Valuable as this research may be, it is hardly breaking new ground. Students have complained about unengaging teachers ever since teaching classes was introduced. I don't think this means that the lecture form is suddenly wrong as a means for delivering - it just means that teachers, as always, should learn how to deliver good lectures, and students should learn how to get the best out of a lecture.
A good lecture is one that explains or highlights the things that are not covered well in the text book; it shouldn't be detailed, unless there is a particular detail that is missing in the book. A good lecture gives background, motivation and context, so the student then goes away and reads the text with greater insight. The language should as plain as possible without abandoning the necessary technicalities, because plain language is easier to understand, and students are beginners in this subject.
A good student, on the other hand, asks questions. Again and again and again. The only stupid question is the one that isn't asked.
I wouldn't pay for internet in the car. I wouldn't have internet in the car if it was free. There are times when I just want to be away from idiotic SPAM, endless trivia and other distractions, and one of those times is when I drive a car. In fact, I'd prefer if everybody else on the road also stayed away from unnecessary distractions and concentrated on driving safely.
Imidaclopirid is a really useful insecticide, and I am not at all thrilled that it might be completely banned. It works perfectly in greenhouses and indoors. Perhaps instead of banning it, they could increase the number of beehives by a factor of ten? Or maybe they could breed imidaclopirid-resistant bees?
Banning the substance might be an incentive for them to develop something better, which has been better tested? Historically, that is the way things have always progressed - some new substance is hailed the new panacea, it is then discovered to be too dangerous in certain respects; then follows the usual struggle with those whose greed far outweighs their concern for the harm they cause. Just look at the history of things like opium, then heroin, cocaine, strychnine, arsenic etc.
Personally, I think there are many more factors involved in CCD, and all have to do with people who cut corners to increase profit. There is little doubt that these poisons play an important role, and it would be a good idea to ban them. But we also need to address the other factors:
- Farmers that spray over open flowers and far too often, thereby loading the environment with poisons. - Beekeepers who lug hundreds or thousands of colonies around the country on lorries, spreading diseases and parasites, as well as stressing the bees. - Monocultures of both bees and crops.
These are all difficult problems to solve, but they are not impossible. Farmers can be educated - the modern farmer is already highly educated, so of course they can learn better practices. There are many ways to encourage local beekeeping in favour of these huge, industrial scale setups; an outright ban might be worth considering. Yes, those huge beekeepers might go out of business, but is that any worse than, say, closing a factory in Detroit? And it will open the market for the small, local beekeepers.
As for monocultures - there is probably a good middle ground between the gigantic monocultures we see, especially in the US, and the complete mixing of crops in the same field. In many countries you will find that farms have a variety of crops - relatively small fields of monocultures, but differents crops in each field, a model which still allows for mechanical harvesting and high yields, and which is better for the environment in general.
As for bees - there are 20000 known species of bees, all of which play a role in pollination, but we only keep one species. And in fact, we only keep a small subset of that one species - the subset that has been optimised for honey yield, ease of management etc.
What really gets me up in arms is this attitude of giving up without even trying - "It sounds like it migh be inconvenient, so I don't want that". We have progressed this far by solving problems and changing our habits, by being willing to face reality and overcome challenges.
You expect too much of managers; their level is more like:
"It was a dark and stormy night; the datagrams fell in torrents â" except at occasional intervals, when they was checked by a violent gust of BGP requests which swept through the infrastruture (for it is in the Datacenter that our scene lies), rattling along the NICs, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the LEDs that struggled against the darkness."
A lot of the features that general progrmmers regard as essential parts of any program, are simply unecessary distrations. I remember one course in "Chemistry for Physicists" - all about calculating molecular orbitals - where the central data processing tool was a FORTRAN program (this was before they invented lower-case, apparently). You started the program. You input data in CSV format. You input an empty line. You got the results back. No prompts, no explanatory textx, no error messages if one of the lines contained an typo. FORTRAN was designed for the sort of mindset that finds this kind of interface desirable. Strings were originally only allowed as constants in FORMAT statements used for output.
