Man, I'm watching Mr Robot these days, and Cambridge Analytica looks more and more to me like a real-life version of E Corp...
http://mrrobot.wikia.com/wiki/...
Interesting. I've lived in the US for 2 years, around 2002. Back then, as a European, I found that drivers were *much* more disciplined than people in my home country (France). I came back in the US recently (same place I used to live in, with a rental car), and my impression has been that things have changed a lot on this front. I saw lots of incivilities (e.g. people using empty lanes to overtake other cars, resulting in traffic jams whenever lanes merge...), speeding, reckless driving... In the meantime, driving in Europe has improved significantly (it's still far from perfect). I don't know if there's any conclusion to be drawn from this, but the trend is pretty clear.
My graduate students are VERY unhappy when they start a week-long model run and a few days later the computer has rebooted to install a needless update.
Well, unless there is a critical piece of software you absolutely require, have you considered that maybe Windows may not be the right OS for graduate students to use, especially for week-long runs ? Mine exclusively use linux for their scientific work (as I do), and I've been happily doing this for years.
... and let me tell you that after last Friday, we are now experiencing a period in which the government can decide and impose whatever it damn pleases : massive surveillance, restricted freedom, you name it.... At this stage, I believe people are willing to accept anything in the name of (presumed) safety. At some point, this period will come to an end but until then, I except the law to change a lot, and essentially nobody is going to raise a finger about it....
Reminds me of the time when I was living in the US, right after 09/11. Sad, really.
There is nothing in the article about France trying to kill diesel. The purpose of those measures are to get rid of OLD DIESEL CARS that are well known source of pollution (for the particules).
No. The plan is to get rid of old diesel cars indeed, but also to incentivize people to acquire gasoline rather than diesel cars. This will be done by applying some kind of malus on new diesel cars, and also by progressively aligning the price of diesel fuel with the price of gasoline (diesel fuel has been significantly cheaper than gasoline in France).
No, sorry but that's simply not true. The French language nowadays includes a lot of foreign words. Of course we have the French Academy which tries to impose French words for everything but really, these (generally old) guys are representative of themselves only, and have nearly no relevance. For instance, they tried to impose "couriel" instead of "email" (and a whole bunch of other ridiculous words) but hey, who would have guessed, it never picked up...
I believe French-speaking Canadians, OTOH, tend to be much more protective towards the original language.
Scilab is far better and always had native 3D graphics, a GUI and a simulation engine: scicos/xcos. It atonishes me that it is systematically ignored. Is it because is french?
Personally, I find Scilab pretty awful (and for the record, I'm french).
It depends on if he knew about it. If he did then he's obviosly responsible. If he didn't then that's of course also bad. Either way is not good for him.
If he knows, he's responsible. If he doesn't, he's incompetent. Which do you prefer ?
Pick up an instrument, or if you used to play an instrument when you were a teenager, time to get it out of the attics.
(Re-)learn how to play (we have great softwares and books/CD for this, nowadays) and learn by listening to the masters. Learn also some theory.
At some point, get out and find yourself a band, suited to your skills (a bit better, ideally) and taste. At the very least, you'll have fun but you could even end up being a good musician. Depends on the time you want to spend on it.
Amen to that. I also have a HP48s, which I still use. Back when I was in school, I sometimes used it to cheat. To do this, I add to input many formulas or reproduce drawings, or write programs to perform some calculations (atomic physics comes to my mind). But in the process of doing that, you learn a lot. Eventually, you don't have to cheat anymore because you know pretty well the subject. And even if you didn't work enough to learn all you were supposed to, you've still learnt some of it. This makes a huge difference compared to, say, using a smartphone to browse the internet and find your answers.
At the moment, the French economy is not doing well, to say the least: austerity has become the rule in the EU and so far, no signs of recovery have been observed (I for one don't think austerity is the right answer, but let's stay on-topic). As a FOSS enthusiast (and, incidentally, as a French...), I'm glad to see this kind of effort finally happening. But I also suspect our government sees this as a cheap way to cut licence costs and won't invest sufficiently in the migration. I think it makes sense from a economic standpoint in the middle/long term, but there is a transition period which I'm not sure they'll be willing (or able) to handle with sufficient resources.
