Are you paying attention? I was talking about counting the votes: i.e., after all the voting is done. The vote counters, not the vote casters. In a close nationwide popular vote, any hanging chad or problem with voter registration in *any voting precinct* would have been something for either side to seize on and try to get counted differently. We'd probably *still* be waiting for all the chaos to end.
In any case, the electoral college *overweights* votes in small states. A state with 10 people (if it were possible to create one) would still have 3 electoral votes. The fact that people in unpopulated states don't have as diverse an electorate is why relatively little campaigning needs to be done there.
In a popular vote, candidates would still concentrate on the populated regions, because they get more campaign per dollar.
In 2000, the pooftieth vote discrepancy was exacerbated by the college system,
I'm not impressed by how the 2000 election was dealt with overall, but the electoral college actually *reduced* the chaos.
The alternative, a nation-wide popular vote, would have meant that George Bush would have been scraping through *every* state and county looking for enough questionable votes to give him the edge over Gore. You'd be multiplying the chaos by fifty times.
As it was, only one state that got involved in the madness.
You are right about the additional entertainment. However, for soundtrack listeners, the drawback with the movie is that the musical portion is overwhelmed by all the dialogue and foley sounds.
Most of the time in a movie, you can hardly hear the music. You are paying more for the CD so that the actors shut the hell up and the guy putting footstep and traffic noise in stops. Perhaps that seems silly, but soundtrack fans are evidentally willing to pay for that, while movie-plot fans aren't.
The Feynman lectures were originally given to Cal Tech undergrads. The lectures were also accompanied by the semi-standard "tutorials" (i.e., smaller classroom meetings) led by course assistants, and problem sets.
The lectures themselves were pitched too high for most (but not all) of the pretty sophisticated Cal Tech undergrads, who started not showing up, but grad students and professors *started* showing up for the lectures, which kept the room pretty full anyhow.
Tipler is the one I learned first year physics from, too, and I don't have any major objection. It is one of the bazillion H&R "ripoffs," by which I mean the pedagogical approach is pretty much the same. Some of the ripoffs are more usable than H&R, mainly because the H&R problems are rather difficult.
Another, non-crackpot idea is that the geology (i.e. rock formations) of oil well sites is somewhat more complicated than the well owners have realized, and that the finite amount of oil down there can move around under the huge pressures involved.
The fact that petroleum tends to accumulate in porous rock layers is no more mysterious than the fact that liquid water tends to accumulate in porous rock layers. I can soak up more water with a sponge than with a stone, too.
Neither means there is some quasi-unlimited source of petroleum down there.
Your concept of "physical time dimension" is incomplete.
What you miss in all your discussion of "ct is in units of meters" is that the spacetime metric, which is what actually determines distance between points in spacetime, assigns an opposite sign to the square of the "ct" component.
If you like, you can keep a Euclidean-looking metric by making the time coordinate imaginary: (ict)^2 = -c^2 t^2.
In either case, the time direction is distinct from the ordinary physical dimensions.
Psychologically, this seems to result in our experiencing that some events occur "earlier" than other "later" events, in a very different way than we see things happen to the "left" of things that are to the "right." Basically, watches and meter sticks seem to be very different kinds of instruments. The speed of light allows us to relate the two types of measurement to each other, but there is just something very different about what they do.
You know, I studied physics that way in school, and it worked for me. But there is something just really depressing about the state of introductory physics textbooks.
The truth of the matter is: there are only two introductory physics textbooks: Halliday & Resnick, and the Feynman lectures. The first is DULL, and the second is unusable. All others are ripoffs of H&R, not done as well.
I really love physics, but first year physics is just damn boring, until you get to grad school and have it in your blood.
Quantum mechanics is really great, too, but not because of all the Schroedinger's cat bullshit. (The measurement problem is not all the great philosophical mystery that the kiddie books talk about. It's tough, and QM coherence can still bend your mind, but it really isn't about the "nature of reality" in any kind of spiritual way.) QM is cool because it works so damn well at describing the world. I'm a condensed matter guy, so I don't care about the superstring/particle theory/cosmology stuff, but I get blown away thinking about how a laser or a transistor just does its thing, and we, as humans, understand it. I imagine if I had been messed up enough to go into high-energy physics, I'd get the heebie-jeebies thinking about all those collisions and particle jets, and how we understand all these particles that would just be fantasies except for the fact that for a few billion dollars, you can make your own.
