro will get the patched version of their binaries out to end users fast enough.
As for the playpen comment. Screw you, lots of people use linux for serious work, both desktop and commonly in the server room. Those supercomputers? not running windows. many running linux. Its getting to the point that you don't have to be an expert to run the system, yes its taken a while, but when it's made by the experts generally for the experts usability is not necessarily the top priority.
Yes I play on my linux box, try the newest stuff, etc. I also write web pages (rarely), do all my correspondence, write software for my job, and play media and games on linux. Basically I do the same things I would do on windows, and I find it less annoying to work with. This is mostly due to the fact that knowing enough about the internals means that I can swear at MS for not providing the expert level interface to go with their wizards. Sometimes a command line is more efficient (Ms may be getting the message if they really are revamping their CLI).
Lets take the words apart: cyclic - as in circular, comes back to the original point. example: phases of the moon
dependency - something depended on. program A depends on library B, B is a dependency of A. Of course, B may depend on C.
Putting it all together: circle of dependencies A depends on B depends on C depends on A Makes it really hard to decide what to do first. Chicken and the egg problem.
If you have a problem figuring out what this all means, at least head for a linux that is built more for an enduser (I've heard good things about ubuntu, mandrake is usually alright, but I don't have direct experience with either).
I agree with you to some degree, but what's wrong with marking certain points in time as "distro. X version Y" The marking is orthogonal to what you're suggesting and plays a valuable role for tracking problems. If someone asks me to look at a box and says it has RH9.0 on it I know about what I'm looking at. Makes life a lot easier. For boxes that I admin and am familiar with I know what they are and what to expect, but being able to sum up the software install in a sentence is really useful when I need to look at a different box.
Also, keep in mind that some upgrades are pretty major, and do break a number of things (think of something like the glibc API changing). Having a distro version number that corresponds to when that happened is once again useful to keep administration simpler. Supporting all possible combinations of packages is untenable, however, supporting an updated distro X version Y is a little simpler.
You do realize where people found carbon nanotubes first, right? soot. as in from fire. as in has been in the atmosphere since the beginning of time. Sure the quantities may be slightly higher, but I'll bet not burning a few acres of rainforest/year would even that right out.
Probably the mass? I.e. different material => different density => different mass. We can pretty simply observe the size, but without seeing interactions with other objects figuring out the mass requires some guesswork.
Slashdot Mirror
With a general purpose language tied to a drawing library I can make custom graphics? Holy crap, who would have thought. For those of us who just want to generate some simple graphs for papers and such, what do people use? I've messed with Excel, gnuplot, R, and now I'm using ploticus. Anyone have better solutions?
If you find this stuff interesting, check out a book called Parasite Rex. It has all the gory details of these and a bunch of other parasites. For example, there's a fluke that lives in a snail, but needs to enter a bird to complete it's life cycle. It actually pushes the snail's eyestalk out and waves around to get the attention of predators.
Alright, lets go with that math. Personally, I think 1% would be a little low for that portion of Virginia, but let's compromise to 1%. He KILLED 32, shot a couple dozen more. IF he ONLY encountered the people who were shot, and this is EXTREMELY unlikely, and 1% were armed he would have around a 50% chance of running into someone carrying. That's flipping a coin. Heads someone is shooting back, tails no one is. You know what? I like those odds better than 0% allowed to carry in the area.
Well, for one thing it is cultural to some degree. I grew up in the south east (north central FL) and was around guns fairly regularly. I'm comfortable with them. Shoot, going out to a range with a friend and a box of 22 rounds can be a nice way to pass an afternoon. They do make it easier for one person to kill another, and especially for something like this to happen, but banning them doesn't mean the crazies won't find another way. No reason this couldn't have been a suicide bomber because you can't ban all the combinations of chemicals that can be made into such devices.
Another thing to remember is that guns have a great equalizing effect. Sure, the thug could pull a gun and kill you, but you have the ability to do the same. In this country even someones grandmother could be carrying a handgun in the big purse. She might even know how to use it. Firearms do put power in the hands of weaker people that they wouldn't have otherwise. Take a big guy who discovers he can get what he wants through force, now give the victim a firearm, big dude is less dangerous.
