I've been running my Eee 901 without swap ever since I installed Ubuntu over the godawful Asus distribution that came with it. I don't notice any performance issues; however, without swap, hibernate doesn't work. I understand it needs a swap partition large enough to dump its entire RAM state when it hibernates, so that it can switch off completely and pick up again where it left off; without that it can only suspend, which saves a lot of power but still has a small drain on the battery.
Joking aside, though, I find this target to be overambitious. Speeding up by a factor of three would be plausible; two would be OK, but I'd hope they'd keep working on it to get it up to three. Four strikes me as unlikely, and five is right out.
I've thought about this long and hard, but I cannot escape the conclusion that we're being terribly unfair to our kids by turning the stories WE loved as children (as did the generation before us) into fare for adults, just because we don't want to give our toys up to the younger generations.
The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were both first published in 1986.
Is it really fair that google makes billions a year while their most popular site is powered by stolen material??
What, google.com? That being Google's most popular site - you know, the search engine? Is that powered by stolen material? Because I thought Google paid for the computers and bandwidth and electricity they use.
Perhaps you mean youtube.com, which while popular is far less so than google.com. But again, I didn't realise they'd stolen the materials that power that site: if they had, wouldn't the police have raided the data centre, taken back the stolen servers and returned them to their rightful owners? Perhaps you mean that a good deal of the content on youtube.com infringes somebody's copyright? Well, if that's the case, then there's a simple solution: you send in a DMCA takedown notice and Youtube takes down the offending clip. It's not difficult.
But of course the artists don't really want their videos removed from so popular a site: they want them to stay up there, but for Google to give them a cut of the revenue. Fair enough. Unfortunately it seems they haven't been able to agree a fee that works for both sides, so Google have taken down all those clips and walked away. At this point I don't see where the artists have a complaint. What, their problem now is that Youtube isn't showing their videos?
Well, there are a lot of religious folk who don't have a problem with evolution: e.g., Catholics, pretty much any mainstream Protestant church, lots of Jews...
I've argued before that this is the best line to take. Science marches on, after all, and if today scientists are starting to think something on a question of fact that contradicts the Bible... well, tomorrow they might have ironclad proof of it, and the day after that they'll have based some technology on it that pervades all our civilisation. And if your church has gone on record as saying that this discovery contradicts the Bible and is entirely false and heretical - then you're going to look a fool.
Much better to nudge God back one more gap and retcon the whole thing: explain how the new discoveries fit just fine with a more sophisticated view of what you've taught all along. Come up with some cunning logic and creative apologetics - I mean isn't that what Jesuits are for? Explain that God can be known through revelation and through tradition, but also through careful study of his creation. Position your religion to be able to incorporate science, rather than opposing it; that way you avoid making awful mistakes like the Church made with Galileo, and like the American Protestants are making with evolution. You don't want to do that.
Football is not a violent contact sport, it's a friendly game where players kick a ball around and are barely allowed to touch each other.
They're allowed to touch each other all right. They've just got to make sure that they touch the ball first. Unless the player's done something gratuitously dangerous, then having played the ball, any further contact as a result of that is perfectly legitimate, even if it leads to the most appalling injury.
Real men (possibly cave men...) killed others with their bare hands! Ban every weapon and we'll be left with our natural ones, and I'm pretty sure it would be difficult to ban hands.
Sure, but to kill a man with your bare hands is difficult. To kill a man with a gun is easy. Random quarrels happen among people in life, and sometimes people lash out in anger. If someone's going to lash out in anger, I'd prefer them not to have a gun, because that way the result is that someone maybe gets a broken jaw, rather than being shot dead for disrespectin' da hood.
it will be shooting in infrared and that means no visible light details of the planets in our solar system, no pictures of asteroids.
There are plenty of giant telescopes on Earth that operate in the visible spectrum. With adaptive optics their images are comparable to those from Hubble. We'll still be observing Solar System objects in the visible spectrum, don't worry about that.
However, no amount of optical trickery can compensate for the fact that the Earth's atmosphere is opaque to infrared. If we want to observe the Universe in the infrared spectrum, we have to do it from orbit, no way around it. So I for one am glad to see that when we launch space telescopes at enormous expense, we make sure that what they see is something that we absolutely could not see from the ground.
