That's "too lame", and even now the Hounds of Grammardalos are moving through many angled space, coordinating on your upcoming position in the 6-dimensional Calabi Yau manifold that underlies real space-time. Your extraction into one of the many trillions of quintic grammar-spaces itself will (theoretically) be painless, but then you will (gasp!) see them in their partly rugose, partly squamous glory. Knowing these rules could have saved your life, your sanity, and your (soon to be topologically inverted and transmuted to Bismuth) spleen, but it's already too late now.
(By the way, the standardised UK English spell-checker does not recognise "rugose", even under the variant "rugous", but actually did accept squamous. That's progress of a sort for you - we'll get it to accept "eldritch" yet.)
You could wire it up to go off if your heart stops and drive around on a motorcycle with it in the sidecar. Just watch out for some pizza delivery dude named Hiro Protagonist.
I see why this drew a flamebait modifier, but it raises a few very good questions. For one, why are people buying 1 and 2 Terabyte disks for PCs if they don't plan on putting lots of video on them? Other people posting to this very thread are mentioning how there are only a very few 'legitimate' uses, as opposed to of storing a huge downloaded collection of video. For another, one common complaint here is that the industry tends to treat everyone like a pirate. But given how many multi Terabyte portable add on drives are sold each year, either a lot of them are almost empty, or a lot of people have paid 20 or 30 Thousand each for their legitmate copies of media, or there is a lot of 'piracy' out there. Are add on drive sales enough to justify the recording industry's claims?
Madoff ripped off a lot of people's life savings, and some of them took a real drop in quality of life. Move into the 'can't afford to see a doctor - maybe this symptom will just go away' group, and you lose up to six years from your average life expectancy by some estimates.
Apply this as a metric to Madoff and he took away enough life from enough people to be the equivalent of killing approximately 12 healthy newborns with otherwise normal life expectancy. (You should see what applying this rule to Ken Lay and the rest of Enron does - they're up in the war crimes range).
Yeah, those people could still have chosen to go into debt seeing a doctor. At some point, they could choose to steal rather than eat cat food, or beg to get into an air conditioned shelter rather than swelter in a home they can't afford to cool. But if some guy is pointing a gun at my head, I can still choose to try to jump him or run or whatever - does that make me responsible for my death if I pick the wrong time to try and wrestle the gun away? Madoff deserves to be held responsible for the drastic shortening of some of his victims life expectancies, whether they also deserve to be held responsible in some measure or not.
My home desktop machines are Kubuntu 10.4, Mythbuntu, and Win 98SE (in order of most to least use). Laptops are Kubuntu 10.4, Xubuntu 9 and Win XP, and there's an odd little box about 3.5" x 5" running Win CE. One of my work machines is Irix 6.5, in a mostly windows shop, and I'm very glad both that the former XP boxes there are now Win 7 and that we skipped Vista entirely. Now what does this prove, if anything? The very fact that I administer an actual UNIX device means I am the last person to have a reliable opinion about whether Ubuntu is ready for the typical home user. That is use that device means I probably should also be a devoted BSD fan or run Debian at home or something like that, and yet I like KDE and Kubuntu, so I'm probably the last person to have an opinion there either. I'm a solder jockey who builds all his own boxes at home and sometimes even fixes others, down to the level of opening damaged hard drives in a clean room environment and getting them to work. How the hell would I know what a typical user is ready for.
The value of contributions to Gnome depends so much on the rest of the Gnome community, on the long standing Gnome/KDE rivalry, and other external factors. If you use contributions to Gnome as a major metric, shouldn't Canonical get some points for indirectly contributing to KDE, XFCE and such via their Kubuntu/Xubuntu connections?
There's also Canonical's hardware certification program and their 3rd party software certification program. The hardware cert program has three tiers, and these are designed to give some needed flexibility to hardware makers and software (particularly driver software) authors.
Ubuntu Certified is the most involved, and from Canonical's viewpoint, probably the most rigorous. OEMs submit systems to Canonical's testing facility. Certification and testing is done by Canonical's engineers.
Ubuntu Ready is much easier for Canonical, as the OEMs self-test their systems using Canonical's certification test suite. OEMs still have to submit their results to Canonical for final review if they want to claim to be Ubuntu ready, but can also use some elements of the test software for other purposes such as internal validation. A good way to evaluate Canonical's over all contribution to the Linux community might be to include how well they have shared this and related code and how well they have modified it based on OEM feedback.
Works with Ubuntu. This designation is used for peripherals, such as printers or USB storage devices, that don't usually need the time and associated costs of a more rigorous certification process for testing before it's reasonable to certify them. It makes it easier for makers of such peripherals to keep up with the Ubuntu 6 month release cycle.
Canonical offers frequent symposiums and group meetings for hardware makers wanting to use this process - in fact, there's one scheduled this month.
The case is a box, with one corner lopped so it sits at an angle (hence the part in the summary about how it won't fit in a rack.). As if this weren't enough to make it call attention to itself, the default color scheme is carbon and acid green.
The design is meant to sell to people who want to show off how they have one, and create consumer envy as a way of moving more units. The problem is, some customers will be turned off by that - for example, they want a device that blends with the others in their viewing room. The color scheme makes this effect worse - after a certain point, the Boxee Box is already distinctive, and has caught the attention of that market share that values gadgets standing out from the crowd - so more distinction will only cost them customers. Acid green is a color that came into style briefly a few years ago, and is now dated to the people who have strong interior decorator modes and really care about such trends - using it this late in the trend cycle comes off a little like making the device in the customer's choice of Almond, Harvest Gold or Avocado.
If they had kept the price under 200$, all that might have flown, with sales to the college dorm crowd and the general youth market, but with the new price point, the design is aimed at a slightly older demographic, one that will actually care about this sort of thing.
