Uhm, no? The name "Pirate Party" works much better in Sweden, which has Pirates in their history and a population that knows enough English to know the term "software piracy".
In Germany, pirates are usually associated with Somalia and the German equivalent for "pirated software" translates as "robbery copy". There was a lot of debate about weather or not it's a good idea to even call it "Pirate Party", in the end it was decided that a consistent name across all countries has more value than having names that better match the local culture.
tl;dr In Germany, "Pirate" is a meaningless, valueless (or bad) word when used in politics.
Not exactly true; "Softwarepiraterie" (literally "software piracy") is a well-known german term that's used in public discussions about the subject quite frequently.
And if you stopped blowing the arse out backwards-ass middle-eastern countries, creating orphans, widows and widowers by the thousands - maybe a lot less of them would turn towards extreme religion to try and explain why dicks like you can do that without repercussions - and we would have significantly less terrorism....
Or you could go on whining about looking tough and continue this cycle of human self-abuse....
I didn't realise until now just how Jersey Shore accurately describes the US mindset as a whole:)
The US faced down the fucking USSR. The USSR could literally destroy the world, and we had a policy of going toe to toe with them if they messed with us or our allies. We were just as ready to jab the 'blow up the god damn world' as they were, if not more so. We went nearly a decade in that mindset without pissing away our civil liberties.
The USSR could destroy the world, but they DID NOT WANT TO. The commies were corrupt dictators, but they were rational people who loved their lives and that of their children. They wouldn't attack the west with terrorist sleeper cells that used airplanes as bombs, or with suitcase nukes in NY harbor. With people who love life, the "mutually assured destruction" deterrent works. The USSR had the capability to destroy the world 10 times over, but they didn't use that capability for 40 years.
Islamic terrorists do want to destroy the world. If you gave the nuclear arsenal and launch sites of the USSR to Al Qaida, western civilization would cease to exist the next day.
And I know that's only the kernel -- but that's all that matters. The userspace stuff isn't "derived" and thus doesn't have to be licensed under the GPL.
And I also know that the above is a Google-provided site, not one provided by the handset manufacturer. But that doesn't matter either as long as the handset manufacturer doesn't himself modify the GPLed parts of Android (i.e. the kernel) and then fails to distribute the source for that. As long as the handset manufacturer just distributes the Android kernel as-is, the source code is available under the above link, and that's it.
So basically, how much of these APIs actually deal with interfacing the graphics card and it's hardware accelerated features
Most of these APIs. OpenGL und D3D are basically meant to be thin, portable layers encapsulating the capabilities of (some generation of) the graphics hardware.
and how much of it is more along the lines of just a standard library that contains frequently used graphics algorithms?
Not much of it. You can use the GLU (GL utililities) library for some software utility functions (basically just convenience or comfort stuff, no thick API layers). Even for very basic stuff like matrix multiplications you have to use 3rd party libraries (if you need to do it on the CPU, rather than in a shader on the GPU). The API implementations may provide software emulations for emulating the features of newer graphics hardware in software (on the CPU) when running on older graphics cards, but if you're using graphics hardware that matches the GL version, there are hardly any sort of thick abstraction layers or algorithms that run on the CPU. The point is that, basically, modern graphics cards and OpenGL/D3D do NOT evolve independently of one another. Instead, there's a more or less lock-stepped development, i.e. graphics hardware comes out in "generations", where each new generation supports an additional set of hardware capabilities, which is supported by a matching major release of the graphics API. The generations are even named after DX API versions -- DX9, DX10, DX11. OpenGL major releases occur a bit more frequently and thus sometimes encapsulate new hardware functionality that's not yet supported by the latest DX version (hardware vendors can also provide their own GL extensions). So basically, graphics cards of the same generation from different vendors are quite similar feature-wise; the differences lie only in how the hardware implements the feature sets (and in basic characteristics like performance and amount of texture memory).
Agreed, but the alternative -- waiting for IT to build something -- is simply unacceptable.
Another alternative would be that many more people (non-IT people) learn to program. I mean program with half-way modern (interactive/scripting) languages, environments and libraries. I actually think that this is a cultural issue, and an education issue. In a world where pretty much every automation is run by computers, you could argue that a deeper understanding of how those machines work is a sort of fundamental piece of knowledge like reading and writing and algebra.
Also, the root account is enabled by default. I know you can do this in ubuntu also, but it's one of a long list of annoyances I have with that distribution.
Are you sure they're going to shut it down? That's the question I've been asking myself -- whether they're also going to shut down the labs web sites such as Google Sets, rather than just Google Labs as a department / organizational unit within Google. Those are two different things after all, right? What harm would it do to Google to leave existing labs websites up and running as they are?
