Larry Niven's "Soft Weapon" ("Slaver Weapon" in the "Star Trek" animated series) provided several different effects in one device. As pointed out there, this is utterly STUPID as an infantry weapon, since you do not want troops messing about selecting the "right" setting. In the story, it was deemed to be a spy's weapon.
This type of thing might work as a small arm for "special operations", such as assassinations and kidnappings.
Artillery, land and naval, has been doing this for ages by varying the powder charge, which is separate from the round.
Why are we "taxpayers" training, and providing weapons for, a mercenary force loyal to the corporate elite and their minions to use in "crowd control"?
When Micro$soft decides to support only its "Surface" in Windows 13, maybe. Of course, if it's for M$-Windows, the only recognizable things on my face will be frustration, anger, and rage at the continual stupidity of the interface. Maybe that can replace the "Start" button to shut it down when I'm too frustrated with it too continue (every 15 minutes, or so).
GSM/GMRS modules often have an embedded microcontroller (ARM7, or the like), and some sort of microkernel. The command/control channel between those and the "system" processor (running Linux/some sort of embedded M$-Windows/...) may emulate, or, in fact, be, a serial port. You exchange sequences similar to the old Hayes modem commands, now commonly called the "AT" command set. You can also use PPP connections, although I don't know if they take advantage of PPP's encapsulation of multiple protocols so the command/control, IP networking, and voice have separate streams within the PPP connection.
As someone sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, perhaps Lt. Col. Bircher should read it. In Section 8, all of the responsibility for paying for and choosing to engage in war belongs to Congress (despite their having fumbled it for the past half-century, at least). The President is merely the "Commander in Chief" ONCE WAR IS DECLARED.
The President may, as a citizen, advocate that Congress make such a declaration, but Congress is failing in its collective responsibility if it takes his (so far) word for anything regarding cause without validation from OUTSIDE the President's subordinates.
I have many legitimately purchased games on my Linux box. I bought games from Loki, back when, specifically to encourage the developers to bring games over.
I will NOT buy any software with a "phone home" requirement. I just deleted LGP's bookmark.
The lack of HyperCard (both creation and execution) is why I didn't buy a Newton. I had (and have) no use for most (if not all) of the apps bundled into PDAs, but the ability to create my own would have sold me one in a NY minute.
BTW, how easy is it to dump apps from (?whatever)ROM on current PDAs and add things of more interest to me in the freed space?
Asserting that it cannot be destroyed simply reveals your preference, not a universal law.
Currently, there is no sensible theory about how the information could be retained in a black hole and restored to the universe later. Once a black hole stops being fed, "Hawking Radiation" is the random escape of one of a sub-Planck time creation of particle/anti-particle pairs, which know nothing of the state of the matter/energy on the other side of the event horizon.
As far as the metaphysics of the instantiation of a universe evolved to its present state:
Isn't this EXACTLY what is proposed by the quantum fracturing concept, or by Hawking's magic webs of universes, wherein all (observed?) quantum states occur, leading to different universes? Entire evolved universes, created at every instant, from nothing more than the available energy of superposed quantum states?
If you give up on the notion of time-symmetric quantum mechanics as a general case, why does the ability for quantum information to be lost imply the instantiation of evolved universes? Again, it's just a preference for pretty equations, not a fact.
When the universe was instantiated, as near as we can define it, there was NO determinism, because quantum fluctuations and simply uncertainty preclude it. Information is continually (or in quanta) being newly instantiated throughout the universe. Why can't it also be continually lost in black holes?
Here's an odd question: suppose quantum information is lost in black holes; could that information leak through some substrate back into the universe to be exposed in expansion? Is there a correlation between the rate of expansion (which has not been constant) and the rate at which information is lost into black holes?
When I have to use the desktops of the other developers at work who KDE, that's what it reminds me of. Three times the effort to do anything, and nothing is in a sensible (to me) place. I've been using GUIs since Xerox invented 'em, and find nearly all of them more trouble than they are use.
