If we only funded research that could be justified as "useful" the world would be a much more boring place.
Unfortunately, this is pretty much how the current scientific funding systems work. Mainly because grant funding is administered by small-minded fools in government, who haven't the faintest grasp of the truth of your statement.
Example: Two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. If the sheep votes, he is implicitly supporting that voting system and cannot complain when the carving knives come out.
Um... you've made the mistake of assuming in advance how the participants are going to vote. The best recourse for the sheep would be to not only vote, but to try to persuade one of the wolves to vote similarly.
Your argument essentially boils down to the following: The majority is always wrong, there's nothing I can do about it, therefore I'll not vote and give the majority even more of an apparent mandate to do the wrong thing. Hopefully you can see the flaw in this reasoning!
The only way to make your voice heard in this world is to speak up. You think government is corrupt? Well, go out and try to do something about it! Because if the system is corrupt, the more people who give up like you've done, the more corrupt the system will become.
Democracy is a tenuous, precious thing -- something that is easily lost. And the US's grip on democracy is more feeble than most: non-compulsory voting on a work day isn't the best way to ensure high voter turnouts! So don't give up, get out there and make your voice heard.
And yet it still sucks. Why on earth network manager insists on protecting wireless network keys in the user's gnome keyring database, I have no idea (if a cracker can read your files, the auth password on your network is going to be the very least of your worries). The end result is a request for gnome keyring authorisation every time you resume from suspend. There's a crazy work-around in 0.7 that involves publishing the network keys system-wide to work around this... but that runs into problems with my network, which uses a hidden SSID.
Wicd happily eschews Gnome Keyring, copes with hidden SSIDs and works much better in my hands (and is thankfully part of the Intrepid repositories...)
OOC, have you tried more recently than a year ago? The X.org ATI drivers have improved enormously in this time, and crashes (for me at least) are now a thing of the past.
Of course, if you didn't enable desktop effects (i.e. used a 2D WM like metacity rather than compiz fusion) you wouldn't get any crashes at all... (this is exactly what I used to do before upgrading)
For data analysis tasks, I tend to use R, which is both far more interactive than python, has much better graphing solutions than python or excel,and supports more statistical analysis methodologies than pretty much anything else. I can prototype and figure out a methodology in R (and provide provable results) long before I get to start running my python script.
I'll second that. R is a life-saver, providing a world-class statistical analysis software package for free.
Mind you, Excel (or OpenOffice Calc in my case) is a good tool for laying out your raw data, before making up the R data tables. (And if all you ever need to do is a t-test, a spreadsheet is a perfectly acceptable solution.)
Re:Is it ok to keep kids off the internet these da
on
Good Email For Kids?
·
· Score: 1
I will set up a laptop just for them, with their kid games and such.
It will mean a lot of work, but it will avoid more problems than it causes.
Just to check: you do realise that this simply means that they'll view pr0n on their friends computers instead?
Personally, I would have thought that education about the evils of the net would be better than banning your child from using it (and thus making it more attractive in their eyes). I'd explain about spam (and teach them to laugh at the ways spammers play on the feeble-minded), explain about chat rooms (and how the girl you're talking to might not necessarily be a girl). And when they reach puberty, explain about pr0n sites, and about hidden costs and addiction.
They're going to find out anyway. Your kids are going to read spam and surf for pr0n, whether or not you prohibit them. Forbidding something only ever makes it more attractive, after all. The real question is: do you want them to learn about the dangers and how to avoid them, at the same time? Or would you rather that they blindly stumble into all the traps set for the inexperienced?
Another words there is a another option that gives you instant on and protects against dead batteries on Linux. Apple computers do a version of this by default.
Of course, you're assuming that your BIOS's implementation of S3 works with linux. Mine never has.
As for the poster's original question, if it's really that important I'd recommend compiling your own minimalist kernel, and writing your own boot scripts. Years ago, I got Crux linux to boot to a login prompt in 15 seconds from power on, using an old P120 laptop. On today's hardware, you should be able to start linux in a few seconds with your own custom kernel.
(Remember: most of the sh*t in the boot scripts included in distros is not needed for your own configuration. You want fast, just re-write them to suit your own hardware. It's simple and easy to do. Crux is a pretty good starter system, if you want to do this.)
Can't we find something better to squabble endlessly about? Like why Firefox's spell checker didn't complain about the word "masturbatory"?
It's not a squabble, it's just a distinction. And it's interesting because Google's Chrome is free as in speech, but it's been wrapped up in a implementation of wine where the source code is hidden.
Hmmm... it's not really begging the question, since there was nothing else in the/. story based on the premise that Gecko was outdated or bloated -- that statement just came out of nowhere at the end. What the article provides is at best an ad populum fallacy (X is popular, therefore X is better than Y).
