More likely, they are measuring the energy levels of the ejected material. Matter goes through a lot of trouble when it accelerates, and you can easily measure the energy levels and composition of matter based on the spectra in astronomy.
BTW, 99.9 +/- 0.1 c is the speed quoted. So that's +/- 3E7 m/s^2, which is still a very, very large number. Consider that as you approach the speed of light, ever increasing amounts of energy are needed to accelerate the matter, that's still a very, very large error bar.
Well, with your logic then we should just shut down the Oscars and the Grammys as well. After all, we're at WAR!
We might as well shut down all the night clubs and party spots while we're at it. What do these people thing we are doing? I mean, we're at WAR!
We should go through and just shut down entire cities. Las Vegas, Atlantic City. Heck, we should probably shut down the entire state of Hawaii! Why would anyone want to go there? We're at WAR!
Or you can just do it the way Guido intended and pass in first class functions. You don't need special notation to pass around references to functions or even bound methods.
Hi! Welcome to my country. I work and toil in this country, pay taxes, and such. You do not. You are a visitor. You are here because I allow you to be. When your time is up, you must promptly leave. Thanks for visiting, but I didn't agree to let you live here.
If I see you doing something suspicious, I'll be watching you. If you are associating with the wrong crowd, I'll get a little too close for your comfort. If you threaten my country, or commit a crime, you're gone for good.
I have a right to know why you are here and what you are doing. I have a right to verify your story. If I don't like what you are doing or if you lie to me, I have a right to kick you out of my country.
I am sure you would feel the same way when I go visit you.
It's like you think the police don't have any rights. (A) They were put in charge of security and preventing crimes, and then convicting anyone who has committed them. (B) They have rights under the constitution.
Did you know that you can be held for 24 hours without charges and without reason? Did you know that you can be arrested without reason? Did you know that when a police officer asks you a question, and you tell something other than the truth, you are committing a crime?
These FBI agents were well within their rights. While this lady may believe she is part of this ultra-peaceful Gandhi-worshipping group, ten to one, there are members who don't think that way. She did the right thing - tell the truth, cooperate fully, and otherwise, stay out of the way. She also did the right thing in telling her story. But I wouldn't read anything into it. Her rights weren't violated.
She might want to find out if any warrants have been issued against her organization, or even herself. I wouldn't be surprised if the FBI was monitoring the group with a valid warrant.
QUESTION: Who was faster in sending aid to the tsunami victims?
ANSWER: Despite the swiftness of the US Navy, they were not the first on the scene. Despite Kofi Annan's influence and power, even now, the UN has yet to do anything to help. No government on earth beat the speed by with PRIVATE INDIVIDUALS and organizations were deploying aid and charity, or the pace at which they raised the necessary funds. This is true in any natural disaster, and even in warfare. The first on the scene is always private individuals and organizations.
YES, there are people who are not prepared for retirement. YES, there are people without health care or without sufficient incomes or that are too stupid to take care of themselves.
Guess what? Government has tried for years to help these people. But they've only made the problems worse. If you'd like, we can go adopt something like what Cuba or the USSR had. But it won't work, just like it isn't and hasn't worked.
The only way to take care of these problems is with private solutions. Just like the first money to hit the tsunami victims, the first medical care, and the first shipments of supplies came from PRIVATE sources, so too we should rely on private sources to take care of all of society's ills. Why? Because they are reliable and effective and swift.
See, one of the crowning doctrines of Christianity and probably ALL world religions is that one has a duty to care for those around them. Even today, despite the fact that we are taxed to death and can barely provide for our own families, we are reaching out to help those in more need than us. Just get the government out of the way, out of our pocketbooks, and let us take care of our own.
Now you're going to argue that we DON'T take care of ourselves. Go ahead and believe that. Should that fantasy ever become reality, no government on earth could ever fix that problem. Should the day come when we care less about those around us than ourselves, we will have far more serious problems than poverty and health care.
But USERS decide what they want, not PROVIDERS
on
Future of Internet News?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Why is this so bad? Even if people get their news from 1 or 2 sources that are heavily biased, the opposing viewpoints are a click away. Often, they provide links and connect to each other, despite being mortal enemies with irreconcilable differences. (I never heard of Daily Kos until I started reading LGF regularly, for instance.)
Users get to determine what they read and in what format they read it in. They can even determine how much of which slant they want on the story.
Without the internet, you would have to search long and far to find opposing viewpoints. You'd have to take what you read at face value or go pay a visit to the library and hope they have recent, relevant material. Either that, or you'd have to subscribe to every magazine and newspaper on earth.
A writes cool software that uses a new technique. B sees the software, realizes that it is patentable, contacts A and works with A to obtain a patent for A. A sells patent to B for $1. B gives A a beautiful plaque and eternal gratitude. B licenses patents for all open source software developers. B, on its own, develops 20 new patents derived from this one. Those 20 turns into 40 more patents. B licenses those patents similarly. Of course, A and all OS developers benefit from B's work. C is left out in the cold, never able to develop technology like what's in the patent.