Stat mech and thermo just rock. Classical, yet quantum, at the same time, and it's in your fridge, too.
And good old classical mechanics: I don't get into the formalism, but Isaac Newton, what a man. For thousands of years, people had seen things fall to the ground, and people had watched the moon and planets go around the sky, and it took the towering genius of Newton to say something that today seems so obvious: maybe these are the same thing. Can you fathom how much this changes things: the heavens and the earth obey the same laws---not one set for beneath the sky, and another set for above the sky, but one set of laws for the whole shebang. Take that, Aristotle.
Man, this stuff is just great. I could go on for days.
Feynman tried to get some of the excitement going by bringing up quantum mechanics much earlier than most textbooks, but he still had to deal with Maxwell's equations and all the math, and it just is too much to take in the dose that he prescribes.
Physics is great, but it's tough. Maybe there isn't any royal road to geometry, but a first-year textbook just isn't what it is about.
I guess what I'm saying is, you need to do the equivalent amount of work either way, but it is a shame that there isn't a text that gets you to the excitement instead of just making sure you've got the chops to understand Newton's laws, free-body diagrams, and the basic laws of electromagnetism.
Computer programs are critically different from mathematical algorithms: they run in computers, which are essentially mechanical devices.
If an auto manufacturer develops some new valve timing that improves engine efficiency, do you think it should not be patentable just because there is a mathematical description of the process?
A further argument against your "stagnation" scenario is that patents are *publically disclosed* at the time the patent is granted. There is no reason the patent can't lead someone else to come up with an alternative idea.
The whole problem with the "software patent" debate is that the arguments made against software patents almost always ignore the fact that the unbelievable advances in *hardware* technology (made mostly by Western inventors) in the last hundred years have all been made under a strong patent regime. Patents do not magically destroy innovation. They allow innovation to be financed.
This fact presents a huge hurdle that an ivory-tower opponent has to overcome: that somehow writing a program is so different from designing a electronic or mechanical device that software patents have exactly the opposite effect that hardware patents have had.
Any tool that is inflexible enough to force programmers to do things a certain way is not going to be flexible enough to solve every problem that a programmer might face.
Programmers need more flexible tools, not less. Not that most developers would know what to do when they got them.
Programmer's create mental "things" which are just as expensive, in terms of mental effort, to tear down and rebuild as it is expensive, in a material sense, to tear down and rebuild a house.
If a programmer screws something down, someone else may have read it and written other code that depends on it. Any changes need to be broadcast to the other developers who might have used it, causing them to have to relearn what they have done and rewrite their code. That's potentially a huge cost in developer effort and frustration.
Why else is "backward compatibility" is such a byword?
I believe that WEB was a great improvement over Pascal at the time that Knuth began to use it. However, it does not solve the underlying software engineering problem. Knuth's style at the time of TeX, etc., involved very little abstraction.
The biggest problem this causes is that the major data structures in TeX do not have well-defined or factored interfaces that allow them to be easily changed or extended. Furthermore, important details of these data structures are basically undocumented, and often cause interdependencies between different portions of a WEB that are not at all obvious.
If you wish to see the problem face-to-face, look through TeX: The Program at the "inner loop" and see how many different sections of the WEB that you would have to understand.
A similar problem is his use of enumerations with certain magic values, where the magic is documented (or becomes apparent, while still undocumented) some distance away from the point of definition.
Another serious problem with WEB is that it allows one to completely obscure the sequential nature of the program. Many times, one chunk depends on initialization that was performed by another chunk. If Knuth decided to make some laconic comment rather than remind you of that initialization, good luck reconstructing the sequential dependencies.
If one is writing monolithic programs, writing them like a Russian novel might be easier to comprehend than one large unformatted source file. However, if one has the alternative of writing a highly modular program with clean interfaces, I don't really see any advantage to breaking up and rearranging the underlying code.
The Fortune 500/Global 500 is ranked in terms of revenue. Most people talking about Microsoft as the world's "largest company" are discussing market capitalization.
