This is why rms is mostly right about free software being better than "open source" software.
Because "open source" software licenses don't guarantee certain freedoms, while they may have some commercial value (precisely because it allows companies to restrict their users' freedom), for people who care about freedom---freedom of use, freedom to modify and improve, and freedom to help others---free software is much better than "open source" software.
I frankly don't see what the problem is (either I'm thinking too simplistically, or everyone is missing the point). If the only problem is that prime numbers can be factored more quickly using Shor's algorithm, why don't they just use bigger prime numbers (and here's the kicker)... found using Shor's algorithm.
Am I wrong to think that numbers consisting of prime numbers that could be possibly (time-wise) be found using Shor's algorithm would be difficult to factorize using the same algorithm? Or is it this algorithm can't be used (say, due to its probabilistic nature) to determine whether a number is a prime?
Hey, it's not me saying it. It was an AC, and I thought it was funny. And, yes, he probably meant "file utils", rather than "fileutils". (I'm not sure if it's my typo or his mistake.)
Now, the fact that you saw my sig brings one thing to question---you are obviously browsing logged in, why are you posting anonymously?;)
In any case, that comment is supposed to be a joke---if you ask me, I like Solaris just the way it is; it certainly isn't their fault that people's expectation (of what standard behavior is) is skewed from their first impressions/experiences with the GNU tools with their own GNU behavior and "features".
Unfortunately, nowadays, if you have a well-stocked electronics storeroom, that joke doesn't work any more. As there are one farad capacitors that are small enough to be portable (maybe even small enough to put into a circuit!).
Of course, it also means that compromised PCs will be able to do nasty things their botnet masters command 6-7 times faster. But when I go FIOS, I go 100% Linux.
Because you know... Linux is unsinkable, like Titanic? Read through Secunia advisories when you have the time... if you run a server, possibly a web server serving PHP scripts vulnerable to a variety of exploits, some of which can even lead to system compromise (rather than, say, something that can only be used to DDoS someone else), it's far less secure than just using an up-to-date Windows XP workstation with proper firewall setup and a user with good sense (i.e. don't visit untrusted sites with IE, don't run executables that you don't know what they are). Running a server more than offsets whatever security you gain by switching to a Unix.
The group I volunteer at runs a dozen or so Solaris workstations. Just because Solaris is less used, we have gotten past a few Linux exploit attempts (because script kiddies can't tell a unix from windows, and a real unix from a unix clone), but our users still somehow manage to get themselves hacked into. Just remember: Linux != Security. ${ANY_OPERATING_SYSTEM} + good sense == security.
Even in a vacuum, light doesn't travel as photons for the entire journey (at least, if you believe in quantum). Light spends some of its time as electron-positron pairs which exist very briefly, before annihilating to product a new photon. As the electron-positron pair travels slower than the speed of light, light in a vacuum (which is how we've defined c) travels slighty slower that the speed of a photon.
I don't know what you are smoking, but what you are saying is just wrong. Most photons you see doesn't have enough energy for electron-positron pair production, not to mention that electron-positron pair production requires another heavy particle to dump momentum to. (You need photon of energy greater than about 1 MeV (gamma rays, and, egh, I don't care to look up the exact value now, but you can get it by multiplying the mass of electron by 2 and converting it to a unit of energy) and another massive particle that the photon can bounce off, since there is no way to go from photon -> electron + positron and simultaneously conserve energy and momentum.)
If you are talking virtual particles, that's an entirely different matter, (and a matter that I feel unqualified to comment on), but wouldn't you think that there is a reason those are called virtual particles? Go learn some science before you talk science. Semi-pseudoscientific use of terms like "quantum" impresses nobody.
P.S. Where did you pull this out of? Your ass? I would imagine current accepted value of c is based on speed of light produced from a laser, which is "coherent". One of the things that says is... the photon that exited the laser is the _same_ photon that enters the detector, not something produced in pair annihilation, which would have a random phase. I only praise/. that you managed to get modded up that far.
For the true retro-gaming experience they fire up the MSDOS system they played with as kids.
FYI, DOSBox gets rid of that problem, not to mention linux ports of SNES emulators. It's the wind0z games that's most troublesome for being M$-free.
