so in a strange turnabout, I suppose geeks would be hacking into Jocks' clothing and (cut-and-) pasting "Kick Me" "I suck" signs on their e-backs. just goes to show you, the future's unpredictable.
The double slit is great. I might vote for the 1919 experiment of Eddington, which verified General Relativity, showing that the mass of the sun bent the path of light. A sweet verification.
This reminds me, Neal Stephenson was working on a new book, related to Cryptonomicon. Anyone know what the status is? Did I miss any Stephenson news? Moderators might bash this as off-topic, but lemme slide on this one, guys.
Wouldn't it be interesting to see NYC, Hong Kong, etc, mandate 100% polymer construction for non-load-bearing elements, and concrete/steel for the rest? think about it--NO BUGS. I COULD FINALLY MOVE TO NYC!!!!!!!!!:-)
seriously, there's no way you can live in a place where you get home and encounter a swarm of flying bugs in your kitchen. jesus christ.
My question is aimed at understanding why people prefer to pay an arm and a leg to use msft office rather than linux apps. Telling me Emacs is not a mere word processor, or how great it is, is not the answer to my question. Gnu types have been going on about that for years, and yet 98% of people go out and get MS Word. I'm trying to have a discussion about why, and how to change that. And for the record, there's nothing difficult about editing.txt files in Word97 or WordXP, in my experience.
Whatever the GPL says or omits, being 'best-positioned to take on closed source shops like msft' will not be possible without understanding why people will pay $550 for a word processor and spreadsheet. And dismissing that behavior as just 'lusers being stupid' isn't an answer. When people will pay $550 for an easy, intuitive word processor that comes with restrictions (Office), rather than a more primitive, ugly, yet free and somewhat as functional word processor (Emacs or other unix WP), there's something begging to be explained. And the licening details are of secondary importance.
Literate programming is how Wolfram wrote Mathematica. Perhaps because of that, it has remarkable structural consistency. I doubt it'll catch on, though, because it takes more discipline and brains to determine the structure before coding, than to code it up, and then explain it.
A) In terms of general human rights, nobody should have the right to determine that your religion is invalid. A system which does so is discriminatory by definition.
B) What the aussie constitution says has no relevance to my argument. I did not accuse the aussies of violating their law. I said their actions show the problems of insufficient separation.
But that's just my argument. Perhaps I don't have as fine a 'handle on reality' as someone whose name is a misspelling of moron.
This reinforces caution against naive predictions about the future, reminding us that the curve of the technologically possible and the curve of the market reality can diverge widely. It means the answer to "When will we all live like The Jetsons?" Is not necessarily "When we know how to build everything The Jetsons had." A simple point, but important.
I appreciate the effort, and couldn't have done any better, but Satirewire just wasn't funny. It was formulaic. Little surprise or imagination. Hopefully he'll be much better at what he does in the future. And it's great that he's not going out like a punk, either, by, say, demanding that the onion change its name to Satirewire/The Onion, or whining about corporations....
This is really good evidence for the need for separation. in a situation like this government ends up exerting pressure in favor of or against religious beliefs. Neutrality is the absense of such pressure.
But Steve, you're an atheist, what do you care?
Because lack of belief could just as easily be invalidated under such a situation. If you like your freedoms, you have to guard your neighbor's.
Open Source contains two peoples. One is for freedom in computing. The other, which also wears the mantle of the first, is anti-business. Red-Hat bashing has nothing to do with freedom. It is just anti-business sentiment. Geek chic is another, smaller, element...there's little esoteric-wizard status to be held when many people start to become familiar with the tech. If linux ever becomes successful among hoi polloi, expect the geek-status seekers to have migrated elsewhere by that time. They'll all be developing embeddedBSD, or making networks of STAMP chips run perl, or some other ego-inflating arcana.
i hope the face of linux is changing. because right now it resembles gerald, the guy who was briefly in my physics program. The breast pocket of his XXL t-shirt (think Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons) was always stretched down a foot, because he kept a 20oz bottle of mountain dew there. What an uberdork. He lasted 2 semesters before transferring to Comp Sci.
the real story here is the experience and technology the eye problem will give neurology. Interacting with the eye and vision structures of the brain is the easiest way to get a foothold in neuro-cybernetics, and such problems are widespread enough to provide researchers much study.
Maybe, in the end, giving machines human-quality visual capabiliy will be a result of using machines to return the same to impaired humans.
The initiation of life is separate from either the big bang or basic evolutionary theory. If you want to understand it, I suggest you start by getting a biochemistry degree. For starters you could read Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry by Nelson and Cox, or any good biochem textbook.
