True, that is technically standardizing but I think the real point is there should be one standard. Linux's desktop adoption is a small fraction of that of Windows and it is further fragmented by multiple desktop standards. This is further complicated by the fact that apps will follow one of the standards so even if you use Gnome the chances are you will still run some apps that were designed for KDE or vice versa.
Having a singular standard would fix a lot of this. You would still have the version issue like Windows does but this is far less of an issue because then an old app is still using a standard that you were used to using even if it is not well suited for the current version.
I doubt any evidence will convince him - there is already a preponderance of evidence that the earth is spherical. The Netflix documentary on flat-earthers showed this well.
A few more technically minded flat-earthers decided to show that the earth was flat by very accurately measuring the distance between the top and bottom of two vertical towers. As you would expect they found that the tops were slightly further apart than the bases. However, instead of being convinced that there was a problem with the flat earth hypothesis they decided that their experiment must be wrong.
If they cannot be convinced by their own data that they themselves collected and which refute their beliefs then this is not a problem that can be solved by a rational, evidence-based approach.
The image was released under a CC 'by' license so technically the only thing this company did wrong is in failing to provide attribution to ESO. If they want to prevent selling of the image by others use the non-commercial clause and/or share-alike clauses. That being said just providing attribution is such a low bar and the company failed to even manage that so they really deserve to get a lot of grief about this.
It was about mathematical notation and Newton's mathematical notation for calculus is still used by physicists today because it is so convenient. This does rather suggest that his notation was aimed at physics and that he was a physicist. The only reason you have a problem with him is that you are trying to make him out to be something he was not.
Ah but have you ever asked yourself where all the Android apps are on the Apple store? I've never seen even one there so clearly there is a bias against apps for non-Apple devices. Don't worry though, I'm sure they will be going after Google for similarly a similar bias in their store that refuses to stock iOS apps.
If I were more cynical I might wonder if this is the EU's new funding model to make up for the hole that Brexit may end up creating.
No it isn't. First I'm not American and certainly not a democrat (or republican for that matter) supporter and secondly the promotion of beliefs over facts is responsible for both the cause and effect of the Trump and Brexit votes. Voters recoiling from the far left philosophy that puts feelings over reality is what pushed people to the far right where they voted based on lies over reality.
Personally, I tend to rather like reality since it is the only thing that ultimately, regardless of our individual feelings and beliefs, we all have to face together and I try to base my decisions based on objective criteria as much as possible. However, recently the evidence seems to be that I'm in a minority in that regard particularly when it comes to politics.
As a mathematician, he was most definitely a hack. Or he just did not care...
He was not a mathematician: he was a physicist. He only developed the mathematics needed to describe his physics so why should he care about maths beyond that when that wasn't what he was interested in? Complaining he was a poor mathematician would be like claiming you are a poor journalist for starting a sentence with 'or'.
The US has never asked anyone to arrest him with the intention of extraditing him.
Sadly the facts have now overtaken your careful and well-reasoned argument. The US has requested his extradition on computer hacking charges for helping Manning.
I appreciate the new form is technically more accurate
It's only technically more accurate if you read the standard form as a fraction. If you actually read the standard form as intended - a notation indicating the second derivative of y with respect to x - the standard notational form is just as accurate as is the Newtonian notation of dots to denote derivatives with respect to time.
The messed up notation by Newton is not used and instead the much saner stuff from Riemann is used.
The advantage of the Newtonian notation is that it is a lot faster and easier for, unsurprisingly, basic Newtonian mechanics where you only really differentiate with respect to time. This is why it is used extensively in this area of physics. Leibnitz's (not Riemann's!) notation is a lot more versatile which is not surprising: Leibnitz was a mathematician who was interested in the abstract concept whereas Newton was a physicist who only developed calculus so he could describe mechanics and so did not really need a broader, more flexible notation.
It is actually quite a common that fundamental physics can find itself ahead of maths. For example String theory today is really a joint venture between maths and physics since they are having to develop the maths needed to describe the physical models they work on.
