I read somewhere that knots are an artifact of having 3 dimensions. They're obviously not (heh) possible in two, and apparently if a 4th dimension is thrown into the mix there's still no way to tie a 4D knot. I thought it was kind of neat, though I have no way of knowing if it's true.
Don't think of 3D objects as being "versions" of 2D counterparts. If you only look at 2 dimensions, any number of things could result in the projection of a circle: a sphere as you mentioned, which will always project a circle in 2D, but also a cylinder, an oblate or prolate spheroid (I had to look those terms up--basically a Skittle shape and a football shape) which will only project circles when oriented certain ways. A torus will project two concentric circles if it is bisected like a bagel, and it will project two circles separated by some distance if it is bisected with 90 degrees rotation from that, like a donut half dunked in coffee.
If you think about 2D as "slices of 3D objects," then you don't need to worry about the missing dimension when they are manipulated in 3D: it's there, it's just that 2D projections can't show it.
My belief is that if there is a 4th dimension as conceived in the game, then every 3D object already has a 4D component that we aren't able to perceive, much in the same way that a tiny 2D person would see an upside-down coffee cup placed over him as an impassable ring (a 2D "wall") suddenly appearing. I think the game also takes this perspective--notices that in the 4D shift, the "ring" being moved has a shadow sticking out to the left, presumably its 4D component made visible.
No, I really don't. Twitter is a social network, meaning that those thousand tweets are only going to count for something if they successfully convince lots of people that they're really Americans beforehand--a daunting task, since most Twitter users already know the people they follow. On top of that, the US military has better sources of information than Twitter about any invasions of US soil. Nor will the military announce its movements over Twitter.
Homosexuality is only wrong in an historical socio cultural specific context. For example, while some group at some point of history considered it "neutral" some other condemned it. Furthermore from the biological and psychological point of view, as far as I udnerstand , you mostly DO NOT CHOSE your sexuality.
These points can be equally applied to pedophilia, and the first one to incest and probably beastiality as well. Will you be so quick to condemn our society's widespread disapproval of those practices?
This is not to equate homosexuality with the others--they're all quite different--except in the sense that it is not the norm. I think out of the ones above, homosexuality is the most deserving of legitimate status since it is generally practiced between consenting adults. This is a far stronger argument than "it's cultural!" and "you can't choose!" because those arguments fail when it comes to other sexual practices.
So China DDOSes all servers, making them unavailable for users. POTUS flips kill switch, making all servers unavailable for users... Isn't that a little redundant?
It might be awesome that if China was to attack the USA (just an extremely unlikely situation ofcourse), the US president could shut down all communication?...It might also be awesome that he can order it any time he wants without having to go through time consuming practices...
What a stunning defense of the idea. These powers should be granted to POTUS because "it might be awesome."
I fail to see why turning off Internet if China invaded would be at all helpful. If anything, in recent years we've seen that the Internet is instrumental in getting out important information about what's going on during critical situations--tweets from Iran and Haiti come to mind. And the "time consuming practices" just means "congressional approval," which isn't all that time-consuming and is a check against presidential overreaching.
Yes! And there should be several rounds of competition and public voting! The competitors must complete several challenges during each round, such as digging for prior art to disqualify their rivals and giving speeches to defend their claim to the Top 10. The whole thing should be shown on C-SPAN and hosted by a three-judge panel: a patent lawyer, an inventor, and Paula Abdul.
These days, no one trusts anything printed over a decade ago, mainly because that's the point where the internet really started to take root in our culture. For many of us, if content isn't constantly updated as more information becomes available, the source of the content loses it's credibility.
This is a cultural failing. The constant updates really only affect the sciences, and even then the new information usually doesn't contradict what has already been written. Your "short chunks at high speeds" result in a superficial understanding of things, whereas a book lets you get closer to grokking a subject even if some of the finer details have changed--once you have the general shape of the thing, you can look for new information and understand the ramifications it has.
Libraries will need to make changes, but adapting to our short-sighted addiction to the new to the detriment of the old is not one of them.
And now that we have the internet, such that I or anybody else can download literally millions of free books (or just read wikipedia), the government-funded libraries are even less necessary.
You do realize that not all books are alike, yes? Even if there are three million free books available online, that's only a sixth of the books estimated to exist worldwide. And an in-depth book is better than Wikipedia for anything but the most cursory look at a topic. There's a reason Wikipedia requires sources, and there's a reason that most of those sources are books--many of which, I might add, you can't find on Gutenberg Project or Amazon. Libraries may indeed outlive their usefulness, but it hasn't happened yet.
Seconded. I have and use the old M-Audio Firewire Solo for all of my audio input and I've never had a problem with it, except for the whole pain in the ass "do not hot swap firewire devices" nonsense, which is the fault of the spec and not the device. The drivers are fine, the sound quality is high, and the gear is solid.
