Average, every day drivers will realize that speed limits in some areas are generally set slower than they are used to driving, and they'll grow tired of the warnings and turn it off.
It doesn't help either, that most speedometers are deliberately set to show a speed 5 - 10% too high; if you compare your GPS speed with the meter speed, you'll probably see the difference. In my car, I can drive 55 mph before my GPS shows 50, and given that GPS relies on accurate timing to calculate the current position, it GPS speed must the the correct one.
Him: "Hi, I'm Randy" Me: "Er, yeah,..., do you need a few minutes on your own? To take matters in hand, as it were?"
I have to say, this particular joke always gets me modded down below groundlevel, but I am hopeful it will do well in this setting. I would say that a few, saucy jokes is what being male is all about, although come to think of it, it's also what being female is all about, really. If you've ever happened to overhear a gaggle of girlfriends going at warp 5, you'll know us blokes have a thing or two to learn in that department. Still, it is good manners to tone it down when you have reason to think that other might feel embarrassed.
I don't know if women in general feel 'threatened' by male company - I suspect it is often more because there are some people who are on the lookout for reasons to feel outraged. On the other hand, I have several colleagues who are contemptuous about women, whether it is because they are just insecure or perhaps gay, who don't want to come out. Nothing wrong with being gay, but OTOH, nothing wrong with being female either.
Taking into account the rather tattered reputation Greenpeace seems to have on/. - perhaps emphasising this guys past involvement in the same is not the best way to give his words weight. And of course, when I read that he has gone from being the founder of what was always a 'leftist', anti-establishment organisation, to being a more right-wing person living off his past fame, then it seems to be simply what most most people do in their life; and he feels embarrassed and want to put some distance to his past.
Whatever the story may be, the science is science, and this article brings nothing new to the table - "climate change can't possibly be our fault, because who are we to think that we are so important?" - ignoring the fact that other species, and indeed the entirety of life, have a profound influence on the planet's climate, geology etc. Science does not postulate - it presents the facts, it tries to explain those facts, it submits itself to constant, critical scrutiny and gets new adjustments all the time. It leaves everybody to make up their own mind. But when you ask science for its advice on matters, you will get scientific advice - anything less would be dishonest.
Why some people on tech boards so upset with smart watches? Is it because helps make technology available to the masses? I don't get it.
I wouldn't say I'm upset, but I think it is in the nature of engineers and scientists - of which there are a fair few - to look at things from an analytical point of view: what are the merits, or weaknesses of something? To me, and to many with a background in engineering, how something looks or whether it will make you stand out as a fashion icon is either irrelevant or unwelcome, even to the extent that if I have to choose a tool, I will stay away from ones that seem to have been designed to look good, based on the suspicion that I would be paying more than it was worth. After all, as somebody who knows how digital equipment and the SW that goes with it are made, I am convinced that smartwatches are without exception overpriced crap - I could have done better.
A good, mechanical clock, on the other hand, is the result of REAL skill. I'm not sure I would be able to learn every step of the process; I respect that a lot.
Google and Intel bring the tech know-how, and Tag Heuer brings the idiots willing to pay ridiculous money for a watch.
Well, to be fair, although I see your point about being an idiot for wanting to pay tens of thousands for a thing that just tells the time, there is at least some justification in a sense, when what you are buying is a mechanical masterpiece made from a few, really rather simple bits, but engineering to a breathtaking standard of accuracy. You can understand why something like that would be expensive, even if you can point out that it is irrelevant for anybody in practical terms.
But a smart watch? It adds no actual value to its user, it is exclusively a way of telling the world that you are stupid and rich enough to not care about how you spend money; a fashion statement. And like all digital technology, it is dated as soon as you have bought it, because even before it goes on sale, the next, better version is already in the pipeline.
Such a result would amuse the hell out of me. And it could be really, really good for the country.
It's not without dangers, though. You might get someone in power who really, absolutely shouldn't be allowed anywhere near, and who could cause untold damage before he/she was stopped. Just imagine if people voted for some stupid bimbo from Alaska! Oh, wait, that almost happened, didn't it?
Mandatory voting is not a bad idea, really, but I'm not sure it is a good idea in a nation, where in principle any moron can get voted into a position with direct access to the world's largest arsenal of dangerous weapons. Perhaps if you guys had a political system more like in Northern Europe. Yes, it is inefficient and slow to react - that is very much the purpose. In war you may need fast decisions and a firm control, but in peace time you need to slow things down, so everybody has time to think, and you need to be sure that nobody can wield too much power, so that when the inevitable idiot comes along, he can't simply place his cup of coffee on it and say "Was that meant to happen?" when Moscow disappears under a mushroom cloud.
Perhaps the best part is that if you can't figure something out on your mac, you can ask someone. With Linux you have to find someone with a setup just like yours, and if you google it you will find a proliferation of solutions none of which work for your rig.
Seriously? I would have thought the only choice would be Linux. As a physicist you ought to be familiar with Linux/UNIX is some form, since *nix in some form is what tends to power most scientific systems - super computers and so on. You would not be unlikely to have a need for Fortran, which is available from GNU, or some of the many scientific tools - such as GAP. I'm not convinced Mathematica is top of the list of tools you are going to need, but then I've never actually had any use for it, personally, so maybe I am just biased. Have look around for what is actually available for scientists as open source, ready to be built and used on UNIX/Linux.
