It's a while since I did physics, but these dark matter theories to me sound like the epicyclic theories of the solar system of old. They are too convoluted to be natural IMHO.
Quite the opposite. Dark matter is one of the most obvious solutions. It would just be another particle out there that interacts with normal matter primarily, if not only, via graviation. Basically, a particle with zero electric charge and also no electroweak charge and no QCD color charge. Just mass.
That's really not a very convoluted idea.
There are compelling reasons why baroyonic matter (ie, normal matter) cannot be more than a small percentage of the mass of the universe. The rest of the mass of the universe must be made up of SOMETHING! It's not just that dark matter is DARK, or non-glowing, and so difficult to detect. We can detect gas clouds just fine even when they do not glow. There are compelling reasons to believe that there is a lot of mass in the universe which does not interact electromagnetically at all.
Of course, it's possible that we simply misunderstand how gravity works at very long distances. I am so far unimpressed with the theories I've seen for modified gravity.
From things I've read, everything in the universe seems to be moving away from something and expanding. So, where is the "center", what's in it?
There is no center. Space is either infinite (open universe) or finite (closed universe). If space is infinite, then there is no center because there is no boundary. On the other hand, if space is finite, then the curvature of space means that the universe eventually closes back on itself at some unimaginably distant distance.
In one case it's like asking "What's the center of an infinite 2-d plane?" I'll ignore jokes answering, "Well, the point 0,0 of course"!:) In the other case, it's like asking, "What's the center of the surface of the Earth?"
Space itself is expanding, like the common example of a cooking loaf of raisin bread. The difference is that a loaf of bread is expanding into an already-existing space. But the universe is simply expanding. This means that space itself is expanding which is one reason that things are getting farther and farther apart.
Curved geometries of 3d space are not intuitive because people can only perceive 3 dimensions. So we cannot easily imagine in what a 3d space can bend in. That's why people always fall back to 2d examples. If a sphere is expanding, to a 2d being embedded in the surface of the sphere, all it can tell is that space itself is getting larger. In its universe, there is no center of the expansion.
The horrible startup speed is by far OpenOffice.org's greatest weakness [snip] "You get what you pay for", she said. [snip] The price is irrelevant, because they promptly pirated MSOffice97 and were happy.
Wow, do you see the irony there? Someone complains that "You get what you pay for" and then pirates commercial software? I have no sympathy, nor respect, for people who pirate software. You mention that person's complaint like it's someone whose opinion should be taken seriously. Someone who is going to pirate software isn't mature enough to get the difference between free as in "Free Beer" and free is in "Free speech."
If you want start up speeds comparable to Office and to Corel's office suite, then you have to do the exact same thing both of those suites do to speed up their loading -- preload the application. Just because Microsoft has made it non-obvious that they preload the app doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Internet Explorer starts up quickly for the same reason. Once I configured Mozilla to preload under Win2k, it started up exactly as rapidly as IE6.
By way of comparison, someone who will pirate commercial software because what is freely available doesn't immediately meet their approval, well, is sort of like someone who doesn't like the food they are being given freely, so instead they go rob a store to get different food. Is that someone whose opinion you worry about? IMO, no.
Explain Microsoft again to me then? Bottled water? 93 Octane gasoline?
Ha!
The answer to all three is marketing.
Many bottled waters just come from the tap in a different city. I have lived in a very few areas where the tap water tastes awful or just has a very high mineral content. By and large, however, tap water is just fine and is no healthier than bottled water.
Where Octane is concerned, consumers believe that higher is better, as with so many other things. Despite studies
that reliably show that octane makes no difference as long as your car is not knocking on the octane you're using.
Microsoft? Marketing. Well, plus other "tactics" too.:)
And to the topic parent, who would have thought that Google could arise and compete against such a well established competitor? When there is not an artificial barrier to entry, it's not uncommon for a small new company to challenge an established market leader.
Isn't this unethical behaviour. They obviously have debts, i.e. creditors. The creditors get nothing, but the same company has basically started again. [snip] What is different here, except you guys think they are the good guys?
