So, Ogg is better at lower bitrates and like the others at higher ones. To me this means that overall it is better than the others.
Maybe there is no need to convert to ogg, but at least it is worth considering for new encodings. The need will come when most of the files you find around will use it.
First of all: they're going to place it in an already working base, so they already have the facilities needed for people.
The answer to the "dark energy" matter could be something like: they don't know whether it exists or not, so they're trying to find out. Yes, the name sounds quite sci-fi, but it's only a name.
For the lighting: depending on the actual distance from the pole they may have days or months of 24 hours daylight, but they're also going to have days or months of 24 hours night, so in the end they get even. Anyway I don't know whether this is a kind of telescope that can work only during the night or not, so maybe this problem does not exists.
Maybe they're just using it during the "winter", when they have long nights and I suppose that other kind of scientist have less work, leaving space for them during the "summer", thus solving both the people and the lighting problem.
I wonder what's the problem with certain fields of Maths labeled as "without direct application". I thought it meant something like "interesting and still worth studying before it gets something that you can see in everyday life", only shorter.
Of course people in the real world are free to have a different translation, they just don't know what they're missing:)
The receiver is able to read every single photon, with a certain probability to read the correct value or not. Then there are ways to tell whether you received the correct photon or not, without actually resending them.
Again it is a matter of what is being sent: for a one time key you can just send losts of photons, and then keep only the ones that have been received correctly (and without being intercepted!)
And yes, a good book on quantum encryption could explain this much better than I can do with vague memories from an uni course for which I haven't tried the exam yet.:)
To reproduce a light polarization you have to modify it, so the one who receives the signal knows that it has been intercepted.
Of course if you're sending unencrypted sensible informations you only know that something bad happened (which is only slightly better than something bad happening without you knowing), but if you're sending data such as the key for an encryption system you can decide whether to use it or not basing on the fact that you're sure whether it has been intercepted or not.
Usually censorship in european countries does not outlaw a film, it can only decide that it can't be seen by people below 14/15 or 18 years, so even censored films are available in Region 2, even if their sale is subject to (sort of - nobody really applies them) restrictions.
I didn't attend an US public school, so I can't judge what in the horror tales I've heard about them is true or what is not.
Anyway, in the public schools I've attended in my country the situation is not as bad as it seems to be over there: there are no weapons and only moderate violence.
There were some minor bullying, as well as lots of gossips, and I believe that by facing them back there I've learned to give the right importance to the opinions of other people.
For the "learning" part, I believe that I've been stimulated enought to learn, both from my parents and teachers, but I admit that this is a matter of luck in finding the right teachers.
On the other side, homeschoolers are often pushed to do more than they're able to do and to look like successful people, and in some extreme case they develop serious psichological problems when they can't succeed. Probably the problem is not homeschooling per se, but can help building such pressions, and so developing such problems.
The best thinkers, maybe, but a good number of them did have social problems.
Anyway, while public schools with all kinds of people are a recent thing, I believe that the one teacher - more pupils relation has been at least as common as one (or more) teacher - one pupil.
Most ancient societies had "public schools" for members of those social class who had a certain schooling and education, such as the scribe schools in ancient Egypt or the way schooling worked in Classic Greece and Rome
Don't know whether they've used the same system, but they've already placed something like that in the Milan Subway.
In Milan it seemed to work: they placed the ads in such a place that most students from scientific and engineering faculties saw it, and I believe they succeeded in having people watching it.
It was quite fun to see lots of geeks and future engineers wondering over the system they used to achieve the effect (backlighted images, frontlighted images, somebody proposed even projected images, either from the ceiling or the train...)
Anyway, I believe that after a few months nobody pays them much attention, unless there is a new ad, probably also because the quality decreased with time.
I don't know what could happen in a "normal" environment, though
That's partially true, but if you know intelligent extraterrestrial life exists, even outside the 40 light years radius, you can suppose that sooner or later we could reduce the distance, and thus it would fall in the "interesting area".
I agree with/.ers suggesting martial arts, and I'll just add that lots of the geeks I now enjoy them, even if they wouldn't practice any sport. Probably one of the reasons is that they let you exercise your mind too.
