Many scientists believe in some form of god, but don't believe in the traditional sense, in religions themselves.
Catholicism and the many other flavours of Christianity have always been intolerant of scientific advance, even when many of the people behind those advances were themselves ordained priests or at least in service of the church. In the middle ages the catholic church took a backward step from more moderate views and fell back on an Aristotelian descriptions for the universe, not because it was right (many knew it wasn't), but because it could be used as a cudgel to halt the advance the new sciences trying to explain the universe, and the somewhat horrific understanding that the void (vacuum), or nothingness, was a real thing, zero existed. They did not like that one bit.
Obviously that failed to halt the advance of science, but it wasn't a fast loss. It left us with the foundations of the absurd Christian extremism of today where perfectly intelligent people will deny even the simplest truths that the main catholic church has itself now accepted.
Islam doesn't get off too lightly either. From them we have the ancient Greek writings and understanding, which they expanded upon, bringing us acceptance of the concept of zero, and enriching our scientific vocabulary with new concepts.
They expanded a great deal of the understanding they saved from the fall of the ancient world, spread it far and wide, then inexplicably turned their back on science, turning into a religion that frowned on anything that might change the balance of power. Most certainly there were powerful individuals behind that change, and Islam has suffered for centuries as a result, because they, unlike Catholics, were unable to work around the problem, Islamic science is a widespread and accepted movement is effectively dead, and has been for a long time. This saddens me greatly..
I certainly see nothing in my understanding of 'religion' that tempts me to follow their precepts, although as a scientist I continue to believe in god.
I met a kid in his first year (ok, 18 year old) whilst in my second year. He sat down in a supposedly advanced tutorial on robotics for my class and wrote, in less then 20 minutes, a python program that retrieved an image from a robots camera 'eye' and post processed it in the required fashion (to isolate an object in the image by light level analysis).
The lecturer concerned was somewhat amazed, and yes, his approach was superior to that of everyone in the class, my own included.
Turns out he'd been coding on his own for many years, and had just started the degree to get himself a qualification. The last I knew of him he was pretty much the best at everything in his year.
Self teaching is simply unbeatable as a means to learn programming. The primary reason is that you want to do it.
A micro kernel written in object Pascal? Are you crazy!
Joke, I'd never have thought of using that. I'm afraid to say I rarely stray from C these days. I am extremely fond of Object Pascal however. I've used it for robotics and found it very nice for implementing a subsumption architecture.
R. A. Brooks (1986) "A Robust Layered Control System For A Mobile Robot", IEEE Journal Of Robotics And Automation, RA-2, April. pp. 14-23.
actually, he must be doing some management, come to think of it, although I replied to say programming (below, somewhere). Mainly programming yes, but he could hardly be considering his own start-up unless he was involved in running the company he's at in some way. I don't know this for sure mind.
sometimes it's useful to write your own. Such as when you need to find a speed increase from somewhere and you have to get elbow deep into the code to find it.
If the LL code (for example) is someone else's that can be harder. I write most of my own stuff of that nature, because in my work even a few clock cycles shaved off an operation is important.
If you're creating a product where you need to concern yourself with other issues, like high level customer requirements, then a well tested third party implementation that works right away is beneficial. It all comes down to the context.
So long, I would say, as you know how to code your own, so you can at least understand the workings of the code your including.
His skill lies in an amazing ability to derive algorithms to solve problems in a very short time. That these usually outperform alternate methods that took longer to develop is what gets him the big money. Large contracts worth many millions have been gained based solely on his database search work. I don't pretend to understand it all, we work in different areas.
My take on how he is so good is that he spent years studying the issue of algorithm development at uni. Each assignment he did usually was accompanied by in depth diagnostics on algorithm performance, far beyond the course requirements. He cost me an A++ once when working on EAs because his work was so much better than mine I was reduced to A+.
I think he'll be in management soon, since he plans to start his own company.
ok, but who would design the system for a computer to allocate its own memory? Do you have any idea how complex a task that would be?
