No. It still considers software unpatentable. Which makes me wonder how on Earth will Microsoft be able to collect that 0.4% in patent royalties from European software developers selling their software to European customers.
Oh, because he can't have found mistakes in his original paper. Please RTFA because dropping your trust in science, because (and I quote the article here) all scientific knowledge is provisional, able to be challenged and overturned. That doesn't make it less objective. Keep in mind that the only dogma in science is that there are no dogmas, and you will be better prepared to deal with both science and other systems that actually state there are untouchable dogmas.
Well, the GP's notions may be preconceived, but it seems they are supported by cold hard facts. Creationism, on the other hand, recurs to asserting that a few thousand million years (billion years in US-speak) worth of coincidences can't bring life as it is now. Yeah, sure, because throwing the dices a few million times can't result in the series that actually happens.
Fortunately for you, Earth has this weird movement called rotation that guarantees the anybody at the same latitude will be able to watch the same phenomenon as long as it is independent of Earth movement and lasts at least a rotation;-)
This is not an eclipse, so you should be able to watch it from the UK, clouds permitting. If you are worried about latitude, you can check the low-cost flights to Spain and come to watch it from here over the weekend. I think you can see Perseus from the UK, anyway.
As I see it, having no copyright (as in copyright law not existing) allows tinkering with the software legally, never mind whether the author likes it or not. Since there is copyright, the only way to have something like no copyright is to make sure no one can decide what software uses are acceptable. Of course, such a thing can't be imposed on everyone just because, but authors can decide to make sure that their software stays available for all to tinker with (whether in original or modified form).
It's counterintuitive: copyleft requires restricting the ability of people to hide their modifications, which sounds bad (I said restricting, didn't I? I must be agains all that is free:-). But that restriction is a countermeasure against the real restriction (the real bad idea according free software advocates), the restriction of the ability of people to learn and better themselves through culture. It's up to each one to decide whether restricting this common good is a good measure in the long run. I think it isn't.
Reading the article, it seems that the computer models of supernovas would strip all those supermassive planets of their gaseous layers, if not blow the planets themselves away. The problem isn't the black hole being that big (that's a symptom), the problem is how do you make a star go nova "softly" like this one would have done.
And, yes, it seems the simulations are wrong. That's why it's hard for the current nova theories (read models) to create a black hole this big.
Torrent trackers can have quite accurate lists, mind you. Many even ban known "evil" clients. And many keep logs, so no, when the client disconnects, its connection history is still available.
And most Flash video viewers allow me to jump back and forth, anyway. Are you sure people will bother skipping a one minute ad every four minutes either way? Think again.
Ermm... I'm just correcting your notion about water having no H3O+ and OH- ions while liquid. It has. No need to read anything else into it.
By the way, switching scales as it suits you is not a good debate method. You started talking about molecules here, not cubic decimeters of anything. And at the molecular level, Brownian movements can provide energy enough to break a few links. You said:
At the molecular scale, water molecules don't just decide to break up and go their own way willy-nilly...
At the molecular scale, some water molecules actually just break up because they got hit, moved and stretched in the right way, and no one bats an eye. And again, I'm not saying the post you answer to is right, because it isn't: not all water is breaking and recreating bonds. Just a tiny part of it.
Remember this useless thing called pH, used for measuring acidity and basicity? You may remember that the neutral point is 7, the pH of pure water at 25 degrees Celsius, when the amounts of H3O+ and OH- are almost equal (yes, those ions exist even in pure liquid water). See this for more information. Thermodynamics is all right but some of its laws get quirky at sufficiently small distances.
Are you saying you can't track Bittorrent users? I certainly hope not, since there are lots of trackers out there keeping statistics per user and/or IP address to calculate ratios. It's just the same IMO.
I agree (even if we are going completely off-topic). Starting the war was a bad idea, but leaving now would probably be even worse. And I say this as one of those "scaredy-cat" Spaniards who voted out the then ruling party because they got us into that clusterfuck. And no, it's not about winning, it's about getting Iraq stable enough for they to finish fixing the problem.
What about a nuclear-powered hydroponic farming plant?
Fission or fussion powered? The first one isn't renewable (the second isn't either, but there's a lot of hydrogen around), the second one isn't yet at the production stage. And looking beyond your question, there is no need to have either one energy source or the other: unless one of them is much better and flexible (and sustainable and...) than any of the others, there will be niches that benefit from a specific energy source.
All we're doing now is currently using huge stockpiles of non-renewing (or renewing on too massive of timescales) biomass to convert to energy.
