Stop being an idiot. Going from nothing to teach the difference, especially if you're the one who can define what the difference is, is a big step forward.
And "the evil church would only allow him to teach the difference when both theories had major holes and he just had to ridicule his most powerful ally along the way" also hasn't quite the same ring to it as "the Inquisition made him a martyr for speaking the truth".
Stop listening to people who are arguing that it was ok to censor the man's empirical proof of a heretical scientific theory.
If it had been about empirical proof noone would have listened to Galileo because the old model -hideously complicated as it was- provided better results. Kinda like Newton vs. Relativity. The heliocentric model only became (vastly) better when Kepler changed the circles to ellipses.
Also Galileo wasn't interested in a scientific theory. The church would have allowed him using and teaching his model as a mathematical tool (which is remarkably similar to how we see all models nowadays, although there is the big difference that in the view of the church the geocentric worldview was an objective truth) but Galileo wanted his absolute truth to replace the old absolute truth (despite the fact that it was worse!).
When the pope, who was a friend of his and had defended him in the first case, offered him the opportunity to write a book giving a balanced account of both models, it would have been easy to subtly slant it his way, giving the old model a few hollow victories while extolling his view, without cowtowing to the church. Instead he had a retard represent the pope's POV ridiculing him all throughout the book. Ridiculing the monarch was considered treason and punishable by death in oh-so-liberal England until the late 18th century. I don't know when they last executed someone for doing that but by the standards of his time Galileo's house arrest was quite mild.
I don't even want to defend Ratzinger or present the church of Galileo's age as a voice of reason and progress, but please stop spreading all the anti-church propaganda of the last 400 years, it isn't any better than the church's very real failings.
From what I know the Soviet Union managed to achieve a consumption level of about 50% during WWII (the remaining 50% of course being military spending), most likely the lowest ever in human history (because less advanced civilizations didn't have the productivity to survive at that rate while more advanced ones can't treat their people the way the Soviets did).
So, if you turned the US into Soviet Russia you could manage a profit of about $6 trillion, give yourself the mother of all performance bonuses and be somewhere else when the whole thing comes crashing down. Romney was a CEO of a private equity firm once, so he probably has some experience in doing this kind of stuff. =)
Re:Why only 4 words on the main page?
on
KDE 4.0 Is Out
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· Score: 1
Just think back to Gnome 2.0. At least the KDE guys clearly told us that the barebones KDE 4.0 is due to necessity and not choice.
I'm back to using Gnome sometimes (first time since the glorious 1.4 times =) and I have to say it works quite well. It's just that with all the "We know what's good for you" and "You are too dumb for options" talk around 2.0 they managed to drive me off quite thoroughly. Had they just told us that there was a lack of features because 2.0 was a rewrite and they didn't have time for them I'd have had much less of a problem with that. Release early, release often is the OSS mantra and KDE 4.0 is kinda scratching at the upper limit you can go without release anyway.
Oh and it's not just OSS. OSX 10.0 was a buggy slow beta-quality release (here come the rabid fanboys =P) and Vista's one steaming pile of sh*t.
And, a perfectly good alternative is "In the 1700's" (seventeen-hundreds).
That's inconsistent with the 1710s, the 1720s,... and the 1790s. Why should you use an expression that's got a different meaning (1700-1709) to describe something that has a perfectly fine word of its own (18th century) just because the American population is too stupid to A) count to 18 or B) remember one simple fact (there's no 0th century, it doesn't really make sense either), which is a lot more logical than half the English language anyway. (And even better, I'm sure most Americans could care less. So the majority of Americans thinks there's less important stuff out there =)
The CEV will be able to land there anyway because if something goes wrong during the launch you end up in the Atlantic Ocean anyway.
However there are two major reasons for landing somewhere in the desert:
Cost. Sending a recovery fleet out to sea is expensive and you don't want to do it for longer and more often than necessary.
More costs. The plan is to reuse the CEV for a number of flights (10 I think) and saltwater is highly corrosive making that difficult.
As someone already pointed out the best solution's probably to land on water when going to the moon (because every kg --remember, NASA's going metric =) -- counts) and on land when going to the ISS/LEO (because $/kg to LEO isn't that bad compared to sending it to the moon)
Even with them, there are no guarantees, but at least they're building the right things, not joyrides with about as much relevance to orbital rocketry as me building a go cart would be to formula 1 racing.
Michael Schumacher started out on go carts.
