Actually, I think it just implies that Linux users have different priorities from Windows users.
Personally, I cannot imagine wanting to use Flash to play full-screen video. Totem or vlc, yes. Flash? You've got to be kidding.
Flash is NOT a media player. It's a browser plugin, of questionable usefulness. It plays tiny little swatches of badly encoded 320x200 video at a low framerate, and then you usually wish you hadn't bothered, because the content of said YouTube video, recommended to you by a Windows-using friend, is almost always the sort of thing that wouldn't be worth your time even if it WERE a quality recording, which it never is. Why would you EVER want to watch that junk in full-screen?
Granted, I don't need support for 4096 processor cores either. But I can imagine that *someone* would legitimately need such a feature, which is more than I can say for full-screen Flash video.
It isn't just processor core numbers and Flash plugins, either. This is a minor symptom of a much larger disconnect between people who actually understand computers and *use* them to get useful things accomplished, versus people who play around with whatever annoying thing gets their attention. Windows is loaded with stupid features I can't imagine ever having any real use for. Debian is loaded with features that I actually use.
I suppose it depends on how you define success, but I would have probably named the common cold and flu as the two most successful viruses of all time, based on the number of infections they've caused, which is significantly more than the total number of people who have ever lived, since they infect most people repeatedly over the course of their lives. This is especially true of the common cold, which infects the average person more than once per year. That's impressive.
Most people *think* they're afraid of death. But in fact, when it comes down to brass tacks, most people are much MORE afraid of pain, especially if it is severe and/or prolonged.
> The GUI was invented on Lisp machines. > Emacs was inspired by Lisp machines.
Indeed, it's difficult to say which is the more important innovation.
> I still miss that future we didn't get to see.
I think you underestimate lisp's influence on subsequent languages. Granted, it is not the MOST influential programming language in history. That would be C. But Lisp might be second place, or close to it. The entire functional paradigm comes from Lisp and its various descendants. So does garbage collection. And I would argue that the combination of these two things is what sets modern languages (like Perl and the various ones that have come out since) apart from third-generation languages (like C).
Every time you use a programming language that has list operations (e.g., a map operator, or grep, or a built-in sort primitive) you are living in that future, built on foundations set by lisp. Incidentally, the internet as you know it would not function as it does without these languages. (Did I mention that SQL is one of them? It is *heavily* influenced by the functional paradigm. Javascript also.)
Admittedly, it has taken a while to get there. Lisp was ahead of its time.
> You know, observational studies are still scientific. > There are plenty of hypotheses that can be tested > without randomized controlled trials.
I don't think it counts as "testing" if you just go over the existing data again rather than constructing an experiment that could actually falsify the hypothesis if it happens to be incorrect.
> You're not going to claim that if astronomers really > wanted to be scientific, they would start their > research by gathering up a bunch of hydrogen and > piling it together in empty space and then watching
That wouldn't be practical.
But I will claim that the construction of theoretical models about that sort of thing (how stars form, etc) in the manner in which it IS practiced is not science in the strictest sense, i.e., they are not using scientific methodology. Frankly it has more in common with philosophy than science, since the primary mechanism for vetting ideas is running them by other respected persons and attempting to reach a consensus.
That way lies madness. You can end up with entire generations believing almost anything, if you accept that kind of methodology as "scientific" and then unquestioningly believe whatever comes out the other end of it.
In popular culture we have come to use the word "science" to mean pretty much any kind of study, almost no matter how it's conducted, but scientists should know the difference. Frankly, educated people in general should know the difference between true science and some of the malarkey that passes for "science".
Incidentally, it is not my intention to hold up the scientific method as the only valid methodology for obtaining reliable information. There are other good methodologies, and in fact I know of some that are MORE reliable than science. (Most obviously, there is an extremely rigorous methodology used in mathematics that, when properly executed, makes even the best science look like guesswork. But it wouldn't be practical to apply that methodology to everything.)
But I do think it's important to know the methodology by which conclusions were reached and to understand that some methodologies are more reliable than others. It is my considered opinion that indiscriminately calling everything "science" blurs those distinctions and thus obscures important information. Getting information from a theoretical model is NOT the same thing as getting it from a series of experiments crafted to allow incorrect ideas to be disproven.
> Are memory manufacturers following the same practice?
No. Fortunately, there are hardware reasons why that wouldn't work out for them. For one thing, if the hapless customer were to purchase a stick of RAM that said it was one gigabyte* but actually only had 0.93 GB of volatile storage, when the customer plugged it into the computer, they wouldn't have to look at how much memory the system properties say they have to find out there's a problem. The BIOS memory test would fail on bootup, and I think that's probably all the further you'd get in most cases (i.e., I don't think the computer would go on and boot up when it knows the RAM failed the test).
Also, motherboards only accept RAM in certain amounts. Even if you were to label it correctly, I don't think a 0.93GB DIMM would work.
I suppose they could take a 1GB DIMM and label it as 1.07 gigabytes*, but to my knowledge no RAM manufacturer has yet attempted to do this.
You *do* see computer manufacturers labeling their computers as having 4GB of RAM, even though not all of that memory is addressable. This is a weird one, though: there actually *is* 4GB of RAM in there, and if you were to take 2GB out (and, say, put it in another computer), there'd be a full 2GB left. It's just that a 32-bit computer can't address that much system memory, for arcane reasons having to do with the way the 32-bit address space is shared between system RAM and other things (e.g., the video card).
> Or do hard drive manufacturers and memory manufactures use > the same unit of measurement differently in their two products?
Yes: hard drive manufacturers use the same words with a different meaning from memory manufacturers, as well as motherboard manufacturers, flash-storage manufacturers, programmers, filesystems, and almost everything else in the entire computer industry.
