It "earned" it's position in the marketplace through illegal practices.
Tut tut. Since the illegal practices are only related to what they did with their monopoly (exclusive licenses are only illegal under a monopoly), they DID earn their monopoly legally. There are no findings of fact to the contrary, are there?
What they did with the monopoly, however, is another story.
While yes, most claims over global warming and the like are vastly exaggerated, some of what you say is not strictly correct.
1. Not sure. One thing I do know in the time I have spent doing atmospheric physics is that people are smarter than that. Temperature data is FAR FAR FAR more than a few thermometers in cities
2. There is an experiment called ATOC which has been doing just that for several decades. While this mightnt yet be long enough, the trend seen so far is for warming.
3. This is no longer correct. The satellite data to which you refer has more recently been analysed, and shows a warming effect. I believe the effect that was ignored was the spiralling in of the satellites over time, but im not sure.
4. Eh? millions of years? and you can see a cause and effect? What's more, your next point contradicts this one. CO2 and water are known greenhouse gasses. Even mars is warmed by a few degrees by its atmosphere.
5. Yes, there is a known dampening effect on greenhouse gasses. The other one is the warmer it is, the faster C02 dissolves in the ocean, leaching out as rock.
See, I tend to think the opposite. Life on earth has spent millions of years adapting to our environment, adapting to be more and more efficient at doing bad stuff to us. I think it would be highly unlikely that any given virus would have any potency in a terrestrial environment. After all, there is nothing inherent about a particular virus that makes it deadly, it is just that its interactions with our bodies cause ill effects.
I would have thought extra-terrestrial life is likely to have the same kind of effect on us as we would on them. If we can't survive over there, why could they survive here? All in all, it is more like a roll of the evolutionary dice, in a game where the possibilities are huge, and the successful species very few. Not only that, but they have to be more successful than the ones on earth that have evolved already.
Is that when they land, some nutter a few centuries on will proclaim them the "holy founders" or "the creators" or something, and everyone will believe the nutter, and yet-another-dumbassed-religion will be formed.
I went through Australia's only nuclear reactor, which is at Lucas Heights near Sydney, and inside the reactor (as in 3m from the fissioning uranium), what do I see, but many-a-start-button lurking around.
Actually, it's not as interesting as that. They dont control stuff, they just log data from experiments being performed. That and there was a button rigged up labelled "Dont press me", with a counter behind it to found out how many times it got pressed:-)
Re:Something that isn't pointed out enough
on
SuSE 7.3 vs XP
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· Score: 1
Steady on. As I read this my memory usage in XP is 75 MB. I have Outlook express and 4 IE windows open, with nothing else running.
Windows 2000 which I use at work has some issues with the system cache. If the computer has been up for a while (in my experience, more than say 2-3 weeks) then I found that a lot of memory was being used up in the system cache unecessarily, and a restart improved performance. XP has an option (sorry, i dont have anymore anecdotal evidence:-) ) to tell it how to manage the system cache.
calculator/computer is a useful tool, but you need to be able to figure out if the answers it is giving you are right
The natural Corollary is that the correct precision of any measurement in an experiment is equal to the number of digits your calculator can show.
How many times have you seen a conversion from "1000 miles" into a metric unit with about 7 significant figures? heh....
I think the other point is that the calculator is a useful tool for the concrete tasks, but useless to perform abstract maths. I've done plenty of physics & maths at university, and never needed a calculator in an exam...
Maybe the dont like the.nz ending of my email address, but I have had my email for around 5 years now, and I get about one spam per month, if that. I dont use any anti-spam software (maybe my ISP does and i dont know it). I am moderately careful about who i give the email to, but it has gone to many websites out there for registrations etc.
Anyone know why some emails get hit more than others?
The majority of them reuse the same arguments. As noted in some other posts, they revolve around broken logic and misapplication of physical laws, such as the laws of thermodynamics.
Occasionally, some points are brought up that at first glance, are not clear why they are wrong. The most oft-quoted is that of the irreducability. The analogy today is that petrol tankers carry are petrol powered, therefore it is impossible for these to exist.