What's different is that it's NOT the same company. Check out in this discussion where one of the two people creating the new companycomments on the situation.
The company that went bankrupt (Trustix AS) had many products. The two people supporting what was Trustix Linux used to be employees of Trustix but were laid off months ago.
A beautiful thing about open source licensed projects is that if the company creating the program goes under, it's comparatively easy to create a new company (or consortium or whatever) supporting it. With a proprietary program, if the company goes under, the individual developers who worked on it have no rights to continue the project.
Although as some have pointed out, some creditors may prefer the proprietary model because maybe someone will buy the assets of the bankrupt company to get the rights to the proprietary code which will help creditors get more money back.
Hmmm, You make the statement: And all absolute statements are wrong.
So is your statement incorrect? For it to be correct, it would have to be absolute, which is the very idea you refute.
I think instead, it may be that the absolute exists, but we have a hard time agreeing on our choice to believe it or not.
Well, I was, in a silly way, saying that we need to be cautious about ANY absolute statement. I enjoy apparent contradictions. Life generally has fewer absolutes than people believe. It's easier to believe an absolute simply because it's less complicated. But the real world is complicated. Real moral situations are complicated. Those who paint the world with absolutist ideas -- that is, zealots -- are (generally speaking) wrong. It doesn't matter what side of the issue, any issue, they are on.
To summarize that whole paragraph (and more that I could say on the subject of zealotry) I used the silly route and the Western equivalent of a koan. Sort of. I ignore most posts that boil complicated situations down to simple slogans. When I don't, I use humor, knowing that I can't really expect zealots to listen or to be open to changing their mind. On anything.
For the record, I acknowledge the existence of Pro-Linux zealots and Pro-Windows zealots and Anti-Linux zealots and Anti-Windows zealots, with some overlap between some of the groups.
To keep this more directly on topic, governments have to balance the need to keep public information available with the need for public information to be widely accessible (useful data formats that people have affordable and fair access to) with budget considerations with, well, many other things. The best decision is one that takes all of that into account. A zealot's decision takes only a subset of factors into account.
If I were in a government making decisions about data formats, I would only allow consideration of data formats that were publically and fully documented, thus assuring future availibility of the documents. This isn't a proprietary/open source argument. There are proprietary data formats that are fully documented. If no such formats are available then you have to make more difficult decisions. But this is only one factor among the many to be considered when one decides which software to use.
they represent just about the best mass-produced conventional cars can do without becoming a "Toyota Echo" or "Geo Metro".
I test drove an Echo a couple of years ago when I was considering replacing my '92 Saturn. It is far roomier inside than it appears. I was confused at how roomy it was until I parked my Saturn exactly next to an Echo. The interior space parts of the two cars are almost exactly the same size. From the front of the front doors to the back, the two cars are about the same lenght. The main length difference is the front hood.
I didn't buy the Echo for three reasons. The Toyota dealership annoyed me and insulted my intelligence. The car was very light, getting blown about on the road on the windy day I test drove it. And my Saturn was doing just fine; I like my $0 monthly car note. Whenever my Saturn starts to need lots of repair, I'll get rid of it.
The engineering of the Echo is remarkable. It looks much tinier inside than it is, and it is surprisingly comforable to climb in and out of the car.
Now only if the back seat folded down COMPLETELY rather than having a small port though which things can poke from the trunk into the back of the car. One of the really nice features of the Saturn is that the WHOLE back seat area opens up from the trunk, not just a little port.
The high price of paperbacks may, as much as anything else, discourage purchases. I still buy books faster than I can read them and I continue to discover new authors who I consider to be breaking new ground.
The character of Good SciFi changes with time, and some people do not like that. But life isn't static. I see this argument as akin to those who think that music stopped being good in the 60s (or 70s or 80s or pick your favorite era). How can anyone reasonably expect any genre to remain static and still remain interesting? Perhaps Spider is holding on to older times and doesn't want to live in the actual future!:)
OK, I probably read more fantasy than I used to, as a percentage. Perhaps some of the creative energy has moved in that direction. (Jim Butcher for example) But for recent SciFi how about Lyda Morehouse, Greg Egan, James Hogan (still publishing interesting stuff), Urulsa K LeGuin (anyone read The Telling?) and John Barnes.