Finally, Newton was neither a hack or a crank but he was a somewhat evil genius. He could be quite nasty and viscous, sometimes in extremely petty ways. For example he discredited Leibnitz and he fell out with Robert Hooke and had all contemporary portraits of him destroyed which so angered a modern artist that she spent the time an effort painting multiple portraits of Hooke from contemporary descriptions so that, today, there are more portraits of Hooke than Newton!
Oceans rise and fall, old cities are abandoned and new ones are built. Humanity survived Meltwater Pulses 1a and b, and it will survive this one too.
I don't think there is any doubt that humanity will survive global warming but that is an incredibly low bar to set. Humanity also survives earthquakes, air disasters etc. but that does not mean that we don't try to reduce and/or protect ourselves from them. Improving the safety of planes costs money and increases ticket prices but, overall, is far better than having planes fall out of the sky and people die.
Global warming is the same. We will survive but there are likely to be significant famines, droughts, floods and huge migrations caused by it if we do not act to reduce the effects. Even ignoring the humanitarian aspect of this, purely economically we are going to be better off developing new technology to reduce and mitigate the effects than we are just dealing with the full impact of a significant temperature increase.
That was my take on the US as well when I lived there 10+ years ago - it was like travelling back a few decades in time compared to Europe. However, for the case of fibre, I think the problem is not that companies are suppressing it for some shadowy reason, but that it costs too much to make it financially viable.
Last summer our local Canadian phone provider, Telus, laid fibre to most of my city and since then they have been increasingly desperate for us to sign up to use it. However, the prices they are charging for fibre-grade internet are insanely expensive compared to the 300Mbit connection we already have with a different cable company and which is already fast enough I rarely if ever want anything faster. While a gigabit might be nice it would come with a (large) bandwidth cap unlike our current connection.
If these are the prices which companies have to charge to recoup the installation costs then the simple truth may be that it is just not yet financially viable.
That's true but I think a lot of people don't switch because there is a ton of commercial software that is available on Windows but not Linux and many of us need some of this software for work. There is also the Windows Subsystem for Linux which lets you use commercial software and develop, run and test code under Linux without rebooting or the overhead of a VM.
That means Russia and Canada will lose their ability to grow wheat where they currently do.
Highly doubtful. Most Canadian wheat is grown in the prairies in the centre of the continent and a long way from the east coast where the gulf stream is and in the opposite direction to the prevailing westerly winds. Indeed, the prediction for northern and central Alberta from a few years ago was cooler and wetter summers and warmer and wetter winters since the expectation was that warming oceans would drive more moisture over the Rockies in the north leading to increased rainfall and a more oceanic climate. In the south of Alberta the prediction was that winds from the interior of the US would dominate causing less rainfall and longer and more severe droughts.
My point is not that it wont be bad for Europe. My point is why should the rest of the world care as it will be better for them?
They will care because it will almost certainly NOT be better for them either! There are entire nations in the Pacific that will be wiped out entirely because they live on low-lying islands. Large cities on the US and Canadian coasts and elsewhere will be severely flooded. Europe's problems will by no means be the worst and the problem they will have - harsher winters and flooding - is probably easier to cope with than no water at all which is what large parts of the US and elsewhere will have to deal with.
Plus the earth has many stabilizing loops built in. As temperatures go up plant growth goes up which pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere.
This is absolutely true, and the oceans absorb a lot of CO2 as well. However, despite these protective mechanisms the global CO2 levels have still dramatically risen to 400ppb. It is also dangerous to rely on complex ecological feedback mechanisms that we do not fully understand. For example, one report was suggesting that the oceans might be reaching saturation in the amount of CO2 they can absorb. This is the problem with global warming: we are effectively conducting a large, geoengineering experiment without any good understanding about what will happen. I do think that these feedback mechanisms will tend to slow and damped the effects of any change we cause but in our global, interconnected world even small temperature rises and the consequential effect on climate and sea level can have a large impact on our society even when where we ourselves live might not be particularly affected.