It's a nieve point anyway. Computers are not 'old enough' for that. The only things that can are languages running on VM or interpreter. They still do not assure that no memory errors will occur, and often have a huge overhead in background processing that prevents their use for high speed applications.
I do agree with you, but language is important. You need a decent working knowledge of some mainstream ones in order to be employable, I was trying to take account of this need.
I can't stand sitting down and coding as a sole means of working. I prefer to go for long walks to work on the problems I solve, then spend some whiteboard time refining it. Only at that point do I instantiate in code.
You remind me of something a lecturer said in my second year 'You can use any language you like except for Visual Basic'. He'd been told to restrict students to the one language, and he threw that out of the window. We also had a wide spread of languages used for that assignment.
My course required all the things you list as well, many of which had to be done in Miranda, a nice little language.
Like I said, I'd love to blame Java. I try not to because I don't really believe that a single language can be so harmful.
Sounds like your course is fun. It sounds like the kind of place that skilled computer scientists will emerge from.
My personal ideal language teaching curve would be
assembler Haskall C Lisp C++/Java
With complex algorithm design emerging in the Lisp Module. Knuth spends a long time just describing the For Loop in his book, and a detailed understanding of the mechanics underlying it and other 'basic' operations would be good for students
Of the people I knew who did well, those who self studied alongside their normal course did things like website design, search algorithms, micro kernel design, robotics and advanced study in certain languages (lisp, c++, C, Object Pascal, assembler), everyone I knew did the last thing, but the languages varied.
You can pass and get a 2.1 or 2.2 easily just by following the course guidelines. I got my phd offer not by doing this, but by cramming every day (almost every day, have a blowout night at the weekend, you've got to have some fun time) with additional study. I exceeded the requirements of every assignment (I wasn't alone in doing this), and studied around every topic taught. The result was a lot of very interesting phd offers when I graduated, it rocked. I was tired a lot, I will admit, but the benefit was vast, I was so far ahead of the students who just followed the course that I actually tutored some.
Don't assume I'm that clever though, I sweated blood sometimes trying to get assignments done early, and the extra learning was oft times very difficult. Every evening spent on it was one well spent however.
Most of the people I know personally who did this are now in great jobs, one heading towards millionaire status at 25. In his case he worked like a dog, even more than I did. You wouldn't beleive what he was capable of on graduation.
Over the last six years I've been increasingly worried by the falling level of ability in CS students.
I've encountered CS students recently who in their third year are unable to do such basic things as understand memory allocation. As for algorithm design? Well that's simply unknown by the majority. That scares the shit out of me.
The Mantra is 'don't re-invent the wheel'. This is used as an excuse for students taking off the shelf components for assignments (sorting classes for java being used for sorting assignments for example), or being given virtually complete assignments by lecturers and being walked slowly through the assignment to the point where little or no original thinking is required.
Now it is true that re-inventing the wheel is a bad move at times. However whilst studying for their qualification, they should learn how to build the wheel in the first place.
Back to the memory allocation point. I currently know of no final year students with a decent understanding of this topic, and yet it is the main cause of security problems in code. They should at least have a working knowledge.
The ephasis is more and more on using languages designed to try and remove the main problems in code, but who writes these languages? It sure isn't the people who are only taught to use them, not create them.
The normal course of action is to blame Java, since it has led to a simplistic approach to CS assignments. I'd love to blame it, I ferkin hate the language, but that isn't the root cause.
Computer science is a hard topic that they are trying to make simpler to encourage more students. This has the result that CS students are graduating with ever reducing levels of ability, so people no longer see it as a worthwhile topic. Nowadays a CS student who wants to do really well has to work on independent study entirely apart from the course they are attending, and has also to face the unpleasant reality that their education as provided by the university is so poor that they may face years of further study to gain a useful level of ability.
Post graduate study can reduce this problem, but there are fewer post grads too, and often it is funding, not interest in a topic, that guides the selection of a course.
Paper use in the US and the UK etc is *not* causing problems.
