Heck, even Chernobyl only happened because they turned off all the safties; it was an inherantly safe reactor until they manually fucked it up.
Which kinda disproves your whole point. You just showed that no matter how inherently safe the reactor is, there will always be stupid people making mistakes. And since no amount of research is expected to improve humans anytime soon, nuclear plants cannot be made perfectly safe.
Um no. Don't read that article. I did read it and I see just another piece where someone tries to discredit Moore's film by arguing with the things the film didn't say.
It becomes a common practice nowadays to show someone in a bad light by first making people believe that someone said something he didn't, and then argue that it was a lie (even though nobody said it!).
In fact, I read quite a few of those "Moore's a liar" articles so far, and all the arguments in those articles just fall apart if you actually see the movie yourself and find out that what the movie is saying is not in fact what these articles claim movie is saying.
The power of propaganda is USA is amazing, especially considering how people often don't notice being brainwashed. Who needs censorship when you can just buy yourself an army of journalists.
Okay since you asked I went and reviewed the difinityion. Here is what I found on dictionary.com
------------- n. pl. documentaries
A work, such as a film or television program, presenting political, social, or historical subject matter in a factual and informative manner and often consisting of actual news films or interviews accompanied by narration. --------------
Seems like Moore's movie fits the definition. Definition says nothing about requiring facts to be collected in some unbiased way, it just requires the movie to consist of material based on actual facts/documents which Farenheit does.
The idea behind social networks is that in theory, when everyone participates in a social network, you can easily find people through your connections. But once you have so many networks (and the craze is only starting) then even in theory you can't have all your friends on the same network. At least I know can't possibly be active on all of them.
I think what networks are aspiring to do is unachievable because their scope is so small. We already have our social network, it's called Internet and it is successful because there is only one Internet.
as long as the mass of a planet is small compared to the mass of the Sun (which will always be true for Mars) the orbit of the planet does not depend on its mass, but only on its velosity. So simpy adding material(mass) does not do anything to the orbit.
The only possible impact would be from ships leaving and landing on the planet, because this adds/removes momentum (and hence affects the velosity). But this would be a bigger problem with Earth, since so many ships launch here. People have been looking at this effect, and I think the conclusion is that it's small enough at the moment. So nothing to worry about.
On the left there are abbreviated weekdays written, and they go from Monday to Saturday. Traditionally in Soviet Union everyone worked 6 day per week, and this calendar only shows the working days.
In the last picture in chapter 9, there is this big slogan across the room. In Ukrainian, it reads: "Long live communism - the bright future for the whole mankind!"
Truly, you may never know how the words you say today will be _seen_ tomorrow.
It bothered me then and now that my tax money and my tuition money was being used to educate people who aren't Americans.
Graduate students are cheap labor, your tax money is not going to "educate" them, you pay them to do research, and you pay them a puny amount barely enough to live on. Good deal for the taxpayer if you ask me. It's a known fact that most of the work in sciences is done by grads and postdocs.
Now you will probably understand why in American graduate school it's not unusual to spend 6 or 7 years studying for PhD in some programs. The rest of the world has 3 year schools.
Also after reading this, you probably realized the answer to your original question about why so much support goes to foreign students. Most of the bright americans (with a few notable exceptions) realize that grad. school is NOT a place to go if you want to earn good money and be appreciated. I study in PhD program in Physics at the Univ. of Pennsylvania, and when I was accepted we had 5 american and 6 foreign students. 3 years later, there was only 1 american student left - they dropped out either by choice or because they couldn't keep up with the classes. All foreign students are still in, some have graduated already.
we all know computers with pre-installed Windows cost more. From this article it seems HP will sell laptops with official SUSE on them. If you try to buy SUSE it costs quite a buck actually, even if less than Windows. So I suppose if you want to buy linux laptop because it's cheaper than this HP offering might not be for you.
if I wanted to buy a reliable laptop with Linux on it (or at least no OS) where would I shop for it?
There are plenty of links popping out of Google, but I wouldn't trust most of these places...
To _sell_ their products in Europe, MS opened the offices that are their represantation there. They can effectively be treated as companies based and operating in Europe, even though they are just departments in MS.
It's only fair that they should obey the local laws.
