The world doesn't owe you courtesy, but generally grants it. When it receives this attitude back, though, I can see it reconsidering. It really isn't so difficult to acknowledge and accept that someone might want a feature for a piece of software, and yet be willing neither to do it themselves nor pay for it. And yet they still are perfectly welcome to express their wish for that feature! It's not that developers have to do everything that users say, but it's simply courteous to pay attention to feedback and requests, deal with them sensibly and thoughtfully, and take action if appropriate.
In fact, I think many of the actual problems in developing countries (when I say actual problems I do not mean, for example, drug abuse, but anti-social behaviour - which could possibly stem from the former) are caused by a two-horned problem: many people today are either pussies or dicks. Not to get to "Team America" about it, but if people weren't dicks - i.e. were, in the most honest sense of the word, nice, life would be a whole lot more pleasant. If the root cause of people's dickishness were found, and people started smiling more, saying "Good morning," talking to people whom they never met before, I think we'd all be phenomenally more happy. I know that when I am party to such idle pleasantries I feel significantly more chipper than I did beforehand. The second problem - that people are pussies - allows the dicks to flourish. If we weren't such pussies, then we'd put would-be dicks quickly in their place - shame them with the power of public embarrassment. Of course, there is no stable middle equilibrium - once we have too many pussies, the dickishness of the dicks increases such that more people become pussies for fear of their shaming backfiring. Thus we achieve the current aura on the underground, where few dare look or speak to anyone they don't know.
Let's not get started on relying on a third party (Google) whom you have no contract with for a large percentage of your business. That's got to rank up there with Stupid Business Models 101 in my view.
You imply that businesses these days have the opportunity to choose whether or not they rely on Google for some or most of their custom.
This is indeed true. Indeed, it's why nD geometry is harder still - because one has to visualise something almost unvisualisable. In fact, as you say, if I want to visualise a hypercube, I have to visualise it in 3D space and extend a cube to a hypercube as I would a square to create a cube.
Yes, this is indeed an issue - I must admit that some of the change from GCSE to high-school maths was that we were expected to think a bit more, but nonetheless, there's little we can expect to meet on the exam that we won't know pretty much exactly. What's nice though at this point is that there tend to be a few different ways of doing things, and if you're used to associating certain methods with certain problems you get caught doing things the long way. That's where actually knowing what you're doing helps.
Mathematically? Not vastly - it's just a logical extension. The real challenge for English students (speaking as an English student) is that even up to A-level, one is not taught to tackle new problems - only the same problems with different numbers. OK, that's exaggerated, but in general, you know exactly what type of question each one is, and exactly which methods to apply. There's very little original thought required. If English students were taught a bit differently - required, for example, to derive methods themselves, then even if they didn't have the knowledge required for the 3D trig question, they could work it out from first principles because it really doesn't (seem to - I've not completed it) involve more complicated maths than basic trig.
On the other hand, the question from the first year university course baffles me, since it is unbelievably simple. So, although similar amounts of mathematical knowledge are required, it is definitely true that the Chinese question is of a more appropriate level. I (heading for university in September) could do it in seconds. I am now going to attempt the Chinese one.
I'm not intimately acquainted with the Ubuntu release schedule, but from what I hear, this seems to be symptomatic of the strict bi-annual schedule. If they allowed run-overs while release-critical bugs were squashed or enforced longer code freezes for example, perhaps we wouldn't see such sloppiness. Although I'm not too fussed either - I moved from FC to Ubuntu to debian when I decided it was nicer to have regular feature upgrades. (More regular than backports)
Fair dos. Presumably the decision was made based on average usage, deemed to be that of someone typing. For me, a send button is just clutter, really. Especially since I usually have one hand on the keyboard all the time.
Hmm, I don't think this has been thought through properly. (regardless of the insightful mod) Just because you've patched up the security hole on the host computer doesn't mean you can't still send stuff out. And of course, it's less than trivial to build in a time delay before the bot patches security holes and terminates itself, during which time it infects as many PCs as it can - so if, by some mechanism, the way you got in is related to the way you're sending yourself out, it would still work.
Never mind that it takes almost as much energy to make ethanol as you'd get from burning it
I should hope so, thermodynamics tends to ensure things like that. Ethanol, petrol, coal, etc are all just ways of transporting energy in usable form. You're not magically creating any new energy. The idea behind using ethanol instead of petrol is that currently there's a lot of CO2 stored in petrol, but by growing plants then burning them, we're not adding any CO2 to the atmosphere.