Unfortunately, this is probably a good argument against project Orion. Hundreds (thousands?) of tiny nukes going off in LEO would probably also do bad things.
It means Orion has to be built in space and moved away from the planet on some other kind of propulsion before you can start launching nukes, not that Orion is a bad idea...
Except that in this case, you need to put the thing in LEO using several Saturn 5 propellers. And this is so expensive (not too mention the risk) that it basically ruins the whole concept. No, really, I used to like Project Orion too but there's no way it could work. Too dangerous, too expensive. Let's put it to rest, already.
I used to be a devout user of WindowMaker around ~2000 (I had used fvwm, olvwm and afterstep before). After that, I've used Gnome 1, then Gnome 2... I found Gnome 3 to be an abomination and I went to XFCE. It does what it is meant to do and quite frankly, I don't see why I would want to go back to WindowMaker. And no, nostalgia isn't enough...
I've always wondered if he would have been so successful without his illness. If he hadn't suffered from MND, I imagine he would have had various activities and maybe he would have diluted his precious time between numerous tasks. I suppose that to qualifiy as what people call a "genius", you have to be very smart and work all day (either by discipline or by being forced to do so, as in his case). In other words, what if myself, a modest scientist was suddenly forced to think about physics all day long rather than share my time between scientific work, administrative burden, and more mundane tasks (including family and leisure), would I be more successful ? I've always doubted that, but I don't think I'll never get an answer to this.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, I'm watching Mr Robot these days, and Cambridge Analytica looks more and more to me like a real-life version of E Corp... http://mrrobot.wikia.com/wiki/...
Interesting. I've lived in the US for 2 years, around 2002. Back then, as a European, I found that drivers were *much* more disciplined than people in my home country (France). I came back in the US recently (same place I used to live in, with a rental car), and my impression has been that things have changed a lot on this front. I saw lots of incivilities (e.g. people using empty lanes to overtake other cars, resulting in traffic jams whenever lanes merge...), speeding, reckless driving... In the meantime, driving in Europe has improved significantly (it's still far from perfect). I don't know if there's any conclusion to be drawn from this, but the trend is pretty clear.
Yes, it was posted on the Strava website yesterday that an outage of AWS was responsible for their own outage.
My graduate students are VERY unhappy when they start a week-long model run and a few days later the computer has rebooted to install a needless update.
Well, unless there is a critical piece of software you absolutely require, have you considered that maybe Windows may not be the right OS for graduate students to use, especially for week-long runs ? Mine exclusively use linux for their scientific work (as I do), and I've been happily doing this for years.
Systemd is the reason Linus is now using FreeBSD at home.
Reference, please ?
... and let me tell you that after last Friday, we are now experiencing a period in which the government can decide and impose whatever it damn pleases : massive surveillance, restricted freedom, you name it.... At this stage, I believe people are willing to accept anything in the name of (presumed) safety. At some point, this period will come to an end but until then, I except the law to change a lot, and essentially nobody is going to raise a finger about it....
Reminds me of the time when I was living in the US, right after 09/11. Sad, really.
Seems they won't let go of the awful ribbon. After all these years, I still hate it... So no thanks.
There is nothing in the article about France trying to kill diesel. The purpose of those measures are to get rid of OLD DIESEL CARS that are well known source of pollution (for the particules).
No. The plan is to get rid of old diesel cars indeed, but also to incentivize people to acquire gasoline rather than diesel cars. This will be done by applying some kind of malus on new diesel cars, and also by progressively aligning the price of diesel fuel with the price of gasoline (diesel fuel has been significantly cheaper than gasoline in France).
Man, when I read this kind of thing, I miss the days when I was using Pine in a terminal. No fluff, no crap, no nothing... Geez I'm getting old...
The French do tend towards language chauvinism.
No, sorry but that's simply not true. The French language nowadays includes a lot of foreign words. Of course we have the French Academy which tries to impose French words for everything but really, these (generally old) guys are representative of themselves only, and have nearly no relevance. For instance, they tried to impose "couriel" instead of "email" (and a whole bunch of other ridiculous words) but hey, who would have guessed, it never picked up ...
