Err, correction--- Lotus discontinued the Lotus Symphony suite in 1992, a few years before being bought by IBM in 1995. When IBM bought Lotus (mainly to get Lotus Notes), they also got all the trademarks, and I guess a decade later decided to resurrect one of them. Either way, the current Symphony isn't code-wise related to the old one.
IBM discontinued the original Symphony suite in 1992, but revived the name in 2007 for their OO.o variant. Apart from being an office suite from IBM, it's not related to the 1980s/early-90s Symphony.
In a political sense I agree he wasn't part of any mainstream environmental movement, but from his writings, he was clearly interested in environmental issues, and they were one of his motivating factors as well. In particular, two of his goals were to: 1) slow down deforestation by increasing yield of existing farmland; and 2) reduce the usage of pesticides by engineering hardier crops.
His life's work on developing high-yield, disease-resistant crops and giving them away for free...
That's what fundamentally made him a good recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He made high-yield new seeds, and encouraged farmers to use them, spread them, replant them in subsequent years, etc., giving them greater food security and freedom. He didn't, to the contrary, patent them, prohibit replanting seeds in subsequent years, and so on. That would have still increased crop yields, but would've made farmers dependent on Borlaug to buy seeds every year, which was the opposite of his intention.
It's true that the Austrian school of economics correctly realizes that human behavior is the central component of economics. But they base their entire subsequent theory on an absurd model of human behavior with no scientific support:
The study of economics can therefore be viewed as a study of groups of self-interested participants working for their own betterment.
This is making a pretty huge assumption about human behavior that most scientific studies of human behavior, in any field, don't bear out.
Based on purely anecdotal evidence, it seems to be getting worse: my impression is that climate scientists who entered the field after it became a partisan political issue are much more likely to have axes to grind one way or another. The 40+ y.o. PhDs entered the field because they were interested in science, but a lot of the under-40 crowd entered the field to join a battle on one side or another.
There are few changes to the very basic set of facts: that there is warming, and a significant proportion of it is anthropogenic. But there is huge disagreement on the details and especially in predictions. That's to be expected, because many of the systems we're attempting to model have sensitive dependence on parameters and initial conditions. Whether, for example, a shutdown of thermohaline circulation is likely, and under what circumstances, isn't at all well understood--- and that's just picking one large-impact uncertainty.
I think most of the interns are CS majors; they're actually pretty common among computer science students, probably 2nd only to the giant flood of Google interns.
This version of the story has some more defensiveness that elaborates more on that:
As for the Pacific Science Center shindig, [Kerry Olin, general manager for university recruiting] said, "It's actually a fairly low-budget effort because of our relationships with the studios and that kind of thing." He said the police escort "is a nice story for the students. The truth of the matter is we just try to cooperate with the police when we're trying to move a dozen buses across town at rush hour."
(A State Patrol spokesman said police escorts are contracted privately and paid for by the person or company that hires them.)
The free Xboxes are an investment, too, Olin said. "We also get some of our technology on campuses in the hands of thought leaders.
Clonal colonies are an edge case of sorts, especially with plants. They're somewhere in between a single plant that keeps sending up new shoots, and new plants that reuse the same root system, depending on how you look at it. It's not just that they're clones, but that they continue to live attached to each other, sprouting from the same system of roots and often sharing nutrients.
This is arguing something different--- not that it's the earliest-to-emerge species with still-living individuals, but that this particular individual is the oldest one still alive. That depends on your definition of "organism" and "individual" and such. Clonal colonies are a bit of an edge case--- they reproduce by continuously producing what could be seen as new individuals, or could be seen as just new branches of the original individual (they often come up from the same root system). To take a similar example, is Pando a single organism with a lot of trunks, which has been alive for tens of thousands of years; or is it a colony of individual trees, each of which has been around a lot less long?
And you can find even more edge cases--- there are stable mats of seagrass that might be 100,000-year-old organisms, if you consider clonal colonies to be individual organisms.
First, of course, what exactly constitutes a single "organism" is a bit controversial, especially with plants, and especially with clonal colonies. But even if you accept clonal colonies as bona-fide organisms, Pando in Utah may or may not be older than Lomatia tasmanica, depending on which age estimates you believe.