As final proof that the Boxee Box isn't going to sell well, I'd buy one, even at the new price. It triggers geeklust in me. The very last tech-thing I bought was a Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver replica (Matt Smith version). Does that sound like a real market exists?
The test depends on the subject - If it's a presidential election, being able to name who currently has the job might actually be fair, but what's a fair test for a nuclear power referendum?
This proposed Nuclear Energy plant will produce power by: a. Fissioning Uranium b. Fusing Bromine c. Burning Coal d. Combining Aluvium Fosdex (the shaving creme atom) with magic pixie dust. e. Cowboy Neal.
or
Please enter the current percentage of power used in our tri-state area during summertime peak load hours, that currently comes from fission. You will be allowed to vote if your answer is correct to three significant digits.
I'd have to agree. Atheism doesn't have to be a religion, but when some people start a new thread on 4-Chan asking for quote wallpapers, ten times in a row, and whichever anonymous poster begins each thread always starts it off with a pro-atheist/anti religious quote, and not a quote about anything else, and they say that the only meaningful quotes about anything are about how bad religion is, that's the actions of religious fanatics. If your point of view has numerous religious fanatics who claim to speak for everyone else, it becomes a religion. If you don't distance yourself from the nutters because they claim to be part of your group, then it becomes your religion. That said, I'm a Zen Gnostic Episcopalian myself. I want to distance myself right now from the WBC, the people who don't want a mosque within 2,000 miles of ground zero, and really, anyone who thinks God wants you to hate for Him. I can logically prove Jesus is superhuman*, and have a separate proof for Apollo's existence**. The rest, I'm not sure about.
*OK, here goes: Jesus' teachings were perverted to support the crusades, the inquisition, and the witch trials. The earliest of these happened about 1,000 years after Jesus was executed. Darwin's teachings were perverted to support the Eugenics movements and Naziism. The earliest of these took only about 40 years after Darwin's publication of his first book to become life destroying monstrosities. It's 39 years from Einstein's first relevant publication to the A-Bomb, and about 43 to the cold war. Ergo, Jesus was roughly 25 times better than some of the very smartest humans we know at avoiding his work being perverted into something loathsome by stupider humans. That's superhuman, although in a somewhat limited sense.
(OK, if you accept that orthodox Christians destroyed the library at Alexandria and killed its head, we can reduce the ratio to roughly 300 years to 40, so Jesus would only be about 8x an incredibly smart human, not 25. Alternately, is it fair to blame anybody for how other people, years after their death, interpret their sayings or writings?).
** The Delphic Oracle guided Greek civilization for at least 500 years. The job was filled by a series of 12 to 15 year old girls, who got blind frackin' stoned day in and day out breathing the fumes they found in a cave. We're talking stoned Emo chicks of the sort who write bad poetry, and obviously, ones who thought nobody understood them, as they kept a host of translators around just to interpret their cryptic utterances. (In fact, this is where cryptic utterances originated). They also played with snakes by some accounts. Everyone believed these immature, spaced-out bints when they claimed to speak for Apollo, and followed their advice. Instead of this promoting one ultimate level massive clusterfrack, it led to an era generally considered surprisingly peaceful and enlightened, and the foundations of what became modern democratic government, formal logic and science. Ergo, Apollo at least was real at that time, because that's an obvious incredible major miracle on a par with everyone on all sides agreeing with the US plan for peace in the Middle East. (Thanks to Alan Moore for this one) .
Buddhism as a whole isn't particularly neutral on the subject of gods. Theravada Buddhism is all about ethical actions and meditation. Theravada doesn't really support anything supernatural, but they also insist on there being one and only one Buddha and his always being a little above even the most enlightened modern practitioner. By them, no one else gets to be a Buddha, just off the wheel of Karma by meditation. So while they claim not to have any gods involved, some of us feel they are making the historical Buddha into one. Mahayana Buddhists mostly believe in gods and lots of other things, but the goal isn't becoming a mere god, it's enlightening yourself and then all sentient beings. You can theoretically become a god in some Mahayana traditions, but you shouldn't want to, as that god may still be as far as you are right now from the real goal of enlightenment. Some Mahayanists also believe in demi-gods (who are in cool afterlives but often too busy being jealous of the full gods to seek enlightenment), and hungry ghosts, who by some accounts are descending to splinter into animal spirits and start the climb back. Then there's Vajrayana, which I can't describe much more succinctly than to say it holds the goal is enlightenment, but you will have to become Dr. Strange first. If Mahayana is supernaturalist with gods and 'other planes', Vajrayana is taking the gods and dimensions and psychic powers stuff to an ongoing TV series, with half a dozen successful spin-offs and lots of special guests and plot cross overs, and you have to learn the names of all the particles of the week to progress.
Zen, by the way, is mostly based on Mahayana teachings.
Most symphony orchestras get taxpayer support. When they record, it's often subsidised by the federal government, or state and local ones. In many cases, the people who manage and broker deals for these orchestras artificially split the funding, so that all the necessary preliminaries to album sales are supposedly based on private investment/contributions. They treat it like all the practice sessions for a live performance are taxpayer subsidised, but the practice sessions for the album are paid for by private sources, so that the law is technically being observed. It's part of that whole "socialise the costs and privatise the profits" school of economics. It makes no sense as a matter of fact instead of law - does anyone really want to claim that they practiced the same piece for live performance and recording, but only put the part of that practice that was funded by one method or the other into their performances. "Yeah, I deliberately held back on that Oboe cadenza, so it didn't sound like all the practice I had contributed to my leet symphonizing skillz!".