> I always thought it was just clueless marketing morons who couldn't do math
There are also six or seven extremely prolific "debaters" (this is the polite term for them) who each spend about eighty hours a week on the internet talking up the decimal definitions on every forum and venue they can find, attempting to create the impression that lots of people like and use them. It's a tempest in a teapot. Whether these "debaters" are in deliberate collusion with one another, I don't know. (They stumble across one another's advocacy threads, of course, and back one another up when they do, but that may just be because they happen to run into one another and agree with one another. I've not seen any evidence that there's deliberate collusion involved.) I also don't know whether they are paid by marketing departments. I suspect not. My general impression is that they actually believe their own bologna.
There are also two or three of these "debaters" who like to talk up use of the mutant words "kibibyte", "gibibyte", and so on, but I'm pretty sure they're just being silly and that absolutely nobody takes that nonsense seriously, EVER.
> But the same thing is happening with milk and other food producers seeking to change > the definition of "organic" so they can sell more food without actually being organic
Actually, it's the "organic food" people who have subverted the meaning of the word. Every time I hear someone talk about "organic" food, I immediately think, "What, as opposed to inorganic food? What are you eating, silicate rocks and metal ores?" As a rule, inorganic compounds have no significant nutritional value, i.e., no calories. You can eat sand if you want I guess, but it's not generally considered to be food.
Chemically speaking, practically everything you would consider to be food is organic. Sugar, for instance, is organic. What's more, the more refined it is, the higher the percentage of organic content -- the purity, if you think of inorganic trace substances as impurities. So raw sugar is if anything LESS organic than the highly-processed stuff you buy at the supermarket. High fructose corn syrup is organic. Monosodium glutamate is organic. Aspartame (best known under the trade name Nutrasweet) is organic. Mix all that stuff up in a bowl together, and what you've got there is organic food. Wouldn't be very *healthy*, but it would be comprised of 100% organic content.
The most notable inorganic substance commonly found in food is table salt.
Unless, of course, the only most likely you'd look up the size in the first place is because you're thinking of transferring it to some other place, such as a floppy disk.
Yeah, and what's two plus two? (Okay, technically not quite everyone would find it that easy, but this is slashdot, so in that context the difference between "everyone" and "everyone who has the powers of two memorized up to at least 65536" is not really worth worrying about. I should probably confiscate your geek card just for asking the question.)
> 15TB?
16TB would be 16384GB, take away 1024, makes fifteen thousand and some odd gigs.
> 405GB to MB's? Its just a lot easier to think 405GB = 405 000MB
Frankly, once you're up in the triple digits, there's no longer any point converting to the smaller units. If you've got a 400 GB file and are worried about individual megabytes, it's time to drag out bzip2 -9 anyway.
The other point you're missing is that filesystems use power-of-two-based storage allocation for sectors and extents and whatnot, so knowing that a gigabyte is 1024 MB is significantly more useful than knowing how many bytes it is, just as knowing that a kilobyte is 1024 bytes is significantly more useful than knowing how many bits it is. You don't store characters in bits: you store them in bytes (and, these days, words and dwords and whatnot). And you don't store files in bytes. You store them in sectors, the size of which is measured in kilobytes or megabytes.
If you really *have* to have a ten-based unit that ignores such considerations, I suggest you forget all about bytes and the various larger byte-based units and just use the number of bits, possibly in conjunction with E notation. That is to say, instead of 15TB, you could say "this file takes up 1.32070244352000E+14 bits". Or you could say "about 132 terabits". This would not be *useful* information, but it would be in base-ten.
> > [unless] the ambient temperature is below 0, which is often the case during winter > And it's often above 0. I think a 10C temperature rise is perfectly fair.
He meant below zero Fahrenheit, not below freezing (0 Celsius). (Granted, he wasn't very clear.) When he spoke of heating something 10C, he was setting up a comparison, only ten degrees versus all the way from subzero. He was saying that heating a road all the way from ten or twenty below clear up to the melting point of snow takes a considerable amount of energy.
However, it should be noted that roads that carry a lot of traffic stay warm to the touch even when the ambient temperature is twenty below. Snow doesn't stick on the interstate unless the weather is sufficiently severe to keep people off the roads (typically, this requires a level three, i.e., the state highway patrol threatens to arrest anyone who's out driving for non-emergency reasons). This is because asphalt is a high-friction surface, so the car tires driving on it create a lot of heat. A glass surface, as proposed in the stupid article, wouldn't work nearly so well in that regard.
> Well, if nobody does the work then it'll definitely never happen.
I'm pretty confident this is one that'll definitely never happen anyway.
> I'm sure if somebody had told Newton about this wonderful > thing called Nuclear energy he'd've laughed in their face.
Nuclear energy didn't become possible because somebody said, "Hey, you know what? Burning coal isn't a very good source of power. We should get power from something else. How about metal? Yeah! I know, we'll use uranium!"
Nuclear power became a reality because somebody in theoretical physics realized that matter is essentially a particularly-structured form of potential energy. Nuclear power was one of the implications.
If materials scientists had been working in their labs and discovered a compound that is well-neigh indestructible, has high surface friction, and converts electromagnetic radiation into usable energy, then roads that generate solar power could be considered as one of the possible implications, and people would take it seriously.
But that's not what's going on here. What happened here is, some dude watched too many episodes of the Jetsons while drunk and then went to a green energy brainstorming session and said, "Duuuuudes, [hic], I've GOT it: we'll put the solar cells... in the [hic] ROAD!"
I mean, come on, they're talking about using *glass* for the surface layer -- silicate glass, for crying out loud. It's much too hard to make a practical road surface, it's WAY too brittle, and even if we could somehow get around those problems, the real killer is we'd pretty much have to make car tires out of gecko skin. I'm sure *that* would get the environmentalists in the warm fuzzies.
This isn't about free speech or free press, because it isn't about WHAT you are allow to say or write. The issue is about how you (the salesman, the politician, whoever) are allowed to use my phone line, that *I* pay the bill for.
