Related article about "Linux for the Rest of Us" over at Business2. They discuss OpenOffice, StarOffice, XimianEvolution, and XimianDesktop. (They diss Lindows in passing.)
...don't understand the ins and outs of Trojans (another joke). But why would you want to spend time writing flames for people who don't share your own brand of uber-geekery? Presumably those of us who spend time here do so in pursuit of some nerdy interest of our own.
Re:Economic incentives do work...
on
Solar Power Play
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· Score: 2
You should use subsidies to encourage the purchase or use of a technology (or product) that is ready for bigtime...Supporting preliminary research is not a damn good reason; it's a pretty damn poor one.
I disagree.
Public funding of research has supported, for example, polio vaccine and improved survival of cancer. Private funding of research has produced, for example, Viagra and multiple studies that claim smoking isn't bad for you.
Private funding of basic research means duplication of effort, secrecy instead of dissemination of knowledge, and a high monopoly price on the fruits of that research. And is this high monopoly price what you think my tax dollars should subsidize? I doubt that course would save either of us money.
Sidney Coleman (way cool physicist) had the biggest Swiss Army knife I ever saw. That thing must have weighed 15 kg by itself. He had carried it with him for years, and he told me... (dramatic drum roll) ..that he had actually had occasion to use all but one of its 99-googol blades in his bike-riding, rock-climbing, etc. activities.
Not satisfied with this imperfect record, he sought out an expert to find out what he could do with that single unused blade. The expert replied, "Remove stones from horses' hooves."
Robert R. Provine's book _Laughter_ (2000, Viking) talks about the incredible media bias that feeds such controversies. He says, "Over the years, I have been contacted by many print and broadcast reporters.. about 'laughing your way to health.' My message that the literature about laughter and health is not all it seems..was as welcome as a skunk at a picnic."
Three small, inadequately-controlled studies by Lee Burk and colleagues on laughter-related increases in immune system function are the basis of much of the folklore about how great it is for your health.
Research contradicting it rarely gets into the popular press. Provine mentions 7-decade study following 1178 males and females which found, surprisingly, that "cheerfulness (opimism and a sense of humor) in childhood to be inversely related to survival in middle to old age. Oddly, conscientiousness was related to survival..."
Provine also cites an editorial by Marcia Angell in the New England Journal of Medicine (1985) as saying "the current evidence for mental states' affecting the cause or cure of disease is largely folklore..."
One of the vital functions of science is to make us pay attention to things we don't want to hear. We can rely on the media to tell us what we want to hear (You deserve a break today, a new car will make you sexy), but the role of science is different.
BTW most of Provine's book is a lot more fun to read than the parts I quoted--he's done a lot of scholarly research, including going up to strangers in malls and asking them to laugh, that is great fun to read about. If I ever have time, I am definitely submitting a book review on it, because it is the definitive nerd book on laughter.
I went to one of their annual conferences when I was almost ready to market my little Mac shareware app. It was a lot of fun and very informative, despite the predominance of Windows people. Hmmm, let me reword that. Some of my best friends are Windows people. What I mean is, I learned a lot about things like marketing, security, setting priceing, etc. that are platform-independent.
Nostalgia is great! I spent hours writing games with Atari Basic. My favorite one had a win sequence that played Happy Birthday, and a lose sequence that did Doppler effects followed by white noise for a bomb.
If I had a nickel for every "goto" I wrote I'd be as rich as Bill Gates.
...considering he and Lawrence Krauss collaborated on this book.
Krauss is one of the few good scientists willing to take the time to go around speaking against creationism and "Intelligent Design." He's debated, written op-eds for the NYT on the subject, and more. There are quite a few links to editorials he's written on the subject over at his website.
This idea would be a great cost-saver for big districts--you could let lots of kids share one set of computers, and having each one tailored to a specialized curriculum would cut down on the confusion of untrained teachers.
But does Apple realize how cold and drafty portable classrooms get during a New England winter? It's hard to type when your fingers are frozen stiff.
But--wait--fortunately, we've got global warming. Good, I was worried for a minute there.
I think it would be a lot more labor-intensive than spamming a search engine. The search-engine fooling tricks I've heard of involve putting sneaky code into your page, or getting other pages to link to you. You do that and you're done--until the search engines catch on to that scam and you have to go look for a new one.
To mess up the Tangle hierarchy, you'd have to clicking back and forth between slashdot.org and linuxbabezonline.com (or whatever) enough times to compete with real users who were going to other destinations.
Or--ugh, I can see it now--a whole new generation of bot-browsers may evolve, for the purpose of messing up Tangle.
