Nope. I'm not about to ease up. This is corporate madness. Force something onto your customer that they don't want in order to try to further your own goals, all the while ignoring the fact that you're making your product less useful and a bigger pain in the ass.
You know that junk mail. The half a ton of crap you never read that comes through the letterbox from the same companies that push "green" "enviro" bags so they could stop giving you free plastic bags, and won't sell you incandescent bulbs any more even though the "green" ones contain mercury and there's better technology available (LED)? Those companies are already defecating on you and the environment.
I agree this won't fly if they don't compensate the cost of the ink / paper but have a more open mind. This may turn out to have been a very good idea regardless if YOU like it or not.
Well I can't think of a more FUCKED UP example of corporate hypocrisy than advertising by print while pushing the whole "green" agenda - no plastic bags because they harm the environment, no incandescent bulbs please, we're green. But oh those printed ads no one reads, they're necessary for business. I'd like 1 million trees. But that's okay because we'll replant them. HORSE SHIT. It's environmental vandalism.
What fucking bright spark in marketing thought this would be something ANY customer would want their printer to do, and what idiot manager approved it on the basis that people would put up with it? Someone should bill them for the paper, ink and recycling costs. $1000/picoliter isn't it? Fuckers!!!
...and who are you calling a dumb Knuth?
on
Knuth Got It Wrong
·
· Score: 1
Solar sails get less practical the further you go out from the sun due to the inverse square law. Somewhere between Mars and Jupiter is about the accepted limit. Certainly not useable for exploring Uranus and Neptune for instance. You can define "deep space" many ways but inner solar system isn't one of them.
Eventually, commercial planes will be unpiloted - pilots are expensive. I'm guessing this will be a good test of that eventuality.
Lots of reasons why this isn't likely in the near future, ranging from legal to psychological.
Consider that we do not yet have driverless cars. Consider also that the list of driverless train lines is less than 2 dozen in number. I'd guess that automating a train that runs on rails is a significantly easier problem than automating a plane.
Even when there are pilots present, the computer getting false readings or over-riding the pilot input incorrectly has contributed to several crashes. Just watch MayDay/Air Crash Investigation some time.
Service Temporarily Unavailable The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
This makes me very happy on one level and very sad on another.
At the amateur end, the advances in technology have meant that what use to be done by a professional with mind blowingly expensive equipment or what was not at all possible because it hadn't been invented can now be done by a dedicated amateur with a reasonable but largish hobby budget. For the amount of money some spend on recreational vehicles and holiday homes an amateur can now do spectroscopy, deep imaging, even adaptive optics. It's not open to everyone - you need to have good circumstances - a job that both pays well and puts somewhere within driving distance from less light polluted skies. But it can be done..
On the other hand the technology has meant at the professional end what was cutting edge a few decades ago is now obsolete and not an area of interest. What use to be done on an individual basis is being taken over by surveys etc.
What this means is that there are only a handful of ways in which an amateur can contribute real science. Mostly this revolves around tasks that are either considered not important enough to dedicate professional resources to, or areas that aren't easily automated or taken over by sky surveys. Stuff like variable star observing and galaxy zoo. Now those areas are dwindling too as the automation gets better. The amateurs have done a wonderful job especially with variable star observing - with records extending back hundreds of years - this is data that professionals did not have the time to gather themselves nor the technology to gather in bulk....until now. With projects like Pan-STARRS coming online, how long will this be a useful way to contribute? The records will improve but the opportunity to contribute will dwindle.
Also there's the nagging feeling that automation, while good for most things, can't completely replace human curiosity. For the Galaxy Zoo project, I wonder if this method would detect anomalous objects like Hanny's Voorwerp. That was only discovered because a schoolteacher bothered to ask "what the heck is that smudge" instead of simply dismissing it as a photographic error. This led to Galaxy Zoo 2 including a button to report such objects.
So overall I think we'll make great progress - much greater than human only efforts - but I do wonder what discoveries we'll miss.
We have the technology right now to enforce the speed limit almost 100% of the time. Just tie an in car GPS receiver to the accelerator. Of course the law is broken and people will complain about it being unsafe for overtaking, so you'd need to put in a delay so that speeding is permitted for anything from half a minute to a minute. And its not perfect. People will try to disable it, it won't work where GPS doesn't (tunnels etc), but it would be a lot more effective than having cops waste their time trying to catch speeders. The reason this would never be implemented is that there's not revenue in it.
You used to be cool, dude. You used to be out partying all night, thumbing your nose at the Man, man. What happened? It's like you just woke up as a geezer. What's next, bro? The Anti Hippity Hop Music Played Too Loud By Those Kids On My Lawn Act 2010?
We wish. It's more like the "We just got a frontal lobotomy" Act 2010
So this would suggest the darkmatter particle has no mass, travels faster than light or both?
I skimmed their journal article on arxiv. At this stage all they've shown is that there is an upper limit to the amount of matter in the central region of a galaxy given that we don't see a "runaway accretion" (presumably the whole galaxy goggled up by the black hole?). They conclude this suggests that the centers of galaxies have constant density.
