In The Netherlands and Belgium, American English is most spoken
... Well spoken language is a different matter. The English spoken in Germany resembles probably more Scottish than RP:). But I guess the exposure to American English through film and clearly dominates there, too. But we are talking here about the spelling of "litre" or "liter", in other words the written language, which, if I'm not mistaken, in the Netherlands is also taught the British way and is not deluded by Oprah. I have some English books bought in Germany, which, despite being written by American authors, are mostly published by British publishers in British spelling. So, I'd guess, the British spelling dominates in continental Europe.
[...] worse, overwhelmingly learning American English now.
Speaking of Europe, at least in France, Germany and (doh) the UK, they teach the British English spelling and RP. I've heard, the same applies for Spain. And then, there is India.
> So you want millions of uninformed uncaring citizens to start determining national policy?
So, in what ways would the current electorate of millions of uninformed caring citizens be better than the one consisting of uninformed uncaring citizens?
but their position *measurements* from Earth are noisy, and therefore vary randomly from one measurement to the other.
Real pure gaussian noise can be arbitrarily reduced by averaging/filtering. The noise only determines the convergence speed for getting an sufficient accurate result. The limiting factor for accuracy for a fixed object, however, is the systematic error.
If there existed any trick to eliminate the errors in these measurements, they would use the same tricks to improve the orbit estimation.
The same trick could be used, provided you can find a satellite with known coordinates in space within a couple of kilometres of the object in question. This, however, seems to me quite complicated in space for the reasons you cited. And probably, deteriorates the accuracy from a signal orignating from a ground based station too much to be of worth for determining a satellite's position. Otherwise, why would one need ground based stations anyway?
You cannot use GPS to give you better measurements than the accuracy of the GPS constellation orbit determination, and the satellites' positions vary more or less randomly due to residual atmosphere, solar wind, and solar radiation pressure.
I don't think, that the satellite positions vary randomly in the sense, that they have gaussian variance in a deliberatly short intervall of time. But their positions contain a systematic error, which can be determined via a fixed known position (actually more, but who cares) and thereby be corrected. This, in general, is the principle behind DGPS. The accuracy does not depend as much on the position of the satelites, but the discrepancy between the systematic error between the fixed known position and the unknown one.
That said, I'm still sceptical concerning the quoted accuracy. Especially for a moving object, like a car.
As individual states became more powerful and less subservient to the Vatican, the idea of a "law higher than the state" remained;
I disagree: The conclusion of the 30 Years' War was that the state (King) is the highest law, not the Church (Pope). The result where said state churches in Lutheran states. In that sense, The Magna Carta Libertatum, the US Declaration of Independence, and the French Revolution are further steps in establishing a state seperate from religion, as they codify a law, which is supreme to none. And they practically always were the result of distress with the current situation. Not some high ideals, which magically survived the ages in the mind of the people. (BTW, at the writing of the Magna Carta, the Roman Catholic Church was still powerful).
[...] yet any religion that dares to become popular is immediately cracked down upon. Why? It's competition to the official state religion, Communism
Not true. They are often cracked down, because they are a threat to the current oligarchy. Counterexample, the current rise of Confucianism is not only not cracked down, but even supported by the government.
Given that, what does "Separation of church and state" really mean, anyway?
If you say that every higher concept is a religion, then nothing.
For an intellectually more challenging job with more freedom? Actually, they'd have to pay me twice as much as now, if I'd have to do a similar tedious job as a janitor.
CORBA? Sun driven? Everyone else did have more complete Corba implementation than Sun in their JDK.
1997... I can't claim that my memory is correct on that matter, but sometime before 2000, JacORB provided a FOSS CORBA 2.0 Java implementation, which surpassed Suns by leaps.
> Being a native-born German now holding dual U.S. citizenship, in theory, Thrun should have been able to participate, since the rules only state that one must be a European citizen in order to qualify.
Um, in theory, he also doesn't have dual citizenship. At the moment, he aquired the U.S. citizenship, he lost his German citizenship. German law doesn't allow for dual citizenships, except for children, or you can't resign your previous citizenship.
> Now once at Stanford they changed how they did things entirely and wrote a ton of code to make everything play much nicer than CMU's platform.
This sounds a little bit more like that, what I have heard. I've read, that they throw away most of the code and rewrote a large deal. E.g the classification of driveable terrain by the laser scanner was rewritten and learned. AFAIK, most of what has been published (and to what you pointed) is fairly generic stuff.
To the best of my knowledge, it has not been published how they learned the far range vision based on the near range laser scanner, which, to my eyes, is the most interesting part of the project.
> Nice try, I wasn't on CMU either.