> freedom of the press applies only to impact printed documents, > don't you know what 'press' means? Inkjet or laser printed > subversive literature will get you 20 to life...
That's a straw man. You can print all the junk you want on your own inkjet printer, or on your own laser printer, or one that you rent... But *I* get to say what you can print on *my* printer, capische?
> free speech is when I ask you a question and you > are allowed to answer and not fear for your life.
Oh, it's a bit more than that. Free speech is when you can stand on on the sidewalk downtown and tell your political ideas to anyone who will listen, hand out pamphlets to anyone who will take them, hold rallies where five hundred like-minded people all get together in a public place...
I am even willing to accept unsolicited political phonecalls, as long as the number you're calling is a publicly listed number and not listed in the DNC registry, and provided it's a human doing the calling.
But machine autocalling with a pre-recorded message is something else. The objection here is NOT to what you are saying. The objection here is to the fact that you are wasting my time *only*, and not spending any of your own time to do so. It doesn't matter if your message is commercial or political, because we're fundamentally not talking about what you're allowed to *say*.
And the do-not-call registry should apply to all unsolicited calls. Ordinarily a politician can knock on your door and, if you answer, ask if he can have a moment of your time to tell you about $issue. A salesman can do the same thing. But if you put a sign on your door asking them not to do so, they're supposed to respect that. The DNC registry serves the same purpose as that sign on the door.
This is not a free speech issue. They can say whatever they want, in public. Nobody's going to arrest or penalize them for what they say. (Well, we might choose to vote for the other guy, but that goes with the territory when you run for public office.) It's not about speech. It's about privacy, and the right of the individual home-owner to choose who and what he allows into his home.
> daytime highs of 2,000 - 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit... > nighttime temperature of roughly 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit... > windspeeds of approximately 7,000 mp... any beings that lived > there would indeed have to be extremely tough, and Chuck > Norris would most likely be checking his closet for them > before going to bed
Forget Chuck Norris. These guys could kick the Terminator into next Tuesday. I mean, what would their skin have to be made of to stay solid at those temperatures, tungsten alloy? Species 8472 would be running scared all the way back to fluidic space.
> we've seen time and time again that negativity just works
No, actually, it doesn't. Well, up to a certain point it does, but ultimately it is self-defeating.
If you pay attention to advertising campaigns and market share, you will note that there's a strong correlation between *positive* advertising campaigns and the ability to attain and retain first place in the market. Not that everybody who runs positive advertising get into first place, but rather the converse: just about everybody who gets into first place, and stays there, does so while running positive advertising.
Take, for example, the fast food industry. McDonald's runs positive advertising like nobody's business and has to my knowledge *never* run a negative ad, and none of their competitors can touch them. Burger King periodically runs negative ads (directed, usually, at McDonald's) and has slipped from second place to, what, fourth or fifth now? Taco Bell *stopped* running negative ads in the eighties, switched over to all positive ads, and climbed from Nth place right up to second. Yes, there are other factors. The advertising isn't the whole cause of any of the above. But the advertising is also a component.
You can see the same thing in political elections. When a campaign boils down to "the other guy sucks", it generally goes down in flames. Successful campaigns look more like "you need our candidate, for these simple positive bullet-point reasons". John Kerry compared himself (and his running mate) to the opposition, and he was defeated by 34 electoral votes. Obama talked about his vision, and he was elected. (There were other factors in both cases, of course. Lots of other factors. But the advertising was also a factor.) You can run through the whole history of all the US Presidential election campaigns, and you'll see that in general the positive campaigns have a much stronger tendency to win than the negative ones. Talking too much about the opposition is self-defeating.
We could look at any number of other industries, but let's bring it around to computers: up through the late nineties or so, Microsoft ran all positive advertisements, and their market share was on the increase. Then they started running negative ads, and their market share is on the decline now. (Granted, there wasn't a lot of room for it to increase further, since it peaked somewhere above 95% around the turn of the century.) Apple never learns: they keep running negative ads for Macs, and their market share languishes in the low single digits. (They have quite good market share in the music player market, but all the iPod advertising is positive.) Again, there are other factors. But inasmuch as the advertising is a driving force in market share dynamics, positive advertising is a positive driving force, and negative advertising traps you beneath a glass ceiling of your own making.
> in order to have clear evidence, we must be able to express our theories
No.
No amount of "expressing theories" will ever add up to evidence. Scientifically speaking, the only way we're ever going to learn anything is to make *falsifiable* predictions and then test them to see if they hold, and then based on the outcome make new falsifiable predictions, lather, rinse, repeat. That's the scientific method.
But nobody seems to be interested in doing that kind of science any more. If you make falsifiable predictions, there's a risk they might be falsified, and then where will your scientific reputation be?
So instead of anything concrete and measurable, we now make vaguely impressive statements like "human behavior causes climate change". Such a proposition is unlikely to be proven or disproven within the lifespan of anyone currently living, so you can build an entire scientific career on it without ever DOING any actual science.
For pi to be equal to three, your surface would have to be curved by just exactly the right amount. (The traditional value of slightly more than three is what you get if your surface is an absolutely flat plane, a shape that quite frankly never occurs outside of geometry textbooks but is a useful simplification for undergraduate classes for a variety of reasons, not least because of the way it causes pairs of parallel lines to interact with other objects that they both intersect.)
> What possible reason would there be for anybody to pay more > to an American worker than to a Chinese or Indian worker?
In terms of the manufacturing sector, if they can make the same stuff, then there's really no such motive, ultimately.
Well, to a small extent there is, to cover things like shipping costs (it's slightly better to produce widgets near to where they're going to be sold) and a bit of inertia (relocating a plant costs money, so it's worth a bit more to hire workers where the plant is as opposed to somewhere else, at least in the short term). But these factors only cover a relatively small wage differential.