There is a lot of good stuff out there. There is also a lot of drek. That's just life. Maybe the people who complain that SciFi is no longer interesting are those who are just not finding the good stuff. It's out there.
I find the genre of hard SciFi continues to improve with time.
For those who aren't holding onto older times and those who are willing to look through the stacks to find the good stuff, maybe some of those left who complain just don't like the direction and the ideas being investigated in current SciFi. I continue to be amazed at the interesting and new directions that SciFi authors take stories.
an open documents format would be suicide for company like Microsoft.
In the short term, Microsoft generates lock-in and better profits with their proprietary file formats. In the long run, they are their worst enemy. Notice that PDF, as a format, is 100% backward compatible in that you can load EVERY PDF document ever made with current generation PDF viewers. With Word, there are a significant number of documents from old versions of the software that will not load in current versions.
Companies and governments are starting to notice the cost of having to convert every single document to a newer format every couple years. Or the alternative cost of losing history and having old documents become unreadable. Where I work we've begun to have problems with all kinds of proprietary file formats (for making ASICs for example) where the company has gone out of business. I don't have confidence in code escrow schemes as a proprietary alternative.
Programmers by the millions are unemployed because communists are undermining the great American capitalist economy by GIVING their software away. How do you expect to get work as a programmer when some guy next door is giving away the software for free? It's outright piracy and should be banned in the United States.
Wow. So it's Open Source that's causing the extinction of the Great American Programmer? Working at a company which is oursourcing coding to another country on the different side of a large ocean, I don't know that Open Source even registers on the radar as to why people are out of work. Please.
And communist? You completely miss the whole business model of open source. And you seem to be under the impression that open source is something recent, when in fact it is as old as programming, the only difference is that now non-programmers are talking about it. Not to mention that name calling is the last argument of those who have no real argument.
Besides, this "Great American Capitalist economy" is being weakened by a government that not only encourages wage deflation in the tech sector, but is actively participating is the process.
But that's OK. You can blame open source if you just want to be angry and have something to rant about that doesn't require much thought or investigation.
I wish the zealots would at least concede that much before blasting the horrible , horrible, evil, closed, proprietary software.
Um, are you missing the definition of the word "zealot"? By definition, zealots on either side of the issue will concede nothing! To misquite The Princess Bride, "I don't think that word means what you think it means."
Sadly, I think it's human nature to look for a panacea. We never learn. There IS no panacea. (And all absolute statements are wrong.) I tend to advise people to be pragmatic in their zealotry. It's a good think I like to hear myself talk, because zealots don't like listen....
This information is really easy to find and it's difficult to argue with plain facts. All corporations, total, pay 1/3 as much in income tax as people pay in FICA and other payroll taxes.
For FY2002, corporate income tax was about $211B. Individuals paid about $1.7 TRILLION total in income and payroll taxes. That makes your claim about corporations paying the vast majority of taxes a pretty specious claim. The rich do pay a large fraction of income tax. But nor corporations. Not even close.
Unless you can come up with some information that proves the IRS doesn't know how to count....
The poor DO pay taxes. Ever heard of FICA? A great many people pay more in payroll taxes than they pay in income taxes. People forget this. Yes, with our current income tax scheme, many of the poor have a negative INCOME tax... but they still pay payroll taxes. And it's not like the US government separates payroll taxes from income taxes when it comes time to spend the money.
These guys have to be smoking SOMETHING to explain the cognitive dissonance in their statements. I mean, "We're not talking about the kernel." "We're talking about the kernel." "We're not going to go after end users." "We're going to go after end users." "Well, we're only going to go after companies but not hobbiests." "We changed our minds again, we never intended to go after anybody."
If only I had the spare ten hours I could go over the last years' press releases and make some "found poetry." Blank verse in this case, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a while since I did physics, but these dark matter theories to me sound like the epicyclic theories of the solar system of old. They are too convoluted to be natural IMHO.