In stock pricing, it is profits (theoretically), not revenue that allow for dividends which give a stock its value. Therefore, being a huge retailer like Walmart with slim profit margins is less important that having Microsoft's huge profit margins on less revenue.
The point is that parallax measurements of distances to stellar or planetary objects are based on the Earth's motion around the sun. The measurements *inherently* give you an answer in AU.
1) Why apply a conversion factor just to express it in meters?
2) The proper conversion factor depends on other measurements (I'm actually not sure how the mean earth-solar distance would be measured), so it can't be defined arbitrarily. If you made the Earth 0.93 AU, you'd have to multiply all your parallax measurements by 0.93 to get the distance in your "new AU" anyway. Pointless effort for no gain.
There is a reason for proliferation of auxiliary units. The interatomic spacing of Si atoms in a crystal is used as a basis for diffraction measurements; the "amu" is the basis for atomic mass measurements; the "mol" is used as a measure of quantity, etc.
In all of these cases, the measurements based on the unit are more (or just slightly less) precise than the basic unit can be measured by other techniques. It is most convenient to express your results that best preserves the original accuracy.
I saw it as a somewhat ironic phrasing: if we can't understand a message from a Slashdot editor posted on the internet, what hope does an alien civilization have of understanding the recordings?
On a less sarcastic note, the point of the record is not really to communicate to aliens. By the time any aliens get the record, the Earth might even be long gone. Any aliens who find this probe will know that there was (or is) some form of intelligence in the universe. Maybe they won't even understand the concept of "sound" as a medium of communication, but it will be clear that this was the product of a civilization. Perhaps the effort to decode the disk will be a source of enlightenment or inspiration for the aliens, even if it isn't successful. If the message were totally straightforward, it might seem trivial. You've got to leave some part of it mysterious, to give them something to chew on and wonder about.
Secondarily (or is it primarily...), it is made for the people of Earth, to know that some remnant of our humanity is floating, practically eternally, through space, even after the Earth is destroyed by solar evolution. That this disc has deliberately tried to preserve sounds that represent a diverse range of humanity is a hopeful gesture, like a time capsule, that no matter what happens to humanity, each of us can know that Voyager represents us in some small way.
The heliopause is not a gravitational feature. It is a feature of matter.
The sun emits a flood of mostly-charged particles that make up the "solar wind." The earth is shielded by its magnetic fields, but the interplanetary environment is quite harsh.
The heliopause is where this outward flow of solar matter becomes less than the general flow of matter through the galaxy. There isn't any good way to observe this from earth, which is why having a Voyager pass through the area is a good thing. Our current picture of the heliopause is based on physical modeling and simulation. Having any observational data to check these models against would be a major step forward.
Well, I've always been skeptical of the link between RF at cell phone power levels and long-term biological damage.
The main problem with a headset is that you either have to keep the headset on whenever you expect a call and look like a goofball or fumble to put the headset on before losing the call to voicemail and look like a klutz.
Without a headset, I can just keep the phone within arm's reach, and grab it.
I'll tell you what *I* think needs to be done: integration of iPod with a full Palm OS capability.
One thing that keeps me from getting an iPod is that I already have too many damn gadgets that I need to function. Pager (work), cell phone (personal), Palm pilot, wallet, and keys. If I add a iPod to this mix, I run out of pocket space. And I don't want to clip three or four things to my belt.
I know that Apple is moving to include calendar and contact information on the iPod, but read-only access is not enough, and entering data through the five buttons + wheel on the iPod would be tedious.
iPod + Palm + phone *might* someday be even better, but a hard drive in a cell phone seems a bit much. I've never really liked the idea of being hooked to my cell phone through a headset.
I have no personal experience with Lisp machines, but Lisp machines didn't have much in the way of protection or "sandbox" type security.
The beauty of the Lisp machine was that even the assembly language in the kernel was expressed in Lisp. There was no real separation between the lower-level services of the operating system and the upper-level programming facilities, and all of it was exposed transparently (and with introspection) to the programmer's tools. Another important feature was the integration of the VM with the garbage collection.
(As an aside, it was possible to program in Fortran, etc., on Lisp machines. But much nicer in Lisp).
The reason this is a mixed bag is that a programmer could basically redefine any part of the system he wanted. You could cause serious confusion by redefining the wrong thing. (A simple example, which might be inaccurate: setting the value of nil to be something other than nil (i.e. a value other than false) would cause all sorts of bizzareness, because almost every element of the system depends on the value of nil to test false.)