BTW, how exactly do they "fire up" MSDOS? If they are running Wind0z X-P like all Joe Sixpacks, then their cmd.exe is utterly incompatible with MSDOS's command.com. Many games rely on DOS-only mode that is not achievable since Wind0z2000 (or was it since Wind0zME?). So, in order to "fire up" MSDOS... they will probably need to dual boot into true MSDOS (like 6.22) on a FAT16 partition---which, BTW, no Joe Sixpack can do.
Can someone please tell me how I could have avoided that double negative?
You can do that by using the negative "not" and a word that is positive in form, but negative in meaning. For example: "I do not disbelieve in..." Yes, logically, this is double negative, but grammatically, this is just one negation, and it's all fine by all our friendly grammar nazis.
There seemed to be other grammatical mistakes and logical... mitakes (such as being incoherent) in your post, but since you didn't ask anyone to fix those, I won't.
Headline: Replication of Own DNA Requires Payment of Royalties
Amount Slashdotters pay: $0 in lieu of no infringing uses on record
Er... I think there are infringing uses, as normal daily metabolism requires replication of cells, and thus DNA. How else does that wound you got when you on the playground as a kid get healed?
I was so surprised when I read this for the first time---this story is so similar to a Korean legend of an honest forrester (timberer? well, he makes living out of cutting/gathering wood from mountains and selling it to the people on the plains) who dropped his axe in a deep lake by mistake, weeped next to the lake (because that was his only possession), at which time a lake divinity appeared and presented to him silver, golden, and iron axes in that order, and when the forrester honestly said that iron axe was his, the divinity gave him all three axes (well, the original stories is more eloquent and developed than this, but this is as much as i can do in one sentence).
I'm not sure whether the similarity is because this is such a common motif or because of some shared ancestry between Israelites and Koreans (or whatever Asian race modern Koreans descended from).
Well, you can imagine why people in the sciences might be a little snarky on this subject.
The problem is, while religions do not make it a secret that they have a particular worldview and a set of beliefs (and thus, sometimes violent and not-so-righteous acts to enforce those beliefs), science is supposed to be objective, fact-based, and experimentally-verified. I'm not here to say that scientists should be completely free of bias or any personal prejudices, but they definitely shouldn't let those things guide nor hinder their work in science---not anything more than initial inspiration, anyway. Religion-bashing does not belong to the "people in sciences". Religion, as far as science is concerned, should be irrelevant---personally significant (either in a positive way or negative way) to a particular scientist, maybe; but it should in no way influence (either positively or negatively) his work in science.
Is this a double-standard? Yes. But I put forward this double-standard as a double believer in scientific principles and Christ. And, as much as I don't like fundamentalists standing in the way of scientific progress, I am appalled by atheists exploiting success of science (which neither presumes nor denies existence of God, so far, at least) to bash religion. I would even go as far as to say that such coattailing is more cowardly act than oppressing minority beliefs under the authority of a powerful Church (a couple centuries back, anyway).
I'm not sure if you had this in mind, but you just might be interested in Star Trek Voyager, Equinox, at the end of season 5 and beginning of season 6. If you didn't know already, well, you will see the connection when you watch it.
Japanese books with more Chinese characters might may take less space than Korean books which probably have less Chinese characters.
Egh... you really don't have a single clue how Korean written system works, do you? Now, you are correct in saying that Koreans eliminated Chinese characters in their writing, pretty much. However, that, in itself, has nothing to do with Japanese occupation. I'll have you know that at the time when Hangeul was created, it was not accepted widely. It was called "Eonmoon", "common people's writing", or more idiomatically, "vernacular". Scholars and aristocrats definitely did not use Hangeul. It was only during and after occupation (er... maybe a littel before that too---my modern Korean history's a bit rusty) that Hanguel was rooted as a symbol of Korean people. Now, I think you are confusing recent efforts to get rid of "Japanese" words (for example, the yellow radish thing they give you in "Chinese" restaurants (run by Koreans, of course), is properly called in Korean, "Danmooji", but it's also often called "Dalg-gguang", which, I believe, is the Japanese name for it; they are trying to get rid of those elements of our speech) or other perceived "Japanese" influence with this change in writing system.
