Scientists have faith; they believe in the following two axioms:
1. There exists only one objective truth.
2. Any group of people can find the same objective truth (corollary: There is no Priestly Class)
Everything else follows. When someone says, "This is the Truth" a scientist, being a skeptic, says "Oh, Really? Evidence?" In our scientific journals not only is opinion expressed, but how the opinion was formed, and the procedures used to get at it. Many, many times in the past, a well believed scientific precept was waiting for someone else to say, "Now wait a darn minute..." and prove them wrong. In my field, chemistry, there was a very famous disagreement between two chemists, Olah (the new kid) and Brown (the highly lauded Old Guard). For years, Brown said most unflattering things about Olah, but the Truth was there, and as time went on, more and more chemists found the results that had guided Olah, and more examples besides. In the end, the Old Guard was shown to be wrong. This is how science works, and this is why science works.
At the University where I work, there are cameras in all of the lobby areas and in many of the labs. They are publicly accessible, for the most part - non-port 22 but otherwise unsecured. However, because the University wants to be able to use the pictures in legal proceedings, all the camera areas are clearly marked with "Video Surveillance" stickers.
I can't speak for anyone else, but it's not that hard to just not do funky things in these areas.
Yes, it intrudes on my sphere, but I have no expectation of privacy at work, or on the street. If I want to do something private, I go somewhere private. It's not that much of a burden, at least to me.
Gee, most of us *nix people - what did that guy call us, something about smoking roosters over small pieces of wood - know that when you need to copy a few gigabytes in background, you use "nice" and crank the priority way down. This has been around since something like 1975 or so.
For those of you who prefer completely natural cleaners, d-limonene (orange oil) works wonders. Goo Gone is limonene diluted with a (cheaper) petroleum solvent.
The only downside for pure citrus orange oil is that your laptop may smell like oranges for days.
With the mandated end of NASA's old, tired, bureaucratic programs, all the desk jockey administrators are out looking for a better free ride. Who knows, maybe they'll go to Wall Street.
In any event, NASA is being left with a bunch of frustrated old farts who were then, and are now, Engineers (capital "E" on purpose). When you turn Engineers loose, and don't saddle them with endless paperwork, they start thinking up things.
And sometimes these things are total disasters. That's the way engineering works.
And then, sometimes these ideas are completely and totally brilliant. "Hey, Joe, what if we take this soggy wheat, grind it up, and bake it into loaves?"
Never forget NASA's greatest disasters were predicated upon management overruling their own engineers. "Too cold to launch? Don't be Silly." "We had a meeting and decided that that big chunk of ice didn't cause any damage, so why should we ask the military to photograph it?"
If we fired 80% of NASA's management, we might have a Space Agency back. You know, people who do jaw dropping things, as opposed to people who print nice glossy viewgraphs of hypothetical jaw dropping things. Just consider, if the Russians hadn't launched the first ISS module, NASA would likely still have an Origami space station -- all paper and cleverness.
Long ago - decades, before Bill Gates was invented, a lot of research went into what would be required for actual voice recognition.
A counterexample was given, about an engineering marvel (of the time) that would recognise when someone said the word "watermelon". For a long time, people in the industry assumed that the path to voice recognition consisted of building more and better watermelon boxes.
Several authors, including Alan Turing himself, argued that actual voice recognition could never be accomplished with a large array of watermelon boxes. Current VR software divides input into a series of hyperplanes, and attempts to build a best match from the classification tree.
THis is the 2010 version of the watermelon box.
Real voice recognition won't be practical until the input is parsed, matched against context, and structured much akin to diagramming a sentence in those old English (or other) classes. In short, matching against a vocabulary is trying to solve an exponential problem with a (large) polynomial engine.
It won't be until the computer actually understands what is said that VR is likely to be practical in a global sense.
As a person who has been building computer systems for 35 years, it bothers me to see a huge body of research done into subjects like these ignored, because someone thinks that none of it applies to PC's.
The words of the Bishop of Rome about the internet, freedom, and transparency, ring very familiar.
It was this very flavor of rhetoric that came from British citizens, Muslim Jihadis, who decry that freedom is the basic sin of mankind. They yearn for Sharia law to rule their lives.