I definitely recommend M-Audio gear. In addition to the FW Solo I have two keyboard controllers and some lowly foot pedals by M-Audio, and they all work flawlessly. Their gear is classified as prosumer solely because they manage to keep costs low enough for mere mortals to purchase it.
Though on other side, the question all Americans should be asking themselves is: do private insurers have better resume???
They're not the only option. Ideally, if people want government-managed healthcare it should be handled at the state level. I heard that Maryland actually has something like this implemented.
On top of that, meaningful reforms can be made piecemeal instead of in some omnibus legislation full of as much bad as good. It shouldn't be hard to pass a bill mandating, for example, that pre-existing conditions can't be a factor in denial of insurance. There isn't a need for the federal government to step in and take over everything.
Grammar nazi comments are a good thing. Wait--hear me out.
Seven percent of every story's comments are grammar nazi posts. That means 14 non-nazi comments exist for every grammar nazi post. Between three and eight of those comments are worthwhile at +3 or higher (this portion varies greatly with the story; the formula to calculate the suitability index is to complex to get into here).
So by posting the apparently useless comment above, Stele actually enabled three more worthwhile comments (SI for politics is 5, but is heavily mitigated by a GWB/BHO comparison right in the headline--what were they thinking?). I've gone and used up one of them for a +5, Funny but I left ample opportunity for another grammar nazi to open up some more slots.
Exactly. The one thing labels do right is exposure. They do it so well that mediocre bands can be extremely popular. It would be nice to see a service like Pandora for indie musicians. Pandora does a good job of finding artists who fit your taste, but the artist still must already have enough of a following to be signed somewhere.
My interest is more than academic, as I have about a dozen songs languishing unfinished on my hard drive that I would finish in a week given a chance at real exposure.
This mirrors my thinking. I understand the *NIX way of doing things, and it makes good sense for that breed of system--it's even doable on OSX as RAMMS+EIN pointed out, provided your package manager works. I tried either DarwinPorts or Fink a while back, I don't recall which, and couldn't get whatever package I was instructed to get even though I was following the instructions exactly, which goes back to one of my original points.
As you say, OSX puts everything in an app bundle. Windows has the same ability: DLLs can be called from the same folder containing the.exe file. I've occasionally seen open source projects that do this. IMO the space saved by requiring a separate resource install--usually well under 50MB, often under 5MB--is not worth the hassle of the easter egg hunt of tracking them all down. Just throw 'em all in there by default and let savvy users delete what they don't need, or make the extra effort to maintain a "full" package with everything and a "slim" package without external libraries. That shouldn't be too hard to set up with the advanced build tools around today.
And to reiterate, the inconvenience becomes an aggravation only when stuff doesn't work. Documentation is important, and if your installation process is pretty involved, your documentation should match it.
The thing that keeps me away from using many open source projects is the installation process. This was true when I used Windows and remains true since I switched to OS X. Far too many cool-sounding projects require me to go to 3 or 4 different sites, find the correct libraries for my platform, install them, then download the project I'm actually interested in and hope it finds them or even go through the hassle of compiling it myself.
For people heavily into system management this isn't a big deal, but my focus is on actually using the product, and I want the same instant gratification I get when I buy commercial software--double-click and go. If an installer for my platform isn't available it's no dealbreaker, but please make sure that your documentation on the installation process is good. More than once I have gotten 3/4 of the way through the process I mentioned above only to have something fail due to a missing library or whatever after carefully following the instructions outlined by the project's site. Other times, the "instructions" consist of "you will need to get X, Y, and Z before compiling this. Here's the source," with nothing else to tell you what goes where or how to build it.
End users should not be doing the packaging work of the project developers for them. That doesn't fly in a commercial environment, which is what free software is competing against. If you want more users, make sure they can easily get your software running on their system.
I realize this submission asked about contributors, but the overwhelming lack of focus given to the installation process makes me think that it's an aspect being avoided, or at least poorly handled, by the majority of developers.
That's right; one of the usability tests was boot-to-use time. I'm sure it was far from the most important, and there are changes in the way computers are used now that make it almost obsolete. For instance, my MacBook Pro might take over a minute from cold boot to an open terminal window, but I reboot it only rarely. Most of the time I just close the lid and let it sleep, so wake-to-use time is under 5 seconds; less if I already had a terminal window open.
The answer to the grandparent's question is, "yes, absolutely."
Slashdot Mirror
I read somewhere that knots are an artifact of having 3 dimensions. They're obviously not (heh) possible in two, and apparently if a 4th dimension is thrown into the mix there's still no way to tie a 4D knot. I thought it was kind of neat, though I have no way of knowing if it's true.
