If a terrorist group is able to build a dirty bomb that causes mass casualties why would they want a nuke?
Because dirty bombs aren't designed to cause mass casualties. Their main effect is fear; with the popular in terror of anything 'nuclear', they are ideal for cowing a whole population. Hell, you don't even need to detonate one; just the thought of a dirty bomb is good enough to terrorize people. The current mindset in the USA is ample evidence of this.
They can also render an (albeit-small) area of real estate uninhabitable for a lengthy period of time. This of course can lead to a significant amount of economic fallout.
It is wonderful to see all the arrogant US folk wet their panties when they realize just how powerful the EU has become.
Indeed. It seems that most folk haven't realized that the US empire has already peaked, and is now beginning its long decline. The EU is giving it stiff competition in the short term (witness the way the Euro is pounding the dollar), while in the long term China will eat it alive.
Do Slashdot readers know of any mechanical implementations of a truly Universal Turing Machine?
Of course not. A truly Universal Turing Machine needs an infinite amount of tape. Or RAM. Or HDD. Or Spaghetti. Or any other infinite amount of storage device. Hell, the submitter makes this clear in their spiel, just after they ask the vacuous question above. I guess they should read what they write a little closer; or stop prancing around like a tit, trying to sound profound and knowledgable.
When you copy a movie which you did not pay for, you are consuming the service (about 90 minutes of entertainment) without the consent of the service provider.
From dictionary.com: consume: To expend; use up.
When you watch a copy of a film, how are you using up their product? What tangible loss do they suffer?
It's very few clicks from my/. username to my CV. Moderately intelligent use of google will do it; so will following the URL in my profile.
While I salute you for waiving your anonymity, I don't have that luxury; I disagree with many strange people online, and I have a family to think of. However, if you look up any recent papers on nonradial stellar pulsation, you are sure to come across some of mine.
Have you ever READ a newspaper?
Don't be facetious, of course I have. A newspaper has to check that articles do not fall foul of certain legal pitfalls, such as libel; likewise, a journal should have a sufficient level of editorial competence, that bullshit papers are not accepted simply because they pander to the notions of the editors.
Ultimately, the Social Text affair was a huge omlette on the face of the postmodernism movement. Unfortunately, this hasn't helped us get closer to a resolution of the problems outlined in C.P. Snow's Two Cultures debate. Nevertheless, many scientists, myself included, saw Sokal's hoax as a long-coming blow against the utter crap written by so many postmodernists about science. Honestly, claiming that progress in fluid dynamics is slow for sexist reasons (the fluid is the feminine)? That's just nuts; progress is slow because fluid dynamics is damn difficult.
Reading this thread, I'm pretty confident that I'm the only participant in this thread who's actually been widely published in peer reviewed journals.
Sorry, mate, try again. I'm widely published too; and I wouldn't be that suprised if a number of other people in this thread are, too. Of course, proving this is a difficult matter, since few of us (yourself included, I'll guess) want to waive the anonymity that/. provides.
You rarely *really* don't know who submitted an article, and there's always a lot of deference to (perceived) authority.
Possibly; but if you tend to be swayed by the perceived authority of an author you are reviewing, then that's less a statement about peer review in general, and more of a statement about you as a peer reviewer.
It's about on par with me getting the local newspaper to print a letter to the editor that contains inaccurate information, and then claiming it proves something about the journalistic standards of the paper
Well, if the paper didn't bother to check a single fact in the letter, then sure; it does prove something about the journalistic standards of the paper. In the same way that Sokal's paper did prove something about the academic standards of Social Text, and perhaps quite a large proportion of postmodernist dialogue.
They deferred to someone who really was in a position to share expert knowledge, and put it in a context of postmodernist theory.
But that's the whole point of peer review: you find someone who is expert enough to judge the new work.
Your drivel is written like a true postmodernist. On the one hand, you feel in a position to make pronouncements about subjects you know nothing about. And on the other hand, you deflect all criticisms of postmodernism, on the grounds that they are made by non-experts. Funny how postmodernists claim that science is a cultural construct, but tend to be recalcitrant about applying the same conclusion to their own analyses.
Why would you let your SO attach an unpatched and unprotected PC to the Internet?
To download security patches from Microsoft? There is a real chicken and egg situation here; you need to go online to patch your machine, but as soon as you are online you are hit by worms.
On the image, the bright stars have a 4 pointed flare.