And anyway, if you read TFA, you'll see that the article strongly praises and supports Gecko, concluding with (my emphasis):
From a technical perspective, Gecko is now very solid and no longer lags behind WebKit. A testament to the rate at which Gecko has been improving is its newfound viability in the mobile space, where it was practically considered a nonstarter not too long ago. Mozilla clearly has the resources, developer expertise, and community support to take Gecko anywhere that WebKit can go.
All of which means that (a) nobody on/. RTFAs (who knew?) and (b) the guy who wrote this story makes George W. Bush look like an intellectual.
This is illogical! It dillutes the meaning of a tab. And it makes it difficult for normal computer users to understand the concept of a tab.
But perhaps the trade-off is that the tab-bar is isolated from the rest of the UI elements, as well as closer to the page content, and is therefore easier to use.
In any case, I'm yet to meet someone who's looked at the tab-bar and screamed, "But it's illogical! I can't understand it!". Even IE now has tabs, and as we all know, IE is a browser for the lowest common denominator.
With respect to text or data entered into and stored by publicly-accessible site features such as forums, comments and bug trackers ("SourceForge Public Content"), the submitting user retains ownership of such SourceForge Public Content; with respect to publicly-available statistical content which is generated by the site to monitor and display content activity, such content is owned by SourceForge. In each such case, the submitting user grants SourceForge the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the terms of any applicable license
But if the user grants SF.net the license to publish their comments, doesn't that mean that the decision to publish the comments on the comments page is now SF.net's, rather than the user's? And in which case, wouldn't that make SF.net liable for any offensive or libellous comment published, since they're effectively the ones who have chosen to publish it?
I've actually known people remove their messages from forums and chat groups before, and normally it's a fairly simple process. This is the first instance I've heard of that request being denied, and I'm rather lost in understanding the reasons behind it.
Every company (at least in the USA) is at-will employment. Every company in the USA can let you go without reason and without notice. They can't fire you because you're a certain ethnicity or gender, etc., but other than a (very few) protectected category, any other reason is fair game. "We decided that employees may no longer have tattoos - oh you have some? You're fired." "I just don't like you any more." "Oh, you like the Rolling Stones? Sorry, I'm a Beatles man - there's the door."
If that's really the case, I'm so glad I decided not to work there...
Seriously, man, that sucks balls. Most other first world countries have decent unfair dismissal laws, not to mention governments and unions that stand up for the rights of workers.
I wasn't asking in regard to the child-care stuff (which I couldn't care less about) -- I was asking because you said that your employer "can let you go without notice and without reason".
And if you're cool with that, good luck to you! I just hope you're getting paid enough to justify the complete lack of job security, is all...
Umm.. I work for a company where everyone is salaried and "at will". My employer can require us to do anything they like because they can let us go without notice and without reason. In the real world (which is where I work) people get whatever conditions they are willing to put up with, and people who don't "play the game" get shown the door.
Out of interest, is there any reason why you're staying with them? That sounds like utterly horrible working conditions to me, and the implications from your previous posts is that having a family/partner/life is frowned upon and discouraged.
At the very least, I hope you're being paid a sh*t load of money to compensate...
Tell you what, why don't you just have a big conference, admit to the world that you're totally clueless and are only spouting these opposing theories in a despeate grab for grant money
... and it's better to light a coal-fired power station than to curse the darkness?
But climate change and your choice of editor are intimately related. It's all the extra processor cycles needed to run emacs that's causing global warming...
Actually, I think the experiment only worked (with limited success) on male faces. And I am male. Something is wrong with the spacing of the female eyebrows and foreheads. Check the pics out.
I dunno -- I find the altered girls' faces more attractive, personally. Which probably implies that I'm closer to the mean than you are in my subjective tastes.
You can't please all the cooks all of the time. And the authors of this paper implicitly acknowledge that, as they use a statistical consensus to get an indication of what appeals to the majority of viewers. There's always going to be outliers.
Well, the complimentary Viking experiment to the LR failed to find evidence of organic compounds in the soil. That's pretty strong evidence against the presence of life, you'd think...
Anyway, I'm just putting two and two together and possibly coming up with five. I just happened to remember that post I linked to from the previous story, and everything clicked.
Slashdot Mirror
Proably upwards of 60% of Google email account holders first log in to check email, but remain logged in while searching.
Just send your google search through a local mirror (eg google.co.uk) and block that mirror from registering cookies.
That way you stay logged in to gmail, but your searches stay pseudo-anonymous (pseudo, depending on whether google logs your IP ...)
Or perhaps people can just spend their points as they see fit.
Well, damn, there goes metamoderation as a pastime ...
If we only funded research that could be justified as "useful" the world would be a much more boring place.
Unfortunately, this is pretty much how the current scientific funding systems work. Mainly because grant funding is administered by small-minded fools in government, who haven't the faintest grasp of the truth of your statement.
