So what you really mean is that instead of being about the details of the kernel, it is now about the userland apps that you use to actually Do Stuff(TM)? I think that this has been the case for a very long time already. Even in 1995, the details of the kernel were not that important. The important thing then was the user interface. Windows 95 had a GUI! weehoo! People got excited about Word 6.0, not about drivers. Since the very early days, it has been about the apps. At least ever since Visicalc.
So, given that, tell me again, what is the fuss all about today? How is it new?
I notice that you said that all required "programming" courses are C++. That is precisely right. C++, Java, C, Python, Perl, and friends are used for programming. However, programming and computer science are not really the same thing. Computer science is properly a branch of mathematics (See Turing, Von Neumann, Chaitin, Church, etc). The name is far more frequently whored out to give artificial gravitas to a programming training course, however. The world really requires surprisingly few actual computer scientists, and far far more programmers. However, a thorough understanding of computer science tends to make for better programmers.
Well, if somebody dies before me, then it is quite likely that their body will decompose before my eyes do... So in that case, their body would have decomposed before my very eyes. Happens all the time. Literally billions of bodies have decomposed before my very eyes.
Except that I didn't claim that failure to be 100% accurate on every point meant that the entire argument fell down. I wasn't even intending to engage in any argument, I was merely intending to nitpick. However, the page you link to clearly states that the "Nitpick" character uses his nitpicking to fallaciously attack the argument. Thus, I cannot be the Nitpick character in this case.
Heat does not rise! Heat does not rise! Hot air rises, which is not at all the same thing! If you block air circulation, that is, if you prevent convection, then heat will conduct downwards just as quickly and as easily as it will upwards. So stop saying heat rises! Let's see, it is 10 characters to type "heat rises", and 13 characters to type "hot air rises". Not that big of a difference to be correct instead of mindlessly repeating a myth. And you might think it doesn't make any difference, because you know that it isn't heat, but hot air, that rises, but people who don't know any better read what you write and hear what you say. When smart people who know better say things that are incorrect, you get dumb stuff like the Verizon people who think that.002 cents is the same thing as.002 dollars. So don't do it!
Yes, I do realize that if you put something above and something below a hot thing, the above something will typically be hotter than the below something. This is due to convection of the air, NOT some intrinsic anti-gravity property of heat. Radiative transfer and conductive transfer are isotropic. Convection only occurs in a gravitational field (not in free-fall, either).
</rant>
A collective right is only somewhat nonsense. It only doesn't make sense if it is a collective declaring its own rights, although even that could make sense if it is a promise to other collectives, like a treaty. A treaty could be viewed as saying "we collectively waive our right to attack you".
In other cases, where there is a hierarchy of collectives, though, it can make perfect sense. Consider state's rights. The federal government (a collective which is above the collectives called states) says "Ok, these things we reserve for you to decide. You, as a collective, but under us, have the right to {set your own speed limits, use the death penalty or not, etc}." So, the people of the great state of Texas have the collective right to set the speed limit on I-35E between Dallas and Italy. However, they do not have that individual right. Of course, I'm not checking my facts here, it may be that the speed limits are municipal rather than state rights... But I don't think so. Anyways, you get the point, right?
OTOH, I heartily agree that the Bill of Rights refers to individual rights of each person, rather than any form of collective rights, ludicrous or otherwise.
non-copyrighted music (Creative Commons, Public Domain etc)
Creative Commons stuff is definitely copyrighted. You might say copylefted, but it is still copyright law that makes that work. Don't get "free to use" confused with "in the public domain".
just as we find uses for all the other developments in technology.
Are you so sure? Perhaps we just never hear about the developments in tech that don't lead to some use. Or perhaps we hear about them, and then forget about them because they didn't turn out to be useful.
It should also be noted nothing is free from flaws and no security will ever be perfect.
You obviously skipped the formalism classes in computer science. I'm a physicist (we make notoriously bad programmers) and I know this. Programs can be proven correct. A program which has been proven to follow its spec exactly, running on a similarly proven hardware platform, is perfectly secure (assuming the spec is secure, which is not always a trivial thing).
For something as allegedly important as airline security, the TSA ought to be doing a far superior job to what they actually are doing, which is wasting an awful lot of taxpayer money on PR to make it seem like they are doing something legit.
Yes. This is correct. Divison is defined as the inverse operation of multiplication. In the cases where other ways of thinking about it (splitting a pie into n pieces, for instance) don't give any kind of reasonable answer, you go back and look at the definition. The definition is very rigorous and exact (comes at its base from ZFC (Zermelo-Fraenkel with Choice), and is a part of Peano Arithmetic), and one of the consequences of that definition is that division by zero is undefined.