That doesn't mean I think they should be banned, or something, but commonality almost always results in the worst possible product (think QWERTY).
I don't understand this abhorrence of a universe in which information can be destroyed.
I realize that we're talking about quantum information, not the Library of Congress, and the preferred simplicity of the equations that describe events that work regardless of the direction (sign) of time. Why does the universe have to be built around that principle just because we like the equations?
I've heard "scary stories" (thanks, George Carlin) about "causality" issues, but AFAICT, they're only scary to those who insist on time-symmetry, not that the universe cannot function that way.
Hawking's pan-dimensional replication of information really sounds like a desperate ploy to retain a childhood fantasy by spinning elaborate webs to sustain it, rather than just asking the simpler question: how would a universe work if information can be destroyed?
Maybe, if information CAN be destroyed, it explains the apparent (at the human level, at least) directionality of time. If the universe is open, at some far-future time, when the protons, neutrons, etc, have decayed, the information of their quantum states will be gone; not transformed, gone. If the universe is closed, it will collapse back into a singularity, and again, the information will be gone. So, what?
IMO, KDE sucks. If I wanted to run M$-Windows, I would.
IMO, Gnome is annoying, but less so than KDE.
I do not like the way a Mac GUI works, either.
If you want specifics, I can list them, but they're in old posts here.
Any common GUI is going to both suck and be VERY annoying, AFAICT.
I know that there are LOTS of KDE fans out there, and I'm happy that they have the choice, and the same applies for Gnome fans.
Personally, I need to take a few days and see if I can get Sawmill/Sawfish running again. For me, it's been all downhill since then, since I really resent the loss of useful screen real estate to tool bars and the like, and even that one seems to have lost the ability to have a window focused, but NOT front.
One of the nice things about Linux is that we don't all have to march to the same piper's tune. Why is there anyone trying to ruin that just to make it acceptable to some corporate dweeb who is NEVER going to use it anyway (since they're so brainwashed by M$, and the few cases where M$-Windows has a useful feature that no one has bothered to duplicate)?
I have already ordered OpenBSD 4.3 for a firewall, and could try it for a desktop, if Linux keeps trying to be M$-Windows, or continues to degrade my desktop experience.
'22 internal bays cannot hold as much as the '117, and if you hang stuff from the pylons, the stealth is lost, so you might as well use a '15E or F/A-18 E/F. The F-22 is NOT a replacement for the F-117, since it cannot carry 2 x 2000lbs bombs stealthily, as the F-117 can. That is not to say it isn't useful, just that the official line coming from the Air Force, repeated in the press, is a lie, designed to pump up the "demand" for cool toys by claiming they are a replacement for essentially every other single-seater in the current inventory. They should have given the A-10s, or new, upgraded ones to the US Army, since the Air Force doesn't really want to commit expensive, relatively fragile, planes to a job that the A-10s did so well and that still needs doing (and the JSF is a long hike from production).
You can't build planes in a weekend, so when a threat surfaces, you need to have some inventory to work with, but no one out there that doesn't already have planes is going to build them in a weekend, either, so we don't need to crank out F-22s just to stroke Air Force egos.
The F-117 and the F-22 have two completely different missions, therefore the F-22 cannot "replace" the F-117. The F-117 is a first-strike night attack bomber, deploying, mostly, precision-guided munitions. It took on roles that would have required much larger formations had they been done with the F-111 (replacement for the F-105) which had much higher visibility, so needed escorts and AA suppression. The F-22 is supposed to replace the aging, but still very potent, F-15 as an air superiority fighter, while the F-15 is shuffled off to the strike fighter role as the F-15E.
F-22s are much more expensive than F-15s. In theory, they are able to provide more kills-per-sortie than the F-15, so we would need fewer of them. The problem with that is that, despite supersonic cruise, there is only so much airspace that an F-22 can control, so, if the missions are geographically dispersed, a larger number of F-15s can provide more coverage.