So they seem to be saying dark matter doesn't live there (or that there is a limit to it) and that is how it avoids being sucked into the black hole.
1) The matter in a black hole isn't missing. It's accounted for. We can't know what kind of matter is in there because we can't know anything about stuff beyond the event horizon
2) We still don't know what Dark matter is, but we know that the so called WIMP model is most likely to account for most of it. We know this due to studies of objects like the bullet cluster of galaxies which can't be explained by MACHOs. In the bullet cluster, you see 2 galaxies that have collided - the normal matter in the form of gas and dust in each galaxy got slowed down, but the dark matter passed through each other. That wouldn't happen with MACHOs, and we would expect to be able to detect MACHOs in such a matter rich area by their microlensing events.
This is called corruption and failing to oppose it is how democrasy dies. The more I see shit like this the more I'm certain that your politicians, judges, and police all need to be rounded up and tried for treason and corruption. There's just no excuse whatsoever. A police officer in public should be fine with being videotaped in 99% of circumstances. There's no suggestion that what they do in private is to be recorded.
The point is this article has the phrase 'Peak Wood' right there in the title, and no one has scored above 3 with a joke about erections as far as I can tell. What the hell happened to slashdot?
Bullshit. I do a great deal of C/C++, R, C# development on XP and very, very rarely need to run anything as administrator. I can't even remember the last time I had to runas Admin other than installing software.
Well if it works for you on your one development environment I'm sure it must work for every one of the huge multitude of varied enviroments on the planet. That's because everyone uses the same tools for development.
But there are some web-based apps like Zimbra and Gmail which are pretty darned good and that's certainly the direction my organization is looking at as we expand.
There are many businesses with security requirements that make online apps run by a vendor externally a non-starter.
There are plenty of good mail clients but few good calendar programs. Outlook fills that void.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. I'm not about to ease up. This is corporate madness. Force something onto your customer that they don't want in order to try to further your own goals, all the while ignoring the fact that you're making your product less useful and a bigger pain in the ass.
You know that junk mail. The half a ton of crap you never read that comes through the letterbox from the same companies that push "green" "enviro" bags so they could stop giving you free plastic bags, and won't sell you incandescent bulbs any more even though the "green" ones contain mercury and there's better technology available (LED)? Those companies are already defecating on you and the environment.
I agree this won't fly if they don't compensate the cost of the ink / paper but have a more open mind. This may turn out to have been a very good idea regardless if YOU like it or not.
Well I can't think of a more FUCKED UP example of corporate hypocrisy than advertising by print while pushing the whole "green" agenda - no plastic bags because they harm the environment, no incandescent bulbs please, we're green. But oh those printed ads no one reads, they're necessary for business. I'd like 1 million trees. But that's okay because we'll replant them. HORSE SHIT. It's environmental vandalism.
What fucking bright spark in marketing thought this would be something ANY customer would want their printer to do, and what idiot manager approved it on the basis that people would put up with it? Someone should bill them for the paper, ink and recycling costs. $1000/picoliter isn't it? Fuckers!!!
Or is it a stupid Knuth?
Since when did they start speaking redneck in Chicago?
You do realise that spacecraft have to make minor corrections to stay on course don't you?
Solar sails get less practical the further you go out from the sun due to the inverse square law. Somewhere between Mars and Jupiter is about the accepted limit. Certainly not useable for exploring Uranus and Neptune for instance. You can define "deep space" many ways but inner solar system isn't one of them.
Now if they want to run just cargo planes as drones, that's fine.
So you're fine if it falls on you, or your family or just your house, as long as you're not in it?
Eventually, commercial planes will be unpiloted - pilots are expensive. I'm guessing this will be a good test of that eventuality.
Lots of reasons why this isn't likely in the near future, ranging from legal to psychological.
Consider that we do not yet have driverless cars. Consider also that the list of driverless train lines is less than 2 dozen in number. I'd guess that automating a train that runs on rails is a significantly easier problem than automating a plane.
Even when there are pilots present, the computer getting false readings or over-riding the pilot input incorrectly has contributed to several crashes. Just watch MayDay/Air Crash Investigation some time.
Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
New feature: KDE can now be slashdotted.
This makes me very happy on one level and very sad on another.
At the amateur end, the advances in technology have meant that what use to be done by a professional with mind blowingly expensive equipment or what was not at all possible because it hadn't been invented can now be done by a dedicated amateur with a reasonable but largish hobby budget. For the amount of money some spend on recreational vehicles and holiday homes an amateur can now do spectroscopy, deep imaging, even adaptive optics. It's not open to everyone - you need to have good circumstances - a job that both pays well and puts somewhere within driving distance from less light polluted skies. But it can be done..
On the other hand the technology has meant at the professional end what was cutting edge a few decades ago is now obsolete and not an area of interest. What use to be done on an individual basis is being taken over by surveys etc.
