"In other words, what's wrong with the Control Panel interface that hinders developers to the point where they have to hack in these types of kludges?"
You don't use Windows, hey?
My thought when I read the article was similar. If your developers are making themselves obscure shortcuts, you might want to have your UI team rethink their design.
Well, you don't need thermals to fly a kite. Regular wind works just fine.
Yes, cloud suck is quite the experience. There are few things worse than being up there and wishing you were down here but no matter what you do you keep going up.
Sort of. The difference is that in things like the Bible Code you have to jump through hoops to find anything at all, then, when you do, you don't go back and figure out how likely it was that you'd find what you did.
In science, when you do something like pattern matching you figure out how likely it is that you'd find pattern A in dataset B by chance. If it's less than a certain value (5% or 1 time in 20 is often used in biology), then you say it's statistically significant and publish it.
Which multiple products would these be? You are aware that Dick didn't invent the word "android", right? Nor the term "nexus" incidentally. Nor numbers.
The GGGP/GGP were talking about risk of death, not total body count. Risk of death describes what you should logically be afraid of dying from. If terrorists nuked a major city every four years you would be logically justified in being just as afraid of terrorists as you are of driving.
Good point. I'd include equality of women and education in a first world lifestyle though. In fact, I'd list education as the number one component of a first world lifestyle. It might also be difficult to maintain a good education level in the long term without at least enough wealth to have your basic needs consistently met.
About the same as a regular thermal? That is, a nice big cumulous cloud. And the top will be a good deal higher than 2400 feet, mostly because hot air rises even when it's not in a tower, as opposed to momentum.
Changing the oil in a car takes about the same level of skill and investment in tools as it takes to change the battery in an iPhone or iPod.
Actually, changing the battery in a iPhone requires a screw driver and a knife and can be done at your kitchen table in a few minutes. Changing the oil in a car requires at least a wrench and a pail but probably also a set of tire ramps (a specialized tool) and usually you want to have an oil filter wrench or strap handy (also a specialized tool). Modern car makers also have an irritating tendency to put the oil filter somewhere non-trivial to reach.
If you want to call an iPhone battery non-user replaceable than the oil in a car is as well.
If you missed it, my statement about changing the oil in cars was sarcastic. I was going to write something about toilet maintenance, which might have been more obviously sarcastic, but I couldn't quite bring it together.
"Terrorism is the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion." (that's cited as being from the Merriam-Webster dictionary)
"Common definitions of terrorism refer only to those violent acts which are intended to create fear (terror)"
"In November 2004, a United Nations Security Council report described terrorism as any act 'intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act'"
I realize it requires a wee bit of thought to get from "terrorism is the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion" and "refer only to those violent acts which are intended to create fear" to "the point of terrorism is not putting people in danger, but rather making people believe they are in danger" but perhaps you can do it if you try.
PS: if it doesn't come with a reference to a peer-reviewed publication, consider everything you read on the Internet to be an opinion.
You're posting on Slashdot and you can't replace the battery in an Apple device? Give me your soldering iron before you hurt yourself.
This place will sell you a kit for the iPhone including instructions and tools for twenty bucks. If you really can't do it yourself they'll do it for you for another $25.
The real problem is those damn car manufacturers, making the oil non-user replaceable. You're supposed to get that done every four months!
Sure. Notebooks are great, but they can be heavy and they're difficult to use while you're on the move. A netbook is a good idea, but they're difficult to use when you're on the move and really too small to use comfortably on your lap.
A netbook-type machine in a tablet format with good handwriting/speech/something else + virtual keyboard would eat netbooks for lunch.
I just printed off two papers to read on the bus home. Why? Because my iPhone is too small to comfortably read a scientific paper on and my notebook is too big. A netbook sized tablet would be just perfect.
For $1000 it would have to make a good run at replacing my notebook. Depending on what it does, I might be interested in one at that price. The future is the netbook niche though. $250-$300 and netbooks are no more. There isn't really any reason why it should cost more to make a tablet style netbook.
Yes, my point was not that there could not have been a disaster but that it doesn't matter. The only important thing is that people believe there could have been.
Hypothetically, if the people on that plane made up the whole thing and convinced everyone else that it was true, the effect would be the same as if there was actually a guy with a bomb, even though the plane would not have actually been in danger.
The point of terrorism is not putting people in danger, but rather making people believe they are in danger, regardless of whether they actually are. To be a successful terrorist you really want people to believe there is far more danger than there actually is. Usually putting a few people in danger is the best way to achieve the desired effect, but it's not really necessary.