What is causing a problem is illegal logging. That is an entirely different issue, unrelated to recycling. Bag all the used paper you want, it won't stop greedy businessmen cutting down thousands of acres of hardwoods each week from Rainforests. FYI, that is not the usual source of our paper/cardboard. The stuff we use comes from managed sites. Yes the illegal loggers probably also sell to paper mills. That again is not a problem that recycling could solve.
I lived near a managed site when I was a teenager. It's still there, 20 years later, still used for paper, and still huge. If it had a disadvantage it was that the tree's were all evenly spaced and a bit boring to walk through. The bird life was exciting though, there was a conservation program happening that used the forest rather well.
Want to eat fast food? Watch out for Toxins.. Want to have healthy intestines?, have it washed with a hose to get rid of 'Toxins' I'll bet most people who start talking about toxins don't even know what they are.
Where do these toxins come from then? That would be one of those misconceptions I'm afraid.
And the dumping is a result of the recycling. It's collected as stuff for recycling, then sold on to third world countries as a commodity for them to deal with.
Then it ends up in stinking heaps being picked over by kids.
yes, it was well observed, why should I not refer to it? Mainly though a very disturbing series of investigations and documentaries done recently here in the UK. Shocking is the word I'm looking for I think.
That our 'recyclables' are winding up in villages in India and china is very concerning. Children playing among the crap from our bins is not my idea of a good thing.
For that reason alone, recycling is a lie. And I happen to live within 20 miles of a large landfill site. It's very clean, well managed, and no danger whatsoever to the environment. Stuff that used to go there is now winding up rotting on the surface being picked over by poor people, go on, tell me that's good for the environment.
I don't actually own a car, never have. Hybrids seem to me though to exist for one reason only. They are there to extend the need for petrol into the future.
We could have pure electric cars. People have been conditioned to not want them though, 'too slow', although apparently this is no longer the case.
Electric cars couldn't go from city to city most likely, but then why bother? Why not have maglev trains shifting at a fair old lick between cities, carrying cars to the local drop off zones on the edge of cities.
America would not have anywhere near the current pollution from cars problem had not the automotive industry sponsored the wholesale tearing up of tramlines across the States (and here in the UK), for replacement with bus services. People could have been catching trams that ran on electricity that could more easily be converted to a less pollution ridden form of power generation.
a policy of tree re plantation to match supply with demand. As you likely know, just having tree's around isn't quite enough, you have to replace what you use.
Much of what is collected is dumped. In the UK we 'export' it to vast mounds of plastic crap in china and third world countries. This is shameful, and exists solely because of the current fashion of enforced recycling. In the US a large percentage of 'recyclables' are still dumped.
Recycling is mostly makework. The profits come from the lavish grants that are provided, and avoidance of penalties for not instituting it.
Melting plastic to re-use costs as much, if not more energy then creating it in the first place. Paper has been a renewable resource for *decades*. There is no need to recycle it, and the chemicals used to clean it also have to be produced, using more raw materials to do a job that doesn't need to be done.We also have no need whatsoever to recycle glass, none. It costs as much to recycle as produce in the first place, and we are in no danger of running out of sand... Lastly, it is an outright lie that large landfill is bad for the environment.
Recycling probably produces more harm to the environment then not recycling at all. The only exception is Tin, which is useful as a recycled product.
what we have here is pretty much the same phenomena that was exploited to get recycling off the ground.
To dissent about that was to invite intense hostility, even fines.
It's time to ask the old question 'where is the money'. Who stands to gain most from each side of the argument. And don't say 'mankind'. I'd be willing to bet that some groups are planning to leverage considerable power from this hype/hysteria.
Global warming, man made or not, has been known about for a long time. Why is it to the fore now? Is it perhaps because the powers that be have decided that us western sheep need something to distract us from the whole terror thing?
It sure isn't joe average who needs to act to stop global warming, it's the multi-nationals that control most of the polluting technology/industries. And yet the public are being stirred up.