There is no longer an opposing air force in Iraq, and the Iranians were stupid enough to buy planes from us, so they don't really have one, either. Other than the US, there is almost no long-range bomber capability, so the only remaining function for the F-22 is as an escort for B-2s on first-strike missions into nations with active fighter forces, such as Russia, China, and Western Europe (if they don't stop picking on Microsoft).
The parents are not to "blame", since this evidence is relatively recent, but the fault is not in their stars, but in themselves, to borrow a bit from the Bard.
The human brain is still evolving, very complex, and a bit fragile, rather like a program kludged together to make a ship date, then patched and repatched to fix bugs and add features. Schizophrenia is known to have family links, as are other mental disorders.
It's interesting how much nonsense has been generated by trying to ask a mathematical question in a common human language. Reminds me of the old Greek runner's paradox, where a runner is described as covering half the distance between himself and a turtle leading him at each "tick" and he cannot, therefore ever "catch" the turtle. Not if he is continually slowing down!
I didn't watch the show, but I get the gist of the question.
Assumption 1: Monty always opens a door and offers the choice to change your prior selection, so there is no information to be gained from the offer of choice.
Assumption 2: Monty isn't explaining to the producers why he opened the door behind which the car sits and is offering you a chance to choose again.
Forget the initial condition of three doors as it is now obsoleted by new information that one of the doors definitely does not have a car behind it. So there are no 1/3, 1/6, or whatever (except 3/6, reduced to 1/2) chances of anything.
You have a new condition of two closed doors, behind one of which is a car. You are being asked to choose between them (despite the obfuscating language). "Changing your choice" says you choose !S rather than S, but you still have exactly a 50% chance that the car is behind one of them.
Because, unlike most other other ISO standards for documents, like fax G3 and G4 compression, and ODF (Open Document Format) OOXML literally cannot be implemented by anyone other than Microsoft. This is not because the entire rest of the world contains no competent programmers, but because the standard simply does not have enough information to do so. Microsoft wrote the proposed standard with what amount to calls into their libraries of legacy Word code, the actions of which are NOT documented, rather than "tag X requires an indent level of 30000 millipels from the indent level of the enclosing block", or whatever.
The entire purpose of OOXML is to subvert the increasing call for public documents to be stored in a format that can A) be read without buying Word/Office/..., on the theory that documents created in a citizen's government should be available to those citizens without paying a corporate "tax", and B) that by documenting the format of the documents, readers/editors can be created, as needed, at a future time when the original creation tool may no longer exist or have a computer on which to run, unlike, say, Word documents, where support for older formats is simply dropped by Microsoft.
Microsoft is an ongoing criminal organization, and as such, should be seized under the RICO act, and its parts sold off or its source code simply published for those parts without buyers, and the buyers should be forever blocked from forming a cartel, single company, sharing directors,... to prevent a resurrection of Microsoft.
Spoken like a completely ignorant child. How the hell do you think (if you even can) we older guys got into this business? We were tinkering with new things, using them when appropriate, before many of you were born, and the joy of new ideas hasn't worn off. The only difference is we don't do it quite so impulsively, just because it seems new.
For one thing, multiple homogeneous cores is NOT new (hetero- either, for that matter), just fitting them into the same die. I've used quad 68040 systems, where, due to the ability of the CPUs to exchange data between their copy-back caches, some frequently-used data items were NEVER written to memory, and on System V you could couple processing as tightly or loosely as you wanted. There are some problem sets that take advantage of in-"job" multi-processing better than others, just as some problem sets will take of advantage of multiple cores by doing completely different tasks simultaneously. Simple (very) example: copying all of the files between volumes (not a block-for-block clone); if I have two cores, I can can either have a multi-threaded equivalent of "cp" which walks the directory tree of the source and dispatches the create/copy jobs in parallel, each core dropping into the kernel as needed, or I can start a "cpio -o" on one core and pipe it to a "cpio -i" on the other, with a decent block size on the pipe. More cores means more dispatch threads in the first case, and background horsepower handling the low-level disk I/O in the other. In my experience, the "cpio" case works better than the multi-threaded "cp" (due, AFAICT, to the locks on the destination directories).
