can't see why that wouldn't work, provided (and this also answers a question someone else asked of your post) that the coils are turned off once the dust has collected.
Some way of fixing the dust in place would be needed, but there are plenty of foams well suited to that sort of job. I say foams because by starting as a semi liquid they would gain better coverage over the dust.
Ok, perhaps no patent existed on this before, and he got it through, but what chance is there that it can be enforced? There could be so many potential infringer's and so many more entities with money that would see it as worthwhile to halt any attempt that he'd be a fool to do anything with this but frame it and stick it on the wall.
I'd love to get a pointless patent, so I could publish a paper on how stupid it is that I got it, and get my 15 minutes of dubious fame before dedicating it.
Universities that don't engage in challenges or bleeding edge research can quickly lose their reputation. Harvard could only go so far without improvement before it became a place that used to be good.
I know of one in the UK that was, a few years ago, considered to be among the top 5 for CS. Nowadays it would be hard pressed to appear at any meaningful position at all.
Why? Because they were 'so good' that they froze things as they were to maintain their level of excellence, causing other universities to charge ahead.
Also, Oxford university was doing so badly a few years ago in running courses that were relevant to the modern age that they tried to merge with a newer local university called Oxford Brookes (old style tech college, now a university), and Oxford Brookes turned them down because it would be detrimental to their image. Who'd have thought that would happen? I mean, Oxford University getting turned down!
Bizarrely, even though many in academia scoffed at this wannabe university, it turned out to have such a high level of excellence that students would come to Oxford to attend Brookes, not the venerable old Oxford University.
Incidentally, the CS dept at Brookes was so superior to that of Oxford uni that it wasn't even funny. This was a decade ago, things might have improved since.
given that most of the trouble in the middle east started over corporations wanting to keep their power and control (even going as far back as post WW1 and preventing the unification of Arab nations), I'd say they've had this 'too much power' thing for quite a while.
Hell, the East India Company wasn't named that just because it was a cool name, it was the first corporation (well, equivalent, they didn't wall it that), to actually own a country.
I'm not an OSS zealot (although I know the type of person you mean), I have four open and one closed source project (a game), and that isn't what I meant by open. I mean an open process where there is a free flow of information, not open source.
I dispute that what you describe amounts to a proper peer review process. In windows a bug may only become apparent when a piece of apparently bug free code accesses code from another portion of the windows tree. Vendors and so on mainly wouldn't have the entire tree to play with, or the time.
What you describe is a thing that might happen by chance, not a deliberate act of bug hunting and code checking. That does not compare to an open peer review process where all the code is available, people spend their time just on bug hunting and there is a free flow of information on request.
Other people who pay lots and lots of money or are required by law get access, but it is not for peer review and assistance with bug hunting, it's for customising aspects to work with their own applications, or tailoring applications to work with the existing code base.
Availability of code under these conditions is not comparable to an open peer review process.
Oh I agree. However I mean Microsoft don't put the code out there for others outside of Microsoft to review. Well they can't, it's 'proprietary', so this is kind of obvious. That's their business model, it can't be helped.
Not because of anything so simple as crap coders or Microsoft being shit (lame reasons when there are so many others that can be justified with examples) . They can't because it's too complex, subject to too many attack vectors, and closed from peer review of code.
Time was this refusal to allow external entities to search for and fix bugs in their code was acceptable as normal business practice. Since Linux got more popular, people have started to see that peer review of code is superior when it comes to finding and fixing errors.
I'd be willing to bet that if Linux was closed source it would be as defective as Windows is. That it isn't testifies to the usefulness of open source/bsd style approaches.
I thought I had the perfect method to get a -3 (or who knows, a -5), but still I failed. I don't know what else to do, since I refuse to resort to vulgarity (that being just silly, andd probably cheating..).
One can get tired of 'excellent' karma after the first six months...
The installer had still got some serious flaws a few months ago, and I see no reason to trust it yet.
Anyway, the installer still requires that you understand what's going on, so the manual is still useful.
I've used gentoo on many systems, and have a ten system cluster running it. However that's a barebones gentoo setup. Home user gentoo is frustratingly hard for newbies.
I seriously doubt that someone discovered fire then tried to find a use for it.
More likely they encountered fire and noted its effects, initially that predators were afraid of it, and it evolved from there.
Early humans had no free time for abstract thought, a thing was either immediately useful or it wasn't utilised.
Abstraction, and research (of a kind) did not occur until man had found ways to domesticate animals and obtain more reliable food sources. Once the daily need to hunt all day was gone, things got easier, and we could ponder.
My point is that compared to simpler Linux installs, or (god forbid) windows, its a very hard thing to install, so saying that it's an alternative to Vista is sheer folly.