Another good way to exercise is swimming, that helps you improve your whole body at the same time (if not your mind, like martial arts do).
If you really want to do geeky things you can always mod a bike to power some computer with it, maybe a bike powered mame station or similar stuff, but then I'm afraid that in such ways you can exercise only some parts of your body, so you're going to need other different kind of exercise for the other parts.
From the article it seems that the proteine is already in the human (or mice's) brain, and that it prolonges the effect of caffeine, but the effect of adding such proteine in the body directly aren't clear. Maybe it has more or less the same effect of caffeine, maybe if you take it together with caffeine the body feels that there is already enough of it and you have the (gulp!) opposite effect. So one of the few researchs that could have helped caffeine-addicted people ends helping those sad "decaffeinated" people out there, and this is not good.:)
Me, I'll just stick to real coffee and use chocolate to enhance the effect of caffeine.
By the way, I wonder whether the big number of people in favour of "caffeinated" as opposed do "decaffeinated" in the pool has something to do with people from slashdot.:)
I'm afraid that it is far easier to prove that extraterrestrial life exists than to prove that it doesn't: to prove the former we only need to find it, otherwise we need to:
prove that the universe is finite
explore the whole universe, planet by planet, asteroid by asteroid, minor fragment of stone by minor fragment of stone
and this is quite lots of work, even if it can be done in finite, arbitrary long time. Unless of course the universe is not finite, otherwise we just can't decide.
Anyway I believe that the problem is not with people who have faith in things that can't be demonstrated (at least now), after all it is the same thing mathematicians are doing with axioms; the problem is with people who believe in fake pseudo-scientific explanations of things that can be proved false. In my opinion the problem is the confusion between facts and matters of faith that otherwise would have each its own place in one's mind.
There are some problems in this approach: first of all you would need an huge amount of phrases in your table, and even worse you can't simply check for exact match, but you should look for similar matches, because in most languages there are at least two similar ways to say something, whith the same translation in another language.
I don't think that we're going to have enough computational power to do so in the few next years, at least not in some device that can be easily carried everywhere.
I believe that 2.9 would be the development version for 2.10, not 3.0. (But I admit that I have no clue on what the dev version for 3.0 would be called.)
Anyway, 3.0 would mean complete rewrite of the code, and I don't think that such a thing is planned in a nearby future.
Anybody knows whether there are studies about the impact that air conditioning may have on the climate? expecially in cities/towns.
At least the microclimate near air conditioned buildings is influenced: sometimes you can't just pass near them because of hot air.
I know that there are some places around the world where you couldn't live without AC, and that there are places where you need it for computers and other sensible stuff, but I feel that in most places it is abused. (Things like 18C inside when outside there is only a perfectly tolerable 25C)
not everyone has the programming skills necessary to do so
This is true, but it also true that people who still need old kernels tend to have higher than average computer skills, so among them it is easier to find somebody who could fix bugs etc.
Anyway, when an open source piece of software is abandoned by official maintainers and is not picked up by anybody chances are that almost nobody is using it anymore, as all of the few who still did decided that an upgrade would have caused less problems than acquiring the skills needed to continue using it.
Yes, even open source software dies, but this happens when it really has no more reasons to be alive, not when some commercial department decides that they want to sell some new version.
I believe that the author was talking about processes without open windows: ctrl-alt-escape, as well as xkill, only works if you can "see" the process that is giving problems.
People use computers to do things, not to run programs.
While this is partially true, in the long term this attitude may lead to big problems when people need to learn how to do the things they need to do.
Having tried to teach quite some people to use computers after they had been exposed to windows' "we decided what you needed to do and we wrote the right apps for it" attitude, I've found out that most of them saw the computer as some sort of magic device that does certain tasks if and if only the user performs some obscure and intricated ritual that should be learned by heart and repeated exactly in the same way everytime. While this won't prevent them from doing some office work with their computer, it is going to make it quite harder for them to learn even simple tasks.
On the other side, I found out that people who had been taught briefly what an operating system and and application are, the difference between them and the fact that to do something you have one of the programs that can do it, could learn easily how to use a computer and became soon able to learn to do new things with little or no help from somebody else. Some of them succeded also in migrating from win to an already installed and configured linux, without big problems.
