If they dont comply all MSN sites may get censored by China wholesale. Or if the Chinese are REALLY pissed they can just ignore all of Ms's copyrights in China.
Yes but this is far different than mathematical proof. I mean as far as I understand things, this rocky planet is not the only possible answer which explains things, but the most probable one.
Now I do not know the specifics of this situation but in general one cannot deduct with certainty the existance of another body based on the force exerted on a known body. That is because an effective force can be caused by multiple combinations of bodies. For example if I had one electron 1 m in front of me it would cause the exact electrical force as having to electrons one meter in front of me and a third electron one meter behind me.
Also, the wobble can be caused by assymetrical mass distribution within the star itself.
Now if you had a good education you would know better to get your info from rigth wing hate websites. Having attended Columbia, I would like to say that "rampant anti-semitism" is about the wrongest thing you can say about this school right now. Columbia has to have the highest percentage of Jewish students of any major school. Certainly the highest in an ivy league school. Jews are well represented in all levels of faculty, student groups, student government, etc. (to be honest Columbia did use to be anti semitic, and actually tried to limit the number of jews that can be admitted but these practices were stopped by the left wingers the original poster is complaining about).
The rest of your post is just as incoherrent but I will center my comments on Columbia, because I'd hate to see my school tarnished.
And if you stayed in school you could have still had a sys-admin job. You would have also been able to speak better english.
That may not be too important for you, but it does have its advantages.
AFAIK most of them. By "directly observe" of course i do not mean "see with one's own eyes" but detect some kind of direct interaction with the particle.
So the discovered subatomic particles which have been directly observed have been crashed into a sensor that detects their energy or have decayed close to a sensor that detects the energy released in the decay. I would call that direct observation.
This is a good critique against certain trends of the present education system, but not education in general.
A good formal education, if you can get it, can be very useful.
But you are quite right about the hordes of incompetent CS graduates. When I was in undergrad the dot. com stuff was heating up and we were getting a lot of new students in the computer programs. But the professors in my school were not willing to let anybody let by easily -- they would fail half of a class without batting an eyelid rather than passing a kid that does not know how pointers work. I loved it... it did wonders for the curve when half your class was failing.
Unfortunately later the industry pressured the school to produce more graduates and standards fell accross the board.
It is quite disappointing to see Jobs pulling a Larry Ellison and telling kids to drop out.
First of all it is the rudest thing you can say at a graduation speech. All these kids worked hard and paid good money to graduate... if you disagree with them, at least do it politely... and if you are not able to politely disagree then don't do the damn graduation speech to begin with! He can very easily make his point about the uselessness of a college degree without ruining a graduation ceremony; he could, for example, write an article about it.
Now I am sure Steve had a tough time being poor and all, and had to overcome a lot of things... But when he is giving advice to young kids that respect him he should try to silence his enourmous ego and try to figure out the advice which would be best for the kids rather than telling them to follow precisely in his footsteps like some preacher with a messiah complex.
Jobs should look at the data and realize that he is a statistical oddity. Most people that do not graduate college do not do nearly as well as the ones that do. It is great that Jobs was able to overcome the hurdle of a lack of a college degree, but guess what - it is a hurdle and it is stupid to encourage kids to add that hurdle to their lives when they do not need to.
It is very nice of Jobs to tell kids that life is too short to do things that you do not enjoy, but guess what -- that usually has nothing to do with wuitting college. Most intelligent kids usually find something in college that intersts them, and the ones that are unhappy there are usually so because they stuck to a wrong major and not because they had to graduate. I mean I am sure Jobs would have loved a couple of more years to study caligraphy and art.
What does it mean to discover a planet?
on
Rocky Planet Discovered
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
After reading the article it seems like they "discovered" the planet simply by observing the star and two very large jupiter type gas giants that are circling the star. By the orbits of the planets and the "wobble" of the star they have determined that there must be another planet of the specified size and orbit.
So essentially this planet was discovered solely on observation of its gravitational effect on other planets. In other words the scientists built a computer model which includes the star and two visible gas giants, and found a planet which they could insert in it so it causes the star and the gas giants to behave as they in the model as they do in observation. Then they declared that they have discovered a new planet.