Think of it this way - if you are a worker (selling your labor) in a foreign country, you should still obey that country's laws. And if you park illegally on your neighbour's lawn, you will be fined.
Could this kill the plan before it has a chance to start?
The plan is not just unrealistic, it's stupid; remember that a big chunk of the money that Bush promised to give to space program would come from "redistributing" the money within NASA.
I.e. they will kill all other programs, pour money into space program, add a few billions of their own, and that's it!
Now you are in situation where a) you can't go to Mars because funding is - obviously - not sufficient; b) you can't make progress in any other area because you dismantled all other programs.
See, this really has nothing to do with trillions... even if you look at figures 2 orders of magnitude smaller, the plan breaks down.
In russian, there is this proverbial saying: "Bylo vashe, stalo nashe!" or: "was yours, now ours!"
Re:I stopped worrying and love SCO
on
SCO Aims For The Feds
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Excellent link. When I read this passage from the article:
"Open-source software--available widely through the Internet--has the potential to provide our nation's enemies or potential enemies with computing capabilities that are restricted by U.S. law," McBride said. "A computer expert in North Korea who has a number of personal computers can download the latest version of Linux...and in short order build a virtual supercomputer."
I though that when people write crap like this and are dead serious about it... then well, they are probably long past the point of arguing with. We just have to find a way to not let them do their crazy thing.
Um, if someone forces me to do something (in this case go and serve in the army) I no longer have freedom.
So essentially my country is taking my freedom when I am conscipted.
So maybe instead of shouting slogans you don't understand you should pick up a rifle or two at your friendly local K-Mart and go to war with your governement because it is the real enemy threating your freedom and that enemy is much more likely to succeed in taking your freedom away than some bearded terrorist in Asia.
in practical terms, I am running 2.6.3 now and I use XFS on all my partitions, do I need to upgrade to prevent my disk from possible "bad stuff" happening to it?
What makes me unhappy about science is that it no longer seems to gain understanding of nature, it only gains raw knowlegde.
Let me clarify what I mean by that. As I see it, one of the main goals of science is satisfying our curiousity. The mission of science (or one of the missions to be precise) is to learn about nature so that everyone who is eager to know why things are the way they are can learn and understand.
However, the way the physical science has been progressing lately, the more we "learn" about the universe, the farther we are from our goal. Before 20th century, the scientific knowledge could be explained to anyone, you didn't need any complex formulas, almost any law of physics could be explained in simple terms. People indeed could learn and understand.
Now look at what science has become. In order to understand field theory, or cosmology, students study for 10 years in school, then 4 years in college, then several more years in grad. school and only then they start getting a grasp at what this whole thing is, and start to understand how it all works.
It is practically impossible now for anyone except a very small group of very specialized people to understand the recent theories in physics. We seem to discover new things every day
but noone understands them except a few chosen.
I remember that Einstein used to say in the beginning of the 20th century that in the 21st century special relativity will seem just as obvious and normal to every kid as steam engine was to kids back then. Yet today, I am a graduate student in physics, and I cannot claim to really understand special relativity, I only understand how to use the formulas to predict how things behave.
I think the way things stand now, science is failing one of its most important missions. We no longer understand our universe. All we do is learn how to predict the behaivor of things with greater and greater precision, which is very useful and all, but we are getting further and further from _understanding_ the universe which really is the inpiration of science.
because anyone (even you) can make changes to the encyclopedia and write new articles. Thus there has to exist ONE SINGLE DATABASE where this changes are collected. That is exactly what they need money for.
whoever says scientists are just raking in the money and doing nothing needs a clue.
First off, science budget is only a small fraction of money spent by the government. Secondly, scientists are making just enough money to keep them working. Anyone who has been in the graduate school can tell you about a classic dilemma - stay in academia and earn 30k a year or get an industry job and start with a small wage of 60-70k. The system encourages only the people with real dedication and passion to stay and do science, even knowing that they could be paid twice more for their talent doing a more mundane job.
And think about something else... That SSC which was never built - they closed it because it required like a couple billions more and politicians said "this is too much". That was a project which would have paid off with many many years of good frontier science.
Now compare these couple billions to 87 billions we just allocated for Iraq in one day.
we don't study things that have been smashed into pieces. Actually, in an accelerator, when electrons or protons collide, we _create_ many different particles and study them.