There is no description of any kind of biological evolution in the big bang theory. Nor do any of my fellow atheists believe that the big bang initiated life. Please leave evolution to the biologists, and the big bang to the physicists.
for anyone who missed the above posts, here's a synopsis:
creationist: evolution is wrong because if a fish done evolved a lung it would die.
knowledgeable person: That exact type of fish exists. Here's a link to it.
creationist: You're life is pointless. Your a sadist. You is sick in the head.
fighting opponents like this is too fun to resist!
Damn, this is such a softball, it almost feels unfair to swing at it.
"Suppose a fish evolves lungs. What happens then? Does it move up to the next evolutionary stage? Of course not. It drowns."
Well, there's a living fish that puts the lie to this idiocy:
"This particular species has the ability to hop across the land or crawl across the land. It has rudimentary legs and a rudimentary lung," said Bob Lunsford, a biologist with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. "It can live out of water for up to three days."
the comment is about the Chinese Snakehead, which was recently mentioned right here on Slashdot. A story about this fish can be found here:
http://stacks.msnbc.com/local/WRC/A1240710.asp
It's easy for those of us surrounded by scientists to forget that some people lack an understanding of evolution, and believe both that it is obviously wrong, and they can confidently have an reliable opinion about a scientific topic. Then something like this Slashdot review causes these notions to appear disturbingly on my screen.
I have slowly learned there's no point in debating people who believe this sort of thing. But it's still amusing, in a sense, to object to the more blatant nonsense. It's okay, as long is you keep it a small part of life. A mind is a terrible thing to waste debating the brainless.;-)
Macro evolution as described in the big bang theory ?
That's so wrong that the word 'wrong' seems insufficient. You need to do a lot of learning and thinking, not discussing, right now.
We take Moore's Law and it's cousins for granted these days. But it's worth remembering that those things are fueled by profit from computer-market turnover and growth. There are good reasons to believe those things are durable, but it is--even if unlikely--possible they will strongly diminish at some point. Keep this in mind while pondering the situation of cgi being fantastically cheaper than ordinary production in the future. Or instead, ponder a deeper, more interesting question: what would compel consumers in 2020 to pay a premium for a 133 Teraflop HP over an everyday 100 Teraflop HP?
I hope that Peru doesn't reverse course after encountering the mobs of vicious, immature linux acolytes who give other friends of linux a bad name. I hope the benevolent, helpful side of linux overwhelms the side comprised of people who talk of 'lusers', demean anyone who uses msft products, and think that compiling a kernel makes them intelligent. We'll see.
if you think a system might be insecure, you tell the system administrators. You do not commit a crime to prove the insecurity. if you do, and you are arrested, hopefully you'll get the death penalty so I can read the resulting amusing Darwin Award writeup about your dumb a$$.
Slashdot Mirror
so in a strange turnabout, I suppose geeks would be hacking into Jocks' clothing and (cut-and-) pasting "Kick Me" "I suck" signs on their e-backs.
just goes to show you, the future's unpredictable.
It's not, someone's just abusing the moderation system.
The double slit is great. I might vote for the 1919 experiment of Eddington, which verified General Relativity, showing that the mass of the sun bent the path of light. A sweet verification.
just a simple physics student's comment.
This reminds me, Neal Stephenson was working on a new book, related to Cryptonomicon. Anyone know what the status is? Did I miss any Stephenson news? Moderators might bash this as off-topic, but lemme slide on this one, guys.
seriously, there's no way you can live in a place where you get home and encounter a swarm of flying bugs in your kitchen. jesus christ.
My question is aimed at understanding why people prefer to pay an arm and a leg to use msft office rather than linux apps. Telling me Emacs is not a mere word processor, or how great it is, is not the answer to my question. Gnu types have been going on about that for years, and yet 98% of people go out and get MS Word. I'm trying to have a discussion about why, and how to change that. .txt files in Word97 or WordXP, in my experience.
And for the record, there's nothing difficult about editing
Whatever the GPL says or omits, being 'best-positioned to take on closed source shops like msft' will not be possible without understanding why people will pay $550 for a word processor and spreadsheet. And dismissing that behavior as just 'lusers being stupid' isn't an answer.
When people will pay $550 for an easy, intuitive word processor that comes with restrictions (Office), rather than a more primitive, ugly, yet free and somewhat as functional word processor (Emacs or other unix WP), there's something begging to be explained. And the licening details are of secondary importance.
Literate programming is how Wolfram wrote Mathematica. Perhaps because of that, it has remarkable structural consistency. I doubt it'll catch on, though, because it takes more discipline and brains to determine the structure before coding, than to code it up, and then explain it.
A) In terms of general human rights, nobody should have the right to determine that your religion is invalid. A system which does so is discriminatory by definition.
B) What the aussie constitution says has no relevance to my argument. I did not accuse the aussies of violating their law. I said their actions show the problems of insufficient separation.
But that's just my argument. Perhaps I don't have as fine a 'handle on reality' as someone whose name is a misspelling of moron.