I believe that with this appoach, one could easily solve problems number 1 and 4 of the list, and it could also help with problems 3 (you can just use CUPS instead of the default system), 7 and 10.
I might just be lucky, but neither of them have ever urinated on anything other than their litter box.
Maybe I'm lucky too, but I've never heard of a female cat that ever urinatd outside of its litter box (or outside of her usual place in the garden, for those who have one) past her second month, if properly trained.
Anyway, I am lucky, as mine has been litter trained by her own mother, as soon as she was born, and I believe that this is not as strange as it may seem.
I've heard that one can have problems with male cats, as they tend to mark their territory with urine, unless sterilized, but I've never had one, so I can't say if it's always true.
I agree in the fact that cast are the best geek pet, as well as the best animal that have ever been in a human dwelling, as well as... ok, my own cat has left my monitor, so I can stop:)
It is also true that they require minimum manteinance, but the "little attention" part is not always true and depends much on personality and habits of the single cat: some of them may just see you when they have to eat, so they require almost no attention, while other may become very esigent, expecially when you're doing something that is obviously useless, like, well, almost everything that doesn't involve them directly.
For the CRT part, I've noticed that cats tend to love computers, probably because of the heat or because they actually are geeks. Since I've gently asked my cat not to sleep on my modem (because of his hairs - actual method used involved an empty bottles barrier between the modem and the rest of the home:) ) she decided that the space in front of the keyboard is just perfect for her naps, expecially when I'm trying to type, also because she actually gets some chances to write her own opinions (or because I tend to scratch her ears while I'm thinking what to write next).
Cats are also a good choice in apartments, as they don't smell and they aren't noisy (except when something falls in the opposite side of the building from the one they are in:) ); you should only take care that they can have some space to exercise, either horizontally or vertically.
Anyway, most of the cats I know tend to agree on the fact that a geek is a good pet for them, so a cat is probably a good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Slackware is one of the incarnations of what Linux is meant to be, together with all of the others incarnations needed to conquer the world.
It also happens to be the best one, but that's another stuff.
So, Ogg is better at lower bitrates and like the others at higher ones. To me this means that overall it is better than the others.
Maybe there is no need to convert to ogg, but at least it is worth considering for new encodings. The need will come when most of the files you find around will use it.
I wonder what "perfect play" is: playing the move with the highest chance to win? the highest chance not to loose? something else?
First of all: they're going to place it in an already working base, so they already have the facilities needed for people.
The answer to the "dark energy" matter could be something like: they don't know whether it exists or not, so they're trying to find out. Yes, the name sounds quite sci-fi, but it's only a name.
For the lighting: depending on the actual distance from the pole they may have days or months of 24 hours daylight, but they're also going to have days or months of 24 hours night, so in the end they get even. Anyway I don't know whether this is a kind of telescope that can work only during the night or not, so maybe this problem does not exists.
Maybe they're just using it during the "winter", when they have long nights and I suppose that other kind of scientist have less work, leaving space for them during the "summer", thus solving both the people and the lighting problem.
I wonder what's the problem with certain fields of Maths labeled as "without direct application". I thought it meant something like "interesting and still worth studying before it gets something that you can see in everyday life", only shorter.
Of course people in the real world are free to have a different translation, they just don't know what they're missing :)
The receiver is able to read every single photon, with a certain probability to read the correct value or not. Then there are ways to tell whether you received the correct photon or not, without actually resending them.
Again it is a matter of what is being sent: for a one time key you can just send losts of photons, and then keep only the ones that have been received correctly (and without being intercepted!)
And yes, a good book on quantum encryption could explain this much better than I can do with vague memories from an uni course for which I haven't tried the exam yet. :)
To reproduce a light polarization you have to modify it, so the one who receives the signal knows that it has been intercepted.
Of course if you're sending unencrypted sensible informations you only know that something bad happened (which is only slightly better than something bad happening without you knowing), but if you're sending data such as the key for an encryption system you can decide whether to use it or not basing on the fact that you're sure whether it has been intercepted or not.
Usually censorship in european countries does not outlaw a film, it can only decide that it can't be seen by people below 14/15 or 18 years, so even censored films are available in Region 2, even if their sale is subject to (sort of - nobody really applies them) restrictions.
