Did you look at the demographics of graduate students in the US lately? China has now programs to revert the brain drain, offering nice jobs to successful Chinese academics in the US and elsewhere.
Just look at the attendance list of scientific conferences. You will see at least one or two Chinese names in every big international event, in pretty much any field. The ones that are held in China has more than half the attendants from China.
And they are good. They have a tradition of working hard, and there are a lot of Chinese. Once it becomes economically attractive, it is inevitable that a lot of bright Chinese people will go into research. This is already happening in my field (astrophysics) but I feel other life sciences have similar situations.
Not that I am complaining. I am looking forward to visiting Beijing next October and start new collaborations.
Actually there is a neat solution: deny corporations having patents. They are not individuals after all. There is no reason for them to enjoy the rights of an individual (but they do) since they cannot be punished the same way (eg., cannot be imprisoned). At least do not apply same standards to individuals and corporations, eg., shift the burden of proof.
Of course this would open a huge can of worms, and it needs to be implemented w/o loopholes, but I think it would be a step in the positive direction if implemented.
"Grow up, get a real job and see what the real world is like."
sounds like a bitter adult to me. some people are really happy staying as curious kids, compiling their kernel and do other stuff that is interesting to them, rather getting a "real job".
Actually it makes a lot of sense to limit yourself to a single system when you realize reading more channels with multiple protocols require a lot more power. It even makes sense to limit yourself to 12 channels rather than 20 available, if you are really concerned about power. There are GPS devices out there that use previous generation chipsets because of power constraints.
If they could somehow make the two systems act as one, and you could read a channel from one system with no extra power cost, then I agree that getting a fix from best available satellites and mixing-an-matching during the process is superior to limiting yourself to one system.
AFAIK there is not an asymmetry in charging and discharging per se. However, while
charging a capacitor, your power supply's/batteries' internal resistance comes
into action; but to discharge, you can just short the poles of the capacitor. So, if
you want to have fun in the electronics lab, discharging is a lot easier.
I don't know how the guy in your link handles the rapid energy production problem.
I glanced over the link, and I have the impression that a lot of energy is
wasted in that process. This whole issue is part of electrical engineering and
admittedly not my expertise. My experience is though, you have to be careful with
large currents flying through your circuit elements.Even if your capacitor does not
explode, a substantial energy loss would still render your solution unviable.
Physically swapping would work of course but may be too expensive.
However, your first solution will definetely not work. Discharging a capacitor,
requires energy. In every capacitor there is an electric field and
changing this field from its full value to zero will lead to motion
in the dielectrics over which the field passes.Actually if you do it
too fast, your capacitor will certainly explode. Remember we are talking
about transferring energy equivalent to what is in a tank full of gas.
It will be a pretty big explosion too:-)
For the record, I am a physicist who now works as an astronomer.
OK, am I "free" to have slaves? Would that improve "freedom"?
Not that software and human rights are equally important of course, but
your reasoning is not logical.
I don't think this definition is a universal one. There are multiple definitions. In any case, poverty is a problem in the US. I lived in the States for seven years and I remember TV ads calling for help for starving people living within the US. I also personally saw homeless people, trying to find a shelter in the bitter cold of Chicago winter, and I do remember that many people died during the heat wave some years ago, because they could not afford AC or even transportation w/ AC.
People actually die in the States because they cannot afford to live properly. They are on the border already and one anomaly kills them. Just look at New Orleans, the people knew the disaster was coming and they could not leave, because they could not afford to leave.
There are many poor people in the States who are in much worse shape than the middle class of, say, Turkey. And, it is getting worse.
Is it possible that, as I think I once read here on Slashdot, some cosmological constants may really be variables that shift very slowly as the universe ages, and that MECOs were thus possible then, but no longer are
I am an astrophysicist but not a general relativity (GR) or cosmology person; take the following with a grain of salt. As far as I understand all solutions of GR equations involving singularities require some assumptions, since they need to take quantum effects into account and we do not have a theory of quantum gravity. So, we should be living in a very interesting universe if a few parameters about quantum gravity had such values and changed in such a way that MECOs were possible in the past and black holes are possible now. It is certainly possible, but if this happened I would suspect that there is a deeper reason for this.
It is not bait-and-switch if the developers of OpenSSH say "we will not continue to develop OpenSSH, unless OpenBSD lives along with it." At least it should not carry the bad connotations. It is quite possible that they see OpenSSH mainly as part of OpenBSD and only accidentally as a tool to use with other operating systems, and hence their motivation for developing it would disappear if OpenBSD dies.
These are not corporate businessmen trying to rob you. These are not people who develop tools and try to maximize their profits from those tools. They are also quite talented in what they are doing and I would not be surprised if what looks sociologically one thing to the majority looks something entirely different to them.