How did they know it was a rocky planet? Well, correct me if i am wrong but it seems like they decided that by elimination -- the planet is too small to be a gas giant and too close to the star to have anu liquid water on it. Therefore, it must be a rocky planet.
Admittedly I do not know much about modern astronomy but all of this is a little troubling. I mean should we not obtain direct observation from something before we proclaim it "discovered"?
I am sure modeling solar objects is very useful but modeling is limited to our current knowledge. If rely too much on modeling we will never discover anything that we do not already know about.
Well if you actually read the article the ACLU is suing on behalf of content providers and not content users. And the content providers do not have choice of whether or not to be on the list. They can be put on the list by the AG and have no way to challenge that. This is the main issue which the ACLU complains about and the fact that the users have a choice whether or not to block is not that material to this issue.
Also note that the ACLU article has helpful links to in-depth discussion of the law and the legislative history so they are definately not trying to withhold information from you.
Did the good people of Utah restrict this law to ISP's only located in Utah? No they did not.
Now every damn ISP in the US is liable under this law, because every reasonably sized ISP is bound to have at least one customer in Utah.
Other than that it is a settled matter in the US that there are certain rights wich are guaranteed by the constitution and cannot be taken away by states, and the right to free speech is one of them.
Also I should say that you are little bit behind the times. Since they took over power in the federal government the conservatives quickly forgot all about states rights and are working hard to increase the power of the federal government.
So in view of the final version yes it is true that ISP's have a choice to provide software instead of filtering at the servers, but guess what every single ISP will choose to filter at the servers because it will be much cheaper to do than support any kind of software at users' computers.
Also the law specifically states that a service provider is not allowed to charge people for blocking content for them, and can only increase the charges to ALL its customers. So they cannot just direct their customers to netnanny, unless they pay for it. Also the language about "commercially reasonable manner" pretty much requires the ISP to provide support for any software they give to the consumer because that is the commercial norm nowadays. There is an exception made for small ISPs less than 7500 customers but most people use ISPs that are larger than that. And even that exception is limited to the cost of software and does not include support costs, so the cost to the average customer of a small isp will increase as well.
And while the attorney general is required to publish the list he/she is NOT required to take any public input from what is on the list. Naturally the AG will be careful not to put the DNC or the GOP website on the list because the political fallout will hurt his career, but he can easily ban smaller and less popular websites. For example, websites that that provide support about homosexuality in a completely non-pornographic manner (i.e., providing education, and helping with the depression and other issues that trouble people with confused sexuality) are often victims of these schemes. And the AG of Utah can easily ban these sites without suffering politicaly at all.
It is still a bad idea to force the ISP to do that, however.
The customer has complete control over his/her computer, if they want to block sites they should be able to do it themselves, at their computer. So voluntary censorship is OK, but it requires absolutely no legislation, and can easily b done at the local computer level.
Once you start legislating things for ISPs you get into all kinds of problems. First you force the ISP services to become more expensive for people that do not wish to use the blocking software. Also, you get into all kinds of federalism issues, because this law will ruin the day (and increase the costs) of any ISP in the US not only the ones in Utah. And you also open the door for censorship, at schools, libraries, etc. That is because at those places the actual institution will be the customer and they will make the choice whether to block things or not, not the people that are using the computers. Now you may say that schools and libraries should not have porn in them but every porn blocking service so far has been found to sneak in some political websites in their block lists, so the free speech issues are significant.
But the biggest problem if we let these laws pass we will force the ISPs of America to create an infrastructure for cencorship (similar to the on in China) which can then easily be used for actual censorship that is directed by the government. That is, once the infrastructure is created at the ISP level, it will be very easy for the government to revoke the part where the customer is free to choose whether they get censored or not.
Actually, I was talking about the Lisa (Maura Tierney) character. Although I have to agree Khandi is definately sexier, but unfortunately her character was not used as much and was mostly a straight woman for the other character's.
It is actually pretty amazing, because the US version was just a complete word for word copy of the British show with different actors. But you are right it was not that funny.
Naturally i have not read TFA because it is an obvious plug, but I thought I would give my unsolicited opinion about the best sitcom ever made.