As far finding somebody who can help you - do you actually know from experience what you are talking about? With Linux, there are loads and loads of web sites addressing just about anything you could run into as well as many you are not likely to come across. And, of course, when you use Linux, you are going to learn a technology that covers not just a vast range of hardware, from ARM based thingies over PCs, midrange servers to the biggest you can imagine in mainframes and super computers, but also is valid across the many variants of UNIX. It is VERY easy to go into AIX, Solaris, HP-UX or others, when you are familiar with Linux. And as somebody pointed out - if you buy a Macbook, you can wipe it and install Linux, which you can then keep upgradign to the latest version for free; you can't install OSX on anything other Apple HW and as far as I know, it costs if you want to get the latest version.
Compare that with OSX or Windows: If you are an expert in those, that is all you know, really. PCs and mobiles, that about sums it up.
The only way I can see self driving cars really working is to have special roads to carry them.
This may well be the best way to do it, at least initially. A sort of small train wagons that could aggregate into whole train sets for part of the way and split off to different routes when appropriate. The biggest problem with public transport atm is that trains and buses are too inflexible - they don't go exactly to where people need them, and they too often aren't full to capacity - and when they are full, they are usually not big enough. A system of self-driving cars could address both problems, thereby becoming competitive with private cars, plus, they could be better optimsed for fuel efficiency, since they won't be driven by impatient drivers; if you don't have to keep your eyes on the road, you won't mind too much that you aren't driving as fast as possible. And of course, a well managed network of automatic vehicles would be able to avoid congestion most of the time simply by coordinating the way each vehicle moves.
It's not about taking from "the makers", it's about not allowing rich assholes to flout the law just because they have more money.
In UK we have a system that does seem to have some effect: a combination of a fine and points on your licence. You typically get 3 points for traffic transgressions, and once you reach 12, you lose it. And if you drive while banned, you go to jail. To most people, even if the fine doesn't make an impression, the prospect of losing your licence does.
I've never actually bought one of their products, but I have been keeping their address lying around. The story behind that is, that I got fed up with keyboards always being cheap, with a rather rubbery feel to the key action and no proper click; I'm old enough to have worked with - and loved the feel of - the original IBM PC keyboards, that appeared to be made from cast iron and concrete. It seems this company makes keyboards with proper keys, each fitted on top of gold plated switches or whatever. I want one, but they are a bit expensive, so I hold back. You know how it is.
Being born conveys only liberties, not responsibilities. Being a member of a community conveys both. It is up to a person to choose the latter, and it is up to a child's guardians to convey the benefits and consequences of such a contract. And it is up to every person to negotiate the social fluidity of all of these.
One point worth making, however, which I think you overlook: while it is true that being born into a society does not in itself convey responsibilities, you can't expect to be allowed to remain part of any group or society, unless you are willing to obey it rules. It's like tax: you don't have to, but if you don't, then get the hell out of our society, stop using roads, schools etc you don't contribute to. Why should we accept somebody as part of us, if they are only freeloading?
The driving force behind the creation and abandonment of execution methods is the constant search for a humane means of taking a human life. Arizona, for example, abandoned hangings after a noose accidentally decapitated a condemned woman in 1930.
Not really; what your example here shows is that it is about the perceptions. It's not about being humane, but about appearing to be humane. A ripped of head is shocking, gross and possibly upsetting, but I doubt the victim could have told the difference.
And execution is not about punishment, but revenge. Death as punishment is not going to make the victim a better person, obviously, and if the only purpose of executing people was to eliminate a dangerous individual, then society would have chosen a method that was cheap and effectivean associated with minimal fuss. Instead we have opted for methods that clearly involve cruelty, but superficially look 'civilized'; the ultimate in that respect has to be injection, which looks a bit like the kind of genuine, final kindness we show to our suffering pets. The likely reality, however, is that the victim is trapped, unable to move, fully conscious and goes through several minutes of excruciating pain. Whatever one will call it, humane it isn't - human, perhaps, since we humans have an amazing capacity for inventing new cruelties to inflict on each other. The driving force has never been anything other than a lust for revenge and ritual sacrifice; one has to wonder to which god.
The Embuggerance - something that leaves you feeling screwed?
Pratchett was one of the great masters of language and words, and with the courage to meet his fate face on, I think. One of the things I will always remember him for is saying - on BBC - that he would 'gnaw the arse of a dead mole' if he thought that might help. Brilliant. Defiant.
Another thing I think a lot of people will remember him for is 'Good Omens'. And The Carpet people. and all the other stories. And the two science fiction books he wrote: 'Strata' and 'The Dark Side of the Sun'' - I would have loved to see more like those too. But it is over. Just leave me alone for a while.
Start with classical, then move forward to the Romantics, then back to the barroque period, then you can chose yourself if you prefer neo-classical or renaissance.