Before PulseAudio it wasn't possible to turn on a bluetooth headset and have any audio that was playing through your speakers automatically start going to the headset instead.
And that was a fundamental design flaw in Alsa (rather than just missing drivers), and it could only be remedied by inventing a whole new sound daemon / system and putting it on top of Alsa?
I think you need a few more zeros on your multiplier. MySQL is not ACID, so for an enterprise to rely on it for anything important is just pure idiocy.
InnoDB can be configured to be ACID compliant. That said, a database that contains 600,000 user records and associated data, is distributed worldwide, and provides 0.1 seconds of response time at several million queries per second can't be ACID anyway.
The fundamental principle of the CANDU reactor design is the use of heavy water as a neutron moderator. Because water vaporizes at low temperatures, the reactor has a negative void coefficient, which means that overheating the reactor causes it to be inefficient at slowing neutrons, which reduces the reaction rate. This means that the CANDU reactor has an inherent negative feedback system and will effectively shut itself down if it overheats.
Well, didn't Fukushima reactor shut itself down too immediately after the tsunami hit it? You don't need a running reactor with a self-sustaining chain reaction to have a nuclear accident and a large release of radioactive material into the environment.
I you mean it spans "ocean to ocean", so does Panama (which, is also in America) and several others.
Yeah, but America started out geographically at a place where the continent was much thicker, so spanning it ocean to ocean was going to be a bigger challenge for America than it was for Panama when Panama was founded, and the founding fathers could foresee this!
Maybe all those billions will end up having been paid for worthless software patents.
Correct, that would be the best outcome. I thought about this too, and the question that I have been asking myself is whether such a reform would be legal at all. I can imagine a reform that forbids NEW patents, but invalidating EXISTING ones retroactively? Wouldn't that be prohibited by some "no punishment without pre-existing law" meta-law?
Unfortunately at this point we can't determine the force created because we don't know the distance the energy is acting over. Newton Meter is a unit of energy which is equivalent to a Joule (disregarding semantics), however a Newton is a unit of force which is Nm / Distance.
The energy is used to accelerate alpha particles from zero to the velocity v corresponding to 2.9 MeV of kinetic energy of an alpha particle, so you can use F=d(m*v)/dt, with m = 100000 times the mass of one particle, and dt=1ps. (that gives the force during the time when the laser is on; for getting the net force you'd best use dt=1s and m=75e6*100000*(mass of one particle)).
Specifically, I would like to know the power requirements for a piece of equipment like this. If its reaction can sustain the apparatus's own power draw, that would be a huge point in its favor.
Well, I doubt that it could do that, because if it could, then we should have a working fusion power station on earth based on the same principles years before someone manages to build a rocket engine with it.
what do you doubt??? that a human brain can do something a turing machine cannot?
Right, that part.
you equate consciousness with brain?
basically you are saying that you are a turing machine?
The laws of physics themselves are Turing computable, for all we know. Since my brain certainly exists inside the physical world and behaves according to the laws of physics, it is equivalent to a Turing machine. That's the part that Penrose seems to be unwilling/unable to wrap his head around, hence his insistence that there must be some exotic physics in the brain that causes consciousness. I don't have to read his book to know that such an idea is a baseless, unfounded speculation.
When it comes to the brain and consciousness, Penrose is basically a crackpot. That's what it comes down to. There's just no evidence whatsoever that consciousness relies on QM, and as the GP correctly states, QM is just indeterministic, but not "conscious", so even if there were some QM indeterminism involved in the macroscopic behaviour of the brain and the "free will", then that "free will" wouldn't be "free", it would just be indeterministic.
I don't misunderstand anything; you claimed that "(the) WHO has stated that there is no evidence of any significant release of radiation", and you continue to fail to provide any source for that, while I did provide sources that do say the opposite (and the NNSA is part of the DOE -- hardly an anti-nuclear organization). The WHO FAQ that you cited says -- among many general advices and guidelines -- that the evacuations ordered by the Japanese government are "in line" with what the US would do under similar circumstances, which, if anything, indicates that there was a significant release of radiation; and I totally fail to see how an EPA-provided list of radiation levels in the United States could tell you that no significant amount of radiation was released in Japan.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm, no? The name "Pirate Party" works much better in Sweden, which has Pirates in their history and a population that knows enough English to know the term "software piracy". In Germany, pirates are usually associated with Somalia and the German equivalent for "pirated software" translates as "robbery copy". There was a lot of debate about weather or not it's a good idea to even call it "Pirate Party", in the end it was decided that a consistent name across all countries has more value than having names that better match the local culture.
tl;dr In Germany, "Pirate" is a meaningless, valueless (or bad) word when used in politics.
Not exactly true; "Softwarepiraterie" (literally "software piracy") is a well-known german term that's used in public discussions about the subject quite frequently.
