if people actually used their damn heads on the internet, it wouldn't matter much at all which browser they used.
All men have two heads, but they can only think with one of them at a time. Now, if you're indulging in some "one-handed browsing," how secure your browser is may well be a factor in keeping your computer clean because sites like that are prime grazing ground for malware and trojans and spyware, Oh my!
If you want to make the rest of the world run Linux, you will have to relax some of the arcane command-level stuff.
Actually, you can do without it completely for the most part if you use a distro like Ubuntu, that's designed with that in mind. On the whole, though, I agree with you. Linux is for people who want to be able to control their computers and to decide for themselves what it looks like and what programs it uses. Windows is for the rest of them; it's the OS for people who don't want to know what's going on, don't want to choose or even know that there's a choice, people who want to be told what to use. And, because of that, it will always have a bigger market share than Linux. The Year of the Linux Desktop will also be the year that Linux users had to start using an anti-virus, and I'd rather not have that happen, TYVM.
Hey, I had one of those. They were really dx3 99, but marketdroids thought that 100 sounded better. The funny thing is, a dx4 100 would have had a bus speed of 25Mhz and this one was 33Mhz, so it was actually faster than claimed when you figured in total throughput. Totally off-topic, I know, but it brought back memories and I just had to share.
I'm wondering if the cure is worse than the disease.
The cure, of course, would be to use an OS that was designed with security in mind, and patched as quickly as possible when a security vulnerability turned up. Anti-virus software isn't a cure, it's a band aid, and it's always going to be at least one step behind the black hats. There's no way it can work, let alone be effective, without using up system resources, and from what I gather, getting more bloated, more of a resource hog and less effective as time goes on. I say I hear, because I don't use anti-virus software, I use Linux and as long as The Year Of The Linux Desktop never comes, I'll never need to worry about getting infected.
One thing you have to take into consideration is that most people don't understand that Windows is insecure by design. They don't know that until recently security was not something Microsoft gave any consideration to, or that when they did, it was mostly tacked on as an afterthought. All they know is that their computers keep getting slower and slower and eventually they decide to throw it away, buy a newer, faster one and start the cycle over. About all this will mean to them is that their newest computer will come with AV, instead of their having to download and install it. (All too many, of course, don't bother, which is part of the problem.) Assuming that they allow it to update itself, and that it's not simply security theater (Cancel or Allow, anybody?) it might even make their computers last a little longer before they get discarded simply because they need a tune-up.
Presumably Dr. Forward took that into account. I'd also presume he took the rates at which heat would be generated and would be dissipated into account. For a physicist, that's part of the job, you know.
Of course. Bob Forward specified a lump the size of a bowling ball IIRC. He didn't cover what would happen if the anti-matter were in the form of a cloud of sub-atomic particles. That's why I specified a lump.
Plutonium-238 will vaporize itself if you collect a large enough lump of it in one place and Pu-238 is a positively gentle decay compared to matter-antimatter annihilation.
Well, yes, but you have to remember that in the case of Plutonium, the reaction is taking place all through the sample instead of just on the surface. Makes a big difference in the rate, you know.
It's even worse than that. During a panel at LACon II, back in '84, Dr. Robert Forward said that according to the best calculations, if you dropped a lump of anti-matter on the floor, it wouldn't vanish in a flash of gamma rays, it would sizzle like a drop of water on a hot griddle. You see, the anti-matter can only interact with its environment and annihilate on its surface, and there's this little thing called the "cube-square law" that says that very little of it is going to be on the surface.
Yes. She was convicted of lying to investigators when she wasn't under oath and hadn't been warned that what she said might be used against her. Not only that, what she lied about must not have been a crime because she was never charged with anything else.
Now we know: never talk to the feds unless your lawyer's present, even if you don't think you've done anything against the law.
Thanks; I'd not thought of that. I'd imagine that how long it took to find one near the exit would be important, because it would show how fast the current was. But what if none of them turn up for several years, hundreds if not thousands of miles away? Could they still learn something from that? (Not a challenge; I'm trying to find out just how much they can get out of this.)
From what I could tell when I RTFA, they already suspect that the melt water from the glacier reaches the ocean and I doubt that anybody would have any reason to dispute this. If and when somebody reports finding one, they'll have proved this. TFA talks about learning about conditions under the glacier, but makes no mention of how. There are no instruments inside the duckies or any way to record what they go through, so how can the scientists learn anything from them, other than the (as I pointed out above) obvious fact that the melt water reaches the sea?
And if he's not taking it with him, why does he need a laptop
In this case, the laptop would be used to make it look like he's using a computer to get more work done. Of course, when the cameras aren't rolling he can put it away and get on with doing things on paper if that's what he wants. If he were really interested in computerizing his work he'd get a desktop. He'd have a faster computer with more RAM and a bigger, better monitor that would actually make his work easier. Using a laptop in this context is just more proof that BO favors form over function.