Actually the Kiuper belt is a very large region. Yes indeed, some elements of it do come a bit close. That's what we in the scientific world like to call an 'edge'. You find them on all sorts of things. Some regions of the Solar System do not have clearly defined boundaries, the Kuiper Belt is one such region.
Pluto is doubtless a member of it, and the closest we know of outside the Comets. Comets of course don't strictly count any more, because they have left the belt long before.
Oh, and you know that moon Titan? Well the thinking is that was also a Kuiper Belt object that fell in and got trapped in an odd orbit.
The big issue is that he is honoured for the wrong thing.
When Pluto was found it was the first *ever* Kuiper Belt object to be observed by mankind. A serious achievement, and a notable step in the evolution of astronomy.
Alas this real achievement has been mired in argument for decades, because people want Pluto to be something it isn't.
sourceforge has been having increasing numbers of problems recently. Their shell service for instance was down for weeks not too long back. That's happened many times over the last few years, and it's been a source of real problems, since its the only way to get access to update projects.
Their entire service was off-line for a while last week, not fun.
I've moved my project to google code project hosting. Their service is simpler, but reliable. The addition of a wiki is really helpful, and uploading new releases is trivially easy.
google could offer a compile farm with ease. I expect it won't be long now that sourceforge have removed theirs.
When I first started using sourceforge four years ago I liked the service, but when they moved to having paying customers, everything started to decline for the free hosted projects. They said it wouldn't but it still occurred.
I'm of the opinion that sourceforge got too complex, and now they can't manage all the aspects they wanted to include. No doubt if everyone paid it would be easier, but not many open source developers have free funds for such things. If people had to pay then small incomplete projects might not even get off the ground. Mine certainly wouldn't have, since I was a student, and financially limited.
Slashdot Mirror
it depends what you mean by religious.
Many scientists believe in some form of god, but don't believe in the traditional sense, in religions themselves.
Catholicism and the many other flavours of Christianity have always been intolerant of scientific advance, even when many of the people behind those advances were themselves ordained priests or at least in service of the church.
In the middle ages the catholic church took a backward step from more moderate views and fell back on an Aristotelian descriptions for the universe, not because it was right (many knew it wasn't), but because it could be used as a cudgel to halt the advance the new sciences trying to explain the universe, and the somewhat horrific understanding that the void (vacuum), or nothingness, was a real thing, zero existed. They did not like that one bit.
Obviously that failed to halt the advance of science, but it wasn't a fast loss. It left us with the foundations of the absurd Christian extremism of today where perfectly intelligent people will deny even the simplest truths that the main catholic church has itself now accepted.
Islam doesn't get off too lightly either. From them we have the ancient Greek writings and understanding, which they expanded upon, bringing us acceptance of the concept of zero, and enriching our scientific vocabulary with new concepts.
They expanded a great deal of the understanding they saved from the fall of the ancient world, spread it far and wide, then inexplicably turned their back on science, turning into a religion that frowned on anything that might change the balance of power. Most certainly there were powerful individuals behind that change, and Islam has suffered for centuries as a result, because they, unlike Catholics, were unable to work around the problem, Islamic science is a widespread and accepted movement is effectively dead, and has been for a long time. This saddens me greatly..
I certainly see nothing in my understanding of 'religion' that tempts me to follow their precepts, although as a scientist I continue to believe in god.
Just don't go asking me for his phone number..
best you crack on with it then.....
I met a kid in his first year (ok, 18 year old) whilst in my second year. He sat down in a supposedly advanced tutorial on robotics for my class and wrote, in less then 20 minutes, a python program that retrieved an image from a robots camera 'eye' and post processed it in the required fashion (to isolate an object in the image by light level analysis).
The lecturer concerned was somewhat amazed, and yes, his approach was superior to that of everyone in the class, my own included.
Turns out he'd been coding on his own for many years, and had just started the degree to get himself a qualification. The last I knew of him he was pretty much the best at everything in his year.
Self teaching is simply unbeatable as a means to learn programming. The primary reason is that you want to do it.
heh :-)
A micro kernel written in object Pascal? Are you crazy!