Man, I would HATE to be C in this scenario. It would be a big motivator to license software with an OS license.
Oh, give it five to ten years, and IBM + OS community will develop and implement some truly awesome patents. About that time, expect our attitudes towareds patents to shift slightly, because it will benefit us far more than it will the others.
See, IBM licenses a lot of their patents. They are making some money from the patents they have. Consider this: If they all of a sudden decided to license all of their patents for free to the OS community, a very large portion of the software world would be very upset.
Also, remember that IBM has already taken the stance that they were not going to pursue patent infringment with OS developers. Guess what? That means every patent anyway. So this latest move is just trying to explain to people that IBM is very, very serious.
(I also would not be surprised if among the thousands of patents that IBM owns, only 500 or so deal exclusively with software.)
I am already introducing my son into the world of computers with my PlayStation. His time is limited, and we spend the time together. But he is learning how harsh a mistress computers are. He is also learning the general rules about computers. One, don't do things at random. If you don't know what it is, don't touch it. Two, computers are sensitive. Scratch that disk, and you're never playing that game again. Three, computers crash every once in a while. The reason why Ratchet isn't moving anymore is because it crashed, son.
I am teaching him the alphabet (caps first). He is only 3 and he knows 80% of the alphabet already. I'll move him into lowercase before he reaches four. He'll be reading before he is five.
Once he can read and write, I am going to show him the real world of computers. He'll be writing programs before 6. He'll be doing it on his own by 8. By the time he graduates from high school, he'll know almost everything there is to know about modern computers and the internet.
I've decided that understanding computers can be what farming was a long time ago. I have a responsibility to hand down my knowledge and understanding before he becomes an adult. He may not choose to be a computer expert (or farmer) but understanding this one niche will help him wherever he goes.
This is my favorite server vendor. I got a server for home because they are cheap and good, and local.
I used to work for a small web company. We built servers from scratch (tigerdirect). I told the CTO that my servers were going to be built by someone who actually tests the software on the hardware. Guess what? My cheap $2,000 system beat the pants off of the other servers people put together because the hardware was actually compatible. Sure, it cost about 10% more, but it was faster, more server-room-friendly. When we had a problem with it, the answer was a phone call away. It was nice being able to focus on software rather than hardware for a change. I felt a tremendous burden drop from my shoulders after that experience.
That's the last time I ever cobbled together a system. I'm looking at getting one of their desktops for my next upgrade...
Why are companies outsourcing? Because others do it cheaper than we do. If we want to keep our fat salaries, we have to become far more productive than our foreign counterparts.
In the computer world, that means using processes and tools that make us vastly superior programmers. In the manufacturing world, that means using robots and devices to make one person able to do the work of hundreds.
Those who are losing their jobs to these machines only have themselves to blame. If you want a fat salary, you have to be that much more productive than the next guy. They should've been spending some time figuring out how to be more productive rather than wasting their time away working in routine jobs.
Now, I feel sorry for these guys. They weren't educated enough to see the future staring down at them. I am willing to help them get off their butts, get a better education, or figure out things they can do productively that machines can't do (yet). But they must do so with the understanding that they must be productive or they won't get paid.
Another option is to get into the machine building business. Learn how to build and run and repair these machines, and you'll be employed as long as people need machines. As for me, I write programs that allow people to access machines and I figure as long as people want to access machines, I'll have a job.
Or they can decide to drop out of modern life, go get a patch of land and raise their own food and live a simple lifestyle without modern trappings. There are still areas of the US and world where land is dirt cheap and arable. I am more and more inclined to this lifestyle as time goes on. I hear a lot of people are doing it already. Sure, it's back-breaking work just to stay even, but you'll never get fired.
I'm glad I upgraded to Fedora Core 3, and left SELinux running, despite the problems with MySQL. Even if you can get a root account, if you don't have the right roles, you are still locked in a tiny little box without a key.
With your scaling of drives, you missed something important. Right now, let's say that once every 4 years one of these drives will fail. That's a pretty good record, I think, for consumer hardware. When you've got four of these running, you are pretty much guaranteed that one will fail every year. With eight, you now have a good chance that one will fail every 6 months.
I'm not saying they'll fail once every six months. I'm saying that on average they will. More than likely, three will fail in a single month, but you'll have a couple of years without failure before then.
Now that you want to put several drives together, you are inclined to look at redundancy and fault-tolerance. This is what RAID is for.
I run only a single hard drive in each of my home computers, exactly because of this reason. The number of components I actually manage is minimized, so that my home network works, and I don't have keep replacing stuff. At work, I have two hard drives in my machines. One, because I don't manage the backup servers, and two, because I can get a new one in less than an hour, installed, because our tech staff keeps a box full of brand new ones around because it is cost-efficient.
