There's a lot of selection bias in their current methods toward finding huge gas giants with tight orbits.
They're rapidly getting better, but the process of finding extra-solar planetary systems is so young, I think we should take every "conclusion" the research comes up with with a whole lot of will-they-be-saying-this-in-twenty-years salt.
Sure, but in 10^18 or however many stars, if something is rare, it will still happen a lot.
The question is, how likely are we to find something similar to ourselves in a smaller more realistic timeframe?
If solar systems like ours only happen one out of every 2 or 3 billion times, we're going to have to search long and hard, and when and if we do find one, it may be too far away to communicated with or travel to.
Outsider theories always have the burden of proof on their own shoulders. To paraphrase someone famous, "there are many questions fools can ask that wise men struggle to answer." There's no where this applies more than in science. Creation Science can throw out some sticky questions and make some points that are hard to disprove.
But Science is about proving things, not suggesting every possible idea and disproving them one by one. For a well established idea that has made a lot of successful predictions, even a known incomplete idea like the standard cosmological model, to be tossed aside, there needs to be an overwhelming amount of evidence, not just some compelling questions.
If an alternative model of the universe explains the preponderance of evidence we already have (such as the background radiation, the count of galaxies, the scarcity of structures above a certain scale, the calculated mass of galaxies, the total amount of gamma radiation etc.) as well as a current theory, as well as making successful new predictions that existing models failed to make, then over a process of several years, people in the field would become convinced, and as the literature is peer reviewed, the dogma would shift. But established scientific ideas are SUPPOSED to be dogma. It isn't politics. Equal time isn't given to competing ideas, that's not the way it works. There are too many bad scientists and professional crackpots, the system would collapse without a hierarchy of opinion.
And all science works this way and always has. Even the sciences that cure disease and deliver technological miracles. Since those things keep happening, I'm confident as a semi lay person that science, while certainly getting many small details wrong and making mistakes and sometimes taking too long to come to the right conclusions, is still heading in a monotonically positive direction.
How much do you want to bet that someone scored a holy hell of a black-budget contract out of that demo? When trying to puzzle out the governments shadowier actions, never forget profit motive. Most of the guts of our government is public/private ventures these days.
I doubt much more was going on than the testing of space weaponry in plain sight.
But why aren't we more upset about that? Is it really just OK that our government is openly defying the treaties that prevent the weaponization of space?
This is why conspiracies bug me so much. People believe the government lies and thus focus their attentions on grandiose and outlandish possible lies and cover-ups, rather than pay attention to all of the 100% verifiable medium-sized lies that the government tells day in and day out. Rather than fabricate an entire false narrative, the way to do it these days seems to be admit to 80% of what really happened, lie your pants off even if people will call you on it, and wait for the news cycle to pass on by the 20% that didn't add up.
Seriously, we've all but caught our government in an act that is very formally (as in, it would piss off thomas jefferson and not just moveon.org) against the principles of our democracy. What more conspiracy do we need?
Since you can get a factory sealed new computer for less than $200 these days, for this to work, the total cost of shipping all that quasi-junk out there + the cost in time (yes even third world man hours have a price, especially skilled ones, people who are struggling to feed their families can't devote large amounts of time to tasks that don't have immediate material benefit) + the cost of disposing of what can't be recycled has to be less than that figure or there just won't be incentive to use such a program, especially if it isn't implemented at scale.
I don't mean to be a naysayer. I'm all about reuse and recycling. But charities should listen to the people they're trying to help, not make assumptions about other peoples' problems.
Well and good, but let them ask for it. It's a bit presumptuous of us to dump tons (literally) of unwanted garbage, turn around, yell "there you go, better yourself!" and just leave.
No, I might like people to filter what they send a little bit, but we take donations in a limited capacity, so we don't tire ourselves out driving the truck back and forth to the electronics recycling place.
But donated machines have all kinds of problems. If you're working in any environment where worker time is given a dollar value, the extra hassles of using pre-owned heterogenous equipment with no guarantee or warrantee is really almost never worth it.
We're a bunch of lefty volunteers, a business wouldn't do what we do, unless it was unscrupulous and priced the fixed machines accordingly.
Eh, freelance web programming and a cheap little small city bohemia mean that I'm a happy lazy young dude. I don't plan on spending my whole life like this, but it works right now. I did an office for a while. I got to buy more stuff. Not interested at the moment.
I know guys who are like me but a few years older, I know that I'm going to have to do something different when I start planning for the future, but I think a big secret to happiness is to not be planning for the damn future all the time. If you've got an education, you have a lot of options in this country. It's fine to enjoy that security a bit.