I don't understand why "To Kill A Mocking Bird" is banned. It should be required reading
It was, for us (in.uk). I imagine it's still controversial in some parts of the US, though. First off it portrays extreme racism - I'm guessing the official reason it's banned is because the word 'nigger' gets used. The unofficial reason it's banned is probably because it portrays extreme racism as a bad thing.
There's a reason people are still investigating string theory with the dogma and zeal of a crusader, despite its primary purpose to reconcile a disproven theory with a proven one.
One of general relativity and quantum mechanics has been disproven, and the other has been proven? Which is which, and how were the two achieved?
You know those 'experience' packs you can buy in shops? I saw one of them (with a picture of the space shuttle on the front no less) in WH Smith in the UK about 4-5 years ago. It was priced at £100,000 and had on the back a disclaimer saying it didn't actually garuntee you would in fact be able to fly in space.
The Russians have been offering space tourism services for quite some time now. Not sure what £100,000 would get you, but orbital space tourism is priced highly enough that you can't afford it unless you're the kind of rich that bankrolls major Linux distributions entirely for the lulz. I'm guessing what you had there was one of the deals where they put you in the back seat of a high-end fighter jet and point it straight up, taking you into a region that could be called spaceflight, sort of, maybe.
And none of these deals guarantee a flight in space. If you don't pass the ground training, if you don't convince them that you're physically capable of handling it and that you're not going to break anything, then you don't fly.
Second, the developers couldn't even agree on how to create it, so it's full of bugs and littered with bits of trash left-over from the process.
Outside had developers? I thought they just set up a procedural generator and some genetic algorithms, left it to run for a week or so and figured that was good enough. I mean, that was how I was explaining all the evidence of incompetent design throughout the product...
Seriously, I'm over 50, and I do a lot to try to stay sharp. Sudoku, chess problems, bridge problems, cryptic crosswords - virtually every day. I think a lot of people once they get out of school just stop exercising their brains. What you don't use, you lose.
I've got Nintendo marketing department on the line for you, they'd like you to appear in a commercial for a DS game...
As a 27-year old, I realize that I have completely spent the peak years of my intellectual capacity having made no greater contribution to the advancement of the human race than a few hundred Slashdot posts....
Ever paged through an archived/. article on some topic of interest you're looking up - maybe you're in a discussion elsewhere and you think 'hang on, wasn't there that thing I read about a few years back where...' and you Google it and it turns up the/. page - and while reading through the comments for that article you come upon one that perfectly sums up exactly what you had in mind, exactly what you wanted to say, and does so concisely and clearly, far better than you ever could have put it?
And then you look at who wrote that comment...
... and it's you?
Because if as we're told it's all downhill from 27, then I suppose I'll have to expect a lot more experiences like that.
Actually, you're quite right. Dinosaurs did coexist with humans, and still do. They're considerably smaller, feathered, and toothless, but dinosaurs nonetheless.
Nuclear weapons need to be replaced, and you do sell quite a lot to NATO member states.
As far as I know, _nobody_ sells nuclear weapons to anybody at all. The US sells Britain the submarines and missiles, and they've been sharing the blueprints since the fifties (after Britain detonated its first homegrown H-bomb, and supposedly in exchange for the recipe for VX nerve gas) but the warheads loaded onto them are made in the UK with British plutonium. There's no way in hell the Americans would ever sell the French anything of the sort, even if the French would stoop to buying them, and no other NATO state operates a nuclear deterrent. Nuclear powers tend to be awfully jealous of their status as such; if you have a devastating advantage of that kind, you don't really want to share it.
There are occasional rumours about old Soviet suitcase nukes surfacing on the black market, but I find them dubious. Perhaps there are such weapons listed as manufactured, but now unaccounted for; I tend to interpret that as meaning that some Communist at a factory somewhere lied about productivity in order to meet quota, and in reality those devices were dummies or duds or prototypes or got cannibalised for parts long ago. At any rate, it's been twenty years now; the half-life of tritium being what it is, without regular maintenance in the intervening period, it's debatable whether such a weapon would even detonate today.
Nukes are only 'The Bomb' because of their emotional impact.
Well, that and the equivalent explosive yield of, oh, 100 or so Olympic swimming pools full of TNT. And the fallout. That has a small effect. Dwarfed by the emotional impact, of course, because nothing says 'I love you' like radiation sickness.