And let's go to the last/best argument. The cat is out of the bag. Guns are scattered through our country now. If you banned them it would have little if any effect in the short or medium term. Well, the black market value would probably go up, and law abiding citizens would be more unarmed, but neither of those is good. They've been such a part of our culture for so long that removing them now just isn't a viable option. Shoot, I know a number of law abiding citizens that just wouldn't give them up, let alone criminals.
Personally, I have very little problem with concealed carry laws. One day I may carry a gun myself. Unlikely, but I don't have a feeling of disgust about it. That said, I think people should have some very good training, regular re-examinations, psychological testing, etc. before they are allowed to carry.
Have you seen Cowboy Neal? Unfortunately, it's still overlords.
I'm more of a pro-gun liberal. I grew up in the SE around guns, and personally, I'd be thrilled if the hunter's safety course was at least required for gun ownership. I don't think it's enough training either, but at least it's something. I mean, gun safety ain't rocket science. Only point it at something you want to die. Maybe a little addition about locking it up safe. That's pretty much it. Ideally we'd see this sort of training as a general requirement on the populace. I mean, come on, we're only talking about a few days of training here, and I'm not asking everyone to own a gun, just have a very basic idea how to properly handle one and what they can do.
I think you touched on the biggest problem. You can ban them all you want, but that doesn't remove the millions already in circulation.
I always LOVED that slogan. "Hi! we're looking for psycopathic loners. Who wants to be trained to kill and dropped behind enemy lines? Raise your hands."
the existance of State organisations in a field is like penicillin in a petri dish.
Yeah, seriously, like the US Postal Service. If only they'd shut down then private companies could start shipping packages. And the pharmacutical companies. I mean they're research is just being held back by the existance of things like the NIH and CDC.
No rule is absolute, regardless of how strongly you believe it, even this one =).
Of course there's always a chance of this, but as long as we're using the best current science possible to make the decision to use this or not, then it's really all you can ask for. Also, keep in mind that it'll have to be pretty bad for you to be worse than the smog it removes.
Papers please, Comrade?
Thank you US gov't. Wanna just light that annoying "Bill of Rights" on fire? Seems more direct.
Yeah, seriously, I just set up my myth 0.19 box YESTERDAY.
Agreed. I'm currently playing with a media box I put together for a lot less than 2200. Of course, my demand for bells and whistles is fairly low. I personally prefer a small, quiet, media box, so I use the Antec Aria case. It doesnt have a lot of room, but it can hold a reasonable motherboard (MSI something... cant remember right now), TV card, and a DVD drive. I also have to disagree with the article where it talks about using a keyboard instead of the remote. Personally, when I'm using my media box I really just wish I could not think and use 1 button, not a keyboard worth. Oh well, someday I'll have the voice controlled media box done =). For now, with MythTV and Lirc it does pretty much anything I need.
<shameless type="shill">
And if you want to buy a premade Lirc (or WinLirc) homebrew transceiver, or assemble it yourself, I might have what you need.
</shameless>
keep the iris closed... problem will resolve itself.
That sounds great and all, but do you have any idea of the complexity, and therefore cost involved? Ever tried to debug something consisting of 10000 lines, let alone something the size of an OS? No bugs is just not realistic, and truly a better goal is to ensure that when bugs are found they have minimal impact (like ensure users aren't running as root) and patch them in reasonable time (days to weeks, not months to years).
Now on the topic of this bug counting, if windows is lumped together then linux should be to some degree too, but on the same order of magnitude. A half dozen distros, maybe even mirror the windows counting a little more and make some of those distros be older but still supported ones. Also, the various unixes and linux are entirely different beasts. Just because they try and present a somewhat compatible user interface and APIs doesn't mean that they should be grouped into one object when counting bugs.
Clearing the screen when you logout is done (or at least was on my machines) by the .bash_logout.
Come on, just move the keyboard under your head and bash away.... it'll make a valid sendmail config....
Arg, that gristle and fat is good, depending on the cooking method. When you end up with unappetizing wads of the stuff someone just didn't treat that piece of meat right. Those big steaks with huge lines of gristle would be better off making a stew or pot roast. That fillet should be seared and little else done. Trim that fat off that brisket *after* I slow cook with it on top.
"Ensure it's grown very lean, so you can market it as a healthier alternative as well."
Make lean an adjustable knob and I'll be happier. I can't tell you how tired of the leanest cuts of meat cooked to medium well because the resturant gives you no other choices (or the chef doesn't know when to pull the meat just for lack of experience). Some times fat and connective tissue are a good thing. Ribs wouldn't be ribs, pot roast wouldn't be pot roast, and dark meat chicken wouldnt be dark meat chicken.