No, it is not MASH, nor Cheers, nor Faulty Towers nor Sienfeld although they are all good shows.
It is News Radio. A brilliant show with the best comic talent assembled in one show since the good days of SNL. It is also very well written, the characters all compliment the actors abilities. Also, it has the only woman character ever to appear on American TV that is both sexy and intelligent.
It is too bad the show was beset by bad management on the part of the network (i think it was Fox or NBC) and then tragedy as one of its leading actors was murdered.
I double boot WinXP and Ubuntu linux. I do not use the CLI in Ubuntu.
I did have to do some screwing around with config files to get the proper resolutions on (Ubuntu does not recognize sony flatscreens for some bizarre reason). But I had as much trouble getting a cam to work in windows. I did not have to modify config files in wondows, but I had to scrounge the internet for old drivers (most of which did not work, some froze my system) which was just as hard and annoying.
Anyways, my point is that in normal use Ubuntu is just as point and click as windows XP.
Of course Ubuntu still has the CLI and all, but that is no problem as long as you can do everything with the mouse. That is the CLI should not make developers lazy, I know most Linux devs use the cli for everything, but they should make sure that things work with the point and click interface as well. So far Ubuntu+gnome seems to be pretty good about that.
BTW I would be really careful of "software development that works like a powerpoint drawing". I know there have been attempts at making software development "easy" since the software field existed, but people should keep one thing in mind -- the "difficulty" of writing software is often related to the difficulty of the problem you are trying to solve. And you will never make development easier than the underlying problem. Thus, many "easy" development environments are only good for solving easy problems.
Remember how gaming systems used to have hardware protection against playing unaouthorized cds? Remember how easy that was to get around?
Guess what, if there is any interest ou tthere whatsoever, one will be able to easily "chip" an x86 machine to run OSX.
Of course apple will try to have a different hardware than the usual x86 machine, but the things that are hard to reverse engineer (CPU, memory, GPU) will be the same. The bios and the rest of the mobo chipset will not be hard to reverse engineer at all.
So expect the x86 apple clones to start popping up about an year after Apple starts selling the originals.
Dude, you are a mac person, it comes with the territory. Mac people love their computers, which in today's world means only one thing -- they can be abused more, they have more juice to squeeze before they get fed up and switch platforms.
And lets face it Steve Jobs is to put it mildly an ambitios guy. (To put it less mildly he has a Napoleon complex). High profit margins and happy customers are not enough for him. He needs to rule the world the way Bill G used to. Or even in a bigger way than Bill Gates used to, because lets face it Bill only had a software monopoly. So he will abuse his faithfull customers to get to his goal.
And judging from today's Slashdot posts he has not made a mistake. Most of Slashdot's Mac-fanboys support the move.
I suggest you go for Linux. Not because it is better than OSX (I cannot say that coz I have not used OSX much) but because in Linux there is no Steve Jobs or Bill Gates that can make your life difficult with one of their business decisions. The software is usually open source so you can recompile it on whatever platform you like.
The most amazing thing about this story was that an unsubstantiated rumor posted on slashdot proved to be correct. Good job Slashdot! Although they had to rub it in by posting half a dozen "Mac to switch to Intel" stories. Hopefully this will be the last one since, it is already official.
Another amuzing thing was how in the initial stories every machead denied the rumor and explained at great lengths how the PPC kicks ass and is so much faster than the Intel chips. And then they had to hear it from their god Steve Jobs himself that the PPC is not really that great. Poor macheads.
Good for them. I think one of the most ridiculous things in the US is the cold temperature of the office buildings during the summer.
It has gotten so bad that I am much more likely to get a cold in the summer than in the winter just from walking into freezing buildings from the over heated outside.
The batteries of electric cars are recycled. The toxic metals are not released in the environment but put in new batteries.
Also old cars should get scrapped. That is because old cars are usually very inefficient because of the odler engine technology and the wear and tear of old engines.
Slashdot Mirror
If they dont comply all MSN sites may get censored by China wholesale. Or if the Chinese are REALLY pissed they can just ignore all of Ms's copyrights in China.
Yes but this is far different than mathematical proof. I mean as far as I understand things, this rocky planet is not the only possible answer which explains things, but the most probable one.
