I wouldn't ever say "a majority of things", particularly if you're a practising Christian. And if you're not, why do you even care?;) Enjoy the holiday!!
As it is, the data strongly indicates the Higgs is in fact around 120 GeV, but they only have enough statistics so far to claim "evidence" and not "proof".
Actually, Christmas has always been a celebration of the birth of Christ. Full Stop.
You are correct that they moved the *time* of Christmas to coincide with certain non-Christian religious celebrations, and then incorporated some of the trappings of those celebrations into the overall theme and process (in order to smooth the assimilation process), but that doesn't change the original intent. To say that "Christmas is a heathen celebration of the winter solstice" is either ignorant or uninformed.
Besides, any occasion encouraging us to help each other through the long darkness is a good one.
And, as other others noted, they think the fact that THESE neutrinos have been amped up to energy levels orders of magnitude above the supernova's might be a factor.
Don't be such a wet blanket. Results that don't properly match current theory are the only way for science to get to better theories. This is potentially the most amazing and interesting data CERN has produced to date.
I still don't get what's "crappy" about a screen size I can actually fit in my pocket. It's all you damn baggy-pants kids complaining, isn't it? Isn't it???
Get off my goddamm lawn and leave my phone's form factor alone.
There are several factors at work in the "boondoggle items" myth.
One is tolerances. If you need a 100 +/-.01 Ohm resistor, but can only buy off the shelf +/- 1 Ohm resistors, you need to buy and test, on average, 100 resistors for every one that proves to meet your requirements. So yes, it's "only" a 100 Ohm resistor, or a cosmic-ray hardened chip, but it costs at least 100x normal plus professional tester time.
Another is specificity. Sometimes you can't just look for a "good enough" off the shelf part... you need to pay a proper engineer to design a part to the specs you actually require, then get a custom fab to create it. This is where expensive toilet seats come from... there are NO seats at Home Depot that will work in space. Highly trained engineers spent real time (and therefore money) to figure out how to poop safely in space, then had the proper seats custom made. Bespoke always costs more than off the rack.
The courts, by default, assume that the USPTO did their job correctly and **all** issued patents are valid. Someone who infringes on an obviously invalid patent needs to pay the cost of delaying their trial while they, on the side, try to get it invalidated by the USPTO. Judges who "get it" will regularly stay the trial pending the results of the invalidation examination, which helps a little, but even that isn't guaranteed.
The waiting lists of childless couples hoping to adopt are still very long, and most states have "no questions asked" policies on accepting your unwanted infant. The fact that you are not ready/qualified to raise a child does not give you the right to kill it.
Even if you aren't "sure" that an N-week fetus is a human life yet... if there's a reasonable chance that it is than we really should err in it's behalf.
But... if you're blocking level 0 content, this doesn't help. Repost away...
I really think people, and certain governments in particular, are completely missing the boat on this issue.
A good, effective search engine helps authorities find "illicit" content just as effectively as it helps the regular people looking for it. Even if you are an oppressive government looking to quell dissension, or a "responsible" government looking to crack down on crime and kiddie porn... having access to good search results would -help- you do so more effectively.
"But...", the governments cry, "couldn't we block these evil things from the common prole while maintaining a 'privileged' access so -we- could search?"
No, you can't. The effectiveness of the search results is based on crowdsourcing and the accumulation of access data. Block access and you lose both the data and the effectiveness of your search. If, for the sake of argument, you wanted to keep your people from accessing porn, or seditious diatribes against the state, you really should embrace open search engines. Let people search and build up the data to efficiently find the things you detest, then you can search too and block those sites at your great National Firewall of Destiny. No matter how sites change addresses, as the people who want to find them find them, they will bubble up in search results, and your official firewall can be updated.
Effective search engines, like so many things, are in essence morally neutral. You can use them both to free or oppress.
The big problem the global community is running into is that, at a fundamental level, we simply can't agree on what is reasonable, unacceptable, or even illegal. Perhaps the UN can step up with a minimal set of standards for internet conduct... but otherwise we're sinking deeper into a mire of legal confusion. When The Republic of Republica declares it illegal to post images of the Prime Minister (because that helps steal his soul) or mailboxes (due to privacy concerns and a local mailbox vandalism spree), or panda bears (which local religion holds to be symbolic of pure evil), should German, US, or Chinese search engines purge them from their databases? We are now a globall community... and we are very soon going to need a global set of laws and guidelines.