Now, coming back to the topic, do you really not know how exactly Koreans "eliminated" Chinese characters? They write it phonetically in Korean. In fact, what is one character in Chinese is also one character in Korean---even if original Chinese pronunciation of that particular "word" isn't one syllable, you can be guaranteed that the Korean version is one syllable and therefore representable by one Korean character. Of course, this introduces problem of ambiguity now and then, and that's where Chinese characters are used mostly now (in parenthesis, for short and effective disambiguation for the learned). Nevertheless, Korean vocabulary, especially in the "learned" writing, remains very much Sino-Korean, if anything, especially given the similarity of Korean and Japanese, I would assert (but since I don't know Japanese, I cannot verify this authoritatively) that the same content written in Korean is shorter, since Korean writing system, even when writing pure-Korean words, writes only one character for one syllable, whereas Japanese writing system for pure Japanese words do not (IIRC, they work very much like Roman alphabet).
Now, if you are going to claim yourself as a Korean, don't stop at what your dad told you---'hate to break it to you, but much of it probably isn't right, and even if they are, probably not in depth enough. Study Korean (Hangeul) for yourself, learn your culture, or just blend into the mainstream and act like clueless Westerners.
PS. I should put this disclaimer that the North Korea does go all the way and tries to eliminate all non-pure-Korean words (Sino-Korean, Japanese, English, etc.), resulting in a longer writing/speech. But, I'm going to assume that you or your parents are not recent arrivals from North Korea.
Well, because AFAIK, there is no such legend. I don't have time to read the site you cite, but a quick search (and a cursory glance) reveals no word "leaf" or "leaves". It does mention how the characters were meant to resemble organ shapes (and that's the story I read about consonants in Korea) and nature (sky and things like that; I haven't heard this story, but is believable enough for now), but those are not the same legends you talk of.
Well, to cut the long story short, the one reason in particular I objected to your metioning your "legend" was, i) it trivializes creation of Hanguel (specifically, makes it sound like it was arbitrary, the way Roman alphabets are---which isn't true, BTW), and that's one of the worst insult you can throw at a person with Korean heritage (aside from saying Dok-doh is a Japanese island, perhaps); ii) it's simply not true.
Legend has it that the Korean alphabet was based on images left on leaves or something.
Legend? I thought it was pretty much accepted that the King Sejong commissioned creation of Korean alphabet, which changed only in minor aspects over 400 years.
Now, granted, there were other attempts to devise a Korean writing system (including something called Yidoo, which is nothing more than using Chinese characters in phonetic fasion, I believe), and creation of Hangeul was probably nothing like coming up with some brilliant writing system overnight, out of thin air, but the history of Korean writing system is better documented than you indicate.
What you are saying, put in the American perspective, is quite similar to saying, "The U.S. Constitution, according to legends, was revealed to the Founding Fathers on a holy mountain in Massachusetts by the Holy Spirit."
See how ridiculous it is? There is no such legend, and there is no _need_ for one, since we already know the true (more or less...take a scribe's "error" or two) story.
I = E/R. Otherwise resistors would increase current, not reduce it.
Er... V != E. Unless you mean E in that special sense, "electromotive force" (i.e. voltage of a battery, etc.). That's not to say E is unrelated to V, but still.
And what happens to the cost of elecricity when everyone starts plugging their cars in?
And, indeed, if only economics (and not governments) were in play, gasoline should be much cheaper than it is now---it's not as bad in U.S., but in Europe and Asia, more than half the gasoline price is tax.
Nevertheless, this comparison shows... well, that the prices are nearly equal (with the order of magnitude) and there are no economic incentive or disincentive to use electricity on its own---only coupled with either environmental or political incentives.
Check out that "fine motivational strategy" sign on page 10...
Be more responsible
Complain less
Be more attentive
Make lesser mistakes
Yay. I feel so motivated just reading it.
Rather, notice the Chinese part. See how it's all four characters long? What you are reading in English is a badly translated motto which must be at least somewhat decent (I can't read Chinese either---I only have some cultural awareness). Most Chinese proverbs and mottos are designed to be four characters long---it's almost like a poetry (with meter and rhyme) and it has to be translated as thus...
(But, of course, we "enligthened" Western overlords like to look at badly, unidiomatically translated piece of "exotic" Eastern writing, point at it and say, "Awww, look, they write and speak funny. How cute." You have yet to read a badly-translated English in another language.)
This makes no sense to me. If you're going to change it, why not just change it to a P (pass, or numerical equivalent thereof)? Much less risk of detetction, and if you *do* get caught, you've got the excuse "Why would I change it to 51% if I could have changed it to 90%?"
