...it'll be so expensive that only a few rich patients will afford to buy it, effectively allowing the poor to continue spreading the virus. What a fantastic way to stop an epidemy.
While the Arctic is getting warmer thanks to our carbon economy, we are going to see more claims like that in the future as the area becomes more approachable. In the end, a war could take place just because a previously cold inaccessible area melted and revealed new resources (note that most of the Arctic is already controlled by either NATO or Russia). Perhaps, apart from the economic uses, Kremlin and the oligarchs want to install platforms with missiles nearer the North Pole, just to be prepared for the coming global warming wars. While homo economicus fscks up this solar system's only habitable planet, governments get ready for the next nuclear war. How uplifting...
We have Debian. The community existed before commercial interests took notice of us and we do not need any commercial vendor. SUSE, RedHat, and any other commercial vendor could file for bankruptcy without affecting the GNU/Linux community at all. Our power lies in cooperation, volunteerism, and our love for free software. We don't need money to keep our community alive, because it is based on ideology and love for technology. I moved all of my SUSE-based servers and machines to Debian after the Novell patent deal.
if we spend our time to discredit the ID theory, even if we are successful, another superstitious theory will come along to capture the minds of the scientifically illiterate. The solution is not to attack individual crackpot theories, but to attempt to teach the public to recognise all of them with critical thinking and with as much scientific knowledge we can pass to them. Only by educating the public we can get rid of crackpots.
I am afraid the next creationist dark age will come before we terraform Mars, and then science will be prohibited and scientists will be jailed as enemies of the people.
Both of my hands also suffer from extreme pain. In my case it's not only the wrists but also other areas. I have tried a variety of ergonomic products, albeit not vertical mice yet. No product seems to be perfect, although a few have helped me relieve from some pain. I use both hands to control my trackballs and mice, and I use a special keyboard and helps minimise excessive use of the right hand (typematrix). I have found that using your left hand as well to control the mouse, and switching between the hands every x minutes helps you a lot. I also have found that changing trackballs and mice regularly is also good as different models and designs tend to make you use different parts of your hand, so if you have 5 or 10 mice and switch between them every second day and you also switch between your two hands every hour or so will help you not to use the same muscles too much. Using the keyboard for navigation operations also seems to help, as well as the use of Dvorak layouts.
I use trackballs, and many times I find myself trying to hold them vertically to ease the pain on my hands. I plan to try a vertical mouse (or vertical trackball if I can find one) soon. As a side note, if you suffer from pain on your hands you should use an ergonomic keyboard as well, preferably one with Dvorak layout. I use TypeMatrix keyboards and they have helped my hands a lot.
Newsflash: Reason still survives in the modern world - Government officials have not fallen into the dark ages (yet) - Hopes for sustainance of science in the coming decades!
Future archaeologists and historians will undoubtedly regard the presence of such news stories before the next dark ages as a clear indication of the pathetic condition of science in our civilisation. When confronted with a stupid theory the best course of action is to blatantly ignore it without remorse. Even by taking your time to attack the stupid theory, you are giving it some value (your time).
I don't pay a cent for any downloadable music that isn't the free and open and universal MP3 MP3 is associated with some patents. I prefer Ogg Vorbis instead.
(it takes roughly 100-200 years to move from one level of physics to the next, based on history). We don't have much scientific history to base this proposal. We know for sure, however, that the process can halt for thousands of years as it did during the last dark ages. But we don't know how fast it can proceed. If a scientist at Einstein level or above creates new physics during their 30s, what stops them from creating entirely new physics in their 50s? If a single person had the imagination and intelligence necessary to find out undiscovered physics, then they may be able to do it again in their lifetime, which means that it would be possible to move from one level of physics to the next within a few years or a decade. Furthermore, I would like to add that in my opinion the present world is not very supportive of science in general and that many researchers have to try a lot just to get some funding or even persuade governments to release resources from military development into scientific research. The problem, however, is not only one of resources, but also one of attitude and social implications. Many parents would prefer their children to become supermodels rather than mad scientists into a lab without social life. Not only that, but creativity and imagination much needed for new discoveries and inventions are not promoted into our society, and our educational systems many times fail to capture the enthusiasm of the youth. As a result, science doesn't proceed as fast as it probably could had we had a more science-promoting society.