What is it with America and superheroes? I don't think any other nation has ever produced quite such a concept. I suppose the nearest thing in UK would be 'super detectives' like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot or Lord Peter Wimsey, who were intellectual and self-ironic. Or in Scandinavian tradition, the god Thor - who was rather short, red-haired, choleric and not a little stupid, unlike the American re-invention.
The American superheroes all seem to be overgrown teenagers with inflated egoes and shaped like body-builders. I wonder if that is because Americans are obscessed with youth - or perhaps fear of getting old?
Well, a good craftsman knows which tools are suitable for the job. And I don't agree with those who insist that some languages are 'bad' - most languages were designed with a specific purpose in mind, so solve that sort of problems well. A good craftsman also knows his own limitations and chooses his tools accordingly - and doesn't usually blame the tools for his limitations either.
What often annoys me is the flak C++ gets simply because people don't know how to use it well. That's a bit like calling Linux crap because it allows you to run 'rm -rf/' as root. Well made C++ code is easy to read and understand, because the important structure on each level is made more visible. Such as operator overloading: if the agreed convention or 'intuition' is that concatenating two strings is similar to 'adding', then it is perfectly reasonable to use the '+' operator for that. The fact that many developers are poor at designing their code is not an argument against overloading; it's an argument for looking before you jump.
With a mindset like yours, it doesn't seem all that unlikely that you might one day be on the receiving end of the penal process. Perhaps you would see things differently, then?
Now, to elaborate on the subject of torturing people - criminals or not - to death: Historically, it was the norm to execute prisoners with prolonged torture, but this is something we as a society have moved away from. Not just because we have become more humane, but also because it has no effect on the rate of crime - on the contrary. When punishments are regarded as unfair, people will turn against society and will feel justified in taking extreme action against their perceived enemies; society can only develop in a positive way if people feel they can trust the institutions of society: government, the court, the police etc.
There is a huge grin on my face right now. Knowing it pisses you off even makes me happier.
Really? I have to disappoint you, then; my reaction is not one of anger, but pity. You are such a sad person.
Clueless psychopathic suits in management, who make impossible schedule demands, and have no programming background themselves.
Yeah, I can feel like that too, sometimes. However, I don't agree with the picture you paint - it isn't the case that all management is always useless and harmful and all engineers are always competent and beneficial, but so completely restricted in their options that they can't write good code. Most managers in most IT companies are in fact willing to listen to sensible advice and make concessions that make life easier for their staff; after all, a manager's success is measured by how well his team as a whole does, so a successful manager is likely to be one who is able and willing to communicate with his employees. But it only works if the employees are able and willing to communicate facts to the manager in a language he can understand and use to make sensible decision with; and engineers are notoriously bad at doing that.
The use of popular, but garbage programming languages. C++, PHP and Perl are probably the main three culprits here....
There is an old saying that goes something like: Don't blame the tool for bad craftsmanship. If you are a good programmer, then you can write good code in any language that you know - COBOL, FORTRAN,... Haskell, C, C++,... - even Intercal. The problem with some languages is that they demand much more of the developer - using C++ well requires a much higher level of theoretical understanding of good design than using a simple language like C, so it is much easier to loose your way in obscure and misunderstood constructs in C++.
It's sedentary living. You will never get millions to eat so little that they avoid obesity while watching screens 16 hours a day.
And then again...
It's true that sitting still in front of a screen all day long means we burn less calories, just as it is true that we get fatter because we eat more than we need. There is a long chain of causes and effects, and perhaps there is no real, fundamental reason; but if we want to fix the problem, I think the best place to start is by removing the very powerful, economic incentive that certain industries have to produce a lifestyle in which everybody are passive consumers of light-weight entertainment and heavy-weight food.
And don't give the tired old crap about "nobody forces you to overeat" etc, because it is hardly the whole truth. You just try to work up an appetite, then go to any average supermarket; what are you most likely to buy? The healthy options, which are generally a bit grey, tasteless and expensive (and difficult to find), or the cheap, sugary and fatty stuff that you can find easily and wrap your face around quickly?
