It's amazing to me you will believe some website but you won't believe the findings of the 911 commission. I'll grant you the possibility of a relationship between Palestinian suicide bombers and Saddam. But there is no proof of any such relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam. This so called relationship was one of the primary reasons the Bush administration called for invading Iraq.
We should have never went into Iraq. It was a pretty stupid decision. All we did was legitimize the growing Shiite theocracy. How many American lives were lost for what? Iraq and Saddam had nothing to do with terrorism and the government we will have installed there will have nothing to do with democracy. That's if it lasts longer than 5 years. I'm not saying the Muslim world isn't ready for a democracy but it's going to be a democracy that is starkly different than what we had in mind. Also how friendly will these governments be towards the USA? The administration keeps stating that we must stay in Iraq for the long haul but in reality how long before the government there kicks us out?
Actually the point of my post is that we aren't fucked yet. If we can stabilize the rate of melting we will be okay. If we accept the calculations and assumptions from the article you discover we are pretty much doomed. Meaning the entire Greenland glacier ice will melt in less than 100 years. Therefore the majority of coastal cities will be flooded and inhabitable. I was just saying we aren't there yet.
Actually I did the calculation assuming the rate of change will double every 5 years and the entire Greenland glacier ice will melt in less than 60 years. Discovering that figure I thought maybe it was better to assume that the rate of change has peaked. So yeah maybe the assumption that the rate of change will remain constant is not the best but to assume it will remain it's current acceleration is not by default a better one.
If all of the glacier ice on Greenland melted, worldwide ocean levels would rise 20 feet. I got this number from the history channel so I don't know how accurate they are with non-Hitlter based facts. Anyway the article says the current Greenland glacier melting accounts for a 0.5 mm rise in ocean levels per year.
so they could conveniently, and with no threat to their own livelihoods, find slavery unacceptable.
Who is they? I assume you don't mean the some 500k+ Northern casualties. The rapid socio-economic development of the North had a lot to do with the anti-slavery movement. But it was not as you state they suddenly discovered slavery unprofitable and inconvenient and shifted their values. There are deeper things at work than the collective perspective on the profitability of a political stance. Also the vast majority of southerners did not own slaves and did not directly profit from it. Yet they still thought slavery was okay. People are not as simple as you assume.
Does this makes capitalism horrible? No, because it's only as good as we are. People like to do the right thing, and will do the right thing, when doing the wrong thing is no longer profitable or convenient.
Forget about right and wrong but history is filled with people who did things that were neither profitable nor convenient. The assumption that the sole motivation behind people to do things is because it is profitable and/or convenient is wrong.
Look at the instituion of slavery which did not die out because it stopped being profitable or convient. People began to change their minds on how they viewed slavery and it became unpopular. The removal of slavery was a very painful process especially in the United States. So the point being large institutions like slavery and capitalism are just manifestations of people's attitudes. And in time they change but it has nothing to do with profits nor convenience.
Actually it's not that big of a deal. The dvd copiers will just band together in a p2p network or a darknet and just trade. Get together with a few of your friends or coworkers and each rent 5 movies a month. Just collaborate on who rents what, which is easy through word of mouth or the internet(IM,email,forums, etc).
The only people who get punished are the honest ones who want to watch 20 movies a month.
They could have never kept the source closed because it would have to be checked into the Xorg tree eventually. These conspiracy stories are just created by people in certain communities who are scared of Novell. Novell is doing things unconventionally and is actually making some progess. Read more on how Novell is doing things...
"Xgl has already been checked into the public repositories, Compiz will be checked in after David Reveman's presentation at the X conference."
Which is Feb, 8th at 10am PST.. Also the XGL code has been available for some time. Browse the CVS. I'm somewhat expecting an update of the code tomorrow too.
Neutrinos are considered a small percentage of hot dark matter. These findings suggest what we thought was cold dark matter is actually "hot". But the speed of 9km/s is way too slow for a neutrino. I guess there is the slim possibility of a massive neutrino or something like that. But I think we would have detected such by now.