Why do you think the US economy has been, for half a century or so, gradually moving away from most kinds of manufacturing?
Some kinds of services can be outsourced to the third world nearly as easily as manufacturing, but others really can't, or at least not to the same effect. Advertising, for example, needs to be handled by people who know the target market and culture. Design work requires a certain level of education, so even if you hire your engineers in India or China, they're still going to make a good deal more than the poverty-stricken masses you could hire to run manufacturing lines. (In fact, for a lot of that stuff you'd mostly be hiring the kind of people who could probably get H1B visas and work in the US if they were so inclined. That's going to drive wage expectations in a certain direction.) Medical professionals have to be hired in the places where people spend a lot of money on medical care, and the US is fairly high on the list there. And so on.
> Companies don't care about fascism.
Actually, they kind of do. On the whole, they're not generally real happy about it, although they prefer it to populism (hello, Latin America) or outright communism (Eastern Europe, I'm looking at you).
> We just need to become cheaper,
The market is sorting that out.
Granted, it would be sorted out faster if the government would stop trying to delay the inevitable (particularly, the shift away from a manufacturing-based economy). I mean, come on, do you really WANT to work in a factory? Let it go, already. There are more worthwhile (and more profitable) things you could be doing with your time.
> or we need to help Chinese and Indians become rich.
Define "become rich".
Because, if you mean "become rich compared to where they were a few decades ago", that's already happened, and continues to happen. The per capita standard of living in China today is much higher than in China fifty years ago, and the same is true in India.
Of course, it's true in the US as well: fifty years ago, the average US household had one car, one radio, one record player, one rotary phone, no camera, no computer, no shelf full of movies, very few electric kitchen appliances, and only about a 50/50 chance of having a television. Today the average household has slightly more than one car per person over age 15, 2-3 radios per person, multiple CD players, multiple cellphones, several cameras, internet access, a shelf full of DVDs, a counter (or cupboard) full of kitchen appliances, cable and/or satellite television, and a bunch of other junk we don't actually need.
(It is at this point not difficult to imagine our society reaching the point where attempting to maintain a household at the standard of living that was average in the fifties might put you in danger of having your children taken away by child services. Make it a hundred years instead of fifty and we're probably there now: the lack of indoor plumbing would just about do it, quite aside from everything else.)
So if you mean "help Chinese and Indians become rich(er) relative to Americans", then that's a different thing. But I don't see how that would create a "reason... for anybody to pay more to an American worker than to a Chinese or Indian worker". Quite the reverse, in fact.
> If this is true, why not simplify the tax code to > get rid of the "exceptions, credits, and deductions"
I'd vote for that.
But realistically it is very unlikely to happen. US tax law is extremely complicated for a reason: there is *constant* political pressure coming from two opposite directions, and tax rates get tangled up in the crossfire.
Approximately 40% of the nation always wants taxes cut, and another 40% always wants revenue increased to pay for more government spending. (Actually, it's more like 95% and 75% respectively if you count overlap when people want taxes to be cut *and* spending increased, but the 40% figures are based on which thing they would rather have if they have to pick.) The remaining 20% is either moderate and reasonable, or confused and wishy-washy, depending on who you ask: they switch sides back and forth depending on various factors.
Those percentages are rough estimates, but you can see where this is going: politicians who want to get re-elected want to support legislation that looks good to both sides: to people who want taxes cut, and to people who would rather see taxes increased. They want to be able to say "I supported the tax cut" and "I supported the funding for popular programs" pretty much in the same breath. When it comes to corporate taxes specifically, they want to say "I supported increasing corporate taxes to pay for important stuff and still take the tax load off the backs of households", and at the same time they also want to say "I created jobs by supporting tax breaks for businesses that employ thousands of people." They want to say all that and point to their voting record to prove it all.
Obfuscation and convolution create ambiguity, room for interpretation and conjecture, so that while nobody is completely satisfied, neither half of the electorate is completely outraged, either.
So yeah, US tax law is complicated. I would like to see it be simpler, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
> Well, if you have problems remembering to > unsilence your phone, leave it behind...
If you leave it home all the time, what exactly is the advantage over a cordless phone and landline?
> This is a feature..., not a bug.
It's a feature, sure, but it's a feature with severe problems that in practice make it (the feature) mostly useless and/or too annoying to leave turned on. It's fine to say, "sure, if the feature is implemented so poorly that you can't use it, just don't use the feature", but the feature we're talking about here is *the* selling point for cell phones, the sole advantage, the single feature that, if it were actually usable, might potentially make a cell phone better than a regular phone, at least for some people.
The bug in cell phones is the fact that call quality is so bad the rest of us (with real phones) want to hang up on you. Actually, a feature (analogous to Anonymous Call Block) that stops my phone from ringing if the caller is on a cell phone would be worth money to me.
> I have better call quality going cell phone to cell > phone than I do from my cell phone to my parents' landline.
Oh, it's certainly possible to buy a land-line phone that produces poor sound quality (on both ends of the call). Maybe not quite as bad as a cell phone, but pretty bad. Lots of static, so much it makes it hard to hear the other person's voice. Such phones cost about $5. If you only have one phone, it might actually be worth having one of these cheapies around in a drawer, as a backup in case you have a bad day and spill coffee in your good phone or something and need to make a call before you can get it replaced.
> As written, it would appear to discriminate against people who > use a speech synthesizer to communicate, like Stephen Hawking.
That's obviously not the *intention* of the law, but in any case I hope Stephen Hawking can find something better to do with his time than make unsolicited commercial phone calls.
Slashdot Mirror
There's this newspaper reporter from 1996 on the line. He wants his sensationalist headline back.
Actually, I think it just implies that Linux users have different priorities from Windows users.