I don't know how it works in other schools, but in my school, my instructors do not know whether I'm taking the class P/NP or for letter grade. They simply give me a letter grade when they submit grades, and the registration system gives me P/NP (if I chose that option) based on a certain criterion (i.e. C or higher for pass). So, if you wanted to change your grading option, you would have to hack someone else's account (I don't know whose it might be though... the college counselor? The dean?)
Also, if the class was required for her major, this might not be an option, as requirements for majors may not be taken (once again, at least at my school) P/NP. In fact, if a class (say, freshman calculus, which is MATH 1A and 1B here) was taken P/NP and later you changed your major to something that required that course, you were in serious trouble, since that class could not be taken again for credit and the major department would take only letter-graded credits. (I'm sure there are ways to wiggle yourself out of this (approval of department head, use of internal records of the letter grade received, etc.) but I wouldn't want to go there, if possible.)
I think the quantum confusion may have come from the famous wave/particle duality experiment involving the two 45 degree mirrors - I forget who did it. Although how you shrink mirrors to this scale and embed them on a substrate, I'm not so sure.
IIRC, this is Michelson-Morley experiment which provided the motivation for the theory of special relativity (and experimental evidence of absence of ether). Unless there is another experiment that I don't know, this experiment isn't related to quantum mechanics.
... There's the saying, "Don't feed the trolls," but since this is marked "Informative", I should correct it on a few points:
A Proton is a neutron with a positron.
No, it's not. A proton is three quarks. From Wikipedia: Protons are classified as baryons and are composed of two Up quarks and one Down quark, which are also held together by the strong nuclear force, mediated by gluons. The proton's antimatter equivalent is the antiproton, which has the same magnitude charge as the proton but the opposite sign.
A neutron may decay into a proton+electron pair, but a proton is most definitely not composed of neutron+something else. If nothing else, this should be the proof: neutron is heavier than proton---by conservation of mass and energy, neutron cannot be a component of proton.
When electrons or positrons move (current) they produce electro magnectic waves which are light.
No, it's not when they move that they produce EM waves. It's when they accelerate that it does (if you had been a physicist, this difference would have been carved into your very being). Moving charge only creates a magnetic field, which doesn't necessarily propagate as an oscillating field in space (i.e. EM wave). What you need is not a current but an alternating (as one example) current.
It's a small step toward faster computing and eventualy quantum computing...
Er... I know that you don't know what you are talking about, but this has nothing to do with quantum computing. (O.K. I haven't RTFM (nor do I have interest or time to do so), so I may be wrong on this, but...) This development is analogous to moving to fiber optics from copper cables---it does use a less "lossy" and perhaps faster medium, but it is in no way related to quantum computing.
And now, how do I uninstall it,since the Makefiles don't seem to have make remove/uninstall/etc. that would delete the installed binaries.
IMHO, this is a non-issue if the install was done carefully. You can simply use --prefix option available in most configure scripts (although, I do have to admit, some packages have this option broken and might need some editing of config/makefiles to get it done) to install everything (yes, everything: binaries, libraries, documentations, config. files, etc.) under a directory, say,/opt/package_name. You can use symlinks for files that have to be in some system-default location. When you are done with the package, just delete the directory---and you can worry about symlinks later, since they don't take space or do anything to interfere with normal operation, and it's trivial to find broken symlinks and delete them from time to time.
And, well, if you don't know about symlinks or passing --prefix=$some_install_dir_like_"/opt/package" to the configure script, and you use *nix, well, you should learn it---it's vastly useful and not that difficult to learn.
It's a collection of background notes that were never meant by their author to be published...
I take it that you are not a Tolkien fan? Silmarillion was actually submitted to a publisher and rejected (more details available in the endnotes of "Lays of Beleriand", by Tolkien (whichever one you want)). There, in fact, JRR Tolkien is quoted as writing that he hope to publish it some day. The end result of the publisher wanting some more "Hobbit story" but rejecting the Silmarillion was, in fact, LOTR!
Granted, the Silmarillion was never "complete", at least not to Tolkien's standards, but IMHO, it is far more complete (in plot-line and style) some of the junks I read in Sci-Fi (or any other fiction) genre.
When the publishers rejected Silmarillion, they said, not to offend Tolkien, that "rather than a story in itself, it is a mine to be mined" (quoting from memory, so not sure whether my i's are dotted right and t's are crossed right) for other books, and so it became such for Tolkien (you can see lots of elements of LOTR mirroring what happened during the First or Second Era). If the movie-makers had any brain, it should be the same for them: Silmarillion should be a mine to be mined for more movie scripts! They always "defile" the originals anyway, and if they are going to change the original text, they should be doing it on an "incomplete" text as Silmarillion, not the completely-polished product as LOTR (yes, I didn't like LOTR movie trilogy too much) or Hobbit.