All sorts of nastiness was developed by us Brits - piracy, slavery, banking
Piracy? Ancient. The young Julius Caesar was once taken hostage by pirates; he insisted that they increase his ransom fee, because he felt he was worth more than they were asking, and told them that once released he would come back with a fleet and have the whole lot of them crucified, which of course he did. Slavery? Even older - Joseph is sold into slavery in Genesis and I'm sure there are still more ancient references than that. Banking? The modern institution was a Venetian innovation if I recall my Renaissance history aright, though it built on moneylending traditions going back a long, long way.
it's that they neglect to do the mathematics involved in computing just how much energy would have been required for the evolution to occur, given the statistical likelihood of cellular mutation, and the amount of energy required to induce it when it occurs.
The energy required to induce a genetic mutation is vanishingly tiny compared to the energy required to be alive in the first place. And the energy that keeps us alive comes from food, which comes (possibly via a middleman, or indeed a middlecow) from photosynthesising plants, and ultimately from the Sun. Although I suppose that the creationists might have a theory of Intelligent Nutrition where the energy really comes from God, who blesses our food, and that's why it's important to say grace before eating. Man shall not live by bread alone, and all that.
... here's your new smart phone for this mission. Now, if you press this button it sends us a GPS signal so that we know exactly where you are. This button activates the camera, this button activates the sound recorder, and this button makes it shapeshift into a particularly nasty little knife. I'm sure you'll find excellent uses for them all.
The original ending galvanized humanity into working together and would eventually lead them into space and exploration searching for a reason as to why this occurred. This new ending basically put the fear of a angry new god into them.
Actually, my guess is that the movie ending would be a more lasting peace. I was never so convinced that the original ending would hold for long; the shock drew mankind back from the brink this once, and maybe that will be enough, but normal service will likely be resumed before long.
I don't see any indication that the squid was supposed to have come from space. The giant squid thing exploded into place at the Dimensional Developments building, didn't it? The conclusion people will draw once the initial shock is over is that those guys were messing with something weird and opened a gate that brought through a hideous squiddy thing. Then there's no peril of an invasion at all. At best they'll pass regulations saying 'all further research of this kind to be conducted waaaaay out in the middle of nowhere' and return to business as usual; at worst, they'll close down Dimensional Developments and put Veidt in prison, where he has no chance of influencing the direction of the brave new world he has created.
Instead of that we have the explosion of a number of Dr Manhattan's new power plants, shortly after Dr Manhattan himself has left the planet in anger. Conclusion obvious: Dr Manhattan did it. So as they say: that peace will last until people stop believing that Dr Manhattan is watching them. How long did it take us to stop believing that God was watching us? Centuries at least. And in the meantime, they'll be highly motivated to fund intrinsic field research and tachyon physics, exotic technologies to defend the Earth against the peril lurking beyond, and guess whose firm is perfectly placed to lead the way? Yep. Veidt is is a position of power and is well placed to influence the direction of the new world.
Still, either way: however long Veidt's peace lasts, when normal service is resumed it is resumed without Dr Manhattan. I think his departure for galaxies new is actually the main factor in maintaining a long-term peace. He was the main confounding factor in the Cold War, which drove tensions substantially higher than they ever were in our history. When you don't have God on your side, you're maybe a little more inclined to be conciliatory when the next crisis comes around.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been running my Eee 901 without swap ever since I installed Ubuntu over the godawful Asus distribution that came with it. I don't notice any performance issues; however, without swap, hibernate doesn't work. I understand it needs a swap partition large enough to dump its entire RAM state when it hibernates, so that it can switch off completely and pick up again where it left off; without that it can only suspend, which saves a lot of power but still has a small drain on the battery.
Joking aside, though, I find this target to be overambitious. Speeding up by a factor of three would be plausible; two would be OK, but I'd hope they'd keep working on it to get it up to three. Four strikes me as unlikely, and five is right out.
The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were both first published in 1986.
What, google.com? That being Google's most popular site - you know, the search engine? Is that powered by stolen material? Because I thought Google paid for the computers and bandwidth and electricity they use.
Perhaps you mean youtube.com, which while popular is far less so than google.com. But again, I didn't realise they'd stolen the materials that power that site: if they had, wouldn't the police have raided the data centre, taken back the stolen servers and returned them to their rightful owners? Perhaps you mean that a good deal of the content on youtube.com infringes somebody's copyright? Well, if that's the case, then there's a simple solution: you send in a DMCA takedown notice and Youtube takes down the offending clip. It's not difficult.