If you wanna do space tourism even on a semi-large scale then suborbital is the only thing feasible at the moment.
You're right that using WK as a first stage for orbital launches sounds dubious but don't belittle what they're doing.
People at Harvard do illegal file sharing. Now the government can take all their computers! Woohoo! I bet they have nice stuff.
Who cares about the computers? This inexcusable crime wouldn't have happened if the miscreant hadn't been sheltered in Harvard buildings, been educated in the basics of computer use in Harvard classrooms and read all about how to weasle out of his just punishment in Harvard libraries.
Adios Harvard, say hello to *AArvard and the Jack Valenti School of Intellectual Property.
The survey's your run of the mill online questionnaire. So it's a self-selecting sample (head over to reddit for lots of foaming posts how some mainstream media page took down a poll after Ron Paul got 80% of the votes. The vast leftright-wing conspiracy at work...)
The only thing it measures is hype, and the most interesting fact you can get from the data is that debian users got better things to do than fill out online-surveys. =)
Of course this doesn't mean that the data doesn't correlate with reality, it'd just be the same as a broken watch showing the right time twice a day.
If they changed the icons too often, it would be distracting and hurt continuity.
Once every six years should be possible without distracting everyone.
You'll probably be modded down for trolling or baiting flames, and you deserve it.
What trolling? I called them lazy and that's about it. Since when is calling someone "lazy" on/. enough to be called a troll? If I'd called them sons of whores that ass-rape sheeps while devouring Linus' children for the greater glory of Adolf Hitler, it might have been borderline trolling. But lazy?!
Even more importantly, dupes are a running gag on/. (although they seem to occur less frequently nowadays; the tagging system at work or nostalgia at work? =) and quite often you realize that not even the editor who posted a story bothered to click the links included. If that's not lazy I don't know what is.
Why are the icons all ridiculously huge and ridiculously tiny?
Why did they put 3 battery applets on the desktop? Why is the clock huge and in the middle of the panel? Because it's not final. You can't honestly think that those buttons will stay that way?!
Why are the sides of the taskbar chopped off? What's the point in rounding off the corners?
Because it's not full size? You can have it run all the way across the bottom and it won't have the corners and sides but if you have a panel that's less then the full width of the desktop you're probably interested in what the sides are gonna look like.
I was going to say I'm not usually the sort of person who runs lots of eye-candy applets but it seems under KDE4 users aren't given much choice:/
I like the widget and window theme, but the kicker replacement at the bottom looks pretty tacky. It was the same in beta, and I'd hoped they'd change it for release, but it seems like they're sticking with it.
No, it's gonna look like this. In fact, it already does in CVS apparently.
Your KDE logo is outdated. In fact it's been replaced in 2001 I think. With a large and professional staff like on/. that works hard to bring us only the latest, most relevant stories you'd think that one of you lazy fuckers would be able to head over to the official kde site and use one of their provided logos.
I mean you've finally managed to replace the similarily outdated GNOME logo so get your ass in gear.
The military would be interested in satellites that can transfer lots energy from the sun accurately to targets on the ground.
That's btw. not limited to using it as a weapon. The military spends ludicrous amounts of money to transport fuel all over the world (especially expensive in war zones like Iraq where you have to protect those transports) for both vehicles and all those electrical generators that keep the network-centric buzzwords running when the local power grid is a joke.
In my opinion (which, of course is not neutral) the information contained *in* trivia must be integrated with the rest of the articles. Therefore, it is trivia lists what should be discouraged, but the information must be kept there in a good prose text.
Why? If the trivia comes in discrete, unrelated chunks (mostly it does because it is trivia) I don't see why it shouldn't be in the form of a list.
What I don't like is those lists taking up half the space, or them and those "xy in popular culture" sections appear prominently in articles where they really should not be ("Auschwitz in popular culture"). All of them should be stuffed into their own article and linked from the main article.
It's been said a lot of times. There are no limits on the number of articles wikipedia can support and as long as the search engine (i.e. google; wiki's own is utter crap) can cope and manages to put the relevant pages up front there's no reason we shouldn't see the 20th million article.