Unless you were referring to energy required to actually process crops into ethanol, in which case you might remember that the crops from which ethanol is refined produce byproducts capable of also being harnessed for their energy content.
Not that I'm disagreeing, but if you indicate the old address out loud, then you'd have had to spell it so they didn't go to game.com or something. This is, nonetheless, worse.
If you tried to use unmaintained drivers with windows several releases down the line, would you expect those to work, as well? Good counterexamples are the nvidia and ATi drivers, neither of which are in the kernel source tree, both of which update reasonably regularly, and both of which work.
The mathematics department at the college I attend has just bought the so-called "interactive whiteboards" for most maths classrooms. This is another example of what appears to be people who don't really think things through being duped by shiny technology promising to improve teaching or learning. Goodness knows who decided that providing us with computers designed to do the exact same things as whiteboards, but apparently not providing more than the most basic of training with the included whiteboard simulator, would improve anything. The upshot, predictably, is a load of pissed of maths teachers who now find that they are forced to do the same task on an inferior piece of equipment.
Unless someone gives them some training, and some more software, then all this can ever be as an expensive way of doing the same thing as before, but worse, since they have a lower resolution, are less intuitive, and are slower - the sensitivity seems to mean that drawing quickly is impossible, and writing is uniformly illegible. (Examples, for example, once turned out looking more like Exomiles) In one classroom at least, a traditional whiteboard is going to be installed by the side of the new one (with a hole cut out of the middle, because it will now be covering the light switch) and the word from our teacher is that this will be used in preference to the new "monstrosity."
There is a vague possibility that, at some point, someone will decide to put graphing software up, but it's difficult to see how this will be more helpful than what we have at the moment.
But it pretty obviously isn't. The goal is to try and prevent littering. Not that it's the right way to go about it, since, given the mentality of England's litterer's and vandals, it will either breed resentment or just have no effect whatsoever.
It's impossible to not break laws you aren't even aware exist.
Generally, that's only true if the law is a bad one in the first place. Laws are supposed to reflect the public mentality - people who are ignorant of a law against murder generally don't murder anyway. In most cases, if you're going to break a law because you're not aware of it, there's a question of whether that law should be there, rather than a question about whether it should be enforced.
it was postulated that if the universe was truly infinite then an exact replica of you existed
Faulty logic - the set of square numbers is infinitely large, but does not contain 3. An infinite number of universes does not imply that every singe eventuality is contained in them.
10^100 light years away, because that's how much volume of space would be required to store all possible combinations/arrangements of matter that exist in the known/visible universe - at about 10^100 light years you'd have a duplicate arrangement.
That assumes that all that is possible is what we know about.
I'm no microbiologist, but I find it unlikely that enzymes will trigger an immune response, especially if they're not often encountered. The reason that cells are antigens is their surface proteins, but obviously a single protein does not have such things.
What you (and I) have is termed, at least by my optician, as colour deficiency. Colour blindness is indeed (apparently and technically) a complete absence of colour-sensing ability. For the record, I also find it interesting that I have better colour vision if the patch of colour is larger. I am useless, for example, at reading resistor colour codes.
I don't mean to be rude, but, that's irrelevant. That's just how it happens. How do you propose your pushing on your end of the bar is translated to a push at the other end?
I'm no expert, but surely you don't reduce the detail by using a higher ISO - the detail is already lost due to a cheap CCD or cheap film. Increasing the ISO turns up the gain, as you said, amplifying noise with it - but it amplifies the not-noise by the same amount; new noise shouldn't be introduced.
What actually happens is that the molecules in your hand push on the layer of atoms at your end of the bar. This layer knocks into the next layer, which knocks into the next, and so on, until finally the layer of atoms at the other guy's end knocks into the molecules of his hand, and he receives the information.
Yes it is, but you've essentially set up that information prior to starting the experiment, so you have to start timing from back then. As in the cars example, you have to count the time starting from when you transmitted the information about the accident being cleared - imagine that someone told the driver of the first car that the accident would be cleared in ten minutes, pass it back. That information would travel at some speed, which is analogous to c. Once the information's all in place, the information appears to travel from car to car very quickly, but it actually doesn't - it's already been transmitted
Just to clarify for anyone who's not seen this before, although the "wave front" will appear to move very quickly, the wave front is not actually transmitting any information - you are transmitting information from the light bulb to the surface 2 miles away, at c (assuming this is taking place in a vacuum)
This can be seen easily by modifying the experiment slightly. Shine the light at the surface 2 miles away, and rather than spinning it, simply turn it slightly. That point is when the information has been transmitted - the information being the rotation of the light. The light will now take about 10.7 microseconds to reach the surface, at c, and, after that time has passed, the beam will move at 22,619 miles per hour to the new position. You have to add on the 10.7 microseconds of initial delay, because that's the total time it took to transfer the information.