Getting elected is all about putting appearance before substance, and we've all seen how much BO knows about getting elected. What we don't know, yet, is what, if anything, he knows about doing the job. If he follows true to recent Democrat form (Clinton and Carter) it will be something between 12 and 18 months after he's sworn in before we see him acting like a President instead of like a candidate. During that time Web 2.0 would fit his style to a T.
Wikipedia does not agree with you. It says that in England the truth is "an allowable defense," but that a defamatory statement is to be presumed false until proven otherwise by the defendant. Scroll down a little, and you'll see that in America the truth is "an absolute defense." That means that in America, if you can prove that what you wrote is true, you can't be guilty of libel, but in Britain you can.
If so, British Law has undergone a major change in the last few years because one of the grievances that led to the American Revolution was a case in which a colonial lost a libel case because the judge (and plaintiff, I might add) refused to allow the truth as a defense. The rich, in England, have long used threats of suit for libel as a way to keep their dirty little secrets out of the newspapers, which wouldn't work if what you wrote was true. IANAL either, but AIUI, you can present the truth as a defense there, but it's not an absolute defense as it is in LeftPondia. Note that I'm referring to suit for libel, BTW, not criminal charges.
Some answers, but first, hang on! What do you mean "what makes Arithmetic complicated... is the inclusion of infinity?"
Many years ago, I was talking about this with a friend with a degree in Math, who'd actually studied this. He told me that, as an example, the arithmetic of all integers between zero and one million, inclusive, would not be sufficiently complex. I don't remember if he explicitly said that any system that couldn't take infinity into account wasn't enough for Goedel's theorem to apply, but that's the impression I came away with.
So there's no issue about computers being unable to handle infinity. I mean, we really can't either, otherwise, it would have been simply possible to check Fermat's Last Theorem for every n... Hope this helps!
Yes, and no. I didn't mean that we can handle infinity in the sense that computers can handle floating point numbers. I meant that the Arithmetic of Natural Numbers can express any finite integer, and that the concept of infinity is part of our tool box, if you will. Again, I'm writing as a layman, so my understanding may, and probably is as incomplete as math itself.
Not quite. Every sufficiently complicated formal system is limited by Goedel's incompleteness theorem. (Emphasis added.) Although IANAMathmatician, I've always understood that what makes Arithmetic complicated enough for the theorem to apply is the inclusion of infinity. As computers can't really handle infinity (just numbers outside their range) I don't know if they're complicated enough. If anybody does know, I'd appreciate an answer.
This is so obviously true, I find it hard to understand why it was published, let alone got to the Slashdot front page. OpenOffice has been out for how many years? Google Apps came out how many months ago? Of course OO.o is more popular; people have had well over ten times as long to adopt it.
Slashdot Mirror
All men have two heads, but they can only think with one of them at a time. Now, if you're indulging in some "one-handed browsing," how secure your browser is may well be a factor in keeping your computer clean because sites like that are prime grazing ground for malware and trojans and spyware, Oh my!
Better would have been, "the word 'gun' refers to a crew-fired weapon."
Actually, you can do without it completely for the most part if you use a distro like Ubuntu, that's designed with that in mind. On the whole, though, I agree with you. Linux is for people who want to be able to control their computers and to decide for themselves what it looks like and what programs it uses. Windows is for the rest of them; it's the OS for people who don't want to know what's going on, don't want to choose or even know that there's a choice, people who want to be told what to use. And, because of that, it will always have a bigger market share than Linux. The Year of the Linux Desktop will also be the year that Linux users had to start using an anti-virus, and I'd rather not have that happen, TYVM.
Hey, I had one of those. They were really dx3 99, but marketdroids thought that 100 sounded better. The funny thing is, a dx4 100 would have had a bus speed of 25Mhz and this one was 33Mhz, so it was actually faster than claimed when you figured in total throughput. Totally off-topic, I know, but it brought back memories and I just had to share.
The cure, of course, would be to use an OS that was designed with security in mind, and patched as quickly as possible when a security vulnerability turned up. Anti-virus software isn't a cure, it's a band aid, and it's always going to be at least one step behind the black hats. There's no way it can work, let alone be effective, without using up system resources, and from what I gather, getting more bloated, more of a resource hog and less effective as time goes on. I say I hear, because I don't use anti-virus software, I use Linux and as long as The Year Of The Linux Desktop never comes, I'll never need to worry about getting infected.
One thing you have to take into consideration is that most people don't understand that Windows is insecure by design. They don't know that until recently security was not something Microsoft gave any consideration to, or that when they did, it was mostly tacked on as an afterthought. All they know is that their computers keep getting slower and slower and eventually they decide to throw it away, buy a newer, faster one and start the cycle over. About all this will mean to them is that their newest computer will come with AV, instead of their having to download and install it. (All too many, of course, don't bother, which is part of the problem.) Assuming that they allow it to update itself, and that it's not simply security theater (Cancel or Allow, anybody?) it might even make their computers last a little longer before they get discarded simply because they need a tune-up.
Presumably Dr. Forward took that into account. I'd also presume he took the rates at which heat would be generated and would be dissipated into account. For a physicist, that's part of the job, you know.