The SUSY partner of the neutrino, neutralino, is considered a WIMP and a dark matter candidate. But again this was before these findings so they might be cancelled out as well.
What the findings suggest is that dark matter isn't exotic matter but a different kind of matter all together. The hierarchy of forces according to interaction goes gravity -> electroweak -> strong. This means all matter we know of interacts with gravity, all matter (until recently) interacts with the electroweak force and a subset of matter, quarks, interacts with the strong force. Note, quarks also interact with the electroweak force since protons and neutrons have electric charge and these particles are made of quarks. However leptons, like the electron do not interact with the strong force.
Now it was possible that dark matter could interact with the electroweak force but very weakly and therefore undetectable at large scales. It was assumed that this meant they were very cold and at very low energy states. However if they are moving at 9km/s that would mean they have high energy states. Therefore if they did interact with the electroweak force, they would be absorbing or emitting photons. But they aren't.
So we have a new type of matter with that only interacts with standard matter(leptons, quarks) via the gravitational force.
I think the immediate goal for the Linux desktop is to fill the needs of the average computer user. These things include Email/IM/Web/Media Management, I think that covers about 70% of the desktop market. Right now Linux does the majority of these things pretty well. It just needs a little tweaking and some better "packaging" by which I mean marketing/usability/setup and support. To focus your efforts on a small percentage of users is just not the right way to go. It's better to grab the ordinary users and then use them as an incentive to get niche apps ported to your OS. Sure you could spend your limited resources on making Linux accessible to photo/video professionals but it makes more business sense to work on things like better ipod connectivity.
It might have to do with LAME. I'm not really sure. But I think the problem is the distribution of binaries and not paying licensing fees. If anyone can clarify this I'd like to know.
The Gimp is good enough for most of us. It is different than Photoshop so people need to relearn how to do some basic things which can painful for the easily frustrated. A better GUI for Gimp wouldn't hurt and I think they addressing some of the issues in 2.4. Also others have mentioned GimpShop, I'm not sure how mature that is though. But yes Gimp as it stands is not good enough for photo professionals because it lacks color management and built in CMYK support, even though a plugin exists. But then again how many photo professionals use Linux in the first place?
On a side note I'm really impressed with how much work/research Novell is putting into the Linux desktop. Instead the gradual long-term effort Red Hat has invested, Novell seems to be thinking short-term. Novell desktop 10 looks really interesting and their sponsorship of XGL is also really great. I'm glad someone is stepping it up.
Thats interesting. But Minkowski space is a non-Euclidean geometry, sure the Greeks had the toolset to describe at least SR but they would have never understood it. They would first need the conceptual understanding of non-Euclidean geometry and differential calculus.
Away this might be where we currently are with string theory. We have the toolset to describe it but lack the serious conceptual grasp of what the theory means.
Wait a minute, you won an award for showing the metric tensor is related to the Riemann tensor? Was this in like high school or something? Because that should be no surprise to anyone.
What are you talking about? The Lorentz transformation has only one degree of freedom in the time dimension. We call it the future or the past. This guy is suggesting that time has more than one degree of freedom. Which is nothing new...
Don't take up programming unless it's serious abstract stuff like AI. In 10 years all the programming jobs will be outsourced to India/China except the high level/academic fields. Basically if you don't plan on getting a PhD it's not worth it. Here's a better idea, become a plumber... everyone needs plumbers and there aren't enough of them. Easy to learn and you basically set your own schedule and pay-rate.
I said stay away from people who *only* know PHP. What don't you understand about the word *only*? Apparently everything. Also people who start out with more serious languages like C/C++ tend to pick up better habits. I'm not dissing PHP. I'm just stating if you only learn one language and it happens to be PHP you can seriously hinder your potential. But people do it anyway because they can get away with it.