I, for one, am willing to give them at least the benefit of doubt.
Actually, BSD is the antithesis of Windows, because it is the only completely free OS. RMS's GNU puts strings on it's "free" software that limit how you can distribute modified copies.
Just like making slavery illegal limits our freedom?
I personally think Richard would be more appropiate than Linus. The freeness of Linux in particular and GNU/Linux in general comes from RMS's ideals, or more precisely his expression of some ideals common to many people. Linus has done a great job, but the antithesis of Windows is GNU.
Re:Qt is a bad example
on
Why Use GTK+?
·
· Score: 1
I'm afraid I could not express myself clearly. I did not say you cannot dual license your code. Of course you can.
What I tried to say was, you cannot have a term in your dual licensing such as "You can either buy a license from us and do whatever you want, or you can use the software under the terms of GNU GPL, but then only non-commercially". This is incompatible with GNU GPL. If you are licensing your code under GNU GPL, then you cannot attach further strings, like "you cannot sell the derivative works of this code". Of course in principle you can write a license equivalent to GNU GPL and modify it to disallow commercial use (or better yet, you can use an appropiate CC license).
From a legal point of view, if somebody accuses me of copyright infringement and I point out that the piece of code I use is available elsewhere with terms I am not violating, their case would go right out of the window. There might be a catch though, if when I bought the code I entered into a contract which prohibits me from using the code in certain ways, e.g., releasing it under GPL, they would have a case for violation of this contract.
Yes, you can rely on the above advice and feel free to sue me if it gets you in trouble. I do not live in US though:-) Here everybody gives advice to everybody and if you get something for free and complain, people will not be very sympathetic.
Re:Interestingly...
on
Why Use GTK+?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
its only GPL for non-commercial stuff
you cannot do this. it is either GPL or not, if it is GPL you cannot have "non-commercial" attached to it.
i can develop stuff with a dual-licensed library (GPL and proprietary; say with Qt) and and sell my stuff while distributing the library or its derivative works relying on GPL. however, then i have to release my own work as GPL as well; and my first customer can undersell me, because i cannot restrict further copying. only if i want to restrict further copying (or do not want to release source code etc. etc.) i have to use the proprietary license, not if i want to sell my work.
Headlines can be obtained by a simple press release. You do not need to hype, you certainly do not need to lie about your results or discoveries to make headlines. Also, the scientists are not to blame for this situation, it is a consequence of capitalism, which, being short-sighted, needs immediate return on every investment; or at least you have a higher chance of survival if you claim immediate returns. The more a state sponsors science, the less there is media buzz about scientific discoveries in that country.
If you wait until results come out before supporting science, you will never get any results.
Finally, we are closer to answers in many problems. Actually we solved many problems in the past decade. Of course nobody is expecting to learn the origin of the universe by using a single instrument, but it is easier to make a 5-inch telescope followed by a 10-inch telescope then to make a 10-inch telescope from scratch. Also the science that comes out of 5-inch telescope will be valuable in itself (I am using an analogy here, I do not mean HST is literally a 5-inch telescope).
A bigger source of CO2 will be naturally occuring forest fires which according to some estimates already make up for nearly 50% of the world's C02 production.
Which estimates would this be? As far as I know the increase in CO2 concentrations and global temperature coincides with industrial revolution. Since forest fires supposedly did not naturally increase in this era, I am inclined to think that the temperature and CO2 concentration increase is associated with human activities, in particular the burning of fossil fuels. I would be very surprised if natural forest fires produce more CO2 than human activities (lots of forest fires are human activity), and I would really appreciate if you could provide a reputable reference. I did Google but very much lack the expertise to sort out crap from real science, and do not know which journals to check for this information.
:: Who thinks USA has anything to do with democracy?
: *raises hand* I do. In a non-democratic state, you couldn't even make such accusations without having to fear imprisonment or death.
That kind of retaliation would happen only if you pose a real threat or they have nothing to lose by imprisoning/killing you. For the US, the mass media ensures to show criticisms of the government and big corporations (which is becoming more and more the same thing), so you are not a real threat; on the other hand if government acts on you, they may wake some people up who have the illusion of democracy, so they do not. I gues when they really need to act they label you as a terrorist first. There are already many new restrictions on free speech. There are designated free speech zones during meetings etc. in the US! What the fuck does that mean?
Ask yourself this question. Could the "government" of Iraq function as it does now, e.g., holding those meetings for the new constitution requirements if there were not any US troops there? Then ask the similar question for Japan, Turkey, Germany etc. It is the function of the troops, not merely their presence which defines sovereignity. But I can also accept the argument that the presence of foreign troops hurt the sovereignity of a nation to some degree in any case.