Be thankful, I work for a volunteer organization that prepares donated computers for charities and people with need. A huge stack of computer equipment of questionable functionality is a chore, not a gift.
No, what you're saying is "the only way for this to be solved without someone having to act on something other than profit motive" is for the economics to work out.
There are other solutions, they just take some work.
This is a wonderful example of where regulation works. It seems like some minimal level of certification of the exported hardware, some basic test to see if it works would solve a large bit of this problem. Yes, people should be able to donate working equipment to the developing world, but no, the developing world shouldn't have to dig through garbage to get it.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. I don't make too much, and as I'm sure this will play into most peoples moral calculations of me: I don't plan on making too much, at least before I'm responsible for someone other than myself.
My limited entertainment dollar is spent on social activities. I rent movies at a local shop. I see live music. I go to cheap bars. At very small concerts, I donate money to bands. I use my local library. If I were buying commercial records and video games, that money would be coming directly out of my more primary entertainment expenses. The decision to pirate a game or album comes down to "pirate this or read / play / listen to someting I already have / go to the library." It isn't priate vs. buy. I'm not really much of a fan. There's very seldom something coming out that I just HAVE to be a part of, and I don't really understand that kind of behavior. It's pirate vs. do something else that would be free or almost free.
If mainstream commercial pop culture were to become inaccessible except at the kind of fees they seem to believe they deserve, I'd largely stop consuming it. I don't hate the stuff or consider myself above it, but I could do without it. It seems like only a recent development that large numbers of people spend over $100 a month on consuming pop culture. I think people from the 70s would think we're insane.
The argument could certainly be made that if I want to have that many albums on my ipod I should just go get some job I'd hate and make a bunch more money. OK. Sure. Whatever. I'm not.
I know this is about independent games specifically, and I can't say I play any. I'd probably pay for those. I'm a big believer in the little guy.
Even if you reach back in time, find some guru out of Bell Labs or the MIT AI project or DARPA or wherever who can write ruthlessly efficient machine code, you've still got to maintain their work, and the extra hours of mere mortals' time isn't going to be worth the extra efficiency.
Now I'm not one for throwing design patterns and agile paradigms at a problem until it stops making noise. I think an ideal team is a small group of exceptional programmers who decide on their own standards, maintain their own work, and train the any new eyeballs coming there way. A lot of software management is the theory of how to do acceptable work with market average talent. There's obviously a place for that... just hopefully no place I'm going to have to work.
This is definitely the java best practices way of doing it, but I'm not 100% sold that a function that is only called once is a good design.
When confronted with new code, I find it easier to digest if one "action" is one function, and as much as possible is written in the primitives of the language, and not a domain specific library.
Of course, I'm a hobbyist and not a professional, and I like systems, and not applications, so I tend toward a C style of doing things.
The best way to code depends on what you're coding, where you're coding it, and who you're coding it for.
It's also just not frequently important to get the linear increase in speed or decrease in executable or memory footprint that you get with these techniques any more.
A program that runs half as fast but is twice as easy to maintain is almost always the correct design on modern systems.
I had a professor who allowed gotos as long as they were used for getting out of deeply nested loops, and were jumping to a label within the same function, no more than about 15 or 20 lines of text away. He asserted (and I agree) that this is more readable than flag values and cascading
if (flag) break;
I've seen a goto used in place of more traditional looping constructs deep within the inner loop of a very performance intense application. This thing already had resorted to inline assembly in other areas, so ease of code reading most definitely being sacrificed for bleeding edge performance.
This isn't the type of thing that anyone does very often, and most people probably never need to.
I love all that those guys are doing for Linux, I really do. But man it's the lowest forum signal to noise ratio I've ever seen in Linux. I stick with Debian where the philosophy is conservative, and change comes nice and slooooow.
Not to pick on you alone, but this has to be one of the most useless Slashdot threads in recent memory.
Does anyone around here even know what typesetting IS ? The parent is asking for a replacement typesetting package and most of the responses are either "LaTeX is great!" or "don't use typesetting."
Helpful guys, real helpful.
That said, LaTeX is the only typesetting package I'm familiar with, so I'm not much more use myself.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a lot of selection bias in their current methods toward finding huge gas giants with tight orbits.
They're rapidly getting better, but the process of finding extra-solar planetary systems is so young, I think we should take every "conclusion" the research comes up with with a whole lot of will-they-be-saying-this-in-twenty-years salt.