Don't think of 3D objects as being "versions" of 2D counterparts. If you only look at 2 dimensions, any number of things could result in the projection of a circle: a sphere as you mentioned, which will always project a circle in 2D, but also a cylinder, an oblate or prolate spheroid (I had to look those terms up--basically a Skittle shape and a football shape) which will only project circles when oriented certain ways. A torus will project two concentric circles if it is bisected like a bagel, and it will project two circles separated by some distance if it is bisected with 90 degrees rotation from that, like a donut half dunked in coffee.
If you think about 2D as "slices of 3D objects," then you don't need to worry about the missing dimension when they are manipulated in 3D: it's there, it's just that 2D projections can't show it.
My belief is that if there is a 4th dimension as conceived in the game, then every 3D object already has a 4D component that we aren't able to perceive, much in the same way that a tiny 2D person would see an upside-down coffee cup placed over him as an impassable ring (a 2D "wall") suddenly appearing. I think the game also takes this perspective--notices that in the 4D shift, the "ring" being moved has a shadow sticking out to the left, presumably its 4D component made visible.
If you had the capability to read the complete post, you would see that that's pretty much what I wrote. You're really on a hair-trigger, aren't you?
You get the point...
No, I really don't. Twitter is a social network, meaning that those thousand tweets are only going to count for something if they successfully convince lots of people that they're really Americans beforehand--a daunting task, since most Twitter users already know the people they follow. On top of that, the US military has better sources of information than Twitter about any invasions of US soil. Nor will the military announce its movements over Twitter.
Care to try again?
Homosexuality is only wrong in an historical socio cultural specific context. For example, while some group at some point of history considered it "neutral" some other condemned it. Furthermore from the biological and psychological point of view, as far as I udnerstand , you mostly DO NOT CHOSE your sexuality.
These points can be equally applied to pedophilia, and the first one to incest and probably beastiality as well. Will you be so quick to condemn our society's widespread disapproval of those practices?
This is not to equate homosexuality with the others--they're all quite different--except in the sense that it is not the norm. I think out of the ones above, homosexuality is the most deserving of legitimate status since it is generally practiced between consenting adults. This is a far stronger argument than "it's cultural!" and "you can't choose!" because those arguments fail when it comes to other sexual practices.
So China DDOSes all servers, making them unavailable for users.
POTUS flips kill switch, making all servers unavailable for users...
Isn't that a little redundant?
That question can't be answered for at least 10 years, which is when the effects of all the stuff Obama's been pushing will become apparent.
It might be awesome that if China was to attack the USA (just an extremely unlikely situation ofcourse), the US president could shut down all communication?...It might also be awesome that he can order it any time he wants without having to go through time consuming practices...
What a stunning defense of the idea. These powers should be granted to POTUS because "it might be awesome."
I fail to see why turning off Internet if China invaded would be at all helpful. If anything, in recent years we've seen that the Internet is instrumental in getting out important information about what's going on during critical situations--tweets from Iran and Haiti come to mind. And the "time consuming practices" just means "congressional approval," which isn't all that time-consuming and is a check against presidential overreaching.
Hmm, so if I'm a Platonist, then...everything already exists in Forms, thus everything is discovered, never invented, thus...no patents?
Yes! And there should be several rounds of competition and public voting! The competitors must complete several challenges during each round, such as digging for prior art to disqualify their rivals and giving speeches to defend their claim to the Top 10. The whole thing should be shown on C-SPAN and hosted by a three-judge panel: a patent lawyer, an inventor, and Paula Abdul.
Not in the headline. They already had to drop the "u" in "you" for length.
These days, no one trusts anything printed over a decade ago, mainly because that's the point where the internet really started to take root in our culture. For many of us, if content isn't constantly updated as more information becomes available, the source of the content loses it's credibility.
This is a cultural failing. The constant updates really only affect the sciences, and even then the new information usually doesn't contradict what has already been written. Your "short chunks at high speeds" result in a superficial understanding of things, whereas a book lets you get closer to grokking a subject even if some of the finer details have changed--once you have the general shape of the thing, you can look for new information and understand the ramifications it has.
Libraries will need to make changes, but adapting to our short-sighted addiction to the new to the detriment of the old is not one of them.
And now that we have the internet, such that I or anybody else can download literally millions of free books (or just read wikipedia), the government-funded libraries are even less necessary.
You do realize that not all books are alike, yes? Even if there are three million free books available online, that's only a sixth of the books estimated to exist worldwide. And an in-depth book is better than Wikipedia for anything but the most cursory look at a topic. There's a reason Wikipedia requires sources, and there's a reason that most of those sources are books--many of which, I might add, you can't find on Gutenberg Project or Amazon. Libraries may indeed outlive their usefulness, but it hasn't happened yet.
"Government-funded" is a separate issue.
Seconded. I have and use the old M-Audio Firewire Solo for all of my audio input and I've never had a problem with it, except for the whole pain in the ass "do not hot swap firewire devices" nonsense, which is the fault of the spec and not the device. The drivers are fine, the sound quality is high, and the gear is solid.