But forgetting about natural resources - the big difference is that Antartica isn't a security threat - space is - its the ultimate high ground. An engine attached to a boulder makes it into a space to surface bombardment system. You don't need nukes or lasers to threaten from above - just being up there is threat enough...
This is incorrect. You need a descent amount of angular momentum to stay up there, and for any projectile launched from the orbit to reach earth, you need to kill its angular momentum, which would in return screw up the satellite's angular momentum.
Space has military use though, in form of communication and surveliance satellites. Those smart bombs used in pre-ground troop invasion of Iraq were guided by GPS, IIRC.
Re:You don't need new standards
on
The New C Standard
·
· Score: 0, Troll
...and problems you solve today are different from the ones someone had back in the days of C creation
Just like what we are saying today is different what our parents were saying, so let's throw away our languages and invent a new one for each generation.:-)
Actually P~2*Q. Also, there are tweaks to Quicksort which guarantees O(nlogn) behaviour. If you need an efficient but somewhat general purpose quicksort I strongly recommend Jörg Schön's collection of C programs which include a simple include file that creates a very efficient sortinf routine, and coding takes seconds!!
Slashdot Mirror
Did you look at the demographics of graduate students in the US lately? China has now programs to revert the brain drain, offering nice jobs to successful Chinese academics in the US and elsewhere.
Just look at the attendance list of scientific conferences. You will see at least one or two Chinese names in every big international event, in pretty much any field. The ones that are held in China has more than half the attendants from China.
And they are good. They have a tradition of working hard, and there are a lot of Chinese. Once it becomes economically attractive, it is inevitable that a lot of bright Chinese people will go into research. This is already happening in my field (astrophysics) but I feel other life sciences have similar situations.
Not that I am complaining. I am looking forward to visiting Beijing next October and start new collaborations.
Actually there is a neat solution: deny corporations having patents. They are not individuals after all. There is no reason for them to enjoy the rights of an individual (but they do) since they cannot be punished the same way (eg., cannot be imprisoned). At least do not apply same standards to individuals and corporations, eg., shift the burden of proof.
Of course this would open a huge can of worms, and it needs to be implemented w/o loopholes, but I think it would be a step in the positive direction if implemented.
"Grow up, get a real job and see what the real world is like."
sounds like a bitter adult to me. some people are really happy staying as curious kids, compiling their kernel and do other stuff that is interesting to them, rather getting a "real job".
If they could somehow make the two systems act as one, and you could read a channel from one system with no extra power cost, then I agree that getting a fix from best available satellites and mixing-an-matching during the process is superior to limiting yourself to one system.
I don't know how the guy in your link handles the rapid energy production problem. I glanced over the link, and I have the impression that a lot of energy is wasted in that process. This whole issue is part of electrical engineering and admittedly not my expertise. My experience is though, you have to be careful with large currents flying through your circuit elements.Even if your capacitor does not explode, a substantial energy loss would still render your solution unviable.
However, your first solution will definetely not work. Discharging a capacitor, requires energy. In every capacitor there is an electric field and changing this field from its full value to zero will lead to motion in the dielectrics over which the field passes.Actually if you do it too fast, your capacitor will certainly explode. Remember we are talking about transferring energy equivalent to what is in a tank full of gas. It will be a pretty big explosion too :-)
For the record, I am a physicist who now works as an astronomer.
OK, am I "free" to have slaves? Would that improve "freedom"? Not that software and human rights are equally important of course, but your reasoning is not logical.
People actually die in the States because they cannot afford to live properly. They are on the border already and one anomaly kills them. Just look at New Orleans, the people knew the disaster was coming and they could not leave, because they could not afford to leave.
There are many poor people in the States who are in much worse shape than the middle class of, say, Turkey. And, it is getting worse.
Is it possible that, as I think I once read here on Slashdot, some cosmological constants may really be variables that shift very slowly as the universe ages, and that MECOs were thus possible then, but no longer are
I am an astrophysicist but not a general relativity (GR) or cosmology person; take the following with a grain of salt. As far as I understand all solutions of GR equations involving singularities require some assumptions, since they need to take quantum effects into account and we do not have a theory of quantum gravity. So, we should be living in a very interesting universe if a few parameters about quantum gravity had such values and changed in such a way that MECOs were possible in the past and black holes are possible now. It is certainly possible, but if this happened I would suspect that there is a deeper reason for this.
These are not corporate businessmen trying to rob you. These are not people who develop tools and try to maximize their profits from those tools. They are also quite talented in what they are doing and I would not be surprised if what looks sociologically one thing to the majority looks something entirely different to them. I, for one, am willing to give them at least the benefit of doubt.
Just like making slavery illegal limits our freedom?
I personally think Richard would be more appropiate than Linus. The freeness of Linux in particular and GNU/Linux in general comes from RMS's ideals, or more precisely his expression of some ideals common to many people. Linus has done a great job, but the antithesis of Windows is GNU.