I have - my problem is that I have heard a lot and still find it too - what's the word - dilute? There are one or two genuinely good, classical composers, like Mozart or Beethoven, or Dowland or the Strausses; but for each, there seem to be hundreds that are no better than trivial pop, who seem to confuse passion with volume. The worst, to my ear, is Wagner, whose operas seem to have been scored for the Hulk. Put on top of that the fact that early music always seems to be either rattled off on modern instruments or accompanied by constipation and foot-dragging. It's only lute music that seems to feel genuine, probably because it is quite difficult to make scraping, asthmatic sounds on a plucked instrument.
An ice-age, eh? To me it sounds like hyped-up FUD; there's a certain comic value in the observation that someone called Elmar emits FUD, I think.
I can't see why watchmakers should tremble any more than they already do. People haven't bought watches to cover their need for knowing the time for a long time - they are simply fashion accessories, jewellery that men can use without feeling effeminate. There is a certain something about having a fully mechanical watch, that I think most engineers will appreciate; a machanical clock is at the same time both such a simple device and an amazing piece of engineering and craftsmanship. I still find it fascinating to watch the way it works - bloody clever, if you want my opinion; it's a bit like those carved balls of marble, with a small ball inside a larger one inside a larger one. A smart watch just doesn't have it, even if it comes with 16 core CPU, holographic projectors and surround sound.
Does matter, really? I've stopped listening to music, more or less, because there is so little that is original. But I agree, it is stupid to fight over, especially for the music industry, because it is ALL just a grey mass of assembly line noise.
I find that I increasingly listen to music from the very fringes - at one end of the scale, it is stuff like renaissance lute music, Chinese classics, Arabic classics etc, and at the other end, it is weird, new, alternative music that I can't put a name to. Or things like Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. Modern mainstream music is no better than a symphony, whether it is Rock, Jazz or Blues. The original classics in most genres are cool, mind, but it fades away so fast.
You assert "life does not belong to some God" and automatically assume that it belongs to the individual. How is it a fact rather than your personal philosophical position?
Did I say it was a fact? However, I think it follows logically from the idea of the right to self-determination, which I think is a very reasonable idea, all considered. Throughout life - and if you believe in an afterlife, perhaps even after death - we are judged on our actions, we are assumed to be responsible for our own actions. But if you have to bear the responsibility for your choices and actions, then you must have the right to make the choices. There is no natural reason for why the right to decide whether to live or not should be denied the individual, so you must have the right to make that choice as well. To me this is obvious.
What if your life belongs to your parents who conceived you?
How can you argue for that position? It is the role of parents to bring up their children to be able to make their own decisions, but they don't own their child - they are custodians, and once the child mature enough to make informed decisions, that's is what they should do. Good parents will encourage this, and will offer advice and help when the child wants it.
What if it belongs jointly to you and your spouse if you promised to never leave them?
If you have made that promise, then you have made the decision to give away some of your freedom, and the promise may influence how you make decisions in the future. I would hope so - otherwise you can't function as part of any relationship.
What if it belongs to the community that you're part of, or to the nation, or to a god, or to your species, or to the slave master, or to a gene that is trying to propagate itself through you?
Well, are they there to take the responsibility for what I do? No, but I am, so the decisions about my life are mine to make.
What I mean to say is that an opinion does not necessarily have to be based on traditional religion to be a faith position.
Faith? What is faith in this context, other than religious faith? All anybody needs, really, is to decide what they think is fundamentally true - the axioms, the basic assumptions. If you go to the extreme, you can shave it down to very little - something like a belief in the validity of logic and the assumption that if you can observe something repeatedly, then it is likely to be real. There is no need to assume the existence of a god or anything supernatural, not even in order to establish moral values; they follow directly from simple considerations over what makes a social group work, and what is necessary in order to succesfully bring up children.
Of course he was - much as I respect him for his eminent work, he is a primadonna, and he likes to be controversial.
I suppose it will always be a matter of taste, what you think of a particular language. Personally, I like C++ a lot. The great strength of the language is that it allows you to express similar constructs in a similar way - take the concept of the iterator: it basically allows you to loop over any set of objects with a simple for() loop, by hiding away all the house keeping that goes into finding the initial object, getting to the next one and determing the end conditions. This means that you as a programmer are able to show the essential loop to whoever comes to read your code, instead of drowning them in details. Of course, it also means that there are more things to understand - C++ is a demanding language.
I think what makes C++ code horrible isn't the language as much as the programmers, who don't quite understand the purpose of the powerful features and who insist on applying every damn thing in every program. Just because you can make complex class hierarchies with templates, multiple inheritance and overloading, it doesn't mean you have to do it all the time; a god programmer will always strive to write code that is easy to understand - if using advanced, object features help you do that, then it is right to do so, but very often more basic code will do the job.
Well written C++ makes it easier to spot the way the program works; but you can't write well in any language unless you are a master of the language. It is in many ways unfortunate that it is called C++ because it makes you think that it is 'C and a bit'; but C is an extremely simpe language compared to C++, and if you come to C++ thinking that your good understanding of C means that you are obviously going to understand C++ just like that, then it is hardly a surprise that you end up writing horrible, showy code.