You are an ordered collection of cells, molecules, and atoms. If you were blown apart into pieces, we would have the original cells, molecules, and atoms, but not into an ordered state - we would have lost the organised collection, ie you. Now, had we had a way to reconstruct that ordered collection, I believe that we should be able bring you back in life, and if we could alter some of your components maybe we could even implant memories of your destruction and reconstruction into your mind. Now we face the question whether you are a collection of specific cells, molecules, and atoms, but I think the answer is that you can be made up of any kind of components as long as the interactions between these components yields the same results externally. Cells die and regenerate every day. You lose molecules and atoms every day as well, but you replenish them by eating. Could we replace carbon with another hypothetical element that has the same chemical behaviour in its interactions with your other components? I believe so, as the important thing is the properties of an element and not the element itself. It is the set of interactions between your basic components and the way they are interlinked that makes up you. If you lose an organ, you can get a transplant, even an artificial one, but you are still you. This brings us to another question, whether you are just a piece of information. I think so. You may just be the information that describes what properties your components have and how they are interlinked. If we could extract this information, then we could copy you and create a new you (in the end we could create a computer file whenever a new human is born and be able to manage its material existance with simple copy/delete operations, and this also yields the interesting idea that your relatives could bring you back to life after your death, or that you could be re-created as a child and then again as an adult by keeping two or three files with your information at different ages, but now we slip into science fiction). This also brings us to the interesting idea of whether the universe is just an information processing system. It may be. If it is, then we should be able to understand it with mathematics, and there is a scientific paper out there that says that the universe is a set of mathematical relations and that these mathematical objects would think that they really exist into a material world. Similar ideas were also expressed by Zuse and others in the past. In the end we may just live inside a big computer. I just hope it runs a real OS like GNU/Linux and not MS Windows!
They can just graduate with low marks, keep their books (if they have bought sany books) and read them. It is not necessary to have a professor over your head or be enrolled in order to learn, although it sometimes can be helpful. If they wish to prove that they know some advanced algorithmic stuff, they can simply write some open source code demonstrating their knowledge and copy-paste the code into their CV.
If I was hiring right now I would focus on your open-source experience. The fact that you have been involved in open source is by itself of higher importance than a full-time job or a university degree, according to my own criteria. The reason is that a person who gets into open source has showed initiative and a certain level of intelligence that cannot be assured by a day job or a programme of study. When you are a student, you are confined within the walls of an educational system, which often makes learning more difficult than it needs to be, so university is not the right environment to let your talent shine. When you become an employee, you are again working within the limitations of an environment which often distrusts any hint of creativity, and you are also likely to be granted limited responsibility. There are only two ways in which an intelligent recruiter can assess your real talent: Either from your hobbies (including open source) or from the way you manage your own business (if you have any self-employment or freelance experience, but I usually exclude most consulting occupations from my test). The way I would choose from a pile of applicants actually places A-graders at a disadvantage. I actually would prefer to hire a person with bad marks and many professional and personal interests rather than a graduate with high marks and little or no interests. After all, your grades measure only the time and effort you actually invested on your university education, and not your intelligence or ability. For me, grades fail to predict future performance, even academic. However, be warned that not everyone thinks like me in hiring decisions. Most HR recruiters at companies will probably focus on your work experience, while technical recruiters may also wish to hear about your open source involvement. Postgraduate university departments are less predictable: Many universities place too much emphasis on grades, while others are keen to accept students with work experience, open source involvement, and involvement in professional organisations (eg ACM, IEEE, BCS, IET, ACS). The problem with recruitment is that only an intelligent recruiter with freedom of action can choose the right staff, but in the real world many recruiters are either stupid, restricted by bureaucracy, or both. You have to choose what kind of recruiters to target. I think the best course of action is to take a hybrid integrative approach, attempting to keep your options as open as possible, therefore not excluding recruiters seeking high grades from your target list, especially if you wish to become a university professor someday. Even if you have bad marks now, you can try to get higher marks in a another programme, like these offered by the Open University (UK) or even complement your low-grade degree with a postgraduate qualification (perhaps a PgCert or PgDip if you can't wait for a full Master's) in another academic field (eg business management). The most important thing to remember is, however, the opportunity costs associated with day jobs and education. If you give all your time to an employer and/or a bunch of professors you may have not enough time to do somethign worthwile in your life, such as participating in open source. After you somehow get in the position of being able to pass most recruiters's tests (through grades or experience), I suggest that you invest your time as much as possible on a project that excites you, and this can be an open source project, self-employment, a charity, or anything else you believe you could excel at. Jobs and schools do have some value and should not be easily denounced, but you should always aim higher (if you do have the inate ability to climb higher, that is).