Perhaps, but not a talent for painting. The talent is the "performance art" of fitting into and regurgitating the BS that passes for art knowledge among the "cognoscenti", and finding a sponsor who needs to sell you as the "next big thing".
The post-Modernist abstractions are just a collective circle-jerk (well, probably more a spiral-jerk), getting each other off without producing anything that matters outside the circle.
Beethoven's symphonies are very dense, but even lay-persons can take something from them. A Kandinsky is just scribbled paint on a wasted canvas to anyone who isn't caught up in the collective delusion.
> Is literature also rubbish? At one point Joyce was "modern". Please, call his work rubbish.
All right: "Joyce' work is rubbish". The page of it that I can read before getting a severe headache sounds like a very bad attempt to write "cutesy" childrens' literature. If that "stream of consciousness" is representative of anyone, they need to be in a sheltered environment.
Linux gobbles free RAM to add to the buffer cache. This is already a large RAM disk with automatic sync. In embedded systems, you can even decouple the buffer cache from any physical media and just live in a variable size RAM disk, which means that Linux finally catching up to AmigaDOS.
I abhor the (ab)use of Flash on the Web. Many sites don't allow access, at all, unless a specific version of Flash is installed, even if all the information I want could be easily handled with static text pages. Additionally, the Flash player implementations allow Trojans trivially (not that QuickTime is without its own issues).
Is it the fault of those writing the specifications for sites or the site developers that low-to-moderate-bandwidth, Flash-free pages that provide all the information a visitor needs are not developed? Maybe mobile Web access will bring about a change to the current mindlessly Flash burdened paradigm.
'Course the Soviet attempt to place missiles with reach of US cities didn't have anything to do with the fact that we had ALREADY put nuclear-armed missiles in Turkey, within easy range of Moscow and most of the Russian heartland. Having been invaded by the Germans, the Soviets weren't looking forward to an attack by the US, with no means to deter/retaliate. Before you (stupidly) say we would not have done it, remember that US troops fought on the side of the Czar during the revolution, and that senior members of the military and politics had publicly advocated a first strike on the Soviet Union before they could attain anything close to parity.
Worked on an MBA as a "language class" (primarily in Finance, so it was trivial math for me, and fun to watch the classmates freak) because I'd seen too many engineering managers ignored because they couldn't speak the language of the PHBs and marketdroids. Then I realized that I NEVER wanted to sit in those meetings.
Blindingly obvious? It requires a tremendous ability to detect genetic differences when the difference is a nothing more than the number of copies of a few base pairs in an entire genome (~3,000,000,000 base pairs). We still don't know whether there are any epigenetic differences, or what those might be, because that is even more difficult to measure.
While it may seem obvious to the uneducated that twins are "different", there is a lot of research that shows high correlation, even when the twins are raised apart, so identifying the cause(s) of the differences and whether those are "nature" or "nurture" is still of value. Even within a family, the differences may be simply something like feeding order, where the earlier fed may get different (not necessarily better or worse) nutrition or bonding experience than the later fed, rather than, necessarily, a genetic difference.
When it is copy numbers, or very small polymorphisms, and there is some somatic variation, we can use the data to more closely identify which genetic values are associated with the variation.
Slashdot Mirror
2000 - 1600 (from the site) is NOT 2400 years!
It should be 400 CE (or AD, if you've not caught up with the current usage).
Anyone else think of this one?