I'll suppose that when you talk about "non-renewing biomass" you mean coal, oil and other fossil carbons. Actually, that is _not_ all we are doing now: see Brasil and ethanol or Europe requiring increasing quantities of it in gasoline and biodiesels. We are slowly migrating from unsutainable power resources to sustainable ones (well, the USA may not, since corn ethanol wasn't self-sufficient yet last time I read about the subject). For example, Spain has had its grain production curtailed for years, to the point farmers received money so they wouldn't sow wheat. Now the tides are turning and they are getting paid to sow it. Another case in point is kudzu, currently a weed in the USA, which may end being an sutainable source of ethanol, too.
I see no mention of nutrition in these comments. Everyone seems focused on quantity of food while mostly ignoring the issue of quality.
Maybe quality has been ignored because it is irrelevant: the efficiency of different farming methods can be compared for any given quality (and no, all that post-processing you mention doesn't matter either).
I would like you to explain why do you say that. AFAIK, current crops and current agricultural methods provide more food per surface unit (and I'm not even getting into account hidroponics): mechanization of the work allows to plant and seed at the optimum growth distance, and current crops usually require less space per plant to grow and produce the same amount.
I don't need to provide references, having attempted to implement ODF that draws correctly it is obvious that it is not fully specified.
So, in order to know where it fails I need to implement it? I find that not quite obvious. Don't worry, I'll try and find references that don't require me to trust blindly any given implementation.
I fail to see the fuss, both formats suck and really have no place as a desktop publishing format. They are crappy WYSIWYG data dumps that are heavily tied to rendering algorithms of their respective editor and really are not archival safe.
Please provide references to ODF ties to OpenOffice rendering. I guess having it supported in other suites like MS Office (through third-party products) and KOffice means they are tied to OpenOffice as well. And please define "archival safe". As far as I know, TeX is completely defined (which makes it a useful file format), and so is ODF. Please prove me wrong.
Oh, and lest I forget, what is more WYSIWYG than a hard print? At least with TeX you have sections, subsections, etc, sprinkled in the text that explicitly tell what is going on. Good luck making an OCR understand what is a title, a subtitle or whatever.
I still can't find a paper about it through that link. And reading the UNSW article doesn't make anything much clearer either: they apply Cognitive Load Theory to support their statement that making people solve problems requires time, which is true, but is not the point we are debating. They also state that getting the same information through sight and hearing _can_ be counterproductive. That just means someone preparing a presentation must take care of doing it right: the information on the slide and the verbal information must complement each other.
I may have no college degree on making presentations, but I can usually tell when one won't work. It's all about compactness: the slides must show the basic concepts in as few words as possible so the audience can tune the slide out in the time the speaker needs to mention each concept and then pay attention to what the speaker says. It's all about the KISS principle. What's the difference between that and having the teacher write the concepts on the blackboard and then start talking about them? Little to none: I would actually posit using slides is more efficient.
Blackboards have been used in education for well over 100 years, thus it is a proven technology that helps learning.
Yes, blackboards are good tools when correctly used. Please provide reference to that study on Powerpoint presentations. Slide shows have been used for well over 40 years, perhaps they aren't such a bad idea.
Or they may get the notes beforehand and take notes on paper. I did that, at least: I only needed to label the slides and where each note was to be applied; it wasn't time-consuming. Giving them PDFs may be a good idea, too: they can read it without needing to carry a stack of papers, if they so desire. You don't need to foot their printing bill, by the way: you give one (or two) copies and let them photocopy at will.
Slashdot Mirror
No. It still considers software unpatentable. Which makes me wonder how on Earth will Microsoft be able to collect that 0.4% in patent royalties from European software developers selling their software to European customers.
Oh, because he can't have found mistakes in his original paper. Please RTFA because dropping your trust in science, because (and I quote the article here) all scientific knowledge is provisional, able to be challenged and overturned. That doesn't make it less objective. Keep in mind that the only dogma in science is that there are no dogmas, and you will be better prepared to deal with both science and other systems that actually state there are untouchable dogmas.
Well, the GP's notions may be preconceived, but it seems they are supported by cold hard facts. Creationism, on the other hand, recurs to asserting that a few thousand million years (billion years in US-speak) worth of coincidences can't bring life as it is now. Yeah, sure, because throwing the dices a few million times can't result in the series that actually happens.
And then you notice this scientist _retracted_ his paper, thus admitting he made a mistake. Perfection, anyone?
This is not an eclipse, so you should be able to watch it from the UK, clouds permitting. If you are worried about latitude, you can check the low-cost flights to Spain and come to watch it from here over the weekend. I think you can see Perseus from the UK, anyway.
Get back to troll university, you still don't cut it.
It's counterintuitive: copyleft requires restricting the ability of people to hide their modifications, which sounds bad (I said restricting, didn't I? I must be agains all that is free:-). But that restriction is a countermeasure against the real restriction (the real bad idea according free software advocates), the restriction of the ability of people to learn and better themselves through culture. It's up to each one to decide whether restricting this common good is a good measure in the long run. I think it isn't.