I stand corrected. Thank you.
What I tried to say was, you cannot have a term in your dual licensing such as "You can either buy a license from us and do whatever you want, or you can use the software under the terms of GNU GPL, but then only non-commercially". This is incompatible with GNU GPL. If you are licensing your code under GNU GPL, then you cannot attach further strings, like "you cannot sell the derivative works of this code". Of course in principle you can write a license equivalent to GNU GPL and modify it to disallow commercial use (or better yet, you can use an appropiate CC license).
From a legal point of view, if somebody accuses me of copyright infringement and I point out that the piece of code I use is available elsewhere with terms I am not violating, their case would go right out of the window. There might be a catch though, if when I bought the code I entered into a contract which prohibits me from using the code in certain ways, e.g., releasing it under GPL, they would have a case for violation of this contract.
Yes, you can rely on the above advice and feel free to sue me if it gets you in trouble. I do not live in US though :-) Here everybody gives advice to everybody and if you get something for free and complain, people will not be very sympathetic.
its only GPL for non-commercial stuff
you cannot do this. it is either GPL or not, if it is GPL you cannot have "non-commercial" attached to it.
i can develop stuff with a dual-licensed library (GPL and proprietary; say with Qt) and and sell my stuff while distributing the library or its derivative works relying on GPL. however, then i have to release my own work as GPL as well; and my first customer can undersell me, because i cannot restrict further copying. only if i want to restrict further copying (or do not want to release source code etc. etc.) i have to use the proprietary license, not if i want to sell my work.
do you realize that jokes can be offensive as well? maybe not as much as insults, but they still can.
Headlines can be obtained by a simple press release. You do not need to hype, you certainly do not need to lie about your results or discoveries to make headlines. Also, the scientists are not to blame for this situation, it is a consequence of capitalism, which, being short-sighted, needs immediate return on every investment; or at least you have a higher chance of survival if you claim immediate returns. The more a state sponsors science, the less there is media buzz about scientific discoveries in that country.
If you wait until results come out before supporting science, you will never get any results.
Finally, we are closer to answers in many problems. Actually we solved many problems in the past decade. Of course nobody is expecting to learn the origin of the universe by using a single instrument, but it is easier to make a 5-inch telescope followed by a 10-inch telescope then to make a 10-inch telescope from scratch. Also the science that comes out of 5-inch telescope will be valuable in itself (I am using an analogy here, I do not mean HST is literally a 5-inch telescope).
Thanks a lot!
Which estimates would this be? As far as I know the increase in CO2 concentrations and global temperature coincides with industrial revolution. Since forest fires supposedly did not naturally increase in this era, I am inclined to think that the temperature and CO2 concentration increase is associated with human activities, in particular the burning of fossil fuels. I would be very surprised if natural forest fires produce more CO2 than human activities (lots of forest fires are human activity), and I would really appreciate if you could provide a reputable reference. I did Google but very much lack the expertise to sort out crap from real science, and do not know which journals to check for this information.
why not
#define START main() {
rather than
#define START {
: *raises hand* I do. In a non-democratic state, you couldn't even make such accusations without having to fear imprisonment or death.
That kind of retaliation would happen only if you pose a real threat or they have nothing to lose by imprisoning/killing you. For the US, the mass media ensures to show criticisms of the government and big corporations (which is becoming more and more the same thing), so you are not a real threat; on the other hand if government acts on you, they may wake some people up who have the illusion of democracy, so they do not. I gues when they really need to act they label you as a terrorist first. There are already many new restrictions on free speech. There are designated free speech zones during meetings etc. in the US! What the fuck does that mean?
Ask yourself this question. Could the "government" of Iraq function as it does now, e.g., holding those meetings for the new constitution requirements if there were not any US troops there? Then ask the similar question for Japan, Turkey, Germany etc. It is the function of the troops, not merely their presence which defines sovereignity. But I can also accept the argument that the presence of foreign troops hurt the sovereignity of a nation to some degree in any case.
This is incorrect. You need a descent amount of angular momentum to stay up there, and for any projectile launched from the orbit to reach earth, you need to kill its angular momentum, which would in return screw up the satellite's angular momentum.
Space has military use though, in form of communication and surveliance satellites. Those smart bombs used in pre-ground troop invasion of Iraq were guided by GPS, IIRC.
Just like what we are saying today is different what our parents were saying, so let's throw away our languages and invent a new one for each generation. :-)
Actually P~2*Q. Also, there are tweaks to Quicksort which guarantees O(nlogn) behaviour. If you need an efficient but somewhat general purpose quicksort I strongly recommend Jörg Schön's collection of C programs which include a simple include file that creates a very efficient sortinf routine, and coding takes seconds!!