Imho the main problem of wikipedia is that its principle leads to fanatics hijacking articles or parts of wikipedia and driving all others out. There's the example of the pro-pedophilia articles that always get mentioned when the topic comes up, but there are lots of others.(The reason I mention it is that just today I looked on wikipedia for two almost completely unrelated things: the text of the Ode to Joy and a date of the second mongol invasion of Hungary. The Ode to Joy article has the German, English and Polish version and the mongol invasion article reads like Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Poland)
Digg's and reddit's descent into crappiness is mostly due to the same reason. Slashdot made probably the most brilliant decision in its history when they came up with the system where everyone gets mod-points but only a very limited number. Despite all the conspiracy theories it works pretty well.
Two words (actually 4): Casino Royale, Battlestar Galactica.
It's not Star Trek that's tired and irrelevant. We're sick of Bad Star Trek, like the last two movies and Enterprise as well as half of Voyager. Star Trek is just an excellent, extensive backdrop allowing people to tell stories. If the stories suck no amount of Star Trekiness will save the series and that's what we had the last ten years.
In the history of not-our-finest-hours, this episode was a real bitch.
Honestly, I don't think it would make the top 10 of not-our-finest-hours. The opium addicts weren't really the problem but the government's attempt to stop the opium trade brought down the Chinese bureaucracy.
Now don't get me wrong, the imperial government was right in trying to stop it but it made apparent the rampant corruption, cliques and incompetence that had infested the Chinese bureaucracy over the centuries since the Manchu took power. Add to this the clear demonstration of impotence of the Chinese military and you had a recipe for disaster.
Doesn't mean the British were in any way justified to do what they did, but in the larger picture they were just the straw that broke the camels back.
The other thing that caught my attention was Bussard's comment that they should go straight to full scale. He may or may not be right. Most people who have been around the block more than once would be sceptical though. When you are trying something new, there is almost always a gotcha or two.
It's one of the things that had the alarm bells ringing about the Polywell because it's something you'd expect from someone who wants to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.
But I think in his case he just saw the writing on the wall. He knew he wouldn't see a full-scale reactor if it was done step-by-step, he was just too old for that.
I really hope someone with the required expertise will take an honest look at the Polywell. The concept sounds good and the central question seems to be whether the plasma will move into thermal equilibrium or not. And the paper every critic cites is one master thesis written by the student of one of Bussard's rivals for Navy funding. Hmmmm...
Now, the fact that your opponent's not trustworthy doesn't mean that you are, but I think that considering all the money that goes into ITER a few million for looking at different approaches (mostly this and lasers/inertial confinement =) are a good investment.
They gave us Ultima, Wing Commander, Crusader and System Shock. Then came Ultima Online and EA canned anything that wasn't a MMO game, then they started a Privateer Online canned that, and simply let UO fizzle out.
Encryption was designed to protect communications between Alice to Bob from the evil Eve. It was not designed to cope with the case where Bob and Eve are the same person. As a clueless DRM proponent, you are trying to give Bob access to an item without giving Bob access to the item... which isn't logical.
No, Alice wants to send Bob a letter but for technical reasons she has to send her diary with the letter inside. The obvious solution is to fit a lock around the diary and install a black box at Bob's. If you put the locked diary inside the box the box opens it, gives the letter to Bob and keeps the diary.
Now obviously most Bobs (who hate Alice with a passion anyway) would simply open the black box and take the diary. This is why the black box needs a self destruct mechanism.
And you thought those exploding batteries and Red Rings of Death where just due to incompetence.
Slashdot Mirror
And "the evil church would only allow him to teach the difference when both theories had major holes and he just had to ridicule his most powerful ally along the way" also hasn't quite the same ring to it as "the Inquisition made him a martyr for speaking the truth".
If it had been about empirical proof noone would have listened to Galileo because the old model -hideously complicated as it was- provided better results. Kinda like Newton vs. Relativity. The heliocentric model only became (vastly) better when Kepler changed the circles to ellipses.
Also Galileo wasn't interested in a scientific theory. The church would have allowed him using and teaching his model as a mathematical tool (which is remarkably similar to how we see all models nowadays, although there is the big difference that in the view of the church the geocentric worldview was an objective truth) but Galileo wanted his absolute truth to replace the old absolute truth (despite the fact that it was worse!).
When the pope, who was a friend of his and had defended him in the first case, offered him the opportunity to write a book giving a balanced account of both models, it would have been easy to subtly slant it his way, giving the old model a few hollow victories while extolling his view, without cowtowing to the church. Instead he had a retard represent the pope's POV ridiculing him all throughout the book. Ridiculing the monarch was considered treason and punishable by death in oh-so-liberal England until the late 18th century. I don't know when they last executed someone for doing that but by the standards of his time Galileo's house arrest was quite mild.