But of course the artists don't really want their videos removed from so popular a site: they want them to stay up there, but for Google to give them a cut of the revenue. Fair enough. Unfortunately it seems they haven't been able to agree a fee that works for both sides, so Google have taken down all those clips and walked away. At this point I don't see where the artists have a complaint. What, their problem now is that Youtube isn't showing their videos?
I've argued before that this is the best line to take. Science marches on, after all, and if today scientists are starting to think something on a question of fact that contradicts the Bible... well, tomorrow they might have ironclad proof of it, and the day after that they'll have based some technology on it that pervades all our civilisation. And if your church has gone on record as saying that this discovery contradicts the Bible and is entirely false and heretical - then you're going to look a fool.
Much better to nudge God back one more gap and retcon the whole thing: explain how the new discoveries fit just fine with a more sophisticated view of what you've taught all along. Come up with some cunning logic and creative apologetics - I mean isn't that what Jesuits are for? Explain that God can be known through revelation and through tradition, but also through careful study of his creation. Position your religion to be able to incorporate science, rather than opposing it; that way you avoid making awful mistakes like the Church made with Galileo, and like the American Protestants are making with evolution. You don't want to do that.
They're allowed to touch each other all right. They've just got to make sure that they touch the ball first. Unless the player's done something gratuitously dangerous, then having played the ball, any further contact as a result of that is perfectly legitimate, even if it leads to the most appalling injury.
Sure, but to kill a man with your bare hands is difficult. To kill a man with a gun is easy. Random quarrels happen among people in life, and sometimes people lash out in anger. If someone's going to lash out in anger, I'd prefer them not to have a gun, because that way the result is that someone maybe gets a broken jaw, rather than being shot dead for disrespectin' da hood.
There are plenty of giant telescopes on Earth that operate in the visible spectrum. With adaptive optics their images are comparable to those from Hubble. We'll still be observing Solar System objects in the visible spectrum, don't worry about that.
However, no amount of optical trickery can compensate for the fact that the Earth's atmosphere is opaque to infrared. If we want to observe the Universe in the infrared spectrum, we have to do it from orbit, no way around it. So I for one am glad to see that when we launch space telescopes at enormous expense, we make sure that what they see is something that we absolutely could not see from the ground.
It was, for us (in .uk). I imagine it's still controversial in some parts of the US, though. First off it portrays extreme racism - I'm guessing the official reason it's banned is because the word 'nigger' gets used. The unofficial reason it's banned is probably because it portrays extreme racism as a bad thing.
One of general relativity and quantum mechanics has been disproven, and the other has been proven? Which is which, and how were the two achieved?
The Russians have been offering space tourism services for quite some time now. Not sure what £100,000 would get you, but orbital space tourism is priced highly enough that you can't afford it unless you're the kind of rich that bankrolls major Linux distributions entirely for the lulz. I'm guessing what you had there was one of the deals where they put you in the back seat of a high-end fighter jet and point it straight up, taking you into a region that could be called spaceflight, sort of, maybe.
And none of these deals guarantee a flight in space. If you don't pass the ground training, if you don't convince them that you're physically capable of handling it and that you're not going to break anything, then you don't fly.
Outside had developers? I thought they just set up a procedural generator and some genetic algorithms, left it to run for a week or so and figured that was good enough. I mean, that was how I was explaining all the evidence of incompetent design throughout the product...
I've got Nintendo marketing department on the line for you, they'd like you to appear in a commercial for a DS game...
As a 27-year old, I realize that I have completely spent the peak years of my intellectual capacity having made no greater contribution to the advancement of the human race than a few hundred Slashdot posts....
Ever paged through an archived /. article on some topic of interest you're looking up - maybe you're in a discussion elsewhere and you think 'hang on, wasn't there that thing I read about a few years back where...' and you Google it and it turns up the /. page - and while reading through the comments for that article you come upon one that perfectly sums up exactly what you had in mind, exactly what you wanted to say, and does so concisely and clearly, far better than you ever could have put it?
And then you look at who wrote that comment...
... and it's you?
Because if as we're told it's all downhill from 27, then I suppose I'll have to expect a lot more experiences like that.
Well, he did spend a lot of his time around pretty young boys in frilly dresses...
Go read a book
Shakespeare might have preferred you to go watch a play.
... Loch Ness?
Actually, you're quite right. Dinosaurs did coexist with humans, and still do. They're considerably smaller, feathered, and toothless, but dinosaurs nonetheless.