No. Mobility = Freedom. I want more of it. I want to be able to travel around the world one day. Heck, I want to visit Mars and Jupiter and distant stars one day.
No, this is something much deeper. Physicists admit that this is a bit of philosophical work, but hey, it makes sense, in a way.
The equations that describe the behavior of particles take into account a statistical distribution for the mechanical properties of the particle. Things like "position" and "momentum" (momentum = which way and how fast it is going) aren't single values. They are possibilities.
How do you "measure" something? You have to interact with the system, constraining one or the other of the properties. I can build a piece of metal with a very tiny slit. Particles passing through the slit must have a position that is very well defined, compared to particles passing through the air. Or, I can build a laser that shoots particles at a very specific speed and direction (aka momentum). I am measuring the properties of those particles as I put them into this kind of system.
By constraining one or the other properties, the corresponding statistical distribution has changed. In the case of the slit, the position is somewhere bettween the two edges of the slit. In the case of the laser beam, the direction is well-defined as well as the speed.
How are these two properties related according to quantum mechanics? In effect, the momentum is basically like a Fourier transform on the position, and vice-versa. What's a Fourier transform? It's how you get the frequencies that compose a signal, and vice-versa.
Mathematically, there is a limit to the precision of the properties. This is the Heisenberg principle. Think of it this way. A pulse of sound - a loud snap or pop - has many frequencies. It's confined in the position graph, but all spread out in the momentum chart. Conversely, a single frequency signal is a sine or cosine wave. It is all spread out on the position, but a single point on the frequency graph.
By constraining the position, the momentum becomes more distributed. In the case of the slit, the particle scatters at odd angle, creating an interference pattern. In the case of the laser beam, you can't tell where along the beam the photon actually is.
Since the math and reality agree so well, this explanation has held as the rules that govern particle dynamics at the quantum scale.
Which is why we say with certainty that if you want to eliminate uncertainty, you have to change the particle somehow. In other words, observation affects reality.
A note on reality: A lot of people think that the reality that one person perceives is very different than another's. This is not true. The perceptions are different, but reality is not. What you percieve is not reality. Instead, reality is deduced from the perception. If the rules for transforming a perception into reality are indeed laws of nature, then we shouldn't arrive at two different conclusions on reality. Reality doesn't change based on who's looking at it. It is independent of observation. In the case of quantum mechanics, we have to look at how the observation affects reality, because we have yet to discover a way to inobtrusively observe quantum mechanical states.
* Statistically speaking, Rossi is still considered the winner unless Gregoire pulls out with a 300 vote lead. This is pure math, folks, nothing more, nothing less.
No. She is the winner if she has a 1-vote lead. You don't average out the previous counts. The result of the current recount is the result, period. It's simple law, folks.
Uhhh... statistically speaking. I thought republicans were supposed to be the dumb ones, too.
What the majority feel is irrelevant. What the law says is what matters.
Interesting. Does the majority have a right to change the law to reflect their desires or not? Does the majority choose who will be the next judges and legislatures or not? The survey results are important because when the majority doesn't get what it wants, things change. That was my point.
In some respects, perhaps, but the question is whether they are following the law properly *now,* and the Supreme Court just ruled in its favor, and the Republican Secretary of State is on the county's side in this matter.
You mean the part where they don't even verify signatures on the absentee ballots? Or the part where they allow people to list office buildings as their primary residence? Or the part where they allow people to register and vote multiple times under the same name at the same address? I didn't know the Supreme Court ruled on those matters. I thought they just ruled on whether or not recanvassing can be done when the law says it cannot.
King County is not very democrat. It's split. Seattle is 60-40 democrat, but the rest of the county is most definitely republican. You'll note that there is a 7-6 split D-R on the council.
Break off Seattle from the county, and it will be bright red, like the rest of the state.
As for the animosity, yes, that has been happening for the past 20 years of democrat rule, thank you very much. We've been holding torches and pitchforks for ages, but you have your head so far up your *** that you haven't noticed. I-695 anyone?
But you're right. This may be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Ever heard of Cedar County?
This blog has some startling facts that you should familiarize yourself with.
* Statistically speaking, Rossi is still considered the winner unless Gregoire pulls out with a 300 vote lead. This is pure math, folks, nothing more, nothing less.
* A survey of the voters in Washington showed that if Rossi wins, he should be declared the winner. However. the majority feel that if Gregoire wins, we should have a runoff election.
* Interesting notes as one of the bloggers investigates the voting rolls. Fraud, anyone?
* Everyone in Washington State now admits that King County has not been following state law in the elections process. Even the Seattle Weekly isn't ashamed to admit it. King County may have been throwing off close elections for the past 10 years.
Check out the information on that blog, consider it scientifically and with an open mind, and draw your own conclusion.