Unfortunately, human beings have proven themselves spectacularly bad at coming up with reasonable compromises on such things. (The EU struggles with this regularly, as does the US.) Often this basically means taking the union of everyone's "forbid" list and declaring it forbidden, which obviously ends up depriving most societies of content they see as reasonable and acceptable in the name of pleasing everyone.
>> With the one large desktop when you maximize a window it fills both monitors and things might size oddly if your monitors aren't the same size/resolution
> That's true and it does not depend on which operating system you're using.
It's absolutely not true. I'm currently on Centos5 with three monitors arranged (via Xinerama) as one very large desktop. Maximizing an app causes it to completely fill the leftmost monitor that it currently occupies, NOT the entire multi-monitor desktop.
>> Windows multiple monitors also supports having separate monitors where you can maximize a window on a single display, but you can move windows >> between the monitors or even span multiple monitors. Is this setup possible to do under Linux?
This appears to be the default behavior using Xinerama, no fancy tricks required
I appreciate all the suggestions to use fixed patterns or algorithms, but the problem I (and I'm sure most of you) run into is that I need passwords for sites that both:
Every pattern I've tried inevitably runs into a new website that demands more or only accepts less, leading to a menagerie of subtle variations and the need to remember whether this particular site needed "PaSSword", "password!", "password5", "PWD", etc, etc, etc.
I have a text file, stored on both disk and USB key, that lists which passwords go with which accounts... then I GPG-encrypt it.
Also, I never use a similar pattern between low-risk sites like message boards and high-risk sites like Paypal and my bank.
Everyone should read the original page, particularly the Introduction and section explaining how to interpret their population numbers. Here's a relevant quote:
"The daily numbers should represent the potential maximum level of the infection, but in previous test cases usually prove to be much less than that maximum. So, take the range of 25% to 75% of the values that we display as the possible infection population and you will be close to the real value."
So the people actually providing these numbers are really saying that the current number of infections is likely to be between 1,750,000 and 5,250,000.
Oh certainly, if everyone you get email from uses PGP, you're already good.
I'm talking about keeping all the plaintext and/or HTML mail you get from normal people/banks/mailing lists and having the mailserver know to automatically encrypt the content of new messages with your public key. An ISP running such a server could then HOST your normal mail without ever having access to it, or without ever implicitly getting your permission to access it.
It's not about transportation, it's about destination. Plus there's no expectation that FedEx would (or should) have access to the *contents* of your mail, but an ISP-hosted email account, currently, does have full access to the content, with your tacit approval.
There are options, potentially, for the more privacy minded: * POP email with "delete from server" active will limit how much of your mail your ISP has access to. * Run your own mailserver. * Develop a mailserver that stores mail in an encrypted folder and requires your key to access.
That last one could also go a long way to helping solve the issue where private companies have to host their own mail and forbid employees from using other accounts solely to avoid the exposure of proprietary communications to third parties (the ISP). It also shouldn't be too difficult to set up...
To echo some of what's already been said, if you really want a format that will look the same for all clients, HTML is not the answer. The problem is that HTML gives too much formatting control to the VIEWER, allowing one to change the font size, change the screen (or paper!) size (think everyone prints on A4, or on US Letter? Think again!!), or even the entire font. If you really want your report to look the same, export to PDF or use a real typesetting language.
That said, if you really want to use HTML, look more closely at the "orphan control" CSS options. Used properly on your p or div elements, they can help ensure that your paragraphs or sections line up nicely on separate pages, no matter what sizes those pages end up being, or what font they end up being rendered in. If what you really want is to keep your writing from becoming visually fragmented, this may very well do the trick for you.
It also reminded me of the old UNIX "talk" app that I used quite a bit in college.
Last year I had the opportunity to use some chat applications for work and I definitely noticed this concept coming up as a problem while trying to get across complicated or lengthy concepts. Many of us self implemented a workaround of entering sentence fragments with "..." between them rather than full sentences because the silent wait was too long otherwise. It was especially important when you want to reply to someone else before other people start chiming in or the conversation moves away.