And you can't install it without the manual, because they have this habit of changing things so what worked a few months ago suddenly doesn't work any more.
I'm afraid the USE flag thing is that bad. One of the recent GUI installer releases failed completely because of a tk dependency, and even hosed some systems entirely.
I've used gentoo for years, and I'm a fan, but I am all too aware of the risks of using it, you have to be far more careful then with other distributions.
1: Put gentoo cd in drive 2: wade through the initial setup in the voluminous manual 3: try to work out how the hell textmode web browsers work 4: discover gnome won't emerge and compile because you don't have -tk set as a USE flag 5: Try to figure out what the fuck a USE flag is anyway 6: Spend a day trying to set up X.org 7: mistakenly try to compile Openoffice from source 8: wait... 9: wait.... 10: wait.... 11: Find that your config files need updating. 11: Realise Gnome is screwed because you updated the config files wrong 12: Give up on Gnome, try to install KDE 13: wait.. 14: wait.... 15: wait..... 16: find that something you want is masked, unmask it. Smiling happily as it compiles 17: slowly realise that you've done something very very bad... 18: Give the fuck up and try Fedora instead
I see something I am quite familiar with in scientific papers, lots of complex ways to say simple things to disguise the fact that they haven't the feintest idea what this can really be used for.
Take the nuggets: "microfluidic channels" "global external field" "decoupling of the velocity of the particles"
All appearing in the abstract, with a definite avoidance of plain English.
I mean, wtf is that all about? I see not a single practical application mentioned with a decent justification for that application being superior or equivalent to some other method. They have speculated greatly, but tested nothing of consequence. That's not good science I'm sorry to say I see this a lot in papers, the less certain the authors are that their work is actually useful, the greater the use of complex terms that decompose to trivially simple statements.
What we have here is a case of premature publication.
It's very interesting, but come on guys, apply it to something of use.
I think the reason for the Christian predilection for bloody behaviour is that Christianity has, from its very inception, been about keeping the masses uneducated and compliant, while the ruling class are privy to the real information/power. You can see this today, most clearly in the (sorry to say) American Christian movements that are heavy on rejection of modern thoughts, and just as heavy on acceptance of an almost Aristotelian world view, since it removes the need for change.
Centuries passed with catholic ceremonies being performed only in Latin, to prevent anyone getting idea's, like their own interpretation of scripture.
That way the ruling class could muster vast armies and head off to conquer, certain in the knowledge that their armies would not dare dissent, for fear of damnation. It was, you might say, a neat setup.
At least the Islamic world started off well. Shame it all fell apart really.
I wish I'd hit preview a few more times though, I missed some repetition.
I tell you what, I'd hate to be a quantum physicist who believed in god. I mean, those guys are screwed up enough as it is:-)
Seriously though, I enjoy the history of religion to a certain extent, except for the nasty bits, which are alas all too frequent. Mostly I enjoy the bits where they squirm around trying to avoid change, you get some really wacky stuff at those points.
The worst that's happened to me as a scientist is that my hypothesis was trashed at a symposium once. I was able to prove the doubting professor wrong through application of logic and some heavy whiteboard usage (no I didn't hit him with it, can't say I didn't want to..:). When I dabbled in religion I never once was able to alter the viewpoint of someone who 'knew more' then I did.
religion, to my understanding, means literally to gather together. Therefore it implies involvement in an organised religion.
I toyed with organised religion in my youth, but encountered too many people who wished me to accept their world view 'on faith' and be happy as a result and, most importantly, to stop asking awkward questions. This didn't suit me one bit.
I wasn't a scientist then, and didn't become one till this dislike of organised religion was well in place, and yet I encounter people now who take my dislike of religion to be because I am a scientist. This I take as being a result of their acceptance of the 'don't ask questions' method of learning.
Slashdot Mirror
I said ten years ago did I not. I added this qualifier because I have no idea how they compare nowadays
Besides, one of you lot scoffed at my 'puny' but hard won computing resources last year, so I'm probably not well inclined towards you.
can't see why that wouldn't work, provided (and this also answers a question someone else asked of your post) that the coils are turned off once the dust has collected.
Some way of fixing the dust in place would be needed, but there are plenty of foams well suited to that sort of job. I say foams because by starting as a semi liquid they would gain better coverage over the dust.
Ok, perhaps no patent existed on this before, and he got it through, but what chance is there that it can be enforced?
There could be so many potential infringer's and so many more entities with money that would see it as worthwhile to halt any attempt that he'd be a fool to do anything with this but frame it and stick it on the wall.