As for me, it's obvious. The democrats have successfully stolen the election, and I have proof.
The reason no one has ever actively pursued mecha is because they would be so inefficient. Tanks and such are built with a low profile, and if you ask frontline soldiers, they are only useful in limited roles. My army friend much prefers the new strykers because of their flexibility and reliability.
A mecha would be standing 20 feet in the battlefied, an open and tempting target to everything from bombers to tanks to helicopters and to RPGs. It would have limited mobility, be extremely difficult to keep in working condition, and will have less load capacity than its tracked or wheeled counterparts. In short, it would look cool, but would be a useless coffin.
In BattleTech, they make up for the obvious disadvantages of a mecha by giving them advantages over vehicles. Mecha are more reliable, more maneuvarable, able to take more damage and continue to function, and can carry more weapons. Even then, if you pit a balanced vehicle force against a balanced mecha force, ton for ton, credit for credit, the vehicles can easily overpower the mecha in most circumstances.
I don't want to discourage this backyard project. After all, how many inventions were made when there was no necessity, but a necessity was found at a later time? But I do want folks to exercise a bit of common sense. If mecha were such a great idea, we'd have used them in WWII. We certainly had the technology to build them back then.
This is absolute hogwash. What happens to the rich is they get lazy. And the lazy don't exercise their brain or bodies and they get weak. If there's one thing history teaches us it is that through competition and conflict and struggle humanity thrives. We need adversity, and we crave it, and it strengthens us.
You can't buy intelligence. You can buy the appearance of intelligence, you can buy credentials, you can buy your way into accolades and titles, but that doesn't mean you are smart. What happens is that these people begin to conglomerate and pat each other on the back and tell each other they are doing a good job when they are miserable failures.
Then they get setup for failure. Someone smarter, faster, more adaptive comes along and rocks their world to pieces. That's what's happening to the democrat party. They are sitting on their success of FDR, and haven't realized that sixty years of being second fiddle has given the republican party the ability and the blood and the intelligence to engineer a revolution. The funny thing is that the same thing happened to the republican party sixty years ago, led by an upstart called FDR!
I keep thinking back to the Chinese illiterati writing poetry and drawing pictures, when Genghis Khan to the north was gathering troops and fighting for his life and for his future. When the two forces met, who was the conqueror? The well-bred rich illiterati with thousands of years of experience of ruling over millions of people? Or the Mongol hordes led by a brilliant general who knew how to win battles decisively? If the Chinese were so smart, they would've been training like the Greeks and the Romans and the British in their heyday.
This is too true, too true. The environmentalists get defensive when you propose building machines to suck the greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere. They get upset when we tell them that North America is a net consumer of CO2. They get fuddled when we tell them that the world's worst environmental offenders are found in communist countries like China and the old Soviet Union.
The religion of environmentalism has one doctrine:
(1) It is all America's fault, in particular the industrialist capitalists who provide billions of jobs to workers everywhere and improve the quality of life for everyone on the planet.
You don't have to look deep within the environmental movement to see the old Red Guard, communist conspiracies, and blatant anti-Americanism. What once championed worker's rights are now championing the environment.
Combine this with the movement's terrorist attributes (greenpeace, et al), and you see the true motive of the movement: to undermine America and its economy. They burn our property and threaten our people, and wonder why the FBI are treating them like Al Qaeda? Amusing.
As for me, I refuse to worship the false gods of hate, injustice, falsehoods, and mass hysteria. I bow only to the God of truth, justice, knowledge, and peace, as do all good scientists.
Can you show me ONE study that proves that humanity has an effect on the climate? Just one, please.
I have yet to find it. I have seen study after study showing (A) the earth's climate has changed in the past, back when humans were blundering idiots who could barely feed themselves, and (B) that the sun has far more impact on global climate than anything on the earth, and (C) a single volcano pumps out more so-called greenhouse gasses than we can ever hope to produce in a year. Heck, St. Helens is not even erupting and it is producing more gasses than the entire State of Washington!
PS. Models don't cut it. The models that I have seen can't even predict the current global climate based on past information. The weather models we have today can't even predict TOMORROW'S weather accurately, let alone in 100 years. (Just this Wednesday, I was told, "Clear skies Thursday, rainy Friday". Well, it rained on Thursday, and it is dry today.
PPS. Please include the error bars on all the graphs. I always like seeing the predictions that the global climate will increase by 2 C over the next 100 years, +/- 1,000 C.
As for the rest of us, we remember all the threats about imminent human disaster that were made before we were born. After all, the world's population has been decimated by the famine of the 70's, we have run out of oil long ago, and the American empire has collapsed. Oh, and the ozone hole got so big it's not safe to go outside without SPF 20,000, the earth is experiencing global warming AND cooling simultaneously.
Slashdot Mirror
More likely, they are measuring the energy levels of the ejected material. Matter goes through a lot of trouble when it accelerates, and you can easily measure the energy levels and composition of matter based on the spectra in astronomy.