Apologies for the rhetorical question, but obviously GPGPU for scientific simulations isn't new. We've had awholelotonthatalready. The only possible new thing could be using the Xbox360 for it. But as far as I can tell (confirmed by all the comments I've seen so far), there isn't even anything interesting about that--- this guy just used the Xbox360 because he was already familiar with the programming environment, not because it has any particular advantages over CUDA on a PC.
Because the syst... The games are cheap And Sega is a developer who I respect And arigato And you can play Sonic And Sonic loves us all And Sonic saves animals And he doesn't care that Tails is gay
if a company won't cooperate with a police request relating to an investigation - subpoena or no - the company should be prosecuted itself
That doesn't sound like the kind of society I want to live in. A subpoena is the process by which the police make a request you cannot legally refuse to cooperate with--- subpoena means "under penalty", and a subpoena is a "request" that carries a penalty for noncooperation. Most free societies have some sort of judicial oversight of this process. You sound like you're arguing for any request by the police to be treated as if it were automatically a subpoena?
Not in general. On the radio, it's illegal unless the payment is disclosed, but that regulation's under the FCC's power to regulate radio. For general websites, newspapers, books, etc., there's no anti-payola legislation.
It doesn't actually sound like it'll have any impact on the success of the site. They're not proposing something obviously stupid like charging for accounts, or charging to post or read. They're just planning to sell some data-analysis services to companies that want to buy them. Those services might or might not be useful, but I don't see how it'll affect the normal operation of the site.
Oops, I guess I did the reverse of normal Slashdot custom and read the linked article, but not the Slashdot summary. The linked article has a bullet point (#1) that says "Full screen video playback", but doesn't mention YouTube anywhere. I'm guessing the Slashdot summary is wrong, unless the submitter got information on YouTube playback from somewhere other than the linked article?
It says "full screen video playback", not specifically Flash, so I'm guessing it's some other kind of video that can take advantage of hardware decoding--- probably DVD.
Some might think that keeping on trying someone with different juries until you find a jury that gives the answer you want would be some sort of abuse of the legal process. But not us Brits!
Well, there is the ancient common-law doctrine of autrefois acquit (which served as the basis for the US constitutional prohibition on double jeopardy), but it seems to have been recently weakened substantially in the UK.
Slashdot Mirror
Err, correction--- Lotus discontinued the Lotus Symphony suite in 1992, a few years before being bought by IBM in 1995. When IBM bought Lotus (mainly to get Lotus Notes), they also got all the trademarks, and I guess a decade later decided to resurrect one of them. Either way, the current Symphony isn't code-wise related to the old one.
IBM discontinued the original Symphony suite in 1992, but revived the name in 2007 for their OO.o variant. Apart from being an office suite from IBM, it's not related to the 1980s/early-90s Symphony.
In a political sense I agree he wasn't part of any mainstream environmental movement, but from his writings, he was clearly interested in environmental issues, and they were one of his motivating factors as well. In particular, two of his goals were to: 1) slow down deforestation by increasing yield of existing farmland; and 2) reduce the usage of pesticides by engineering hardier crops.
I wouldn't say the matter's agreed upon, but the fact that operant conditioning works is a common counterexample.
A bit of an emendation:
That's what fundamentally made him a good recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He made high-yield new seeds, and encouraged farmers to use them, spread them, replant them in subsequent years, etc., giving them greater food security and freedom. He didn't, to the contrary, patent them, prohibit replanting seeds in subsequent years, and so on. That would have still increased crop yields, but would've made farmers dependent on Borlaug to buy seeds every year, which was the opposite of his intention.
It's true that the Austrian school of economics correctly realizes that human behavior is the central component of economics. But they base their entire subsequent theory on an absurd model of human behavior with no scientific support:
This is making a pretty huge assumption about human behavior that most scientific studies of human behavior, in any field, don't bear out.
Well, it's a better extended pick-up line than Why Don't We Do It In The Road, anyway...
On the plus side, MSR is about a billion times more interesting than non-Research parts of Microsoft...
Based on purely anecdotal evidence, it seems to be getting worse: my impression is that climate scientists who entered the field after it became a partisan political issue are much more likely to have axes to grind one way or another. The 40+ y.o. PhDs entered the field because they were interested in science, but a lot of the under-40 crowd entered the field to join a battle on one side or another.