The OP's "thoughts" overall didn't feel very well put together. For example, he contrasts joining an edited wave late (where you are presented with the latest version) with going to a wiki page (where you are... presented with the latest version) and doesn't seem to get that wave "playback" is identical to and just as accessible as the wiki changelog. In fact, it takes the changelog one step further by allowing you to see the changes happen rather than just browse the descriptions of the changes (although the latter should also be easily possible, if not in the basic GUI than in a very simple extension).
He also missed the hectic but rather interesting segment later in the presentation where six people are all editing at once.
On my part, I'd love to have something like this subsume my regular forum posts, email, and messaging. My communication was good for a while, but lately it fragmented out and now I have too many disparate places to check. A new protocol that allows sufficient functionality to replicate email, IM, talk, wiki, and discussion boards, with extensibility on both the server and client, *is* pretty exciting.
My only real concern is the permission issue, but if the protocol allows subtrees of your wave to be made "private" to a specific group, it's only a small step to use the same sort of structure to make subtrees "read only" to a specific group. Problem solved.
If you haven't watched the whole thing, you need to see the auto-translator near the end of the presentation. It's pretty sweet.
"Before going forward, the use of the term 'Big Brother' in both the title and throughout the book is erroneous."
The usage of 'Big Brother' to refer to any sort of general surveillance is not only common, but perfectly valid. It is indeed a reference to 1984, but it primarily references the ever-present posters that remind people 'Big Brother is watching', not the oppressive government itself. If -someone- is watching, that someone is often referred to as Big Brother, because BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING, not necessarily because that someone is part of an authoritarian regime of oppression and misinformation.
Slashdot Mirror
Lambs and bunnies.
Agnus dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, done nobis pacem.
I wouldn't ever say "a majority of things", particularly if you're a practising Christian. ;) Enjoy the holiday!!
And if you're not, why do you even care?
They could if the data suggested it.
As it is, the data strongly indicates the Higgs is in fact around 120 GeV, but they only have enough statistics so far to claim "evidence" and not "proof".
Because writers are sloppy and occasionally omit the word "previously", as in "previously missing material".
But yes... ha ha. Aussies will apparently make fresh scans of nothing. *guffaw*
Actually, Christmas has always been a celebration of the birth of Christ. Full Stop.
You are correct that they moved the *time* of Christmas to coincide with certain non-Christian religious celebrations, and then incorporated some of the trappings of those celebrations into the overall theme and process (in order to smooth the assimilation process), but that doesn't change the original intent. To say that "Christmas is a heathen celebration of the winter solstice" is either ignorant or uninformed.
Besides, any occasion encouraging us to help each other through the long darkness is a good one.
Merry Christmas!
I strongly suspect "cutting studies in which less than 60% fail to find work" should be corrected to "more than 60% fail to find work".
And, as other others noted, they think the fact that THESE neutrinos have been amped up to energy levels orders of magnitude above the supernova's might be a factor.
Don't be such a wet blanket. Results that don't properly match current theory are the only way for science to get to better theories.
This is potentially the most amazing and interesting data CERN has produced to date.
"and still has a crappy 3.5" screen."
I still don't get what's "crappy" about a screen size I can actually fit in my pocket.
It's all you damn baggy-pants kids complaining, isn't it? Isn't it???
Get off my goddamm lawn and leave my phone's form factor alone.
Damn kids. Get off our lawn!
(Or at least install Linux on it...)
There are several factors at work in the "boondoggle items" myth.
One is tolerances. If you need a 100 +/- .01 Ohm resistor, but can only buy off the shelf +/- 1 Ohm resistors, you need to buy and test, on average, 100 resistors for every one that proves to meet your requirements. So yes, it's "only" a 100 Ohm resistor, or a cosmic-ray hardened chip, but it costs at least 100x normal plus professional tester time.
Another is specificity. Sometimes you can't just look for a "good enough" off the shelf part... you need to pay a proper engineer to design a part to the specs you actually require, then get a custom fab to create it. This is where expensive toilet seats come from... there are NO seats at Home Depot that will work in space. Highly trained engineers spent real time (and therefore money) to figure out how to poop safely in space, then had the proper seats custom made.
Bespoke always costs more than off the rack.
This is, in fact, part of "The Problem".
The courts, by default, assume that the USPTO did their job correctly and **all** issued patents are valid.