BTW, 99.9 +/- 0.1 c is the speed quoted. So that's +/- 3E7 m/s^2, which is still a very, very large number. Consider that as you approach the speed of light, ever increasing amounts of energy are needed to accelerate the matter, that's still a very, very large error bar.
Yeah, heaven forbid we ever consider the president the employee of the people. I mean, we don't even pay the guy! (Oh, wait a minute...)
Well, with your logic then we should just shut down the Oscars and the Grammys as well. After all, we're at WAR!
We might as well shut down all the night clubs and party spots while we're at it. What do these people thing we are doing? I mean, we're at WAR!
We should go through and just shut down entire cities. Las Vegas, Atlantic City. Heck, we should probably shut down the entire state of Hawaii! Why would anyone want to go there? We're at WAR!
Or you can just do it the way Guido intended and pass in first class functions. You don't need special notation to pass around references to functions or even bound methods.
Hi! Welcome to my country. I work and toil in this country, pay taxes, and such. You do not. You are a visitor. You are here because I allow you to be. When your time is up, you must promptly leave. Thanks for visiting, but I didn't agree to let you live here.
If I see you doing something suspicious, I'll be watching you. If you are associating with the wrong crowd, I'll get a little too close for your comfort. If you threaten my country, or commit a crime, you're gone for good.
I have a right to know why you are here and what you are doing. I have a right to verify your story. If I don't like what you are doing or if you lie to me, I have a right to kick you out of my country.
I am sure you would feel the same way when I go visit you.
It's like you think the police don't have any rights. (A) They were put in charge of security and preventing crimes, and then convicting anyone who has committed them. (B) They have rights under the constitution.
Did you know that you can be held for 24 hours without charges and without reason? Did you know that you can be arrested without reason? Did you know that when a police officer asks you a question, and you tell something other than the truth, you are committing a crime?
These FBI agents were well within their rights. While this lady may believe she is part of this ultra-peaceful Gandhi-worshipping group, ten to one, there are members who don't think that way. She did the right thing - tell the truth, cooperate fully, and otherwise, stay out of the way. She also did the right thing in telling her story. But I wouldn't read anything into it. Her rights weren't violated.
She might want to find out if any warrants have been issued against her organization, or even herself. I wouldn't be surprised if the FBI was monitoring the group with a valid warrant.
QUESTION: Who was faster in sending aid to the tsunami victims?
ANSWER: Despite the swiftness of the US Navy, they were not the first on the scene. Despite Kofi Annan's influence and power, even now, the UN has yet to do anything to help. No government on earth beat the speed by with PRIVATE INDIVIDUALS and organizations were deploying aid and charity, or the pace at which they raised the necessary funds. This is true in any natural disaster, and even in warfare. The first on the scene is always private individuals and organizations.
YES, there are people who are not prepared for retirement. YES, there are people without health care or without sufficient incomes or that are too stupid to take care of themselves.
Guess what? Government has tried for years to help these people. But they've only made the problems worse. If you'd like, we can go adopt something like what Cuba or the USSR had. But it won't work, just like it isn't and hasn't worked.
The only way to take care of these problems is with private solutions. Just like the first money to hit the tsunami victims, the first medical care, and the first shipments of supplies came from PRIVATE sources, so too we should rely on private sources to take care of all of society's ills. Why? Because they are reliable and effective and swift.
See, one of the crowning doctrines of Christianity and probably ALL world religions is that one has a duty to care for those around them. Even today, despite the fact that we are taxed to death and can barely provide for our own families, we are reaching out to help those in more need than us. Just get the government out of the way, out of our pocketbooks, and let us take care of our own.
Now you're going to argue that we DON'T take care of ourselves. Go ahead and believe that. Should that fantasy ever become reality, no government on earth could ever fix that problem. Should the day come when we care less about those around us than ourselves, we will have far more serious problems than poverty and health care.
Why is this so bad? Even if people get their news from 1 or 2 sources that are heavily biased, the opposing viewpoints are a click away. Often, they provide links and connect to each other, despite being mortal enemies with irreconcilable differences. (I never heard of Daily Kos until I started reading LGF regularly, for instance.)
Users get to determine what they read and in what format they read it in. They can even determine how much of which slant they want on the story.
Without the internet, you would have to search long and far to find opposing viewpoints. You'd have to take what you read at face value or go pay a visit to the library and hope they have recent, relevant material. Either that, or you'd have to subscribe to every magazine and newspaper on earth.
A writes cool software that uses a new technique.
B sees the software, realizes that it is patentable, contacts A and works with A to obtain a patent for A.
A sells patent to B for $1. B gives A a beautiful plaque and eternal gratitude.
B licenses patents for all open source software developers.
B, on its own, develops 20 new patents derived from this one. Those 20 turns into 40 more patents. B licenses those patents similarly.