I'd love to get a pointless patent, so I could publish a paper on how stupid it is that I got it, and get my 15 minutes of dubious fame before dedicating it.
Universities that don't engage in challenges or bleeding edge research can quickly lose their reputation. Harvard could only go so far without improvement before it became a place that used to be good.
I know of one in the UK that was, a few years ago, considered to be among the top 5 for CS. Nowadays it would be hard pressed to appear at any meaningful position at all.
Why? Because they were 'so good' that they froze things as they were to maintain their level of excellence, causing other universities to charge ahead.
Also, Oxford university was doing so badly a few years ago in running courses that were relevant to the modern age that they tried to merge with a newer local university called Oxford Brookes (old style tech college, now a university), and Oxford Brookes turned them down because it would be detrimental to their image. Who'd have thought that would happen? I mean, Oxford University getting turned down!
Bizarrely, even though many in academia scoffed at this wannabe university, it turned out to have such a high level of excellence that students would come to Oxford to attend Brookes, not the venerable old Oxford University.
Incidentally, the CS dept at Brookes was so superior to that of Oxford uni that it wasn't even funny.
This was a decade ago, things might have improved since.
given that most of the trouble in the middle east started over corporations wanting to keep their power and control (even going as far back as post WW1 and preventing the unification of Arab nations), I'd say they've had this 'too much power' thing for quite a while.
Hell, the East India Company wasn't named that just because it was a cool name, it was the first corporation (well, equivalent, they didn't wall it that), to actually own a country.
I'm not an OSS zealot (although I know the type of person you mean), I have four open and one closed source project (a game), and that isn't what I meant by open. I mean an open process where there is a free flow of information, not open source.
I dispute that what you describe amounts to a proper peer review process. In windows a bug may only become apparent when a piece of apparently bug free code accesses code from another portion of the windows tree. Vendors and so on mainly wouldn't have the entire tree to play with, or the time.
What you describe is a thing that might happen by chance, not a deliberate act of bug hunting and code checking. That does not compare to an open peer review process where all the code is available, people spend their time just on bug hunting and there is a free flow of information on request.
Other people who pay lots and lots of money or are required by law get access, but it is not for peer review and assistance with bug hunting, it's for customising aspects to work with their own applications, or tailoring applications to work with the existing code base.
Availability of code under these conditions is not comparable to an open peer review process.
Oh I agree. However I mean Microsoft don't put the code out there for others outside of Microsoft to review. Well they can't, it's 'proprietary', so this is kind of obvious.
That's their business model, it can't be helped.
They can't
Not because of anything so simple as crap coders or Microsoft being shit (lame reasons when there are so many others that can be justified with examples) . They can't because it's too complex, subject to too many attack vectors, and closed from peer review of code.
Time was this refusal to allow external entities to search for and fix bugs in their code was acceptable as normal business practice. Since Linux got more popular, people have started to see that peer review of code is superior when it comes to finding and fixing errors.
I'd be willing to bet that if Linux was closed source it would be as defective as Windows is. That it isn't testifies to the usefulness of open source/bsd style approaches.
it's not fair, is it...
I thought I had the perfect method to get a -3 (or who knows, a -5), but still I failed. I don't know what else to do, since I refuse to resort to vulgarity (that being just silly, andd probably cheating..).
One can get tired of 'excellent' karma after the first six months...
aw come on mods, that had to be at least a -3 off topic.
it's not fair. I've had loads of +2 to +5 moderations, but never a -3, surely you can give me this one thing....
Holy crap, it's Friday night, and I'm ripped, alone, and reading slashdot.
Is that sad? I suspect so.
I await the attention of the zealots with mod points, but you have to admit there is truth to my words.....
The installer had still got some serious flaws a few months ago, and I see no reason to trust it yet.
Anyway, the installer still requires that you understand what's going on, so the manual is still useful.
I've used gentoo on many systems, and have a ten system cluster running it. However that's a barebones gentoo setup. Home user gentoo is frustratingly hard for newbies.
ps, IT WAS A JOKE!!!!!!111one lighten up n00b
I seriously doubt that someone discovered fire then tried to find a use for it.
More likely they encountered fire and noted its effects, initially that predators were afraid of it, and it evolved from there.
Early humans had no free time for abstract thought, a thing was either immediately useful or it wasn't utilised.
Abstraction, and research (of a kind) did not occur until man had found ways to domesticate animals and obtain more reliable food sources. Once the daily need to hunt all day was gone, things got easier, and we could ponder.
So you're saying it's recursive are you?
Watch out, or some BSD hack will prove us both wrong...
My point is that compared to simpler Linux installs, or (god forbid) windows, its a very hard thing to install, so saying that it's an alternative to Vista is sheer folly.