I don't even want to defend Ratzinger or present the church of Galileo's age as a voice of reason and progress, but please stop spreading all the anti-church propaganda of the last 400 years, it isn't any better than the church's very real failings.
So, if you turned the US into Soviet Russia you could manage a profit of about $6 trillion, give yourself the mother of all performance bonuses and be somewhere else when the whole thing comes crashing down. Romney was a CEO of a private equity firm once, so he probably has some experience in doing this kind of stuff. =)
I'm back to using Gnome sometimes (first time since the glorious 1.4 times =) and I have to say it works quite well. It's just that with all the "We know what's good for you" and "You are too dumb for options" talk around 2.0 they managed to drive me off quite thoroughly. Had they just told us that there was a lack of features because 2.0 was a rewrite and they didn't have time for them I'd have had much less of a problem with that. Release early, release often is the OSS mantra and KDE 4.0 is kinda scratching at the upper limit you can go without release anyway.
Oh and it's not just OSS. OSX 10.0 was a buggy slow beta-quality release (here come the rabid fanboys =P) and Vista's one steaming pile of sh*t.
That's why we need Kepler.
That's inconsistent with the 1710s, the 1720s, ... and the 1790s. Why should you use an expression that's got a different meaning (1700-1709) to describe something that has a perfectly fine word of its own (18th century) just because the American population is too stupid to A) count to 18 or B) remember one simple fact (there's no 0th century, it doesn't really make sense either), which is a lot more logical than half the English language anyway. (And even better, I'm sure most Americans could care less. So the majority of Americans thinks there's less important stuff out there =)
You seem to be unaware that kg!=lbs. Do you work at NASA by chance?
However there are two major reasons for landing somewhere in the desert:
- Cost. Sending a recovery fleet out to sea is expensive and you don't want to do it for longer and more often than necessary.
- More costs. The plan is to reuse the CEV for a number of flights (10 I think) and saltwater is highly corrosive making that difficult.
As someone already pointed out the best solution's probably to land on water when going to the moon (because every kg --remember, NASA's going metric =) -- counts) and on land when going to the ISS/LEO (because $/kg to LEO isn't that bad compared to sending it to the moon)Michael Schumacher started out on go carts.
If you wanna do space tourism even on a semi-large scale then suborbital is the only thing feasible at the moment.
You're right that using WK as a first stage for orbital launches sounds dubious but don't belittle what they're doing.
Who cares about the computers? This inexcusable crime wouldn't have happened if the miscreant hadn't been sheltered in Harvard buildings, been educated in the basics of computer use in Harvard classrooms and read all about how to weasle out of his just punishment in Harvard libraries.
Adios Harvard, say hello to *AArvard and the Jack Valenti School of Intellectual Property.
VGCats once had a comic about that.
The only thing it measures is hype, and the most interesting fact you can get from the data is that debian users got better things to do than fill out online-surveys. =)
Of course this doesn't mean that the data doesn't correlate with reality, it'd just be the same as a broken watch showing the right time twice a day.
The touchscreen otoh could come in quite handy.
Combine most of the stuff that's on TV with punch the monkey and you have an instant win. =)
Unlike the GNOME logo?
If they changed the icons too often, it would be distracting and hurt continuity.
Once every six years should be possible without distracting everyone.
You'll probably be modded down for trolling or baiting flames, and you deserve it.
What trolling? I called them lazy and that's about it. Since when is calling someone "lazy" on /. enough to be called a troll? If I'd called them sons of whores that ass-rape sheeps while devouring Linus' children for the greater glory of Adolf Hitler, it might have been borderline trolling. But lazy?!
Even more importantly, dupes are a running gag on /. (although they seem to occur less frequently nowadays; the tagging system at work or nostalgia at work? =) and quite often you realize that not even the editor who posted a story bothered to click the links included. If that's not lazy I don't know what is.
Why did they put 3 battery applets on the desktop? Why is the clock huge and in the middle of the panel? Because it's not final. You can't honestly think that those buttons will stay that way?!
Why are the sides of the taskbar chopped off? What's the point in rounding off the corners?
Because it's not full size? You can have it run all the way across the bottom and it won't have the corners and sides but if you have a panel that's less then the full width of the desktop you're probably interested in what the sides are gonna look like.