Lisp machines were virtually ideal (some would claim still unsurpassed) as developer workstations. Not so ideal for deployment as enterprise servers.
Scheme (which I don't call Lisp, but rather a dialect of Lisp) doesn't have standard packages, and combines the namespaces of variables and functions, which allows for notational elegance at the expense of limiting variable names.
Well, that's a bit harsher than I would put it. The value of a degree is basically what opportunities it gives you that you wouldn't otherwise have.
But if your goal is getting tenure at a major research university someday, not getting into a top-flight graduate program should be a first sign that the road is going to be a very difficult one.
A somewhat unfortunate reality is that many large universities need physics graduate students for their teaching, in order to provide manpower for the large engineering classes. Providing them with a research environment that will allow them to produce quality research results is not necessarily a high priority.
I'm generally against the trend among graduate students to unionize, but this kind of "exploitation" is what motivates it. I feel that [prospective] grad students need to be very realistic in their expectations. I think unionizing goes in the wrong direction, basically agreeing that teaching is the primary reason that graduate students go to grad school. Instead, I see teaching as a useful experience and a way to get financial support needed to pursue the real goal: to learn to advance human knowledge.
Hate to break it to you, but this is one of the greatest failures of open source: documentation. Most open source contributors are so taken with their "skill" at coding, that they can't be bothered to do the difficult job of documenting what they've done.
Hastily written manual==worse than useless documentation. One's work isn't complete unless someone else can figure out what the hell it is that you actually did.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you paying attention? I was talking about counting the votes: i.e., after all the voting is done. The vote counters, not the vote casters. In a close nationwide popular vote, any hanging chad or problem with voter registration in *any voting precinct* would have been something for either side to seize on and try to get counted differently. We'd probably *still* be waiting for all the chaos to end.
In any case, the electoral college *overweights* votes in small states. A state with 10 people (if it were possible to create one) would still have 3 electoral votes. The fact that people in unpopulated states don't have as diverse an electorate is why relatively little campaigning needs to be done there.
In a popular vote, candidates would still concentrate on the populated regions, because they get more campaign per dollar.
What is important is that you not be able to connect the choice made by a voter with the voter's identity, or vice versa.
Otherwise, your employer or anyone else with the ability to put pressure on you can influence your vote.
With anonymity, no matter how I vote, nobody can find out if I did what they consider to be the "right thing."
In 2000, the pooftieth vote discrepancy was exacerbated by the college system,
I'm not impressed by how the 2000 election was dealt with overall, but the electoral college actually *reduced* the chaos.
The alternative, a nation-wide popular vote, would have meant that George Bush would have been scraping through *every* state and county looking for enough questionable votes to give him the edge over Gore. You'd be multiplying the chaos by fifty times.
As it was, only one state that got involved in the madness.
You are right about the additional entertainment. However, for soundtrack listeners, the drawback with the movie is that the musical portion is overwhelmed by all the dialogue and foley sounds.
Most of the time in a movie, you can hardly hear the music. You are paying more for the CD so that the actors shut the hell up and the guy putting footstep and traffic noise in stops. Perhaps that seems silly, but soundtrack fans are evidentally willing to pay for that, while movie-plot fans aren't.
The Feynman lectures were originally given to Cal Tech undergrads. The lectures were also accompanied by the semi-standard "tutorials" (i.e., smaller classroom meetings) led by course assistants, and problem sets.
The lectures themselves were pitched too high for most (but not all) of the pretty sophisticated Cal Tech undergrads, who started not showing up, but grad students and professors *started* showing up for the lectures, which kept the room pretty full anyhow.
Tipler is the one I learned first year physics from, too, and I don't have any major objection. It is one of the bazillion H&R "ripoffs," by which I mean the pedagogical approach is pretty much the same. Some of the ripoffs are more usable than H&R, mainly because the H&R problems are rather difficult.
Another, non-crackpot idea is that the geology (i.e. rock formations) of oil well sites is somewhat more complicated than the well owners have realized, and that the finite amount of oil down there can move around under the huge pressures involved.