Example: Two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. If the sheep votes, he is implicitly supporting that voting system and cannot complain when the carving knives come out.
Um ... you've made the mistake of assuming in advance how the participants are going to vote. The best recourse for the sheep would be to not only vote, but to try to persuade one of the wolves to vote similarly.
Your argument essentially boils down to the following: The majority is always wrong, there's nothing I can do about it, therefore I'll not vote and give the majority even more of an apparent mandate to do the wrong thing. Hopefully you can see the flaw in this reasoning!
The only way to make your voice heard in this world is to speak up. You think government is corrupt? Well, go out and try to do something about it! Because if the system is corrupt, the more people who give up like you've done, the more corrupt the system will become.
Democracy is a tenuous, precious thing -- something that is easily lost. And the US's grip on democracy is more feeble than most: non-compulsory voting on a work day isn't the best way to ensure high voter turnouts! So don't give up, get out there and make your voice heard.
I'm not sure on your issue, but the network manager has had some serious work done:
http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/intrepid/alpha5#Network Manager 0.7
And yet it still sucks. Why on earth network manager insists on protecting wireless network keys in the user's gnome keyring database, I have no idea (if a cracker can read your files, the auth password on your network is going to be the very least of your worries). The end result is a request for gnome keyring authorisation every time you resume from suspend. There's a crazy work-around in 0.7 that involves publishing the network keys system-wide to work around this ... but that runs into problems with my network, which uses a hidden SSID.
Wicd happily eschews Gnome Keyring, copes with hidden SSIDs and works much better in my hands (and is thankfully part of the Intrepid repositories ...)
OOC, have you tried more recently than a year ago? The X.org ATI drivers have improved enormously in this time, and crashes (for me at least) are now a thing of the past.
Of course, if you didn't enable desktop effects (i.e. used a 2D WM like metacity rather than compiz fusion) you wouldn't get any crashes at all ... (this is exactly what I used to do before upgrading)
It is actually faster for me to load all the extra crap with Chrome than it is for adblock to remove it and render the page with stuff missing.
... but you still have to look at all the rubbishy ads!
(am I missing something here? I mean, I'd rather a page took twice as long to load if it lacked ads ...)
For data analysis tasks, I tend to use R, which is both far more interactive than python, has much better graphing solutions than python or excel,and supports more statistical analysis methodologies than pretty much anything else. I can prototype and figure out a methodology in R (and provide provable results) long before I get to start running my python script.
I'll second that. R is a life-saver, providing a world-class statistical analysis software package for free.
Mind you, Excel (or OpenOffice Calc in my case) is a good tool for laying out your raw data, before making up the R data tables. (And if all you ever need to do is a t-test, a spreadsheet is a perfectly acceptable solution.)
I will set up a laptop just for them, with their kid games and such.
It will mean a lot of work, but it will avoid more problems than it causes.
Just to check: you do realise that this simply means that they'll view pr0n on their friends computers instead?
Personally, I would have thought that education about the evils of the net would be better than banning your child from using it (and thus making it more attractive in their eyes). I'd explain about spam (and teach them to laugh at the ways spammers play on the feeble-minded), explain about chat rooms (and how the girl you're talking to might not necessarily be a girl). And when they reach puberty, explain about pr0n sites, and about hidden costs and addiction.
They're going to find out anyway. Your kids are going to read spam and surf for pr0n, whether or not you prohibit them. Forbidding something only ever makes it more attractive, after all. The real question is: do you want them to learn about the dangers and how to avoid them, at the same time? Or would you rather that they blindly stumble into all the traps set for the inexperienced?
Another words there is a another option that gives you instant on and protects against dead batteries on Linux. Apple computers do a version of this by default.
Of course, you're assuming that your BIOS's implementation of S3 works with linux. Mine never has.
As for the poster's original question, if it's really that important I'd recommend compiling your own minimalist kernel, and writing your own boot scripts. Years ago, I got Crux linux to boot to a login prompt in 15 seconds from power on, using an old P120 laptop. On today's hardware, you should be able to start linux in a few seconds with your own custom kernel.
(Remember: most of the sh*t in the boot scripts included in distros is not needed for your own configuration. You want fast, just re-write them to suit your own hardware. It's simple and easy to do. Crux is a pretty good starter system, if you want to do this.)
Can't we find something better to squabble endlessly about? Like why Firefox's spell checker didn't complain about the word "masturbatory"?
It's not a squabble, it's just a distinction. And it's interesting because Google's Chrome is free as in speech, but it's been wrapped up in a implementation of wine where the source code is hidden.
It's fewer ffs.
No, it's not. See the usage note here, for example ...
You've begged the question, there.
Hmmm ... it's not really begging the question, since there was nothing else in the /. story based on the premise that Gecko was outdated or bloated -- that statement just came out of nowhere at the end. What the article provides is at best an ad populum fallacy (X is popular, therefore X is better than Y).