Still Yahoo-like in the amount of ads. At least google keeps their ads on the left side of the page. Joe 6 pack doesn't know the difference, but it's still sleazy...
IDK, but, to me it seems, it's exactly like Google interface. In fact, they probably copied it over from Google, exactly. If it weren't for the logo (o.k. I'm exaggerating), I wouldn't be able to tell that it wasn't Google. (BTW, google also displays some ads on top of the search page, but they are marked clearly (by different background) as ads---and it's exactly the same way in search.yahoo.com.)
Slashdot Mirror
This is why rms is mostly right about free software being better than "open source" software.
Because "open source" software licenses don't guarantee certain freedoms, while they may have some commercial value (precisely because it allows companies to restrict their users' freedom), for people who care about freedom---freedom of use, freedom to modify and improve, and freedom to help others---free software is much better than "open source" software.
I frankly don't see what the problem is (either I'm thinking too simplistically, or everyone is missing the point). If the only problem is that prime numbers can be factored more quickly using Shor's algorithm, why don't they just use bigger prime numbers (and here's the kicker) ... found using Shor's algorithm.
Am I wrong to think that numbers consisting of prime numbers that could be possibly (time-wise) be found using Shor's algorithm would be difficult to factorize using the same algorithm? Or is it this algorithm can't be used (say, due to its probabilistic nature) to determine whether a number is a prime?
Hey, it's not me saying it. It was an AC, and I thought it was funny. And, yes, he probably meant "file utils", rather than "fileutils". (I'm not sure if it's my typo or his mistake.)
;)
Now, the fact that you saw my sig brings one thing to question---you are obviously browsing logged in, why are you posting anonymously?
In any case, that comment is supposed to be a joke---if you ask me, I like Solaris just the way it is; it certainly isn't their fault that people's expectation (of what standard behavior is) is skewed from their first impressions/experiences with the GNU tools with their own GNU behavior and "features".
Unfortunately, nowadays, if you have a well-stocked electronics storeroom, that joke doesn't work any more. As there are one farad capacitors that are small enough to be portable (maybe even small enough to put into a circuit!).
Used to be great fun, though.
Because you know... Linux is unsinkable, like Titanic? Read through Secunia advisories when you have the time... if you run a server, possibly a web server serving PHP scripts vulnerable to a variety of exploits, some of which can even lead to system compromise (rather than, say, something that can only be used to DDoS someone else), it's far less secure than just using an up-to-date Windows XP workstation with proper firewall setup and a user with good sense (i.e. don't visit untrusted sites with IE, don't run executables that you don't know what they are). Running a server more than offsets whatever security you gain by switching to a Unix.
The group I volunteer at runs a dozen or so Solaris workstations. Just because Solaris is less used, we have gotten past a few Linux exploit attempts (because script kiddies can't tell a unix from windows, and a real unix from a unix clone), but our users still somehow manage to get themselves hacked into. Just remember: Linux != Security. ${ANY_OPERATING_SYSTEM} + good sense == security.
I don't know what you are smoking, but what you are saying is just wrong. Most photons you see doesn't have enough energy for electron-positron pair production, not to mention that electron-positron pair production requires another heavy particle to dump momentum to. (You need photon of energy greater than about 1 MeV (gamma rays, and, egh, I don't care to look up the exact value now, but you can get it by multiplying the mass of electron by 2 and converting it to a unit of energy) and another massive particle that the photon can bounce off, since there is no way to go from photon -> electron + positron and simultaneously conserve energy and momentum.)
If you are talking virtual particles, that's an entirely different matter, (and a matter that I feel unqualified to comment on), but wouldn't you think that there is a reason those are called virtual particles? Go learn some science before you talk science. Semi-pseudoscientific use of terms like "quantum" impresses nobody.
P.S. Where did you pull this out of? Your ass? I would imagine current accepted value of c is based on speed of light produced from a laser, which is "coherent". One of the things that says is... the photon that exited the laser is the _same_ photon that enters the detector, not something produced in pair annihilation, which would have a random phase. I only praise /. that you managed to get modded up that far.
FYI, DOSBox gets rid of that problem, not to mention linux ports of SNES emulators. It's the wind0z games that's most troublesome for being M$-free.