And if you stopped blowing the arse out backwards-ass middle-eastern countries, creating orphans, widows and widowers by the thousands - maybe a lot less of them would turn towards extreme religion to try and explain why dicks like you can do that without repercussions - and we would have significantly less terrorism....
Or you could go on whining about looking tough and continue this cycle of human self-abuse....
I didn't realise until now just how Jersey Shore accurately describes the US mindset as a whole :)
I'm German, thank you very much.
The US faced down the fucking USSR. The USSR could literally destroy the world, and we had a policy of going toe to toe with them if they messed with us or our allies. We were just as ready to jab the 'blow up the god damn world' as they were, if not more so. We went nearly a decade in that mindset without pissing away our civil liberties.
The USSR could destroy the world, but they DID NOT WANT TO. The commies were corrupt dictators, but they were rational people who loved their lives and that of their children. They wouldn't attack the west with terrorist sleeper cells that used airplanes as bombs, or with suitcase nukes in NY harbor. With people who love life, the "mutually assured destruction" deterrent works. The USSR had the capability to destroy the world 10 times over, but they didn't use that capability for 40 years. Islamic terrorists do want to destroy the world. If you gave the nuclear arsenal and launch sites of the USSR to Al Qaida, western civilization would cease to exist the next day.
I wouldn't call failing to distribute the source a "tiny mistake".
http://android.git.kernel.org/
Looks distributed enough to me.
And I know that's only the kernel -- but that's all that matters. The userspace stuff isn't "derived" and thus doesn't have to be licensed under the GPL.
And I also know that the above is a Google-provided site, not one provided by the handset manufacturer. But that doesn't matter either as long as the handset manufacturer doesn't himself modify the GPLed parts of Android (i.e. the kernel) and then fails to distribute the source for that. As long as the handset manufacturer just distributes the Android kernel as-is, the source code is available under the above link, and that's it.
I explicitly allow ads on Slashdot, and other sites I enjoy,
That's not enough; you also have to click on the ads. Do you?
So basically, how much of these APIs actually deal with interfacing the graphics card and it's hardware accelerated features
Most of these APIs. OpenGL und D3D are basically meant to be thin, portable layers encapsulating the capabilities of (some generation of) the graphics hardware.
and how much of it is more along the lines of just a standard library that contains frequently used graphics algorithms?
Not much of it. You can use the GLU (GL utililities) library for some software utility functions (basically just convenience or comfort stuff, no thick API layers). Even for very basic stuff like matrix multiplications you have to use 3rd party libraries (if you need to do it on the CPU, rather than in a shader on the GPU). The API implementations may provide software emulations for emulating the features of newer graphics hardware in software (on the CPU) when running on older graphics cards, but if you're using graphics hardware that matches the GL version, there are hardly any sort of thick abstraction layers or algorithms that run on the CPU. The point is that, basically, modern graphics cards and OpenGL/D3D do NOT evolve independently of one another. Instead, there's a more or less lock-stepped development, i.e. graphics hardware comes out in "generations", where each new generation supports an additional set of hardware capabilities, which is supported by a matching major release of the graphics API. The generations are even named after DX API versions -- DX9, DX10, DX11. OpenGL major releases occur a bit more frequently and thus sometimes encapsulate new hardware functionality that's not yet supported by the latest DX version (hardware vendors can also provide their own GL extensions). So basically, graphics cards of the same generation from different vendors are quite similar feature-wise; the differences lie only in how the hardware implements the feature sets (and in basic characteristics like performance and amount of texture memory).
Agreed, but the alternative -- waiting for IT to build something -- is simply unacceptable.
Another alternative would be that many more people (non-IT people) learn to program. I mean program with half-way modern (interactive/scripting) languages, environments and libraries. I actually think that this is a cultural issue, and an education issue. In a world where pretty much every automation is run by computers, you could argue that a deeper understanding of how those machines work is a sort of fundamental piece of knowledge like reading and writing and algebra.
I'd like to see a similar chart graphing debt versus control of the house and the senate. Know where I can find one?
Here.
Also, the root account is enabled by default. I know you can do this in ubuntu also, but it's one of a long list of annoyances I have with that distribution.
"sudo su" is even less to type than "su - root".
Are you sure they're going to shut it down? That's the question I've been asking myself -- whether they're also going to shut down the labs web sites such as Google Sets, rather than just Google Labs as a department / organizational unit within Google. Those are two different things after all, right? What harm would it do to Google to leave existing labs websites up and running as they are?
Before PulseAudio it wasn't possible to turn on a bluetooth headset and have any audio that was playing through your speakers automatically start going to the headset instead.
And that was a fundamental design flaw in Alsa (rather than just missing drivers), and it could only be remedied by inventing a whole new sound daemon / system and putting it on top of Alsa?