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The world doesn't owe you courtesy, but generally grants it. When it receives this attitude back, though, I can see it reconsidering. It really isn't so difficult to acknowledge and accept that someone might want a feature for a piece of software, and yet be willing neither to do it themselves nor pay for it. And yet they still are perfectly welcome to express their wish for that feature! It's not that developers have to do everything that users say, but it's simply courteous to pay attention to feedback and requests, deal with them sensibly and thoughtfully, and take action if appropriate.
In fact, I think many of the actual problems in developing countries (when I say actual problems I do not mean, for example, drug abuse, but anti-social behaviour - which could possibly stem from the former) are caused by a two-horned problem: many people today are either pussies or dicks. Not to get to "Team America" about it, but if people weren't dicks - i.e. were, in the most honest sense of the word, nice, life would be a whole lot more pleasant. If the root cause of people's dickishness were found, and people started smiling more, saying "Good morning," talking to people whom they never met before, I think we'd all be phenomenally more happy. I know that when I am party to such idle pleasantries I feel significantly more chipper than I did beforehand. The second problem - that people are pussies - allows the dicks to flourish. If we weren't such pussies, then we'd put would-be dicks quickly in their place - shame them with the power of public embarrassment. Of course, there is no stable middle equilibrium - once we have too many pussies, the dickishness of the dicks increases such that more people become pussies for fear of their shaming backfiring. Thus we achieve the current aura on the underground, where few dare look or speak to anyone they don't know.
You imply that businesses these days have the opportunity to choose whether or not they rely on Google for some or most of their custom.
Either way, try licking ice at -50 and tell us it's slippery!
This is indeed true. Indeed, it's why nD geometry is harder still - because one has to visualise something almost unvisualisable. In fact, as you say, if I want to visualise a hypercube, I have to visualise it in 3D space and extend a cube to a hypercube as I would a square to create a cube.
Yes, this is indeed an issue - I must admit that some of the change from GCSE to high-school maths was that we were expected to think a bit more, but nonetheless, there's little we can expect to meet on the exam that we won't know pretty much exactly. What's nice though at this point is that there tend to be a few different ways of doing things, and if you're used to associating certain methods with certain problems you get caught doing things the long way. That's where actually knowing what you're doing helps.
Mathematically? Not vastly - it's just a logical extension. The real challenge for English students (speaking as an English student) is that even up to A-level, one is not taught to tackle new problems - only the same problems with different numbers. OK, that's exaggerated, but in general, you know exactly what type of question each one is, and exactly which methods to apply. There's very little original thought required. If English students were taught a bit differently - required, for example, to derive methods themselves, then even if they didn't have the knowledge required for the 3D trig question, they could work it out from first principles because it really doesn't (seem to - I've not completed it) involve more complicated maths than basic trig.
On the other hand, the question from the first year university course baffles me, since it is unbelievably simple. So, although similar amounts of mathematical knowledge are required, it is definitely true that the Chinese question is of a more appropriate level. I (heading for university in September) could do it in seconds. I am now going to attempt the Chinese one.
I'm not intimately acquainted with the Ubuntu release schedule, but from what I hear, this seems to be symptomatic of the strict bi-annual schedule. If they allowed run-overs while release-critical bugs were squashed or enforced longer code freezes for example, perhaps we wouldn't see such sloppiness. Although I'm not too fussed either - I moved from FC to Ubuntu to debian when I decided it was nicer to have regular feature upgrades. (More regular than backports)
Fair dos. Presumably the decision was made based on average usage, deemed to be that of someone typing. For me, a send button is just clutter, really. Especially since I usually have one hand on the keyboard all the time.
What were you just using to type your gTalk message with, if not the keyboard?
Hmm, I don't think this has been thought through properly. (regardless of the insightful mod) Just because you've patched up the security hole on the host computer doesn't mean you can't still send stuff out. And of course, it's less than trivial to build in a time delay before the bot patches security holes and terminates itself, during which time it infects as many PCs as it can - so if, by some mechanism, the way you got in is related to the way you're sending yourself out, it would still work.