Of course, I have no problem should they choose to live their lives under Sharia law. My problem comes about when they decide that I should live my life by Sharia law, whether I want to or not. It is, they explain, good for me.
So when el Papa decided that internet freedom is not for me, my immediate reaction was, "I've heard all this before."
It never fails to astound me when Men of God not only want to live their own lives by their code of conduct, but they want me to live that way, also.
When God shows up in a burning bush, and then explains how I should live, I may decide to give it some credibility. Until then, I'll go on striving for freedom of choice for myself, and for others. They can, if they choose, live by Biblical law.
It is indeed. Companies that support open source projects make money in other venues, often supported at their base by the very non-profit open source that they support.
Other companies buy up projects to kill them. After all, it's also hard to pay employees for your very expensive database when a more-or-less free one does a more-or-less good job.
Open source is not profitable, per se. If you require beancounters to add up direct income from the product itself, that's a non-starter. If you have a little more leeway and count service contracts, that's a little better.
By and large, though, open source benefits the community and not the captalist. It's simply too hard for accountants to add up all the indirect benefits to society, and then, also indirectly, to themselves. Having a solid code base that can be -- and is -- improved by thousands of eyes is akin to trying to ennumerate how Van Gogh failed to profit from his pretty pictures.
In my first lecture for a quantum physics course at UIUC in 1970, the professor - who had a most quaint German accent - walked in and told us that we were not permitted to take notes. More to the point, he stated, "Der vill be no note taking in dis class. You vill listen vit your minds and not vit your notebooks."
People can pretty easily live without toilets - billions of them do. Would one argue that a toilet is "not a necessity?" I think not.
If my internet connection were to evaporate, I have a slew of bills that would not get paid, at least for a while. The majority of my purchasing accounts are paperless, and I would not get statements. My bank account is electronic; I have not written a check in many years. I could go back, but it would be a Herculean effort.
OK, it's not necessary. Neither is a refrigerator.
In point of fact, there are sites that I would just rather not see from Google searches. An example of this would be news articles about politics from either NMR or Fox News. If I want propaganda, I can go to al-jazeera. In a similar vein, when I am searching for a product, I do not want to see twenty "we compare prices" sites -- if I wanted a price comparison site, I'd go to one.
I would like a way to customize my google "experience" so that I could specify sites that I simply do not want to see. Far be it from me to suggest that others not see these sites; I just want google to leave them out of results it produces for me.
As for pay news sites, I have paid subscriptions to a few news sites, and also subscriptions to some sites presented in Google Scholar. That does not mean that I want to subscribe - ever - to certain "news" sites that I find to be exceptionally biased.
If nothing else, perhaps I can convince google to add an option (plugin?) so that certain news sites links are rendered in yellow, instead of the default color. This would be helpful, at least to me.
In case you hadn't noticed, "obvious prior art" doesn't seem to be so, to the USPTO. Clearly the people who work at the patent office in the USA are ancient men who respect football and beer and have secretaries to print their email so that they can read it. They have black dial phones, and a cell is a place to hold felons. They have a colective case of cranio-sygmoidal insertion that would rate a Guiness record.
I discovered that those colurful "Designed for Windows" stickers look positively marvelous on the white porcelain just above the flush lever on my toilet.
Not too many years ago, in Africa - lake Nyos to be specific - an event happened that wiped out entire villages, adults, children, cattle, even flies. A deadly cloud of poison gas was released and killed everything, where it lay, or stood, or roosted. What was the evil enterprise, you ask, that released this killing cloud on all those people? Well, it wasn't a corporation (this time), it was the lake itself. The gas was Carbon Dioxide.
The lake had been "sequestering" carbon dioxide gas from volcanic vents for years, until one fateful night, a disturbance came along and the lake gave up it's deadly cargon into an invisible cloud of death, that enveloped villages along the shoreline and killed everything in it's path. Just a year or two ago, it happened again, this time in Yellowstone park. Elk and bison died where they stood, killed by a cloud of this invisible poison.
Now, "clean coal" advocates are suggesting that we should capture and "store" this poison by the millions of tons. And unlike nuclear waste, that can be stored for only 100,000 years until it becomes harmless, CO2 remains deadly forever. It has to be stored, in quantities tens of thousands of times as great as any nuclear waste, until the end of time.