90% or so of what is on offer in most shops is unhealthy, and a lot of the things advertised as healthy are just as unhealthy, so how much of a real choice does the average consumer have? The only real solution is to stop the production of crap food at its source.
This is a very real problemâ"it's not just some rich people being assholes, but rather some rich people who stand to become substantially less rich if things go the way they seem to be going.
Where's the problem in that? Do rich people deserve to stay rich no matter what? As I read the situation, they very emphatically don't - in fact, they deserve to lose everything, because they are nothing more than parasites.
Planned obsolescence and subscription services that didn't exist for most people 30 years ago are helping to keep things afloat
They certainly give the illusion of markets growing. In real terms, I don't think the economy is growing; we are still living in a closed ecosystem, so at some point we will hit the ceiling and experience a catastrophic breakdown, unless we learn to curb our delusions about unlimited growth. The question is only when it will happen - but there is still an absurd reluctance to even consider the question, so we don't know if it might be tomorrow or perhaps in 500 years.
Grossly offensive to Muslims? Not really - that sort of tripe is an insult to the intelligence of anybody and a disgrace to whoever utters it, be he ever so much a national icon. As for the socalled 'party', Liberty GB, I couldn't find anything on Google other than their own self-aggrandising statements; they seem to be a non-entity in real life.
As for Winston Churchill, his excuse was that he was born in an age where the British seriously believed they were set on Earth to rule the world and extend their benign superiority to the lower races. Paul Weston has no such excuse.
It's like the difference between erotic art and pornography; erotic art tries to make you think and feel on your own, whereas pornography just want you to say bye-bye to your money. I suppose there are so many forms of 'porn' out there because the world is full of wankers.
I can enjoy the simple, unthinking gameplay sometimes, but a good story is what makes me want to come back for more.
Well, yes,... - but what you are saying is nothing more than what all scientists agree on: that all theories are models limited by our understanding and observattions. The big bang model is a proper theory, by the way: a hypothesis, that has produced predictions, none of which have been falsified. And it is amazingly accurate for such a long shot. We have very little reason to doubt that something very much like a huge explosion happened around 13 - 14 billion years ago; where the doubt creeps in is some time before inflation. That is no surprise, since we, as scientists, are working within the limits of our observations and can only speculate about what we can't (yet) observe.
I'm not convinced about what you say about time and location, or measurements; for one thing, we still don't have a clear understanding of several of the fundamental concept we use. For example, why does time seem to be so different from other dimensions? Why does the speed of light seem invariable? What is a particle? And a field? And mass, electric charge,....? Just because we have a mathematical form to fit these observables into, doesn't mean that we actually understand what they are.
Think how crazy this sounds: the Catholic church tells us that during communion the bread and wine literally turn into the blood and body of Christ. However, through some mysterious process, they appear to our senses as unchanged. So the Catholic church tells you that what you're seeing and tasting is wrong, and you should ignore the evidence right in front of you.
Ah, but you forget that Jesus was not of this world, and who are you to say that the bodies of the residents of Heaven are not, in fact, made of substances that to our limited senses are indistiguishable from bread and wine?
How about composting it, then? Just a thought, and it may well not be profitable. However, living in the city I have often had the opportunity to observe how, on one hand, there's a lot people with small gardens, who spend small fortunes on expensive soil mixtures - basically peat or compost - while on the other hand, just a few miles away there are livery stables that actually pay farmers to come and take away horse manure, which would have been an excellent basis for production of compost. I can't quite understand this sort of thing.
That candid picture of your Mom sharing a moment with your aunt would look great if it were not for the Ronald McDonald billboard in the background.
Hmm, perhaps. But I have increasingly over the last few years seen so many, brilliantly clear photos with fabulous colour etc etc which are so achingly dull because the photographer has no sense of the artistic and no experimental curiousity. Despite the fact that with a digital SLR camera it is cheaper and easier than ever to experiment: just try and then throw out the failures.
Personally, I have started on taking deliberately imperfect pictures; I am particularly fond of under-exposure - it is surprising how much structure you can find in a seemingly black photo, using eg. edge-detection in GIMP.