I believe it was similar to the LHC. Someone raised the question of whether the RHIC could create a black hole (or was it some other planet destroying catastrophe?). Someone calculated the probability that the RHIC could create a black hole, which was vanishingly small (and didn't mean that the black hole would destroy the planet anyway). It turns out, the physicist made a boo boo in his very speculative calculation and the correct result was a somewhat different very, very tiny number.
A quick Google didn't turn up any good hits, but you might find something by looking a little harder.
There is a non-zero chance that your next Slashdot posting will cause a quantum mechanical reaction that will destroy the planet (or the universe, whatever). Therefore you should refrain from posting on Slashdot, right?
BTW - the LHC is the most expensive (and largest?) scientific apparatus ever constructed. It's going to be a LONG time before we're realistically able to build anything like it on the moon.
How many jurors do you guys have? Wikipedia says Scotland has the biggest juries, at 15, and that in the US usually it's 12 but can go as low as 6. Even if the article didn't specify US law and we were considering Scotland instead, you'd still be VERY unlikely to find a jury with a combined IQ of 2000.
Assuming a 12 person US jury, you'd expect, on average, to find the combined IQ to be 1200.
Some of the most convincing arguments for why the LHC will not destroy the planet come from astronomy anyway. And astronomers don't really have any vested interest in the LHC.
True, but Clarke's quote is also extremely misleading without mentioning probability.
It may be possible that there is a large, invisible elephant sitting on the GPs head, but the probability of this being true is so small it is not worth worrying about. Similarly, it is not impossible that the LHC will destroy the planet, but the probability of it doing so is so small it is not worth worrying about (once we've established that it is indeed very small).
It may also be possible that by typing my next sentence I will cause just the right flow of electricity to somehow cause the planet to collapse into strange matter. However, the probability is so small as to be
A black hole is also described by a wave equation. A black hole of electron mass and electron charge would be described by a wave equation that looks an awful lot like that of an electron.
Slashdot Mirror
"In other words, what's wrong with the Control Panel interface that hinders developers to the point where they have to hack in these types of kludges?"
You don't use Windows, hey?
My thought when I read the article was similar. If your developers are making themselves obscure shortcuts, you might want to have your UI team rethink their design.
Well, you don't need thermals to fly a kite. Regular wind works just fine.
Yes, cloud suck is quite the experience. There are few things worse than being up there and wishing you were down here but no matter what you do you keep going up.
Sort of. The difference is that in things like the Bible Code you have to jump through hoops to find anything at all, then, when you do, you don't go back and figure out how likely it was that you'd find what you did.
In science, when you do something like pattern matching you figure out how likely it is that you'd find pattern A in dataset B by chance. If it's less than a certain value (5% or 1 time in 20 is often used in biology), then you say it's statistically significant and publish it.
They may not have HAD to. They played it safe because Lucas actually invented the word "droid" and does have a trademark on it's use.
Which multiple products would these be? You are aware that Dick didn't invent the word "android", right? Nor the term "nexus" incidentally. Nor numbers.
The GGGP/GGP were talking about risk of death, not total body count. Risk of death describes what you should logically be afraid of dying from. If terrorists nuked a major city every four years you would be logically justified in being just as afraid of terrorists as you are of driving.
That referred to the last part of the sentence: hang gliders and hawks love the columns of rising air that create clouds.
Good point. I'd include equality of women and education in a first world lifestyle though. In fact, I'd list education as the number one component of a first world lifestyle. It might also be difficult to maintain a good education level in the long term without at least enough wealth to have your basic needs consistently met.
That is the cost of reducing birth rates. The only way around that is to kill everyone over a certain age.
Clouds. The big puffy ones you see in the summer, which are a result of columns of rising air.
Hawks and hang gliders love them.
About the same as a regular thermal? That is, a nice big cumulous cloud. And the top will be a good deal higher than 2400 feet, mostly because hot air rises even when it's not in a tower, as opposed to momentum.
Guess what the only thing we've discovered that limits population growth without actually killing people is?
Give up?
It's a first world lifestyle.
BC, a province of Canada, has had a carbon tax for several years.
Just to blow your mind that extra little bit.
Nope, generally those would be counted as particle physics studying collisions in the atmosphere.
I'm talking about the astronomers who have noticed that neutron stars don't spontaneously convert into black holes.
If anything, neutron star studying astronomers are going to be competing with particle physicists for funding.
Changing the oil in a car takes about the same level of skill and investment in tools as it takes to change the battery in an iPhone or iPod.
Actually, changing the battery in a iPhone requires a screw driver and a knife and can be done at your kitchen table in a few minutes. Changing the oil in a car requires at least a wrench and a pail but probably also a set of tire ramps (a specialized tool) and usually you want to have an oil filter wrench or strap handy (also a specialized tool). Modern car makers also have an irritating tendency to put the oil filter somewhere non-trivial to reach.