I own an HTC Universal (Qtek 9000) which uses a stylus and I already have difficulty using the onmouse features of many websites. The best thing the manufacturers can do is to include a mini-trackball interface on their devices, as appeared on HTC 3300.
join an IRC channel and get to know the participants, state that you are a student and you wish to learn how to help. Browse the TODO list or the bug list and ask them how one could fix a particular bug, then try to do it.
I personally see no link between intelligence and school admissions or grades. Why do so many people assume that someone who was accepted to college X must be smart? In fact, I personally have noticed that many smart people fail college because they have much more interesting things to do.
Why would you think that the browser market must be "MSIE, 2nd player, and a 3rd loser" and not "1st player, 2nd player, and MSIE as the 3rd loser". MSIE is so annoying that if a big business like Apple makes entry to the browser market a strategic priority then MSIE could be extinguished from the planet even if it remains integrated into the OS. The future browser market could be composed of Safari and Firefox, with MSIE a thing of the past.
Why should any competent programmer out there aspire to become an employee making a businessperson more rich? I am self-employed and I strongly encourage anyone having the abilities to seek starting up their own businesses. It worths the effort. It's much better to own a small business from being employed in a company.
There are only two things needed to realise galaxy colonisation: Appropriate technology and strong economic drive for leaving the home planet. If people become hungry or greedy and have the technology, they will go everywhere.
The way we assess future professionals may be wrong: We give them a piece of paper or sit them in front of a computer screen full of questions, and ask them to either choose from multiple answers or write down their own answer. However, few of these professionals will ever need to do exactly that in their actual jobs. In essence, we benchmark candidates by asking them to do something they will rarely do in real life. The results are easy to predict: Some will learn how to pass tests without exhibiting real-life performance, while others will be able to do the job but fail on the test. In the end, tests seem to mainly assess the candidates's patience and conformity to social hierarchies.
I'm actually quite relieved that Pluto was demoted from planethood. I never considered it a true planet. If we let Pluto back into the planetary club, then we ought to do the same with many other, probably yet undiscovered, TNOs (Trans-Neptunian Objects). Pluto is just a big TNO, not a planet.
Slashdot Mirror
...it'll be so expensive that only a few rich patients will afford to buy it, effectively allowing the poor to continue spreading the virus. What a fantastic way to stop an epidemy.
While the Arctic is getting warmer thanks to our carbon economy, we are going to see more claims like that in the future as the area becomes more approachable. In the end, a war could take place just because a previously cold inaccessible area melted and revealed new resources (note that most of the Arctic is already controlled by either NATO or Russia). Perhaps, apart from the economic uses, Kremlin and the oligarchs want to install platforms with missiles nearer the North Pole, just to be prepared for the coming global warming wars. While homo economicus fscks up this solar system's only habitable planet, governments get ready for the next nuclear war. How uplifting...
We have Debian. The community existed before commercial interests took notice of us and we do not need any commercial vendor. SUSE, RedHat, and any other commercial vendor could file for bankruptcy without affecting the GNU/Linux community at all. Our power lies in cooperation, volunteerism, and our love for free software. We don't need money to keep our community alive, because it is based on ideology and love for technology. I moved all of my SUSE-based servers and machines to Debian after the Novell patent deal.
if we spend our time to discredit the ID theory, even if we are successful, another superstitious theory will come along to capture the minds of the scientifically illiterate. The solution is not to attack individual crackpot theories, but to attempt to teach the public to recognise all of them with critical thinking and with as much scientific knowledge we can pass to them. Only by educating the public we can get rid of crackpots.
Are they addicted to inventing addictions?
I am afraid the next creationist dark age will come before we terraform Mars, and then science will be prohibited and scientists will be jailed as enemies of the people.