Personally, I cannot imagine wanting to use Flash to play full-screen video. Totem or vlc, yes. Flash? You've got to be kidding.
Flash is NOT a media player. It's a browser plugin, of questionable usefulness. It plays tiny little swatches of badly encoded 320x200 video at a low framerate, and then you usually wish you hadn't bothered, because the content of said YouTube video, recommended to you by a Windows-using friend, is almost always the sort of thing that wouldn't be worth your time even if it WERE a quality recording, which it never is. Why would you EVER want to watch that junk in full-screen?
Granted, I don't need support for 4096 processor cores either. But I can imagine that *someone* would legitimately need such a feature, which is more than I can say for full-screen Flash video.
It isn't just processor core numbers and Flash plugins, either. This is a minor symptom of a much larger disconnect between people who actually understand computers and *use* them to get useful things accomplished, versus people who play around with whatever annoying thing gets their attention. Windows is loaded with stupid features I can't imagine ever having any real use for. Debian is loaded with features that I actually use.
I suppose it depends on how you define success, but I would have probably named the common cold and flu as the two most successful viruses of all time, based on the number of infections they've caused, which is significantly more than the total number of people who have ever lived, since they infect most people repeatedly over the course of their lives. This is especially true of the common cold, which infects the average person more than once per year. That's impressive.
> Most people fear death - a lot.
Most people *think* they're afraid of death. But in fact, when it comes down to brass tacks, most people are much MORE afraid of pain, especially if it is severe and/or prolonged.
> The GUI was invented on Lisp machines.
> Emacs was inspired by Lisp machines.
Indeed, it's difficult to say which is the more important innovation.
> I still miss that future we didn't get to see.
I think you underestimate lisp's influence on subsequent languages. Granted, it is not the MOST influential programming language in history. That would be C. But Lisp might be second place, or close to it. The entire functional paradigm comes from Lisp and its various descendants. So does garbage collection. And I would argue that the combination of these two things is what sets modern languages (like Perl and the various ones that have come out since) apart from third-generation languages (like C).
Every time you use a programming language that has list operations (e.g., a map operator, or grep, or a built-in sort primitive) you are living in that future, built on foundations set by lisp. Incidentally, the internet as you know it would not function as it does without these languages. (Did I mention that SQL is one of them? It is *heavily* influenced by the functional paradigm. Javascript also.)
Admittedly, it has taken a while to get there. Lisp was ahead of its time.
> You know, observational studies are still scientific.
> There are plenty of hypotheses that can be tested
> without randomized controlled trials.
I don't think it counts as "testing" if you just go over the existing data again rather than constructing an experiment that could actually falsify the hypothesis if it happens to be incorrect.
> You're not going to claim that if astronomers really
> wanted to be scientific, they would start their
> research by gathering up a bunch of hydrogen and
> piling it together in empty space and then watching
That wouldn't be practical.
But I will claim that the construction of theoretical models about that sort of thing (how stars form, etc) in the manner in which it IS practiced is not science in the strictest sense, i.e., they are not using scientific methodology. Frankly it has more in common with philosophy than science, since the primary mechanism for vetting ideas is running them by other respected persons and attempting to reach a consensus.
That way lies madness. You can end up with entire generations believing almost anything, if you accept that kind of methodology as "scientific" and then unquestioningly believe whatever comes out the other end of it.
In popular culture we have come to use the word "science" to mean pretty much any kind of study, almost no matter how it's conducted, but scientists should know the difference. Frankly, educated people in general should know the difference between true science and some of the malarkey that passes for "science".
Incidentally, it is not my intention to hold up the scientific method as the only valid methodology for obtaining reliable information. There are other good methodologies, and in fact I know of some that are MORE reliable than science. (Most obviously, there is an extremely rigorous methodology used in mathematics that, when properly executed, makes even the best science look like guesswork. But it wouldn't be practical to apply that methodology to everything.)
But I do think it's important to know the methodology by which conclusions were reached and to understand that some methodologies are more reliable than others. It is my considered opinion that indiscriminately calling everything "science" blurs those distinctions and thus obscures important information. Getting information from a theoretical model is NOT the same thing as getting it from a series of experiments crafted to allow incorrect ideas to be disproven.
> Are memory manufacturers following the same practice?
No. Fortunately, there are hardware reasons why that wouldn't work out for them. For one thing, if the hapless customer were to purchase a stick of RAM that said it was one gigabyte* but actually only had 0.93 GB of volatile storage, when the customer plugged it into the computer, they wouldn't have to look at how much memory the system properties say they have to find out there's a problem. The BIOS memory test would fail on bootup, and I think that's probably all the further you'd get in most cases (i.e., I don't think the computer would go on and boot up when it knows the RAM failed the test).
Also, motherboards only accept RAM in certain amounts. Even if you were to label it correctly, I don't think a 0.93GB DIMM would work.
I suppose they could take a 1GB DIMM and label it as 1.07 gigabytes*, but to my knowledge no RAM manufacturer has yet attempted to do this.
You *do* see computer manufacturers labeling their computers as having 4GB of RAM, even though not all of that memory is addressable. This is a weird one, though: there actually *is* 4GB of RAM in there, and if you were to take 2GB out (and, say, put it in another computer), there'd be a full 2GB left. It's just that a 32-bit computer can't address that much system memory, for arcane reasons having to do with the way the 32-bit address space is shared between system RAM and other things (e.g., the video card).
> Or do hard drive manufacturers and memory manufactures use
> the same unit of measurement differently in their two products?
Yes: hard drive manufacturers use the same words with a different meaning from memory manufacturers, as well as motherboard manufacturers, flash-storage manufacturers, programmers, filesystems, and almost everything else in the entire computer industry.