The fact that petroleum tends to accumulate in porous rock layers is no more mysterious than the fact that liquid water tends to accumulate in porous rock layers. I can soak up more water with a sponge than with a stone, too.
Neither means there is some quasi-unlimited source of petroleum down there.
Your concept of "physical time dimension" is incomplete.
What you miss in all your discussion of "ct is in units of meters" is that the spacetime metric, which is what actually determines distance between points in spacetime, assigns an opposite sign to the square of the "ct" component.
If you like, you can keep a Euclidean-looking metric by making the time coordinate imaginary:
(ict)^2 = -c^2 t^2.
In either case, the time direction is distinct from the ordinary physical dimensions.
Psychologically, this seems to result in our experiencing that some events occur "earlier" than other "later" events, in a very different way than we see things happen to the "left" of things that are to the "right." Basically, watches and meter sticks seem to be very different kinds of instruments. The speed of light allows us to relate the two types of measurement to each other, but there is just something very different about what they do.
You know, I studied physics that way in school, and it worked for me. But there is something just really depressing about the state of introductory physics textbooks.
The truth of the matter is: there are only two introductory physics textbooks: Halliday & Resnick, and the Feynman lectures. The first is DULL, and the second is unusable. All others are ripoffs of H&R, not done as well.
I really love physics, but first year physics is just damn boring, until you get to grad school and have it in your blood.
Quantum mechanics is really great, too, but not because of all the Schroedinger's cat bullshit. (The measurement problem is not all the great philosophical mystery that the kiddie books talk about. It's tough, and QM coherence can still bend your mind, but it really isn't about the "nature of reality" in any kind of spiritual way.) QM is cool because it works so damn well at describing the world. I'm a condensed matter guy, so I don't care about the superstring/particle theory/cosmology stuff, but I get blown away thinking about how a laser or a transistor just does its thing, and we, as humans, understand it. I imagine if I had been messed up enough to go into high-energy physics, I'd get the heebie-jeebies thinking about all those collisions and particle jets, and how we understand all these particles that would just be fantasies except for the fact that for a few billion dollars, you can make your own.
Stat mech and thermo just rock. Classical, yet quantum, at the same time, and it's in your fridge, too.
And good old classical mechanics: I don't get into the formalism, but Isaac Newton, what a man. For thousands of years, people had seen things fall to the ground, and people had watched the moon and planets go around the sky, and it took the towering genius of Newton to say something that today seems so obvious: maybe these are the same thing. Can you fathom how much this changes things: the heavens and the earth obey the same laws---not one set for beneath the sky, and another set for above the sky, but one set of laws for the whole shebang. Take that, Aristotle.
Man, this stuff is just great. I could go on for days.
Feynman tried to get some of the excitement going by bringing up quantum mechanics much earlier than most textbooks, but he still had to deal with Maxwell's equations and all the math, and it just is too much to take in the dose that he prescribes.
Physics is great, but it's tough. Maybe there isn't any royal road to geometry, but a first-year textbook just isn't what it is about.
I guess what I'm saying is, you need to do the equivalent amount of work either way, but it is a shame that there isn't a text that gets you to the excitement instead of just making sure you've got the chops to understand Newton's laws, free-body diagrams, and the basic laws of electromagnetism.
Computer programs are critically different from mathematical algorithms: they run in computers, which are essentially mechanical devices.
If an auto manufacturer develops some new valve timing that improves engine efficiency, do you think it should not be patentable just because there is a mathematical description of the process?
A further argument against your "stagnation" scenario is that patents are *publically disclosed* at the time the patent is granted. There is no reason the patent can't lead someone else to come up with an alternative idea.
The whole problem with the "software patent" debate is that the arguments made against software patents almost always ignore the fact that the unbelievable advances in *hardware* technology (made mostly by Western inventors) in the last hundred years have all been made under a strong patent regime. Patents do not magically destroy innovation. They allow innovation to be financed.
This fact presents a huge hurdle that an ivory-tower opponent has to overcome: that somehow writing a program is so different from designing a electronic or mechanical device that software patents have exactly the opposite effect that hardware patents have had.
Any tool that is inflexible enough to force programmers to do things a certain way is not going to be flexible enough to solve every problem that a programmer might face.
Programmers need more flexible tools, not less. Not that most developers would know what to do when they got them.