What the federal government funds is normally held in the public trust, not subject to copyright. I know several symphony soloists and conductors who are generally uncomfortable with this legal ruse, and have heard accounts of many more. Most orchestras don't have the stature to sell a lot of recordings, and taxpayer funding generally takes any profit from CD sales into account, so it seldom benefits the performers much, if at all. It's more likely they see the same overall pay, with a shift in just when they get each check because some of it is coming as royalties after sales figures are processed. It makes bookkeeping for symphonies much more complex, and some managing directors see it as a big gamble, where they might get lucky and see really impressive sales, but doing classical music at the major orchestra level isn't gambling to most people, it's a steady job with a safe floor for income. Just like some people in rock/pop/rap/whatever become studio musicians because they want a steady paycheck instead of a high risk venture, people who shoot for a job in the second row violins for the New York Philharmonic want a reliable career instead of a 1 in 10,000 chance of a mansion with leopard skin covered volleyball courts.
Copyright isn't a legal document, it's a body of law. The creator can't write some special copyright that sets different terms than the rights the law gives.
Rothbard's argument is relevant, but not sufficient. There's a huge difference between saying that we should consider this from a propertarian viewpoint and that we should consider it only from that viewpoint. Rothbard crosses that line by the time he uses the word "simply" in the second sentence of your quote. As one poster has already pointed out, this situation is complex, and oversimplifying doesn't give meaningful input.
How would Murray Rothbard's argument address any apparent conflict when property is held in common? Do I gain the right to shout fire in a crowded public venue funded from tax dollars? Your Rothbard quote is arguing that all public property is criminal, because all rights can only be sustained where there is private ownership. But, in the US, it took a whole series of special laws in every state's legal codes for theatre owners to gain the right to be treated as though a contract existed without actually having printed one and gained signatures. A right of implied contract exists only because of specialised laws (a privilege or private law, the very word privilege coming from the Latin roots 'Privus' (Private) + 'Lex' (law)) intended to protect theater owners.
Rothbard actually is arguing for the unlimited power of the government to create or destroy rights. How else can the right of contract support all these other rights, particularly when, in his own example, a contract doesn't exist physically, but exists only by government fiat. At the same time, he's arguing against himself, holding that same government fiat is insufficent to grant another right by any other means than through property rights. Since the real US constitution is most emphatically not about how the government grants rights, but how it must rather respect them, neither facet of his argument really sheds more light than heat.
I'll agree provisionally - the provision being that this affects some subjects much more than others. I trust most real idiots not to care enough to bother about editing a wiki entry on Malament-Hogarth spacetime or Reissner-Nordstrom metrics. (Maybe I shouldn't mention those as it will encourage some real idiot to mess with them). Still, what about wanting to avoid (A) acting 100% certain when you aren't, or to avoid (B) caring more about ego boost than taking a chance on getting more overall truth by sharing the process? Both of those, especially together, might make it worth putting up with your high negative index for (C) even if you are right about it.
For something which might shed some light on your 'aliens' example, you might read Douglas R. Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach". He has a section where he writes on contrafactuals, and goes into some detail into how people think about things they know are not actually true. He begins this section by writing about some fictional characters such as Achilles and the Tortoise, which he uses at many places in the book, and in this case they are watching a TV sports event on a set that can show how the game might go if some rules were different. He points out that it seems to make more sense to speculate about what might have happened if the wide reciever had sweaty hands than what the play would have looked like if space was five dimensional (or something like that). It seems to be very natural for most of us to accept some things we know to be untrue provisionally, and speculate about what else would change if they were true, but to reject other speculations as too weird or too silly, or just not done. And there's a largeish middle ground where some things 'feel' reasonable in some cases but not others. Hofstadter gives some excellent examples.
That's what philosophy is for. "Everybody" or at least 99%+ of us, will entertain some things we think are untrue, provisionally, to see where they lead. It can be overwhelmingly stupid not to. For example, just imagine making a mistake that leads to a very close call while driving, and not thinking "That was dangerous - I could have been killed!", or deciding that, since you weren't actually killed, you won't think any further about whether it was your mistake or not. Good work in philosophy can take something such as this and delve into why some such speculations seem more reasonable than others, when after all, they are all equally based at their very beginning on something we start off by knowing is untrue. Why does it not make sense to stop immediately when a counterfactual comes up in thought? What Hofstadter is doing there is epistemology - basically "how do we know the things we know?".
The aliens problem isn't just a stupid play on words, if it gets you thinking properly about the chain of contrafactuals that lead to it. How sure are you that there aren't any actual aliens provably available to point to for this example? (Hopefully very, or you'll produce one). How sure are you of all the mechanisms that drive evolution? (Probably much less so). How big a change in the way things evolved on this world would your particular hypothetical aliens take? (And how sure are you of your answer, probably less sure than for either previous question). Are we going farther out on a speculative limb to imagine aliens that evolved from giant land dwelling bat descendants, and use sonar to hunt prey, or ones that are built like hydrogen filled gasbags and digest solar energy? Why does one sound more realistic, more like something evolution maybe could do, more 'survivable' than the other? (Does either one really sound more plausable to you?). Remember, a lie is a lie, a counterfactual is a counterfactual - why isn't that where your brain wants to stop, instead of perhaps thinking something like "Yes, but it wouldn't have taken a lot of changes for some bats to have lost flight and evolved towards being land dwellers again, but it would take big changes in the way things are for hydrogen filled flying lifeforms to survive on a world with frequent lightning, fires and sharp pointy objects."
We have Paul Simon's and Art Garfunkle's account, (although I could never remember which one was the rock and which one was the island). By that, "... a rock feels no pain...".
The difference in the way most straight men and most straight women would feel about some reasonably attractive person of the opposite sex indicating a sexual interest on short acquaintance should be enough to demonstrate this without bringing up S&M edge cases.