Those aren't flares, they're diffraction spikes. You get them in all astronomical images of bright sources.
Even though Hubble does indeed have a lens, this is only to correct the optics; most of the focusing is done by its mirror, and I don't think there is any flaring to speak of.
I'm sure you mean other than the contemporary Jewish historian Josephus.
Josephus was born after Jesus' supposed crucifixion, so it is misleading to label him contemporary. Furthermore, there is some reason to believe that Josephus' references to Jesus were tampered with later by Christians. In this respect, Josephus does not constiute a reliable witness, and his account is no more evidence for the existence of Jesus, than Aristotle's mention of Atlantis is evidence for the Lost Continent.
There is enough evidence out there that says that there was a man named Jesus and that he performed miracles.
I'm sure that's what you beleive, but talk to any historian, and you'll find that the evidence supporting the existence of Jesus is practially non-existent. Haven't you ever wondered about the fact that none of the authors of the Gospels ever knew the supposed Messiah? An easy conundrum to resolve, once you've reconciled yourself to the fact that Jesus never existed.
It's a good thing I have a Savior to pay the price for me.
Not when it was the supposed 'Saviour' who imposed the 'price' in the first place. Suppose someone sticks a gun against your head and threatens to kill you unless you worship them. After you've scraped and grovelled, should you hail them as your saviour when they don't shoot?
If this is your god, then he is a very small being indeed.
Maybe what we should do is require scientists and engineers to pair-program with recent CS graduates.
Why? I'm a scientist who programs in Fortran on a daily basis. Rather than having a script-kiddie CS graduate hovering over my shoulder and telling me C++ is better than Fortran, I'd far rather have a copy of Knuth on my desk. Which I do.
Having said that, you go and dig out a book on numerical methods, and you'll find that more of them are written by physicists, mathematicians and engineers, than by computer scientists.
...which isn't particularly infamous, when you realize that this problem never caused the demise of a spacecraft, unlike the urban legend would have us believe.
Not true; new Fortran standards were issued in 1990, 1995 and 2003/4, and it continues to be a majority player in High Performance Computing (HPC). While this is certainly a niche area, it is the area that Fortran was originally designed to compete in. Nobody ever intended the language to be for writing operating systems.
Whereas SQL is a rather lightweight scripting language for database manipulation. Not in the same league; when did you last work on project with 500,000 lines of SQL?
We're still using F77 here, so I didn't know that.:-)
Fortran 90/95/2003 are well worth 'upgrading' to -- for starters, the array syntax is fantastic. If A and B are arrays, you can assign from one to another simply by 'A=B'. Likewise, 'A=sin(B)' would set each element of A to the sine of the corresponding element of B. Code like this is a doddle to parallelize automatically, enabling one to write parallel code with very little effort.
My advice is to stay away from it unless you like learning languages of old.
Well, we won't be taking your advice, because you obviously haven't got a fucking clue. New Fortran language standards were issued in 1990, 1995 and 2003/4, keeping Fortran the language of choice for all numerically-intensive tasks.
C/C++ have attempted to replace Fortran, but have serious language problems (such as argument aliasing) that prevent compilers from optimizing code to the same degree as Fortran. Furthermore, contrary to your claim, there simply isn't a C/C++ library resource that comes anywhere close to the Fortran Netlib repository.
Mathematica is a nice product, but it deals with Math, and Math != Numerical Simulation. Mathematica is useless for serious computations, of the sort that would run on parallel computers.
Fortran has accepted A==B as an equivalence test since 1990. But it is still immune from the C programming pitfall, since A=B can never appear in an evaluation context.
...stands for 'Advanced RISC Machines', the spinoff company that grew out of Acorn Ltd's ARM (this time, 'Acorn RISC Machine') series of RISC cpus. These chips made their debut in Acorn's Archimedes computers, and were the first RISC chips to appear in home machines. They are used a lot today in situations where a high MIPS/watt ratio is needed, typically embedded devices.
Slashdot Mirror
I dislike your name. Please change it now, or stop posting. Thank you.
If a terrorist group is able to build a dirty bomb that causes mass casualties why would they want a nuke?
Because dirty bombs aren't designed to cause mass casualties. Their main effect is fear; with the popular in terror of anything 'nuclear', they are ideal for cowing a whole population. Hell, you don't even need to detonate one; just the thought of a dirty bomb is good enough to terrorize people. The current mindset in the USA is ample evidence of this.