I didn't attend an US public school, so I can't judge what in the horror tales I've heard about them is true or what is not.
Anyway, in the public schools I've attended in my country the situation is not as bad as it seems to be over there: there are no weapons and only moderate violence.
There were some minor bullying, as well as lots of gossips, and I believe that by facing them back there I've learned to give the right importance to the opinions of other people.
For the "learning" part, I believe that I've been stimulated enought to learn, both from my parents and teachers, but I admit that this is a matter of luck in finding the right teachers.
On the other side, homeschoolers are often pushed to do more than they're able to do and to look like successful people, and in some extreme case they develop serious psichological problems when they can't succeed. Probably the problem is not homeschooling per se, but can help building such pressions, and so developing such problems.
The best thinkers, maybe, but a good number of them did have social problems.
Anyway, while public schools with all kinds of people are a recent thing, I believe that the one teacher - more pupils relation has been at least as common as one (or more) teacher - one pupil.
Most ancient societies had "public schools" for members of those social class who had a certain schooling and education, such as the scribe schools in ancient Egypt or the way schooling worked in Classic Greece and Rome
Don't know whether they've used the same system, but they've already placed something like that in the Milan Subway.
In Milan it seemed to work: they placed the ads in such a place that most students from scientific and engineering faculties saw it, and I believe they succeeded in having people watching it.
It was quite fun to see lots of geeks and future engineers wondering over the system they used to achieve the effect (backlighted images, frontlighted images, somebody proposed even projected images, either from the ceiling or the train...)
Anyway, I believe that after a few months nobody pays them much attention, unless there is a new ad, probably also because the quality decreased with time.
I don't know what could happen in a "normal" environment, though
That's partially true, but if you know intelligent extraterrestrial life exists, even outside the 40 light years radius, you can suppose that sooner or later we could reduce the distance, and thus it would fall in the "interesting area".
I agree with /.ers suggesting martial arts, and I'll just add that lots of the geeks I now enjoy them, even if they wouldn't practice any sport. Probably one of the reasons is that they let you exercise your mind too.
Another good way to exercise is swimming, that helps you improve your whole body at the same time (if not your mind, like martial arts do).
If you really want to do geeky things you can always mod a bike to power some computer with it, maybe a bike powered mame station or similar stuff, but then I'm afraid that in such ways you can exercise only some parts of your body, so you're going to need other different kind of exercise for the other parts.
From the article it seems that the proteine is already in the human (or mice's) brain, and that it prolonges the effect of caffeine, but the effect of adding such proteine in the body directly aren't clear. Maybe it has more or less the same effect of caffeine, maybe if you take it together with caffeine the body feels that there is already enough of it and you have the (gulp!) opposite effect. So one of the few researchs that could have helped caffeine-addicted people ends helping those sad "decaffeinated" people out there, and this is not good. :)
Me, I'll just stick to real coffee and use chocolate to enhance the effect of caffeine.
By the way, I wonder whether the big number of people in favour of "caffeinated" as opposed do "decaffeinated" in the pool has something to do with people from slashdot. :)
I'm afraid that it is far easier to prove that extraterrestrial life exists than to prove that it doesn't: to prove the former we only need to find it, otherwise we need to:
and this is quite lots of work, even if it can be done in finite, arbitrary long time. Unless of course the universe is not finite, otherwise we just can't decide.
Anyway I believe that the problem is not with people who have faith in things that can't be demonstrated (at least now), after all it is the same thing mathematicians are doing with axioms; the problem is with people who believe in fake pseudo-scientific explanations of things that can be proved false. In my opinion the problem is the confusion between facts and matters of faith that otherwise would have each its own place in one's mind.
There are some problems in this approach: first of all you would need an huge amount of phrases in your table, and even worse you can't simply check for exact match, but you should look for similar matches, because in most languages there are at least two similar ways to say something, whith the same translation in another language.
I don't think that we're going to have enough computational power to do so in the few next years, at least not in some device that can be easily carried everywhere.
Or you could just bounce the key and keep the encrypted information somewhere publicy accessible here on earth.
In this way the only dangerous alien race that could get it is humankind.