Of course, A and all OS developers benefit from B's work.
C is left out in the cold, never able to develop technology like what's in the patent.
Man, I would HATE to be C in this scenario. It would be a big motivator to license software with an OS license.
Oh, give it five to ten years, and IBM + OS community will develop and implement some truly awesome patents. About that time, expect our attitudes towareds patents to shift slightly, because it will benefit us far more than it will the others.
See, IBM licenses a lot of their patents. They are making some money from the patents they have. Consider this: If they all of a sudden decided to license all of their patents for free to the OS community, a very large portion of the software world would be very upset.
Also, remember that IBM has already taken the stance that they were not going to pursue patent infringment with OS developers. Guess what? That means every patent anyway. So this latest move is just trying to explain to people that IBM is very, very serious.
(I also would not be surprised if among the thousands of patents that IBM owns, only 500 or so deal exclusively with software.)
I am already introducing my son into the world of computers with my PlayStation. His time is limited, and we spend the time together. But he is learning how harsh a mistress computers are. He is also learning the general rules about computers. One, don't do things at random. If you don't know what it is, don't touch it. Two, computers are sensitive. Scratch that disk, and you're never playing that game again. Three, computers crash every once in a while. The reason why Ratchet isn't moving anymore is because it crashed, son.
I am teaching him the alphabet (caps first). He is only 3 and he knows 80% of the alphabet already. I'll move him into lowercase before he reaches four. He'll be reading before he is five.
Once he can read and write, I am going to show him the real world of computers. He'll be writing programs before 6. He'll be doing it on his own by 8. By the time he graduates from high school, he'll know almost everything there is to know about modern computers and the internet.
I've decided that understanding computers can be what farming was a long time ago. I have a responsibility to hand down my knowledge and understanding before he becomes an adult. He may not choose to be a computer expert (or farmer) but understanding this one niche will help him wherever he goes.
www.pogolinux.com
This is my favorite server vendor. I got a server for home because they are cheap and good, and local.
I used to work for a small web company. We built servers from scratch (tigerdirect). I told the CTO that my servers were going to be built by someone who actually tests the software on the hardware. Guess what? My cheap $2,000 system beat the pants off of the other servers people put together because the hardware was actually compatible. Sure, it cost about 10% more, but it was faster, more server-room-friendly. When we had a problem with it, the answer was a phone call away. It was nice being able to focus on software rather than hardware for a change. I felt a tremendous burden drop from my shoulders after that experience.
That's the last time I ever cobbled together a system. I'm looking at getting one of their desktops for my next upgrade...
Why are companies outsourcing? Because others do it cheaper than we do. If we want to keep our fat salaries, we have to become far more productive than our foreign counterparts.
In the computer world, that means using processes and tools that make us vastly superior programmers. In the manufacturing world, that means using robots and devices to make one person able to do the work of hundreds.
Those who are losing their jobs to these machines only have themselves to blame. If you want a fat salary, you have to be that much more productive than the next guy. They should've been spending some time figuring out how to be more productive rather than wasting their time away working in routine jobs.
Now, I feel sorry for these guys. They weren't educated enough to see the future staring down at them. I am willing to help them get off their butts, get a better education, or figure out things they can do productively that machines can't do (yet). But they must do so with the understanding that they must be productive or they won't get paid.
Another option is to get into the machine building business. Learn how to build and run and repair these machines, and you'll be employed as long as people need machines. As for me, I write programs that allow people to access machines and I figure as long as people want to access machines, I'll have a job.
Or they can decide to drop out of modern life, go get a patch of land and raise their own food and live a simple lifestyle without modern trappings. There are still areas of the US and world where land is dirt cheap and arable. I am more and more inclined to this lifestyle as time goes on. I hear a lot of people are doing it already. Sure, it's back-breaking work just to stay even, but you'll never get fired.
I'm glad I upgraded to Fedora Core 3, and left SELinux running, despite the problems with MySQL. Even if you can get a root account, if you don't have the right roles, you are still locked in a tiny little box without a key.
With your scaling of drives, you missed something important. Right now, let's say that once every 4 years one of these drives will fail. That's a pretty good record, I think, for consumer hardware. When you've got four of these running, you are pretty much guaranteed that one will fail every year. With eight, you now have a good chance that one will fail every 6 months.
I'm not saying they'll fail once every six months. I'm saying that on average they will. More than likely, three will fail in a single month, but you'll have a couple of years without failure before then.
Now that you want to put several drives together, you are inclined to look at redundancy and fault-tolerance. This is what RAID is for.
I run only a single hard drive in each of my home computers, exactly because of this reason. The number of components I actually manage is minimized, so that my home network works, and I don't have keep replacing stuff. At work, I have two hard drives in my machines. One, because I don't manage the backup servers, and two, because I can get a new one in less than an hour, installed, because our tech staff keeps a box full of brand new ones around because it is cost-efficient.