What this means is that there are only a handful of ways in which an amateur can contribute real science. Mostly this revolves around tasks that are either considered not important enough to dedicate professional resources to, or areas that aren't easily automated or taken over by sky surveys. Stuff like variable star observing and galaxy zoo. Now those areas are dwindling too as the automation gets better. The amateurs have done a wonderful job especially with variable star observing - with records extending back hundreds of years - this is data that professionals did not have the time to gather themselves nor the technology to gather in bulk....until now. With projects like Pan-STARRS coming online, how long will this be a useful way to contribute? The records will improve but the opportunity to contribute will dwindle.
Also there's the nagging feeling that automation, while good for most things, can't completely replace human curiosity. For the Galaxy Zoo project, I wonder if this method would detect anomalous objects like Hanny's Voorwerp. That was only discovered because a schoolteacher bothered to ask "what the heck is that smudge" instead of simply dismissing it as a photographic error. This led to Galaxy Zoo 2 including a button to report such objects.
So overall I think we'll make great progress - much greater than human only efforts - but I do wonder what discoveries we'll miss.
1) Why call it Timberwolf? To avoid the Iceweasel debacle?
The guy who wrote it has aspergers and is obsessed with Justin Timberlake.
2) Timberwolf sounds a whole lot cooler than Firefox.
Oh dear, another Justin fan!
3) AmigaOS looks pretty from the screenshots.
Note: Doesn't reserve the word "pretty" for females. Yep that about confirms it.
We have the technology right now to enforce the speed limit almost 100% of the time. Just tie an in car GPS receiver to the accelerator. Of course the law is broken and people will complain about it being unsafe for overtaking, so you'd need to put in a delay so that speeding is permitted for anything from half a minute to a minute. And its not perfect. People will try to disable it, it won't work where GPS doesn't (tunnels etc), but it would be a lot more effective than having cops waste their time trying to catch speeders. The reason this would never be implemented is that there's not revenue in it.
Dear HP Printer,
PC Load Letter???? What the @#$!# does that mean?!?!?
Sincerely,
Frustrated User.
You used to be cool, dude. You used to be out partying all night, thumbing your nose at the Man, man. What happened? It's like you just woke up as a geezer. What's next, bro? The Anti Hippity Hop Music Played Too Loud By Those Kids On My Lawn Act 2010?
We wish. It's more like the "We just got a frontal lobotomy" Act 2010
Dozens of comments despite the lack of article. I vote slashdot does away with links to the articles and just posts speculation from now on.
black holes do not absorb dark matter
http://www.universetoday.com/2010/03/22/astronomers-find-black-holes-do-not-absorb-dark-matter/#more-60422
So this would suggest the darkmatter particle has no mass, travels faster than light or both?
I skimmed their journal article on arxiv. At this stage all they've shown is that there is an upper limit to the amount of matter in the central region of a galaxy given that we don't see a "runaway accretion" (presumably the whole galaxy goggled up by the black hole?). They conclude this suggests that the centers of galaxies have constant density.
So they seem to be saying dark matter doesn't live there (or that there is a limit to it) and that is how it avoids being sucked into the black hole.
For pity sake
1) The matter in a black hole isn't missing. It's accounted for. We can't know what kind of matter is in there because we can't know anything about stuff beyond the event horizon
2) We still don't know what Dark matter is, but we know that the so called WIMP model is most likely to account for most of it. We know this due to studies of objects like the bullet cluster of galaxies which can't be explained by MACHOs. In the bullet cluster, you see 2 galaxies that have collided - the normal matter in the form of gas and dust in each galaxy got slowed down, but the dark matter passed through each other. That wouldn't happen with MACHOs, and we would expect to be able to detect MACHOs in such a matter rich area by their microlensing events.
http://www.universetoday.com/2010/03/01/what-can-the-dark-matter-be/
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/D/darkmat.html
3) What's even more interesting is that recent work suggests black holes do not absorb dark matter
http://www.universetoday.com/2010/03/22/astronomers-find-black-holes-do-not-absorb-dark-matter/#more-60422
This is called corruption and failing to oppose it is how democrasy dies. The more I see shit like this the more I'm certain that your politicians, judges, and police all need to be rounded up and tried for treason and corruption. There's just no excuse whatsoever. A police officer in public should be fine with being videotaped in 99% of circumstances. There's no suggestion that what they do in private is to be recorded.
They're called written _orders_ for a reason...
The please is implied. As in please do your @#$%ing job, you petty idiot.
If Tiobe's website is to be believed, the #1 programming language right now is Whitespace.
I would have thought it would be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck
The point is this article has the phrase 'Peak Wood' right there in the title, and no one has scored above 3 with a joke about erections as far as I can tell. What the hell happened to slashdot?
Bullshit. I do a great deal of C/C++, R, C# development on XP and very, very rarely need to run anything as administrator. I can't even remember the last time I had to runas Admin other than installing software.
Well if it works for you on your one development environment I'm sure it must work for every one of the huge multitude of varied enviroments on the planet. That's because everyone uses the same tools for development.
But there are some web-based apps like Zimbra and Gmail which are pretty darned good and that's certainly the direction my organization is looking at as we expand.
There are many businesses with security requirements that make online apps run by a vendor externally a non-starter.
There are plenty of good mail clients but few good calendar programs. Outlook fills that void.