Both of my hands also suffer from extreme pain. In my case it's not only the wrists but also other areas. I have tried a variety of ergonomic products, albeit not vertical mice yet. No product seems to be perfect, although a few have helped me relieve from some pain. I use both hands to control my trackballs and mice, and I use a special keyboard and helps minimise excessive use of the right hand (typematrix). I have found that using your left hand as well to control the mouse, and switching between the hands every x minutes helps you a lot. I also have found that changing trackballs and mice regularly is also good as different models and designs tend to make you use different parts of your hand, so if you have 5 or 10 mice and switch between them every second day and you also switch between your two hands every hour or so will help you not to use the same muscles too much. Using the keyboard for navigation operations also seems to help, as well as the use of Dvorak layouts.
I use trackballs, and many times I find myself trying to hold them vertically to ease the pain on my hands. I plan to try a vertical mouse (or vertical trackball if I can find one) soon. As a side note, if you suffer from pain on your hands you should use an ergonomic keyboard as well, preferably one with Dvorak layout. I use TypeMatrix keyboards and they have helped my hands a lot.
I only hope the ninth team isn't Microsoft
Newsflash: Reason still survives in the modern world - Government officials have not fallen into the dark ages (yet) - Hopes for sustainance of science in the coming decades!
Future archaeologists and historians will undoubtedly regard the presence of such news stories before the next dark ages as a clear indication of the pathetic condition of science in our civilisation. When confronted with a stupid theory the best course of action is to blatantly ignore it without remorse. Even by taking your time to attack the stupid theory, you are giving it some value (your time).
You are an ordered collection of cells, molecules, and atoms. If you were blown apart into pieces, we would have the original cells, molecules, and atoms, but not into an ordered state - we would have lost the organised collection, ie you. Now, had we had a way to reconstruct that ordered collection, I believe that we should be able bring you back in life, and if we could alter some of your components maybe we could even implant memories of your destruction and reconstruction into your mind. Now we face the question whether you are a collection of specific cells, molecules, and atoms, but I think the answer is that you can be made up of any kind of components as long as the interactions between these components yields the same results externally. Cells die and regenerate every day. You lose molecules and atoms every day as well, but you replenish them by eating. Could we replace carbon with another hypothetical element that has the same chemical behaviour in its interactions with your other components? I believe so, as the important thing is the properties of an element and not the element itself. It is the set of interactions between your basic components and the way they are interlinked that makes up you. If you lose an organ, you can get a transplant, even an artificial one, but you are still you. This brings us to another question, whether you are just a piece of information. I think so. You may just be the information that describes what properties your components have and how they are interlinked. If we could extract this information, then we could copy you and create a new you (in the end we could create a computer file whenever a new human is born and be able to manage its material existance with simple copy/delete operations, and this also yields the interesting idea that your relatives could bring you back to life after your death, or that you could be re-created as a child and then again as an adult by keeping two or three files with your information at different ages, but now we slip into science fiction). This also brings us to the interesting idea of whether the universe is just an information processing system. It may be. If it is, then we should be able to understand it with mathematics, and there is a scientific paper out there that says that the universe is a set of mathematical relations and that these mathematical objects would think that they really exist into a material world. Similar ideas were also expressed by Zuse and others in the past. In the end we may just live inside a big computer. I just hope it runs a real OS like GNU/Linux and not MS Windows!
They can just graduate with low marks, keep their books (if they have bought sany books) and read them. It is not necessary to have a professor over your head or be enrolled in order to learn, although it sometimes can be helpful. If they wish to prove that they know some advanced algorithmic stuff, they can simply write some open source code demonstrating their knowledge and copy-paste the code into their CV.