We don't study the electrons or the protons any more - they are not as interesting as the particles that can be produced by annihilating them.
And to be even more precise, the particles we study are not even pieces of the original particles, they simply emerge out of the free energy released in the collision, and most often have nothing whatsoever to do with the original particles.
This might be a good idea... or might be not. I personally don't think I am qualified to say whether it is or not. In any case, if this campaign is to happen, it has to be organized by someone with reputation, someone whose name people would trust. And if such campaign is to happen, someone should _first_ consult a lawyer on (a) whether it's legally correct to go to small claims court with this (b) if it will really help to solve the legal mess over Linux and SCO.
And most importantly of all, does the community even agree on whether we want SCO to shut up or not? There is a good argument for not making SCO shut up - then the case goes to court where IBM (and GPL) can win it - that would be a great thing for GPL.
So in short, if this campaign is to be organized, it has to happen with someone like EFF supporting and approving it. Or at least with some of the respected people in Linux community saying this will actually help the cause.
Otherwise these guerilla actions may simply not help anyone.
I remember a story on slashdot a while ago about XFS support in the development version of the kernel. I thought it would make it into 2.4.21. Does anyone know why this isn't in yet?
I agree in general, 7 CDs is just way too much, and shouldn't be
downloaded.
However, having a CD or two with the.deb packages that are most
likely to be used would be very nice - because connection isn't something you can always rely on, because it's less trouble to
download stuff once than at 5 different points, and because you
may always need these.debs later for isntalling on the other machine or just reintstalling the system (what if you break something or fail to install at a later stage and want a clean start over?)
And that is one of the big weaknesses of Debian - you don't have that option of downloading a CD with a bunch of most
often used packages. You have to go with either full network
install, or buy all 7 CDs. I imagine that's a big deterrent to many people out there who may want to try out this great distribution otherwise.
And by the way, if you want to know how much software can fit on one CD, look at the list packages in Knoppix 3.2. It's really amazing - it has practically everything any normal user would ever need on a Linux box. With a CD filled with.deb packages like that, no user will find himself downloading more than a handful of files by http apt-get.
One good step in that direction I saw recently is Bonzai Linux - it's a 180M CD image of Debian-based distribution that has KDE 3.1.2 and some other usefull stuff - all in 180m iso image!
And it is great at hardware autoconfiguration.
However, Bonzai isn't Debian per se, whereas I would like to see similar effort for the official Debian...
Slashdot Mirror
Heck, even Chernobyl only happened because they turned off all the safties; it was an inherantly safe reactor until they manually fucked it up.
Which kinda disproves your whole point. You just showed that no matter how inherently safe the reactor is, there will always be stupid people making mistakes.
And since no amount of research is expected to improve humans anytime soon, nuclear plants cannot be made perfectly safe.
Um no. Don't read that article. I did read it and I see just another piece where someone tries to discredit Moore's film by arguing with the things the film didn't say.
It becomes a common practice nowadays to show someone in a bad light by first making people believe that someone said something he didn't, and then argue that it was a lie (even though nobody said it!).
In fact, I read quite a few of those "Moore's a liar" articles so far, and all the arguments in those articles just fall apart if you actually see the movie yourself and find out that what the movie is saying is not in fact what these articles claim movie is saying.
The power of propaganda is USA is amazing, especially considering how people often don't notice being brainwashed. Who needs censorship when you can just buy yourself an army of journalists.
Okay since you asked I went and reviewed the difinityion. Here is what I found on dictionary.com
-------------
n. pl. documentaries
A work, such as a film or television program, presenting political, social, or historical subject matter in a factual and informative manner and often consisting of actual news films or interviews accompanied by narration.
--------------
Seems like Moore's movie fits the definition. Definition says nothing about requiring facts to be collected in some unbiased way, it just requires the movie to consist of material based on actual facts/documents which Farenheit does.
The idea behind social networks is that in theory, when everyone participates in a social network, you can easily find people through your connections.
But once you have so many networks (and the craze is only starting) then even in theory you can't have all your friends on the same network.
At least I know can't possibly be active on all of them.
I think what networks are aspiring to do is unachievable because their scope is so small. We already have our social network, it's called Internet and it is successful because there is only one Internet.
as long as the mass of a planet is small compared to the mass of the Sun (which will always be true for Mars) the orbit of the planet does not depend on its mass, but only on its velosity.