And anyway, if you read TFA, you'll see that the article strongly praises and supports Gecko, concluding with (my emphasis):
From a technical perspective, Gecko is now very solid and no longer lags behind WebKit. A testament to the rate at which Gecko has been improving is its newfound viability in the mobile space, where it was practically considered a nonstarter not too long ago. Mozilla clearly has the resources, developer expertise, and community support to take Gecko anywhere that WebKit can go.
All of which means that (a) nobody on /. RTFAs (who knew?) and (b) the guy who wrote this story makes George W. Bush look like an intellectual.
This is illogical! It dillutes the meaning of a tab. And it makes it difficult for normal computer users to understand the concept of a tab.
But perhaps the trade-off is that the tab-bar is isolated from the rest of the UI elements, as well as closer to the page content, and is therefore easier to use.
In any case, I'm yet to meet someone who's looked at the tab-bar and screamed, "But it's illogical! I can't understand it!". Even IE now has tabs, and as we all know, IE is a browser for the lowest common denominator.
With respect to text or data entered into and stored by publicly-accessible site features such as forums, comments and bug trackers ("SourceForge Public Content"), the submitting user retains ownership of such SourceForge Public Content; with respect to publicly-available statistical content which is generated by the site to monitor and display content activity, such content is owned by SourceForge. In each such case, the submitting user grants SourceForge the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the terms of any applicable license
But if the user grants SF.net the license to publish their comments, doesn't that mean that the decision to publish the comments on the comments page is now SF.net's, rather than the user's? And in which case, wouldn't that make SF.net liable for any offensive or libellous comment published, since they're effectively the ones who have chosen to publish it?
I've actually known people remove their messages from forums and chat groups before, and normally it's a fairly simple process. This is the first instance I've heard of that request being denied, and I'm rather lost in understanding the reasons behind it.
Every company (at least in the USA) is at-will employment. Every company in the USA can let you go without reason and without notice. They can't fire you because you're a certain ethnicity or gender, etc., but other than a (very few) protectected category, any other reason is fair game. "We decided that employees may no longer have tattoos - oh you have some? You're fired." "I just don't like you any more." "Oh, you like the Rolling Stones? Sorry, I'm a Beatles man - there's the door."
If that's really the case, I'm so glad I decided not to work there ...
Seriously, man, that sucks balls. Most other first world countries have decent unfair dismissal laws, not to mention governments and unions that stand up for the rights of workers.
I wasn't asking in regard to the child-care stuff (which I couldn't care less about) -- I was asking because you said that your employer "can let you go without notice and without reason".
And if you're cool with that, good luck to you! I just hope you're getting paid enough to justify the complete lack of job security, is all ...
Umm.. I work for a company where everyone is salaried and "at will". My employer can require us to do anything they like because they can let us go without notice and without reason. In the real world (which is where I work) people get whatever conditions they are willing to put up with, and people who don't "play the game" get shown the door.
Out of interest, is there any reason why you're staying with them? That sounds like utterly horrible working conditions to me, and the implications from your previous posts is that having a family/partner/life is frowned upon and discouraged.
At the very least, I hope you're being paid a sh*t load of money to compensate ...
Tell you what, why don't you just have a big conference, admit to the world that you're totally clueless and are only spouting these opposing theories in a despeate grab for grant money
... and it's better to light a coal-fired power station than to curse the darkness?
I'm still busy with the emacs vs vi debate.
But climate change and your choice of editor are intimately related. It's all the extra processor cycles needed to run emacs that's causing global warming ...
My 3 year old beats me in Limbo every time. He's an amazing competitor, that one.
And if your three year old can also beat the world in gymnastics, good luck to him. He fully deserves all the gold medals he can win.
Actually, I think the experiment only worked (with limited success) on male faces. And I am male. Something is wrong with the spacing of the female eyebrows and foreheads. Check the pics out.
I dunno -- I find the altered girls' faces more attractive, personally. Which probably implies that I'm closer to the mean than you are in my subjective tastes.
You can't please all the cooks all of the time. And the authors of this paper implicitly acknowledge that, as they use a statistical consensus to get an indication of what appeals to the majority of viewers. There's always going to be outliers.
Meanwhile a considerable number of scientists are still looking behind the couch for the missing methane.
It's not behind the couch, it's in the gaps between the cushions. Man, everything falls between those cushions, frikkin' everything ...
Well, the complimentary Viking experiment to the LR failed to find evidence of organic compounds in the soil. That's pretty strong evidence against the presence of life, you'd think ...
Anyway, I'm just putting two and two together and possibly coming up with five. I just happened to remember that post I linked to from the previous story, and everything clicked.
That's not M as in Million, it's M as in Mousand.
Yeah, they should have used K as in Kousand ...