I should hope so, thermodynamics tends to ensure things like that. Ethanol, petrol, coal, etc are all just ways of transporting energy in usable form. You're not magically creating any new energy. The idea behind using ethanol instead of petrol is that currently there's a lot of CO2 stored in petrol, but by growing plants then burning them, we're not adding any CO2 to the atmosphere.
Unless you were referring to energy required to actually process crops into ethanol, in which case you might remember that the crops from which ethanol is refined produce byproducts capable of also being harnessed for their energy content.
Not that I'm disagreeing, but if you indicate the old address out loud, then you'd have had to spell it so they didn't go to game.com or something. This is, nonetheless, worse.
If you tried to use unmaintained drivers with windows several releases down the line, would you expect those to work, as well? Good counterexamples are the nvidia and ATi drivers, neither of which are in the kernel source tree, both of which update reasonably regularly, and both of which work.
The mathematics department at the college I attend has just bought the so-called "interactive whiteboards" for most maths classrooms. This is another example of what appears to be people who don't really think things through being duped by shiny technology promising to improve teaching or learning. Goodness knows who decided that providing us with computers designed to do the exact same things as whiteboards, but apparently not providing more than the most basic of training with the included whiteboard simulator, would improve anything. The upshot, predictably, is a load of pissed of maths teachers who now find that they are forced to do the same task on an inferior piece of equipment.
Unless someone gives them some training, and some more software, then all this can ever be as an expensive way of doing the same thing as before, but worse, since they have a lower resolution, are less intuitive, and are slower - the sensitivity seems to mean that drawing quickly is impossible, and writing is uniformly illegible. (Examples, for example, once turned out looking more like Exomiles) In one classroom at least, a traditional whiteboard is going to be installed by the side of the new one (with a hole cut out of the middle, because it will now be covering the light switch) and the word from our teacher is that this will be used in preference to the new "monstrosity."
There is a vague possibility that, at some point, someone will decide to put graphing software up, but it's difficult to see how this will be more helpful than what we have at the moment.
But it pretty obviously isn't. The goal is to try and prevent littering. Not that it's the right way to go about it, since, given the mentality of England's litterer's and vandals, it will either breed resentment or just have no effect whatsoever.
Faulty logic - the set of square numbers is infinitely large, but does not contain 3. An infinite number of universes does not imply that every singe eventuality is contained in them.
That assumes that all that is possible is what we know about.
I'm no microbiologist, but I find it unlikely that enzymes will trigger an immune response, especially if they're not often encountered. The reason that cells are antigens is their surface proteins, but obviously a single protein does not have such things.
What you (and I) have is termed, at least by my optician, as colour deficiency. Colour blindness is indeed (apparently and technically) a complete absence of colour-sensing ability. For the record, I also find it interesting that I have better colour vision if the patch of colour is larger. I am useless, for example, at reading resistor colour codes.
While we're about spelling, that should be knew ;)
I don't mean to be rude, but, that's irrelevant. That's just how it happens. How do you propose your pushing on your end of the bar is translated to a push at the other end?
I'm no expert, but surely you don't reduce the detail by using a higher ISO - the detail is already lost due to a cheap CCD or cheap film. Increasing the ISO turns up the gain, as you said, amplifying noise with it - but it amplifies the not-noise by the same amount; new noise shouldn't be introduced.
What actually happens is that the molecules in your hand push on the layer of atoms at your end of the bar. This layer knocks into the next layer, which knocks into the next, and so on, until finally the layer of atoms at the other guy's end knocks into the molecules of his hand, and he receives the information.
Yes it is, but you've essentially set up that information prior to starting the experiment, so you have to start timing from back then. As in the cars example, you have to count the time starting from when you transmitted the information about the accident being cleared - imagine that someone told the driver of the first car that the accident would be cleared in ten minutes, pass it back. That information would travel at some speed, which is analogous to c. Once the information's all in place, the information appears to travel from car to car very quickly, but it actually doesn't - it's already been transmitted
This can be seen easily by modifying the experiment slightly. Shine the light at the surface 2 miles away, and rather than spinning it, simply turn it slightly. That point is when the information has been transmitted - the information being the rotation of the light. The light will now take about 10.7 microseconds to reach the surface, at c, and, after that time has passed, the beam will move at 22,619 miles per hour to the new position. You have to add on the 10.7 microseconds of initial delay, because that's the total time it took to transfer the information.