To understand science, one has to understand that 'may' is in fact a central concept; it is the possibility that something may be true, that guides our research. In most cases, when scientists use the word 'may', it is because they think there is a very good possibility that this is true. In the case of wind erosion and canyons, I would say it is just a question of figuring out how much each factor - wind and water - contributed. Intuitively, water mostly erodes *down*, whereas wind erodes *sideways*, bringing material down to the water flow, where it can we washed away, or carrying it away as fine dust. The question is how much of each?
Look, we have our lives flooded with devices that are always online - smart phones, smart watches, tablets etc - TV sets that record your conversations and send them off to a central server 'as a service', and who knows what other crap that we don't exactly hear about; and you worry about some advice about where to put a CCTV camera that people have actually bought after considering the implications of putting a camera in their home? The government is at least potentially on the side of their electorate, but global corporations are guaranteed to piss you up and down if they can make a profit by doing so. The state is not really your enemy - unless they are in the pockets of business.
Trying to address the issue of suicide by taking away the means of killing yourself is probably entirely the wrong way to go about it. People who are serious about suicide will always find a way, for starters, and unless something substantial is done to address the mental suffering that drives a person to suicide, all you achieve is to prolong the suffering. It is the kind of boneheaded, incompetent idiocy that you get from politicians, when their only goal is to get re-elected.
I think a much better approach would be
1) Give people the right to suicide and the help to do so safely, if that is the right word. This will show people who are suicidal, that you respect them, something is all too often not the case. I think respect is crucial, because if you see suicide as the only way out, you don't want to seek help if you fear that this way out will be taken away; so you have to know that you can go ahead, if you really want to.
2) Make that right dependent on them having been through good quality advice and assessment. Many people only want kill themselves because they can see no other way - they can often be helped to find a better way out.
There is still too much religiously motivated prudishness towards death - life does not belong to some 'God', it belongs to the individual and it is ultimately the responsibility of the individual what they want to do. It is IMO deeply unethical to force life on somebody who really doesn't want it.
Race is a human construct based on small differences in genetics.
Make that *very* small differences. Also, it is worth keeping in mind that conecpts like 'race', 'species' etc are abstractions, based on perceived, biological differences; whereas 'species' is mostly based on good, scientific evidence, 'race' is mostly based on biases and prejudices harking back to medieval times or earlier, which is why terms like 'subspecies' or 'phenotype' have replaced it in scientific usage.
Even 'species' is not entirely without controversy, as one can see from the ongoing dichotomy between those that regard Neanderthals as a separate species vs those that consider them a subspecies of Homo sapiens. The concept of 'race' has no scientific merit today - it is tainted by the way it was used in the not too recent past, when people would even talk about 'the Spanish race' or 'Jewish race' and other nonsense like that, and for that reason it has been replaced with concepts that are not loaded with the same, historical burden of contempt for one's fellow human beings.
If you say so - what I question is not whether this is possible or will be in a near future, but the claim of the article, that having a detailed record of everything that's ever happened in your life is going to be crucial to the individual. I don't doubt the value to science or medicine of having vast amounts of good quality data, and I no doubt whatsoever that there are advertising vultures, governmental spies and identity fraudsters out there keen to get their hands on the intimate details of everybody; but I can't see how any of that is of value to the individual.
The hype about 'perfect recall' and having 'all your best moments preserved for the future' - what nonsense is that? There are many good reasons not to have perfect recall - there are people who suffer tremendously from not being able to forget even trivial details, not to mention traumatic incidents. The things that are worth recalling are the ones that stay with us, to put it popularly. Our brains have the ability to forget for good reasons; and having recorded your whole life in detail will not compensate for the fact that you are living a pretty trivial life.
Not everyone is going to give a damn, to be honest - we don't all live and breathe for things like Twitbook or whatever they are called.
I mean, I'm hardly a luddite, being a UNIX sysadmin, developing web applications in J2EE and so on, but I have only just got my first smartphone - and I have spent most of the time getting rid of crap I don't need or want. It's possible that sales guys actually believe in the hype when they go 'This Change Everything!!!!' from time to time, but it doesn't really. Think about it realistically; the internet has changed many of the ways we interact with information, but in many ways it is still the same sort of shape: Wikipedia has replaced the Encyclopedia and made it a lot easier to find out about things, but it is still, basically, an encyclopedia. On-line shopping is still shopping; we look at things, we pay for them etc. The internet, for at it's usefulness, has not "changed everything", it has just made the same old thing more convenient.
There is a sort of Darwinian-like selection that goes on in all this: a lot of new technology is developed all the time, but most of it does not survive; in many cases because it isn't acutally that useful. Will it be compellingly useful to have complete timelines for every person on the planet? I doubt it; a lot of the data that can be collected will come from involuntary sources - such as the cheap, disposable computing devices that are one the way in. Never heard of them? Not surprising, perhaps, but there are in fact companies already now that make business from producing ultra-thin, printable computers, which can collect their electric power from ambient sources, and which will be fully networked. So, much of the data from people's "timeline" will come from such devices embedded in wrapping paper, cardboard boxes and clothes. There will GB of data from your underwear, just for starters. How useful is that going to be? People's video logs will be a very minor part of it, I can guarantee you. It's a fad, nothing more.
Slashdot Mirror
Average, every day drivers will realize that speed limits in some areas are generally set slower than they are used to driving, and they'll grow tired of the warnings and turn it off.