Anyway you're right about the best programmers know many different languages and pick the best one for the job. Which was implied in my post.
This is what I mean. How do you unknow languages? Either you know it or you don't. There is no qualification needed here. Here's a tip if someone asks you "Do you know C++?" dont say "I knew it." That sounds like poor C++ has passed away.
Once you learn something you always 'know' it. Sure you might have not used it in awhile but believe me things come back pretty fast when you dive back in. Unless of course you've suffered a serious brain injury. I stand corrected you could say you 'knew' C++. 'Yes I knew C++ until my coworker bludgeoned me with a fax machine because of the insufferable frustration resulting from debugging my code'
Because they dont know how to program. If the only language they know is PHP, STAY AWAY!!. Find someone who knows multiple languages which include C/C++, even though they might never use it to program your web app they'll generally be a better programmer.
I have a big problem with your use of the word "same" here, especially when you say "Our thoughts tend to be in images and nonverbal but these images are symbolic." I would say that "the structure of language" can only be mapped to "the structure of thought". However, language imposes a linear and semantic discipline on a thought that greatly restricts its original scope. Yes there are going to be similarities in the structure, but its like a two dimensional representation of a three dimensional world.
When I say the same I mean an isomorphism. Ordinary languages are just a higher level of abstraction but provide the same informational content. I agree that sometimes it is difficult to translate the lower levels into the higher ones. However when you do accomplish the translation the informational content is the same. I'm sure you have read something and suddenly the thought pops into your mind. Also sometimes you have read something and the thought takes while to sit in. This would make it appear that thought and language are two different things. However it is more about ordinary language being a higher abstraction which entails compression and sometimes noise. This allows the informational content of a string in ordinary language to become distorted. It would be nice if we could communicate in the lowest level of thought but such a language would consist of very large strings of data. Therefore inefficient to communicate in unless we figured out a way to increase the bandwidth capacity of our communication channel.
But the point remains that you can always find an isomorphisn between the different levels. If such an isomorphism didn't exist we would be inable to communicate with each other. If an isomorphism exists the structures are the same.
When I said language I meant all language not just ordinary language. Our thoughts tend to be in images and nonverbal but these images are symbolic. They represent things and their sequence denotes order and relationships. Also I meant "I" not as the word but as the state of being. Without the state of being aware of the self, consciousness is impossible. This is what the "I" expresses. I'm not insisiting lower animals have the word "I" but they have this state of being, or at least in a watered down form.
We tend to seperate the brain into categories of complexity and at a certain level we achieve language. As if the rest of the brain is just a data processing center. This might be true in the sense that certain parts of the brain just exist to process raw data. However consciousness has the ability to override the results of raw data processing. The tiered model of the brain would insist that the language part of the brain is the last stage and this is where data can be filtered.
I think we have certain parts of the brain that calculate. Also there are certain parts of the brain that just collect raw data. However these parts would do little without the ability to determine relationships. This is where consciousness comes into play. Now many will quickly point out that computers can determine relationships and they are not conscious. However a computer is pretty much worthless until someone programs it. It takes an effort of consciousness to make a computer usable. I think this is what Wittgenstein meant when he said computers are humans that calculate.
Language is the fundamental structure of consciousness. Not just ordinary language but all languages. The appearance of an "I" predicates the "other" and therefore a relationship between the two. Every animal that is self-aware in some form has a mode of communication. Some of it is simple like a bee dance others are complex like a human language.
The informational reality that results in language is equivalent to the physical reality that results in consciousness. So language is the structure of our thought. Yet many of our thoughts are wordless. However they must entail some form of language or else translating wordless thought into words would be impossible. The structure of thought must be the same as the structure of language.
So if this is true that language is the structure of thought and fundamental to consciousness it is no surprise it would influence us in deep ways. In a sense language is the consciousness API.
