Could you at least check Wine compatibility?
See, if your app is completely Wine-compatible, it's almost like it's ported. IIRC, Picasa on Linux works in this way.
Installing scientific Python modules (scipy, numpy, matplotlib) on Linux -trivial. Installing the same module on Windows: boring but easy. Installing them on OS X: Next to impossible, a lot of command line hacking needed.
I have a MB Pro and I always fire up the Gentoo partition. I tried to use OS X but the whole thing is terrible. Gimp doesn't work. Inkscape doesn't work. Scientific packages don't work. I simply cannot do serious work on OS X.
Plenty of reactive silanes are possible. All known biochemistry is based on carbon, so of course silicon is not going to catalyze many biochemical reactions.
The problem is not building catalysts. The problem is that life needs polymers. Silicon-based polymers are not stable as carbon-based polymers. The variety of stable molecules that silicon can form is much less than the variety of stable molecules carbon can form. See wikipedia for discussion.
So why do we need to stifle ideas of how things might evolve on other planets with vastly different experimental conditions?
No stifling, just weighting the odds. I'd love to be surprised by the discovery of a silicon-based lifeform -I just think it's not going to happen soon.
This claim has recently been challenged. However I'd love to search for Earth rocks on Mars and look at the surroundings -but it is probably a prohibitively time-consuming, complex search.
There is a problem with silicon-based life. Silicon is not as nearly versatile chemically as carbon is. It is highly doubtful silicon can sustain any meaningful biochemistry -at least, not by itself, a biochemistry made of carbon AND silicon is probably possible. The most worrying data for silicon-based life come from Earth itself: there is much more silicon than carbon on Earth's surface, yet we are a carbon-based lifeform.
I often wonder what we could find if hypothetical carbon planets turn to exist.
As for iron-based life, I don't know where this idea comes from, and I'd be interested in reading about it. It seems chemically very wacky too, but I'd like to know on which assumptions it is based. Any link?
Well, given the trailes, I surely wouldn't want to see the Watchmen movie.
It seems to have nothing to do with the (truly wonderful) comic. Why is Nite Owl a Batman ripoff? Why does Ozymandias look like an emo? Why does the Comedian seem to come straight out the Village People?
This looks like just Hollywood s**t, just like 300 was.
(And no, I'm not trolling or flaming or what. That's my honest opinion. If you disagree, is fine with me.)
In the Italian Social Republic, socialization of factories and enterprises was (at least formally) begun. Occupation by the Allies ended the experiment.
Fascism is, economically, rooted in Socialism. It is basically Socialism with Nationalism overtones... hmm, someone says National-Socialism?
I think your interpretation on euthanasia is at least as overstretched as mine.
There are all good reasons to think that when it says "To please no one will I prescribe a deadly drug nor give advice which may cause his death." it means something "I won't use my abilities to help killers to kill people", not to explicitly avoid euthanasia.
As for abortion, well, yes, I disagree with the oath (It must be remembered however the oath was written in a period where abortion was probably very dangerous). Not that I'm very much embarrassed by that: if I have to choose between today's ethical standards and the ones of thousands of years ago, well, I choose the former. So much for the poor old oath.
but euthanasia by actively terminating someone's life does not qualify as "doing no harm".
It depends on your definition of "harm". For my definition of harm, being forced to live in pain is much more harmful than the alternative of dying peacefully (it makes my life so bad that it is better no life than this kind of life). So, no contradiction. As for abortion, it depends on your definition of "patient". To me, an unborn embryo is not a patient, just like a tumour is not. Again, no contradiction.
And yes, as a scientist, it is obvious I feel entitled to push my view on the data. If I found these data, no one probably will know better than me about them, therefore I'm the one most entitled to talk about them.
I like programming, but I've never delved into it too much. However, after childhood experiences with Basic (brrr!) and Matlab, I've become a decent Python programmer, and I'm currently developing a modular data analysis application in my research laboratory.