No you missed the point. If nobody bought from these crippled music stores, then they would cease to exist. That has nothing to do with the existence of non-crippled music stores online. The conglomerates and their lawyers cannot force people to buy something, they can only force those selling other things out of existence.
Gosh, I did a seventh grade research paper ages ago on predicting earthquakes. I did mention radon... However, the conclusion of my paper was that earthquakes really couldn't be reliably predicted, so I suppose that some source I had said that you really couldn't effectively use radon as a good predictor, but I can't remember why exactly.
Some speculation: Perhaps false positives were an issue. After all, shutting a city down for an earthquake is an expensive proposition (just in lost time if nothing else), and if it turns out that the false positive rate is high, the cost would make it intractable. Also, I think an even bigger issue would be the very fact that it could be "months, days, minutes" before the quake. Radon might predict that a quake was likely soon, but is it going to be in 10 minutes, or is it going to be in two months? You certainly couldn't keep everyone on earthquake shutdown for two months.
To be quite honest, the educational incentive package thing isn't a bad idea. Except for the "only if everyone has windows", it isn't a nasty thing to do really. It doesn't exploit MS's monopoly, merely furthers it. And of course, since it doesn't require a monopoly to do, why don't we (the FOSS camp) do it too when the time comes?
I was using dose to refer to an amount, as in a dose of cough syrup is 4 tablespoons, rather than radiation dose (or dose equivalent, which is Sieverts). If you only consider the radiation dose, perhaps the lethal amount is 3mCi. However Polonium is a heavy metal, and as such will have chemical properties that make it toxic as well. Perhaps if this is taken into account, the lethal amount is closer to 200uCi.
Whoops. I didn't understand what bioavailable meant last time I replied to you. I took it to mean "available to lifeforms"... bzzt. For those of you who are like me, bioavailability refers to the percentage of the amount of a drug that has been administered that reaches full dispersal throughout the body. So, if you take any drug intravenously, the bioavailability is 100% (unless the halflife is in microseconds or something.). Anyway, I'm not sure how bioavailable it is either. However, I do know that pure Po tends to vaporise quite easily. If you had a block of it sitting on a table, after a while it would have all dissolved into the air. This of course leads to inhalation of it.
However, obviously since the lethal dose of Po-210 is so low, and you don't hear of smokers dying every day with symptoms like Litvinenko's, even from cigarettes, the amount of Po-210 is miniscule. I don't even want to think about how many packs of cigarettes you'd have to process in order to get the amount of Po-210 that killed Litvinenko.
Hey man, chill out. Since you didn't take notice, I did acknowledge that in this case, karma whoring does not come into it. If you're in doubt of this, please just go back and reread my post. I promise it is in there. I checked just now for good measure.
The reason I responded to your comment and not to the umpteen hundred other posts with some "Oh please merciful moderators don't mod me down" crap in them is that yours just happened to be the straw that broke the camel's back, to use the cliche.
I have absolutely no problem with the post being modded above 0. AS I SAID, since you didn't actually bother to read my post, I found the original post interesting, and would have modded it informative. I liked it. It was a good, informative comment. More of that is what slashdot needs. However, I do have a problem with whining about mod points for the sole purpose of getting mod points. It is a cheap trick, does not contribute to the actual quality of the post in the slightest, and it is just plain annoying. If a post deserves mod points, then it will get them. If it does not deserve mod points, then it will not get them. However, oftentimes, worthless posts with mod point whining will get modded up because it puts the mods on a guilt trip. I don't want to read worthless posts!
Oh, and if you or anyone else has a problem with their comments starting at 0, then REGISTER! Nothing is forcing you to stay an AC. Don't bitch about something that is completely within your power to change. Although, if this latest post is the kind of rubbish you more typically spew, you'd pretty quickly pick up negative karma, and I wouldn't have to read it anyway.
I'm not the one who called it ADD, btw. Using ADD in that sense SEVERELY pisses me off because it cheapens ADD and removes credibility from those of us who actually have been diagnosed with ADD by a competent physician.