One release from a power plant in an urban area could kill millions of people in an hour, with no chance of escape, no warning, and no way out. Of course, there probably won't be a release.
Just like aircraft probably won't crash. Just like wildfires probably won't happen near your house.
Do we want to trust the same engineers who designed the Pinto car, or Firestone tires, or the Tacoma Narrows bridge, to keep oceans of deadly gas stoppered up for all time?
Coal is the enemy here. "Clean Coal" is just the enemy in sheeps clothing.
Look at it this way. Suppose you wanted to become an auto mechanic. Which tool would you specialize in? Would you study crescent wrench? Or perhaps ball-peen hammer? Or would you go more mechanized, and study only impact wrench?
All if this is silly. Computer languages are tools, not destinations. You use the language that is appropriate to the task at hand. If you aren't intimately familiar with that language, snag a couple of books and learn.
In school, you should be learning approaches to problem solving. Far too many of the current crop of computer scientists are a whiz at a language, but unfamiliar with the concepts of algorithms and measurement of software solutions.
A whole lot of the ongoing and multitudinous bugs in Microsoft software stem from the belief, all those years ago, that decades of computer science research simply didn't apply to PC's.
There is a vast body of knowledge about how to construct reliable software, and how to avoid problems, and not a bit of it worries about whether such software is written in Java, or Eiffel, or C#, or any of the plethora of tools now available.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a wonderful tool. In the short term, it should allow a lot of people to track interesting trends.
In the long term, though, Heisenberg Rules. If I may paraphrase, "Knowledge of the model, invalidates the model."
Want a real world example today? Stock market. This is why automated make-money tools don't work nearly as well as they should.
Scientists have faith; they believe in the following two axioms:
1. There exists only one objective truth.
2. Any group of people can find the same objective truth (corollary: There is no Priestly Class)
Everything else follows. When someone says, "This is the Truth" a scientist, being a skeptic, says "Oh, Really? Evidence?" In our scientific journals not only is opinion expressed, but how the opinion was formed, and the procedures used to get at it. Many, many times in the past, a well believed scientific precept was waiting for someone else to say, "Now wait a darn minute..." and prove them wrong. In my field, chemistry, there was a very famous disagreement between two chemists, Olah (the new kid) and Brown (the highly lauded Old Guard). For years, Brown said most unflattering things about Olah, but the Truth was there, and as time went on, more and more chemists found the results that had guided Olah, and more examples besides. In the end, the Old Guard was shown to be wrong. This is how science works, and this is why science works.
Isn't this akin to the DEA informing a grocery store that they can't have a parking lot, because a lot of drug deals are taking place there at night?
At the University where I work, there are cameras in all of the lobby areas and in many of the labs. They are publicly accessible, for the most part - non-port 22 but otherwise unsecured. However, because the University wants to be able to use the pictures in legal proceedings, all the camera areas are clearly marked with "Video Surveillance" stickers.
I can't speak for anyone else, but it's not that hard to just not do funky things in these areas.
Yes, it intrudes on my sphere, but I have no expectation of privacy at work, or on the street. If I want to do something private, I go somewhere private. It's not that much of a burden, at least to me.
Gee, most of us *nix people - what did that guy call us, something about smoking roosters over small pieces of wood - know that when you need to copy a few gigabytes in background, you use "nice" and crank the priority way down. This has been around since something like 1975 or so.
Be very careful. Aluminium foil will not work effectively. On needs genuine tin foil to be safe.
For those of you who prefer completely natural cleaners, d-limonene (orange oil) works wonders. Goo Gone is limonene diluted with a (cheaper) petroleum solvent.
The only downside for pure citrus orange oil is that your laptop may smell like oranges for days.
With the mandated end of NASA's old, tired, bureaucratic programs, all the desk jockey administrators are out looking for a better free ride. Who knows, maybe they'll go to Wall Street.
In any event, NASA is being left with a bunch of frustrated old farts who were then, and are now, Engineers (capital "E" on purpose). When you turn Engineers loose, and don't saddle them with endless paperwork, they start thinking up things.