Of course. Bob Forward specified a lump the size of a bowling ball IIRC. He didn't cover what would happen if the anti-matter were in the form of a cloud of sub-atomic particles. That's why I specified a lump.
Well, yes, but you have to remember that in the case of Plutonium, the reaction is taking place all through the sample instead of just on the surface. Makes a big difference in the rate, you know.
If you're referring to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you're wrong. Both of those devices were in the kilotons, not megatons.
Good question. I presume that the reaction would be somewhat more energetic, but nobody thought to ask, and he didn't say.
It's even worse than that. During a panel at LACon II, back in '84, Dr. Robert Forward said that according to the best calculations, if you dropped a lump of anti-matter on the floor, it wouldn't vanish in a flash of gamma rays, it would sizzle like a drop of water on a hot griddle. You see, the anti-matter can only interact with its environment and annihilate on its surface, and there's this little thing called the "cube-square law" that says that very little of it is going to be on the surface.
Yes. She was convicted of lying to investigators when she wasn't under oath and hadn't been warned that what she said might be used against her. Not only that, what she lied about must not have been a crime because she was never charged with anything else.
Now we know: never talk to the feds unless your lawyer's present, even if you don't think you've done anything against the law.
I'm not saying that the experiment shouldn't be done, I was just looking for more information about what they can expect to learn. Thank you.
Thanks; I'd not thought of that. I'd imagine that how long it took to find one near the exit would be important, because it would show how fast the current was. But what if none of them turn up for several years, hundreds if not thousands of miles away? Could they still learn something from that? (Not a challenge; I'm trying to find out just how much they can get out of this.)
From what I could tell when I RTFA, they already suspect that the melt water from the glacier reaches the ocean and I doubt that anybody would have any reason to dispute this. If and when somebody reports finding one, they'll have proved this. TFA talks about learning about conditions under the glacier, but makes no mention of how. There are no instruments inside the duckies or any way to record what they go through, so how can the scientists learn anything from them, other than the (as I pointed out above) obvious fact that the melt water reaches the sea?
In this case, the laptop would be used to make it look like he's using a computer to get more work done. Of course, when the cameras aren't rolling he can put it away and get on with doing things on paper if that's what he wants. If he were really interested in computerizing his work he'd get a desktop. He'd have a faster computer with more RAM and a bigger, better monitor that would actually make his work easier. Using a laptop in this context is just more proof that BO favors form over function.
Getting elected is all about putting appearance before substance, and we've all seen how much BO knows about getting elected. What we don't know, yet, is what, if anything, he knows about doing the job. If he follows true to recent Democrat form (Clinton and Carter) it will be something between 12 and 18 months after he's sworn in before we see him acting like a President instead of like a candidate. During that time Web 2.0 would fit his style to a T.
Wikipedia does not agree with you. It says that in England the truth is "an allowable defense," but that a defamatory statement is to be presumed false until proven otherwise by the defendant. Scroll down a little, and you'll see that in America the truth is "an absolute defense." That means that in America, if you can prove that what you wrote is true, you can't be guilty of libel, but in Britain you can.
If so, British Law has undergone a major change in the last few years because one of the grievances that led to the American Revolution was a case in which a colonial lost a libel case because the judge (and plaintiff, I might add) refused to allow the truth as a defense. The rich, in England, have long used threats of suit for libel as a way to keep their dirty little secrets out of the newspapers, which wouldn't work if what you wrote was true. IANAL either, but AIUI, you can present the truth as a defense there, but it's not an absolute defense as it is in LeftPondia. Note that I'm referring to suit for libel, BTW, not criminal charges.
Yes. Thirty years after the US became a separate country with the help of France.
Many years ago, I was talking about this with a friend with a degree in Math, who'd actually studied this. He told me that, as an example, the arithmetic of all integers between zero and one million, inclusive, would not be sufficiently complex. I don't remember if he explicitly said that any system that couldn't take infinity into account wasn't enough for Goedel's theorem to apply, but that's the impression I came away with.
So there's no issue about computers being unable to handle infinity. I mean, we really can't either, otherwise, it would have been simply possible to check Fermat's Last Theorem for every n... Hope this helps!
Yes, and no. I didn't mean that we can handle infinity in the sense that computers can handle floating point numbers. I meant that the Arithmetic of Natural Numbers can express any finite integer, and that the concept of infinity is part of our tool box, if you will. Again, I'm writing as a layman, so my understanding may, and probably is as incomplete as math itself.
Not quite. Every sufficiently complicated formal system is limited by Goedel's incompleteness theorem. (Emphasis added.) Although IANAMathmatician, I've always understood that what makes Arithmetic complicated enough for the theorem to apply is the inclusion of infinity. As computers can't really handle infinity (just numbers outside their range) I don't know if they're complicated enough. If anybody does know, I'd appreciate an answer.
Oh, I don't know. After all, have you ever seen an economist who didn't have a lot of money?
This is so obviously true, I find it hard to understand why it was published, let alone got to the Slashdot front page. OpenOffice has been out for how many years? Google Apps came out how many months ago? Of course OO.o is more popular; people have had well over ten times as long to adopt it.