Are there any benefits to having everything connected to just one vast address space? I certainly can't spot them. I think this is a solution to a problem that has already been solved in another (and better) way.
Although I may concede that it could potentially be useful to have a larger address space, I think it would be massively stupid to start frittering it away on insignificant frivolities like an "internet of things". I mean, would you want your fridge to have 'friends' on Facebook or start tweeting about its contents? When we're all worried about privacy?
Exactly. Empirical science is not about proving truth, but about discovering the flaws in our current theories in the hope that there is an ultimate truth behind it all, and that we will get ever closer to it by eliminating the things that don't match observations.
This makes me think of the ideas of certain thinkers, who said that this kind of society is inherently unstable - the social inequality will keep growing, the rich becoming richer by extracting wealth from the poorer, until there is nothing left, the value of wealth vanishes because there nothing the spend it on, and the whole thing comes tumbling down. I think it was Karl Marx who said it, actually. He was sometimes a very clear thinker.
I believe it is true that he also advocated bringing on a revolution, but the main message was that at some point something will by necessity happen to overturn the system and level out the imbalances, not for ideological reasons, but because the economic dynamics make it unavoidable, no matter what we do. He also imagined that a perfect society would be something like communism or socialism, and he may well have been right; but it will have to evolve naturally, as people become convinced that this is what they want. Well, one can dream.
Since I am the only guy with Linux experience I would have to support the Linux installations. Now the problem is what works perfectly fine for me may be a horrible experience for some of my coworkers, and even if they would only be using Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice I don't know if I could seriously recommend using Linux as a desktop OS in a business. Instead I want to set up one test machine for users to try it and ask THEM if they like it. The test machine should be as easy and painless to use as possible and not look too different compared to Windows. Which distro and what configuration should I choose for this demo box?
All changes are painful, and there will always be some that will whinge and tell you that can't live with it. So, you have to prepare the ground, persuade people that it is worth it, all the same. Having worked in the industry for 30 years, I have seen a lot of changes, and the thing that I have learned is that you absolutely must do your groundwork if you want to succeed. It doesn't actually matter whether the programs are best in class or whatever - it is amazing what people can put up with if they feel it makes sense; after all, they have lived with Windows and Office, which for most of the past decades has been unstalbe and poorly designed - it is only since XP that Windows didn't unversally require reboot several times per day. I mean, just run that last sentence past your mental SYSRDR one more time - other OSes have stayed up for years since the 60es.
So, prepare people and get them on board (one really can't say this too much); after that, it will be fine. Linux is great on the desktop, as you already know, and if you do have to support people, you can use ssh -X or even Xnest, so you won't even have to climb around in the compund all that much.
IOW: make good preparations (sorry if I repeat myself). Ask people what they use their systems for, what they really want to be able to do in Linux (including the non-work things!) and find out to do it. Make plans for how you will support them and how you will teach them things. Done well, this can be great for everyone.
I really don't understand you guys. I really, REALLY don't. I mean, how can anyone believe that a for-profit healthcare can be both better, cheaper and more fair than something run by society? But as soon as anybody opens their mouth to challenge this view, they get 1) modded down, and 2) called 'socialist' or 'communists'. I can only assume that this is an expression of what goes for 'faith': the ability to reject clear facts in order to avoid having to change your mind.
To paraphrase Terry Pratchett - there are certain people who one one hand wouldn't believe it if a high Priest told them the sky was blue, and could show them signed affidavits to that effect from any number of people of good standing, but on the other hand are perfectly willing to bet their lives on the word of a stranger they've met in the pub.
Now, to my mind, and you can call me socialist or worse - and I shall wear that title with pride - that mindset is exactly why America is no longer the greatest nation in the world. You seem to have closed you minds, so how could it be any other way?
In a universe that seems to be infinite in size (or a closed manifold), any point can be declared to be the centre. The reason for saying that Earth and the other planets circle the Sun is that it makes it easy to understand the observable orbits of the planets. But, it is perfectly valid to put Earth in the middle, if you have a wish to do so, just not very useful.