> I always thought it was just clueless marketing morons who couldn't do math
There are also six or seven extremely prolific "debaters" (this is the polite term for them) who each spend about eighty hours a week on the internet talking up the decimal definitions on every forum and venue they can find, attempting to create the impression that lots of people like and use them. It's a tempest in a teapot. Whether these "debaters" are in deliberate collusion with one another, I don't know. (They stumble across one another's advocacy threads, of course, and back one another up when they do, but that may just be because they happen to run into one another and agree with one another. I've not seen any evidence that there's deliberate collusion involved.) I also don't know whether they are paid by marketing departments. I suspect not. My general impression is that they actually believe their own bologna.
There are also two or three of these "debaters" who like to talk up use of the mutant words "kibibyte", "gibibyte", and so on, but I'm pretty sure they're just being silly and that absolutely nobody takes that nonsense seriously, EVER.
> But the same thing is happening with milk and other food producers seeking to change
> the definition of "organic" so they can sell more food without actually being organic
Actually, it's the "organic food" people who have subverted the meaning of the word. Every time I hear someone talk about "organic" food, I immediately think, "What, as opposed to inorganic food? What are you eating, silicate rocks and metal ores?" As a rule, inorganic compounds have no significant nutritional value, i.e., no calories. You can eat sand if you want I guess, but it's not generally considered to be food.
Chemically speaking, practically everything you would consider to be food is organic. Sugar, for instance, is organic. What's more, the more refined it is, the higher the percentage of organic content -- the purity, if you think of inorganic trace substances as impurities. So raw sugar is if anything LESS organic than the highly-processed stuff you buy at the supermarket. High fructose corn syrup is organic. Monosodium glutamate is organic. Aspartame (best known under the trade name Nutrasweet) is organic. Mix all that stuff up in a bowl together, and what you've got there is organic food. Wouldn't be very *healthy*, but it would be comprised of 100% organic content.
The most notable inorganic substance commonly found in food is table salt.
Unless, of course, the only most likely you'd look up the size in the first place is because you're thinking of transferring it to some other place, such as a floppy disk.
> How quickly you calculate that to 4TB?
Yeah, and what's two plus two? (Okay, technically not quite everyone would find it that easy, but this is slashdot, so in that context the difference between "everyone" and "everyone who has the powers of two memorized up to at least 65536" is not really worth worrying about. I should probably confiscate your geek card just for asking the question.)
> 15TB?
16TB would be 16384GB, take away 1024, makes fifteen thousand and some odd gigs.
> 405GB to MB's? Its just a lot easier to think 405GB = 405 000MB
Frankly, once you're up in the triple digits, there's no longer any point converting to the smaller units. If you've got a 400 GB file and are worried about individual megabytes, it's time to drag out bzip2 -9 anyway.
The other point you're missing is that filesystems use power-of-two-based storage allocation for sectors and extents and whatnot, so knowing that a gigabyte is 1024 MB is significantly more useful than knowing how many bytes it is, just as knowing that a kilobyte is 1024 bytes is significantly more useful than knowing how many bits it is. You don't store characters in bits: you store them in bytes (and, these days, words and dwords and whatnot). And you don't store files in bytes. You store them in sectors, the size of which is measured in kilobytes or megabytes.
If you really *have* to have a ten-based unit that ignores such considerations, I suggest you forget all about bytes and the various larger byte-based units and just use the number of bits, possibly in conjunction with E notation. That is to say, instead of 15TB, you could say "this file takes up 1.32070244352000E+14 bits". Or you could say "about 132 terabits". This would not be *useful* information, but it would be in base-ten.
> > [unless] the ambient temperature is below 0, which is often the case during winter
> And it's often above 0. I think a 10C temperature rise is perfectly fair.
He meant below zero Fahrenheit, not below freezing (0 Celsius). (Granted, he wasn't very clear.) When he spoke of heating something 10C, he was setting up a comparison, only ten degrees versus all the way from subzero. He was saying that heating a road all the way from ten or twenty below clear up to the melting point of snow takes a considerable amount of energy.
However, it should be noted that roads that carry a lot of traffic stay warm to the touch even when the ambient temperature is twenty below. Snow doesn't stick on the interstate unless the weather is sufficiently severe to keep people off the roads (typically, this requires a level three, i.e., the state highway patrol threatens to arrest anyone who's out driving for non-emergency reasons). This is because asphalt is a high-friction surface, so the car tires driving on it create a lot of heat. A glass surface, as proposed in the stupid article, wouldn't work nearly so well in that regard.
> Well, if nobody does the work then it'll definitely never happen.
I'm pretty confident this is one that'll definitely never happen anyway.
> I'm sure if somebody had told Newton about this wonderful
> thing called Nuclear energy he'd've laughed in their face.
Nuclear energy didn't become possible because somebody said, "Hey, you know what? Burning coal isn't a very good source of power. We should get power from something else. How about metal? Yeah! I know, we'll use uranium!"
Nuclear power became a reality because somebody in theoretical physics realized that matter is essentially a particularly-structured form of potential energy. Nuclear power was one of the implications.
If materials scientists had been working in their labs and discovered a compound that is well-neigh indestructible, has high surface friction, and converts electromagnetic radiation into usable energy, then roads that generate solar power could be considered as one of the possible implications, and people would take it seriously.
But that's not what's going on here. What happened here is, some dude watched too many episodes of the Jetsons while drunk and then went to a green energy brainstorming session and said, "Duuuuudes, [hic], I've GOT it: we'll put the solar cells... in the [hic] ROAD!"
I mean, come on, they're talking about using *glass* for the surface layer -- silicate glass, for crying out loud. It's much too hard to make a practical road surface, it's WAY too brittle, and even if we could somehow get around those problems, the real killer is we'd pretty much have to make car tires out of gecko skin. I'm sure *that* would get the environmentalists in the warm fuzzies.
> And why the knee-jerk
> assumption that
> petrified wood could
> not be a moon rock?
