Oops, my bad for operating on the assumption that the fact that it was a slashdot headline implied something more than that ibm passed some money under the table for a not-so-subtle advertisement. You can see how I might be confused.
This announcement confuses me. Doesn't the fact that eclipse took so long to be ported to OS X indicate deficiencies in java as a cross platform language (assuming that I am rembering the facts correctly, and that eclipse is written in Java)? I mean if cross-platform development in java was a snap the fact that eclipse was ported wouldn't make headlines now would it (and would have been done a long time ago)? Of course simple applications might be easy to port in java, but Eclipse seems to be targeted at people working on complex applications (otherwise you wouldn't need all that overhead).
This seems like a "duh" improvement. If you can hard-wire some logic then clearly you can implement the same logic in software, gaining the ability to update the logic, or make it more flexible in other ways, at the cost of speed and, possibly, power. Haven't there been a number of other devices that have evolved in this way?
Currently this article is tagged "things" (or at least it was when I viewed it). That may be the tag that conveys the least possible amount of information. Sorry to be off-topic, but the absurdity of the tag seems to be saying something either about the tagging system or the people who use it. (Of course I wouldn't say that the tag "science" on an article in the science section is much more useful.)
... which is a feature (ability to add new torrents remotely) the program being promoted doesn't have. (And I agree with you, that it would be the only useful feature such a program could have.)
This may be the most uselss application I have ever seen promoted on/. It might be useful if your torrent program was extremely limited, but uTorrent already allows you to schedule torrents, change speed automatically when they finish, and to impose speed and total download caps if you need them. These features make the ability to remotely monitor your torrents relatively useless, unless you are interested in obsessing over exactly when one of them finishes. But the rest of us have the ability to leave our computers and let uTorrent intelligently manage things without us, with no remote monitoring capability required.
You have to wonder why thunderbird doesn't compete as well in the email marketspace as firefox does in the browser market space. I suspect its because thunderbird doesn't really offer anything more than its competitors and because it has few must-have extensions. But it could also be the prevalence of web mail. So what would make a killer email client?
If what you say is true (and that's basically what I thought) then the farmers don't really have any room to complain (minus the misuse of patents of course). If they are making more money by using GM crops even if they have to repurchase seeds regularly then they are better off. And if seed costs are too high then they could go back to non-GM crops. So it seems like the farmers are complaining just because they can't do things the way they used to and that they can't make even more money, which seems like an unjustified complaint if using GM is really a net gain (its like complaining that the things I bought could have been cheaper, and that it isn't fair that the store marks up their prices).
Well if we don't need GM crops then its a mystery to me as to why farmers are buying them if the conditions attached suck so much. Again, from a free market standpoint if GM crops were a losing position then you wouldn't expect people to buy them, unless we absolutely needed them. Secondly, making certain forms of genetic engineering a crime is absurd, not just for free market reasons. It undermines the rule of law to make things crimes which aren't a form of one party befenitting unethically at the expense of another. That's what the patent lawsuits involved, but not the design of the crops. Because, as I mentioned, no one is putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to buy them. So getting the law to step in and say what kind of genetic engineering you can and can't do (outside stuff that is unsafe) is a bit like the law trying to say what you can and can't say or paint (limitations on what is essentially a creative act); in my opinion people have a right to create whatever they want (as a form of freedom of expression), so long as it isn't dangerous.
I hate to be a jerk, but I have to question why the farmers just don't stick to their traditional crops (versus the GM versions) if Monsanto is so horrible. Not one is forcing them to buy GM seeds (they could have kept saving and resuing their old seeds forever, without having to buy anything from Monsanto). So either buying Monsanto seeds isn't a losing deal (i.e. the farmers still make more money than they would have otherwise) or the farmers have poor judgement. Am I missing something?
Patents aside that's just how captialism works, if you can make money creating seeds that don't germinate then someone will. Trying to regulate that away just isn't going to work, for example it might scare companies away from making genetically modified crops, and with our growing population (world wide) we desperately need more and better genetically modified crops. Instead of complaining take a page from the open source movement: make your own genetically modified crops and don't prevent them from reproducing, thus making them effectivelly free. I know, that's hard to do, but many people feel the same way about software (that it is too hard for anyone to do for free) and that didn't stop the open source movement.
Im going to assume, for the sake of charity, that you are being facetious, and know that what is called the "god particle" has nothing whatsoever to do with god as the word is usually understood (as an invisible sky wizard). The higgs particle is only called the god particle as a joke by physicists to emphasize how awesome finding it would be. Once upon a time I was bothered by that, because I thought it was confusing for no good reason, but now I see it as a kind of intelligence test.