I am not a biologist, but I am a physicist. I do not always I admit, read all the evidence and make up my own mind on everything, because there isnt time. Evolution is often thought of as a "great debate" or some such thing, as if the "debate" hadnt ended decades ago. For this reason, most people in scientific circles have spent much time reading themselves.
When it comes down to it, the arguments for and against are rather irrelevant, as there is such an overwhelming amount of evidence, such as fossils, genetic evidence and so forth that support Evolution. So no matter which way you argue it, I can point to the AIDS virus and say "Behold! It mutateth at 1% per year!", and trace the evolution of animals back in time.
I have heard a lot of comments about the standard thing, with office documents. What, pray tell is the standard for office type documents? (really, this is a serious question!)
Take the usecase that I encounter. I need to send sometimes a nicely formatted document to someone else, for them to edit, and send back to me (ruling pdf out). What do you suggest I send it in, if not *.doc, etc? HTML? As far as I am aware, the only standards are quite inadequate, such as RTF or the like.
Perhaps some focus on what the standard actually is, rather than the fact we should use it would be useful.
Generally it is a good thing to be able to reason with people. However, the above diatribe demonstrates why the only way of getting education to the masses about so many things scientific is with, well, evolution:-)
Note that gravity is a theory. I have a theory about gravity too, should it be taught? Evolution is as much a theory as the theory of relativity, gravity, etc. The details might not be correct, but essentially, there is no known counter-evidence, and no reason to suggest it is incorrect.
Mind you, i didnt think anybody took the no-evolution argument seriously these days anyway. Occasionally you get accosted by a christian in the streets, but other than that, most christians I know cede evolution as factual.
Meanwhile, I'm feeling very special with the banner ad up the top asking me if Im selling to New Zealand. Geotargeting, eh? Though, one wonders, if given that I'm in NZ already, shouldn't I be seeing ads asking me if I'm selling somewhere else? ooooohhh screws with the mind... help....
Higher prices for a number of electronics goods are not just peculiar to Europe. here in NZ, a lot of things such as Palms, are significantly (read 50%) more expensive, even when I calculate shipping a single unit and the exchange rate
Palm is of course, free to charge what ever they like to us. Competitions should be the only thing that would force them to sell for less. Several years back, the government introduced something called "Parallel importing", and while I Am Not An Expert, this meant that it was legal to import Palms and sell them here even if it wasnt sanctioned by Palm. This was done to help drive prices down, in cases just like this.
The effect of this was to drive prices down, but not in all areas. Palm PCs are still *way* more expensive here. It is also made more difficult by the fact that most online retailers seem not to ship outside the US, for some reason.
Jeepers people, didnt you watch Terminator? The matrix?
Television knows all.
The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug
Ohmigod it's already happened. I'm gonna unplug my computer before it eats me.
Wait!!!
Neo: What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets? Morpheus: No, Neo. I'm trying to tell you that when you're ready, you won't have to.
A number of people have mentioned that the piracy would be less if the cost were less. I imagine, to a certain extent, this would be true. However, I am reminded of one of those naff TV programs that comes on every now and again "The world's stupidest burglars" or something. One point that was made many times (OK, so I watched the whole program) is that virtually nobody steals a sack of potatoes, some oranges, etc. Everyone steals the luxury items, the most expensive deoderant, perfumes etc. The point is that for shoplifting, the price is not the issue. The greed of the shoplifter is the only real force at work here.
I dont know to what extent it applies to shareware, after all, how many people can honestly say they never cracked something?, but I do believe it is more complicated than price alone.
For my own curiosity, I compiled an interpreter I had written in java using this, just to compare the performance.
It took forever to compile, but once it was done, I had a (large) executable for my native platform, windows.
It ran about 30% slower than the JDK. There are a number of things that are still pretty slow in java, but in general, it's a pretty fast language these days. JIT compilers and hotspot to a good job. It can never be as fast as C++ due to things such as GC, but the performance tends to be close for most applications.
This is indeed interesting, but I think it is entirely irrelevant. Speed of execution is usually about 7th on the list of important-stuff-im-thinking-about when choosing a language and starting a project. There are so many more important things, such as maintainability, scalability, code reusability, code robustness (the number of stuff you get so easy compared to C++ just leaves you wondering how you could ever program in C++ again), you know the stuff. These things are often far more of an issue than raw performance. Look at Slashdot, it's written in perl, presumably because they thought it was easier to write the website in, not because it was the fastest thing around.