They can also render an (albeit-small) area of real estate uninhabitable for a lengthy period of time. This of course can lead to a significant amount of economic fallout.
It is wonderful to see all the arrogant US folk wet their panties when they realize just how powerful the EU has become.
Indeed. It seems that most folk haven't realized that the US empire has already peaked, and is now beginning its long decline. The EU is giving it stiff competition in the short term (witness the way the Euro is pounding the dollar), while in the long term China will eat it alive.
Do Slashdot readers know of any mechanical implementations of a truly Universal Turing Machine?
Of course not. A truly Universal Turing Machine needs an infinite amount of tape. Or RAM. Or HDD. Or Spaghetti. Or any other infinite amount of storage device. Hell, the submitter makes this clear in their spiel, just after they ask the vacuous question above. I guess they should read what they write a little closer; or stop prancing around like a tit, trying to sound profound and knowledgable.
When you copy a movie which you did not pay for, you are consuming the service (about 90 minutes of entertainment) without the consent of the service provider.
From dictionary.com: consume: To expend; use up.
When you watch a copy of a film, how are you using up their product? What tangible loss do they suffer?
Most CS topics are essentially mathematics, which is as hard of a science you can get.
Except that Mathematics isn't a science. Science is about describing the natural world, which mathematics has only a tangential link to.
It's very few clicks from my /. username to my CV. Moderately intelligent use of google will do it; so will following the URL in my profile.
While I salute you for waiving your anonymity, I don't have that luxury; I disagree with many strange people online, and I have a family to think of. However, if you look up any recent papers on nonradial stellar pulsation, you are sure to come across some of mine.
Have you ever READ a newspaper?
Don't be facetious, of course I have. A newspaper has to check that articles do not fall foul of certain legal pitfalls, such as libel; likewise, a journal should have a sufficient level of editorial competence, that bullshit papers are not accepted simply because they pander to the notions of the editors.
Ultimately, the Social Text affair was a huge omlette on the face of the postmodernism movement. Unfortunately, this hasn't helped us get closer to a resolution of the problems outlined in C.P. Snow's Two Cultures debate. Nevertheless, many scientists, myself included, saw Sokal's hoax as a long-coming blow against the utter crap written by so many postmodernists about science. Honestly, claiming that progress in fluid dynamics is slow for sexist reasons (the fluid is the feminine)? That's just nuts; progress is slow because fluid dynamics is damn difficult.
Reading this thread, I'm pretty confident that I'm the only participant in this thread who's actually been widely published in peer reviewed journals.
Sorry, mate, try again. I'm widely published too; and I wouldn't be that suprised if a number of other people in this thread are, too. Of course, proving this is a difficult matter, since few of us (yourself included, I'll guess) want to waive the anonymity that /. provides.
You rarely *really* don't know who submitted an article, and there's always a lot of deference to (perceived) authority.
Possibly; but if you tend to be swayed by the perceived authority of an author you are reviewing, then that's less a statement about peer review in general, and more of a statement about you as a peer reviewer.
It's about on par with me getting the local newspaper to print a letter to the editor that contains inaccurate information, and then claiming it proves something about the journalistic standards of the paper
Well, if the paper didn't bother to check a single fact in the letter, then sure; it does prove something about the journalistic standards of the paper. In the same way that Sokal's paper did prove something about the academic standards of Social Text, and perhaps quite a large proportion of postmodernist dialogue.
They deferred to someone who really was in a position to share expert knowledge, and put it in a context of postmodernist theory.
But that's the whole point of peer review: you find someone who is expert enough to judge the new work.
Your drivel is written like a true postmodernist. On the one hand, you feel in a position to make pronouncements about subjects you know nothing about. And on the other hand, you deflect all criticisms of postmodernism, on the grounds that they are made by non-experts. Funny how postmodernists claim that science is a cultural construct, but tend to be recalcitrant about applying the same conclusion to their own analyses.
...papyrus. That, or clay tablets. Nothing else comes close. And I'm not joking.
poor hardware support
Remind me where I can buy a copy of Windows XP for x86-64?
Why would you let your SO attach an unpatched and unprotected PC to the Internet?
To download security patches from Microsoft? There is a real chicken and egg situation here; you need to go online to patch your machine, but as soon as you are online you are hit by worms.
On the image, the bright stars have a 4 pointed flare.