Larry Niven's "Soft Weapon" ("Slaver Weapon" in the "Star Trek" animated series) provided several different effects in one device. As pointed out there, this is utterly STUPID as an infantry weapon, since you do not want troops messing about selecting the "right" setting. In the story, it was deemed to be a spy's weapon.
This type of thing might work as a small arm for "special operations", such as assassinations and kidnappings.
Artillery, land and naval, has been doing this for ages by varying the powder charge, which is separate from the round.
Why are we "taxpayers" training, and providing weapons for, a mercenary force loyal to the corporate elite and their minions to use in "crowd control"?
When Micro$soft decides to support only its "Surface" in Windows 13, maybe. Of course, if it's for M$-Windows, the only recognizable things on my face will be frustration, anger, and rage at the continual stupidity of the interface. Maybe that can replace the "Start" button to shut it down when I'm too frustrated with it too continue (every 15 minutes, or so).
"serial connection to GSM/GPRS"
GSM/GMRS modules often have an embedded microcontroller (ARM7, or the like), and some sort of microkernel. The command/control channel between those and the "system" processor (running Linux/some sort of embedded M$-Windows/...) may emulate, or, in fact, be, a serial port. You exchange sequences similar to the old Hayes modem commands, now commonly called the "AT" command set. You can also use PPP connections, although I don't know if they take advantage of PPP's encapsulation of multiple protocols so the command/control, IP networking, and voice have separate streams within the PPP connection.
As someone sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, perhaps Lt. Col. Bircher should read it. In Section 8, all of the responsibility for paying for and choosing to engage in war belongs to Congress (despite their having fumbled it for the past half-century, at least). The President is merely the "Commander in Chief" ONCE WAR IS DECLARED.
The President may, as a citizen, advocate that Congress make such a declaration, but Congress is failing in its collective responsibility if it takes his (so far) word for anything regarding cause without validation from OUTSIDE the President's subordinates.
I have many legitimately purchased games on my Linux box. I bought games from Loki, back when, specifically to encourage the developers to bring games over.
I will NOT buy any software with a "phone home" requirement. I just deleted LGP's bookmark.
The lack of HyperCard (both creation and execution) is why I didn't buy a Newton. I had (and have) no use for most (if not all) of the apps bundled into PDAs, but the ability to create my own would have sold me one in a NY minute.
BTW, how easy is it to dump apps from (?whatever)ROM on current PDAs and add things of more interest to me in the freed space?
Asserting that it cannot be destroyed simply reveals your preference, not a universal law.
Currently, there is no sensible theory about how the information could be retained in a black hole and restored to the universe later. Once a black hole stops being fed, "Hawking Radiation" is the random escape of one of a sub-Planck time creation of particle/anti-particle pairs, which know nothing of the state of the matter/energy on the other side of the event horizon.
As far as the metaphysics of the instantiation of a universe evolved to its present state:
Isn't this EXACTLY what is proposed by the quantum fracturing concept, or by Hawking's magic webs of universes, wherein all (observed?) quantum states occur, leading to different universes? Entire evolved universes, created at every instant, from nothing more than the available energy of superposed quantum states?
If you give up on the notion of time-symmetric quantum mechanics as a general case, why does the ability for quantum information to be lost imply the instantiation of evolved universes? Again, it's just a preference for pretty equations, not a fact.
When the universe was instantiated, as near as we can define it, there was NO determinism, because quantum fluctuations and simply uncertainty preclude it. Information is continually (or in quanta) being newly instantiated throughout the universe. Why can't it also be continually lost in black holes?
Here's an odd question: suppose quantum information is lost in black holes; could that information leak through some substrate back into the universe to be exposed in expansion? Is there a correlation between the rate of expansion (which has not been constant) and the rate at which information is lost into black holes?
When I have to use the desktops of the other developers at work who KDE, that's what it reminds me of. Three times the effort to do anything, and nothing is in a sensible (to me) place. I've been using GUIs since Xerox invented 'em, and find nearly all of them more trouble than they are use.