Joke, I'd never have thought of using that. I'm afraid to say I rarely stray from C these days. I am extremely fond of Object Pascal however. I've used it for robotics and found it very nice for implementing a subsumption architecture.
R. A. Brooks (1986) "A Robust Layered Control System For A Mobile Robot", IEEE Journal Of Robotics And Automation, RA-2, April. pp. 14-23.
actually, he must be doing some management, come to think of it, although I replied to say programming (below, somewhere). Mainly programming yes, but he could hardly be considering his own start-up unless he was involved in running the company he's at in some way. I don't know this for sure mind.
sometimes it's useful to write your own. Such as when you need to find a speed increase from somewhere and you have to get elbow deep into the code to find it.
If the LL code (for example) is someone else's that can be harder. I write most of my own stuff of that nature, because in my work even a few clock cycles shaved off an operation is important.
If you're creating a product where you need to concern yourself with other issues, like high level customer requirements, then a well tested third party implementation that works right away is beneficial. It all comes down to the context.
So long, I would say, as you know how to code your own, so you can at least understand the workings of the code your including.
programming, specifically in the telecoms field.
His skill lies in an amazing ability to derive algorithms to solve problems in a very short time. That these usually outperform alternate methods that took longer to develop is what gets him the big money. Large contracts worth many millions have been gained based solely on his database search work. I don't pretend to understand it all, we work in different areas.
My take on how he is so good is that he spent years studying the issue of algorithm development at uni. Each assignment he did usually was accompanied by in depth diagnostics on algorithm performance, far beyond the course requirements. He cost me an A++ once when working on EAs because his work was so much better than mine I was reduced to A+.
I think he'll be in management soon, since he plans to start his own company.
ok, but who would design the system for a computer to allocate its own memory? Do you have any idea how complex a task that would be?
It's a nieve point anyway. Computers are not 'old enough' for that. The only things that can are languages running on VM or interpreter. They still do not assure that no memory errors will occur, and often have a huge overhead in background processing that prevents their use for high speed applications.
I do agree with you, but language is important. You need a decent working knowledge of some mainstream ones in order to be employable, I was trying to take account of this need.
I can't stand sitting down and coding as a sole means of working. I prefer to go for long walks to work on the problems I solve, then spend some whiteboard time refining it. Only at that point do I instantiate in code.
You remind me of something a lecturer said in my second year 'You can use any language you like except for Visual Basic'. He'd been told to restrict students to the one language, and he threw that out of the window. We also had a wide spread of languages used for that assignment.
My course required all the things you list as well, many of which had to be done in Miranda, a nice little language.
Like I said, I'd love to blame Java. I try not to because I don't really believe that a single language can be so harmful.
Sounds like your course is fun. It sounds like the kind of place that skilled computer scientists will emerge from.
My personal ideal language teaching curve would be
assembler
Haskall
C
Lisp
C++/Java
With complex algorithm design emerging in the Lisp Module. Knuth spends a long time just describing the For Loop in his book, and a detailed understanding of the mechanics underlying it and other 'basic' operations would be good for students
Self study.
Of the people I knew who did well, those who self studied alongside their normal course did things like website design, search algorithms, micro kernel design, robotics and advanced study in certain languages (lisp, c++, C, Object Pascal, assembler), everyone I knew did the last thing, but the languages varied.
You can pass and get a 2.1 or 2.2 easily just by following the course guidelines. I got my phd offer not by doing this, but by cramming every day (almost every day, have a blowout night at the weekend, you've got to have some fun time) with additional study. I exceeded the requirements of every assignment (I wasn't alone in doing this), and studied around every topic taught. The result was a lot of very interesting phd offers when I graduated, it rocked. I was tired a lot, I will admit, but the benefit was vast, I was so far ahead of the students who just followed the course that I actually tutored some.
Don't assume I'm that clever though, I sweated blood sometimes trying to get assignments done early, and the extra learning was oft times very difficult. Every evening spent on it was one well spent however.