So simpy adding material(mass) does not do anything to the orbit.
The only possible impact would be from ships leaving and landing on the planet, because this adds/removes momentum (and hence affects the velosity). But this would be a bigger problem with Earth, since so many ships launch here. People have been looking at this effect, and I think the conclusion is that it's small enough at the moment. So nothing to worry about.
On the left there are abbreviated weekdays written, and they go from Monday to Saturday. Traditionally in Soviet Union everyone worked 6 day per week, and this calendar only shows the working days.
In the last picture in chapter 9, there is this big slogan across the room. In Ukrainian, it reads:
"Long live communism - the bright future for the whole mankind!"
Truly, you may never know how the words you say today will be _seen_ tomorrow.
It bothered me then and now that my tax money and my tuition money was being used to educate people who aren't Americans.
Graduate students are cheap labor, your tax money is not going to "educate" them, you pay them to do research, and you pay them a puny amount barely enough to live on. Good deal for the taxpayer if you ask me. It's a known fact that most of the work in sciences is done by grads and postdocs. Now you will probably understand why in American graduate school it's not unusual to spend 6 or 7 years studying for PhD in some programs. The rest of the world has 3 year schools.
Also after reading this, you probably realized the answer to your original question about why so much support goes to foreign students. Most of the bright americans (with a few notable exceptions) realize that grad. school is NOT a place to go if you want to earn good money and be appreciated. I study in PhD program in Physics at the Univ. of Pennsylvania, and when I was accepted we had 5 american and 6 foreign students. 3 years later, there was only 1 american student left - they dropped out either by choice or because they couldn't keep up with the classes. All foreign students are still in, some have graduated already.
we all know computers with pre-installed Windows cost more. From this article it seems HP will sell laptops with official SUSE on them. If you try to buy SUSE it costs quite a buck actually, even if less than Windows.
So I suppose if you want to buy linux laptop because it's cheaper than this HP offering might not be for you.
Damn, Microsoft is in that list! MS payed money to get Bush elected! :)
I knew it!
if I wanted to buy a reliable laptop with Linux on it (or at least no OS) where would I shop for it?
There are plenty of links popping out of Google, but I wouldn't trust most of these places...
It's only fair that they should obey the local laws.
Think of it this way - if you are a worker (selling your labor) in a foreign country, you should still obey that country's laws. And if you park illegally on your neighbour's lawn, you will be fined.
Could this kill the plan before it has a chance to start?
The plan is not just unrealistic, it's stupid; remember that a big chunk of the money that Bush promised to give to space program would come from "redistributing" the money within NASA.
I.e. they will kill all other programs, pour money into space program, add a few billions of their own, and that's it!
Now you are in situation where a) you can't go to Mars because funding is - obviously - not sufficient; b) you can't make progress in any other area because you dismantled all other programs.
See, this really has nothing to do with trillions... even if you look at figures 2 orders of magnitude smaller, the plan breaks down.
In russian, there is this proverbial saying: "Bylo vashe, stalo nashe!" or: "was yours, now ours!"
"Open-source software--available widely through the Internet--has the potential to provide our nation's enemies or potential enemies with computing capabilities that are restricted by U.S. law," McBride said. "A computer expert in North Korea who has a number of personal computers can download the latest version of Linux...and in short order build a virtual supercomputer."
I though that when people write crap like this and are dead serious about it... then well, they are probably long past the point of arguing with. We just have to find a way to not let them do their crazy thing.
So essentially my country is taking my freedom when I am conscipted.
So maybe instead of shouting slogans you don't understand you should pick up a rifle or two at your friendly local K-Mart and go to war with your governement because it is the real enemy threating your freedom and that enemy is much more likely to succeed in taking your freedom away than some bearded terrorist in Asia.
um, does it mean there were dangerous bugs?
in practical terms, I am running 2.6.3 now and I use XFS on all my partitions, do I need to upgrade to prevent my disk from possible "bad stuff" happening to it?
Let me clarify what I mean by that. As I see it, one of the main goals of science is satisfying our curiousity. The mission of science (or one of the missions to be precise) is to learn about nature so that everyone who is eager to know why things are the way they are can learn and understand.