That doesn't mean I think they should be banned, or something, but commonality almost always results in the worst possible product (think QWERTY).
I don't understand this abhorrence of a universe in which information can be destroyed.
I realize that we're talking about quantum information, not the Library of Congress, and the preferred simplicity of the equations that describe events that work regardless of the direction (sign) of time. Why does the universe have to be built around that principle just because we like the equations?
I've heard "scary stories" (thanks, George Carlin) about "causality" issues, but AFAICT, they're only scary to those who insist on time-symmetry, not that the universe cannot function that way.
Hawking's pan-dimensional replication of information really sounds like a desperate ploy to retain a childhood fantasy by spinning elaborate webs to sustain it, rather than just asking the simpler question: how would a universe work if information can be destroyed?
Maybe, if information CAN be destroyed, it explains the apparent (at the human level, at least) directionality of time. If the universe is open, at some far-future time, when the protons, neutrons, etc, have decayed, the information of their quantum states will be gone; not transformed, gone. If the universe is closed, it will collapse back into a singularity, and again, the information will be gone. So, what?
IMO, KDE sucks. If I wanted to run M$-Windows, I would.
IMO, Gnome is annoying, but less so than KDE.
I do not like the way a Mac GUI works, either.
If you want specifics, I can list them, but they're in old posts here.
Any common GUI is going to both suck and be VERY annoying, AFAICT.
I know that there are LOTS of KDE fans out there, and I'm happy that they have the choice, and the same applies for Gnome fans.
Personally, I need to take a few days and see if I can get Sawmill/Sawfish running again. For me, it's been all downhill since then, since I really resent the loss of useful screen real estate to tool bars and the like, and even that one seems to have lost the ability to have a window focused, but NOT front.
One of the nice things about Linux is that we don't all have to march to the same piper's tune. Why is there anyone trying to ruin that just to make it acceptable to some corporate dweeb who is NEVER going to use it anyway (since they're so brainwashed by M$, and the few cases where M$-Windows has a useful feature that no one has bothered to duplicate)?
I have already ordered OpenBSD 4.3 for a firewall, and could try it for a desktop, if Linux keeps trying to be M$-Windows, or continues to degrade my desktop experience.
http://xkcd.com/378/
'22 internal bays cannot hold as much as the '117, and if you hang stuff from the pylons, the stealth is lost, so you might as well use a '15E or F/A-18 E/F. The F-22 is NOT a replacement for the F-117, since it cannot carry 2 x 2000lbs bombs stealthily, as the F-117 can. That is not to say it isn't useful, just that the official line coming from the Air Force, repeated in the press, is a lie, designed to pump up the "demand" for cool toys by claiming they are a replacement for essentially every other single-seater in the current inventory. They should have given the A-10s, or new, upgraded ones to the US Army, since the Air Force doesn't really want to commit expensive, relatively fragile, planes to a job that the A-10s did so well and that still needs doing (and the JSF is a long hike from production).
You can't build planes in a weekend, so when a threat surfaces, you need to have some inventory to work with, but no one out there that doesn't already have planes is going to build them in a weekend, either, so we don't need to crank out F-22s just to stroke Air Force egos.
The F-117 and the F-22 have two completely different missions, therefore the F-22 cannot "replace" the F-117. The F-117 is a first-strike night attack bomber, deploying, mostly, precision-guided munitions. It took on roles that would have required much larger formations had they been done with the F-111 (replacement for the F-105) which had much higher visibility, so needed escorts and AA suppression. The F-22 is supposed to replace the aging, but still very potent, F-15 as an air superiority fighter, while the F-15 is shuffled off to the strike fighter role as the F-15E.
F-22s are much more expensive than F-15s. In theory, they are able to provide more kills-per-sortie than the F-15, so we would need fewer of them. The problem with that is that, despite supersonic cruise, there is only so much airspace that an F-22 can control, so, if the missions are geographically dispersed, a larger number of F-15s can provide more coverage.