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Valuable as this research may be, it is hardly breaking new ground. Students have complained about unengaging teachers ever since teaching classes was introduced. I don't think this means that the lecture form is suddenly wrong as a means for delivering - it just means that teachers, as always, should learn how to deliver good lectures, and students should learn how to get the best out of a lecture.
A good lecture is one that explains or highlights the things that are not covered well in the text book; it shouldn't be detailed, unless there is a particular detail that is missing in the book. A good lecture gives background, motivation and context, so the student then goes away and reads the text with greater insight. The language should as plain as possible without abandoning the necessary technicalities, because plain language is easier to understand, and students are beginners in this subject.
A good student, on the other hand, asks questions. Again and again and again. The only stupid question is the one that isn't asked.
I wouldn't pay for internet in the car. I wouldn't have internet in the car if it was free. There are times when I just want to be away from idiotic SPAM, endless trivia and other distractions, and one of those times is when I drive a car. In fact, I'd prefer if everybody else on the road also stayed away from unnecessary distractions and concentrated on driving safely.
Imidaclopirid is a really useful insecticide, and I am not at all thrilled that it might be completely banned. It works perfectly in greenhouses and indoors. Perhaps instead of banning it, they could increase the number of beehives by a factor of ten? Or maybe they could breed imidaclopirid-resistant bees?
Banning the substance might be an incentive for them to develop something better, which has been better tested? Historically, that is the way things have always progressed - some new substance is hailed the new panacea, it is then discovered to be too dangerous in certain respects; then follows the usual struggle with those whose greed far outweighs their concern for the harm they cause. Just look at the history of things like opium, then heroin, cocaine, strychnine, arsenic etc.
Personally, I think there are many more factors involved in CCD, and all have to do with people who cut corners to increase profit. There is little doubt that these poisons play an important role, and it would be a good idea to ban them. But we also need to address the other factors:
- Farmers that spray over open flowers and far too often, thereby loading the environment with poisons.
- Beekeepers who lug hundreds or thousands of colonies around the country on lorries, spreading diseases and parasites, as well as stressing the bees.
- Monocultures of both bees and crops.
These are all difficult problems to solve, but they are not impossible. Farmers can be educated - the modern farmer is already highly educated, so of course they can learn better practices. There are many ways to encourage local beekeeping in favour of these huge, industrial scale setups; an outright ban might be worth considering. Yes, those huge beekeepers might go out of business, but is that any worse than, say, closing a factory in Detroit? And it will open the market for the small, local beekeepers.
As for monocultures - there is probably a good middle ground between the gigantic monocultures we see, especially in the US, and the complete mixing of crops in the same field. In many countries you will find that farms have a variety of crops - relatively small fields of monocultures, but differents crops in each field, a model which still allows for mechanical harvesting and high yields, and which is better for the environment in general.
As for bees - there are 20000 known species of bees, all of which play a role in pollination, but we only keep one species. And in fact, we only keep a small subset of that one species - the subset that has been optimised for honey yield, ease of management etc.
What really gets me up in arms is this attitude of giving up without even trying - "It sounds like it migh be inconvenient, so I don't want that". We have progressed this far by solving problems and changing our habits, by being willing to face reality and overcome challenges.
You expect too much of managers; their level is more like:
"It was a dark and stormy night; the datagrams fell in torrents â" except at occasional intervals, when they was checked by a violent gust of BGP requests which swept through the infrastruture (for it is in the Datacenter that our scene lies), rattling along the NICs, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the LEDs that struggled against the darkness."
A: Legacy code.
B: It is good enough for the purpose.
A lot of the features that general progrmmers regard as essential parts of any program, are simply unecessary distrations. I remember one course in "Chemistry for Physicists" - all about calculating molecular orbitals - where the central data processing tool was a FORTRAN program (this was before they invented lower-case, apparently). You started the program. You input data in CSV format. You input an empty line. You got the results back. No prompts, no explanatory textx, no error messages if one of the lines contained an typo. FORTRAN was designed for the sort of mindset that finds this kind of interface desirable. Strings were originally only allowed as constants in FORMAT statements used for output.