I believe French-speaking Canadians, OTOH, tend to be much more protective towards the original language.
That is all.
Scilab is far better and always had native 3D graphics, a GUI and a simulation engine: scicos/xcos. It atonishes me that it is systematically ignored. Is it because is french?
Personally, I find Scilab pretty awful (and for the record, I'm french).
It depends on if he knew about it. If he did then he's obviosly responsible. If he didn't then that's of course also bad. Either way is not good for him.
If he knows, he's responsible. If he doesn't, he's incompetent. Which do you prefer ?
Pick up an instrument, or if you used to play an instrument when you were a teenager, time to get it out of the attics.
(Re-)learn how to play (we have great softwares and books/CD for this, nowadays) and learn by listening to the masters. Learn also some theory.
At some point, get out and find yourself a band, suited to your skills (a bit better, ideally) and taste. At the very least, you'll have fun but you could even end up being a good musician. Depends on the time you want to spend on it.
The pedal orientation is not switched in RHD cars.
Woosh
True. And I have a hard time convincing myself that these guys are doing it alone. For sure, they get some help. China ?
n/t
Amen to that. I also have a HP48s, which I still use. Back when I was in school, I sometimes used it to cheat. To do this, I add to input many formulas or reproduce drawings, or write programs to perform some calculations (atomic physics comes to my mind). But in the process of doing that, you learn a lot. Eventually, you don't have to cheat anymore because you know pretty well the subject. And even if you didn't work enough to learn all you were supposed to, you've still learnt some of it. This makes a huge difference compared to, say, using a smartphone to browse the internet and find your answers.
Obligatory xkcd link
I for one find this cartoon incredibly insightful and disturbing (and I do use google services, although I wish I wasn't).
At the moment, the French economy is not doing well, to say the least: austerity has become the rule in the EU and so far, no signs of recovery have been observed (I for one don't think austerity is the right answer, but let's stay on-topic). As a FOSS enthusiast (and, incidentally, as a French...), I'm glad to see this kind of effort finally happening. But I also suspect our government sees this as a cheap way to cut licence costs and won't invest sufficiently in the migration. I think it makes sense from a economic standpoint in the middle/long term, but there is a transition period which I'm not sure they'll be willing (or able) to handle with sufficient resources.
Unfortunately, this is probably a good argument against project Orion. Hundreds (thousands?) of tiny nukes going off in LEO would probably also do bad things.
It means Orion has to be built in space and moved away from the planet on some other kind of propulsion before you can start launching nukes, not that Orion is a bad idea...
Except that in this case, you need to put the thing in LEO using several Saturn 5 propellers. And this is so expensive (not too mention the risk) that it basically ruins the whole concept. No, really, I used to like Project Orion too but there's no way it could work. Too dangerous, too expensive. Let's put it to rest, already.
Not everyone on /. is like that. Many of us quiet readers idolize folks like RMS and you, Bruce.
-brian
And some of us quiet readers just have a lot of respect for guys like you (which is not exactly the same as "idolize").
Why is this RUBBISH on the front page?
Yeah, yesterday, I was just asking myself "Why is this RUBBISH on Ars Technica" ?
I used to be a devout user of WindowMaker around ~2000 (I had used fvwm, olvwm and afterstep before). After that, I've used Gnome 1, then Gnome 2... I found Gnome 3 to be an abomination and I went to XFCE. It does what it is meant to do and quite frankly, I don't see why I would want to go back to WindowMaker. And no, nostalgia isn't enough...
I've always wondered if he would have been so successful without his illness. If he hadn't suffered from MND, I imagine he would have had various activities and maybe he would have diluted his precious time between numerous tasks. I suppose that to qualifiy as what people call a "genius", you have to be very smart and work all day (either by discipline or by being forced to do so, as in his case). In other words, what if myself, a modest scientist was suddenly forced to think about physics all day long rather than share my time between scientific work, administrative burden, and more mundane tasks (including family and leisure), would I be more successful ? I've always doubted that, but I don't think I'll never get an answer to this.