Now I do not know the specifics of this situation but in general one cannot deduct with certainty the existance of another body based on the force exerted on a known body. That is because an effective force can be caused by multiple combinations of bodies. For example if I had one electron 1 m in front of me it would cause the exact electrical force as having to electrons one meter in front of me and a third electron one meter behind me.
Also, the wobble can be caused by assymetrical mass distribution within the star itself.
Now if you had a good education you would know better to get your info from rigth wing hate websites. Having attended Columbia, I would like to say that "rampant anti-semitism" is about the wrongest thing you can say about this school right now. Columbia has to have the highest percentage of Jewish students of any major school. Certainly the highest in an ivy league school. Jews are well represented in all levels of faculty, student groups, student government, etc. (to be honest Columbia did use to be anti semitic, and actually tried to limit the number of jews that can be admitted but these practices were stopped by the left wingers the original poster is complaining about).
The rest of your post is just as incoherrent but I will center my comments on Columbia, because I'd hate to see my school tarnished.
And if you stayed in school you could have still had a sys-admin job. You would have also been able to speak better english. That may not be too important for you, but it does have its advantages.
AFAIK most of them. By "directly observe" of course i do not mean "see with one's own eyes" but detect some kind of direct interaction with the particle.
So the discovered subatomic particles which have been directly observed have been crashed into a sensor that detects their energy or have decayed close to a sensor that detects the energy released in the decay. I would call that direct observation.
i suppose they are looking for Wozniaks.
and apparently he keeps it all in 2 dollar bills.
This is a good critique against certain trends of the present education system, but not education in general.
... it did wonders for the curve when half your class was failing.
A good formal education, if you can get it, can be very useful.
But you are quite right about the hordes of incompetent CS graduates. When I was in undergrad the dot. com stuff was heating up and we were getting a lot of new students in the computer programs. But the professors in my school were not willing to let anybody let by easily -- they would fail half of a class without batting an eyelid rather than passing a kid that does not know how pointers work. I loved it
Unfortunately later the industry pressured the school to produce more graduates and standards fell accross the board.
I would juast like to point out that I was not criticizing science in general. So this defense of science while laudable is quite unnecessary.
I was just suggesting that astronomers rething the language they use in their press releases.
It is quite disappointing to see Jobs pulling a Larry Ellison and telling kids to drop out.
... if you disagree with them, at least do it politely ... and if you are not able to politely disagree then don't do the damn graduation speech to begin with! He can very easily make his point about the uselessness of a college degree without ruining a graduation ceremony; he could, for example, write an article about it.
... But when he is giving advice to young kids that respect him he should try to silence his enourmous ego and try to figure out the advice which would be best for the kids rather than telling them to follow precisely in his footsteps like some preacher with a messiah complex.
First of all it is the rudest thing you can say at a graduation speech. All these kids worked hard and paid good money to graduate
Now I am sure Steve had a tough time being poor and all, and had to overcome a lot of things
Jobs should look at the data and realize that he is a statistical oddity. Most people that do not graduate college do not do nearly as well as the ones that do. It is great that Jobs was able to overcome the hurdle of a lack of a college degree, but guess what - it is a hurdle and it is stupid to encourage kids to add that hurdle to their lives when they do not need to.
It is very nice of Jobs to tell kids that life is too short to do things that you do not enjoy, but guess what -- that usually has nothing to do with wuitting college. Most intelligent kids usually find something in college that intersts them, and the ones that are unhappy there are usually so because they stuck to a wrong major and not because they had to graduate. I mean I am sure Jobs would have loved a couple of more years to study caligraphy and art.
After reading the article it seems like they "discovered" the planet simply by observing the star and two very large jupiter type gas giants that are circling the star. By the orbits of the planets and the "wobble" of the star they have determined that there must be another planet of the specified size and orbit.
So essentially this planet was discovered solely on observation of its gravitational effect on other planets. In other words the scientists built a computer model which includes the star and two visible gas giants, and found a planet which they could insert in it so it causes the star and the gas giants to behave as they in the model as they do in observation. Then they declared that they have discovered a new planet.
How did they know it was a rocky planet? Well, correct me if i am wrong but it seems like they decided that by elimination -- the planet is too small to be a gas giant and too close to the star to have anu liquid water on it. Therefore, it must be a rocky planet.