The good news: this doesn't mean all online anonymity everywhere just disappeared. The Va Supreme Court's opinion is based on the following idea, which it quotes from an earlier case:
"The tort complained of here is an intentional wrong to the property rights of another, accomplished by words...employed in pursuance of a scheme designed wrongfully to enrich the speaker at the expense of the victim. The law provides a remedy in such cases, and the constitutional guarantees of free speech afford no more protection to the speaker than they do to any other tortfeasor who employs words to commit a criminal or a civil wrong."
The bad news: plaintiffs could easily be "creative" in claiming that an anonymous poster has done them felonious harm, and should therefore lose anonymity.
You teach critical theory and your analysis is "Bogdanov hoax more damning than Sokal's"?
First of all, the Bogdanov hoax is not a hoax. It's a goof, a public display of carelessness, by a bunch of physicists who now look very silly.
But let's test your theory--the experiment is in progress. The Sokal hoax trashed the entire Pomo field of cultural studies, cut the number and quality of grad students in half, reduced grant allocations, and so on, and so on.... Let's watch and see if the same thing now happens to physics, shall we?
The folks stung by Sokal do have something to celebrate at last--maybe not one of their own being clever, but at least some scientists looking stupid also.
It's not clear whether Baez meant this as a literal statement of his belief, or if he was looking for a newsworthy way to say the Bogdonovs' theories are crap. Of course, if Baez had simply said the papers were crap, we would not be reading about it in the NYT, let alone Slashdot.
The Bogdonovs say their papers are not a hoax--they are simply very theoretical and "daring."
The New York Times article is a disjointed mishmash of quotes from good physicists who have been asked to assess the physics theories of two French TV stars with toilet-paper PhDs. There is no indication--none--that their work is a Sokal-like hoax.
If you care, you can read a clearer account of the incident in the November 5 online edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
This list of 10 Linux problems is pure cut-and-paste of an article by Adam Wiggins. (The witty title is, however, Anonymous Coward's own contribution.)
If you want to know what weblogs are saying about the Nasa moon hoax story then I recommend you get psycholog^H^H^H^H put a bookmark on good old Blogdex. Fine format, good leads to web stories both nerdy and not. You want links (and related weblogs) for the text of the UN Resolution on Iraq, the hockey dad suing to get his son named MVP, or a simple tool to give you the size and text of any web page? They're on Blogdex today.
I have seen a desk with a glass top, monitor visible under it, keyboard in a pull-out drawer. There is some company in Boston that sells a kit.
The MIT prof who has this got it because he has bifocals, and was sick of tilting his head back to look at the screen. When he's not computing, he has a flat, uncluttered desktop.
Free advice (worth every penny): do *not* use up a cupboard for this. Destroy a kitchen table to hold it instead. You will never have enough cupboard space, nobody does.
We've had a Mac in the kitchen for more than a year now, thanks to reading one of those "technology is soooo cool" articles about wireless networking with the Airport. I'm sure you can do all those wireless things with PCs also; my experience just happens to be with a Mac.
Here are a few tips, based on experience.
Use a laptop. You can protect the keyboard from mess by folding it shut.
With a laptop plus wireless, you can also carry it out into the garden when you're ordering bulbs online.
Google is great for finding recipes to match your ingredients.
Slashdot Mirror
Lots of annoying popups there, sorry about that.
...don't understand the ins and outs of Trojans (another joke). But why would you want to spend time writing flames for people who don't share your own brand of uber-geekery? Presumably those of us who spend time here do so in pursuit of some nerdy interest of our own.
I disagree.
Public funding of research has supported, for example, polio vaccine and improved survival of cancer. Private funding of research has produced, for example, Viagra and multiple studies that claim smoking isn't bad for you.
Private funding of basic research means duplication of effort, secrecy instead of dissemination of knowledge, and a high monopoly price on the fruits of that research. And is this high monopoly price what you think my tax dollars should subsidize? I doubt that course would save either of us money.
Any chance of our tax $$ promoting solar power--providing long-range and short-range benefits, helping us break our dependence on fossil fuels?
Somebody's been messing around there, don't you think?
(dramatic drum roll)
..that he had actually had occasion to use all but one of its 99-googol blades in his bike-riding, rock-climbing, etc. activities.
Not satisfied with this imperfect record, he sought out an expert to find out what he could do with that single unused blade. The expert replied, "Remove stones from horses' hooves."
Hey, not every story has a happy ending.
Three small, inadequately-controlled studies by Lee Burk and colleagues on laughter-related increases in immune system function are the basis of much of the folklore about how great it is for your health.
Research contradicting it rarely gets into the popular press. Provine mentions 7-decade study following 1178 males and females which found, surprisingly, that "cheerfulness (opimism and a sense of humor) in childhood to be inversely related to survival in middle to old age. Oddly, conscientiousness was related to survival..."