I think you have vastly underestimated the impact of rapid climate change. A 20m sea level rise would affect every major city on a coast and as well as flat, low lying areas which are often highly populated. The shutdown of the gulf stream would not just affect the UK but all of Scandinavia as well as France, Benelux, Germany since their climate would all switch to being similar to central Canada and, having lived in both locations, not many European plants will survive a Canadian winter where it freezes in November, hits -30 to -40C in January/February and the snow only fully melts in April (we still have some on the ground now).
Of course, Canada and Russia will be doing great as more land becomes farmable and the permafrost retreats further north but when water supplies start running out in the US and elsewhere governments are going to have to take action to secure the water their citizens need to live. This is going to cause political instability and probably wars.
Climate change is definitely survivable as a species but the death, instability, famine and ecological damage it will cause is going to be terrible.
True, but do you really think that a student who has worked hard at high school to get good grades and who has just heard that they have got into the University program they always dreamed about is going to think it is at all likely that they will either drop or burn out?
The only way ISA's make sense is if they are compulsory in which case why not just fund everyone's university education through income tax just like we already do for schools? The argument for funding schools - that society as a whole benefits from ensuring there is a supply of educated citizens - works just the same for universities. It seems a strange choice to only fund education up to a certain level and not beyond.
It tastes vile. It seems to be the North American equivalent of marmite or, for our Australian friends, vegemite. Somehow if you are exposed to these products as a young kid your body must develop some type of immunity to the taste to protect you. Thereafter you can safely ingest the stuff and possibly even pretend to enjoy it while for the rest of us the only protection we have is our gag reflex.
Reminder: Atmospheric carbon PPM is all that separates Earth and Venus.
No, not at all. First, there is the distance to the sun: Venus is about 100e6 km vs. Earth 150e6 km which means Venus receives about twice the intensity of solar radiation. Then there is the atmospheric pressure on Venus which is about 90 times higher than Earth's.
You cannot generate a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth by burning all the fossil fuel reserves because they simply do not contain enough carbon, which is not surprising since this carbon originally came from the atmosphere in the first place. If you look at this article then the current estimate is that you would need to burn about ten times the amount of carbon locked away in coal and oil to generate a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth and even then it is not certain.
Climate change is a serious problem because it will lead to rapid changes in which areas of the planet are habitable both for humans and for the crops we depend on. This will lead to political instability as well as potential deaths due to famines and droughts. Not to mention the damage to ecosystems which may have repercussions we have not yet figured out. That list of dire results should be enough to motivate anyone to action without the need to invent fictitious rubbish about runaway greenhouse effects which, because it is so obviously wrong, undermines the message about the real and still disastrous implications of rapid global warming.
Or any part of Canada that is not within 100 miles of the US border? I don't think Urbanization is the problem here.
Yes, I live there and I have to say that urban heat definitely exists in Edmonton as well as Calgary. Not every large city in Canada is within 160km of the US border but since we have a population about half that of the UK and a land area about 40 times greater it is true that urbanization is not going to account for any significant effect on the average temperature.
I agree that there are a lot of attractive things about ISA's but they have a fundamental flaw that will prevent them from working: they are voluntary. Students ending high-earning degrees like medicine, law, science and engineering where they are reasonably certain that they will have significant earning potential will be far worse off financially signing up for an ISA vs a regular loan. Since loans will certainly be available to these students why would any of them sign up for an ISA which will cost them far more?
The result is that the high income students will sign up for loans and so the ISAs will only attract low income students making them financially unfeasible because they will have lost their upside.
The only way to make this work is to have ISAs compulsory for all students...but we already have a system exactly like that called income tax which is how University education always used to be funded. So how about we go back to that and then when high earners end up paying higher tax rates they will at least know that they benefitted from those taxes when they were a student and so perhaps they may object to them - and try to avoid them - a bit less than they do now?
Slashdot Mirror
True, but if the US was as expensive as Switzerland it might still have a $1,000 note.
Yes, they appear to have come up with a very novel solution that problem: they make sure the screen fails more rapidly than the battery.
And we have that, in spades. Gnome, MATE, KDE.