I'd like to learn new languages. I tried to learn C++ just for the sake of it, but the fact is, I never needed it, so I just stopped bothering. I can do practically all what I want to do with Python, and I never found myself in the situation of needing C, C++ or Java. And I'm not the "coding for the coding's sake" kind of person. I like coding a lot, but only if there's a definite purpose for it.
So, what is your advice? What kind of programming language should I learn after Python, and what kind of practical problems could it be applied on that could be interesting? For example, I wondered if PHP and/or Javascript are good choices, since I'd like to do web stuff but I have almost no experience on it. But they're just examples. What I mean, what kind of problems would require me to say "oh s**t, this needs C++/Java/Lisp/Ruby... and not Python"?
Children have no concept of privacy. They know when they have it, but they don't think of privacy as an idea, much less a right that they deserve. And they shouldn't. They don't have that right (nor do you) while they live under their parent's roof. Until you get your own place and pay your own way, privacy is a privilege granted to you, as a sign of maturity. And children are not mature. They can be brilliant, insightful, but they are still children.
This is simply wrong. When I was 7, I had an extremly strong concept of privacy (I just didn't know the name of it), and I struggled as much as possible to maintain it. I hated as hell my parents dealing with my private things. Every five minutes: "what are you doing?" "what are you writing?" "how was it at school today?" and everything I wanted to answer them was "shut the fuck up, it's MY stuff" (and sometimes I actually did). Why should my parents read the novels I was writing? Why should they know about my fantasies and dreams and games?
I'm sure a child shouldn't have the same privacy an adult has. But privacy, especially for some kind of introverted personalities, is a need to grow sane. I just wanted to live in my world, and my parents didn't allow that. Ruining my childhood, prettily, and ruining my relationship with them: I just can't sit down and chat easily with them even today, at 27, because I constantly feel inside they want to dig into my secrets and judge me, even if today there's no reason at all to think it.
I bought a MBP for your same hardware reasons. However, I practically immediately installed Gentoo on it. OS X Leopard is nifty, but to me is pretty useless as a OS. Many open source apps I use are not well supported (Openoffice, Amarok, Gimp, Inkscape, k3b. They either don't work, are lagging behind, or mix Mac paradigm with normal menu-in-window paradigm: so much for OS X usability); the OS X interface is awful (yes: awful. Graphically impressive, but awful. You can read comments on my blog), and MacPorts packages didn't compile 50% of the time.
Of course on Gentoo some hardware support is a bit flaky here and there, but it can only improve. We're talking of brand new hardware. Only disappointing thing is battery time (about 25-30% inferior to that on OS X, and yes, I pretty much optimized it as much as possible). That's why I still keep a substantial OS X partition on the thing.
Or do you think publishing is a magical free activity that has no actual costs associated with it?
It has costs. But not costs that justify the monstrous fees these journals want to read their papers. How much does it cost to publish on arXiv? Do we need to pay much more, really? Why don't we simply extend and fund a global, free database like arXiv?
The problem is, the whole scientific publication model is nonsense. We publish on journals where the authors are not paid a dime, if they don't have to pay themselves. Peer reviewers are also not paid a dime. And then, the institutions that employ the authors must then pay those journals' subscriptions.
About getting rich, well, I'm sure people working in these companies are not rich, just like Microsoft employees are not as wealthy as Bill Gates. But you have to explain me how you *cannot* be rich when you own a company that sells subscriptions in the order of tens of thousands of dollars about journals that are 1)mostly distributed online 2)do not pay their contributors 3)do not pay their peer reviewers 4)they even have advertising. If they are just "barely surviving", I guess ALL newspapers and magazines are collapsing.
Second, no one is getting rich from publishing academic journals.
Yes, seriously. I guess Wiley, ACS, Macmillan and the like just do publishing for fun. Too bad their "fun" costs a lot of money that is drained out of taxpayers' wallets and research funds.
Maybe you love the idea of GNU project etc., but you really don't understand it if you don't see that the inescapable consequence is that the whole book (or at least the whole book chapter) must be GFDLed now.