If the article does not go into the present situation much, maybe. But let's examine a real basic online article about the natural numbers. Probably no one has said anything new there at least since Godel trumped the Principia, but what if the article mentions schools where outstanding living experts on the subject teach, or publications? Those things can change pretty quickly. Right now, a cheap, dirty, and not to be trusted for anything serious by itself search (wikipedia) turns up an online article on "Proofs involving the Addition of Natural Numbers", with this as its only print citation:
Edmund Landau, Foundations of Analysis, Chelsea Pub Co. ISBN 0-8218-2693-X.
Is that book still in print? Is it widely used? Maybe most colleges these days use some other text, or that's the 4th edition being cited and Dr. Landau, doubtless a tireless author, has written the 5th, and it comes with a nice shiny CD! A genuine expert source might check those things. 5 years is probably a pretty good rule of thumb to update those sorts of references.
Maybe the four links at the bottom of the page are not sufficient for lay readers - in fact, this is just my arrogant opinion as a guy who does math as a hobby, far from a pro, but links to the definitions of all sorts of other numbers by types and to proofs involving them could be useful. This article contains a link to the definition page for binary operations, but not one to proofs involving transcendental or imaginary or compound numbers, or to their definitions. A few pros, looking back over that article, would probably spot the need and maybe fix it.
And ultimately, the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture is one of the remaining Millennium Prize problems, and it's about determining when complex equations have either a finite or an infinite set of whole number solutions (rather than no whole number solutions at all), so just maybe the article will be outdated someday. (What's the half-life of a Millennium Prize problem? Probably much more than 5 years.).
Or are you mostly just pissed because it seems fewer people than you'd like agree with you about the positive aspects of institutions built around, and publicly celebrating the ripping off of creative people? I suppose this is where you say that authors, musicians, performers, film makers, photographers, actors and all the rest have no choice but to work for The Man, and thus you're doing them a favor by ripping them off, right? That the world is a better place when some 12 year old gets to make an entertainment slave out of their favorite musician?
The standard model doesn't, but then the standard model doesn't predict what the fine structure constant has to be by any of the fundamental assumptions. The standard model says in effect "measure the damned fine structure constant and take it as measured, but don't expect to know why the universe is that way." Some string theories (and if I recall correctly, some brane theories) predict a specific value for alpha and some other constants that are just arbitrary by the standard model, but the trouble is, they don't all include the same constants. Both the Weak and Strong Anthropic Principles gain any meaning they may have, in large part, because life as we know it requires a very precise range of values for a few of these arbitrary seeming constants.
That earlier team would be at the University of New South Wales under John Webb in 1999.
It is interesting however, that Cosmologists/Astrophysicists seem to be far from universal agreement on one point:
What else would have to vary if Alpha (the Fine structure constant) varies.
Alpha can be described in terms of other physical constants, via any of three equations that each use some of these values:
e = the elementary charge;
= h/2, the reduced Planck constant;
c = the speed of light (in vacuum, of course); and either
0 = the electric constant or permittivity of free space; or
0 = the magnetic constant or permeability of free space; or
ke = the Coulomb constant. So one of these at least would have to vary as well in each equation.
What surprised me is there seems to be very little agreement which of these other constants would be most likely to actually be variable. It seems obvious that if the electric constant actually varies, the magnetic constant does as well, because of the normal coupling of electromagnetism, but that would mean the coulomb constant would be the variable in the third equation, and so ke doesn't always equal 1. Except, there's a lot of convenience for fundamental physics in setting everything so the Coulomb constant always becomes 1. The statcoulomb is defined as it is simply to make ke come out to 1.
Alternately, all three equations contain c, so that suggests the simplest assumption might be that c varies.
Change the Coulomb constant from unity, and physics loses some cancelation tricks, and a lot of related equations gain some complicated, messy extra terms that make them feel less elegant. Change c and the same thing happens, plus the popular press siezes on this with "Was Einstein Wrong?" headlines. Either case would take a physicist with impeccable credentials doing very solid work before the community would take it seriously.
The problem is, the experiments showed that amino acids were much easier to get than was originally thought. But when that result was announced, the general opinion was that getting from there to protein and nucleic acid synthesis was comparatively simpler, and would happen using much the same experimental setup. People confidently predicted the full synthesis of life within a year, or at most a few. Such predictions flew about, in major places such as Life magazine, the New York Times, and official U.S. Government reports. That part didn't happen. instead, the experiment revealed protein folding and other steps in getting to actual life were probably much, much harder than had been supposed.
Now consider this in light of the 'God of the Gaps' argument so popular among Atheists. (The reason I urge this is that the Miller-Urey experiments actually led directly to a bunch of God of the Gaps remarks in those same articles, and were hailed by Atheist spokespersons such as Sir Bertrand Russell.). The way that argument is usually phrased, the 'gaps' are not just shifting around, rather they are getting smaller with modern science. What happened here was, as one gap got smaller, another grew (as one event turned out to be much more probable than thought, another event in the chain was shown to be much more improbable than was thought by the same theories.).
Really, Atheists don't have to prove their claim, as it's a simple negative. Even though I'm taking the side of the Theists here, I'll grant that. The thing is, Atheist spokespersons and groups have seized on many scientific discoveries, including the Miller-Urey experiments, as proof of something they don't really carry the burden of proving, and those theories and discoveries have later fallen flat (witness Sir Bertrand Russell, Howard Phillips Lovecraft and others using the Steady State universe model as a proof of Atheism, with the argument being: No moment of first creation = No first creator). A lot of Carl Sagan's rhetoric and some of Richard Dawkins' is still based on these same points, and those two have had to ignore things they knew/know about modern science to cling to their (un)beliefs.
The Miller-Urey experiments were brilliant and fundamental to much new knowledge, but they are also something that has been widely misinterpreted and need to be groked most carefully.