And sometimes these things are total disasters. That's the way engineering works.
And then, sometimes these ideas are completely and totally brilliant. "Hey, Joe, what if we take this soggy wheat, grind it up, and bake it into loaves?"
Never forget NASA's greatest disasters were predicated upon management overruling their own engineers. "Too cold to launch? Don't be Silly." "We had a meeting and decided that that big chunk of ice didn't cause any damage, so why should we ask the military to photograph it?"
If we fired 80% of NASA's management, we might have a Space Agency back. You know, people who do jaw dropping things, as opposed to people who print nice glossy viewgraphs of hypothetical jaw dropping things. Just consider, if the Russians hadn't launched the first ISS module, NASA would likely still have an Origami space station -- all paper and cleverness.
Long ago - decades, before Bill Gates was invented, a lot of research went into what would be required for actual voice recognition.
A counterexample was given, about an engineering marvel (of the time) that would recognise when someone said the word "watermelon". For a long time, people in the industry assumed that the path to voice recognition consisted of building more and better watermelon boxes.
Several authors, including Alan Turing himself, argued that actual voice recognition could never be accomplished with a large array of watermelon boxes. Current VR software divides input into a series of hyperplanes, and attempts to build a best match from the classification tree.
THis is the 2010 version of the watermelon box.
Real voice recognition won't be practical until the input is parsed, matched against context, and structured much akin to diagramming a sentence in those old English (or other) classes. In short, matching against a vocabulary is trying to solve an exponential problem with a (large) polynomial engine.
It won't be until the computer actually understands what is said that VR is likely to be practical in a global sense.
As a person who has been building computer systems for 35 years, it bothers me to see a huge body of research done into subjects like these ignored, because someone thinks that none of it applies to PC's.
The words of the Bishop of Rome about the internet, freedom, and transparency, ring very familiar.
It was this very flavor of rhetoric that came from British citizens, Muslim Jihadis, who decry that freedom is the basic sin of mankind. They yearn for Sharia law to rule their lives.
Of course, I have no problem should they choose to live their lives under Sharia law. My problem comes about when they decide that I should live my life by Sharia law, whether I want to or not. It is, they explain, good for me.
So when el Papa decided that internet freedom is not for me, my immediate reaction was, "I've heard all this before."
It never fails to astound me when Men of God not only want to live their own lives by their code of conduct, but they want me to live that way, also.
When God shows up in a burning bush, and then explains how I should live, I may decide to give it some credibility. Until then, I'll go on striving for freedom of choice for myself, and for others. They can, if they choose, live by Biblical law.
It is indeed. Companies that support open source projects make money in other venues, often supported at their base by the very non-profit open source that they support.
Other companies buy up projects to kill them. After all, it's also hard to pay employees for your very expensive database when a more-or-less free one does a more-or-less good job.
Open source is not profitable, per se. If you require beancounters to add up direct income from the product itself, that's a non-starter. If you have a little more leeway and count service contracts, that's a little better.
By and large, though, open source benefits the community and not the captalist. It's simply too hard for accountants to add up all the indirect benefits to society, and then, also indirectly, to themselves. Having a solid code base that can be -- and is -- improved by thousands of eyes is akin to trying to ennumerate how Van Gogh failed to profit from his pretty pictures.
Fork the code base. While we still can.
In my first lecture for a quantum physics course at UIUC in 1970, the professor - who had a most quaint German accent - walked in and told us that we were not permitted to take notes. More to the point, he stated, "Der vill be no note taking in dis class. You vill listen vit your minds and not vit your notebooks."
So, how many? At least one.
People can pretty easily live without toilets - billions of them do. Would one argue that a toilet is "not a necessity?" I think not.
If my internet connection were to evaporate, I have a slew of bills that would not get paid, at least for a while. The majority of my purchasing accounts are paperless, and I would not get statements. My bank account is electronic; I have not written a check in many years. I could go back, but it would be a Herculean effort.
OK, it's not necessary. Neither is a refrigerator.
After visiting the creation science museum, I wonder if the BYU crew found any evidence of saddles along with the dinosaurs?
For what it's worth, that marks my last Ubuntu install.