Admittedly I do not know much about modern astronomy but all of this is a little troubling. I mean should we not obtain direct observation from something before we proclaim it "discovered"?
I am sure modeling solar objects is very useful but modeling is limited to our current knowledge. If rely too much on modeling we will never discover anything that we do not already know about.
Well if you actually read the article the ACLU is suing on behalf of content providers and not content users. And the content providers do not have choice of whether or not to be on the list. They can be put on the list by the AG and have no way to challenge that. This is the main issue which the ACLU complains about and the fact that the users have a choice whether or not to block is not that material to this issue.
Also note that the ACLU article has helpful links to in-depth discussion of the law and the legislative history so they are definately not trying to withhold information from you.
Did the good people of Utah restrict this law to ISP's only located in Utah? No they did not.
Now every damn ISP in the US is liable under this law, because every reasonably sized ISP is bound to have at least one customer in Utah.
Other than that it is a settled matter in the US that there are certain rights wich are guaranteed by the constitution and cannot be taken away by states, and the right to free speech is one of them.
Also I should say that you are little bit behind the times. Since they took over power in the federal government the conservatives quickly forgot all about states rights and are working hard to increase the power of the federal government.
Ok, after some RTFA-ing I discovered that the bill provided in the article summary is not the final version. This is the final version:
0 260.pdf
http://www.le.state.ut.us/~2005/bills/hbillenr/hb
So in view of the final version yes it is true that ISP's have a choice to provide software instead of filtering at the servers, but guess what every single ISP will choose to filter at the servers because it will be much cheaper to do than support any kind of software at users' computers.
Also the law specifically states that a service provider is not allowed to charge people for blocking content for them, and can only increase the charges to ALL its customers. So they cannot just direct their customers to netnanny, unless they pay for it. Also the language about "commercially reasonable manner" pretty much requires the ISP to provide support for any software they give to the consumer because that is the commercial norm nowadays. There is an exception made for small ISPs less than 7500 customers but most people use ISPs that are larger than that. And even that exception is limited to the cost of software and does not include support costs, so the cost to the average customer of a small isp will increase as well.
And while the attorney general is required to publish the list he/she is NOT required to take any public input from what is on the list. Naturally the AG will be careful not to put the DNC or the GOP website on the list because the political fallout will hurt his career, but he can easily ban smaller and less popular websites. For example, websites that that provide support about homosexuality in a completely non-pornographic manner (i.e., providing education, and helping with the depression and other issues that trouble people with confused sexuality) are often victims of these schemes. And the AG of Utah can easily ban these sites without suffering politicaly at all.
This is a link of the final text of the bill as signed into law (I assume that is wghat "enrolled copy" means):
0 260.pdf
http://www.le.state.ut.us/~2005/bills/hbillenr/hb
The link provided by slashdot is an intermediate version that was still being amended.
It is still a bad idea to force the ISP to do that, however.
The customer has complete control over his/her computer, if they want to block sites they should be able to do it themselves, at their computer. So voluntary censorship is OK, but it requires absolutely no legislation, and can easily b done at the local computer level.
Once you start legislating things for ISPs you get into all kinds of problems. First you force the ISP services to become more expensive for people that do not wish to use the blocking software. Also, you get into all kinds of federalism issues, because this law will ruin the day (and increase the costs) of any ISP in the US not only the ones in Utah. And you also open the door for censorship, at schools, libraries, etc. That is because at those places the actual institution will be the customer and they will make the choice whether to block things or not, not the people that are using the computers. Now you may say that schools and libraries should not have porn in them but every porn blocking service so far has been found to sneak in some political websites in their block lists, so the free speech issues are significant.
But the biggest problem if we let these laws pass we will force the ISPs of America to create an infrastructure for cencorship (similar to the on in China) which can then easily be used for actual censorship that is directed by the government. That is, once the infrastructure is created at the ISP level, it will be very easy for the government to revoke the part where the customer is free to choose whether they get censored or not.
Actually, I was talking about the Lisa (Maura Tierney) character. Although I have to agree Khandi is definately sexier, but unfortunately her character was not used as much and was mostly a straight woman for the other character's.