Slashdot Mirror
That's "too lame", and even now the Hounds of Grammardalos are moving through many angled space, coordinating on your upcoming position in the 6-dimensional Calabi Yau manifold that underlies real space-time. Your extraction into one of the many trillions of quintic grammar-spaces itself will (theoretically) be painless, but then you will (gasp!) see them in their partly rugose, partly squamous glory. Knowing these rules could have saved your life, your sanity, and your (soon to be topologically inverted and transmuted to Bismuth) spleen, but it's already too late now.
(By the way, the standardised UK English spell-checker does not recognise "rugose", even under the variant "rugous", but actually did accept squamous. That's progress of a sort for you - we'll get it to accept "eldritch" yet.)
Dr. Ann De Wees Voldemort?
You could wire it up to go off if your heart stops and drive around on a motorcycle with it in the sidecar. Just watch out for some pizza delivery dude named Hiro Protagonist.
I see why this drew a flamebait modifier, but it raises a few very good questions. For one, why are people buying 1 and 2 Terabyte disks for PCs if they don't plan on putting lots of video on them? Other people posting to this very thread are mentioning how there are only a very few 'legitimate' uses, as opposed to of storing a huge downloaded collection of video. For another, one common complaint here is that the industry tends to treat everyone like a pirate. But given how many multi Terabyte portable add on drives are sold each year, either a lot of them are almost empty, or a lot of people have paid 20 or 30 Thousand each for their legitmate copies of media, or there is a lot of 'piracy' out there. Are add on drive sales enough to justify the recording industry's claims?
Madoff ripped off a lot of people's life savings, and some of them took a real drop in quality of life. Move into the 'can't afford to see a doctor - maybe this symptom will just go away' group, and you lose up to six years from your average life expectancy by some estimates.
Apply this as a metric to Madoff and he took away enough life from enough people to be the equivalent of killing approximately 12 healthy newborns with otherwise normal life expectancy. (You should see what applying this rule to Ken Lay and the rest of Enron does - they're up in the war crimes range).
Yeah, those people could still have chosen to go into debt seeing a doctor. At some point, they could choose to steal rather than eat cat food, or beg to get into an air conditioned shelter rather than swelter in a home they can't afford to cool. But if some guy is pointing a gun at my head, I can still choose to try to jump him or run or whatever - does that make me responsible for my death if I pick the wrong time to try and wrestle the gun away? Madoff deserves to be held responsible for the drastic shortening of some of his victims life expectancies, whether they also deserve to be held responsible in some measure or not.
My home desktop machines are Kubuntu 10.4, Mythbuntu, and Win 98SE (in order of most to least use). Laptops are Kubuntu 10.4, Xubuntu 9 and Win XP, and there's an odd little box about 3.5" x 5" running Win CE. One of my work machines is Irix 6.5, in a mostly windows shop, and I'm very glad both that the former XP boxes there are now Win 7 and that we skipped Vista entirely. Now what does this prove, if anything? The very fact that I administer an actual UNIX device means I am the last person to have a reliable opinion about whether Ubuntu is ready for the typical home user. That is use that device means I probably should also be a devoted BSD fan or run Debian at home or something like that, and yet I like KDE and Kubuntu, so I'm probably the last person to have an opinion there either. I'm a solder jockey who builds all his own boxes at home and sometimes even fixes others, down to the level of opening damaged hard drives in a clean room environment and getting them to work. How the hell would I know what a typical user is ready for.
The value of contributions to Gnome depends so much on the rest of the Gnome community, on the long standing Gnome/KDE rivalry, and other external factors. If you use contributions to Gnome as a major metric, shouldn't Canonical get some points for indirectly contributing to KDE, XFCE and such via their Kubuntu/Xubuntu connections?
There's also Canonical's hardware certification program and their 3rd party software certification program. The hardware cert program has three tiers, and these are designed to give some needed flexibility to hardware makers and software (particularly driver software) authors.
Ubuntu Certified is the most involved, and from Canonical's viewpoint, probably the most rigorous. OEMs submit systems to Canonical's testing facility. Certification and testing is done by Canonical's engineers.
Ubuntu Ready is much easier for Canonical, as the OEMs self-test their systems using Canonical's certification test suite. OEMs still have to submit their results to Canonical for final review if they want to claim to be Ubuntu ready, but can also use some elements of the test software for other purposes such as internal validation. A good way to evaluate Canonical's over all contribution to the Linux community might be to include how well they have shared this and related code and how well they have modified it based on OEM feedback.
Works with Ubuntu. This designation is used for peripherals, such as printers or USB storage devices, that don't usually need the time and associated costs of a more rigorous certification process for testing before it's reasonable to certify them. It makes it easier for makers of such peripherals to keep up with the Ubuntu 6 month release cycle.
Canonical offers frequent symposiums and group meetings for hardware makers wanting to use this process - in fact, there's one scheduled this month.
The case is a box, with one corner lopped so it sits at an angle (hence the part in the summary about how it won't fit in a rack.). As if this weren't enough to make it call attention to itself, the default color scheme is carbon and acid green.
The design is meant to sell to people who want to show off how they have one, and create consumer envy as a way of moving more units. The problem is, some customers will be turned off by that - for example, they want a device that blends with the others in their viewing room. The color scheme makes this effect worse - after a certain point, the Boxee Box is already distinctive, and has caught the attention of that market share that values gadgets standing out from the crowd - so more distinction will only cost them customers. Acid green is a color that came into style briefly a few years ago, and is now dated to the people who have strong interior decorator modes and really care about such trends - using it this late in the trend cycle comes off a little like making the device in the customer's choice of Almond, Harvest Gold or Avocado.
If they had kept the price under 200$, all that might have flown, with sales to the college dorm crowd and the general youth market, but with the new price point, the design is aimed at a slightly older demographic, one that will actually care about this sort of thing.
As final proof that the Boxee Box isn't going to sell well, I'd buy one, even at the new price. It triggers geeklust in me. The very last tech-thing I bought was a Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver replica (Matt Smith version). Does that sound like a real market exists?