4. Google take down music videos from YouTube
5. PRS start whining that having the videos removed from YouTube is a bad thing for the artists.
It sounds to me like PRS want (a) Google to advertise their product for them, and (b) Google to pay them for the privilege.
As far as I know, _nobody_ sells nuclear weapons to anybody at all. The US sells Britain the submarines and missiles, and they've been sharing the blueprints since the fifties (after Britain detonated its first homegrown H-bomb, and supposedly in exchange for the recipe for VX nerve gas) but the warheads loaded onto them are made in the UK with British plutonium. There's no way in hell the Americans would ever sell the French anything of the sort, even if the French would stoop to buying them, and no other NATO state operates a nuclear deterrent. Nuclear powers tend to be awfully jealous of their status as such; if you have a devastating advantage of that kind, you don't really want to share it.
There are occasional rumours about old Soviet suitcase nukes surfacing on the black market, but I find them dubious. Perhaps there are such weapons listed as manufactured, but now unaccounted for; I tend to interpret that as meaning that some Communist at a factory somewhere lied about productivity in order to meet quota, and in reality those devices were dummies or duds or prototypes or got cannibalised for parts long ago. At any rate, it's been twenty years now; the half-life of tritium being what it is, without regular maintenance in the intervening period, it's debatable whether such a weapon would even detonate today.
Well, that and the equivalent explosive yield of, oh, 100 or so Olympic swimming pools full of TNT. And the fallout. That has a small effect. Dwarfed by the emotional impact, of course, because nothing says 'I love you' like radiation sickness.
Piracy? Ancient. The young Julius Caesar was once taken hostage by pirates; he insisted that they increase his ransom fee, because he felt he was worth more than they were asking, and told them that once released he would come back with a fleet and have the whole lot of them crucified, which of course he did. Slavery? Even older - Joseph is sold into slavery in Genesis and I'm sure there are still more ancient references than that. Banking? The modern institution was a Venetian innovation if I recall my Renaissance history aright, though it built on moneylending traditions going back a long, long way.
The energy required to induce a genetic mutation is vanishingly tiny compared to the energy required to be alive in the first place. And the energy that keeps us alive comes from food, which comes (possibly via a middleman, or indeed a middlecow) from photosynthesising plants, and ultimately from the Sun. Although I suppose that the creationists might have a theory of Intelligent Nutrition where the energy really comes from God, who blesses our food, and that's why it's important to say grace before eating. Man shall not live by bread alone, and all that.
... here's your new smart phone for this mission. Now, if you press this button it sends us a GPS signal so that we know exactly where you are. This button activates the camera, this button activates the sound recorder, and this button makes it shapeshift into a particularly nasty little knife. I'm sure you'll find excellent uses for them all.
There's a couple of places I could name where the radioactivity might do the gene pool a favour.
Actually, my guess is that the movie ending would be a more lasting peace. I was never so convinced that the original ending would hold for long; the shock drew mankind back from the brink this once, and maybe that will be enough, but normal service will likely be resumed before long.
I don't see any indication that the squid was supposed to have come from space. The giant squid thing exploded into place at the Dimensional Developments building, didn't it? The conclusion people will draw once the initial shock is over is that those guys were messing with something weird and opened a gate that brought through a hideous squiddy thing. Then there's no peril of an invasion at all. At best they'll pass regulations saying 'all further research of this kind to be conducted waaaaay out in the middle of nowhere' and return to business as usual; at worst, they'll close down Dimensional Developments and put Veidt in prison, where he has no chance of influencing the direction of the brave new world he has created.
Instead of that we have the explosion of a number of Dr Manhattan's new power plants, shortly after Dr Manhattan himself has left the planet in anger. Conclusion obvious: Dr Manhattan did it. So as they say: that peace will last until people stop believing that Dr Manhattan is watching them. How long did it take us to stop believing that God was watching us? Centuries at least. And in the meantime, they'll be highly motivated to fund intrinsic field research and tachyon physics, exotic technologies to defend the Earth against the peril lurking beyond, and guess whose firm is perfectly placed to lead the way? Yep. Veidt is is a position of power and is well placed to influence the direction of the new world.
Still, either way: however long Veidt's peace lasts, when normal service is resumed it is resumed without Dr Manhattan. I think his departure for galaxies new is actually the main factor in maintaining a long-term peace. He was the main confounding factor in the Cold War, which drove tensions substantially higher than they ever were in our history. When you don't have God on your side, you're maybe a little more inclined to be conciliatory when the next crisis comes around.