Occam's Razor. Human error is a much simpler explanation.
This isn't about free speech or free press, because it isn't about WHAT you are allow to say or write. The issue is about how you (the salesman, the politician, whoever) are allowed to use my phone line, that *I* pay the bill for.
> freedom of the press applies only to impact printed documents,
> don't you know what 'press' means? Inkjet or laser printed
> subversive literature will get you 20 to life...
That's a straw man. You can print all the junk you want on your own inkjet printer, or on your own laser printer, or one that you rent... But *I* get to say what you can print on *my* printer, capische?
> free speech is when I ask you a question and you
> are allowed to answer and not fear for your life.
Oh, it's a bit more than that. Free speech is when you can stand on on the sidewalk downtown and tell your political ideas to anyone who will listen, hand out pamphlets to anyone who will take them, hold rallies where five hundred like-minded people all get together in a public place...
I am even willing to accept unsolicited political phonecalls, as long as the number you're calling is a publicly listed number and not listed in the DNC registry, and provided it's a human doing the calling.
But machine autocalling with a pre-recorded message is something else. The objection here is NOT to what you are saying. The objection here is to the fact that you are wasting my time *only*, and not spending any of your own time to do so. It doesn't matter if your message is commercial or political, because we're fundamentally not talking about what you're allowed to *say*.
And the do-not-call registry should apply to all unsolicited calls. Ordinarily a politician can knock on your door and, if you answer, ask if he can have a moment of your time to tell you about $issue. A salesman can do the same thing. But if you put a sign on your door asking them not to do so, they're supposed to respect that. The DNC registry serves the same purpose as that sign on the door.
This is not a free speech issue. They can say whatever they want, in public. Nobody's going to arrest or penalize them for what they say. (Well, we might choose to vote for the other guy, but that goes with the territory when you run for public office.) It's not about speech. It's about privacy, and the right of the individual home-owner to choose who and what he allows into his home.
> daytime highs of 2,000 - 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit...
> nighttime temperature of roughly 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit...
> windspeeds of approximately 7,000 mp... any beings that lived
> there would indeed have to be extremely tough, and Chuck
> Norris would most likely be checking his closet for them
> before going to bed
Forget Chuck Norris. These guys could kick the Terminator into next Tuesday. I mean, what would their skin have to be made of to stay solid at those temperatures, tungsten alloy? Species 8472 would be running scared all the way back to fluidic space.
> we've seen time and time again that negativity just works
No, actually, it doesn't. Well, up to a certain point it does, but ultimately it is self-defeating.
If you pay attention to advertising campaigns and market share, you will note that there's a strong correlation between *positive* advertising campaigns and the ability to attain and retain first place in the market. Not that everybody who runs positive advertising get into first place, but rather the converse: just about everybody who gets into first place, and stays there, does so while running positive advertising.
Take, for example, the fast food industry. McDonald's runs positive advertising like nobody's business and has to my knowledge *never* run a negative ad, and none of their competitors can touch them. Burger King periodically runs negative ads (directed, usually, at McDonald's) and has slipped from second place to, what, fourth or fifth now? Taco Bell *stopped* running negative ads in the eighties, switched over to all positive ads, and climbed from Nth place right up to second. Yes, there are other factors. The advertising isn't the whole cause of any of the above. But the advertising is also a component.
You can see the same thing in political elections. When a campaign boils down to "the other guy sucks", it generally goes down in flames. Successful campaigns look more like "you need our candidate, for these simple positive bullet-point reasons". John Kerry compared himself (and his running mate) to the opposition, and he was defeated by 34 electoral votes. Obama talked about his vision, and he was elected. (There were other factors in both cases, of course. Lots of other factors. But the advertising was also a factor.) You can run through the whole history of all the US Presidential election campaigns, and you'll see that in general the positive campaigns have a much stronger tendency to win than the negative ones. Talking too much about the opposition is self-defeating.
We could look at any number of other industries, but let's bring it around to computers: up through the late nineties or so, Microsoft ran all positive advertisements, and their market share was on the increase. Then they started running negative ads, and their market share is on the decline now. (Granted, there wasn't a lot of room for it to increase further, since it peaked somewhere above 95% around the turn of the century.) Apple never learns: they keep running negative ads for Macs, and their market share languishes in the low single digits. (They have quite good market share in the music player market, but all the iPod advertising is positive.) Again, there are other factors. But inasmuch as the advertising is a driving force in market share dynamics, positive advertising is a positive driving force, and negative advertising traps you beneath a glass ceiling of your own making.
> in order to have clear evidence, we must be able to express our theories
No.
No amount of "expressing theories" will ever add up to evidence. Scientifically speaking, the only way we're ever going to learn anything is to make *falsifiable* predictions and then test them to see if they hold, and then based on the outcome make new falsifiable predictions, lather, rinse, repeat. That's the scientific method.
But nobody seems to be interested in doing that kind of science any more. If you make falsifiable predictions, there's a risk they might be falsified, and then where will your scientific reputation be?
So instead of anything concrete and measurable, we now make vaguely impressive statements like "human behavior causes climate change". Such a proposition is unlikely to be proven or disproven within the lifespan of anyone currently living, so you can build an entire scientific career on it without ever DOING any actual science.
For pi to be equal to three, your surface would have to be curved by just exactly the right amount. (The traditional value of slightly more than three is what you get if your surface is an absolutely flat plane, a shape that quite frankly never occurs outside of geometry textbooks but is a useful simplification for undergraduate classes for a variety of reasons, not least because of the way it causes pairs of parallel lines to interact with other objects that they both intersect.)
> What possible reason would there be for anybody to pay more
... for anybody to pay more to an American worker than to a Chinese or Indian worker". Quite the reverse, in fact.
> to an American worker than to a Chinese or Indian worker?
In terms of the manufacturing sector, if they can make the same stuff, then there's really no such motive, ultimately.