True, that is technically standardizing but I think the real point is there should be one standard. Linux's desktop adoption is a small fraction of that of Windows and it is further fragmented by multiple desktop standards. This is further complicated by the fact that apps will follow one of the standards so even if you use Gnome the chances are you will still run some apps that were designed for KDE or vice versa.
Having a singular standard would fix a lot of this. You would still have the version issue like Windows does but this is far less of an issue because then an old app is still using a standard that you were used to using even if it is not well suited for the current version.
I doubt any evidence will convince him - there is already a preponderance of evidence that the earth is spherical. The Netflix documentary on flat-earthers showed this well.
A few more technically minded flat-earthers decided to show that the earth was flat by very accurately measuring the distance between the top and bottom of two vertical towers. As you would expect they found that the tops were slightly further apart than the bases. However, instead of being convinced that there was a problem with the flat earth hypothesis they decided that their experiment must be wrong.
If they cannot be convinced by their own data that they themselves collected and which refute their beliefs then this is not a problem that can be solved by a rational, evidence-based approach.
The image was released under a CC 'by' license so technically the only thing this company did wrong is in failing to provide attribution to ESO. If they want to prevent selling of the image by others use the non-commercial clause and/or share-alike clauses. That being said just providing attribution is such a low bar and the company failed to even manage that so they really deserve to get a lot of grief about this.
It was about mathematical notation and Newton's mathematical notation for calculus is still used by physicists today because it is so convenient. This does rather suggest that his notation was aimed at physics and that he was a physicist. The only reason you have a problem with him is that you are trying to make him out to be something he was not.
Ah but have you ever asked yourself where all the Android apps are on the Apple store? I've never seen even one there so clearly there is a bias against apps for non-Apple devices. Don't worry though, I'm sure they will be going after Google for similarly a similar bias in their store that refuses to stock iOS apps.
If I were more cynical I might wonder if this is the EU's new funding model to make up for the hole that Brexit may end up creating.
That's bullshit democrat bias right there!
No it isn't. First I'm not American and certainly not a democrat (or republican for that matter) supporter and secondly the promotion of beliefs over facts is responsible for both the cause and effect of the Trump and Brexit votes. Voters recoiling from the far left philosophy that puts feelings over reality is what pushed people to the far right where they voted based on lies over reality.
Personally, I tend to rather like reality since it is the only thing that ultimately, regardless of our individual feelings and beliefs, we all have to face together and I try to base my decisions based on objective criteria as much as possible. However, recently the evidence seems to be that I'm in a minority in that regard particularly when it comes to politics.
As a mathematician, he was most definitely a hack. Or he just did not care...
He was not a mathematician: he was a physicist. He only developed the mathematics needed to describe his physics so why should he care about maths beyond that when that wasn't what he was interested in? Complaining he was a poor mathematician would be like claiming you are a poor journalist for starting a sentence with 'or'.
The US has never asked anyone to arrest him with the intention of extraditing him.
Sadly the facts have now overtaken your careful and well-reasoned argument. The US has requested his extradition on computer hacking charges for helping Manning.
When facts conflict with beliefs (especially politically), which do you think will win?
Especially when we are talking politically the answer is clearly beliefs. How else do you explain Trump and Brexit?
I appreciate the new form is technically more accurate
It's only technically more accurate if you read the standard form as a fraction. If you actually read the standard form as intended - a notation indicating the second derivative of y with respect to x - the standard notational form is just as accurate as is the Newtonian notation of dots to denote derivatives with respect to time.
The messed up notation by Newton is not used and instead the much saner stuff from Riemann is used.
The advantage of the Newtonian notation is that it is a lot faster and easier for, unsurprisingly, basic Newtonian mechanics where you only really differentiate with respect to time. This is why it is used extensively in this area of physics. Leibnitz's (not Riemann's!) notation is a lot more versatile which is not surprising: Leibnitz was a mathematician who was interested in the abstract concept whereas Newton was a physicist who only developed calculus so he could describe mechanics and so did not really need a broader, more flexible notation.