Most of the people I know personally who did this are now in great jobs, one heading towards millionaire status at 25. In his case he worked like a dog, even more than I did. You wouldn't beleive what he was capable of on graduation.
So work hard, and study around the subjects.
Over the last six years I've been increasingly worried by the falling level of ability in CS students.
I've encountered CS students recently who in their third year are unable to do such basic things as understand memory allocation. As for algorithm design? Well that's simply unknown by the majority. That scares the shit out of me.
The Mantra is 'don't re-invent the wheel'. This is used as an excuse for students taking off the shelf components for assignments (sorting classes for java being used for sorting assignments for example), or being given virtually complete assignments by lecturers and being walked slowly through the assignment to the point where little or no original thinking is required.
Now it is true that re-inventing the wheel is a bad move at times. However whilst studying for their qualification, they should learn how to build the wheel in the first place.
Back to the memory allocation point. I currently know of no final year students with a decent understanding of this topic, and yet it is the main cause of security problems in code. They should at least have a working knowledge.
The ephasis is more and more on using languages designed to try and remove the main problems in code, but who writes these languages? It sure isn't the people who are only taught to use them, not create them.
The normal course of action is to blame Java, since it has led to a simplistic approach to CS assignments. I'd love to blame it, I ferkin hate the language, but that isn't the root cause.
Computer science is a hard topic that they are trying to make simpler to encourage more students. This has the result that CS students are graduating with ever reducing levels of ability, so people no longer see it as a worthwhile topic. Nowadays a CS student who wants to do really well has to work on independent study entirely apart from the course they are attending, and has also to face the unpleasant reality that their education as provided by the university is so poor that they may face years of further study to gain a useful level of ability.
Post graduate study can reduce this problem, but there are fewer post grads too, and often it is funding, not interest in a topic, that guides the selection of a course.
Paper use in the US and the UK etc is *not* causing problems.
What is causing a problem is illegal logging. That is an entirely different issue, unrelated to recycling.
Bag all the used paper you want, it won't stop greedy businessmen cutting down thousands of acres of hardwoods each week from Rainforests. FYI, that is not the usual source of our paper/cardboard. The stuff we use comes from managed sites.
Yes the illegal loggers probably also sell to paper mills. That again is not a problem that recycling could solve.
I lived near a managed site when I was a teenager. It's still there, 20 years later, still used for paper, and still huge. If it had a disadvantage it was that the tree's were all evenly spaced and a bit boring to walk through. The bird life was exciting though, there was a conservation program happening that used the forest rather well.
Ah yes, ther generic 'toxin' argument.
Want to eat fast food? Watch out for Toxins..
Want to have healthy intestines?, have it washed with a hose to get rid of 'Toxins'
I'll bet most people who start talking about toxins don't even know what they are.
Where do these toxins come from then? That would be one of those misconceptions I'm afraid.
And the dumping is a result of the recycling. It's collected as stuff for recycling, then sold on to third world countries as a commodity for them to deal with.
Then it ends up in stinking heaps being picked over by kids.
And no I'm not emoting, that's what's happening.
Hawking speculates that micro black holes are throughout the universe. That makes for a lot of places where dark matter could hide.
I can't find a paper in which he says this, so no citation.
yes, it was well observed, why should I not refer to it? Mainly though a very disturbing series of investigations and documentaries done recently here in the UK. Shocking is the word I'm looking for I think.
That our 'recyclables' are winding up in villages in India and china is very concerning. Children playing among the crap from our bins is not my idea of a good thing.
For that reason alone, recycling is a lie. And I happen to live within 20 miles of a large landfill site. It's very clean, well managed, and no danger whatsoever to the environment.
Stuff that used to go there is now winding up rotting on the surface being picked over by poor people, go on, tell me that's good for the environment.
I don't actually own a car, never have.
Hybrids seem to me though to exist for one reason only. They are there to extend the need for petrol into the future.
We could have pure electric cars. People have been conditioned to not want them though, 'too slow', although apparently this is no longer the case.