Someone who infringes on an obviously invalid patent needs to pay the cost of delaying their trial while they, on the side, try to get it invalidated by the USPTO. Judges who "get it" will regularly stay the trial pending the results of the invalidation examination, which helps a little, but even that isn't guaranteed.
[repost with correct login]
Wave Disk Generator?
I'm holding out for the Wave Motion Engine/Cannon!
Our Star-Blazers!
Carrying a baby to term != Raising a child.
The waiting lists of childless couples hoping to adopt are still very long, and most states have "no questions asked" policies on accepting your unwanted infant.
The fact that you are not ready/qualified to raise a child does not give you the right to kill it.
Even if you aren't "sure" that an N-week fetus is a human life yet... if there's a reasonable chance that it is than we really should err in it's behalf.
Come on now. It's an airplane made entirely of paper (and glue)... how is that not a "paper airplane"???
But... if you're blocking level 0 content, this doesn't help. Repost away...
I really think people, and certain governments in particular, are completely missing the boat on this issue.
A good, effective search engine helps authorities find "illicit" content just as effectively as it helps the regular people looking for it.
Even if you are an oppressive government looking to quell dissension, or a "responsible" government looking to crack down on crime and kiddie porn... having access to good search results would -help- you do so more effectively.
"But...", the governments cry, "couldn't we block these evil things from the common prole while maintaining a 'privileged' access so -we- could search?"
No, you can't. The effectiveness of the search results is based on crowdsourcing and the accumulation of access data. Block access and you lose both the data and the effectiveness of your search.
If, for the sake of argument, you wanted to keep your people from accessing porn, or seditious diatribes against the state, you really should embrace open search engines.
Let people search and build up the data to efficiently find the things you detest, then you can search too and block those sites at your great National Firewall of Destiny. No matter how sites change addresses, as the people who want to find them find them, they will bubble up in search results, and your official firewall can be updated.
Effective search engines, like so many things, are in essence morally neutral. You can use them both to free or oppress.
The big problem the global community is running into is that, at a fundamental level, we simply can't agree on what is reasonable, unacceptable, or even illegal. Perhaps the UN can step up with a minimal set of standards for internet conduct... but otherwise we're sinking deeper into a mire of legal confusion. When The Republic of Republica declares it illegal to post images of the Prime Minister (because that helps steal his soul) or mailboxes (due to privacy concerns and a local mailbox vandalism spree), or panda bears (which local religion holds to be symbolic of pure evil), should German, US, or Chinese search engines purge them from their databases? We are now a globall community... and we are very soon going to need a global set of laws and guidelines.
Unfortunately, human beings have proven themselves spectacularly bad at coming up with reasonable compromises on such things. (The EU struggles with this regularly, as does the US.) Often this basically means taking the union of everyone's "forbid" list and declaring it forbidden, which obviously ends up depriving most societies of content they see as reasonable and acceptable in the name of pleasing everyone.
Curses. Reboot logged me out. I am the OP.
>> With the one large desktop when you maximize a window it fills both monitors and things might size oddly if your monitors aren't the same size/resolution
> That's true and it does not depend on which operating system you're using.
It's absolutely not true. I'm currently on Centos5 with three monitors arranged (via Xinerama) as one very large desktop.
Maximizing an app causes it to completely fill the leftmost monitor that it currently occupies, NOT the entire multi-monitor desktop.
>> Windows multiple monitors also supports having separate monitors where you can maximize a window on a single display, but you can move windows
>> between the monitors or even span multiple monitors. Is this setup possible to do under Linux?
This appears to be the default behavior using Xinerama, no fancy tricks required
I appreciate all the suggestions to use fixed patterns or algorithms, but the problem I (and I'm sure most of you) run into is that I need passwords for sites that both:
* Require mixed case/special characters/long length
* Don't accept mixed case/special characters/long length
Every pattern I've tried inevitably runs into a new website that demands more or only accepts less, leading to a menagerie of subtle variations and the need to remember whether this particular site needed "PaSSword", "password!", "password5", "PWD", etc, etc, etc.
I have a text file, stored on both disk and USB key, that lists which passwords go with which accounts... then I GPG-encrypt it.
Also, I never use a similar pattern between low-risk sites like message boards and high-risk sites like Paypal and my bank.