Quite the opposite. Dark matter is one of the most obvious solutions. It would just be another particle out there that interacts with normal matter primarily, if not only, via graviation. Basically, a particle with zero electric charge and also no electroweak charge and no QCD color charge. Just mass.
That's really not a very convoluted idea.
There are compelling reasons why baroyonic matter (ie, normal matter) cannot be more than a small percentage of the mass of the universe. The rest of the mass of the universe must be made up of SOMETHING! It's not just that dark matter is DARK, or non-glowing, and so difficult to detect. We can detect gas clouds just fine even when they do not glow. There are compelling reasons to believe that there is a lot of mass in the universe which does not interact electromagnetically at all.
Of course, it's possible that we simply misunderstand how gravity works at very long distances. I am so far unimpressed with the theories I've seen for modified gravity.
From things I've read, everything in the universe seems to be moving away from something and expanding. So, where is the "center", what's in it?
There is no center. Space is either infinite (open universe) or finite (closed universe). If space is infinite, then there is no center because there is no boundary. On the other hand, if space is finite, then the curvature of space means that the universe eventually closes back on itself at some unimaginably distant distance.
In one case it's like asking "What's the center of an infinite 2-d plane?" I'll ignore jokes answering, "Well, the point 0,0 of course"! :) In the other case, it's like asking, "What's the center of the surface of the Earth?"
Space itself is expanding, like the common example of a cooking loaf of raisin bread. The difference is that a loaf of bread is expanding into an already-existing space. But the universe is simply expanding. This means that space itself is expanding which is one reason that things are getting farther and farther apart.
Curved geometries of 3d space are not intuitive because people can only perceive 3 dimensions. So we cannot easily imagine in what a 3d space can bend in. That's why people always fall back to 2d examples. If a sphere is expanding, to a 2d being embedded in the surface of the sphere, all it can tell is that space itself is getting larger. In its universe, there is no center of the expansion.
The horrible startup speed is by far OpenOffice.org's greatest weakness [snip] "You get what you pay for", she said. [snip] The price is irrelevant, because they promptly pirated MSOffice97 and were happy.
Wow, do you see the irony there? Someone complains that "You get what you pay for" and then pirates commercial software? I have no sympathy, nor respect, for people who pirate software. You mention that person's complaint like it's someone whose opinion should be taken seriously. Someone who is going to pirate software isn't mature enough to get the difference between free as in "Free Beer" and free is in "Free speech."
If you want start up speeds comparable to Office and to Corel's office suite, then you have to do the exact same thing both of those suites do to speed up their loading -- preload the application. Just because Microsoft has made it non-obvious that they preload the app doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Internet Explorer starts up quickly for the same reason. Once I configured Mozilla to preload under Win2k, it started up exactly as rapidly as IE6.
By way of comparison, someone who will pirate commercial software because what is freely available doesn't immediately meet their approval, well, is sort of like someone who doesn't like the food they are being given freely, so instead they go rob a store to get different food. Is that someone whose opinion you worry about? IMO, no.
Explain Microsoft again to me then? Bottled water? 93 Octane gasoline?
Ha!
The answer to all three is marketing.
Many bottled waters just come from the tap in a different city. I have lived in a very few areas where the tap water tastes awful or just has a very high mineral content. By and large, however, tap water is just fine and is no healthier than bottled water.
Where Octane is concerned, consumers believe that higher is better, as with so many other things. Despite studies that reliably show that octane makes no difference as long as your car is not knocking on the octane you're using.
Microsoft? Marketing. Well, plus other "tactics" too. :)
And to the topic parent, who would have thought that Google could arise and compete against such a well established competitor? When there is not an artificial barrier to entry, it's not uncommon for a small new company to challenge an established market leader.
Isn't this unethical behaviour. They obviously have debts, i.e. creditors. The creditors get nothing, but the same company has basically started again. [snip] What is different here, except you guys think they are the good guys?
What's different is that it's NOT the same company. Check out in this discussion where one of the two people creating the new companycomments on the situation.