To expand on your point:
Programmer's create mental "things" which are just as expensive, in terms of mental effort, to tear down and rebuild as it is expensive, in a material sense, to tear down and rebuild a house.
If a programmer screws something down, someone else may have read it and written other code that depends on it. Any changes need to be broadcast to the other developers who might have used it, causing them to have to relearn what they have done and rewrite their code. That's potentially a huge cost in developer effort and frustration.
Why else is "backward compatibility" is such a byword?
This is absolutely on the mark.
I believe that WEB was a great improvement over Pascal at the time that Knuth began to use it. However, it does not solve the underlying software engineering problem. Knuth's style at the time of TeX, etc., involved very little abstraction.
The biggest problem this causes is that the major data structures in TeX do not have well-defined or factored interfaces that allow them to be easily changed or extended. Furthermore, important details of these data structures are basically undocumented, and often cause interdependencies between different portions of a WEB that are not at all obvious.
If you wish to see the problem face-to-face, look through TeX: The Program at the "inner loop" and see how many different sections of the WEB that you would have to understand.
A similar problem is his use of enumerations with certain magic values, where the magic is documented (or becomes apparent, while still undocumented) some distance away from the point of definition.
Another serious problem with WEB is that it allows one to completely obscure the sequential nature of the program. Many times, one chunk depends on initialization that was performed by another chunk. If Knuth decided to make some laconic comment rather than remind you of that initialization, good luck reconstructing the sequential dependencies.
If one is writing monolithic programs, writing them like a Russian novel might be easier to comprehend than one large unformatted source file. However, if one has the alternative of writing a highly modular program with clean interfaces, I don't really see any advantage to breaking up and rearranging the underlying code.
The Fortune 500/Global 500 is ranked in terms of revenue. Most people talking about Microsoft as the world's "largest company" are discussing market capitalization.
In stock pricing, it is profits (theoretically), not revenue that allow for dividends which give a stock its value. Therefore, being a huge retailer like Walmart with slim profit margins is less important that having Microsoft's huge profit margins on less revenue.
The point is that parallax measurements of distances to stellar or planetary objects are based on the Earth's motion around the sun. The measurements *inherently* give you an answer in AU.
1) Why apply a conversion factor just to express it in meters?
2) The proper conversion factor depends on other measurements (I'm actually not sure how the mean earth-solar distance would be measured), so it can't be defined arbitrarily. If you made the Earth 0.93 AU, you'd have to multiply all your parallax measurements by 0.93 to get the distance in your "new AU" anyway. Pointless effort for no gain.
There is a reason for proliferation of auxiliary units. The interatomic spacing of Si atoms in a crystal is used as a basis for diffraction measurements; the "amu" is the basis for atomic mass measurements; the "mol" is used as a measure of quantity, etc.
In all of these cases, the measurements based on the unit are more (or just slightly less) precise than the basic unit can be measured by other techniques. It is most convenient to express your results that best preserves the original accuracy.
I saw it as a somewhat ironic phrasing: if we can't understand a message from a Slashdot editor posted on the internet, what hope does an alien civilization have of understanding the recordings?
On a less sarcastic note, the point of the record is not really to communicate to aliens. By the time any aliens get the record, the Earth might even be long gone. Any aliens who find this probe will know that there was (or is) some form of intelligence in the universe. Maybe they won't even understand the concept of "sound" as a medium of communication, but it will be clear that this was the product of a civilization. Perhaps the effort to decode the disk will be a source of enlightenment or inspiration for the aliens, even if it isn't successful. If the message were totally straightforward, it might seem trivial. You've got to leave some part of it mysterious, to give them something to chew on and wonder about.
Secondarily (or is it primarily...), it is made for the people of Earth, to know that some remnant of our humanity is floating, practically eternally, through space, even after the Earth is destroyed by solar evolution. That this disc has deliberately tried to preserve sounds that represent a diverse range of humanity is a hopeful gesture, like a time capsule, that no matter what happens to humanity, each of us can know that Voyager represents us in some small way.
The heliopause is not a gravitational feature. It is a feature of matter.
The sun emits a flood of mostly-charged particles that make up the "solar wind." The earth is shielded by its magnetic fields, but the interplanetary environment is quite harsh.