Electric cars couldn't go from city to city most likely, but then why bother? Why not have maglev trains shifting at a fair old lick between cities, carrying cars to the local drop off zones on the edge of cities.
America would not have anywhere near the current pollution from cars problem had not the automotive industry sponsored the wholesale tearing up of tramlines across the States (and here in the UK), for replacement with bus services. People could have been catching trams that ran on electricity that could more easily be converted to a less pollution ridden form of power generation.
a policy of tree re plantation to match supply with demand. As you likely know, just having tree's around isn't quite enough, you have to replace what you use.
Much of what is collected is dumped. In the UK we 'export' it to vast mounds of plastic crap in china and third world countries. This is shameful, and exists solely because of the current fashion of enforced recycling. In the US a large percentage of 'recyclables' are still dumped.
Recycling is mostly makework. The profits come from the lavish grants that are provided, and avoidance of penalties for not instituting it.
Melting plastic to re-use costs as much, if not more energy then creating it in the first place. Paper has been a renewable resource for *decades*. There is no need to recycle it, and the chemicals used to clean it also have to be produced, using more raw materials to do a job that doesn't need to be done.We also have no need whatsoever to recycle glass, none. It costs as much to recycle as produce in the first place, and we are in no danger of running out of sand...
Lastly, it is an outright lie that large landfill is bad for the environment.
Recycling probably produces more harm to the environment then not recycling at all. The only exception is Tin, which is useful as a recycled product.
what we have here is pretty much the same phenomena that was exploited to get recycling off the ground.
To dissent about that was to invite intense hostility, even fines.
It's time to ask the old question 'where is the money'. Who stands to gain most from each side of the argument. And don't say 'mankind'. I'd be willing to bet that some groups are planning to leverage considerable power from this hype/hysteria.
Global warming, man made or not, has been known about for a long time. Why is it to the fore now? Is it perhaps because the powers that be have decided that us western sheep need something to distract us from the whole terror thing?
It sure isn't joe average who needs to act to stop global warming, it's the multi-nationals that control most of the polluting technology/industries. And yet the public are being stirred up.
I smell bullshit somewhere.
triton, titan, easy mistake to make. You got what I meant though.
It's a bugger to model incidentally. I can never get the orbit right.
Actually the Kiuper belt is a very large region. Yes indeed, some elements of it do come a bit close. That's what we in the scientific world like to call an 'edge'. You find them on all sorts of things. Some regions of the Solar System do not have clearly defined boundaries, the Kuiper Belt is one such region.
Pluto is doubtless a member of it, and the closest we know of outside the Comets. Comets of course don't strictly count any more, because they have left the belt long before.
Oh, and you know that moon Titan? Well the thinking is that was also a Kuiper Belt object that fell in and got trapped in an odd orbit.
honouring is not the problem.
The big issue is that he is honoured for the wrong thing.
When Pluto was found it was the first *ever* Kuiper Belt object to be observed by mankind. A serious achievement, and a notable step in the evolution of astronomy.
Alas this real achievement has been mired in argument for decades, because people want Pluto to be something it isn't.
perhaps they were thinking of the running of different operating systems. People get those two things mixed up.
sourceforge has been having increasing numbers of problems recently. Their shell service for instance was down for weeks not too long back. That's happened many times over the last few years, and it's been a source of real problems, since its the only way to get access to update projects.
Their entire service was off-line for a while last week, not fun.
I've moved my project to google code project hosting. Their service is simpler, but reliable. The addition of a wiki is really helpful, and uploading new releases is trivially easy.
google could offer a compile farm with ease. I expect it won't be long now that sourceforge have removed theirs.
When I first started using sourceforge four years ago I liked the service, but when they moved to having paying customers, everything started to decline for the free hosted projects. They said it wouldn't but it still occurred.
I'm of the opinion that sourceforge got too complex, and now they can't manage all the aspects they wanted to include. No doubt if everyone paid it would be easier, but not many open source developers have free funds for such things. If people had to pay then small incomplete projects might not even get off the ground. Mine certainly wouldn't have, since I was a student, and financially limited.