The idea is that MS is exactly what you say, "Anti-competitive". Competition generally spurs innovation. If MS is trying to win the "browser wars" by flexing their monopoly rather than by making the best browser, then competition is failing to spur improvement. If the "browser wars" were between opera and firefox, or something like that, that is, two browsers not at all tied to the operating system, then whoever made the best browser would tend to win, and strongarm tactics would not enter into the picture. The end result would be better browsers, where better winds up being defined by general preference. And yes, some people would fine one browser to be better, and some would find another to be better. Thus, the war would continue, and browsers would just keep getting better and better.
If all browsers were CSS compliant (and compliant with all other web standards as well), it would no longer be a matter of "this browser doesn't work on this site", but it would be about which browser is fastest, has the smallest memory footprint, has the neatest features, is most secure, looks the prettiest, etc etc etc. Also, since web developers would no longer have to futz about spending the majority of their time devising dumb hacks to work around browsers X, Y, and Z transparently to the user, web development could proceed more quickly and more cheaply. This would lead to better websites, as well as less overhead for companies that need websites (and not just companies... charities need websites too. Less overhead means more of every donation can actually do some good.). I'm assuming that you were not actually thinking that non compliance was a good thing... That would just be more than I could handle.
I was interested in your post. I would have modded it informative (if I had mod points). And then I got to the end and read this. And I was pissed. Everyone realizes by now that saying something like that is a sure way to get mod points, regardless of the actual value of the post. It is a blatant manipulation of the moderation system, and it is time we stopped doing it! Everyone hates karma whores, but really this is just another form of karma whoring (except in this case, because you're an AC). Well, I say stop it!
The following phrases should be banned by the lameness filter: "I know I'll be modded down for this, but" "This will get modded -1, notgroupthink" "I hope someone mods this up" "too bad the moderation system won't let this be heard" And anything like them. Just STOP!
Wikipedia says the lethal dose is 200 uCi. So if you could get the Polonium out of its ceramic capsules (or whatever) in the antistatic brush, then you could kill two and a half people with it. But you would need 2000 of the little exempted sources from United Nuclear to kill someone.
Not very. There are no stable isotopes of polonium. The longest lived isotope has a half life of ~100 years. However, what he was poisoned with (Po-210) has a half-life of only ~140 days. So, if it were found naturally in general, we would also have to find its parent, Bismuth-210, or some other element isotope which decays to Polonium-210, in much greater quantity. Polonium does occur naturally in pitchblende, a uranium ore, where it is the decay product of something or other. Also, if it were bioavailable at all, I think we'd have heard of many more deaths already, and our cancer rate would be much higher. This stuff is so incredibly toxic. A cube 0.35 millimeters on a side is 2400 times the lethal dose. So having it floating around with the dust (it vaporises quite readily and without stimulation) would tend to cause massive amounts of death in the year or so that reasonable amounts of it were still around.
The particular distribution of isotopes. Sure it is mostly Polonium-210, but there are likely to also be small amounts of Polonium-209 and -211 (or perhaps other isotopes, I'm not sure). The ratios of those other isotopes to the total amount of Polonium could indicate where it came from. The distributions will change with time, as the polonium decays. But, if you can also find the decay products, the amounts of those would indicate the original distribution of the polonium isotopes.
The reason this could pick out one particular reactor is that each reactor is slightly different, and perhaps consistently generate particular distributions of various isotopes of various elements. However, that is just speculation on my part.
Problem with that is that there are so many people today who think "OMG TER'RISTS!" and decide that since the government has told them that being more closed will help them fight terrorists, the government should be more closed. So you'd have to know who you were talking to pretty well before deciding to use that argument.
Slashdot Mirror
So what you really mean is that instead of being about the details of the kernel, it is now about the userland apps that you use to actually Do Stuff(TM)? I think that this has been the case for a very long time already. Even in 1995, the details of the kernel were not that important. The important thing then was the user interface. Windows 95 had a GUI! weehoo! People got excited about Word 6.0, not about drivers. Since the very early days, it has been about the apps. At least ever since Visicalc.
So, given that, tell me again, what is the fuss all about today? How is it new?
I notice that you said that all required "programming" courses are C++. That is precisely right. C++, Java, C, Python, Perl, and friends are used for programming. However, programming and computer science are not really the same thing. Computer science is properly a branch of mathematics (See Turing, Von Neumann, Chaitin, Church, etc). The name is far more frequently whored out to give artificial gravitas to a programming training course, however. The world really requires surprisingly few actual computer scientists, and far far more programmers. However, a thorough understanding of computer science tends to make for better programmers.
Well, if somebody dies before me, then it is quite likely that their body will decompose before my eyes do... So in that case, their body would have decomposed before my very eyes. Happens all the time. Literally billions of bodies have decomposed before my very eyes.