This reinforces caution against naive predictions about the future, reminding us that the curve of the technologically possible and the curve of the market reality can diverge widely.
It means the answer to "When will we all live like The Jetsons?" Is not necessarily "When we know how to build everything The Jetsons had."
A simple point, but important.
I appreciate the effort, and couldn't have done any better, but Satirewire just wasn't funny. It was formulaic. Little surprise or imagination. Hopefully he'll be much better at what he does in the future. And it's great that he's not going out like a punk, either, by, say, demanding that the onion change its name to Satirewire/The Onion, or whining about corporations....
But Steve, you're an atheist, what do you care?
Because lack of belief could just as easily be invalidated under such a situation. If you like your freedoms, you have to guard your neighbor's.
Open Source contains two peoples. One is for freedom in computing. The other, which also wears the mantle of the first, is anti-business. Red-Hat bashing has nothing to do with freedom. It is just anti-business sentiment. Geek chic is another, smaller, element...there's little esoteric-wizard status to be held when many people start to become familiar with the tech. If linux ever becomes successful among hoi polloi, expect the geek-status seekers to have migrated elsewhere by that time. They'll all be developing embeddedBSD, or making networks of STAMP chips run perl, or some other ego-inflating arcana.
I didn't. You must have assumed both 'creationist's were the same person.
i hope the face of linux is changing. because right now it resembles gerald, the guy who was briefly in my physics program. The breast pocket of his XXL t-shirt (think Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons) was always stretched down a foot, because he kept a 20oz bottle of mountain dew there. What an uberdork. He lasted 2 semesters before transferring to Comp Sci.
Maybe, in the end, giving machines human-quality visual capabiliy will be a result of using machines to return the same to impaired humans.
The initiation of life is separate from either the big bang or basic evolutionary theory. If you want to understand it, I suggest you start by getting a biochemistry degree. For starters you could read Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry by Nelson and Cox, or any good biochem textbook.
There is no description of any kind of biological evolution in the big bang theory. Nor do any of my fellow atheists believe that the big bang initiated life. Please leave evolution to the biologists, and the big bang to the physicists.
for anyone who missed the above posts, here's a synopsis:
creationist: evolution is wrong because if a fish done evolved a lung it would die.
knowledgeable person: That exact type of fish exists. Here's a link to it.
creationist: You're life is pointless. Your a sadist. You is sick in the head.
fighting opponents like this is too fun to resist!
Damn, this is such a softball, it almost feels unfair to swing at it. "Suppose a fish evolves lungs. What happens then? Does it move up to the next evolutionary stage? Of course not. It drowns." Well, there's a living fish that puts the lie to this idiocy: "This particular species has the ability to hop across the land or crawl across the land. It has rudimentary legs and a rudimentary lung," said Bob Lunsford, a biologist with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. "It can live out of water for up to three days." the comment is about the Chinese Snakehead, which was recently mentioned right here on Slashdot. A story about this fish can be found here: http://stacks.msnbc.com/local/WRC/A1240710.asp It's easy for those of us surrounded by scientists to forget that some people lack an understanding of evolution, and believe both that it is obviously wrong, and they can confidently have an reliable opinion about a scientific topic. Then something like this Slashdot review causes these notions to appear disturbingly on my screen. I have slowly learned there's no point in debating people who believe this sort of thing. But it's still amusing, in a sense, to object to the more blatant nonsense. It's okay, as long is you keep it a small part of life. A mind is a terrible thing to waste debating the brainless. ;-)
Macro evolution as described in the big bang theory ? That's so wrong that the word 'wrong' seems insufficient. You need to do a lot of learning and thinking, not discussing, right now.
We take Moore's Law and it's cousins for granted these days. But it's worth remembering that those things are fueled by profit from computer-market turnover and growth. There are good reasons to believe those things are durable, but it is--even if unlikely--possible they will strongly diminish at some point. Keep this in mind while pondering the situation of cgi being fantastically cheaper than ordinary production in the future. Or instead, ponder a deeper, more interesting question: what would compel consumers in 2020 to pay a premium for a 133 Teraflop HP over an everyday 100 Teraflop HP?
I hope that Peru doesn't reverse course after encountering the mobs of vicious, immature linux acolytes who give other friends of linux a bad name. I hope the benevolent, helpful side of linux overwhelms the side comprised of people who talk of 'lusers', demean anyone who uses msft products, and think that compiling a kernel makes them intelligent. We'll see.
We are. Since we are in the arm of a rotating galaxy, we are accelerating. Acceleration is a change in the velocity vector, not the speed scalar.
if you think a system might be insecure, you tell the system administrators. You do not commit a crime to prove the insecurity. if you do, and you are arrested, hopefully you'll get the death penalty so I can read the resulting amusing Darwin Award writeup about your dumb a$$.