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world - Ludwig Wittgenstein
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It's amazing to me you will believe some website but you won't believe the findings of the 911 commission. I'll grant you the possibility of a relationship between Palestinian suicide bombers and Saddam. But there is no proof of any such relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam. This so called relationship was one of the primary reasons the Bush administration called for invading Iraq.
We should have never went into Iraq. It was a pretty stupid decision. All we did was legitimize the growing Shiite theocracy. How many American lives were lost for what? Iraq and Saddam had nothing to do with terrorism and the government we will have installed there will have nothing to do with democracy. That's if it lasts longer than 5 years. I'm not saying the Muslim world isn't ready for a democracy but it's going to be a democracy that is starkly different than what we had in mind. Also how friendly will these governments be towards the USA? The administration keeps stating that we must stay in Iraq for the long haul but in reality how long before the government there kicks us out?
Actually the point of my post is that we aren't fucked yet. If we can stabilize the rate of melting we will be okay. If we accept the calculations and assumptions from the article you discover we are pretty much doomed. Meaning the entire Greenland glacier ice will melt in less than 100 years. Therefore the majority of coastal cities will be flooded and inhabitable. I was just saying we aren't there yet.
Actually I did the calculation assuming the rate of change will double every 5 years and the entire Greenland glacier ice will melt in less than 60 years. Discovering that figure I thought maybe it was better to assume that the rate of change has peaked. So yeah maybe the assumption that the rate of change will remain constant is not the best but to assume it will remain it's current acceleration is not by default a better one.
If all of the glacier ice on Greenland melted, worldwide ocean levels would rise 20 feet. I got this number from the history channel so I don't know how accurate they are with non-Hitlter based facts. Anyway the article says the current Greenland glacier melting accounts for a 0.5 mm rise in ocean levels per year.
1 foot = 304.8 millimeters
304.8 * 20 * 2 = 12,192
So we have 12,192 years until all the glacier ice melts in Greenland assuming the rate is constant. We still have some time.
so they could conveniently, and with no threat to their own livelihoods, find slavery unacceptable.
Who is they? I assume you don't mean the some 500k+ Northern casualties. The rapid socio-economic development of the North had a lot to do with the anti-slavery movement. But it was not as you state they suddenly discovered slavery unprofitable and inconvenient and shifted their values. There are deeper things at work than the collective perspective on the profitability of a political stance. Also the vast majority of southerners did not own slaves and did not directly profit from it. Yet they still thought slavery was okay. People are not as simple as you assume.
Does this makes capitalism horrible? No, because it's only as good as we are. People like to do the right thing, and will do the right thing, when doing the wrong thing is no longer profitable or convenient.
Forget about right and wrong but history is filled with people who did things that were neither profitable nor convenient. The assumption that the sole motivation behind people to do things is because it is profitable and/or convenient is wrong.
Look at the instituion of slavery which did not die out because it stopped being profitable or convient. People began to change their minds on how they viewed slavery and it became unpopular. The removal of slavery was a very painful process especially in the United States. So the point being large institutions like slavery and capitalism are just manifestations of people's attitudes. And in time they change but it has nothing to do with profits nor convenience.
Actually it's not that big of a deal. The dvd copiers will just band together in a p2p network or a darknet and just trade. Get together with a few of your friends or coworkers and each rent 5 movies a month. Just collaborate on who rents what, which is easy through word of mouth or the internet(IM,email,forums, etc).
The only people who get punished are the honest ones who want to watch 20 movies a month.
They could have never kept the source closed because it would have to be checked into the Xorg tree eventually. These conspiracy stories are just created by people in certain communities who are scared of Novell. Novell is doing things unconventionally and is actually making some progess. Read more on how Novell is doing things...
"Xgl has already been checked into the public repositories, Compiz will be checked in after David Reveman's presentation at the X conference."
Which is Feb, 8th at 10am PST.. Also the XGL code has been available for some time. Browse the CVS. I'm somewhat expecting an update of the code tomorrow too.