And you can't install it without the manual, because they have this habit of changing things so what worked a few months ago suddenly doesn't work any more.
I'm afraid the USE flag thing is that bad. One of the recent GUI installer releases failed completely because of a tk dependency, and even hosed some systems entirely.
I've used gentoo for years, and I'm a fan, but I am all too aware of the risks of using it, you have to be far more careful then with other distributions.
1: Put gentoo cd in drive
2: wade through the initial setup in the voluminous manual
3: try to work out how the hell textmode web browsers work
4: discover gnome won't emerge and compile because you don't have -tk set as a USE flag
5: Try to figure out what the fuck a USE flag is anyway
6: Spend a day trying to set up X.org
7: mistakenly try to compile Openoffice from source
8: wait...
9: wait....
10: wait....
11: Find that your config files need updating.
11: Realise Gnome is screwed because you updated the config files wrong
12: Give up on Gnome, try to install KDE
13: wait..
14: wait....
15: wait.....
16: find that something you want is masked, unmask it. Smiling happily as it compiles
17: slowly realise that you've done something very very bad...
18: Give the fuck up and try Fedora instead
I got that, but there was, so far as I could see, no evidence of an attempt at practical aplication, just speculation.
It may well be fabulous, but it seems to me they have this interesting thing, but no evidence of it actually working on application to a problem
Ok very nice, but is there a use?
I see something I am quite familiar with in scientific papers, lots of complex ways to say simple things to disguise the fact that they haven't the feintest idea what this can really be used for.
Take the nuggets:
"microfluidic channels"
"global external field"
"decoupling of the velocity of the particles"
All appearing in the abstract, with a definite avoidance of plain English.
I mean, wtf is that all about? I see not a single practical application mentioned with a decent justification for that application being superior or equivalent to some other method. They have speculated greatly, but tested nothing of consequence. That's not good science
I'm sorry to say I see this a lot in papers, the less certain the authors are that their work is actually useful, the greater the use of complex terms that decompose to trivially simple statements.
What we have here is a case of premature publication.
It's very interesting, but come on guys, apply it to something of use.
your comment has been deemed harmful to children and kittens.
Do not leave your house, place your hands on the wall and wait, a mind correction team will be with you shortly...
I think the reason for the Christian predilection for bloody behaviour is that Christianity has, from its very inception, been about keeping the masses uneducated and compliant, while the ruling class are privy to the real information/power.
You can see this today, most clearly in the (sorry to say) American Christian movements that are heavy on rejection of modern thoughts, and just as heavy on acceptance of an almost Aristotelian world view, since it removes the need for change.
Centuries passed with catholic ceremonies being performed only in Latin, to prevent anyone getting idea's, like their own interpretation of scripture.
That way the ruling class could muster vast armies and head off to conquer, certain in the knowledge that their armies would not dare dissent, for fear of damnation. It was, you might say, a neat setup.
At least the Islamic world started off well. Shame it all fell apart really.
Screw technology, think of the higher priorities. If you rely on paper maps you will get lost/get ruined maps really easily.
Cloth maps are what you want. How do I know this? Because once, many years ago I said 'what do I need a cloth map for?'
Oh boy did I ever find out. Know what its like to wander back and forth over the German/Holland border for a whole night? I do...
Oh yes, and carrying and using lots of tech stuff will mark you as, well, a mark, to be tapped at the first opportunity. Take as little as possible.
sure, want fries with that?
I wish I'd hit preview a few more times though, I missed some repetition.
:-)
:). When I dabbled in religion I never once was able to alter the viewpoint of someone who 'knew more' then I did.
I tell you what, I'd hate to be a quantum physicist who believed in god. I mean, those guys are screwed up enough as it is
Seriously though, I enjoy the history of religion to a certain extent, except for the nasty bits, which are alas all too frequent. Mostly I enjoy the bits where they squirm around trying to avoid change, you get some really wacky stuff at those points.
The worst that's happened to me as a scientist is that my hypothesis was trashed at a symposium once. I was able to prove the doubting professor wrong through application of logic and some heavy whiteboard usage (no I didn't hit him with it, can't say I didn't want to..
religion, to my understanding, means literally to gather together. Therefore it implies involvement in an organised religion.
I toyed with organised religion in my youth, but encountered too many people who wished me to accept their world view 'on faith' and be happy as a result and, most importantly, to stop asking awkward questions. This didn't suit me one bit.
I wasn't a scientist then, and didn't become one till this dislike of organised religion was well in place, and yet I encounter people now who take my dislike of religion to be because I am a scientist. This I take as being a result of their acceptance of the 'don't ask questions' method of learning.