What is it with America and superheroes? I don't think any other nation has ever produced quite such a concept. I suppose the nearest thing in UK would be 'super detectives' like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot or Lord Peter Wimsey, who were intellectual and self-ironic. Or in Scandinavian tradition, the god Thor - who was rather short, red-haired, choleric and not a little stupid, unlike the American re-invention.
The American superheroes all seem to be overgrown teenagers with inflated egoes and shaped like body-builders. I wonder if that is because Americans are obscessed with youth - or perhaps fear of getting old?
Well, a good craftsman knows which tools are suitable for the job. And I don't agree with those who insist that some languages are 'bad' - most languages were designed with a specific purpose in mind, so solve that sort of problems well. A good craftsman also knows his own limitations and chooses his tools accordingly - and doesn't usually blame the tools for his limitations either.
What often annoys me is the flak C++ gets simply because people don't know how to use it well. That's a bit like calling Linux crap because it allows you to run 'rm -rf /' as root. Well made C++ code is easy to read and understand, because the important structure on each level is made more visible. Such as operator overloading: if the agreed convention or 'intuition' is that concatenating two strings is similar to 'adding', then it is perfectly reasonable to use the '+' operator for that. The fact that many developers are poor at designing their code is not an argument against overloading; it's an argument for looking before you jump.
With a mindset like yours, it doesn't seem all that unlikely that you might one day be on the receiving end of the penal process. Perhaps you would see things differently, then?
Now, to elaborate on the subject of torturing people - criminals or not - to death: Historically, it was the norm to execute prisoners with prolonged torture, but this is something we as a society have moved away from. Not just because we have become more humane, but also because it has no effect on the rate of crime - on the contrary. When punishments are regarded as unfair, people will turn against society and will feel justified in taking extreme action against their perceived enemies; society can only develop in a positive way if people feel they can trust the institutions of society: government, the court, the police etc.
There is a huge grin on my face right now. Knowing it pisses you off even makes me happier.
Really? I have to disappoint you, then; my reaction is not one of anger, but pity. You are such a sad person.
Clueless psychopathic suits in management, who make impossible schedule demands, and have no programming background themselves.
Yeah, I can feel like that too, sometimes. However, I don't agree with the picture you paint - it isn't the case that all management is always useless and harmful and all engineers are always competent and beneficial, but so completely restricted in their options that they can't write good code. Most managers in most IT companies are in fact willing to listen to sensible advice and make concessions that make life easier for their staff; after all, a manager's success is measured by how well his team as a whole does, so a successful manager is likely to be one who is able and willing to communicate with his employees. But it only works if the employees are able and willing to communicate facts to the manager in a language he can understand and use to make sensible decision with; and engineers are notoriously bad at doing that.
The use of popular, but garbage programming languages. C++, PHP and Perl are probably the main three culprits here. ...
There is an old saying that goes something like: Don't blame the tool for bad craftsmanship. If you are a good programmer, then you can write good code in any language that you know - COBOL, FORTRAN, ... Haskell, C, C++, ... - even Intercal. The problem with some languages is that they demand much more of the developer - using C++ well requires a much higher level of theoretical understanding of good design than using a simple language like C, so it is much easier to loose your way in obscure and misunderstood constructs in C++.
It's sedentary living. You will never get millions to eat so little that they avoid obesity while watching screens 16 hours a day.
And then again ...
It's true that sitting still in front of a screen all day long means we burn less calories, just as it is true that we get fatter because we eat more than we need. There is a long chain of causes and effects, and perhaps there is no real, fundamental reason; but if we want to fix the problem, I think the best place to start is by removing the very powerful, economic incentive that certain industries have to produce a lifestyle in which everybody are passive consumers of light-weight entertainment and heavy-weight food.
And don't give the tired old crap about "nobody forces you to overeat" etc, because it is hardly the whole truth. You just try to work up an appetite, then go to any average supermarket; what are you most likely to buy? The healthy options, which are generally a bit grey, tasteless and expensive (and difficult to find), or the cheap, sugary and fatty stuff that you can find easily and wrap your face around quickly?