Well, to a small extent there is, to cover things like shipping costs (it's slightly better to produce widgets near to where they're going to be sold) and a bit of inertia (relocating a plant costs money, so it's worth a bit more to hire workers where the plant is as opposed to somewhere else, at least in the short term). But these factors only cover a relatively small wage differential.
Why do you think the US economy has been, for half a century or so, gradually moving away from most kinds of manufacturing?
Some kinds of services can be outsourced to the third world nearly as easily as manufacturing, but others really can't, or at least not to the same effect. Advertising, for example, needs to be handled by people who know the target market and culture. Design work requires a certain level of education, so even if you hire your engineers in India or China, they're still going to make a good deal more than the poverty-stricken masses you could hire to run manufacturing lines. (In fact, for a lot of that stuff you'd mostly be hiring the kind of people who could probably get H1B visas and work in the US if they were so inclined. That's going to drive wage expectations in a certain direction.) Medical professionals have to be hired in the places where people spend a lot of money on medical care, and the US is fairly high on the list there. And so on.
> Companies don't care about fascism.
Actually, they kind of do. On the whole, they're not generally real happy about it, although they prefer it to populism (hello, Latin America) or outright communism (Eastern Europe, I'm looking at you).
> We just need to become cheaper,
The market is sorting that out.
Granted, it would be sorted out faster if the government would stop trying to delay the inevitable (particularly, the shift away from a manufacturing-based economy). I mean, come on, do you really WANT to work in a factory? Let it go, already. There are more worthwhile (and more profitable) things you could be doing with your time.
> or we need to help Chinese and Indians become rich.
Define "become rich".
Because, if you mean "become rich compared to where they were a few decades ago", that's already happened, and continues to happen. The per capita standard of living in China today is much higher than in China fifty years ago, and the same is true in India.
Of course, it's true in the US as well: fifty years ago, the average US household had one car, one radio, one record player, one rotary phone, no camera, no computer, no shelf full of movies, very few electric kitchen appliances, and only about a 50/50 chance of having a television. Today the average household has slightly more than one car per person over age 15, 2-3 radios per person, multiple CD players, multiple cellphones, several cameras, internet access, a shelf full of DVDs, a counter (or cupboard) full of kitchen appliances, cable and/or satellite television, and a bunch of other junk we don't actually need.
(It is at this point not difficult to imagine our society reaching the point where attempting to maintain a household at the standard of living that was average in the fifties might put you in danger of having your children taken away by child services. Make it a hundred years instead of fifty and we're probably there now: the lack of indoor plumbing would just about do it, quite aside from everything else.)
So if you mean "help Chinese and Indians become rich(er) relative to Americans", then that's a different thing. But I don't see how that would create a "reason
And, of course, "richer" in th
> If this is true, why not simplify the tax code to
> get rid of the "exceptions, credits, and deductions"
I'd vote for that.
But realistically it is very unlikely to happen. US tax law is extremely complicated for a reason: there is *constant* political pressure coming from two opposite directions, and tax rates get tangled up in the crossfire.
Approximately 40% of the nation always wants taxes cut, and another 40% always wants revenue increased to pay for more government spending. (Actually, it's more like 95% and 75% respectively if you count overlap when people want taxes to be cut *and* spending increased, but the 40% figures are based on which thing they would rather have if they have to pick.) The remaining 20% is either moderate and reasonable, or confused and wishy-washy, depending on who you ask: they switch sides back and forth depending on various factors.
Those percentages are rough estimates, but you can see where this is going: politicians who want to get re-elected want to support legislation that looks good to both sides: to people who want taxes cut, and to people who would rather see taxes increased. They want to be able to say "I supported the tax cut" and "I supported the funding for popular programs" pretty much in the same breath. When it comes to corporate taxes specifically, they want to say "I supported increasing corporate taxes to pay for important stuff and still take the tax load off the backs of households", and at the same time they also want to say "I created jobs by supporting tax breaks for businesses that employ thousands of people." They want to say all that and point to their voting record to prove it all.
Obfuscation and convolution create ambiguity, room for interpretation and conjecture, so that while nobody is completely satisfied, neither half of the electorate is completely outraged, either.
So yeah, US tax law is complicated. I would like to see it be simpler, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
> Well, if you have problems remembering to
> unsilence your phone, leave it behind...
If you leave it home all the time, what exactly is the advantage over a cordless phone and landline?
> This is a feature..., not a bug.
It's a feature, sure, but it's a feature with severe problems that in practice make it (the feature) mostly useless and/or too annoying to leave turned on. It's fine to say, "sure, if the feature is implemented so poorly that you can't use it, just don't use the feature", but the feature we're talking about here is *the* selling point for cell phones, the sole advantage, the single feature that, if it were actually usable, might potentially make a cell phone better than a regular phone, at least for some people.
The bug in cell phones is the fact that call quality is so bad the rest of us (with real phones) want to hang up on you. Actually, a feature (analogous to Anonymous Call Block) that stops my phone from ringing if the caller is on a cell phone would be worth money to me.
> I have better call quality going cell phone to cell
> phone than I do from my cell phone to my parents' landline.
Oh, it's certainly possible to buy a land-line phone that produces poor sound quality (on both ends of the call). Maybe not quite as bad as a cell phone, but pretty bad. Lots of static, so much it makes it hard to hear the other person's voice. Such phones cost about $5. If you only have one phone, it might actually be worth having one of these cheapies around in a drawer, as a backup in case you have a bad day and spill coffee in your good phone or something and need to make a call before you can get it replaced.
> As written, it would appear to discriminate against people who
> use a speech synthesizer to communicate, like Stephen Hawking.
That's obviously not the *intention* of the law, but in any case I hope Stephen Hawking can find something better to do with his time than make unsolicited commercial phone calls.