It is actually quite a common that fundamental physics can find itself ahead of maths. For example String theory today is really a joint venture between maths and physics since they are having to develop the maths needed to describe the physical models they work on.
Finally, Newton was neither a hack or a crank but he was a somewhat evil genius. He could be quite nasty and viscous, sometimes in extremely petty ways. For example he discredited Leibnitz and he fell out with Robert Hooke and had all contemporary portraits of him destroyed which so angered a modern artist that she spent the time an effort painting multiple portraits of Hooke from contemporary descriptions so that, today, there are more portraits of Hooke than Newton!
Oceans rise and fall, old cities are abandoned and new ones are built. Humanity survived Meltwater Pulses 1a and b, and it will survive this one too.
I don't think there is any doubt that humanity will survive global warming but that is an incredibly low bar to set. Humanity also survives earthquakes, air disasters etc. but that does not mean that we don't try to reduce and/or protect ourselves from them. Improving the safety of planes costs money and increases ticket prices but, overall, is far better than having planes fall out of the sky and people die.
Global warming is the same. We will survive but there are likely to be significant famines, droughts, floods and huge migrations caused by it if we do not act to reduce the effects. Even ignoring the humanitarian aspect of this, purely economically we are going to be better off developing new technology to reduce and mitigate the effects than we are just dealing with the full impact of a significant temperature increase.
That was my take on the US as well when I lived there 10+ years ago - it was like travelling back a few decades in time compared to Europe. However, for the case of fibre, I think the problem is not that companies are suppressing it for some shadowy reason, but that it costs too much to make it financially viable.
Last summer our local Canadian phone provider, Telus, laid fibre to most of my city and since then they have been increasingly desperate for us to sign up to use it. However, the prices they are charging for fibre-grade internet are insanely expensive compared to the 300Mbit connection we already have with a different cable company and which is already fast enough I rarely if ever want anything faster. While a gigabit might be nice it would come with a (large) bandwidth cap unlike our current connection.
If these are the prices which companies have to charge to recoup the installation costs then the simple truth may be that it is just not yet financially viable.
That's true but I think a lot of people don't switch because there is a ton of commercial software that is available on Windows but not Linux and many of us need some of this software for work. There is also the Windows Subsystem for Linux which lets you use commercial software and develop, run and test code under Linux without rebooting or the overhead of a VM.
Technically it could still be a dream job. Not all dreams are enjoyable.
That means Russia and Canada will lose their ability to grow wheat where they currently do.
Highly doubtful. Most Canadian wheat is grown in the prairies in the centre of the continent and a long way from the east coast where the gulf stream is and in the opposite direction to the prevailing westerly winds. Indeed, the prediction for northern and central Alberta from a few years ago was cooler and wetter summers and warmer and wetter winters since the expectation was that warming oceans would drive more moisture over the Rockies in the north leading to increased rainfall and a more oceanic climate. In the south of Alberta the prediction was that winds from the interior of the US would dominate causing less rainfall and longer and more severe droughts.
My point is not that it wont be bad for Europe. My point is why should the rest of the world care as it will be better for them?
They will care because it will almost certainly NOT be better for them either! There are entire nations in the Pacific that will be wiped out entirely because they live on low-lying islands. Large cities on the US and Canadian coasts and elsewhere will be severely flooded. Europe's problems will by no means be the worst and the problem they will have - harsher winters and flooding - is probably easier to cope with than no water at all which is what large parts of the US and elsewhere will have to deal with.
Plus the earth has many stabilizing loops built in. As temperatures go up plant growth goes up which pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere.
This is absolutely true, and the oceans absorb a lot of CO2 as well. However, despite these protective mechanisms the global CO2 levels have still dramatically risen to 400ppb. It is also dangerous to rely on complex ecological feedback mechanisms that we do not fully understand. For example, one report was suggesting that the oceans might be reaching saturation in the amount of CO2 they can absorb. This is the problem with global warming: we are effectively conducting a large, geoengineering experiment without any good understanding about what will happen. I do think that these feedback mechanisms will tend to slow and damped the effects of any change we cause but in our global, interconnected world even small temperature rises and the consequential effect on climate and sea level can have a large impact on our society even when where we ourselves live might not be particularly affected.