The company that went bankrupt (Trustix AS) had many products. The two people supporting what was Trustix Linux used to be employees of Trustix but were laid off months ago.
A beautiful thing about open source licensed projects is that if the company creating the program goes under, it's comparatively easy to create a new company (or consortium or whatever) supporting it. With a proprietary program, if the company goes under, the individual developers who worked on it have no rights to continue the project.
Although as some have pointed out, some creditors may prefer the proprietary model because maybe someone will buy the assets of the bankrupt company to get the rights to the proprietary code which will help creditors get more money back.
Hmmm, You make the statement:
And all absolute statements are wrong.
So is your statement incorrect? For it to be correct, it would have to be absolute, which is the very idea you refute.
I think instead, it may be that the absolute exists, but we have a hard time agreeing on our choice to believe it or not.
Well, I was, in a silly way, saying that we need to be cautious about ANY absolute statement. I enjoy apparent contradictions. Life generally has fewer absolutes than people believe. It's easier to believe an absolute simply because it's less complicated. But the real world is complicated. Real moral situations are complicated. Those who paint the world with absolutist ideas -- that is, zealots -- are (generally speaking) wrong. It doesn't matter what side of the issue, any issue, they are on.
To summarize that whole paragraph (and more that I could say on the subject of zealotry) I used the silly route and the Western equivalent of a koan. Sort of. I ignore most posts that boil complicated situations down to simple slogans. When I don't, I use humor, knowing that I can't really expect zealots to listen or to be open to changing their mind. On anything.
For the record, I acknowledge the existence of Pro-Linux zealots and Pro-Windows zealots and Anti-Linux zealots and Anti-Windows zealots, with some overlap between some of the groups.
To keep this more directly on topic, governments have to balance the need to keep public information available with the need for public information to be widely accessible (useful data formats that people have affordable and fair access to) with budget considerations with, well, many other things. The best decision is one that takes all of that into account. A zealot's decision takes only a subset of factors into account.
If I were in a government making decisions about data formats, I would only allow consideration of data formats that were publically and fully documented, thus assuring future availibility of the documents. This isn't a proprietary/open source argument. There are proprietary data formats that are fully documented. If no such formats are available then you have to make more difficult decisions. But this is only one factor among the many to be considered when one decides which software to use.
they represent just about the best mass-produced conventional cars can do without becoming a "Toyota Echo" or "Geo Metro".
I test drove an Echo a couple of years ago when I was considering replacing my '92 Saturn. It is far roomier inside than it appears. I was confused at how roomy it was until I parked my Saturn exactly next to an Echo. The interior space parts of the two cars are almost exactly the same size. From the front of the front doors to the back, the two cars are about the same lenght. The main length difference is the front hood.
I didn't buy the Echo for three reasons. The Toyota dealership annoyed me and insulted my intelligence. The car was very light, getting blown about on the road on the windy day I test drove it. And my Saturn was doing just fine; I like my $0 monthly car note. Whenever my Saturn starts to need lots of repair, I'll get rid of it.
The engineering of the Echo is remarkable. It looks much tinier inside than it is, and it is surprisingly comforable to climb in and out of the car.
Now only if the back seat folded down COMPLETELY rather than having a small port though which things can poke from the trunk into the back of the car. One of the really nice features of the Saturn is that the WHOLE back seat area opens up from the trunk, not just a little port.
The high price of paperbacks may, as much as anything else, discourage purchases. I still buy books faster than I can read them and I continue to discover new authors who I consider to be breaking new ground.
The character of Good SciFi changes with time, and some people do not like that. But life isn't static. I see this argument as akin to those who think that music stopped being good in the 60s (or 70s or 80s or pick your favorite era). How can anyone reasonably expect any genre to remain static and still remain interesting? Perhaps Spider is holding on to older times and doesn't want to live in the actual future! :)
OK, I probably read more fantasy than I used to, as a percentage. Perhaps some of the creative energy has moved in that direction. (Jim Butcher for example) But for recent SciFi how about Lyda Morehouse, Greg Egan, James Hogan (still publishing interesting stuff), Urulsa K LeGuin (anyone read The Telling?) and John Barnes.