90% or so of what is on offer in most shops is unhealthy, and a lot of the things advertised as healthy are just as unhealthy, so how much of a real choice does the average consumer have? The only real solution is to stop the production of crap food at its source.
This is a very real problemâ"it's not just some rich people being assholes, but rather some rich people who stand to become substantially less rich if things go the way they seem to be going.
Where's the problem in that? Do rich people deserve to stay rich no matter what? As I read the situation, they very emphatically don't - in fact, they deserve to lose everything, because they are nothing more than parasites.
Planned obsolescence and subscription services that didn't exist for most people 30 years ago are helping to keep things afloat
They certainly give the illusion of markets growing. In real terms, I don't think the economy is growing; we are still living in a closed ecosystem, so at some point we will hit the ceiling and experience a catastrophic breakdown, unless we learn to curb our delusions about unlimited growth. The question is only when it will happen - but there is still an absurd reluctance to even consider the question, so we don't know if it might be tomorrow or perhaps in 500 years.
Grossly offensive to Muslims? Not really - that sort of tripe is an insult to the intelligence of anybody and a disgrace to whoever utters it, be he ever so much a national icon. As for the socalled 'party', Liberty GB, I couldn't find anything on Google other than their own self-aggrandising statements; they seem to be a non-entity in real life.
As for Winston Churchill, his excuse was that he was born in an age where the British seriously believed they were set on Earth to rule the world and extend their benign superiority to the lower races. Paul Weston has no such excuse.
It's like the difference between erotic art and pornography; erotic art tries to make you think and feel on your own, whereas pornography just want you to say bye-bye to your money. I suppose there are so many forms of 'porn' out there because the world is full of wankers.
I can enjoy the simple, unthinking gameplay sometimes, but a good story is what makes me want to come back for more.
Well, yes, ... - but what you are saying is nothing more than what all scientists agree on: that all theories are models limited by our understanding and observattions. The big bang model is a proper theory, by the way: a hypothesis, that has produced predictions, none of which have been falsified. And it is amazingly accurate for such a long shot. We have very little reason to doubt that something very much like a huge explosion happened around 13 - 14 billion years ago; where the doubt creeps in is some time before inflation. That is no surprise, since we, as scientists, are working within the limits of our observations and can only speculate about what we can't (yet) observe.
I'm not convinced about what you say about time and location, or measurements; for one thing, we still don't have a clear understanding of several of the fundamental concept we use. For example, why does time seem to be so different from other dimensions? Why does the speed of light seem invariable? What is a particle? And a field? And mass, electric charge, ....? Just because we have a mathematical form to fit these observables into, doesn't mean that we actually understand what they are.
Think how crazy this sounds: the Catholic church tells us that during communion the bread and wine literally turn into the blood and body of Christ. However, through some mysterious process, they appear to our senses as unchanged. So the Catholic church tells you that what you're seeing and tasting is wrong, and you should ignore the evidence right in front of you.
Ah, but you forget that Jesus was not of this world, and who are you to say that the bodies of the residents of Heaven are not, in fact, made of substances that to our limited senses are indistiguishable from bread and wine?
How about composting it, then? Just a thought, and it may well not be profitable. However, living in the city I have often had the opportunity to observe how, on one hand, there's a lot people with small gardens, who spend small fortunes on expensive soil mixtures - basically peat or compost - while on the other hand, just a few miles away there are livery stables that actually pay farmers to come and take away horse manure, which would have been an excellent basis for production of compost. I can't quite understand this sort of thing.
When in deep shit, sell manure.
That candid picture of your Mom sharing a moment with your aunt would look great if it were not for the Ronald McDonald billboard in the background.
Hmm, perhaps. But I have increasingly over the last few years seen so many, brilliantly clear photos with fabulous colour etc etc which are so achingly dull because the photographer has no sense of the artistic and no experimental curiousity. Despite the fact that with a digital SLR camera it is cheaper and easier than ever to experiment: just try and then throw out the failures.
Personally, I have started on taking deliberately imperfect pictures; I am particularly fond of under-exposure - it is surprising how much structure you can find in a seemingly black photo, using eg. edge-detection in GIMP.