Provine also cites an editorial by Marcia Angell in the New England Journal of Medicine (1985) as saying "the current evidence for mental states' affecting the cause or cure of disease is largely folklore..."
One of the vital functions of science is to make us pay attention to things we don't want to hear. We can rely on the media to tell us what we want to hear (You deserve a break today, a new car will make you sexy), but the role of science is different.
BTW most of Provine's book is a lot more fun to read than the parts I quoted--he's done a lot of scholarly research, including going up to strangers in malls and asking them to laugh, that is great fun to read about. If I ever have time, I am definitely submitting a book review on it, because it is the definitive nerd book on laughter.
You can get really useful info online from the Association of Shareware Professionals . They have lots of tips for developers and distributors.
I went to one of their annual conferences when I was almost ready to market my little Mac shareware app. It was a lot of fun and very informative, despite the predominance of Windows people. Hmmm, let me reword that. Some of my best friends are Windows people. What I mean is, I learned a lot about things like marketing, security, setting priceing, etc. that are platform-independent.
I know Jaguar is wonderful, but darn it, I was just getting good at PowerPlant. Oh well.
If I had a nickel for every "goto" I wrote I'd be as rich as Bill Gates.
Krauss is one of the few good scientists willing to take the time to go around speaking against creationism and "Intelligent Design." He's debated, written op-eds for the NYT on the subject, and more. There are quite a few links to editorials he's written on the subject over at his website.
Krauss is darn funny about it too.
But does Apple realize how cold and drafty portable classrooms get during a New England winter? It's hard to type when your fingers are frozen stiff.
But--wait--fortunately, we've got global warming. Good, I was worried for a minute there.
To mess up the Tangle hierarchy, you'd have to clicking back and forth between slashdot.org and linuxbabezonline.com (or whatever) enough times to compete with real users who were going to other destinations.
Or--ugh, I can see it now--a whole new generation of bot-browsers may evolve, for the purpose of messing up Tangle.
Until that ugly day, I think Tangle sounds great.
Guys, look! She's now in Foxtrot!
Consolation for loss of freedom: this link to audio clip of "My One-Eyed Trouser Snake" sung by raunchy Aussie Barry Humphries (I don't know what Dame Edna does with that trouser snake now).
The link is to a page of sound clips from Private Eye. You have to scroll down to find the trouser snake.
...it had to happen.
If Wilson is going around naming ants after environmentalists, shouldn't our compost bin dude get his own ant? "Pheidole johntechangeli"--cool.
(Hmmm, I seem to be channeling Keanu Reeves tonight...)
The bad news: plaintiffs could easily be "creative" in claiming that an anonymous poster has done them felonious harm, and should therefore lose anonymity.
First of all, the Bogdanov hoax is not a hoax. It's a goof, a public display of carelessness, by a bunch of physicists who now look very silly.
But let's test your theory--the experiment is in progress. The Sokal hoax trashed the entire Pomo field of cultural studies, cut the number and quality of grad students in half, reduced grant allocations, and so on, and so on.... Let's watch and see if the same thing now happens to physics, shall we?
The folks stung by Sokal do have something to celebrate at last--maybe not one of their own being clever, but at least some scientists looking stupid also.
It's not clear whether Baez meant this as a literal statement of his belief, or if he was looking for a newsworthy way to say the Bogdonovs' theories are crap.
Of course, if Baez had simply said the papers were crap, we would not be reading about it in the NYT, let alone Slashdot.
The Bogdonovs say their papers are not a hoax--they are simply very theoretical and "daring."
The New York Times article is a disjointed mishmash of quotes from good physicists who have been asked to assess the physics theories of two French TV stars with toilet-paper PhDs. There is no indication--none--that their work is a Sokal-like hoax.
If you care, you can read a clearer account of the incident in the November 5 online edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
This list of 10 Linux problems is pure cut-and-paste of an article by Adam Wiggins. (The witty title is, however, Anonymous Coward's own contribution.)
If you want to know what weblogs are saying about the Nasa moon hoax story then I recommend you get psycholog^H^H^H^H put a bookmark on good old Blogdex. Fine format, good leads to web stories both nerdy and not. You want links (and related weblogs) for the text of the UN Resolution on Iraq, the hockey dad suing to get his son named MVP, or a simple tool to give you the size and text of any web page? They're on Blogdex today.
The MIT prof who has this got it because he has bifocals, and was sick of tilting his head back to look at the screen. When he's not computing, he has a flat, uncluttered desktop.
Free advice (worth every penny): do *not* use up a cupboard for this. Destroy a kitchen table to hold it instead. You will never have enough cupboard space, nobody does.