The test depends on the subject - If it's a presidential election, being able to name who currently has the job might actually be fair, but what's a fair test for a nuclear power referendum?
This proposed Nuclear Energy plant will produce power by:
a. Fissioning Uranium
b. Fusing Bromine
c. Burning Coal
d. Combining Aluvium Fosdex (the shaving creme atom) with magic pixie dust.
e. Cowboy Neal.
or
Please enter the current percentage of power used in our tri-state area during summertime peak load hours, that currently comes from fission. You will be allowed to vote if your answer is correct to three significant digits.
I'd have to agree. Atheism doesn't have to be a religion, but when some people start a new thread on 4-Chan asking for quote wallpapers, ten times in a row, and whichever anonymous poster begins each thread always starts it off with a pro-atheist/anti religious quote, and not a quote about anything else, and they say that the only meaningful quotes about anything are about how bad religion is, that's the actions of religious fanatics. If your point of view has numerous religious fanatics who claim to speak for everyone else, it becomes a religion. If you don't distance yourself from the nutters because they claim to be part of your group, then it becomes your religion.
That said, I'm a Zen Gnostic Episcopalian myself. I want to distance myself right now from the WBC, the people who don't want a mosque within 2,000 miles of ground zero, and really, anyone who thinks God wants you to hate for Him. I can logically prove Jesus is superhuman*, and have a separate proof for Apollo's existence**. The rest, I'm not sure about.
*OK, here goes: Jesus' teachings were perverted to support the crusades, the inquisition, and the witch trials. The earliest of these happened about 1,000 years after Jesus was executed. Darwin's teachings were perverted to support the Eugenics movements and Naziism. The earliest of these took only about 40 years after Darwin's publication of his first book to become life destroying monstrosities. It's 39 years from Einstein's first relevant publication to the A-Bomb, and about 43 to the cold war. Ergo, Jesus was roughly 25 times better than some of the very smartest humans we know at avoiding his work being perverted into something loathsome by stupider humans. That's superhuman, although in a somewhat limited sense.
(OK, if you accept that orthodox Christians destroyed the library at Alexandria and killed its head, we can reduce the ratio to roughly 300 years to 40, so Jesus would only be about 8x an incredibly smart human, not 25. Alternately, is it fair to blame anybody for how other people, years after their death, interpret their sayings or writings?).
** The Delphic Oracle guided Greek civilization for at least 500 years. The job was filled by a series of 12 to 15 year old girls, who got blind frackin' stoned day in and day out breathing the fumes they found in a cave. We're talking stoned Emo chicks of the sort who write bad poetry, and obviously, ones who thought nobody understood them, as they kept a host of translators around just to interpret their cryptic utterances. (In fact, this is where cryptic utterances originated). They also played with snakes by some accounts. Everyone believed these immature, spaced-out bints when they claimed to speak for Apollo, and followed their advice. Instead of this promoting one ultimate level massive clusterfrack, it led to an era generally considered surprisingly peaceful and enlightened, and the foundations of what became modern democratic government, formal logic and science. Ergo, Apollo at least was real at that time, because that's an obvious incredible major miracle on a par with everyone on all sides agreeing with the US plan for peace in the Middle East. (Thanks to Alan Moore for this one) .
Buddhism as a whole isn't particularly neutral on the subject of gods. Theravada Buddhism is all about ethical actions and meditation. Theravada doesn't really support anything supernatural, but they also insist on there being one and only one Buddha and his always being a little above even the most enlightened modern practitioner. By them, no one else gets to be a Buddha, just off the wheel of Karma by meditation. So while they claim not to have any gods involved, some of us feel they are making the historical Buddha into one. Mahayana Buddhists mostly believe in gods and lots of other things, but the goal isn't becoming a mere god, it's enlightening yourself and then all sentient beings. You can theoretically become a god in some Mahayana traditions, but you shouldn't want to, as that god may still be as far as you are right now from the real goal of enlightenment. Some Mahayanists also believe in demi-gods (who are in cool afterlives but often too busy being jealous of the full gods to seek enlightenment), and hungry ghosts, who by some accounts are descending to splinter into animal spirits and start the climb back. Then there's Vajrayana, which I can't describe much more succinctly than to say it holds the goal is enlightenment, but you will have to become Dr. Strange first. If Mahayana is supernaturalist with gods and 'other planes', Vajrayana is taking the gods and dimensions and psychic powers stuff to an ongoing TV series, with half a dozen successful spin-offs and lots of special guests and plot cross overs, and you have to learn the names of all the particles of the week to progress.
Zen, by the way, is mostly based on Mahayana teachings.
Every point of the universe is the center of the universe.
That wasn't Einstein who said this first in modern times, it was LeMaitre. Whoops, I've brought religion back into the discussion.
Most symphony orchestras get taxpayer support. When they record, it's often subsidised by the federal government, or state and local ones. In many cases, the people who manage and broker deals for these orchestras artificially split the funding, so that all the necessary preliminaries to album sales are supposedly based on private investment/contributions. They treat it like all the practice sessions for a live performance are taxpayer subsidised, but the practice sessions for the album are paid for by private sources, so that the law is technically being observed. It's part of that whole "socialise the costs and privatise the profits" school of economics. It makes no sense as a matter of fact instead of law - does anyone really want to claim that they practiced the same piece for live performance and recording, but only put the part of that practice that was funded by one method or the other into their performances. "Yeah, I deliberately held back on that Oboe cadenza, so it didn't sound like all the practice I had contributed to my leet symphonizing skillz!".