And that's why I love the GNU virality. It bends copyright to force the free spreading of information. That's what I want, politically and philosophically.
I actively edit Wikipedia, and I too have problems with the trivia policy. Usually trivia sections are made of interesting facts that however do not have a clear place in the article corpus. It does not mean that are unimportant, it means they are disconnected from the main logic of the article. So trivia sections arise as a mean for people to keep this information somewhere. I agree they shouldn't become monsters, but a 15-lines trivia section looks absolutely sane to me.
They are supported, but often not that good supported. Look at the Gentoo forums for ALSA issues and you will find tons of horror stories. The Intel ones are the worst in this regard.
For example, if "teh terrist" wanted to send a message like "attack now", why couldn't the message be given via a pre-arranged signal -- say the image shows Osama wearing a silver watch for "It's go time", and a gold watch for "wait out the Americans". No one can detect a "hidden message" because there is none.
(1)This works only on messages you already have acknowledged with the receiver. Good for "attack now", but bad for "The new address of the target is X,Y,Z..."
(2)If you repeaditly use the same image(s) to send the same message, the code is plainly cracked.
I was planning to buy a MacBook Pro as a Linux laptop (Kubuntu or Gentoo). It looked like a powerful and reasonably priced thing; from the howtos etc. I've read I've seen that probably it is not straightforward to have Linux running flawlessly on it, but it's nevertheless doable. However I'm constantly hearing of hardware horror stories about the MacBook Pro, this one being only the last: see here for example. Is the Macbook Pro really so bad? Is, let's say, a Sony VAIO, better or I am hearing more noise about the Macbook just because people expect Apple hardware to be perfect?
Slashdot Mirror
And anyone who thinks Java, Ruby, or Python have enough power to write themselves has not looked carefully at them.
Maybe it's you not looking carefully enough?
Could you at least check Wine compatibility? See, if your app is completely Wine-compatible, it's almost like it's ported. IIRC, Picasa on Linux works in this way.
My own experience as a Macbook user:
Installing scientific Python modules (scipy, numpy, matplotlib) on Linux -trivial.
Installing the same module on Windows: boring but easy.
Installing them on OS X: Next to impossible, a lot of command line hacking needed.
I have a MB Pro and I always fire up the Gentoo partition. I tried to use OS X but the whole thing is terrible. Gimp doesn't work. Inkscape doesn't work. Scientific packages don't work. I simply cannot do serious work on OS X.
I'm Italian, and I'm educated to know that billion = 10^9
The problem is not building catalysts. The problem is that life needs polymers. Silicon-based polymers are not stable as carbon-based polymers. The variety of stable molecules that silicon can form is much less than the variety of stable molecules carbon can form. See wikipedia for discussion.
No stifling, just weighting the odds. I'd love to be surprised by the discovery of a silicon-based lifeform -I just think it's not going to happen soon.
It survived on a moon lander for a decade.
This claim has recently been challenged. However I'd love to search for Earth rocks on Mars and look at the surroundings -but it is probably a prohibitively time-consuming, complex search.
There is a problem with silicon-based life. Silicon is not as nearly versatile chemically as carbon is. It is highly doubtful silicon can sustain any meaningful biochemistry -at least, not by itself, a biochemistry made of carbon AND silicon is probably possible. The most worrying data for silicon-based life come from Earth itself: there is much more silicon than carbon on Earth's surface, yet we are a carbon-based lifeform.
I often wonder what we could find if hypothetical carbon planets turn to exist.
As for iron-based life, I don't know where this idea comes from, and I'd be interested in reading about it. It seems chemically very wacky too, but I'd like to know on which assumptions it is based. Any link?
Well, given the trailes, I surely wouldn't want to see the Watchmen movie.
It seems to have nothing to do with the (truly wonderful) comic. Why is Nite Owl a Batman ripoff? Why does Ozymandias look like an emo? Why does the Comedian seem to come straight out the Village People?
This looks like just Hollywood s**t, just like 300 was.