I was going to say I'm not usually the sort of person who runs lots of eye-candy applets but it seems under KDE4 users aren't given much choice :/
And you got that insight from what exactly?
No, it's gonna look like this. In fact, it already does in CVS apparently.
I mean you've finally managed to replace the similarily outdated GNOME logo so get your ass in gear.
That's btw. not limited to using it as a weapon. The military spends ludicrous amounts of money to transport fuel all over the world (especially expensive in war zones like Iraq where you have to protect those transports) for both vehicles and all those electrical generators that keep the network-centric buzzwords running when the local power grid is a joke.
What I don't like is those lists taking up half the space, or them and those "xy in popular culture" sections appear prominently in articles where they really should not be ("Auschwitz in popular culture"). All of them should be stuffed into their own article and linked from the main article.
It's been said a lot of times. There are no limits on the number of articles wikipedia can support and as long as the search engine (i.e. google; wiki's own is utter crap) can cope and manages to put the relevant pages up front there's no reason we shouldn't see the 20th million article.
Imho the main problem of wikipedia is that its principle leads to fanatics hijacking articles or parts of wikipedia and driving all others out. There's the example of the pro-pedophilia articles that always get mentioned when the topic comes up, but there are lots of others.(The reason I mention it is that just today I looked on wikipedia for two almost completely unrelated things: the text of the Ode to Joy and a date of the second mongol invasion of Hungary. The Ode to Joy article has the German, English and Polish version and the mongol invasion article reads like Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Poland)
Digg's and reddit's descent into crappiness is mostly due to the same reason. Slashdot made probably the most brilliant decision in its history when they came up with the system where everyone gets mod-points but only a very limited number. Despite all the conspiracy theories it works pretty well.
It's not Star Trek that's tired and irrelevant. We're sick of Bad Star Trek, like the last two movies and Enterprise as well as half of Voyager. Star Trek is just an excellent, extensive backdrop allowing people to tell stories. If the stories suck no amount of Star Trekiness will save the series and that's what we had the last ten years.
Give the man a chance.
Football
non-US: A game where you kick a ball with your foot.
US: A game where you throw an egg with your hand.
As both games include certain exceptions to that rule, if in doubt:
non-US: Sissy players rolling around on the ground pretending to be hurt whenever an opponent's been within 20 feet.
US: Manly players like the Quarterback (he's the one fingering the balls of the one in front of him every play) play Rugby in 40 pounds of padding.
Honestly, I don't think it would make the top 10 of not-our-finest-hours. The opium addicts weren't really the problem but the government's attempt to stop the opium trade brought down the Chinese bureaucracy.
Now don't get me wrong, the imperial government was right in trying to stop it but it made apparent the rampant corruption, cliques and incompetence that had infested the Chinese bureaucracy over the centuries since the Manchu took power. Add to this the clear demonstration of impotence of the Chinese military and you had a recipe for disaster.
Doesn't mean the British were in any way justified to do what they did, but in the larger picture they were just the straw that broke the camels back.
It's one of the things that had the alarm bells ringing about the Polywell because it's something you'd expect from someone who wants to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.
But I think in his case he just saw the writing on the wall. He knew he wouldn't see a full-scale reactor if it was done step-by-step, he was just too old for that.
I really hope someone with the required expertise will take an honest look at the Polywell. The concept sounds good and the central question seems to be whether the plasma will move into thermal equilibrium or not. And the paper every critic cites is one master thesis written by the student of one of Bussard's rivals for Navy funding. Hmmmm...
Now, the fact that your opponent's not trustworthy doesn't mean that you are, but I think that considering all the money that goes into ITER a few million for looking at different approaches (mostly this and lasers/inertial confinement =) are a good investment.
They gave us Ultima, Wing Commander, Crusader and System Shock. Then came Ultima Online and EA canned anything that wasn't a MMO game, then they started a Privateer Online canned that, and simply let UO fizzle out.
RIP Origin, Bioware you're next. =/
No, Alice wants to send Bob a letter but for technical reasons she has to send her diary with the letter inside. The obvious solution is to fit a lock around the diary and install a black box at Bob's. If you put the locked diary inside the box the box opens it, gives the letter to Bob and keeps the diary.
Now obviously most Bobs (who hate Alice with a passion anyway) would simply open the black box and take the diary. This is why the black box needs a self destruct mechanism.
And you thought those exploding batteries and Red Rings of Death where just due to incompetence.