BTW, how exactly do they "fire up" MSDOS? If they are running Wind0z X-P like all Joe Sixpacks, then their cmd.exe is utterly incompatible with MSDOS's command.com. Many games rely on DOS-only mode that is not achievable since Wind0z2000 (or was it since Wind0zME?). So, in order to "fire up" MSDOS... they will probably need to dual boot into true MSDOS (like 6.22) on a FAT16 partition---which, BTW, no Joe Sixpack can do.
You can do that by using the negative "not" and a word that is positive in form, but negative in meaning. For example: "I do not disbelieve in..." Yes, logically, this is double negative, but grammatically, this is just one negation, and it's all fine by all our friendly grammar nazis.
There seemed to be other grammatical mistakes and logical... mitakes (such as being incoherent) in your post, but since you didn't ask anyone to fix those, I won't.
Amount Slashdotters pay: $0 in lieu of no infringing uses on record
Er... I think there are infringing uses, as normal daily metabolism requires replication of cells, and thus DNA. How else does that wound you got when you on the playground as a kid get healed?
I was so surprised when I read this for the first time---this story is so similar to a Korean legend of an honest forrester (timberer? well, he makes living out of cutting/gathering wood from mountains and selling it to the people on the plains) who dropped his axe in a deep lake by mistake, weeped next to the lake (because that was his only possession), at which time a lake divinity appeared and presented to him silver, golden, and iron axes in that order, and when the forrester honestly said that iron axe was his, the divinity gave him all three axes (well, the original stories is more eloquent and developed than this, but this is as much as i can do in one sentence).
I'm not sure whether the similarity is because this is such a common motif or because of some shared ancestry between Israelites and Koreans (or whatever Asian race modern Koreans descended from).
The problem is, while religions do not make it a secret that they have a particular worldview and a set of beliefs (and thus, sometimes violent and not-so-righteous acts to enforce those beliefs), science is supposed to be objective, fact-based, and experimentally-verified. I'm not here to say that scientists should be completely free of bias or any personal prejudices, but they definitely shouldn't let those things guide nor hinder their work in science---not anything more than initial inspiration, anyway. Religion-bashing does not belong to the "people in sciences". Religion, as far as science is concerned, should be irrelevant---personally significant (either in a positive way or negative way) to a particular scientist, maybe; but it should in no way influence (either positively or negatively) his work in science.
Is this a double-standard? Yes. But I put forward this double-standard as a double believer in scientific principles and Christ. And, as much as I don't like fundamentalists standing in the way of scientific progress, I am appalled by atheists exploiting success of science (which neither presumes nor denies existence of God, so far, at least) to bash religion. I would even go as far as to say that such coattailing is more cowardly act than oppressing minority beliefs under the authority of a powerful Church (a couple centuries back, anyway).
I'm not sure if you had this in mind, but you just might be interested in Star Trek Voyager, Equinox, at the end of season 5 and beginning of season 6. If you didn't know already, well, you will see the connection when you watch it.
Egh... you really don't have a single clue how Korean written system works, do you? Now, you are correct in saying that Koreans eliminated Chinese characters in their writing, pretty much. However, that, in itself, has nothing to do with Japanese occupation. I'll have you know that at the time when Hangeul was created, it was not accepted widely. It was called "Eonmoon", "common people's writing", or more idiomatically, "vernacular". Scholars and aristocrats definitely did not use Hangeul. It was only during and after occupation (er... maybe a littel before that too---my modern Korean history's a bit rusty) that Hanguel was rooted as a symbol of Korean people. Now, I think you are confusing recent efforts to get rid of "Japanese" words (for example, the yellow radish thing they give you in "Chinese" restaurants (run by Koreans, of course), is properly called in Korean, "Danmooji", but it's also often called "Dalg-gguang", which, I believe, is the Japanese name for it; they are trying to get rid of those elements of our speech) or other perceived "Japanese" influence with this change in writing system.