This is not the case anymore. An example is Zelix Klassmaster. We use it for our java web application. No decompiler can cope with it. The decompiled code is littered with byte code that it couldnt work out what to do with. I wrote the code, and I cannot for the life of me work out which methods are which in the decompiled after obfuscated classes. They also do things like String encryption so even string constants are unrecognisable.
Java is certainly not perfect in this respect, but my experience with obfuscation (this is very recent) has been very good.
The overhead can be less than you might imagine. I was involved in the migration of one (object) database to MS SQL Server. This involved extraction of the entire contents, at this time several hundred MB of data, out of the object database, and into SQLServer. This was done using java, via the Object Database interface and JDBC.
As it happened, there already existed code to span the entire tree, writing out to CSV file, for what ever ungodly reason. The version that spat out to SQL Server took about 10% longer than the one writing to the file system. That's not very much difference.
I should stress however the lies damned lies and statistics factor. The writing probably wasnt the bottleneck, so the raw comparative speed differential may have been greater. And we turned off the indices while it did that.
Slashdot Mirror
Tut tut. Since the illegal practices are only related to what they did with their monopoly (exclusive licenses are only illegal under a monopoly), they DID earn their monopoly legally. There are no findings of fact to the contrary, are there?
What they did with the monopoly, however, is another story.
While yes, most claims over global warming and the like are vastly exaggerated, some of what you say is not strictly correct.
1. Not sure. One thing I do know in the time I have spent doing atmospheric physics is that people are smarter than that. Temperature data is FAR FAR FAR more than a few thermometers in cities
2. There is an experiment called ATOC which has been doing just that for several decades. While this mightnt yet be long enough, the trend seen so far is for warming.
3. This is no longer correct. The satellite data to which you refer has more recently been analysed, and shows a warming effect. I believe the effect that was ignored was the spiralling in of the satellites over time, but im not sure.
4. Eh? millions of years? and you can see a cause and effect? What's more, your next point contradicts this one. CO2 and water are known greenhouse gasses. Even mars is warmed by a few degrees by its atmosphere.
5. Yes, there is a known dampening effect on greenhouse gasses. The other one is the warmer it is, the faster C02 dissolves in the ocean, leaching out as rock.
Was always the ministry of silly walks.
I would have thought extra-terrestrial life is likely to have the same kind of effect on us as we would on them. If we can't survive over there, why could they survive here? All in all, it is more like a roll of the evolutionary dice, in a game where the possibilities are huge, and the successful species very few. Not only that, but they have to be more successful than the ones on earth that have evolved already.
Hooray.
Dude, it's a cool website.
I went through Australia's only nuclear reactor, which is at Lucas Heights near Sydney, and inside the reactor (as in 3m from the fissioning uranium), what do I see, but many-a-start-button lurking around.
Actually, it's not as interesting as that. They dont control stuff, they just log data from experiments being performed. That and there was a button rigged up labelled "Dont press me", with a counter behind it to found out how many times it got pressed :-)
Windows 2000 which I use at work has some issues with the system cache. If the computer has been up for a while (in my experience, more than say 2-3 weeks) then I found that a lot of memory was being used up in the system cache unecessarily, and a restart improved performance. XP has an option (sorry, i dont have anymore anecdotal evidence :-) ) to tell it how to manage the system cache.
The natural Corollary is that the correct precision of any measurement in an experiment is equal to the number of digits your calculator can show.
How many times have you seen a conversion from "1000 miles" into a metric unit with about 7 significant figures? heh....
I think the other point is that the calculator is a useful tool for the concrete tasks, but useless to perform abstract maths. I've done plenty of physics & maths at university, and never needed a calculator in an exam...
Anyone know why some emails get hit more than others?
Sorry. I just had to.
But the pointy hair? doesnt that kinda detract?
The majority of them reuse the same arguments. As noted in some other posts, they revolve around broken logic and misapplication of physical laws, such as the laws of thermodynamics.