However, the way the physical science has been progressing lately, the more we "learn" about the universe, the farther we are from our goal. Before 20th century, the scientific knowledge could be explained to anyone, you didn't need any complex formulas, almost any law of physics could be explained in simple terms. People indeed could learn and understand.
Now look at what science has become. In order to understand field theory, or cosmology, students study for 10 years in school, then 4 years in college, then several more years in grad. school and only then they start getting a grasp at what this whole thing is, and start to understand how it all works.
It is practically impossible now for anyone except a very small group of very specialized people to understand the recent theories in physics. We seem to discover new things every day but noone understands them except a few chosen.
I remember that Einstein used to say in the beginning of the 20th century that in the 21st century special relativity will seem just as obvious and normal to every kid as steam engine was to kids back then. Yet today, I am a graduate student in physics, and I cannot claim to really understand special relativity, I only understand how to use the formulas to predict how things behave.
I think the way things stand now, science is failing one of its most important missions. We no longer understand our universe. All we do is learn how to predict the behaivor of things with greater and greater precision, which is very useful and all, but we are getting further and further from _understanding_ the universe which really is the inpiration of science.
because anyone (even you) can make changes to the encyclopedia and write new articles. Thus there has to exist ONE SINGLE DATABASE where this changes are collected. That is exactly what they need money for.
um, wasn't the hacking of linux kernel bitkeeper servers :)
the second strike?
whoever says scientists are just raking in the money and doing nothing needs a clue.
First off, science budget is only a small fraction of money spent by the government. Secondly, scientists are making just enough money to keep them working. Anyone who has been in the graduate school can tell you about a classic dilemma - stay in academia and earn 30k a year or get an industry job and start with a small wage of 60-70k.
The system encourages only the people with real dedication and passion to stay and do science, even knowing that they could be paid twice more for their talent doing a more mundane job.
And think about something else... That SSC which was never built - they closed it because it required like a couple billions more and politicians said "this is too much". That was a project which would have paid off with many many years of good frontier science.
Now compare these couple billions to 87 billions we just allocated for Iraq in one day.
we don't study things that have been smashed into pieces.
Actually, in an accelerator, when electrons or protons collide,
we _create_ many different particles and study them.
We don't study the electrons or the protons any more - they are not as interesting as the particles that can be produced by annihilating them.
And to be even more precise, the particles we study are not
even pieces of the original particles, they simply emerge out
of the free energy released in the collision, and most often have nothing whatsoever to do with the original particles.
This might be a good idea... or might be not.
I personally don't think I am qualified to say whether it is or not.
In any case, if this campaign is to happen, it has to be organized by someone with reputation, someone whose name people would trust.
And if such campaign is to happen, someone should _first_ consult a lawyer on (a) whether it's legally correct to go to small claims
court with this (b) if it will really help to solve the legal mess over Linux and SCO.
And most importantly of all, does the community even agree on whether we want SCO to shut up or not? There is a good argument for not making SCO shut up - then the case goes to court where IBM (and GPL) can win it - that would be a great thing for GPL.
So in short, if this campaign is to be organized, it has to happen with someone like EFF supporting and approving it.
Or at least with some of the respected people in Linux community saying this will actually help the cause.
Otherwise these guerilla actions may simply not help anyone.
I remember a story on slashdot a while ago about XFS support
in the development version of the kernel. I thought it would make it into 2.4.21.
Does anyone know why this isn't in yet?
However, having a CD or two with the
And that is one of the big weaknesses of Debian - you don't have that option of downloading a CD with a bunch of most often used packages. You have to go with either full network install, or buy all 7 CDs. I imagine that's a big deterrent to many people out there who may want to try out this great distribution otherwise. And by the way, if you want to know how much software can fit on one CD, look at the list packages in Knoppix 3.2. It's really amazing - it has practically everything any normal user would ever need on a Linux box. With a CD filled with .deb packages like that, no user will find himself downloading more than a handful of files by http apt-get.
One good step in that direction I saw recently is Bonzai Linux - it's a 180M CD image of Debian-based distribution that has KDE 3.1.2 and some other usefull stuff - all in 180m iso image!
And it is great at hardware autoconfiguration.
However, Bonzai isn't Debian per se, whereas I would like to see similar effort for the official Debian...