Neutrinos are considered a small percentage of hot dark matter. These findings suggest what we thought was cold dark matter is actually "hot". But the speed of 9km/s is way too slow for a neutrino. I guess there is the slim possibility of a massive neutrino or something like that. But I think we would have detected such by now.
The SUSY partner of the neutrino, neutralino, is considered a WIMP and a dark matter candidate. But again this was before these findings so they might be cancelled out as well.
What the findings suggest is that dark matter isn't exotic matter but a different kind of matter all together. The hierarchy of forces according to interaction goes gravity -> electroweak -> strong. This means all matter we know of interacts with gravity, all matter (until recently) interacts with the electroweak force and a subset of matter, quarks, interacts with the strong force. Note, quarks also interact with the electroweak force since protons and neutrons have electric charge and these particles are made of quarks. However leptons, like the electron do not interact with the strong force.
Now it was possible that dark matter could interact with the electroweak force but very weakly and therefore undetectable at large scales. It was assumed that this meant they were very cold and at very low energy states. However if they are moving at 9km/s that would mean they have high energy states. Therefore if they did interact with the electroweak force, they would be absorbing or emitting photons. But they aren't.
So we have a new type of matter with that only interacts with standard matter(leptons, quarks) via the gravitational force.
I think the immediate goal for the Linux desktop is to fill the needs of the average computer user. These things include Email/IM/Web/Media Management, I think that covers about 70% of the desktop market. Right now Linux does the majority of these things pretty well. It just needs a little tweaking and some better "packaging" by which I mean marketing/usability/setup and support. To focus your efforts on a small percentage of users is just not the right way to go. It's better to grab the ordinary users and then use them as an incentive to get niche apps ported to your OS. Sure you could spend your limited resources on making Linux accessible to photo/video professionals but it makes more business sense to work on things like better ipod connectivity.
It might have to do with LAME. I'm not really sure. But I think the problem is the distribution of binaries and not paying licensing fees. If anyone can clarify this I'd like to know.
The Gimp is good enough for most of us. It is different than Photoshop so people need to relearn how to do some basic things which can painful for the easily frustrated. A better GUI for Gimp wouldn't hurt and I think they addressing some of the issues in 2.4. Also others have mentioned GimpShop, I'm not sure how mature that is though. But yes Gimp as it stands is not good enough for photo professionals because it lacks color management and built in CMYK support, even though a plugin exists. But then again how many photo professionals use Linux in the first place?
On a side note I'm really impressed with how much work/research Novell is putting into the Linux desktop. Instead the gradual long-term effort Red Hat has invested, Novell seems to be thinking short-term. Novell desktop 10 looks really interesting and their sponsorship of XGL is also really great. I'm glad someone is stepping it up.
Thats interesting. But Minkowski space is a non-Euclidean geometry, sure the Greeks had the toolset to describe at least SR but they would have never understood it. They would first need the conceptual understanding of non-Euclidean geometry and differential calculus.
Away this might be where we currently are with string theory. We have the toolset to describe it but lack the serious conceptual grasp of what the theory means.
Wait a minute, you won an award for showing the metric tensor is related to the Riemann tensor? Was this in like high school or something? Because that should be no surprise to anyone.
What are you talking about? The Lorentz transformation has only one degree of freedom in the time dimension. We call it the future or the past. This guy is suggesting that time has more than one degree of freedom. Which is nothing new...
Don't take up programming unless it's serious abstract stuff like AI. In 10 years all the programming jobs will be outsourced to India/China except the high level/academic fields. Basically if you don't plan on getting a PhD it's not worth it. Here's a better idea, become a plumber... everyone needs plumbers and there aren't enough of them. Easy to learn and you basically set your own schedule and pay-rate.
Is that better?
I said stay away from people who *only* know PHP. What don't you understand about the word *only*? Apparently everything. Also people who start out with more serious languages like C/C++ tend to pick up better habits. I'm not dissing PHP. I'm just stating if you only learn one language and it happens to be PHP you can seriously hinder your potential. But people do it anyway because they can get away with it.