The only thing the layman knows about cosmology is that the universe began several billions of years ago with a big bang. And this new discovery does not undermine that fact, it only disputes certain claims about how the big bang happened, specifically how much and how fast inflation occured after it. Since the layman is completely ignorant of the technical details of inflation anyways talking about how this data might impact some of those thoeries is unecessarily confusing, as it has confused you if you think that changing our theories about how inflation happened is equivalent to giving up the big bang model.
And sometimes it is worth pursuing an outcome that is not maximally effecient for other reasons, a fact that people seem to overlook sometimes. So what if the internet is half as fast as it could be; that is an acceptable trade-off for a free and open internet.
If we can design something then you don't need to posit a god as the designer of life on Earth. Thus intelligent design, even if true, would no longer be a argument for the existence of god (if it ever was one), only for some motivated beings who evolved under more favorable conditions to seed life here.
So in a sense the insurance companies are also competing with each other to give the biggest payouts, the most coverage. And this thus drives insurance premiums up. So while the competition gives better drivers better premiums it leads to everyone having higher premiums in order to benefit those who actually get into accidents more. But of course this doesn't really tell us which is better now. Is it better to have low premiums but low payouts, or higher premiums and higher payouts (government monopoly favoring the first, and free markets favoring the second)? This really would make for a great paper (if only I was in economics).
Ah, fragmenting the geek vote I see. You know geeks could be a powerful voting block, if they could organize and officially support a single candidate. Unfortunately partisinship destroys this, and geeks seem willing to get in bed (so to speak) with whoever is willing to throw them a few treats (i.e. favoring Edwards just because he utterd the words "open source", not even in support of it in general).
Then I guess classical economic analysis has failed us in this case (someone should go write a journal article on why). Possibly the people of Manitoba are unusually safe drivers? Or maybe getting rid of the overhead saved enough money to cancel out the other effects?
Slashdot Mirror
Is this a joke? Oh you got me slashdot, for a moment I thought your were serious. But if it's April 1st where is the OMG Ponies! theme?
Oops, my bad for operating on the assumption that the fact that it was a slashdot headline implied something more than that ibm passed some money under the table for a not-so-subtle advertisement. You can see how I might be confused.
This announcement confuses me. Doesn't the fact that eclipse took so long to be ported to OS X indicate deficiencies in java as a cross platform language (assuming that I am rembering the facts correctly, and that eclipse is written in Java)? I mean if cross-platform development in java was a snap the fact that eclipse was ported wouldn't make headlines now would it (and would have been done a long time ago)? Of course simple applications might be easy to port in java, but Eclipse seems to be targeted at people working on complex applications (otherwise you wouldn't need all that overhead).
That is a logic, in the sense of a function that converts inputs to outputs in a regular way. Just not a boolean logic.
This seems like a "duh" improvement. If you can hard-wire some logic then clearly you can implement the same logic in software, gaining the ability to update the logic, or make it more flexible in other ways, at the cost of speed and, possibly, power. Haven't there been a number of other devices that have evolved in this way?
Currently this article is tagged "things" (or at least it was when I viewed it). That may be the tag that conveys the least possible amount of information. Sorry to be off-topic, but the absurdity of the tag seems to be saying something either about the tagging system or the people who use it. (Of course I wouldn't say that the tag "science" on an article in the science section is much more useful.)
We are talking about Darth Vader right? (A long time ago in a galaxy far far away...)
Now I can stop moving altogether and type only with my mind, thus completely leaving the animal kingdom.
... which is a feature (ability to add new torrents remotely) the program being promoted doesn't have. (And I agree with you, that it would be the only useful feature such a program could have.)
So ... you want Mozilla. Maybe you should just download Mozilla then.
This may be the most uselss application I have ever seen promoted on /. It might be useful if your torrent program was extremely limited, but uTorrent already allows you to schedule torrents, change speed automatically when they finish, and to impose speed and total download caps if you need them. These features make the ability to remotely monitor your torrents relatively useless, unless you are interested in obsessing over exactly when one of them finishes. But the rest of us have the ability to leave our computers and let uTorrent intelligently manage things without us, with no remote monitoring capability required.
You have to wonder why thunderbird doesn't compete as well in the email marketspace as firefox does in the browser market space. I suspect its because thunderbird doesn't really offer anything more than its competitors and because it has few must-have extensions. But it could also be the prevalence of web mail. So what would make a killer email client?
I agree with you that that is a misuse of patents, my comment was directed at the compaint that Monsanto doesn't allow farmers to save the seeds.