I definitely recommend M-Audio gear. In addition to the FW Solo I have two keyboard controllers and some lowly foot pedals by M-Audio, and they all work flawlessly. Their gear is classified as prosumer solely because they manage to keep costs low enough for mere mortals to purchase it.
Though on other side, the question all Americans should be asking themselves is: do private insurers have better resume???
They're not the only option. Ideally, if people want government-managed healthcare it should be handled at the state level. I heard that Maryland actually has something like this implemented.
On top of that, meaningful reforms can be made piecemeal instead of in some omnibus legislation full of as much bad as good. It shouldn't be hard to pass a bill mandating, for example, that pre-existing conditions can't be a factor in denial of insurance. There isn't a need for the federal government to step in and take over everything.
I think you misunderstand the meaning of "double-slit experiment."
Japan, probably.
Grammar nazi comments are a good thing. Wait--hear me out.
Seven percent of every story's comments are grammar nazi posts. That means 14 non-nazi comments exist for every grammar nazi post. Between three and eight of those comments are worthwhile at +3 or higher (this portion varies greatly with the story; the formula to calculate the suitability index is to complex to get into here).
So by posting the apparently useless comment above, Stele actually enabled three more worthwhile comments (SI for politics is 5, but is heavily mitigated by a GWB/BHO comparison right in the headline--what were they thinking?). I've gone and used up one of them for a +5, Funny but I left ample opportunity for another grammar nazi to open up some more slots.
HTH.
Exactly. The one thing labels do right is exposure. They do it so well that mediocre bands can be extremely popular. It would be nice to see a service like Pandora for indie musicians. Pandora does a good job of finding artists who fit your taste, but the artist still must already have enough of a following to be signed somewhere.
My interest is more than academic, as I have about a dozen songs languishing unfinished on my hard drive that I would finish in a week given a chance at real exposure.
This mirrors my thinking. I understand the *NIX way of doing things, and it makes good sense for that breed of system--it's even doable on OSX as RAMMS+EIN pointed out, provided your package manager works. I tried either DarwinPorts or Fink a while back, I don't recall which, and couldn't get whatever package I was instructed to get even though I was following the instructions exactly, which goes back to one of my original points.
As you say, OSX puts everything in an app bundle. Windows has the same ability: DLLs can be called from the same folder containing the .exe file. I've occasionally seen open source projects that do this. IMO the space saved by requiring a separate resource install--usually well under 50MB, often under 5MB--is not worth the hassle of the easter egg hunt of tracking them all down. Just throw 'em all in there by default and let savvy users delete what they don't need, or make the extra effort to maintain a "full" package with everything and a "slim" package without external libraries. That shouldn't be too hard to set up with the advanced build tools around today.
And to reiterate, the inconvenience becomes an aggravation only when stuff doesn't work. Documentation is important, and if your installation process is pretty involved, your documentation should match it.
The thing that keeps me away from using many open source projects is the installation process. This was true when I used Windows and remains true since I switched to OS X. Far too many cool-sounding projects require me to go to 3 or 4 different sites, find the correct libraries for my platform, install them, then download the project I'm actually interested in and hope it finds them or even go through the hassle of compiling it myself.
For people heavily into system management this isn't a big deal, but my focus is on actually using the product, and I want the same instant gratification I get when I buy commercial software--double-click and go. If an installer for my platform isn't available it's no dealbreaker, but please make sure that your documentation on the installation process is good. More than once I have gotten 3/4 of the way through the process I mentioned above only to have something fail due to a missing library or whatever after carefully following the instructions outlined by the project's site. Other times, the "instructions" consist of "you will need to get X, Y, and Z before compiling this. Here's the source," with nothing else to tell you what goes where or how to build it.
End users should not be doing the packaging work of the project developers for them. That doesn't fly in a commercial environment, which is what free software is competing against. If you want more users, make sure they can easily get your software running on their system.
I realize this submission asked about contributors, but the overwhelming lack of focus given to the installation process makes me think that it's an aspect being avoided, or at least poorly handled, by the majority of developers.
Hah! I love the closing line in the image you linked: "Treatment patients can live with!"
Setting the bar kinda low now, aren't we?
That's right; one of the usability tests was boot-to-use time. I'm sure it was far from the most important, and there are changes in the way computers are used now that make it almost obsolete. For instance, my MacBook Pro might take over a minute from cold boot to an open terminal window, but I reboot it only rarely. Most of the time I just close the lid and let it sleep, so wake-to-use time is under 5 seconds; less if I already had a terminal window open.
The answer to the grandparent's question is, "yes, absolutely."
Blinkenlights?
I could have sworn that Shampoo had him beat...or are we only considering successful inventions?