I believe that 2.9 would be the development version for 2.10, not 3.0. (But I admit that I have no clue on what the dev version for 3.0 would be called.)
Anyway, 3.0 would mean complete rewrite of the code, and I don't think that such a thing is planned in a nearby future.
Anybody knows whether there are studies about the impact that air conditioning may have on the climate? expecially in cities/towns.
At least the microclimate near air conditioned buildings is influenced: sometimes you can't just pass near them because of hot air.
I know that there are some places around the world where you couldn't live without AC, and that there are places where you need it for computers and other sensible stuff, but I feel that in most places it is abused. (Things like 18C inside when outside there is only a perfectly tolerable 25C)
Man, that stuff has been obviously prohibited because it was dangerously addicting, come from some dangerous country or both.
Tetris is addicting and comes from the source of all evils (URSS), so we better prevent our youth from playing it! Prohibite! Destroy all copies!
This way, we can be sure that everyone will be playing tetris, and the conquest of the world shall be complete. :)
This is true, but it also true that people who still need old kernels tend to have higher than average computer skills, so among them it is easier to find somebody who could fix bugs etc.
Anyway, when an open source piece of software is abandoned by official maintainers and is not picked up by anybody chances are that almost nobody is using it anymore, as all of the few who still did decided that an upgrade would have caused less problems than acquiring the skills needed to continue using it.
Yes, even open source software dies, but this happens when it really has no more reasons to be alive, not when some commercial department decides that they want to sell some new version.
I believe that the author was talking about processes without open windows: ctrl-alt-escape, as well as xkill, only works if you can "see" the process that is giving problems.
While this is partially true, in the long term this attitude may lead to big problems when people need to learn how to do the things they need to do.
Having tried to teach quite some people to use computers after they had been exposed to windows' "we decided what you needed to do and we wrote the right apps for it" attitude, I've found out that most of them saw the computer as some sort of magic device that does certain tasks if and if only the user performs some obscure and intricated ritual that should be learned by heart and repeated exactly in the same way everytime. While this won't prevent them from doing some office work with their computer, it is going to make it quite harder for them to learn even simple tasks.
On the other side, I found out that people who had been taught briefly what an operating system and and application are, the difference between them and the fact that to do something you have one of the programs that can do it, could learn easily how to use a computer and became soon able to learn to do new things with little or no help from somebody else. Some of them succeded also in migrating from win to an already installed and configured linux, without big problems.
I believe that with this appoach, one could easily solve problems number 1 and 4 of the list, and it could also help with problems 3 (you can just use CUPS instead of the default system), 7 and 10.
Maybe I'm lucky too, but I've never heard of a female cat that ever urinatd outside of its litter box (or outside of her usual place in the garden, for those who have one) past her second month, if properly trained.
Anyway, I am lucky, as mine has been litter trained by her own mother, as soon as she was born, and I believe that this is not as strange as it may seem.
I've heard that one can have problems with male cats, as they tend to mark their territory with urine, unless sterilized, but I've never had one, so I can't say if it's always true.
I agree in the fact that cast are the best geek pet, as well as the best animal that have ever been in a human dwelling, as well as... ok, my own cat has left my monitor, so I can stop :)
It is also true that they require minimum manteinance, but the "little attention" part is not always true and depends much on personality and habits of the single cat: some of them may just see you when they have to eat, so they require almost no attention, while other may become very esigent, expecially when you're doing something that is obviously useless, like, well, almost everything that doesn't involve them directly.
For the CRT part, I've noticed that cats tend to love computers, probably because of the heat or because they actually are geeks. Since I've gently asked my cat not to sleep on my modem (because of his hairs - actual method used involved an empty bottles barrier between the modem and the rest of the home :) ) she decided that the space in front of the keyboard is just perfect for her naps, expecially when I'm trying to type, also because she actually gets some chances to write her own opinions (or because I tend to scratch her ears while I'm thinking what to write next).
Cats are also a good choice in apartments, as they don't smell and they aren't noisy (except when something falls in the opposite side of the building from the one they are in :) ); you should only take care that they can have some space to exercise, either horizontally or vertically.
Anyway, most of the cats I know tend to agree on the fact that a geek is a good pet for them, so a cat is probably a good idea.