There is no longer an opposing air force in Iraq, and the Iranians were stupid enough to buy planes from us, so they don't really have one, either. Other than the US, there is almost no long-range bomber capability, so the only remaining function for the F-22 is as an escort for B-2s on first-strike missions into nations with active fighter forces, such as Russia, China, and Western Europe (if they don't stop picking on Microsoft).
There is scientific evidence that points to genetic susceptibility, such as this description of a specific mutation:
http://www.nature.com/ng/press_release/ng0107.html
The parents are not to "blame", since this evidence is relatively recent, but the fault is not in their stars, but in themselves, to borrow a bit from the Bard.
The human brain is still evolving, very complex, and a bit fragile, rather like a program kludged together to make a ship date, then patched and repatched to fix bugs and add features. Schizophrenia is known to have family links, as are other mental disorders.
It's interesting how much nonsense has been generated by trying to ask a mathematical question in a common human language. Reminds me of the old Greek runner's paradox, where a runner is described as covering half the distance between himself and a turtle leading him at each "tick" and he cannot, therefore ever "catch" the turtle. Not if he is continually slowing down!
I didn't watch the show, but I get the gist of the question.
Assumption 1: Monty always opens a door and offers the choice to change your prior selection, so there is no information to be gained from the offer of choice.
Assumption 2: Monty isn't explaining to the producers why he opened the door behind which the car sits and is offering you a chance to choose again.
Forget the initial condition of three doors as it is now obsoleted by new information that one of the doors definitely does not have a car behind it. So there are no 1/3, 1/6, or whatever (except 3/6, reduced to 1/2) chances of anything.
You have a new condition of two closed doors, behind one of which is a car. You are being asked to choose between them (despite the obfuscating language). "Changing your choice" says you choose !S rather than S, but you still have exactly a 50% chance that the car is behind one of them.
Four states, two of which yield a car:
S car: S selected -> CAR
S car: !S selected
!S car: S selected
!S car: !S selected CAR
Because, unlike most other other ISO standards for documents, like fax G3 and G4 compression, and ODF (Open Document Format) OOXML literally cannot be implemented by anyone other than Microsoft. This is not because the entire rest of the world contains no competent programmers, but because the standard simply does not have enough information to do so. Microsoft wrote the proposed standard with what amount to calls into their libraries of legacy Word code, the actions of which are NOT documented, rather than "tag X requires an indent level of 30000 millipels from the indent level of the enclosing block", or whatever.
... to prevent a resurrection of Microsoft.
The entire purpose of OOXML is to subvert the increasing call for public documents to be stored in a format that can A) be read without buying Word/Office/..., on the theory that documents created in a citizen's government should be available to those citizens without paying a corporate "tax", and B) that by documenting the format of the documents, readers/editors can be created, as needed, at a future time when the original creation tool may no longer exist or have a computer on which to run, unlike, say, Word documents, where support for older formats is simply dropped by Microsoft.
Microsoft is an ongoing criminal organization, and as such, should be seized under the RICO act, and its parts sold off or its source code simply published for those parts without buyers, and the buyers should be forever blocked from forming a cartel, single company, sharing directors,
Spoken like a completely ignorant child. How the hell do you think (if you even can) we older guys got into this business? We were tinkering with new things, using them when appropriate, before many of you were born, and the joy of new ideas hasn't worn off. The only difference is we don't do it quite so impulsively, just because it seems new.