(And no, I'm not trolling or flaming or what. That's my honest opinion. If you disagree, is fine with me.)
That's exactly what Fascism suggests.
In the Italian Social Republic, socialization of factories and enterprises was (at least formally) begun. Occupation by the Allies ended the experiment.
Fascism is, economically, rooted in Socialism. It is basically Socialism with Nationalism overtones... hmm, someone says National-Socialism?
I think your interpretation on euthanasia is at least as overstretched as mine.
There are all good reasons to think that when it says "To please no one will I prescribe a deadly drug nor give advice which may cause his death." it means something "I won't use my abilities to help killers to kill people", not to explicitly avoid euthanasia.
As for abortion, well, yes, I disagree with the oath (It must be remembered however the oath was written in a period where abortion was probably very dangerous). Not that I'm very much embarrassed by that: if I have to choose between today's ethical standards and the ones of thousands of years ago, well, I choose the former. So much for the poor old oath.
but euthanasia by actively terminating someone's life does not qualify as "doing no harm".
It depends on your definition of "harm". For my definition of harm, being forced to live in pain is much more harmful than the alternative of dying peacefully (it makes my life so bad that it is better no life than this kind of life). So, no contradiction. As for abortion, it depends on your definition of "patient". To me, an unborn embryo is not a patient, just like a tumour is not. Again, no contradiction.
And yes, as a scientist, it is obvious I feel entitled to push my view on the data. If I found these data, no one probably will know better than me about them, therefore I'm the one most entitled to talk about them.
I like programming, but I've never delved into it too much. However, after childhood experiences with Basic (brrr!) and Matlab, I've become a decent Python programmer, and I'm currently developing a modular data analysis application in my research laboratory.
I'd like to learn new languages. I tried to learn C++ just for the sake of it, but the fact is, I never needed it, so I just stopped bothering. I can do practically all what I want to do with Python, and I never found myself in the situation of needing C, C++ or Java. And I'm not the "coding for the coding's sake" kind of person. I like coding a lot, but only if there's a definite purpose for it.
So, what is your advice? What kind of programming language should I learn after Python, and what kind of practical problems could it be applied on that could be interesting? For example, I wondered if PHP and/or Javascript are good choices, since I'd like to do web stuff but I have almost no experience on it. But they're just examples. What I mean, what kind of problems would require me to say "oh s**t, this needs C++/Java/Lisp/Ruby... and not Python"?
You forget the people that would just switch to Linux if a Photoshop native port would be available.
Children have no concept of privacy. They know when they have it, but they don't think of privacy as an idea, much less a right that they deserve. And they shouldn't. They don't have that right (nor do you) while they live under their parent's roof. Until you get your own place and pay your own way, privacy is a privilege granted to you, as a sign of maturity. And children are not mature. They can be brilliant, insightful, but they are still children.
This is simply wrong. When I was 7, I had an extremly strong concept of privacy (I just didn't know the name of it), and I struggled as much as possible to maintain it. I hated as hell my parents dealing with my private things. Every five minutes: "what are you doing?" "what are you writing?" "how was it at school today?" and everything I wanted to answer them was "shut the fuck up, it's MY stuff" (and sometimes I actually did). Why should my parents read the novels I was writing? Why should they know about my fantasies and dreams and games?
I'm sure a child shouldn't have the same privacy an adult has. But privacy, especially for some kind of introverted personalities, is a need to grow sane. I just wanted to live in my world, and my parents didn't allow that. Ruining my childhood, prettily, and ruining my relationship with them: I just can't sit down and chat easily with them even today, at 27, because I constantly feel inside they want to dig into my secrets and judge me, even if today there's no reason at all to think it.
I bought a MBP for your same hardware reasons. However, I practically immediately installed Gentoo on it. OS X Leopard is nifty, but to me is pretty useless as a OS. Many open source apps I use are not well supported (Openoffice, Amarok, Gimp, Inkscape, k3b. They either don't work, are lagging behind, or mix Mac paradigm with normal menu-in-window paradigm: so much for OS X usability); the OS X interface is awful (yes: awful. Graphically impressive, but awful. You can read comments on my blog), and MacPorts packages didn't compile 50% of the time.