If what you say is true (and that's basically what I thought) then the farmers don't really have any room to complain (minus the misuse of patents of course). If they are making more money by using GM crops even if they have to repurchase seeds regularly then they are better off. And if seed costs are too high then they could go back to non-GM crops. So it seems like the farmers are complaining just because they can't do things the way they used to and that they can't make even more money, which seems like an unjustified complaint if using GM is really a net gain (its like complaining that the things I bought could have been cheaper, and that it isn't fair that the store marks up their prices).
Well if we don't need GM crops then its a mystery to me as to why farmers are buying them if the conditions attached suck so much. Again, from a free market standpoint if GM crops were a losing position then you wouldn't expect people to buy them, unless we absolutely needed them. Secondly, making certain forms of genetic engineering a crime is absurd, not just for free market reasons. It undermines the rule of law to make things crimes which aren't a form of one party befenitting unethically at the expense of another. That's what the patent lawsuits involved, but not the design of the crops. Because, as I mentioned, no one is putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to buy them. So getting the law to step in and say what kind of genetic engineering you can and can't do (outside stuff that is unsafe) is a bit like the law trying to say what you can and can't say or paint (limitations on what is essentially a creative act); in my opinion people have a right to create whatever they want (as a form of freedom of expression), so long as it isn't dangerous.
I hate to be a jerk, but I have to question why the farmers just don't stick to their traditional crops (versus the GM versions) if Monsanto is so horrible. Not one is forcing them to buy GM seeds (they could have kept saving and resuing their old seeds forever, without having to buy anything from Monsanto). So either buying Monsanto seeds isn't a losing deal (i.e. the farmers still make more money than they would have otherwise) or the farmers have poor judgement. Am I missing something?
Patents aside that's just how captialism works, if you can make money creating seeds that don't germinate then someone will. Trying to regulate that away just isn't going to work, for example it might scare companies away from making genetically modified crops, and with our growing population (world wide) we desperately need more and better genetically modified crops. Instead of complaining take a page from the open source movement: make your own genetically modified crops and don't prevent them from reproducing, thus making them effectivelly free. I know, that's hard to do, but many people feel the same way about software (that it is too hard for anyone to do for free) and that didn't stop the open source movement.
Im going to assume, for the sake of charity, that you are being facetious, and know that what is called the "god particle" has nothing whatsoever to do with god as the word is usually understood (as an invisible sky wizard). The higgs particle is only called the god particle as a joke by physicists to emphasize how awesome finding it would be. Once upon a time I was bothered by that, because I thought it was confusing for no good reason, but now I see it as a kind of intelligence test.
The only thing the layman knows about cosmology is that the universe began several billions of years ago with a big bang. And this new discovery does not undermine that fact, it only disputes certain claims about how the big bang happened, specifically how much and how fast inflation occured after it. Since the layman is completely ignorant of the technical details of inflation anyways talking about how this data might impact some of those thoeries is unecessarily confusing, as it has confused you if you think that changing our theories about how inflation happened is equivalent to giving up the big bang model.
And sometimes it is worth pursuing an outcome that is not maximally effecient for other reasons, a fact that people seem to overlook sometimes. So what if the internet is half as fast as it could be; that is an acceptable trade-off for a free and open internet.
If we can design something then you don't need to posit a god as the designer of life on Earth. Thus intelligent design, even if true, would no longer be a argument for the existence of god (if it ever was one), only for some motivated beings who evolved under more favorable conditions to seed life here.
Reminds me of a certain cartoon: http://www.angryflower.com/goinaf.gif
So in a sense the insurance companies are also competing with each other to give the biggest payouts, the most coverage. And this thus drives insurance premiums up. So while the competition gives better drivers better premiums it leads to everyone having higher premiums in order to benefit those who actually get into accidents more. But of course this doesn't really tell us which is better now. Is it better to have low premiums but low payouts, or higher premiums and higher payouts (government monopoly favoring the first, and free markets favoring the second)? This really would make for a great paper (if only I was in economics).
Ah, fragmenting the geek vote I see. You know geeks could be a powerful voting block, if they could organize and officially support a single candidate. Unfortunately partisinship destroys this, and geeks seem willing to get in bed (so to speak) with whoever is willing to throw them a few treats (i.e. favoring Edwards just because he utterd the words "open source", not even in support of it in general).
Then I guess classical economic analysis has failed us in this case (someone should go write a journal article on why). Possibly the people of Manitoba are unusually safe drivers? Or maybe getting rid of the overhead saved enough money to cancel out the other effects?