Well, the comment on Sebastian Thruns previous affiliation and the code development sounds like something Mr. Whittaker could have said. But from what I've heard, he followed a fully stochastically approach and less reliance on the physical stability of the sensors and GPS, which AFAIK was quite different to the Red Teams approach and resulted in a much smaller code base.
> Most of the software they used on Stanly (Stanford's bot) was either written by Sebastian in his former research or taken from experience gained on CMU's team the previous year. [...] > BTW, I wasn't on Stanford's team, but I was on another finalist team.
Some differences, first you are living in a society, where most of the religious provocation and rioting has already happened. In previous decades, rock bands and others have reveled in such provocations, but nowadays, such a provocation is boring at best.
Another one is, that you are a very likely a Christian. Well, not a believer, but raised in a christian society. Have a look at what kind of responses criticism at the US from the outside of the US elicits, and you'll see that people are more sensitive to comments from outsiders.
Next is the different situation. A seemingly small incident may result in an uprising, if the tension is already high, idependent from religion.
> ICBMs take suborbital, not orbital trajectories, Primarily, Intercontinental Ballistic Missles have ballistic trajectories. If you don't mind accelerating in some minutes to several km/s and landing with some km/s, you could be quite fast.
But if you have first to wind up several thousands of kilometers of height then travel on a part of a circle with increased radius, and finally wind down, then I don't believe you'll be faster.
The increased height is only an advantage if you can fly a lot faster in thinner air, which I believe is not the case for the Virgin Galactic vehicle.
Mon dieux, how do I convert French percentages into English ones? And all those strange nations. What is this Autriche again, isn't that some Techno group?
It's not a quote. At best it is called "taken out of context". Your "quote" suggests that Brachet doesn't know the difference between an OS and a mail client. Reading a bit further, however, clearly shows otherwise.
A quote would be:
Général Brachet : Thunderbird will be deployed as the only mail client on 45,000 seat in 2006. [...]
Note the omission marks. Or more correctly
Général Brachet : Thunderbird will be deployed as the only mail client on 45,000 seat in 2006. [...] Our first goal is to migrate all the upper layers of the workstation to Open Source Software to be independent of the Operating System.
> They just let you in without any screening whatsoever?
There is a difference between a) no screening whatsoever b) The US government wants to make sure that, if you join their ranks, they know more about you than anybody else
You are going to work for the government, not rule it. Did senators have to pass drug-test or the polygraph?
> We broke away from England because of that principle, and we fought two great wars on the continent to defend those principals (against Nazis!). [...] > First, America sent its sons and fathers to die to defeat Hitler;
You make it almost sound as if the US deliberately entered the wars just to defend those principles.
And did those Europeans not fought in those wars to defend their freedom? And weren't those laws enacted by Europeans, who not only lost their father and sons in said wars, but also their mothers, and daughters, whose cities and lands were burned? Did they not rebel against the monarchs, from which
> I don't get how you don't even understand history here! It scares me a great deal!
And it scares me, how few respect you show for struggle and the decisions of other democratic free societies in comparison to your own.
>Segregation didn't occur because people were allowed to talk about it, Japanese weren't sent to internment camps because we were allowed to talk about it, and the experiments you speak were not the result of free speech, they were the result of secrecy and an unwillingness to challenge coventional wisdom. > Do you think if we stopped talking about racism it would disappear?
No, racism would not disappear. But will it disappear, when racists can freely make propaganda?
And how did Hitler raise to power? By secrecy and an unwillingness to challenge conventional wisdom?
> Even a "loser pays" system wouldn't fix this [...] , single mothers whose kids allegedly [...]
Um, why not? No matter what, the single mother would be bankrupt anyway. So, the winning side wouldn't profit terribly from getting their share paid. But should the single mother have a good case, I think even expensive team of lawyers might take an interest in the case based on the term, that provided they win they get payed by the losing side, and get not payed when they lose.
In the current situation, she could practically only go to court, provided the lawyers work pro bono.
> Of course, the WSIS proponents like China or Saudi Arabia know full well that the US cannot in practice [...] a World Summit on Internet Censorship?
Care to substantiate your claims (the censorship part), or is this merely FUD? To my best knowledge, and according to the article posted, the greatest proponents of the WSIS Internet governance was the European Union. Hence the the letter to foreign minister to the nation currently presiding over the EU.
> ICANN is not a US government organization. It just happens to be on US soil (just like the UN).
No. It is a non-profit company based in the US (under US law), working on exclusive contract with US Department, while taxing people all over the world (2/3 of income supposedly from Europe, due to ccTLDs)
The U.N. is a multinational organisation, where its headquarter happens to be situated in New York on have extraterritorial soil.
> ICANN encourages government representation,
Oh, that's nice. Guess, why they need to encourage it.
> They even have meetings all across the world,
Cool, make the next meeting on Maui.