There are few changes to the very basic set of facts: that there is warming, and a significant proportion of it is anthropogenic. But there is huge disagreement on the details and especially in predictions. That's to be expected, because many of the systems we're attempting to model have sensitive dependence on parameters and initial conditions. Whether, for example, a shutdown of thermohaline circulation is likely, and under what circumstances, isn't at all well understood--- and that's just picking one large-impact uncertainty.
Sure, it'd be a hell of a lot of money in, say, Kansas. But Microsoft's in a coastal location, so has to pay coastal salaries.
I think most of the interns are CS majors; they're actually pretty common among computer science students, probably 2nd only to the giant flood of Google interns.
This version of the story has some more defensiveness that elaborates more on that:
Clonal colonies are an edge case of sorts, especially with plants. They're somewhere in between a single plant that keeps sending up new shoots, and new plants that reuse the same root system, depending on how you look at it. It's not just that they're clones, but that they continue to live attached to each other, sprouting from the same system of roots and often sharing nutrients.
This is arguing something different--- not that it's the earliest-to-emerge species with still-living individuals, but that this particular individual is the oldest one still alive. That depends on your definition of "organism" and "individual" and such. Clonal colonies are a bit of an edge case--- they reproduce by continuously producing what could be seen as new individuals, or could be seen as just new branches of the original individual (they often come up from the same root system). To take a similar example, is Pando a single organism with a lot of trunks, which has been alive for tens of thousands of years; or is it a colony of individual trees, each of which has been around a lot less long?
And you can find even more edge cases--- there are stable mats of seagrass that might be 100,000-year-old organisms, if you consider clonal colonies to be individual organisms.
First, of course, what exactly constitutes a single "organism" is a bit controversial, especially with plants, and especially with clonal colonies. But even if you accept clonal colonies as bona-fide organisms, Pando in Utah may or may not be older than Lomatia tasmanica , depending on which age estimates you believe.
Apologies for the rhetorical question, but obviously GPGPU for scientific simulations isn't new. We've had a whole lot on that already. The only possible new thing could be using the Xbox360 for it. But as far as I can tell (confirmed by all the comments I've seen so far), there isn't even anything interesting about that--- this guy just used the Xbox360 because he was already familiar with the programming environment, not because it has any particular advantages over CUDA on a PC.
The Dreamcast is the correct choice!
Because the syst...
The games are cheap
And Sega is a developer who I respect
And arigato
And you can play Sonic
And Sonic loves us all
And Sonic saves animals
And he doesn't care that Tails is gay
That doesn't sound like the kind of society I want to live in. A subpoena is the process by which the police make a request you cannot legally refuse to cooperate with--- subpoena means "under penalty", and a subpoena is a "request" that carries a penalty for noncooperation. Most free societies have some sort of judicial oversight of this process. You sound like you're arguing for any request by the police to be treated as if it were automatically a subpoena?
Isn't falsely attributing a viewpoint to someone else by impersonating them also generally regarded as poor form?
Not in general. On the radio, it's illegal unless the payment is disclosed, but that regulation's under the FCC's power to regulate radio. For general websites, newspapers, books, etc., there's no anti-payola legislation.
It doesn't actually sound like it'll have any impact on the success of the site. They're not proposing something obviously stupid like charging for accounts, or charging to post or read. They're just planning to sell some data-analysis services to companies that want to buy them. Those services might or might not be useful, but I don't see how it'll affect the normal operation of the site.
Oops, I guess I did the reverse of normal Slashdot custom and read the linked article, but not the Slashdot summary. The linked article has a bullet point (#1) that says "Full screen video playback", but doesn't mention YouTube anywhere. I'm guessing the Slashdot summary is wrong, unless the submitter got information on YouTube playback from somewhere other than the linked article?
It says "full screen video playback", not specifically Flash, so I'm guessing it's some other kind of video that can take advantage of hardware decoding--- probably DVD.
Well, there is the ancient common-law doctrine of autrefois acquit (which served as the basis for the US constitutional prohibition on double jeopardy), but it seems to have been recently weakened substantially in the UK.