By the way, am I the extreme minority of people that think the white meat chicken craze is insane? That the way places cook their supposedly wonderful chicken breasts results in a dry, flavorless bundle of white fibers? The only time I've really enjoyed a chicken breast in years my girlfriend commented that it had the wrong consistency... "well, thats because this one wasnt overcooked...." One last thing about the overcooking of meat, check out the temperatures actually required to kill 99% of the nasty bugs, and compare to the temperatures recommended (or in some organizational cases required) by the government. Lets just say there's a little bit of headroom.
So where did you snag this gem from? First off, like NASA can't plan ahead for a freaking launch window. You act like hitting the launch window that would allow for travel to and from mars would be a miracle. It's hilarious, almost like when the landers just happened to head to Mars at the time it was closest to earth in line 100 years. News agencies reported as if this was some kind of happy coincidence, not like people have been plotting planetary movement into the past and future for hundreds of years (thousands in some cases, but we're a bit more accurate these days). I like the quote near the end:
snip...Currently the Russian Mir space station is one place where astronauts can stay for extended periods of time, and research into these effect is ongoing...snip...it will probably be necessary to construct a larger space station to be used as a staging ground for the mission to Mars....snip
Love to know how they're doing continuing research on MIR. Or that the construction of a larger station is just an idea... not like we have people staying on one. Nice job, try reading all the stolen text first, maybe bringing it a little more up-to-date than just tacking a line about shuttle debris on the front. By the way, shit *always* fell off the shuttle. If we look for that problem we're going to find it, but someone ranted about this recently here so I'll skip the discussion.
I usually dont reply to ACs, but come on. Of course user has different meanings. People running protein folding simulations on super computers are users. So is grandma who needs a machine that automatically opens her email. As for the claim that open-source patches are better, they are, for those high end users who care to patch things themselves. For the rest of us, a distro will get the patched version of their binaries out to end users fast enough.
As for the playpen comment. Screw you, lots of people use linux for serious work, both desktop and commonly in the server room. Those supercomputers? not running windows. many running linux. Its getting to the point that you don't have to be an expert to run the system, yes its taken a while, but when it's made by the experts generally for the experts usability is not necessarily the top priority.
Yes I play on my linux box, try the newest stuff, etc. I also write web pages (rarely), do all my correspondence, write software for my job, and play media and games on linux. Basically I do the same things I would do on windows, and I find it less annoying to work with. This is mostly due to the fact that knowing enough about the internals means that I can swear at MS for not providing the expert level interface to go with their wizards. Sometimes a command line is more efficient (Ms may be getting the message if they really are revamping their CLI).
Lets take the words apart:
cyclic - as in circular, comes back to the original point. example: phases of the moon
dependency - something depended on. program A depends on library B, B is a dependency of A. Of course, B may depend on C.
Putting it all together: circle of dependencies
A depends on B depends on C depends on A
Makes it really hard to decide what to do first. Chicken and the egg problem.
If you have a problem figuring out what this all means, at least head for a linux that is built more for an enduser (I've heard good things about ubuntu, mandrake is usually alright, but I don't have direct experience with either).
I agree with you to some degree, but what's wrong with marking certain points in time as "distro. X version Y" The marking is orthogonal to what you're suggesting and plays a valuable role for tracking problems. If someone asks me to look at a box and says it has RH9.0 on it I know about what I'm looking at. Makes life a lot easier. For boxes that I admin and am familiar with I know what they are and what to expect, but being able to sum up the software install in a sentence is really useful when I need to look at a different box.
Also, keep in mind that some upgrades are pretty major, and do break a number of things (think of something like the glibc API changing). Having a distro version number that corresponds to when that happened is once again useful to keep administration simpler. Supporting all possible combinations of packages is untenable, however, supporting an updated distro X version Y is a little simpler.
You do realize where people found carbon nanotubes first, right? soot. as in from fire. as in has been in the atmosphere since the beginning of time. Sure the quantities may be slightly higher, but I'll bet not burning a few acres of rainforest/year would even that right out.
No, no, physical age, not mental.
Probably the mass? I.e. different material => different density => different mass. We can pretty simply observe the size, but without seeing interactions with other objects figuring out the mass requires some guesswork.