What the federal government funds is normally held in the public trust, not subject to copyright. I know several symphony soloists and conductors who are generally uncomfortable with this legal ruse, and have heard accounts of many more. Most orchestras don't have the stature to sell a lot of recordings, and taxpayer funding generally takes any profit from CD sales into account, so it seldom benefits the performers much, if at all. It's more likely they see the same overall pay, with a shift in just when they get each check because some of it is coming as royalties after sales figures are processed. It makes bookkeeping for symphonies much more complex, and some managing directors see it as a big gamble, where they might get lucky and see really impressive sales, but doing classical music at the major orchestra level isn't gambling to most people, it's a steady job with a safe floor for income. Just like some people in rock/pop/rap/whatever become studio musicians because they want a steady paycheck instead of a high risk venture, people who shoot for a job in the second row violins for the New York Philharmonic want a reliable career instead of a 1 in 10,000 chance of a mansion with leopard skin covered volleyball courts.
Copyright isn't a legal document, it's a body of law. The creator can't write some special copyright that sets different terms than the rights the law gives.
Rothbard's argument is relevant, but not sufficient. There's a huge difference between saying that we should consider this from a propertarian viewpoint and that we should consider it only from that viewpoint. Rothbard crosses that line by the time he uses the word "simply" in the second sentence of your quote. As one poster has already pointed out, this situation is complex, and oversimplifying doesn't give meaningful input.
How would Murray Rothbard's argument address any apparent conflict when property is held in common? Do I gain the right to shout fire in a crowded public venue funded from tax dollars? Your Rothbard quote is arguing that all public property is criminal, because all rights can only be sustained where there is private ownership. But, in the US, it took a whole series of special laws in every state's legal codes for theatre owners to gain the right to be treated as though a contract existed without actually having printed one and gained signatures. A right of implied contract exists only because of specialised laws (a privilege or private law, the very word privilege coming from the Latin roots 'Privus' (Private) + 'Lex' (law)) intended to protect theater owners.
Rothbard actually is arguing for the unlimited power of the government to create or destroy rights. How else can the right of contract support all these other rights, particularly when, in his own example, a contract doesn't exist physically, but exists only by government fiat. At the same time, he's arguing against himself, holding that same government fiat is insufficent to grant another right by any other means than through property rights. Since the real US constitution is most emphatically not about how the government grants rights, but how it must rather respect them, neither facet of his argument really sheds more light than heat.
Wikipedia has a lousy handle on C.
I'll agree provisionally - the provision being that this affects some subjects much more than others. I trust most real idiots not to care enough to bother about editing a wiki entry on Malament-Hogarth spacetime or Reissner-Nordstrom metrics. (Maybe I shouldn't mention those as it will encourage some real idiot to mess with them). Still, what about wanting to avoid (A) acting 100% certain when you aren't, or to avoid (B) caring more about ego boost than taking a chance on getting more overall truth by sharing the process? Both of those, especially together, might make it worth putting up with your high negative index for (C) even if you are right about it.
For something which might shed some light on your 'aliens' example, you might read Douglas R. Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach". He has a section where he writes on contrafactuals, and goes into some detail into how people think about things they know are not actually true. He begins this section by writing about some fictional characters such as Achilles and the Tortoise, which he uses at many places in the book, and in this case they are watching a TV sports event on a set that can show how the game might go if some rules were different. He points out that it seems to make more sense to speculate about what might have happened if the wide reciever had sweaty hands than what the play would have looked like if space was five dimensional (or something like that). It seems to be very natural for most of us to accept some things we know to be untrue provisionally, and speculate about what else would change if they were true, but to reject other speculations as too weird or too silly, or just not done. And there's a largeish middle ground where some things 'feel' reasonable in some cases but not others. Hofstadter gives some excellent examples.
That's what philosophy is for. "Everybody" or at least 99%+ of us, will entertain some things we think are untrue, provisionally, to see where they lead. It can be overwhelmingly stupid not to. For example, just imagine making a mistake that leads to a very close call while driving, and not thinking "That was dangerous - I could have been killed!", or deciding that, since you weren't actually killed, you won't think any further about whether it was your mistake or not. Good work in philosophy can take something such as this and delve into why some such speculations seem more reasonable than others, when after all, they are all equally based at their very beginning on something we start off by knowing is untrue. Why does it not make sense to stop immediately when a counterfactual comes up in thought? What Hofstadter is doing there is epistemology - basically "how do we know the things we know?".
The aliens problem isn't just a stupid play on words, if it gets you thinking properly about the chain of contrafactuals that lead to it. How sure are you that there aren't any actual aliens provably available to point to for this example? (Hopefully very, or you'll produce one). How sure are you of all the mechanisms that drive evolution? (Probably much less so). How big a change in the way things evolved on this world would your particular hypothetical aliens take? (And how sure are you of your answer, probably less sure than for either previous question). Are we going farther out on a speculative limb to imagine aliens that evolved from giant land dwelling bat descendants, and use sonar to hunt prey, or ones that are built like hydrogen filled gasbags and digest solar energy? Why does one sound more realistic, more like something evolution maybe could do, more 'survivable' than the other? (Does either one really sound more plausable to you?). Remember, a lie is a lie, a counterfactual is a counterfactual - why isn't that where your brain wants to stop, instead of perhaps thinking something like "Yes, but it wouldn't have taken a lot of changes for some bats to have lost flight and evolved towards being land dwellers again, but it would take big changes in the way things are for hydrogen filled flying lifeforms to survive on a world with frequent lightning, fires and sharp pointy objects."
We have Paul Simon's and Art Garfunkle's account, (although I could never remember which one was the rock and which one was the island). By that, "... a rock feels no pain ...".
The difference in the way most straight men and most straight women would feel about some reasonably attractive person of the opposite sex indicating a sexual interest on short acquaintance should be enough to demonstrate this without bringing up S&M edge cases.
If the article does not go into the present situation much, maybe. But let's examine a real basic online article about the natural numbers. Probably no one has said anything new there at least since Godel trumped the Principia, but what if the article mentions schools where outstanding living experts on the subject teach, or publications? Those things can change pretty quickly.