If you want to call an iPhone battery non-user replaceable than the oil in a car is as well.
If you missed it, my statement about changing the oil in cars was sarcastic. I was going to write something about toilet maintenance, which might have been more obviously sarcastic, but I couldn't quite bring it together.
You didn't attempt very hard hey?
FYI, my knowledge of terrorism comes from a course I took on the topic, in 2000, before the current hysteria.
From wikipedia:
"Terrorism is the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion." (that's cited as being from the Merriam-Webster dictionary)
"Common definitions of terrorism refer only to those violent acts which are intended to create fear (terror)"
"In November 2004, a United Nations Security Council report described terrorism as any act 'intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act'"
I realize it requires a wee bit of thought to get from "terrorism is the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion" and "refer only to those violent acts which are intended to create fear" to "the point of terrorism is not putting people in danger, but rather making people believe they are in danger" but perhaps you can do it if you try.
PS: if it doesn't come with a reference to a peer-reviewed publication, consider everything you read on the Internet to be an opinion.
You're posting on Slashdot and you can't replace the battery in an Apple device? Give me your soldering iron before you hurt yourself.
This place will sell you a kit for the iPhone including instructions and tools for twenty bucks. If you really can't do it yourself they'll do it for you for another $25.
The real problem is those damn car manufacturers, making the oil non-user replaceable. You're supposed to get that done every four months!
Sure. Notebooks are great, but they can be heavy and they're difficult to use while you're on the move. A netbook is a good idea, but they're difficult to use when you're on the move and really too small to use comfortably on your lap.
A netbook-type machine in a tablet format with good handwriting/speech/something else + virtual keyboard would eat netbooks for lunch.
I just printed off two papers to read on the bus home. Why? Because my iPhone is too small to comfortably read a scientific paper on and my notebook is too big. A netbook sized tablet would be just perfect.
For $1000 it would have to make a good run at replacing my notebook. Depending on what it does, I might be interested in one at that price. The future is the netbook niche though. $250-$300 and netbooks are no more. There isn't really any reason why it should cost more to make a tablet style netbook.
Yes, my point was not that there could not have been a disaster but that it doesn't matter. The only important thing is that people believe there could have been.
Hypothetically, if the people on that plane made up the whole thing and convinced everyone else that it was true, the effect would be the same as if there was actually a guy with a bomb, even though the plane would not have actually been in danger.
The point of terrorism is not putting people in danger, but rather making people believe they are in danger, regardless of whether they actually are. To be a successful terrorist you really want people to believe there is far more danger than there actually is. Usually putting a few people in danger is the best way to achieve the desired effect, but it's not really necessary.
I believe it was similar to the LHC. Someone raised the question of whether the RHIC could create a black hole (or was it some other planet destroying catastrophe?). Someone calculated the probability that the RHIC could create a black hole, which was vanishingly small (and didn't mean that the black hole would destroy the planet anyway). It turns out, the physicist made a boo boo in his very speculative calculation and the correct result was a somewhat different very, very tiny number.
A quick Google didn't turn up any good hits, but you might find something by looking a little harder.
There is a non-zero chance that your next Slashdot posting will cause a quantum mechanical reaction that will destroy the planet (or the universe, whatever). Therefore you should refrain from posting on Slashdot, right?
BTW - the LHC is the most expensive (and largest?) scientific apparatus ever constructed. It's going to be a LONG time before we're realistically able to build anything like it on the moon.
How many jurors do you guys have? Wikipedia says Scotland has the biggest juries, at 15, and that in the US usually it's 12 but can go as low as 6. Even if the article didn't specify US law and we were considering Scotland instead, you'd still be VERY unlikely to find a jury with a combined IQ of 2000.
Assuming a 12 person US jury, you'd expect, on average, to find the combined IQ to be 1200.
Some of the most convincing arguments for why the LHC will not destroy the planet come from astronomy anyway. And astronomers don't really have any vested interest in the LHC.
True, but Clarke's quote is also extremely misleading without mentioning probability.
It may be possible that there is a large, invisible elephant sitting on the GPs head, but the probability of this being true is so small it is not worth worrying about. Similarly, it is not impossible that the LHC will destroy the planet, but the probability of it doing so is so small it is not worth worrying about (once we've established that it is indeed very small).
It may also be possible that by typing my next sentence I will cause just the right flow of electricity to somehow cause the planet to collapse into strange matter. However, the probability is so small as to be
A black hole is also described by a wave equation. A black hole of electron mass and electron charge would be described by a wave equation that looks an awful lot like that of an electron.