There is a lot of good stuff out there. There is also a lot of drek. That's just life. Maybe the people who complain that SciFi is no longer interesting are those who are just not finding the good stuff. It's out there.
I find the genre of hard SciFi continues to improve with time.
For those who aren't holding onto older times and those who are willing to look through the stacks to find the good stuff, maybe some of those left who complain just don't like the direction and the ideas being investigated in current SciFi. I continue to be amazed at the interesting and new directions that SciFi authors take stories.
an open documents format would be suicide for company like Microsoft.
In the short term, Microsoft generates lock-in and better profits with their proprietary file formats. In the long run, they are their worst enemy. Notice that PDF, as a format, is 100% backward compatible in that you can load EVERY PDF document ever made with current generation PDF viewers. With Word, there are a significant number of documents from old versions of the software that will not load in current versions.
Companies and governments are starting to notice the cost of having to convert every single document to a newer format every couple years. Or the alternative cost of losing history and having old documents become unreadable. Where I work we've begun to have problems with all kinds of proprietary file formats (for making ASICs for example) where the company has gone out of business. I don't have confidence in code escrow schemes as a proprietary alternative.
The issue of file formats is a real one.
Programmers by the millions are unemployed because communists are undermining the great American capitalist economy by GIVING their software away. How do you expect to get work as a programmer when some guy next door is giving away the software for free? It's outright piracy and should be banned in the United States.
Wow. So it's Open Source that's causing the extinction of the Great American Programmer? Working at a company which is oursourcing coding to another country on the different side of a large ocean, I don't know that Open Source even registers on the radar as to why people are out of work. Please.
And communist? You completely miss the whole business model of open source. And you seem to be under the impression that open source is something recent, when in fact it is as old as programming, the only difference is that now non-programmers are talking about it. Not to mention that name calling is the last argument of those who have no real argument.
Besides, this "Great American Capitalist economy" is being weakened by a government that not only encourages wage deflation in the tech sector, but is actively participating is the process.
But that's OK. You can blame open source if you just want to be angry and have something to rant about that doesn't require much thought or investigation.
I wish the zealots would at least concede that much before blasting the horrible , horrible, evil, closed, proprietary software.
Um, are you missing the definition of the word "zealot"? By definition, zealots on either side of the issue will concede nothing! To misquite The Princess Bride, "I don't think that word means what you think it means."
Sadly, I think it's human nature to look for a panacea. We never learn. There IS no panacea. (And all absolute statements are wrong.) I tend to advise people to be pragmatic in their zealotry. It's a good think I like to hear myself talk, because zealots don't like listen....
Eddie the Penguin (as I'm known at work)
Coproprations and rich people pay the vast majority of all taxes in the US.
Sorry, but corporations don't pay that much in taxes. Check out the IRS statistics for example.
This information is really easy to find and it's difficult to argue with plain facts. All corporations, total, pay 1/3 as much in income tax as people pay in FICA and other payroll taxes.
For FY2002, corporate income tax was about $211B. Individuals paid about $1.7 TRILLION total in income and payroll taxes. That makes your claim about corporations paying the vast majority of taxes a pretty specious claim. The rich do pay a large fraction of income tax. But nor corporations. Not even close.
Unless you can come up with some information that proves the IRS doesn't know how to count....
The poor DO pay taxes. Ever heard of FICA? A great many people pay more in payroll taxes than they pay in income taxes. People forget this. Yes, with our current income tax scheme, many of the poor have a negative INCOME tax ... but they still pay payroll taxes. And it's not like the US government separates payroll taxes from income taxes when it comes time to spend the money.
These guys have to be smoking SOMETHING to explain the cognitive dissonance in their statements. I mean, "We're not talking about the kernel." "We're talking about the kernel." "We're not going to go after end users." "We're going to go after end users." "Well, we're only going to go after companies but not hobbiests." "We changed our minds again, we never intended to go after anybody."
If only I had the spare ten hours I could go over the last years' press releases and make some "found poetry." Blank verse in this case, of course.