Right now, a cheap, dirty, and not to be trusted for anything serious by itself search (wikipedia) turns up an online article on "Proofs involving the Addition of Natural Numbers", with this as its only print citation:
Edmund Landau, Foundations of Analysis, Chelsea Pub Co. ISBN 0-8218-2693-X.
Is that book still in print? Is it widely used? Maybe most colleges these days use some other text, or that's the 4th edition being cited and Dr. Landau, doubtless a tireless author, has written the 5th, and it comes with a nice shiny CD! A genuine expert source might check those things. 5 years is probably a pretty good rule of thumb to update those sorts of references.
Maybe the four links at the bottom of the page are not sufficient for lay readers - in fact, this is just my arrogant opinion as a guy who does math as a hobby, far from a pro, but links to the definitions of all sorts of other numbers by types and to proofs involving them could be useful. This article contains a link to the definition page for binary operations, but not one to proofs involving transcendental or imaginary or compound numbers, or to their definitions. A few pros, looking back over that article, would probably spot the need and maybe fix it.
And ultimately, the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture is one of the remaining Millennium Prize problems, and it's about determining when complex equations have either a finite or an infinite set of whole number solutions (rather than no whole number solutions at all), so just maybe the article will be outdated someday. (What's the half-life of a Millennium Prize problem? Probably much more than 5 years.).
Or are you mostly just pissed because it seems fewer people than you'd like agree with you about the positive aspects of institutions built around, and publicly celebrating the ripping off of creative people? I suppose this is where you say that authors, musicians, performers, film makers, photographers, actors and all the rest have no choice but to work for The Man, and thus you're doing them a favor by ripping them off, right? That the world is a better place when some 12 year old gets to make an entertainment slave out of their favorite musician?
Put words in other people's mouths much?
Quantum Electro-Dynamics, not Quod Est Demonstratum.
The standard model doesn't, but then the standard model doesn't predict what the fine structure constant has to be by any of the fundamental assumptions. The standard model says in effect "measure the damned fine structure constant and take it as measured, but don't expect to know why the universe is that way." Some string theories (and if I recall correctly, some brane theories) predict a specific value for alpha and some other constants that are just arbitrary by the standard model, but the trouble is, they don't all include the same constants. Both the Weak and Strong Anthropic Principles gain any meaning they may have, in large part, because life as we know it requires a very precise range of values for a few of these arbitrary seeming constants.
That earlier team would be at the University of New South Wales under John Webb in 1999.
It is interesting however, that Cosmologists/Astrophysicists seem to be far from universal agreement on one point:
What else would have to vary if Alpha (the Fine structure constant) varies.
Alpha can be described in terms of other physical constants, via any of three equations that each use some of these values:
e = the elementary charge;
= h/2, the reduced Planck constant;
c = the speed of light (in vacuum, of course);
and either
0 = the electric constant or permittivity of free space;
or
0 = the magnetic constant or permeability of free space;
or
ke = the Coulomb constant.
So one of these at least would have to vary as well in each equation.
What surprised me is there seems to be very little agreement which of these other constants would be most likely to actually be variable. It seems obvious that if the electric constant actually varies, the magnetic constant does as well, because of the normal coupling of electromagnetism, but that would mean the coulomb constant would be the variable in the third equation, and so ke doesn't always equal 1. Except, there's a lot of convenience for fundamental physics in setting everything so the Coulomb constant always becomes 1. The statcoulomb is defined as it is simply to make ke come out to 1.
Alternately, all three equations contain c, so that suggests the simplest assumption might be that c varies.
Change the Coulomb constant from unity, and physics loses some cancelation tricks, and a lot of related equations gain some complicated, messy extra terms that make them feel less elegant. Change c and the same thing happens, plus the popular press siezes on this with "Was Einstein Wrong?" headlines. Either case would take a physicist with impeccable credentials doing very solid work before the community would take it seriously.
The problem is, the experiments showed that amino acids were much easier to get than was originally thought. But when that result was announced, the general opinion was that getting from there to protein and nucleic acid synthesis was comparatively simpler, and would happen using much the same experimental setup. People confidently predicted the full synthesis of life within a year, or at most a few. Such predictions flew about, in major places such as Life magazine, the New York Times, and official U.S. Government reports. That part didn't happen. instead, the experiment revealed protein folding and other steps in getting to actual life were probably much, much harder than had been supposed.
Now consider this in light of the 'God of the Gaps' argument so popular among Atheists. (The reason I urge this is that the Miller-Urey experiments actually led directly to a bunch of God of the Gaps remarks in those same articles, and were hailed by Atheist spokespersons such as Sir Bertrand Russell.). The way that argument is usually phrased, the 'gaps' are not just shifting around, rather they are getting smaller with modern science. What happened here was, as one gap got smaller, another grew (as one event turned out to be much more probable than thought, another event in the chain was shown to be much more improbable than was thought by the same theories.).
Really, Atheists don't have to prove their claim, as it's a simple negative. Even though I'm taking the side of the Theists here, I'll grant that. The thing is, Atheist spokespersons and groups have seized on many scientific discoveries, including the Miller-Urey experiments, as proof of something they don't really carry the burden of proving, and those theories and discoveries have later fallen flat (witness Sir Bertrand Russell, Howard Phillips Lovecraft and others using the Steady State universe model as a proof of Atheism, with the argument being: No moment of first creation = No first creator). A lot of Carl Sagan's rhetoric and some of Richard Dawkins' is still based on these same points, and those two have had to ignore things they knew/know about modern science to cling to their (un)beliefs.
The Miller-Urey experiments were brilliant and fundamental to much new knowledge, but they are also something that has been widely misinterpreted and need to be groked most carefully.