Everyone should read the original page, particularly the Introduction and section explaining how to interpret their population numbers.
Here's a relevant quote:
"The daily numbers should represent the potential maximum level of the infection, but in previous test cases usually prove to be much less than that maximum. So, take the range of 25% to 75% of the values that we display as the possible infection population and you will be close to the real value."
So the people actually providing these numbers are really saying that the current number of infections is likely to be between 1,750,000 and 5,250,000.
Oh certainly, if everyone you get email from uses PGP, you're already good.
I'm talking about keeping all the plaintext and/or HTML mail you get from normal people/banks/mailing lists and having the mailserver know to automatically encrypt the content of new messages with your public key. An ISP running such a server could then HOST your normal mail without ever having access to it, or without ever implicitly getting your permission to access it.
It's not about transportation, it's about destination.
Plus there's no expectation that FedEx would (or should) have access to the *contents* of your mail, but an ISP-hosted email account, currently, does have full access to the content, with your tacit approval.
There are options, potentially, for the more privacy minded:
* POP email with "delete from server" active will limit how much of your mail your ISP has access to.
* Run your own mailserver.
* Develop a mailserver that stores mail in an encrypted folder and requires your key to access.
That last one could also go a long way to helping solve the issue where private companies have to host their own mail and forbid employees from using other accounts solely to avoid the exposure of proprietary communications to third parties (the ISP). It also shouldn't be too difficult to set up...
That example sounds like it could be well rendered using MathML... http://www.w3.org/Math/
To echo some of what's already been said, if you really want a format that will look the same for all clients, HTML is not the answer. The problem is that HTML gives too much formatting control to the VIEWER, allowing one to change the font size, change the screen (or paper!) size (think everyone prints on A4, or on US Letter? Think again!!), or even the entire font. If you really want your report to look the same, export to PDF or use a real typesetting language.
That said, if you really want to use HTML, look more closely at the "orphan control" CSS options. Used properly on your p or div elements, they can help ensure that your paragraphs or sections line up nicely on separate pages, no matter what sizes those pages end up being, or what font they end up being rendered in. If what you really want is to keep your writing from becoming visually fragmented, this may very well do the trick for you.
It also reminded me of the old UNIX "talk" app that I used quite a bit in college.
Last year I had the opportunity to use some chat applications for work and I definitely noticed this concept coming up as a problem while trying to get across complicated or lengthy concepts. Many of us self implemented a workaround of entering sentence fragments with "..." between them rather than full sentences because the silent wait was too long otherwise. It was especially important when you want to reply to someone else before other people start chiming in or the conversation moves away.
The OP's "thoughts" overall didn't feel very well put together. For example, he contrasts joining an edited wave late (where you are presented with the latest version) with going to a wiki page (where you are... presented with the latest version) and doesn't seem to get that wave "playback" is identical to and just as accessible as the wiki changelog. In fact, it takes the changelog one step further by allowing you to see the changes happen rather than just browse the descriptions of the changes (although the latter should also be easily possible, if not in the basic GUI than in a very simple extension).
He also missed the hectic but rather interesting segment later in the presentation where six people are all editing at once.
On my part, I'd love to have something like this subsume my regular forum posts, email, and messaging. My communication was good for a while, but lately it fragmented out and now I have too many disparate places to check. A new protocol that allows sufficient functionality to replicate email, IM, talk, wiki, and discussion boards, with extensibility on both the server and client, *is* pretty exciting.
My only real concern is the permission issue, but if the protocol allows subtrees of your wave to be made "private" to a specific group, it's only a small step to use the same sort of structure to make subtrees "read only" to a specific group. Problem solved.
If you haven't watched the whole thing, you need to see the auto-translator near the end of the presentation. It's pretty sweet.
"Before going forward, the use of the term 'Big Brother' in both the title and throughout the book is erroneous."
The usage of 'Big Brother' to refer to any sort of general surveillance is not only common, but perfectly valid. It is indeed a reference to 1984, but it primarily references the ever-present posters that remind people 'Big Brother is watching', not the oppressive government itself. If -someone- is watching, that someone is often referred to as Big Brother, because BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING, not necessarily because that someone is part of an authoritarian regime of oppression and misinformation.