I think you have vastly underestimated the impact of rapid climate change. A 20m sea level rise would affect every major city on a coast and as well as flat, low lying areas which are often highly populated. The shutdown of the gulf stream would not just affect the UK but all of Scandinavia as well as France, Benelux, Germany since their climate would all switch to being similar to central Canada and, having lived in both locations, not many European plants will survive a Canadian winter where it freezes in November, hits -30 to -40C in January/February and the snow only fully melts in April (we still have some on the ground now).
Of course, Canada and Russia will be doing great as more land becomes farmable and the permafrost retreats further north but when water supplies start running out in the US and elsewhere governments are going to have to take action to secure the water their citizens need to live. This is going to cause political instability and probably wars.
Climate change is definitely survivable as a species but the death, instability, famine and ecological damage it will cause is going to be terrible.
True, but do you really think that a student who has worked hard at high school to get good grades and who has just heard that they have got into the University program they always dreamed about is going to think it is at all likely that they will either drop or burn out?
The only way ISA's make sense is if they are compulsory in which case why not just fund everyone's university education through income tax just like we already do for schools? The argument for funding schools - that society as a whole benefits from ensuring there is a supply of educated citizens - works just the same for universities. It seems a strange choice to only fund education up to a certain level and not beyond.
What do brits have against peanut butter, anyway?
It tastes vile. It seems to be the North American equivalent of marmite or, for our Australian friends, vegemite. Somehow if you are exposed to these products as a young kid your body must develop some type of immunity to the taste to protect you. Thereafter you can safely ingest the stuff and possibly even pretend to enjoy it while for the rest of us the only protection we have is our gag reflex.
Reminder: Atmospheric carbon PPM is all that separates Earth and Venus.
No, not at all. First, there is the distance to the sun: Venus is about 100e6 km vs. Earth 150e6 km which means Venus receives about twice the intensity of solar radiation. Then there is the atmospheric pressure on Venus which is about 90 times higher than Earth's.
You cannot generate a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth by burning all the fossil fuel reserves because they simply do not contain enough carbon, which is not surprising since this carbon originally came from the atmosphere in the first place. If you look at this article then the current estimate is that you would need to burn about ten times the amount of carbon locked away in coal and oil to generate a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth and even then it is not certain.
Climate change is a serious problem because it will lead to rapid changes in which areas of the planet are habitable both for humans and for the crops we depend on. This will lead to political instability as well as potential deaths due to famines and droughts. Not to mention the damage to ecosystems which may have repercussions we have not yet figured out. That list of dire results should be enough to motivate anyone to action without the need to invent fictitious rubbish about runaway greenhouse effects which, because it is so obviously wrong, undermines the message about the real and still disastrous implications of rapid global warming.
Or any part of Canada that is not within 100 miles of the US border? I don't think Urbanization is the problem here.
Yes, I live there and I have to say that urban heat definitely exists in Edmonton as well as Calgary. Not every large city in Canada is within 160km of the US border but since we have a population about half that of the UK and a land area about 40 times greater it is true that urbanization is not going to account for any significant effect on the average temperature.
I agree that there are a lot of attractive things about ISA's but they have a fundamental flaw that will prevent them from working: they are voluntary. Students ending high-earning degrees like medicine, law, science and engineering where they are reasonably certain that they will have significant earning potential will be far worse off financially signing up for an ISA vs a regular loan. Since loans will certainly be available to these students why would any of them sign up for an ISA which will cost them far more?
The result is that the high income students will sign up for loans and so the ISAs will only attract low income students making them financially unfeasible because they will have lost their upside.
The only way to make this work is to have ISAs compulsory for all students...but we already have a system exactly like that called income tax which is how University education always used to be funded. So how about we go back to that and then when high earners end up paying higher tax rates they will at least know that they benefitted from those taxes when they were a student and so perhaps they may object to them - and try to avoid them - a bit less than they do now?