No. Mobility = Freedom. I want more of it. I want to be able to travel around the world one day. Heck, I want to visit Mars and Jupiter and distant stars one day.
No, this is something much deeper. Physicists admit that this is a bit of philosophical work, but hey, it makes sense, in a way.
The equations that describe the behavior of particles take into account a statistical distribution for the mechanical properties of the particle. Things like "position" and "momentum" (momentum = which way and how fast it is going) aren't single values. They are possibilities.
How do you "measure" something? You have to interact with the system, constraining one or the other of the properties. I can build a piece of metal with a very tiny slit. Particles passing through the slit must have a position that is very well defined, compared to particles passing through the air. Or, I can build a laser that shoots particles at a very specific speed and direction (aka momentum). I am measuring the properties of those particles as I put them into this kind of system.
By constraining one or the other properties, the corresponding statistical distribution has changed. In the case of the slit, the position is somewhere bettween the two edges of the slit. In the case of the laser beam, the direction is well-defined as well as the speed.
How are these two properties related according to quantum mechanics? In effect, the momentum is basically like a Fourier transform on the position, and vice-versa. What's a Fourier transform? It's how you get the frequencies that compose a signal, and vice-versa.
Mathematically, there is a limit to the precision of the properties. This is the Heisenberg principle. Think of it this way. A pulse of sound - a loud snap or pop - has many frequencies. It's confined in the position graph, but all spread out in the momentum chart. Conversely, a single frequency signal is a sine or cosine wave. It is all spread out on the position, but a single point on the frequency graph.
By constraining the position, the momentum becomes more distributed. In the case of the slit, the particle scatters at odd angle, creating an interference pattern. In the case of the laser beam, you can't tell where along the beam the photon actually is.
Since the math and reality agree so well, this explanation has held as the rules that govern particle dynamics at the quantum scale.
Which is why we say with certainty that if you want to eliminate uncertainty, you have to change the particle somehow. In other words, observation affects reality.
A note on reality: A lot of people think that the reality that one person perceives is very different than another's. This is not true. The perceptions are different, but reality is not. What you percieve is not reality. Instead, reality is deduced from the perception. If the rules for transforming a perception into reality are indeed laws of nature, then we shouldn't arrive at two different conclusions on reality. Reality doesn't change based on who's looking at it. It is independent of observation. In the case of quantum mechanics, we have to look at how the observation affects reality, because we have yet to discover a way to inobtrusively observe quantum mechanical states.
* Statistically speaking, Rossi is still considered the winner unless Gregoire pulls out with a 300 vote lead. This is pure math, folks, nothing more, nothing less.
No. She is the winner if she has a 1-vote lead. You don't average out the previous counts. The result of the current recount is the result, period. It's simple law, folks.
Uhhh... statistically speaking. I thought republicans were supposed to be the dumb ones, too.
What the majority feel is irrelevant. What the law says is what matters.
Interesting. Does the majority have a right to change the law to reflect their desires or not? Does the majority choose who will be the next judges and legislatures or not? The survey results are important because when the majority doesn't get what it wants, things change. That was my point.
In some respects, perhaps, but the question is whether they are following the law properly *now,* and the Supreme Court just ruled in its favor, and the Republican Secretary of State is on the county's side in this matter.
You mean the part where they don't even verify signatures on the absentee ballots? Or the part where they allow people to list office buildings as their primary residence? Or the part where they allow people to register and vote multiple times under the same name at the same address? I didn't know the Supreme Court ruled on those matters. I thought they just ruled on whether or not recanvassing can be done when the law says it cannot.
King County is not very democrat. It's split. Seattle is 60-40 democrat, but the rest of the county is most definitely republican. You'll note that there is a 7-6 split D-R on the council.
Break off Seattle from the county, and it will be bright red, like the rest of the state.
As for the animosity, yes, that has been happening for the past 20 years of democrat rule, thank you very much. We've been holding torches and pitchforks for ages, but you have your head so far up your *** that you haven't noticed. I-695 anyone?
But you're right. This may be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Ever heard of Cedar County?
This blog has some startling facts that you should familiarize yourself with.
* Statistically speaking, Rossi is still considered the winner unless Gregoire pulls out with a 300 vote lead. This is pure math, folks, nothing more, nothing less.
* A survey of the voters in Washington showed that if Rossi wins, he should be declared the winner. However. the majority feel that if Gregoire wins, we should have a runoff election.
* Interesting notes as one of the bloggers investigates the voting rolls. Fraud, anyone?
* Everyone in Washington State now admits that King County has not been following state law in the elections process. Even the Seattle Weekly isn't ashamed to admit it. King County may have been throwing off close elections for the past 10 years.
Check out the information on that blog, consider it scientifically and with an open mind, and draw your own conclusion.