It doesn't help either, that most speedometers are deliberately set to show a speed 5 - 10% too high; if you compare your GPS speed with the meter speed, you'll probably see the difference. In my car, I can drive 55 mph before my GPS shows 50, and given that GPS relies on accurate timing to calculate the current position, it GPS speed must the the correct one.
One wonders how he greets people?
Him: "Hi, I'm Randy" ..., do you need a few minutes on your own? To take matters in hand, as it were?"
Me: "Er, yeah,
I have to say, this particular joke always gets me modded down below groundlevel, but I am hopeful it will do well in this setting. I would say that a few, saucy jokes is what being male is all about, although come to think of it, it's also what being female is all about, really. If you've ever happened to overhear a gaggle of girlfriends going at warp 5, you'll know us blokes have a thing or two to learn in that department. Still, it is good manners to tone it down when you have reason to think that other might feel embarrassed.
I don't know if women in general feel 'threatened' by male company - I suspect it is often more because there are some people who are on the lookout for reasons to feel outraged. On the other hand, I have several colleagues who are contemptuous about women, whether it is because they are just insecure or perhaps gay, who don't want to come out. Nothing wrong with being gay, but OTOH, nothing wrong with being female either.
Taking into account the rather tattered reputation Greenpeace seems to have on /. - perhaps emphasising this guys past involvement in the same is not the best way to give his words weight. And of course, when I read that he has gone from being the founder of what was always a 'leftist', anti-establishment organisation, to being a more right-wing person living off his past fame, then it seems to be simply what most most people do in their life; and he feels embarrassed and want to put some distance to his past.
Whatever the story may be, the science is science, and this article brings nothing new to the table - "climate change can't possibly be our fault, because who are we to think that we are so important?" - ignoring the fact that other species, and indeed the entirety of life, have a profound influence on the planet's climate, geology etc. Science does not postulate - it presents the facts, it tries to explain those facts, it submits itself to constant, critical scrutiny and gets new adjustments all the time. It leaves everybody to make up their own mind. But when you ask science for its advice on matters, you will get scientific advice - anything less would be dishonest.
Why some people on tech boards so upset with smart watches? Is it because helps make technology available to the masses? I don't get it.
I wouldn't say I'm upset, but I think it is in the nature of engineers and scientists - of which there are a fair few - to look at things from an analytical point of view: what are the merits, or weaknesses of something? To me, and to many with a background in engineering, how something looks or whether it will make you stand out as a fashion icon is either irrelevant or unwelcome, even to the extent that if I have to choose a tool, I will stay away from ones that seem to have been designed to look good, based on the suspicion that I would be paying more than it was worth. After all, as somebody who knows how digital equipment and the SW that goes with it are made, I am convinced that smartwatches are without exception overpriced crap - I could have done better.
A good, mechanical clock, on the other hand, is the result of REAL skill. I'm not sure I would be able to learn every step of the process; I respect that a lot.
Google and Intel bring the tech know-how, and Tag Heuer brings the idiots willing to pay ridiculous money for a watch.
Well, to be fair, although I see your point about being an idiot for wanting to pay tens of thousands for a thing that just tells the time, there is at least some justification in a sense, when what you are buying is a mechanical masterpiece made from a few, really rather simple bits, but engineering to a breathtaking standard of accuracy. You can understand why something like that would be expensive, even if you can point out that it is irrelevant for anybody in practical terms.
But a smart watch? It adds no actual value to its user, it is exclusively a way of telling the world that you are stupid and rich enough to not care about how you spend money; a fashion statement. And like all digital technology, it is dated as soon as you have bought it, because even before it goes on sale, the next, better version is already in the pipeline.
Such a result would amuse the hell out of me. And it could be really, really good for the country.
It's not without dangers, though. You might get someone in power who really, absolutely shouldn't be allowed anywhere near, and who could cause untold damage before he/she was stopped. Just imagine if people voted for some stupid bimbo from Alaska! Oh, wait, that almost happened, didn't it?
Mandatory voting is not a bad idea, really, but I'm not sure it is a good idea in a nation, where in principle any moron can get voted into a position with direct access to the world's largest arsenal of dangerous weapons. Perhaps if you guys had a political system more like in Northern Europe. Yes, it is inefficient and slow to react - that is very much the purpose. In war you may need fast decisions and a firm control, but in peace time you need to slow things down, so everybody has time to think, and you need to be sure that nobody can wield too much power, so that when the inevitable idiot comes along, he can't simply place his cup of coffee on it and say "Was that meant to happen?" when Moscow disappears under a mushroom cloud.
Perhaps the best part is that if you can't figure something out on your mac, you can ask someone. With Linux you have to find someone with a setup just like yours, and if you google it you will find a proliferation of solutions none of which work for your rig.
Seriously? I would have thought the only choice would be Linux. As a physicist you ought to be familiar with Linux/UNIX is some form, since *nix in some form is what tends to power most scientific systems - super computers and so on. You would not be unlikely to have a need for Fortran, which is available from GNU, or some of the many scientific tools - such as GAP. I'm not convinced Mathematica is top of the list of tools you are going to need, but then I've never actually had any use for it, personally, so maybe I am just biased. Have look around for what is actually available for scientists as open source, ready to be built and used on UNIX/Linux.