Now, coming back to the topic, do you really not know how exactly Koreans "eliminated" Chinese characters? They write it phonetically in Korean. In fact, what is one character in Chinese is also one character in Korean---even if original Chinese pronunciation of that particular "word" isn't one syllable, you can be guaranteed that the Korean version is one syllable and therefore representable by one Korean character. Of course, this introduces problem of ambiguity now and then, and that's where Chinese characters are used mostly now (in parenthesis, for short and effective disambiguation for the learned). Nevertheless, Korean vocabulary, especially in the "learned" writing, remains very much Sino-Korean, if anything, especially given the similarity of Korean and Japanese, I would assert (but since I don't know Japanese, I cannot verify this authoritatively) that the same content written in Korean is shorter, since Korean writing system, even when writing pure-Korean words, writes only one character for one syllable, whereas Japanese writing system for pure Japanese words do not (IIRC, they work very much like Roman alphabet).
Now, if you are going to claim yourself as a Korean, don't stop at what your dad told you---'hate to break it to you, but much of it probably isn't right, and even if they are, probably not in depth enough. Study Korean (Hangeul) for yourself, learn your culture, or just blend into the mainstream and act like clueless Westerners.
PS. I should put this disclaimer that the North Korea does go all the way and tries to eliminate all non-pure-Korean words (Sino-Korean, Japanese, English, etc.), resulting in a longer writing/speech. But, I'm going to assume that you or your parents are not recent arrivals from North Korea.
Well, because AFAIK, there is no such legend. I don't have time to read the site you cite, but a quick search (and a cursory glance) reveals no word "leaf" or "leaves". It does mention how the characters were meant to resemble organ shapes (and that's the story I read about consonants in Korea) and nature (sky and things like that; I haven't heard this story, but is believable enough for now), but those are not the same legends you talk of.
Well, to cut the long story short, the one reason in particular I objected to your metioning your "legend" was, i) it trivializes creation of Hanguel (specifically, makes it sound like it was arbitrary, the way Roman alphabets are---which isn't true, BTW), and that's one of the worst insult you can throw at a person with Korean heritage (aside from saying Dok-doh is a Japanese island, perhaps); ii) it's simply not true.
Legend? I thought it was pretty much accepted that the King Sejong commissioned creation of Korean alphabet, which changed only in minor aspects over 400 years.
Now, granted, there were other attempts to devise a Korean writing system (including something called Yidoo, which is nothing more than using Chinese characters in phonetic fasion, I believe), and creation of Hangeul was probably nothing like coming up with some brilliant writing system overnight, out of thin air, but the history of Korean writing system is better documented than you indicate.
What you are saying, put in the American perspective, is quite similar to saying, "The U.S. Constitution, according to legends, was revealed to the Founding Fathers on a holy mountain in Massachusetts by the Holy Spirit."
See how ridiculous it is? There is no such legend, and there is no _need_ for one, since we already know the true (more or less...take a scribe's "error" or two) story.
Er... V != E. Unless you mean E in that special sense, "electromotive force" (i.e. voltage of a battery, etc.). That's not to say E is unrelated to V, but still.
And, indeed, if only economics (and not governments) were in play, gasoline should be much cheaper than it is now---it's not as bad in U.S., but in Europe and Asia, more than half the gasoline price is tax.
Nevertheless, this comparison shows... well, that the prices are nearly equal (with the order of magnitude) and there are no economic incentive or disincentive to use electricity on its own---only coupled with either environmental or political incentives.
Be more responsible Complain less Be more attentive Make lesser mistakes
Yay. I feel so motivated just reading it.
Rather, notice the Chinese part. See how it's all four characters long? What you are reading in English is a badly translated motto which must be at least somewhat decent (I can't read Chinese either---I only have some cultural awareness). Most Chinese proverbs and mottos are designed to be four characters long---it's almost like a poetry (with meter and rhyme) and it has to be translated as thus...
(But, of course, we "enligthened" Western overlords like to look at badly, unidiomatically translated piece of "exotic" Eastern writing, point at it and say, "Awww, look, they write and speak funny. How cute." You have yet to read a badly-translated English in another language.)
I don't know how it works in other schools, but in my school, my instructors do not know whether I'm taking the class P/NP or for letter grade. They simply give me a letter grade when they submit grades, and the registration system gives me P/NP (if I chose that option) based on a certain criterion (i.e. C or higher for pass). So, if you wanted to change your grading option, you would have to hack someone else's account (I don't know whose it might be though... the college counselor? The dean?)
Also, if the class was required for her major, this might not be an option, as requirements for majors may not be taken (once again, at least at my school) P/NP. In fact, if a class (say, freshman calculus, which is MATH 1A and 1B here) was taken P/NP and later you changed your major to something that required that course, you were in serious trouble, since that class could not be taken again for credit and the major department would take only letter-graded credits. (I'm sure there are ways to wiggle yourself out of this (approval of department head, use of internal records of the letter grade received, etc.) but I wouldn't want to go there, if possible.)