That would be expected when talking about black holes and explosions.
And, yes, it seems the simulations are wrong. That's why it's hard for the current nova theories (read models) to create a black hole this big.
On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog.
And most Flash video viewers allow me to jump back and forth, anyway. Are you sure people will bother skipping a one minute ad every four minutes either way? Think again.
By the way, switching scales as it suits you is not a good debate method. You started talking about molecules here, not cubic decimeters of anything. And at the molecular level, Brownian movements can provide energy enough to break a few links. You said:
At the molecular scale, some water molecules actually just break up because they got hit, moved and stretched in the right way, and no one bats an eye. And again, I'm not saying the post you answer to is right, because it isn't: not all water is breaking and recreating bonds. Just a tiny part of it.
Remember this useless thing called pH, used for measuring acidity and basicity? You may remember that the neutral point is 7, the pH of pure water at 25 degrees Celsius, when the amounts of H3O+ and OH- are almost equal (yes, those ions exist even in pure liquid water). See this for more information. Thermodynamics is all right but some of its laws get quirky at sufficiently small distances.
Are you saying you can't track Bittorrent users? I certainly hope not, since there are lots of trackers out there keeping statistics per user and/or IP address to calculate ratios. It's just the same IMO.
I agree (even if we are going completely off-topic). Starting the war was a bad idea, but leaving now would probably be even worse. And I say this as one of those "scaredy-cat" Spaniards who voted out the then ruling party because they got us into that clusterfuck. And no, it's not about winning, it's about getting Iraq stable enough for they to finish fixing the problem.
Fission or fussion powered? The first one isn't renewable (the second isn't either, but there's a lot of hydrogen around), the second one isn't yet at the production stage. And looking beyond your question, there is no need to have either one energy source or the other: unless one of them is much better and flexible (and sustainable and...) than any of the others, there will be niches that benefit from a specific energy source.
I'll suppose that when you talk about "non-renewing biomass" you mean coal, oil and other fossil carbons. Actually, that is _not_ all we are doing now: see Brasil and ethanol or Europe requiring increasing quantities of it in gasoline and biodiesels. We are slowly migrating from unsutainable power resources to sustainable ones (well, the USA may not, since corn ethanol wasn't self-sufficient yet last time I read about the subject). For example, Spain has had its grain production curtailed for years, to the point farmers received money so they wouldn't sow wheat. Now the tides are turning and they are getting paid to sow it. Another case in point is kudzu, currently a weed in the USA, which may end being an sutainable source of ethanol, too.
Maybe quality has been ignored because it is irrelevant: the efficiency of different farming methods can be compared for any given quality (and no, all that post-processing you mention doesn't matter either).
I would like you to explain why do you say that. AFAIK, current crops and current agricultural methods provide more food per surface unit (and I'm not even getting into account hidroponics): mechanization of the work allows to plant and seed at the optimum growth distance, and current crops usually require less space per plant to grow and produce the same amount.
So, in order to know where it fails I need to implement it? I find that not quite obvious. Don't worry, I'll try and find references that don't require me to trust blindly any given implementation.
I fail to see the fuss, both formats suck and really have no place as a desktop publishing format. They are crappy WYSIWYG data dumps that are heavily tied to rendering algorithms of their respective editor and really are not archival safe.
Please provide references to ODF ties to OpenOffice rendering. I guess having it supported in other suites like MS Office (through third-party products) and KOffice means they are tied to OpenOffice as well. And please define "archival safe". As far as I know, TeX is completely defined (which makes it a useful file format), and so is ODF. Please prove me wrong.
Oh, and lest I forget, what is more WYSIWYG than a hard print? At least with TeX you have sections, subsections, etc, sprinkled in the text that explicitly tell what is going on. Good luck making an OCR understand what is a title, a subtitle or whatever.
I may have no college degree on making presentations, but I can usually tell when one won't work. It's all about compactness: the slides must show the basic concepts in as few words as possible so the audience can tune the slide out in the time the speaker needs to mention each concept and then pay attention to what the speaker says. It's all about the KISS principle. What's the difference between that and having the teacher write the concepts on the blackboard and then start talking about them? Little to none: I would actually posit using slides is more efficient.
Yes, blackboards are good tools when correctly used. Please provide reference to that study on Powerpoint presentations. Slide shows have been used for well over 40 years, perhaps they aren't such a bad idea.
Or they may get the notes beforehand and take notes on paper. I did that, at least: I only needed to label the slides and where each note was to be applied; it wasn't time-consuming. Giving them PDFs may be a good idea, too: they can read it without needing to carry a stack of papers, if they so desire. You don't need to foot their printing bill, by the way: you give one (or two) copies and let them photocopy at will.
In terms of equations you are not supposed to remember it (mostly). You are supposed to understand it.