As far finding somebody who can help you - do you actually know from experience what you are talking about? With Linux, there are loads and loads of web sites addressing just about anything you could run into as well as many you are not likely to come across. And, of course, when you use Linux, you are going to learn a technology that covers not just a vast range of hardware, from ARM based thingies over PCs, midrange servers to the biggest you can imagine in mainframes and super computers, but also is valid across the many variants of UNIX. It is VERY easy to go into AIX, Solaris, HP-UX or others, when you are familiar with Linux. And as somebody pointed out - if you buy a Macbook, you can wipe it and install Linux, which you can then keep upgradign to the latest version for free; you can't install OSX on anything other Apple HW and as far as I know, it costs if you want to get the latest version.
Compare that with OSX or Windows: If you are an expert in those, that is all you know, really. PCs and mobiles, that about sums it up.
The only way I can see self driving cars really working is to have special roads to carry them.
This may well be the best way to do it, at least initially. A sort of small train wagons that could aggregate into whole train sets for part of the way and split off to different routes when appropriate. The biggest problem with public transport atm is that trains and buses are too inflexible - they don't go exactly to where people need them, and they too often aren't full to capacity - and when they are full, they are usually not big enough. A system of self-driving cars could address both problems, thereby becoming competitive with private cars, plus, they could be better optimsed for fuel efficiency, since they won't be driven by impatient drivers; if you don't have to keep your eyes on the road, you won't mind too much that you aren't driving as fast as possible. And of course, a well managed network of automatic vehicles would be able to avoid congestion most of the time simply by coordinating the way each vehicle moves.
It's not about taking from "the makers", it's about not allowing rich assholes to flout the law just because they have more money.
In UK we have a system that does seem to have some effect: a combination of a fine and points on your licence. You typically get 3 points for traffic transgressions, and once you reach 12, you lose it. And if you drive while banned, you go to jail. To most people, even if the fine doesn't make an impression, the prospect of losing your licence does.
I would go for one of these:
http://keyboardco.com/
I've never actually bought one of their products, but I have been keeping their address lying around. The story behind that is, that I got fed up with keyboards always being cheap, with a rather rubbery feel to the key action and no proper click; I'm old enough to have worked with - and loved the feel of - the original IBM PC keyboards, that appeared to be made from cast iron and concrete. It seems this company makes keyboards with proper keys, each fitted on top of gold plated switches or whatever. I want one, but they are a bit expensive, so I hold back. You know how it is.
Being born conveys only liberties, not responsibilities. Being a member of a community conveys both. It is up to a person to choose the latter, and it is up to a child's guardians to convey the benefits and consequences of such a contract. And it is up to every person to negotiate the social fluidity of all of these.
One point worth making, however, which I think you overlook: while it is true that being born into a society does not in itself convey responsibilities, you can't expect to be allowed to remain part of any group or society, unless you are willing to obey it rules. It's like tax: you don't have to, but if you don't, then get the hell out of our society, stop using roads, schools etc you don't contribute to. Why should we accept somebody as part of us, if they are only freeloading?
The driving force behind the creation and abandonment of execution methods is the constant search for a humane means of taking a human life. Arizona, for example, abandoned hangings after a noose accidentally decapitated a condemned woman in 1930.
Not really; what your example here shows is that it is about the perceptions. It's not about being humane, but about appearing to be humane. A ripped of head is shocking, gross and possibly upsetting, but I doubt the victim could have told the difference.
And execution is not about punishment, but revenge. Death as punishment is not going to make the victim a better person, obviously, and if the only purpose of executing people was to eliminate a dangerous individual, then society would have chosen a method that was cheap and effectivean associated with minimal fuss. Instead we have opted for methods that clearly involve cruelty, but superficially look 'civilized'; the ultimate in that respect has to be injection, which looks a bit like the kind of genuine, final kindness we show to our suffering pets. The likely reality, however, is that the victim is trapped, unable to move, fully conscious and goes through several minutes of excruciating pain. Whatever one will call it, humane it isn't - human, perhaps, since we humans have an amazing capacity for inventing new cruelties to inflict on each other. The driving force has never been anything other than a lust for revenge and ritual sacrifice; one has to wonder to which god.
of course not - the Sun is ;-)
The Embuggerance - something that leaves you feeling screwed?
Pratchett was one of the great masters of language and words, and with the courage to meet his fate face on, I think. One of the things I will always remember him for is saying - on BBC - that he would 'gnaw the arse of a dead mole' if he thought that might help. Brilliant. Defiant.
Another thing I think a lot of people will remember him for is 'Good Omens'. And The Carpet people. and all the other stories. And the two science fiction books he wrote: 'Strata' and 'The Dark Side of the Sun'' - I would have loved to see more like those too. But it is over. Just leave me alone for a while.
Start with classical, then move forward to the Romantics, then back to the barroque period, then you can chose yourself if you prefer neo-classical or renaissance.