Sure, but in 10^18 or however many stars, if something is rare, it will still happen a lot.
The question is, how likely are we to find something similar to ourselves in a smaller more realistic timeframe?
If solar systems like ours only happen one out of every 2 or 3 billion times, we're going to have to search long and hard, and when and if we do find one, it may be too far away to communicated with or travel to.
I think you hit radio silence pretty quickly into those things. Also, didn't Cassini do something like this?
Outsider theories always have the burden of proof on their own shoulders. To paraphrase someone famous, "there are many questions fools can ask that wise men struggle to answer." There's no where this applies more than in science. Creation Science can throw out some sticky questions and make some points that are hard to disprove.
But Science is about proving things, not suggesting every possible idea and disproving them one by one. For a well established idea that has made a lot of successful predictions, even a known incomplete idea like the standard cosmological model, to be tossed aside, there needs to be an overwhelming amount of evidence, not just some compelling questions.
If an alternative model of the universe explains the preponderance of evidence we already have (such as the background radiation, the count of galaxies, the scarcity of structures above a certain scale, the calculated mass of galaxies, the total amount of gamma radiation etc.) as well as a current theory, as well as making successful new predictions that existing models failed to make, then over a process of several years, people in the field would become convinced, and as the literature is peer reviewed, the dogma would shift. But established scientific ideas are SUPPOSED to be dogma. It isn't politics. Equal time isn't given to competing ideas, that's not the way it works. There are too many bad scientists and professional crackpots, the system would collapse without a hierarchy of opinion.
And all science works this way and always has. Even the sciences that cure disease and deliver technological miracles. Since those things keep happening, I'm confident as a semi lay person that science, while certainly getting many small details wrong and making mistakes and sometimes taking too long to come to the right conclusions, is still heading in a monotonically positive direction.
Congratulations, you're everything I hate about the internet.
The question is not should he have used his anonymity, it's does anyone here have the right to out him? No.
People have the right to anonymity even if you think they are misusing it. Nobody appointed you judge.
How much do you want to bet that someone scored a holy hell of a black-budget contract out of that demo? When trying to puzzle out the governments shadowier actions, never forget profit motive. Most of the guts of our government is public/private ventures these days.
I doubt much more was going on than the testing of space weaponry in plain sight.
But why aren't we more upset about that? Is it really just OK that our government is openly defying the treaties that prevent the weaponization of space?
This is why conspiracies bug me so much. People believe the government lies and thus focus their attentions on grandiose and outlandish possible lies and cover-ups, rather than pay attention to all of the 100% verifiable medium-sized lies that the government tells day in and day out. Rather than fabricate an entire false narrative, the way to do it these days seems to be admit to 80% of what really happened, lie your pants off even if people will call you on it, and wait for the news cycle to pass on by the 20% that didn't add up.
Seriously, we've all but caught our government in an act that is very formally (as in, it would piss off thomas jefferson and not just moveon.org) against the principles of our democracy. What more conspiracy do we need?
Since you can get a factory sealed new computer for less than $200 these days, for this to work, the total cost of shipping all that quasi-junk out there + the cost in time (yes even third world man hours have a price, especially skilled ones, people who are struggling to feed their families can't devote large amounts of time to tasks that don't have immediate material benefit) + the cost of disposing of what can't be recycled has to be less than that figure or there just won't be incentive to use such a program, especially if it isn't implemented at scale.
I don't mean to be a naysayer. I'm all about reuse and recycling. But charities should listen to the people they're trying to help, not make assumptions about other peoples' problems.
Well and good, but let them ask for it. It's a bit presumptuous of us to dump tons (literally) of unwanted garbage, turn around, yell "there you go, better yourself!" and just leave.
No, I might like people to filter what they send a little bit, but we take donations in a limited capacity, so we don't tire ourselves out driving the truck back and forth to the electronics recycling place.
But donated machines have all kinds of problems. If you're working in any environment where worker time is given a dollar value, the extra hassles of using pre-owned heterogenous equipment with no guarantee or warrantee is really almost never worth it.
We're a bunch of lefty volunteers, a business wouldn't do what we do, unless it was unscrupulous and priced the fixed machines accordingly.
Eh, freelance web programming and a cheap little small city bohemia mean that I'm a happy lazy young dude. I don't plan on spending my whole life like this, but it works right now. I did an office for a while. I got to buy more stuff. Not interested at the moment.