As for me, it's obvious. The democrats have successfully stolen the election, and I have proof.
The reason no one has ever actively pursued mecha is because they would be so inefficient. Tanks and such are built with a low profile, and if you ask frontline soldiers, they are only useful in limited roles. My army friend much prefers the new strykers because of their flexibility and reliability.
A mecha would be standing 20 feet in the battlefied, an open and tempting target to everything from bombers to tanks to helicopters and to RPGs. It would have limited mobility, be extremely difficult to keep in working condition, and will have less load capacity than its tracked or wheeled counterparts. In short, it would look cool, but would be a useless coffin.
In BattleTech, they make up for the obvious disadvantages of a mecha by giving them advantages over vehicles. Mecha are more reliable, more maneuvarable, able to take more damage and continue to function, and can carry more weapons. Even then, if you pit a balanced vehicle force against a balanced mecha force, ton for ton, credit for credit, the vehicles can easily overpower the mecha in most circumstances.
I don't want to discourage this backyard project. After all, how many inventions were made when there was no necessity, but a necessity was found at a later time? But I do want folks to exercise a bit of common sense. If mecha were such a great idea, we'd have used them in WWII. We certainly had the technology to build them back then.
This is absolute hogwash. What happens to the rich is they get lazy. And the lazy don't exercise their brain or bodies and they get weak. If there's one thing history teaches us it is that through competition and conflict and struggle humanity thrives. We need adversity, and we crave it, and it strengthens us.
You can't buy intelligence. You can buy the appearance of intelligence, you can buy credentials, you can buy your way into accolades and titles, but that doesn't mean you are smart. What happens is that these people begin to conglomerate and pat each other on the back and tell each other they are doing a good job when they are miserable failures.
Then they get setup for failure. Someone smarter, faster, more adaptive comes along and rocks their world to pieces. That's what's happening to the democrat party. They are sitting on their success of FDR, and haven't realized that sixty years of being second fiddle has given the republican party the ability and the blood and the intelligence to engineer a revolution. The funny thing is that the same thing happened to the republican party sixty years ago, led by an upstart called FDR!
I keep thinking back to the Chinese illiterati writing poetry and drawing pictures, when Genghis Khan to the north was gathering troops and fighting for his life and for his future. When the two forces met, who was the conqueror? The well-bred rich illiterati with thousands of years of experience of ruling over millions of people? Or the Mongol hordes led by a brilliant general who knew how to win battles decisively? If the Chinese were so smart, they would've been training like the Greeks and the Romans and the British in their heyday.
This is too true, too true. The environmentalists get defensive when you propose building machines to suck the greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere. They get upset when we tell them that North America is a net consumer of CO2. They get fuddled when we tell them that the world's worst environmental offenders are found in communist countries like China and the old Soviet Union.
The religion of environmentalism has one doctrine:
(1) It is all America's fault, in particular the industrialist capitalists who provide billions of jobs to workers everywhere and improve the quality of life for everyone on the planet.
You don't have to look deep within the environmental movement to see the old Red Guard, communist conspiracies, and blatant anti-Americanism. What once championed worker's rights are now championing the environment.
Combine this with the movement's terrorist attributes (greenpeace, et al), and you see the true motive of the movement: to undermine America and its economy. They burn our property and threaten our people, and wonder why the FBI are treating them like Al Qaeda? Amusing.
As for me, I refuse to worship the false gods of hate, injustice, falsehoods, and mass hysteria. I bow only to the God of truth, justice, knowledge, and peace, as do all good scientists.
Can you show me ONE study that proves that humanity has an effect on the climate? Just one, please.
I have yet to find it. I have seen study after study showing (A) the earth's climate has changed in the past, back when humans were blundering idiots who could barely feed themselves, and (B) that the sun has far more impact on global climate than anything on the earth, and (C) a single volcano pumps out more so-called greenhouse gasses than we can ever hope to produce in a year. Heck, St. Helens is not even erupting and it is producing more gasses than the entire State of Washington!
PS. Models don't cut it. The models that I have seen can't even predict the current global climate based on past information. The weather models we have today can't even predict TOMORROW'S weather accurately, let alone in 100 years. (Just this Wednesday, I was told, "Clear skies Thursday, rainy Friday". Well, it rained on Thursday, and it is dry today.
PPS. Please include the error bars on all the graphs. I always like seeing the predictions that the global climate will increase by 2 C over the next 100 years, +/- 1,000 C.
No-one ever suggested any of this would happen.
What flavor is your kool-aid?
As for the rest of us, we remember all the threats about imminent human disaster that were made before we were born. After all, the world's population has been decimated by the famine of the 70's, we have run out of oil long ago, and the American empire has collapsed. Oh, and the ozone hole got so big it's not safe to go outside without SPF 20,000, the earth is experiencing global warming AND cooling simultaneously.
Isn't that what the scientists have told us?