> People seem to think that because ICANN agreed with the US on the.xxx tld, that the US made the decision.
No, there are more problems than this single one, it is only the latest one. Remember, when they practically removed the At-Large-members from the decision process? The process of subcontracting the.com-TLD has evoked some criticism. The reluctance of the acceptance of non-ASCII characters in the DNS is another.
Did it occur to you, that a regulated market is not a free market, and a free market may well have monopolies? Some even argue that monopolies are even unevitable in a free market, and not necessarily bad. There are many people, especially here on Slashdot, who believe that a less regulated market leads inevitably to a more competetive market, the results of the study seem to suggest otherwise.
And where does Adam Smith present a discussion on the matter of regulation, in which cases it is good, and in which cases it is not? And I mean not the general part, which judges the regulation by its results, but where it lets you predict the results of the regulation.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of Europe, at least in France, Germany and (doh) the UK, they teach the British English spelling and RP. I've heard, the same applies for Spain. And then, there is India.
> So you want millions of uninformed uncaring citizens to start determining national policy?
So, in what ways would the current electorate of millions of uninformed caring citizens be better than the one consisting of uninformed uncaring citizens?
I don't think, that the satellite positions vary randomly in the sense, that they have gaussian variance in a deliberatly short intervall of time. But their positions contain a systematic error, which can be determined via a fixed known position (actually more, but who cares) and thereby be corrected. This, in general, is the principle behind DGPS. The accuracy does not depend as much on the position of the satelites, but the discrepancy between the systematic error between the fixed known position and the unknown one.
That said, I'm still sceptical concerning the quoted accuracy. Especially for a moving object, like a car.
I disagree: The conclusion of the 30 Years' War was that the state (King) is the highest law, not the Church (Pope). The result where said state churches in Lutheran states. In that sense, The Magna Carta Libertatum, the US Declaration of Independence, and the French Revolution are further steps in establishing a state seperate from religion, as they codify a law, which is supreme to none. And they practically always were the result of distress with the current situation. Not some high ideals, which magically survived the ages in the mind of the people. (BTW, at the writing of the Magna Carta, the Roman Catholic Church was still powerful).
Not true. They are often cracked down, because they are a threat to the current oligarchy. Counterexample, the current rise of Confucianism is not only not cracked down, but even supported by the government.
If you say that every higher concept is a religion, then nothing.
> Why did I go to school for so long?
For an intellectually more challenging job with more freedom? Actually, they'd have to pay me twice as much as now, if I'd have to do a similar tedious job as a janitor.
CORBA? Sun driven? Everyone else did have more complete Corba implementation than Sun in their JDK.
1997... I can't claim that my memory is correct on that matter, but sometime before 2000, JacORB provided a FOSS CORBA 2.0 Java implementation, which surpassed Suns by leaps.
> As for free will, Since "we" are the sum of all our chemical reaction in the brain [...], there is no such things as free will, [...]
We may well be the sum of our chemical reactions and still have a free will, in that sense, that our actions are not pre-determined.
> Bottom line is the debate is over, unless you bring data and evidence to the contrary, not explainable within current frame.
Quantum Mechanics to the rescue: The Free Will Theorem.
> Being a native-born German now holding dual U.S. citizenship, in theory, Thrun should have been able to participate, since the rules only state that one must be a European citizen in order to qualify.
Um, in theory, he also doesn't have dual citizenship. At the moment, he aquired the U.S. citizenship, he lost his German citizenship. German law doesn't allow for dual citizenships, except for children, or you can't resign your previous citizenship.
You know the difference? You are an individuum and not an organisation.
> Now once at Stanford they changed how they did things entirely and wrote a ton of code to make everything play much nicer than CMU's platform.
This sounds a little bit more like that, what I have heard. I've read, that they throw away most of the code and rewrote a large deal. E.g the classification of driveable terrain by the laser scanner was rewritten and learned. AFAIK, most of what has been published (and to what you pointed) is fairly generic stuff.
To the best of my knowledge, it has not been published how they learned the far range vision based on the near range laser scanner, which, to my eyes, is the most interesting part of the project.
> Nice try, I wasn't on CMU either.
Well, the comment on Sebastian Thruns previous affiliation and the code development sounds like something Mr. Whittaker could have said. But from what I've heard, he followed a fully stochastically approach and less reliance on the physical stability of the sensors and GPS, which AFAIK was quite different to the Red Teams approach and resulted in a much smaller code base.
> Most of the software they used on Stanly (Stanford's bot) was either written by Sebastian in his former research or taken from experience gained on CMU's team the previous year.
[...]
> BTW, I wasn't on Stanford's team, but I was on another finalist team.
Those claims combined, it is fairly easy
Like parliament, or garage, or apartment, or restaurant, or ...