I have - my problem is that I have heard a lot and still find it too - what's the word - dilute? There are one or two genuinely good, classical composers, like Mozart or Beethoven, or Dowland or the Strausses; but for each, there seem to be hundreds that are no better than trivial pop, who seem to confuse passion with volume. The worst, to my ear, is Wagner, whose operas seem to have been scored for the Hulk. Put on top of that the fact that early music always seems to be either rattled off on modern instruments or accompanied by constipation and foot-dragging. It's only lute music that seems to feel genuine, probably because it is quite difficult to make scraping, asthmatic sounds on a plucked instrument.
An ice-age, eh? To me it sounds like hyped-up FUD; there's a certain comic value in the observation that someone called Elmar emits FUD, I think.
I can't see why watchmakers should tremble any more than they already do. People haven't bought watches to cover their need for knowing the time for a long time - they are simply fashion accessories, jewellery that men can use without feeling effeminate. There is a certain something about having a fully mechanical watch, that I think most engineers will appreciate; a machanical clock is at the same time both such a simple device and an amazing piece of engineering and craftsmanship. I still find it fascinating to watch the way it works - bloody clever, if you want my opinion; it's a bit like those carved balls of marble, with a small ball inside a larger one inside a larger one. A smart watch just doesn't have it, even if it comes with 16 core CPU, holographic projectors and surround sound.
Does matter, really? I've stopped listening to music, more or less, because there is so little that is original. But I agree, it is stupid to fight over, especially for the music industry, because it is ALL just a grey mass of assembly line noise.
I find that I increasingly listen to music from the very fringes - at one end of the scale, it is stuff like renaissance lute music, Chinese classics, Arabic classics etc, and at the other end, it is weird, new, alternative music that I can't put a name to. Or things like Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. Modern mainstream music is no better than a symphony, whether it is Rock, Jazz or Blues. The original classics in most genres are cool, mind, but it fades away so fast.
You assert "life does not belong to some God" and automatically assume that it belongs to the individual. How is it a fact rather than your personal philosophical position?
Did I say it was a fact? However, I think it follows logically from the idea of the right to self-determination, which I think is a very reasonable idea, all considered. Throughout life - and if you believe in an afterlife, perhaps even after death - we are judged on our actions, we are assumed to be responsible for our own actions. But if you have to bear the responsibility for your choices and actions, then you must have the right to make the choices. There is no natural reason for why the right to decide whether to live or not should be denied the individual, so you must have the right to make that choice as well. To me this is obvious.
What if your life belongs to your parents who conceived you?
How can you argue for that position? It is the role of parents to bring up their children to be able to make their own decisions, but they don't own their child - they are custodians, and once the child mature enough to make informed decisions, that's is what they should do. Good parents will encourage this, and will offer advice and help when the child wants it.
What if it belongs jointly to you and your spouse if you promised to never leave them?
If you have made that promise, then you have made the decision to give away some of your freedom, and the promise may influence how you make decisions in the future. I would hope so - otherwise you can't function as part of any relationship.
What if it belongs to the community that you're part of, or to the nation, or to a god, or to your species, or to the slave master, or to a gene that is trying to propagate itself through you?
Well, are they there to take the responsibility for what I do? No, but I am, so the decisions about my life are mine to make.
What I mean to say is that an opinion does not necessarily have to be based on traditional religion to be a faith position.
Faith? What is faith in this context, other than religious faith? All anybody needs, really, is to decide what they think is fundamentally true - the axioms, the basic assumptions. If you go to the extreme, you can shave it down to very little - something like a belief in the validity of logic and the assumption that if you can observe something repeatedly, then it is likely to be real. There is no need to assume the existence of a god or anything supernatural, not even in order to establish moral values; they follow directly from simple considerations over what makes a social group work, and what is necessary in order to succesfully bring up children.
Was Linus going overboard?
Of course he was - much as I respect him for his eminent work, he is a primadonna, and he likes to be controversial.
I suppose it will always be a matter of taste, what you think of a particular language. Personally, I like C++ a lot. The great strength of the language is that it allows you to express similar constructs in a similar way - take the concept of the iterator: it basically allows you to loop over any set of objects with a simple for() loop, by hiding away all the house keeping that goes into finding the initial object, getting to the next one and determing the end conditions. This means that you as a programmer are able to show the essential loop to whoever comes to read your code, instead of drowning them in details. Of course, it also means that there are more things to understand - C++ is a demanding language.
I think what makes C++ code horrible isn't the language as much as the programmers, who don't quite understand the purpose of the powerful features and who insist on applying every damn thing in every program. Just because you can make complex class hierarchies with templates, multiple inheritance and overloading, it doesn't mean you have to do it all the time; a god programmer will always strive to write code that is easy to understand - if using advanced, object features help you do that, then it is right to do so, but very often more basic code will do the job.
Well written C++ makes it easier to spot the way the program works; but you can't write well in any language unless you are a master of the language. It is in many ways unfortunate that it is called C++ because it makes you think that it is 'C and a bit'; but C is an extremely simpe language compared to C++, and if you come to C++ thinking that your good understanding of C means that you are obviously going to understand C++ just like that, then it is hardly a surprise that you end up writing horrible, showy code.
"May" isn't the word you think it is.