I know guys who are like me but a few years older, I know that I'm going to have to do something different when I start planning for the future, but I think a big secret to happiness is to not be planning for the damn future all the time. If you've got an education, you have a lot of options in this country. It's fine to enjoy that security a bit.
Be thankful, I work for a volunteer organization that prepares donated computers for charities and people with need. A huge stack of computer equipment of questionable functionality is a chore, not a gift.
No, what you're saying is "the only way for this to be solved without someone having to act on something other than profit motive" is for the economics to work out.
There are other solutions, they just take some work.
This is a wonderful example of where regulation works. It seems like some minimal level of certification of the exported hardware, some basic test to see if it works would solve a large bit of this problem. Yes, people should be able to donate working equipment to the developing world, but no, the developing world shouldn't have to dig through garbage to get it.
"All About the Money"
Yeah, that's pretty much it. I don't make too much, and as I'm sure this will play into most peoples moral calculations of me: I don't plan on making too much, at least before I'm responsible for someone other than myself.
My limited entertainment dollar is spent on social activities. I rent movies at a local shop. I see live music. I go to cheap bars. At very small concerts, I donate money to bands. I use my local library. If I were buying commercial records and video games, that money would be coming directly out of my more primary entertainment expenses. The decision to pirate a game or album comes down to "pirate this or read / play / listen to someting I already have / go to the library." It isn't priate vs. buy. I'm not really much of a fan. There's very seldom something coming out that I just HAVE to be a part of, and I don't really understand that kind of behavior. It's pirate vs. do something else that would be free or almost free.
If mainstream commercial pop culture were to become inaccessible except at the kind of fees they seem to believe they deserve, I'd largely stop consuming it. I don't hate the stuff or consider myself above it, but I could do without it. It seems like only a recent development that large numbers of people spend over $100 a month on consuming pop culture. I think people from the 70s would think we're insane.
The argument could certainly be made that if I want to have that many albums on my ipod I should just go get some job I'd hate and make a bunch more money. OK. Sure. Whatever. I'm not.
I know this is about independent games specifically, and I can't say I play any. I'd probably pay for those. I'm a big believer in the little guy.
Even if you reach back in time, find some guru out of Bell Labs or the MIT AI project or DARPA or wherever who can write ruthlessly efficient machine code, you've still got to maintain their work, and the extra hours of mere mortals' time isn't going to be worth the extra efficiency.
Now I'm not one for throwing design patterns and agile paradigms at a problem until it stops making noise. I think an ideal team is a small group of exceptional programmers who decide on their own standards, maintain their own work, and train the any new eyeballs coming there way. A lot of software management is the theory of how to do acceptable work with market average talent. There's obviously a place for that... just hopefully no place I'm going to have to work.
This is definitely the java best practices way of doing it, but I'm not 100% sold that a function that is only called once is a good design.
When confronted with new code, I find it easier to digest if one "action" is one function, and as much as possible is written in the primitives of the language, and not a domain specific library.
Of course, I'm a hobbyist and not a professional, and I like systems, and not applications, so I tend toward a C style of doing things.
The best way to code depends on what you're coding, where you're coding it, and who you're coding it for.
It's also just not frequently important to get the linear increase in speed or decrease in executable or memory footprint that you get with these techniques any more.
A program that runs half as fast but is twice as easy to maintain is almost always the correct design on modern systems.
I had a professor who allowed gotos as long as they were used for getting out of deeply nested loops, and were jumping to a label within the same function, no more than about 15 or 20 lines of text away. He asserted (and I agree) that this is more readable than flag values and cascading
if (flag) break;
I've seen a goto used in place of more traditional looping constructs deep within the inner loop of a very performance intense application. This thing already had resorted to inline assembly in other areas, so ease of code reading most definitely being sacrificed for bleeding edge performance.
This isn't the type of thing that anyone does very often, and most people probably never need to.
Funny, I prefer not frakkin' consuming so damn much.
I think finding moon dust on Mars would be a pretty major discovery.
Yeah, Ubuntu...
I love all that those guys are doing for Linux, I really do. But man it's the lowest forum signal to noise ratio I've ever seen in Linux. I stick with Debian where the philosophy is conservative, and change comes nice and slooooow.
Not to pick on you alone, but this has to be one of the most useless Slashdot threads in recent memory.
Does anyone around here even know what typesetting IS ? The parent is asking for a replacement typesetting package and most of the responses are either "LaTeX is great!" or "don't use typesetting."
Helpful guys, real helpful.
That said, LaTeX is the only typesetting package I'm familiar with, so I'm not much more use myself.