I think you need a few more zeros on your multiplier. MySQL is not ACID, so for an enterprise to rely on it for anything important is just pure idiocy.
InnoDB can be configured to be ACID compliant. That said, a database that contains 600,000 user records and associated data, is distributed worldwide, and provides 0.1 seconds of response time at several million queries per second can't be ACID anyway.
The fundamental principle of the CANDU reactor design is the use of heavy water as a neutron moderator. Because water vaporizes at low temperatures, the reactor has a negative void coefficient, which means that overheating the reactor causes it to be inefficient at slowing neutrons, which reduces the reaction rate. This means that the CANDU reactor has an inherent negative feedback system and will effectively shut itself down if it overheats.
Well, didn't Fukushima reactor shut itself down too immediately after the tsunami hit it? You don't need a running reactor with a self-sustaining chain reaction to have a nuclear accident and a large release of radioactive material into the environment.
I you mean it spans "ocean to ocean", so does Panama (which, is also in America) and several others.
Yeah, but America started out geographically at a place where the continent was much thicker, so spanning it ocean to ocean was going to be a bigger challenge for America than it was for Panama when Panama was founded, and the founding fathers could foresee this!
Maybe all those billions will end up having been paid for worthless software patents.
Correct, that would be the best outcome. I thought about this too, and the question that I have been asking myself is whether such a reform would be legal at all. I can imagine a reform that forbids NEW patents, but invalidating EXISTING ones retroactively? Wouldn't that be prohibited by some "no punishment without pre-existing law" meta-law?
Esitmated output work: 4.646312×10^-14 MJ
Unfortunately at this point we can't determine the force created because we don't know the distance the energy is acting over. Newton Meter is a unit of energy which is equivalent to a Joule (disregarding semantics), however a Newton is a unit of force which is Nm / Distance.
The energy is used to accelerate alpha particles from zero to the velocity v corresponding to 2.9 MeV of kinetic energy of an alpha particle, so you can use F=d(m*v)/dt, with m = 100000 times the mass of one particle, and dt=1ps. (that gives the force during the time when the laser is on; for getting the net force you'd best use dt=1s and m=75e6*100000*(mass of one particle)).
Specifically, I would like to know the power requirements for a piece of equipment like this. If its reaction can sustain the apparatus's own power draw, that would be a huge point in its favor.
Well, I doubt that it could do that, because if it could, then we should have a working fusion power station on earth based on the same principles years before someone manages to build a rocket engine with it.
The public is stupid. The public can be scared into making any type of decision.
Whereas the Japanese's decisions look incredibly smart right now.
The difference is Apple reset consumer expectation. They didn't say, "Here's OSX for your phone".
Really?
Gnome shell is the second biggest memory hog on my system. Only below firefox
So Gnome ISN'T using firefox to render its desktop? That must be remedied ASAP!
Unless the bugs are in, say, the nVidia driver.
...which, according to TFA, they aren't. In fact, the bugs seem to be in anything BUT the proprietary nVidia driver.
what do you doubt??? that a human brain can do something a turing machine cannot?
Right, that part.
you equate consciousness with brain?
basically you are saying that you are a turing machine?
The laws of physics themselves are Turing computable, for all we know. Since my brain certainly exists inside the physical world and behaves according to the laws of physics, it is equivalent to a Turing machine. That's the part that Penrose seems to be unwilling/unable to wrap his head around, hence his insistence that there must be some exotic physics in the brain that causes consciousness. I don't have to read his book to know that such an idea is a baseless, unfounded speculation.
When it comes to the brain and consciousness, Penrose is basically a crackpot. That's what it comes down to. There's just no evidence whatsoever that consciousness relies on QM, and as the GP correctly states, QM is just indeterministic, but not "conscious", so even if there were some QM indeterminism involved in the macroscopic behaviour of the brain and the "free will", then that "free will" wouldn't be "free", it would just be indeterministic.
the first part of his book contained a proof that the human brain could do something a turing machine cannot.
Haha. I doubt that. If you're talking about the "chinese room argument" -- no, that doesn't prove anything like that.
I don't misunderstand anything; you claimed that "(the) WHO has stated that there is no evidence of any significant release of radiation", and you continue to fail to provide any source for that, while I did provide sources that do say the opposite (and the NNSA is part of the DOE -- hardly an anti-nuclear organization). The WHO FAQ that you cited says -- among many general advices and guidelines -- that the evacuations ordered by the Japanese government are "in line" with what the US would do under similar circumstances, which, if anything, indicates that there was a significant release of radiation; and I totally fail to see how an EPA-provided list of radiation levels in the United States could tell you that no significant amount of radiation was released in Japan.