Some differences, first you are living in a society, where most of the religious provocation and rioting has already happened. In previous decades, rock bands and others have reveled in such provocations, but nowadays, such a provocation is boring at best.
Another one is, that you are a very likely a Christian. Well, not a believer, but raised in a christian society. Have a look at what kind of responses criticism at the US from the outside of the US elicits, and you'll see that people are more sensitive to comments from outsiders.
Next is the different situation. A seemingly small incident may result in an uprising, if the tension is already high, idependent from religion.
> ICBMs take suborbital, not orbital trajectories,
Primarily, Intercontinental Ballistic Missles have ballistic trajectories. If you don't mind accelerating in some minutes to several km/s and landing with some km/s, you could be quite fast.
But if you have first to wind up several thousands of kilometers of height then travel on a part of a circle with increased radius, and finally wind down, then I don't believe you'll be faster.
The increased height is only an advantage if you can fly a lot faster in thinner air, which I believe is not the case for the Virgin Galactic vehicle.
Mon dieux, how do I convert French percentages into English ones? And all those strange nations. What is this Autriche again, isn't that some Techno group?
A quote would be:
Note the omission marks. Or more correctly
> They just let you in without any screening whatsoever?
There is a difference between
a) no screening whatsoever
b) The US government wants to make sure that, if you join their ranks, they know more about you than anybody else
You are going to work for the government, not rule it. Did senators have to pass drug-test or the polygraph?
> We broke away from England because of that principle, and we fought two great wars on the continent to defend those principals (against Nazis!). [...]
> First, America sent its sons and fathers to die to defeat Hitler;
You make it almost sound as if the US deliberately entered the wars just to defend those principles.
And did those Europeans not fought in those wars to defend their freedom? And weren't those laws enacted by Europeans, who not only lost their father and sons in said wars, but also their mothers, and daughters, whose cities and lands were burned? Did they not rebel against the monarchs, from which
> I don't get how you don't even understand history here! It scares me a great deal!
And it scares me, how few respect you show for struggle and the decisions of other democratic free societies in comparison to your own.
>Segregation didn't occur because people were allowed to talk about it, Japanese weren't sent to internment camps because we were allowed to talk about it, and the experiments you speak were not the result of free speech, they were the result of secrecy and an unwillingness to challenge coventional wisdom.
> Do you think if we stopped talking about racism it would disappear?
No, racism would not disappear. But will it disappear, when racists can freely make propaganda?
And how did Hitler raise to power? By secrecy and an unwillingness to challenge conventional wisdom?
I also thought it was rather unimpressive.
While we are it: Here the Subway of Tokyo and Berlin.
> Even a "loser pays" system wouldn't fix this [...] , single mothers whose kids allegedly [...]
Um, why not? No matter what, the single mother would be bankrupt anyway. So, the winning side wouldn't profit terribly from getting their share paid.
But should the single mother have a good case, I think even expensive team of lawyers might take an interest in the case based on the term, that provided they win they get payed by the losing side, and get not payed when they lose.
In the current situation, she could practically only go to court, provided the lawyers work pro bono.
> Of course, the WSIS proponents like China or Saudi Arabia know full well that the US cannot in practice [...] a World Summit on Internet Censorship?
Care to substantiate your claims (the censorship part), or is this merely FUD?
To my best knowledge, and according to the article posted, the greatest proponents of the WSIS Internet governance was the European Union. Hence the the letter to foreign minister to the nation currently presiding over the EU.
> ICANN is not a US government organization. It just happens to be on US soil (just like the UN).
.xxx tld, that the US made the decision.
.com-TLD has evoked some criticism. The reluctance of the acceptance of non-ASCII characters in the DNS is another.
No. It is a non-profit company based in the US (under US law), working on exclusive contract with US Department, while taxing people all over the world (2/3 of income supposedly from Europe, due to ccTLDs)
The U.N. is a multinational organisation, where its headquarter happens to be situated in New York on have extraterritorial soil.
> ICANN encourages government representation,
Oh, that's nice. Guess, why they need to encourage it.
> They even have meetings all across the world,
Cool, make the next meeting on Maui.
> People seem to think that because ICANN agreed with the US on the
No, there are more problems than this single one, it is only the latest one. Remember, when they practically removed the At-Large-members from the decision process? The process of subcontracting the
Did it occur to you, that a regulated market is not a free market, and a free market may well have monopolies? Some even argue that monopolies are even unevitable in a free market, and not necessarily bad. There are many people, especially here on Slashdot, who believe that a less regulated market leads inevitably to a more competetive market, the results of the study seem to suggest otherwise.
And where does Adam Smith present a discussion on the matter of regulation, in which cases it is good, and in which cases it is not? And I mean not the general part, which judges the regulation by its results, but where it lets you predict the results of the regulation.