It is actually pretty amazing, because the US version was just a complete word for word copy of the British show with different actors. But you are right it was not that funny.
Naturally i have not read TFA because it is an obvious plug, but I thought I would give my unsolicited opinion about the best sitcom ever made.
No, it is not MASH, nor Cheers, nor Faulty Towers nor Sienfeld although they are all good shows.
It is News Radio. A brilliant show with the best comic talent assembled in one show since the good days of SNL. It is also very well written, the characters all compliment the actors abilities. Also, it has the only woman character ever to appear on American TV that is both sexy and intelligent.
It is too bad the show was beset by bad management on the part of the network (i think it was Fox or NBC) and then tragedy as one of its leading actors was murdered.
I double boot WinXP and Ubuntu linux. I do not use the CLI in Ubuntu.
I did have to do some screwing around with config files to get the proper resolutions on (Ubuntu does not recognize sony flatscreens for some bizarre reason). But I had as much trouble getting a cam to work in windows. I did not have to modify config files in wondows, but I had to scrounge the internet for old drivers (most of which did not work, some froze my system) which was just as hard and annoying.
Anyways, my point is that in normal use Ubuntu is just as point and click as windows XP.
Of course Ubuntu still has the CLI and all, but that is no problem as long as you can do everything with the mouse. That is the CLI should not make developers lazy, I know most Linux devs use the cli for everything, but they should make sure that things work with the point and click interface as well. So far Ubuntu+gnome seems to be pretty good about that.
BTW I would be really careful of "software development that works like a powerpoint drawing". I know there have been attempts at making software development "easy" since the software field existed, but people should keep one thing in mind -- the "difficulty" of writing software is often related to the difficulty of the problem you are trying to solve. And you will never make development easier than the underlying problem. Thus, many "easy" development environments are only good for solving easy problems.
Remember how gaming systems used to have hardware protection against playing unaouthorized cds? Remember how easy that was to get around?
Guess what, if there is any interest ou tthere whatsoever, one will be able to easily "chip" an x86 machine to run OSX.
Of course apple will try to have a different hardware than the usual x86 machine, but the things that are hard to reverse engineer (CPU, memory, GPU) will be the same. The bios and the rest of the mobo chipset will not be hard to reverse engineer at all.
So expect the x86 apple clones to start popping up about an year after Apple starts selling the originals.
Dude, you are a mac person, it comes with the territory. Mac people love their computers, which in today's world means only one thing -- they can be abused more, they have more juice to squeeze before they get fed up and switch platforms.
And lets face it Steve Jobs is to put it mildly an ambitios guy. (To put it less mildly he has a Napoleon complex). High profit margins and happy customers are not enough for him. He needs to rule the world the way Bill G used to. Or even in a bigger way than Bill Gates used to, because lets face it Bill only had a software monopoly. So he will abuse his faithfull customers to get to his goal.
And judging from today's Slashdot posts he has not made a mistake. Most of Slashdot's Mac-fanboys support the move.
I suggest you go for Linux. Not because it is better than OSX (I cannot say that coz I have not used OSX much) but because in Linux there is no Steve Jobs or Bill Gates that can make your life difficult with one of their business decisions. The software is usually open source so you can recompile it on whatever platform you like.
The most amazing thing about this story was that an unsubstantiated rumor posted on slashdot proved to be correct. Good job Slashdot! Although they had to rub it in by posting half a dozen "Mac to switch to Intel" stories. Hopefully this will be the last one since, it is already official.
Another amuzing thing was how in the initial stories every machead denied the rumor and explained at great lengths how the PPC kicks ass and is so much faster than the Intel chips. And then they had to hear it from their god Steve Jobs himself that the PPC is not really that great. Poor macheads.
Good for them. I think one of the most ridiculous things in the US is the cold temperature of the office buildings during the summer.
It has gotten so bad that I am much more likely to get a cold in the summer than in the winter just from walking into freezing buildings from the over heated outside.
The batteries of electric cars are recycled. The toxic metals are not released in the environment but put in new batteries.
Also old cars should get scrapped. That is because old cars are usually very inefficient because of the odler engine technology and the wear and tear of old engines.