Except that I didn't claim that failure to be 100% accurate on every point meant that the entire argument fell down. I wasn't even intending to engage in any argument, I was merely intending to nitpick. However, the page you link to clearly states that the "Nitpick" character uses his nitpicking to fallaciously attack the argument. Thus, I cannot be the Nitpick character in this case.
Heat does not rise! Heat does not rise! Hot air rises, which is not at all the same thing! If you block air circulation, that is, if you prevent convection, then heat will conduct downwards just as quickly and as easily as it will upwards. So stop saying heat rises! Let's see, it is 10 characters to type "heat rises", and 13 characters to type "hot air rises". Not that big of a difference to be correct instead of mindlessly repeating a myth. And you might think it doesn't make any difference, because you know that it isn't heat, but hot air, that rises, but people who don't know any better read what you write and hear what you say. When smart people who know better say things that are incorrect, you get dumb stuff like the Verizon people who think that .002 cents is the same thing as .002 dollars. So don't do it!
Yes, I do realize that if you put something above and something below a hot thing, the above something will typically be hotter than the below something. This is due to convection of the air, NOT some intrinsic anti-gravity property of heat. Radiative transfer and conductive transfer are isotropic. Convection only occurs in a gravitational field (not in free-fall, either).
</rant>
A collective right is only somewhat nonsense. It only doesn't make sense if it is a collective declaring its own rights, although even that could make sense if it is a promise to other collectives, like a treaty. A treaty could be viewed as saying "we collectively waive our right to attack you".
In other cases, where there is a hierarchy of collectives, though, it can make perfect sense. Consider state's rights. The federal government (a collective which is above the collectives called states) says "Ok, these things we reserve for you to decide. You, as a collective, but under us, have the right to {set your own speed limits, use the death penalty or not, etc}." So, the people of the great state of Texas have the collective right to set the speed limit on I-35E between Dallas and Italy. However, they do not have that individual right. Of course, I'm not checking my facts here, it may be that the speed limits are municipal rather than state rights... But I don't think so. Anyways, you get the point, right?
OTOH, I heartily agree that the Bill of Rights refers to individual rights of each person, rather than any form of collective rights, ludicrous or otherwise.
For something as allegedly important as airline security, the TSA ought to be doing a far superior job to what they actually are doing, which is wasting an awful lot of taxpayer money on PR to make it seem like they are doing something legit.
Yes. This is correct. Divison is defined as the inverse operation of multiplication. In the cases where other ways of thinking about it (splitting a pie into n pieces, for instance) don't give any kind of reasonable answer, you go back and look at the definition. The definition is very rigorous and exact (comes at its base from ZFC (Zermelo-Fraenkel with Choice), and is a part of Peano Arithmetic), and one of the consequences of that definition is that division by zero is undefined.
How many computer scientists does it take to change N lightbulbs?
I don't know, but it sure as hell ain't polynomial time.
No you missed the point. If nobody bought from these crippled music stores, then they would cease to exist. That has nothing to do with the existence of non-crippled music stores online. The conglomerates and their lawyers cannot force people to buy something, they can only force those selling other things out of existence.
Gosh, I did a seventh grade research paper ages ago on predicting earthquakes. I did mention radon... However, the conclusion of my paper was that earthquakes really couldn't be reliably predicted, so I suppose that some source I had said that you really couldn't effectively use radon as a good predictor, but I can't remember why exactly.
Some speculation: Perhaps false positives were an issue. After all, shutting a city down for an earthquake is an expensive proposition (just in lost time if nothing else), and if it turns out that the false positive rate is high, the cost would make it intractable. Also, I think an even bigger issue would be the very fact that it could be "months, days, minutes" before the quake. Radon might predict that a quake was likely soon, but is it going to be in 10 minutes, or is it going to be in two months? You certainly couldn't keep everyone on earthquake shutdown for two months.
To be quite honest, the educational incentive package thing isn't a bad idea. Except for the "only if everyone has windows", it isn't a nasty thing to do really. It doesn't exploit MS's monopoly, merely furthers it. And of course, since it doesn't require a monopoly to do, why don't we (the FOSS camp) do it too when the time comes?
I was using dose to refer to an amount, as in a dose of cough syrup is 4 tablespoons, rather than radiation dose (or dose equivalent, which is Sieverts). If you only consider the radiation dose, perhaps the lethal amount is 3mCi. However Polonium is a heavy metal, and as such will have chemical properties that make it toxic as well. Perhaps if this is taken into account, the lethal amount is closer to 200uCi.