Those aren't flares, they're diffraction spikes. You get them in all astronomical images of bright sources.
Even though Hubble does indeed have a lens, this is only to correct the optics; most of the focusing is done by its mirror, and I don't think there is any flaring to speak of.
I'm sure you mean other than the contemporary Jewish historian Josephus.
Josephus was born after Jesus' supposed crucifixion, so it is misleading to label him contemporary. Furthermore, there is some reason to believe that Josephus' references to Jesus were tampered with later by Christians. In this respect, Josephus does not constiute a reliable witness, and his account is no more evidence for the existence of Jesus, than Aristotle's mention of Atlantis is evidence for the Lost Continent.
There is enough evidence out there that says that there was a man named Jesus and that he performed miracles.
I'm sure that's what you beleive, but talk to any historian, and you'll find that the evidence supporting the existence of Jesus is practially non-existent. Haven't you ever wondered about the fact that none of the authors of the Gospels ever knew the supposed Messiah? An easy conundrum to resolve, once you've reconciled yourself to the fact that Jesus never existed.
It's a good thing I have a Savior to pay the price for me.
Not when it was the supposed 'Saviour' who imposed the 'price' in the first place. Suppose someone sticks a gun against your head and threatens to kill you unless you worship them. After you've scraped and grovelled, should you hail them as your saviour when they don't shoot?
If this is your god, then he is a very small being indeed.
Maybe what we should do is require scientists and engineers to pair-program with recent CS graduates.
Why? I'm a scientist who programs in Fortran on a daily basis. Rather than having a script-kiddie CS graduate hovering over my shoulder and telling me C++ is better than Fortran, I'd far rather have a copy of Knuth on my desk. Which I do.
Having said that, you go and dig out a book on numerical methods, and you'll find that more of them are written by physicists, mathematicians and engineers, than by computer scientists.
and the infamous "DO 100 I = 1.10" problem.
...which isn't particularly infamous, when you realize that this problem never caused the demise of a spacecraft, unlike the urban legend would have us believe.
Fortran is hardly used these days
Not true; new Fortran standards were issued in 1990, 1995 and 2003/4, and it continues to be a majority player in High Performance Computing (HPC). While this is certainly a niche area, it is the area that Fortran was originally designed to compete in. Nobody ever intended the language to be for writing operating systems.
Whereas SQL is a rather lightweight scripting language for database manipulation. Not in the same league; when did you last work on project with 500,000 lines of SQL?
I That's the most idiotic attempt at a troll post that I've seen in...well, the past five minutes really.
The grandparent post was encrypted; decoding instructions here.
We're still using F77 here, so I didn't know that. :-)
Fortran 90/95/2003 are well worth 'upgrading' to -- for starters, the array syntax is fantastic. If A and B are arrays, you can assign from one to another simply by 'A=B'. Likewise, 'A=sin(B)' would set each element of A to the sine of the corresponding element of B. Code like this is a doddle to parallelize automatically, enabling one to write parallel code with very little effort.
My advice is to stay away from it unless you like learning languages of old.
Well, we won't be taking your advice, because you obviously haven't got a fucking clue. New Fortran language standards were issued in 1990, 1995 and 2003/4, keeping Fortran the language of choice for all numerically-intensive tasks.
C/C++ have attempted to replace Fortran, but have serious language problems (such as argument aliasing) that prevent compilers from optimizing code to the same degree as Fortran. Furthermore, contrary to your claim, there simply isn't a C/C++ library resource that comes anywhere close to the Fortran Netlib repository.
Mathematica is a nice product, but it deals with Math, and Math != Numerical Simulation. Mathematica is useless for serious computations, of the sort that would run on parallel computers.
Fortran has accepted A==B as an equivalence test since 1990. But it is still immune from the C programming pitfall, since A=B can never appear in an evaluation context.
...stands for 'Advanced RISC Machines', the spinoff company that grew out of Acorn Ltd's ARM (this time, 'Acorn RISC Machine') series of RISC cpus. These chips made their debut in Acorn's Archimedes computers, and were the first RISC chips to appear in home machines. They are used a lot today in situations where a high MIPS/watt ratio is needed, typically embedded devices.
Who's this Taylor guy?
f(x+a) = f(x) + a f'(x) + a^2 f''(x)/2 +...
"Kaffefahrt" literally transfers to "coffee trip"
And there was I, thinking it meant the bout of troublesome flatulence I get after my morning espresso...