To understand science, one has to understand that 'may' is in fact a central concept; it is the possibility that something may be true, that guides our research. In most cases, when scientists use the word 'may', it is because they think there is a very good possibility that this is true. In the case of wind erosion and canyons, I would say it is just a question of figuring out how much each factor - wind and water - contributed. Intuitively, water mostly erodes *down*, whereas wind erodes *sideways*, bringing material down to the water flow, where it can we washed away, or carrying it away as fine dust. The question is how much of each?
No, we'll just install those cameras...
Look, we have our lives flooded with devices that are always online - smart phones, smart watches, tablets etc - TV sets that record your conversations and send them off to a central server 'as a service', and who knows what other crap that we don't exactly hear about; and you worry about some advice about where to put a CCTV camera that people have actually bought after considering the implications of putting a camera in their home? The government is at least potentially on the side of their electorate, but global corporations are guaranteed to piss you up and down if they can make a profit by doing so. The state is not really your enemy - unless they are in the pockets of business.
Trying to address the issue of suicide by taking away the means of killing yourself is probably entirely the wrong way to go about it. People who are serious about suicide will always find a way, for starters, and unless something substantial is done to address the mental suffering that drives a person to suicide, all you achieve is to prolong the suffering. It is the kind of boneheaded, incompetent idiocy that you get from politicians, when their only goal is to get re-elected.
I think a much better approach would be
1) Give people the right to suicide and the help to do so safely, if that is the right word. This will show people who are suicidal, that you respect them, something is all too often not the case. I think respect is crucial, because if you see suicide as the only way out, you don't want to seek help if you fear that this way out will be taken away; so you have to know that you can go ahead, if you really want to.
2) Make that right dependent on them having been through good quality advice and assessment. Many people only want kill themselves because they can see no other way - they can often be helped to find a better way out.
There is still too much religiously motivated prudishness towards death - life does not belong to some 'God', it belongs to the individual and it is ultimately the responsibility of the individual what they want to do. It is IMO deeply unethical to force life on somebody who really doesn't want it.
Race is a human construct based on small differences in genetics.
Make that *very* small differences. Also, it is worth keeping in mind that conecpts like 'race', 'species' etc are abstractions, based on perceived, biological differences; whereas 'species' is mostly based on good, scientific evidence, 'race' is mostly based on biases and prejudices harking back to medieval times or earlier, which is why terms like 'subspecies' or 'phenotype' have replaced it in scientific usage.
Even 'species' is not entirely without controversy, as one can see from the ongoing dichotomy between those that regard Neanderthals as a separate species vs those that consider them a subspecies of Homo sapiens. The concept of 'race' has no scientific merit today - it is tainted by the way it was used in the not too recent past, when people would even talk about 'the Spanish race' or 'Jewish race' and other nonsense like that, and for that reason it has been replaced with concepts that are not loaded with the same, historical burden of contempt for one's fellow human beings.
We are on the cusp of a huge leap in technology
If you say so - what I question is not whether this is possible or will be in a near future, but the claim of the article, that having a detailed record of everything that's ever happened in your life is going to be crucial to the individual. I don't doubt the value to science or medicine of having vast amounts of good quality data, and I no doubt whatsoever that there are advertising vultures, governmental spies and identity fraudsters out there keen to get their hands on the intimate details of everybody; but I can't see how any of that is of value to the individual.
The hype about 'perfect recall' and having 'all your best moments preserved for the future' - what nonsense is that? There are many good reasons not to have perfect recall - there are people who suffer tremendously from not being able to forget even trivial details, not to mention traumatic incidents. The things that are worth recalling are the ones that stay with us, to put it popularly. Our brains have the ability to forget for good reasons; and having recorded your whole life in detail will not compensate for the fact that you are living a pretty trivial life.
Not everyone is going to give a damn, to be honest - we don't all live and breathe for things like Twitbook or whatever they are called.
I mean, I'm hardly a luddite, being a UNIX sysadmin, developing web applications in J2EE and so on, but I have only just got my first smartphone - and I have spent most of the time getting rid of crap I don't need or want. It's possible that sales guys actually believe in the hype when they go 'This Change Everything!!!!' from time to time, but it doesn't really. Think about it realistically; the internet has changed many of the ways we interact with information, but in many ways it is still the same sort of shape: Wikipedia has replaced the Encyclopedia and made it a lot easier to find out about things, but it is still, basically, an encyclopedia. On-line shopping is still shopping; we look at things, we pay for them etc. The internet, for at it's usefulness, has not "changed everything", it has just made the same old thing more convenient.
There is a sort of Darwinian-like selection that goes on in all this: a lot of new technology is developed all the time, but most of it does not survive; in many cases because it isn't acutally that useful. Will it be compellingly useful to have complete timelines for every person on the planet? I doubt it; a lot of the data that can be collected will come from involuntary sources - such as the cheap, disposable computing devices that are one the way in. Never heard of them? Not surprising, perhaps, but there are in fact companies already now that make business from producing ultra-thin, printable computers, which can collect their electric power from ambient sources, and which will be fully networked. So, much of the data from people's "timeline" will come from such devices embedded in wrapping paper, cardboard boxes and clothes. There will GB of data from your underwear, just for starters. How useful is that going to be? People's video logs will be a very minor part of it, I can guarantee you. It's a fad, nothing more.