Of course on Gentoo some hardware support is a bit flaky here and there, but it can only improve. We're talking of brand new hardware. Only disappointing thing is battery time (about 25-30% inferior to that on OS X, and yes, I pretty much optimized it as much as possible). That's why I still keep a substantial OS X partition on the thing.
Or do you think publishing is a magical free activity that has no actual costs associated with it?
It has costs. But not costs that justify the monstrous fees these journals want to read their papers. How much does it cost to publish on arXiv? Do we need to pay much more, really? Why don't we simply extend and fund a global, free database like arXiv?
The problem is, the whole scientific publication model is nonsense. We publish on journals where the authors are not paid a dime, if they don't have to pay themselves. Peer reviewers are also not paid a dime. And then, the institutions that employ the authors must then pay those journals' subscriptions.
About getting rich, well, I'm sure people working in these companies are not rich, just like Microsoft employees are not as wealthy as Bill Gates. But you have to explain me how you *cannot* be rich when you own a company that sells subscriptions in the order of tens of thousands of dollars about journals that are 1)mostly distributed online 2)do not pay their contributors 3)do not pay their peer reviewers 4)they even have advertising. If they are just "barely surviving", I guess ALL newspapers and magazines are collapsing.
Second, no one is getting rich from publishing academic journals.
Yes, seriously. I guess Wiley, ACS, Macmillan and the like just do publishing for fun. Too bad their "fun" costs a lot of money that is drained out of taxpayers' wallets and research funds.
Do you mean posting an article to arXiv.org is too much work for you? Sheesh, it's a 30 minutes stuff.
And it's not too surprising that gas giants form further out. They can't survive too close to a star.
Extrasolar planet research disproves this claim.
Maybe you love the idea of GNU project etc., but you really don't understand it if you don't see that the inescapable consequence is that the whole book (or at least the whole book chapter) must be GFDLed now.
And that's why I love the GNU virality. It bends copyright to force the free spreading of information. That's what I want, politically and philosophically.
I actively edit Wikipedia, and I too have problems with the trivia policy. Usually trivia sections are made of interesting facts that however do not have a clear place in the article corpus. It does not mean that are unimportant, it means they are disconnected from the main logic of the article. So trivia sections arise as a mean for people to keep this information somewhere. I agree they shouldn't become monsters, but a 15-lines trivia section looks absolutely sane to me.
They are supported, but often not that good supported. Look at the Gentoo forums for ALSA issues and you will find tons of horror stories. The Intel ones are the worst in this regard.
For example, if "teh terrist" wanted to send a message like "attack now", why couldn't the message be given via a pre-arranged signal -- say the image shows Osama wearing a silver watch for "It's go time", and a gold watch for "wait out the Americans". No one can detect a "hidden message" because there is none.
(1)This works only on messages you already have acknowledged with the receiver. Good for "attack now", but bad for "The new address of the target is X,Y,Z..."
(2)If you repeaditly use the same image(s) to send the same message, the code is plainly cracked.
As for the envelope, I guess you're joking.
there is the possibility (no matter how remote) you will be interested enough to click the ad and investigate further.
Trust me, there is NO such possibility in my case. So why should I see advertising that for me is nothing more than noise on the page?
I was planning to buy a MacBook Pro as a Linux laptop (Kubuntu or Gentoo). It looked like a powerful and reasonably priced thing; from the howtos etc. I've read I've seen that probably it is not straightforward to have Linux running flawlessly on it, but it's nevertheless doable. However I'm constantly hearing of hardware horror stories about the MacBook Pro, this one being only the last: see here for example. Is the Macbook Pro really so bad? Is, let's say, a Sony VAIO, better or I am hearing more noise about the Macbook just because people expect Apple hardware to be perfect?