Are there any benefits to having everything connected to just one vast address space? I certainly can't spot them. I think this is a solution to a problem that has already been solved in another (and better) way.
Although I may concede that it could potentially be useful to have a larger address space, I think it would be massively stupid to start frittering it away on insignificant frivolities like an "internet of things". I mean, would you want your fridge to have 'friends' on Facebook or start tweeting about its contents? When we're all worried about privacy?
Exactly. Empirical science is not about proving truth, but about discovering the flaws in our current theories in the hope that there is an ultimate truth behind it all, and that we will get ever closer to it by eliminating the things that don't match observations.
This makes me think of the ideas of certain thinkers, who said that this kind of society is inherently unstable - the social inequality will keep growing, the rich becoming richer by extracting wealth from the poorer, until there is nothing left, the value of wealth vanishes because there nothing the spend it on, and the whole thing comes tumbling down. I think it was Karl Marx who said it, actually. He was sometimes a very clear thinker.
I believe it is true that he also advocated bringing on a revolution, but the main message was that at some point something will by necessity happen to overturn the system and level out the imbalances, not for ideological reasons, but because the economic dynamics make it unavoidable, no matter what we do. He also imagined that a perfect society would be something like communism or socialism, and he may well have been right; but it will have to evolve naturally, as people become convinced that this is what they want. Well, one can dream.
Since I am the only guy with Linux experience I would have to support the Linux installations. Now the problem is what works perfectly fine for me may be a horrible experience for some of my coworkers, and even if they would only be using Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice I don't know if I could seriously recommend using Linux as a desktop OS in a business. Instead I want to set up one test machine for users to try it and ask THEM if they like it. The test machine should be as easy and painless to use as possible and not look too different compared to Windows. Which distro and what configuration should I choose for this demo box?
All changes are painful, and there will always be some that will whinge and tell you that can't live with it. So, you have to prepare the ground, persuade people that it is worth it, all the same. Having worked in the industry for 30 years, I have seen a lot of changes, and the thing that I have learned is that you absolutely must do your groundwork if you want to succeed. It doesn't actually matter whether the programs are best in class or whatever - it is amazing what people can put up with if they feel it makes sense; after all, they have lived with Windows and Office, which for most of the past decades has been unstalbe and poorly designed - it is only since XP that Windows didn't unversally require reboot several times per day. I mean, just run that last sentence past your mental SYSRDR one more time - other OSes have stayed up for years since the 60es.
So, prepare people and get them on board (one really can't say this too much); after that, it will be fine. Linux is great on the desktop, as you already know, and if you do have to support people, you can use ssh -X or even Xnest, so you won't even have to climb around in the compund all that much.
IOW: make good preparations (sorry if I repeat myself). Ask people what they use their systems for, what they really want to be able to do in Linux (including the non-work things!) and find out to do it. Make plans for how you will support them and how you will teach them things. Done well, this can be great for everyone.
Here you are:
http://www.mocpages.com/moc.ph...
Now, cough up.
I really don't understand you guys. I really, REALLY don't. I mean, how can anyone believe that a for-profit healthcare can be both better, cheaper and more fair than something run by society? But as soon as anybody opens their mouth to challenge this view, they get 1) modded down, and 2) called 'socialist' or 'communists'. I can only assume that this is an expression of what goes for 'faith': the ability to reject clear facts in order to avoid having to change your mind.
To paraphrase Terry Pratchett - there are certain people who one one hand wouldn't believe it if a high Priest told them the sky was blue, and could show them signed affidavits to that effect from any number of people of good standing, but on the other hand are perfectly willing to bet their lives on the word of a stranger they've met in the pub.
Now, to my mind, and you can call me socialist or worse - and I shall wear that title with pride - that mindset is exactly why America is no longer the greatest nation in the world. You seem to have closed you minds, so how could it be any other way?
In a universe that seems to be infinite in size (or a closed manifold), any point can be declared to be the centre. The reason for saying that Earth and the other planets circle the Sun is that it makes it easy to understand the observable orbits of the planets. But, it is perfectly valid to put Earth in the middle, if you have a wish to do so, just not very useful.