If I was hiring right now I would focus on your open-source experience. The fact that you have been involved in open source is by itself of higher importance than a full-time job or a university degree, according to my own criteria. The reason is that a person who gets into open source has showed initiative and a certain level of intelligence that cannot be assured by a day job or a programme of study. When you are a student, you are confined within the walls of an educational system, which often makes learning more difficult than it needs to be, so university is not the right environment to let your talent shine. When you become an employee, you are again working within the limitations of an environment which often distrusts any hint of creativity, and you are also likely to be granted limited responsibility. There are only two ways in which an intelligent recruiter can assess your real talent: Either from your hobbies (including open source) or from the way you manage your own business (if you have any self-employment or freelance experience, but I usually exclude most consulting occupations from my test). The way I would choose from a pile of applicants actually places A-graders at a disadvantage. I actually would prefer to hire a person with bad marks and many professional and personal interests rather than a graduate with high marks and little or no interests. After all, your grades measure only the time and effort you actually invested on your university education, and not your intelligence or ability. For me, grades fail to predict future performance, even academic. However, be warned that not everyone thinks like me in hiring decisions. Most HR recruiters at companies will probably focus on your work experience, while technical recruiters may also wish to hear about your open source involvement. Postgraduate university departments are less predictable: Many universities place too much emphasis on grades, while others are keen to accept students with work experience, open source involvement, and involvement in professional organisations (eg ACM, IEEE, BCS, IET, ACS). The problem with recruitment is that only an intelligent recruiter with freedom of action can choose the right staff, but in the real world many recruiters are either stupid, restricted by bureaucracy, or both. You have to choose what kind of recruiters to target. I think the best course of action is to take a hybrid integrative approach, attempting to keep your options as open as possible, therefore not excluding recruiters seeking high grades from your target list, especially if you wish to become a university professor someday. Even if you have bad marks now, you can try to get higher marks in a another programme, like these offered by the Open University (UK) or even complement your low-grade degree with a postgraduate qualification (perhaps a PgCert or PgDip if you can't wait for a full Master's) in another academic field (eg business management). The most important thing to remember is, however, the opportunity costs associated with day jobs and education. If you give all your time to an employer and/or a bunch of professors you may have not enough time to do somethign worthwile in your life, such as participating in open source. After you somehow get in the position of being able to pass most recruiters's tests (through grades or experience), I suggest that you invest your time as much as possible on a project that excites you, and this can be an open source project, self-employment, a charity, or anything else you believe you could excel at. Jobs and schools do have some value and should not be easily denounced, but you should always aim higher (if you do have the inate ability to climb higher, that is).
I own an HTC Universal (Qtek 9000) which uses a stylus and I already have difficulty using the onmouse features of many websites. The best thing the manufacturers can do is to include a mini-trackball interface on their devices, as appeared on HTC 3300.
join an IRC channel and get to know the participants, state that you are a student and you wish to learn how to help. Browse the TODO list or the bug list and ask them how one could fix a particular bug, then try to do it.
I personally see no link between intelligence and school admissions or grades. Why do so many people assume that someone who was accepted to college X must be smart? In fact, I personally have noticed that many smart people fail college because they have much more interesting things to do.
I would really have no problem to swap my mobile phone for a million pounds. Please sign me up!
Why would you think that the browser market must be "MSIE, 2nd player, and a 3rd loser" and not "1st player, 2nd player, and MSIE as the 3rd loser". MSIE is so annoying that if a big business like Apple makes entry to the browser market a strategic priority then MSIE could be extinguished from the planet even if it remains integrated into the OS. The future browser market could be composed of Safari and Firefox, with MSIE a thing of the past.
If a company doesn't treat its customers well, there is a good chance that its employees will suffer as well.
Why should any competent programmer out there aspire to become an employee making a businessperson more rich? I am self-employed and I strongly encourage anyone having the abilities to seek starting up their own businesses. It worths the effort. It's much better to own a small business from being employed in a company.
There are only two things needed to realise galaxy colonisation: Appropriate technology and strong economic drive for leaving the home planet. If people become hungry or greedy and have the technology, they will go everywhere.
The way we assess future professionals may be wrong: We give them a piece of paper or sit them in front of a computer screen full of questions, and ask them to either choose from multiple answers or write down their own answer. However, few of these professionals will ever need to do exactly that in their actual jobs. In essence, we benchmark candidates by asking them to do something they will rarely do in real life. The results are easy to predict: Some will learn how to pass tests without exhibiting real-life performance, while others will be able to do the job but fail on the test. In the end, tests seem to mainly assess the candidates's patience and conformity to social hierarchies.
I'm actually quite relieved that Pluto was demoted from planethood. I never considered it a true planet. If we let Pluto back into the planetary club, then we ought to do the same with many other, probably yet undiscovered, TNOs (Trans-Neptunian Objects). Pluto is just a big TNO, not a planet.