There are other fish in the sea, and Yahoo is a boat anchor.
When I was barely 21, or so, around 30 years ago, the porn flick "Stewardesses" was released in 3D.
I have no idea if it was a "big hit" or not, but watching ankles in peripheral vision was an interesting experience.
A nit - it's "site" instead of "sight"
On the other hand, NASA is well known for being real good at deciding something isn't dangerous.
In point of fact, there are sites that I would just rather not see from Google searches. An example of this would be news articles about politics from either NMR or Fox News. If I want propaganda, I can go to al-jazeera. In a similar vein, when I am searching for a product, I do not want to see twenty "we compare prices" sites -- if I wanted a price comparison site, I'd go to one.
I would like a way to customize my google "experience" so that I could specify sites that I simply do not want to see. Far be it from me to suggest that others not see these sites; I just want google to leave them out of results it produces for me.
As for pay news sites, I have paid subscriptions to a few news sites, and also subscriptions to some sites presented in Google Scholar. That does not mean that I want to subscribe - ever - to certain "news" sites that I find to be exceptionally biased.
If nothing else, perhaps I can convince google to add an option (plugin?) so that certain news sites links are rendered in yellow, instead of the default color. This would be helpful, at least to me.
In case you hadn't noticed, "obvious prior art" doesn't seem to be so, to the USPTO. Clearly the people who work at the patent office in the USA are ancient men who respect football and beer and have secretaries to print their email so that they can read it. They have black dial phones, and a cell is a place to hold felons. They have a colective case of cranio-sygmoidal insertion that would rate a Guiness record.
We'll see what Google does with this patent.
I discovered that those colurful "Designed for Windows" stickers look positively marvelous on the white porcelain just above the flush lever on my toilet.
And now, they're putting toxic chemtrails in space!
Not too many years ago, in Africa - lake Nyos to be specific - an event happened that wiped out entire villages, adults, children, cattle, even flies. A deadly cloud of poison gas was released and killed everything, where it lay, or stood, or roosted. What was the evil enterprise, you ask, that released this killing cloud on all those people? Well, it wasn't a corporation (this time), it was the lake itself. The gas was Carbon Dioxide.
The lake had been "sequestering" carbon dioxide gas from volcanic vents for years, until one fateful night, a disturbance came along and the lake gave up it's deadly cargon into an invisible cloud of death, that enveloped villages along the shoreline and killed everything in it's path. Just a year or two ago, it happened again, this time in Yellowstone park. Elk and bison died where they stood, killed by a cloud of this invisible poison.
Now, "clean coal" advocates are suggesting that we should capture and "store" this poison by the millions of tons. And unlike nuclear waste, that can be stored for only 100,000 years until it becomes harmless, CO2 remains deadly forever. It has to be stored, in quantities tens of thousands of times as great as any nuclear waste, until the end of time.
One release from a power plant in an urban area could kill millions of people in an hour, with no chance of escape, no warning, and no way out. Of course, there probably won't be a release.
Just like aircraft probably won't crash. Just like wildfires probably won't happen near your house.
Do we want to trust the same engineers who designed the Pinto car, or Firestone tires, or the Tacoma Narrows bridge, to keep oceans of deadly gas stoppered up for all time?
Coal is the enemy here. "Clean Coal" is just the enemy in sheeps clothing.
Look at it this way. Suppose you wanted to become an auto mechanic. Which tool would you specialize in? Would you study crescent wrench? Or perhaps ball-peen hammer? Or would you go more mechanized, and study only impact wrench?
All if this is silly. Computer languages are tools, not destinations. You use the language that is appropriate to the task at hand. If you aren't intimately familiar with that language, snag a couple of books and learn.
In school, you should be learning approaches to problem solving. Far too many of the current crop of computer scientists are a whiz at a language, but unfamiliar with the concepts of algorithms and measurement of software solutions.
A whole lot of the ongoing and multitudinous bugs in Microsoft software stem from the belief, all those years ago, that decades of computer science research simply didn't apply to PC's.
There is a vast body of knowledge about how to construct reliable software, and how to avoid problems, and not a bit of it worries about whether such software is written in Java, or Eiffel, or C#, or any of the plethora of tools now available.