However, obviously since the lethal dose of Po-210 is so low, and you don't hear of smokers dying every day with symptoms like Litvinenko's, even from cigarettes, the amount of Po-210 is miniscule. I don't even want to think about how many packs of cigarettes you'd have to process in order to get the amount of Po-210 that killed Litvinenko.
Hey man, chill out. Since you didn't take notice, I did acknowledge that in this case, karma whoring does not come into it. If you're in doubt of this, please just go back and reread my post. I promise it is in there. I checked just now for good measure.
The reason I responded to your comment and not to the umpteen hundred other posts with some "Oh please merciful moderators don't mod me down" crap in them is that yours just happened to be the straw that broke the camel's back, to use the cliche.
I have absolutely no problem with the post being modded above 0. AS I SAID, since you didn't actually bother to read my post, I found the original post interesting, and would have modded it informative. I liked it. It was a good, informative comment. More of that is what slashdot needs. However, I do have a problem with whining about mod points for the sole purpose of getting mod points. It is a cheap trick, does not contribute to the actual quality of the post in the slightest, and it is just plain annoying. If a post deserves mod points, then it will get them. If it does not deserve mod points, then it will not get them. However, oftentimes, worthless posts with mod point whining will get modded up because it puts the mods on a guilt trip. I don't want to read worthless posts!
Oh, and if you or anyone else has a problem with their comments starting at 0, then REGISTER! Nothing is forcing you to stay an AC. Don't bitch about something that is completely within your power to change. Although, if this latest post is the kind of rubbish you more typically spew, you'd pretty quickly pick up negative karma, and I wouldn't have to read it anyway.
I'm not the one who called it ADD, btw. Using ADD in that sense SEVERELY pisses me off because it cheapens ADD and removes credibility from those of us who actually have been diagnosed with ADD by a competent physician.
The idea is that MS is exactly what you say, "Anti-competitive". Competition generally spurs innovation. If MS is trying to win the "browser wars" by flexing their monopoly rather than by making the best browser, then competition is failing to spur improvement. If the "browser wars" were between opera and firefox, or something like that, that is, two browsers not at all tied to the operating system, then whoever made the best browser would tend to win, and strongarm tactics would not enter into the picture. The end result would be better browsers, where better winds up being defined by general preference. And yes, some people would fine one browser to be better, and some would find another to be better. Thus, the war would continue, and browsers would just keep getting better and better.
If all browsers were CSS compliant (and compliant with all other web standards as well), it would no longer be a matter of "this browser doesn't work on this site", but it would be about which browser is fastest, has the smallest memory footprint, has the neatest features, is most secure, looks the prettiest, etc etc etc. Also, since web developers would no longer have to futz about spending the majority of their time devising dumb hacks to work around browsers X, Y, and Z transparently to the user, web development could proceed more quickly and more cheaply. This would lead to better websites, as well as less overhead for companies that need websites (and not just companies... charities need websites too. Less overhead means more of every donation can actually do some good.). I'm assuming that you were not actually thinking that non compliance was a good thing... That would just be more than I could handle.
But there is no need for slashdot to be neutral, nor any claim that it is, was, or will ever be neutral.
The following phrases should be banned by the lameness filter: "I know I'll be modded down for this, but" "This will get modded -1, notgroupthink" "I hope someone mods this up" "too bad the moderation system won't let this be heard" And anything like them. Just STOP!
Wikipedia says the lethal dose is 200 uCi. So if you could get the Polonium out of its ceramic capsules (or whatever) in the antistatic brush, then you could kill two and a half people with it. But you would need 2000 of the little exempted sources from United Nuclear to kill someone.
The particular distribution of isotopes. Sure it is mostly Polonium-210, but there are likely to also be small amounts of Polonium-209 and -211 (or perhaps other isotopes, I'm not sure). The ratios of those other isotopes to the total amount of Polonium could indicate where it came from. The distributions will change with time, as the polonium decays. But, if you can also find the decay products, the amounts of those would indicate the original distribution of the polonium isotopes.
The reason this could pick out one particular reactor is that each reactor is slightly different, and perhaps consistently generate particular distributions of various isotopes of various elements. However, that is just speculation on my part.
Problem with that is that there are so many people today who think "OMG TER'RISTS!" and decide that since the government has told them that being more closed will help them fight terrorists, the government should be more closed. So you'd have to know who you were talking to pretty well before deciding to use that argument.