The heliopause is where this outward flow of solar matter becomes less than the general flow of matter through the galaxy. There isn't any good way to observe this from earth, which is why having a Voyager pass through the area is a good thing. Our current picture of the heliopause is based on physical modeling and simulation. Having any observational data to check these models against would be a major step forward.
After reading some of the responses here, I'm glad I've never seen anyone try to use Ask Slashdot to get fashion advice.
Quantum physics hasn't delivered anything for forty years.
Excuse me? Heterostructure lasers haven't been around for forty years yet, have they?
Check out this list of achievements that quantum physics has made for telecommunications.
Well, I've always been skeptical of the link between RF at cell phone power levels and long-term biological damage.
The main problem with a headset is that you either have to keep the headset on whenever you expect a call and look like a goofball or fumble to put the headset on before losing the call to voicemail and look like a klutz.
Without a headset, I can just keep the phone within arm's reach, and grab it.
I'll tell you what *I* think needs to be done: integration of iPod with a full Palm OS capability.
One thing that keeps me from getting an iPod is that I already have too many damn gadgets that I need to function. Pager (work), cell phone (personal), Palm pilot, wallet, and keys. If I add a iPod to this mix, I run out of pocket space. And I don't want to clip three or four things to my belt.
I know that Apple is moving to include calendar and contact information on the iPod, but read-only access is not enough, and entering data through the five buttons + wheel on the iPod would be tedious.
iPod + Palm + phone *might* someday be even better, but a hard drive in a cell phone seems a bit much. I've never really liked the idea of being hooked to my cell phone through a headset.
I have no personal experience with Lisp machines, but Lisp machines didn't have much in the way of protection or "sandbox" type security.
The beauty of the Lisp machine was that even the assembly language in the kernel was expressed in Lisp. There was no real separation between the lower-level services of the operating system and the upper-level programming facilities, and all of it was exposed transparently (and with introspection) to the programmer's tools. Another important feature was the integration of the VM with the garbage collection.
(As an aside, it was possible to program in Fortran, etc., on Lisp machines. But much nicer in Lisp).
The reason this is a mixed bag is that a programmer could basically redefine any part of the system he wanted. You could cause serious confusion by redefining the wrong thing. (A simple example, which might be inaccurate: setting the value of nil to be something other than nil (i.e. a value other than false) would cause all sorts of bizzareness, because almost every element of the system depends on the value of nil to test false.)
Lisp machines were virtually ideal (some would claim still unsurpassed) as developer workstations. Not so ideal for deployment as enterprise servers.
What do you mean by Lisp not having namespaces?
Common Lisp has several namespaces, including the containing of groups of "symbols" (names, crudely speaking) in "packages." The notation for this is
package-name::symbol-name
(C++ package notation looks suspicously similar. Hmmmmm.)
Scheme (which I don't call Lisp, but rather a dialect of Lisp) doesn't have standard packages, and combines the namespaces of variables and functions, which allows for notational elegance at the expense of limiting variable names.
Well, that's a bit harsher than I would put it. The value of a degree is basically what opportunities it gives you that you wouldn't otherwise have.
But if your goal is getting tenure at a major research university someday, not getting into a top-flight graduate program should be a first sign that the road is going to be a very difficult one.
A somewhat unfortunate reality is that many large universities need physics graduate students for their teaching, in order to provide manpower for the large engineering classes. Providing them with a research environment that will allow them to produce quality research results is not necessarily a high priority.
I'm generally against the trend among graduate students to unionize, but this kind of "exploitation" is what motivates it. I feel that [prospective] grad students need to be very realistic in their expectations. I think unionizing goes in the wrong direction, basically agreeing that teaching is the primary reason that graduate students go to grad school. Instead, I see teaching as a useful experience and a way to get financial support needed to pursue the real goal: to learn to advance human knowledge.
Hate to break it to you, but this is one of the greatest failures of open source: documentation. Most open source contributors are so taken with their "skill" at coding, that they can't be bothered to do the difficult job of documenting what they've done.
Hastily written manual==worse than useless documentation. One's work isn't complete unless someone else can figure out what the hell it is that you actually did.
Misspelling won't work, because those misspellings are far more likely to mark a spam than a legitimate e-mail.
PG makes the point himself with the c0ck example.