For one thing, multiple homogeneous cores is NOT new (hetero- either, for that matter), just fitting them into the same die. I've used quad 68040 systems, where, due to the ability of the CPUs to exchange data between their copy-back caches, some frequently-used data items were NEVER written to memory, and on System V you could couple processing as tightly or loosely as you wanted. There are some problem sets that take advantage of in-"job" multi-processing better than others, just as some problem sets will take of advantage of multiple cores by doing completely different tasks simultaneously. Simple (very) example: copying all of the files between volumes (not a block-for-block clone); if I have two cores, I can can either have a multi-threaded equivalent of "cp" which walks the directory tree of the source and dispatches the create/copy jobs in parallel, each core dropping into the kernel as needed, or I can start a "cpio -o" on one core and pipe it to a "cpio -i" on the other, with a decent block size on the pipe. More cores means more dispatch threads in the first case, and background horsepower handling the low-level disk I/O in the other. In my experience, the "cpio" case works better than the multi-threaded "cp" (due, AFAICT, to the locks on the destination directories).
> really does take talent.
Perhaps, but not a talent for painting. The talent is the "performance art" of fitting into and regurgitating the BS that passes for art knowledge among the "cognoscenti", and finding a sponsor who needs to sell you as the "next big thing".
The post-Modernist abstractions are just a collective circle-jerk (well, probably more a spiral-jerk), getting each other off without producing anything that matters outside the circle.
Beethoven's symphonies are very dense, but even lay-persons can take something from them. A Kandinsky is just scribbled paint on a wasted canvas to anyone who isn't caught up in the collective delusion.
> Is literature also rubbish? At one point Joyce was "modern". Please, call his work rubbish.
All right: "Joyce' work is rubbish". The page of it that I can read before getting a severe headache sounds like a very bad attempt to write "cutesy" childrens' literature. If that "stream of consciousness" is representative of anyone, they need to be in a sheltered environment.
Linux gobbles free RAM to add to the buffer cache. This is already a large RAM disk with automatic sync. In embedded systems, you can even decouple the buffer cache from any physical media and just live in a variable size RAM disk, which means that Linux finally catching up to AmigaDOS.
I abhor the (ab)use of Flash on the Web. Many sites don't allow access, at all, unless a specific version of Flash is installed, even if all the information I want could be easily handled with static text pages. Additionally, the Flash player implementations allow Trojans trivially (not that QuickTime is without its own issues).
Is it the fault of those writing the specifications for sites or the site developers that low-to-moderate-bandwidth, Flash-free pages that provide all the information a visitor needs are not developed? Maybe mobile Web access will bring about a change to the current mindlessly Flash burdened paradigm.
'Course the Soviet attempt to place missiles with reach of US cities didn't have anything to do with the fact that we had ALREADY put nuclear-armed missiles in Turkey, within easy range of Moscow and most of the Russian heartland. Having been invaded by the Germans, the Soviets weren't looking forward to an attack by the US, with no means to deter/retaliate. Before you (stupidly) say we would not have done it, remember that US troops fought on the side of the Czar during the revolution, and that senior members of the military and politics had publicly advocated a first strike on the Soviet Union before they could attain anything close to parity.
Worked on an MBA as a "language class" (primarily in Finance, so it was trivial math for me, and fun to watch the classmates freak) because I'd seen too many engineering managers ignored because they couldn't speak the language of the PHBs and marketdroids. Then I realized that I NEVER wanted to sit in those meetings.
Blindingly obvious? It requires a tremendous ability to detect genetic differences when the difference is a nothing more than the number of copies of a few base pairs in an entire genome (~3,000,000,000 base pairs). We still don't know whether there are any epigenetic differences, or what those might be, because that is even more difficult to measure.
While it may seem obvious to the uneducated that twins are "different", there is a lot of research that shows high correlation, even when the twins are raised apart, so identifying the cause(s) of the differences and whether those are "nature" or "nurture" is still of value. Even within a family, the differences may be simply something like feeding order, where the earlier fed may get different (not necessarily better or worse) nutrition or bonding experience than the later fed, rather than, necessarily, a genetic difference.
When it is copy numbers, or very small polymorphisms, and there is some somatic variation, we can use the data to more closely identify which genetic values are associated with the variation.