Occasionally, some points are brought up that at first glance, are not clear why they are wrong. The most oft-quoted is that of the irreducability. The analogy today is that petrol tankers carry are petrol powered, therefore it is impossible for these to exist.
I am not a biologist, but I am a physicist. I do not always I admit, read all the evidence and make up my own mind on everything, because there isnt time. Evolution is often thought of as a "great debate" or some such thing, as if the "debate" hadnt ended decades ago. For this reason, most people in scientific circles have spent much time reading themselves.
When it comes down to it, the arguments for and against are rather irrelevant, as there is such an overwhelming amount of evidence, such as fossils, genetic evidence and so forth that support Evolution. So no matter which way you argue it, I can point to the AIDS virus and say "Behold! It mutateth at 1% per year!", and trace the evolution of animals back in time.
Take the usecase that I encounter. I need to send sometimes a nicely formatted document to someone else, for them to edit, and send back to me (ruling pdf out). What do you suggest I send it in, if not *.doc, etc? HTML? As far as I am aware, the only standards are quite inadequate, such as RTF or the like.
Perhaps some focus on what the standard actually is, rather than the fact we should use it would be useful.
A more closed mind I may never meet.
I think that would be two oxymorons in one paragraph. To you sir, I take my hat off.
A professor of Creatonism? que?
Meanwhile, I'm feeling very special with the banner ad up the top asking me if Im selling to New Zealand. Geotargeting, eh? Though, one wonders, if given that I'm in NZ already, shouldn't I be seeing ads asking me if I'm selling somewhere else? ooooohhh screws with the mind... help....
Palm is of course, free to charge what ever they like to us. Competitions should be the only thing that would force them to sell for less. Several years back, the government introduced something called "Parallel importing", and while I Am Not An Expert, this meant that it was legal to import Palms and sell them here even if it wasnt sanctioned by Palm. This was done to help drive prices down, in cases just like this.
The effect of this was to drive prices down, but not in all areas. Palm PCs are still *way* more expensive here. It is also made more difficult by the fact that most online retailers seem not to ship outside the US, for some reason.
Television knows all.
The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug
Ohmigod it's already happened. I'm gonna unplug my computer before it eats me.
Wait!!!
Neo: What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets?
Morpheus: No, Neo. I'm trying to tell you that when you're ready, you won't have to.
We must wait for the one.
I dont know to what extent it applies to shareware, after all, how many people can honestly say they never cracked something?, but I do believe it is more complicated than price alone.
Just my NZ$0.02
It took forever to compile, but once it was done, I had a (large) executable for my native platform, windows.
It ran about 30% slower than the JDK. There are a number of things that are still pretty slow in java, but in general, it's a pretty fast language these days. JIT compilers and hotspot to a good job. It can never be as fast as C++ due to things such as GC, but the performance tends to be close for most applications.
This is indeed interesting, but I think it is entirely irrelevant. Speed of execution is usually about 7th on the list of important-stuff-im-thinking-about when choosing a language and starting a project. There are so many more important things, such as maintainability, scalability, code reusability, code robustness (the number of stuff you get so easy compared to C++ just leaves you wondering how you could ever program in C++ again), you know the stuff. These things are often far more of an issue than raw performance. Look at Slashdot, it's written in perl, presumably because they thought it was easier to write the website in, not because it was the fastest thing around.
This is not the case anymore. An example is Zelix Klassmaster. We use it for our java web application. No decompiler can cope with it. The decompiled code is littered with byte code that it couldnt work out what to do with. I wrote the code, and I cannot for the life of me work out which methods are which in the decompiled after obfuscated classes. They also do things like String encryption so even string constants are unrecognisable.
Java is certainly not perfect in this respect, but my experience with obfuscation (this is very recent) has been very good.
I never saw such a green city.
As it happened, there already existed code to span the entire tree, writing out to CSV file, for what ever ungodly reason. The version that spat out to SQL Server took about 10% longer than the one writing to the file system. That's not very much difference.
I should stress however the lies damned lies and statistics factor. The writing probably wasnt the bottleneck, so the raw comparative speed differential may have been greater. And we turned off the indices while it did that.