IIRC, this is Michelson-Morley experiment which provided the motivation for the theory of special relativity (and experimental evidence of absence of ether). Unless there is another experiment that I don't know, this experiment isn't related to quantum mechanics.
A Proton is a neutron with a positron.
No, it's not. A proton is three quarks. From Wikipedia:
Protons are classified as baryons and are composed of two Up quarks and one Down quark, which are also held together by the strong nuclear force, mediated by gluons. The proton's antimatter equivalent is the antiproton, which has the same magnitude charge as the proton but the opposite sign.
A neutron may decay into a proton+electron pair, but a proton is most definitely not composed of neutron+something else. If nothing else, this should be the proof: neutron is heavier than proton---by conservation of mass and energy, neutron cannot be a component of proton.
When electrons or positrons move (current) they produce electro magnectic waves which are light.
No, it's not when they move that they produce EM waves. It's when they accelerate that it does (if you had been a physicist, this difference would have been carved into your very being). Moving charge only creates a magnetic field, which doesn't necessarily propagate as an oscillating field in space (i.e. EM wave). What you need is not a current but an alternating (as one example) current.
It's a small step toward faster computing and eventualy quantum computing...
Er... I know that you don't know what you are talking about, but this has nothing to do with quantum computing. (O.K. I haven't RTFM (nor do I have interest or time to do so), so I may be wrong on this, but...) This development is analogous to moving to fiber optics from copper cables---it does use a less "lossy" and perhaps faster medium, but it is in no way related to quantum computing.
IMHO, this is a non-issue if the install was done carefully. You can simply use --prefix option available in most configure scripts (although, I do have to admit, some packages have this option broken and might need some editing of config/makefiles to get it done) to install everything (yes, everything: binaries, libraries, documentations, config. files, etc.) under a directory, say, /opt/package_name. You can use symlinks for files that have to be in some system-default location. When you are done with the package, just delete the directory---and you can worry about symlinks later, since they don't take space or do anything to interfere with normal operation, and it's trivial to find broken symlinks and delete them from time to time.
And, well, if you don't know about symlinks or passing --prefix=$some_install_dir_like_"/opt/package" to the configure script, and you use *nix, well, you should learn it---it's vastly useful and not that difficult to learn.
I take it that you are not a Tolkien fan? Silmarillion was actually submitted to a publisher and rejected (more details available in the endnotes of "Lays of Beleriand", by Tolkien (whichever one you want)). There, in fact, JRR Tolkien is quoted as writing that he hope to publish it some day. The end result of the publisher wanting some more "Hobbit story" but rejecting the Silmarillion was, in fact, LOTR!
Granted, the Silmarillion was never "complete", at least not to Tolkien's standards, but IMHO, it is far more complete (in plot-line and style) some of the junks I read in Sci-Fi (or any other fiction) genre.
When the publishers rejected Silmarillion, they said, not to offend Tolkien, that "rather than a story in itself, it is a mine to be mined" (quoting from memory, so not sure whether my i's are dotted right and t's are crossed right) for other books, and so it became such for Tolkien (you can see lots of elements of LOTR mirroring what happened during the First or Second Era). If the movie-makers had any brain, it should be the same for them: Silmarillion should be a mine to be mined for more movie scripts! They always "defile" the originals anyway, and if they are going to change the original text, they should be doing it on an "incomplete" text as Silmarillion, not the completely-polished product as LOTR (yes, I didn't like LOTR movie trilogy too much) or Hobbit.
When I type in a correct password (tried it first with an _incorrect_ password), this is what I get:
404 Not Found:
The requested URL /eBayISAPI.php was not found on this server.
And "this server" is, 62.193.211.236.
Now, only if there's a way to figure out who their ISP is and alert them about this phishing scheme....
PS. Of course, I changed my password immediately afterwards. I'm stupid, but not _that_ stupid.
IDK, but, to me it seems, it's exactly like Google interface. In fact, they probably copied it over from Google, exactly. If it weren't for the logo (o.k. I'm exaggerating), I wouldn't be able to tell that it wasn't Google. (BTW, google also displays some ads on top of the search page, but they are marked clearly (by different background) as ads---and it's exactly the same way in search.yahoo.com.)