Anyway you're right about the best programmers know many different languages and pick the best one for the job. Which was implied in my post.
This is what I mean. How do you unknow languages? Either you know it or you don't. There is no qualification needed here. Here's a tip if someone asks you "Do you know C++?" dont say "I knew it." That sounds like poor C++ has passed away.
Once you learn something you always 'know' it. Sure you might have not used it in awhile but believe me things come back pretty fast when you dive back in. Unless of course you've suffered a serious brain injury. I stand corrected you could say you 'knew' C++. 'Yes I knew C++ until my coworker bludgeoned me with a fax machine because of the insufferable frustration resulting from debugging my code'
Because they dont know how to program. If the only language they know is PHP, STAY AWAY!!. Find someone who knows multiple languages which include C/C++, even though they might never use it to program your web app they'll generally be a better programmer.
And no this is not a troll.
I have a big problem with your use of the word "same" here, especially when you say "Our thoughts tend to be in images and nonverbal but these images are symbolic." I would say that "the structure of language" can only be mapped to "the structure of thought". However, language imposes a linear and semantic discipline on a thought that greatly restricts its original scope. Yes there are going to be similarities in the structure, but its like a two dimensional representation of a three dimensional world.
When I say the same I mean an isomorphism. Ordinary languages are just a higher level of abstraction but provide the same informational content. I agree that sometimes it is difficult to translate the lower levels into the higher ones. However when you do accomplish the translation the informational content is the same. I'm sure you have read something and suddenly the thought pops into your mind. Also sometimes you have read something and the thought takes while to sit in. This would make it appear that thought and language are two different things. However it is more about ordinary language being a higher abstraction which entails compression and sometimes noise. This allows the informational content of a string in ordinary language to become distorted. It would be nice if we could communicate in the lowest level of thought but such a language would consist of very large strings of data. Therefore inefficient to communicate in unless we figured out a way to increase the bandwidth capacity of our communication channel.
But the point remains that you can always find an isomorphisn between the different levels. If such an isomorphism didn't exist we would be inable to communicate with each other. If an isomorphism exists the structures are the same.
When I said language I meant all language not just ordinary language. Our thoughts tend to be in images and nonverbal but these images are symbolic. They represent things and their sequence denotes order and relationships. Also I meant "I" not as the word but as the state of being. Without the state of being aware of the self, consciousness is impossible. This is what the "I" expresses. I'm not insisiting lower animals have the word "I" but they have this state of being, or at least in a watered down form.
We tend to seperate the brain into categories of complexity and at a certain level we achieve language. As if the rest of the brain is just a data processing center. This might be true in the sense that certain parts of the brain just exist to process raw data. However consciousness has the ability to override the results of raw data processing. The tiered model of the brain would insist that the language part of the brain is the last stage and this is where data can be filtered.
I think we have certain parts of the brain that calculate. Also there are certain parts of the brain that just collect raw data. However these parts would do little without the ability to determine relationships. This is where consciousness comes into play. Now many will quickly point out that computers can determine relationships and they are not conscious. However a computer is pretty much worthless until someone programs it. It takes an effort of consciousness to make a computer usable. I think this is what Wittgenstein meant when he said computers are humans that calculate.
Language is the fundamental structure of consciousness. Not just ordinary language but all languages. The appearance of an "I" predicates the "other" and therefore a relationship between the two. Every animal that is self-aware in some form has a mode of communication. Some of it is simple like a bee dance others are complex like a human language.
The informational reality that results in language is equivalent to the physical reality that results in consciousness. So language is the structure of our thought. Yet many of our thoughts are wordless. However they must entail some form of language or else translating wordless thought into words would be impossible. The structure of thought must be the same as the structure of language.
So if this is true that language is the structure of thought and fundamental to consciousness it is no surprise it would influence us in deep ways. In a sense language is the consciousness API.
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world - Ludwig Wittgenstein