You forget that OS X is now the most important reason to by a Mac for most of the users. Personally, I would never buy a Mac because of the looks. I bought mine because it's the most easy to use and best supported Unix platform out there. And, arguably, it's about the most stable as well (and yes, I have tried Debian. For three years...). If Apple abandoned OS X, they would lose the majority of their users (especially in Academia and Education) instantly.
When I show people my Mac, I don't tell them "Look how beautiful and silent it is". They can see and hear that for themselves. I tell them "It's practically immune to viruses; it runs MS Office AND emacs natively and it hasn't been rebooted for a month."
Google has changed a lot in its interface over the past year. Has anyone else had the following problem?:
I'm living in one country but want to see results from another (in my case, I'm in Germany but I want to see English results). In the good old days, google had a radiobutton that let you choose between "results from the web" and "results in German" (or, rather, "Deutsche Ergebnisse"). But not anymore. Now, even if I explicitly type "www.google.com" in my address bar (firefox, in English, with locale set to US), the stupid server hands me back a google.de redirect. The radiobutton is gone. So is the point in the preferences where I could, back in the day, decide that I wanted results in all languages. It's been replaced by a list of checkboxes where I can, in principle say I only want results in English. But, heavens, I want results in German AND English. Okay, so I check "English" and "German".
Guess what I get? A preordered list with all the German results first (since I'm on google.de. What else could I want anyway?), then the English ones. Like, first the result from de.wikipedia.org, while the English one is nowhere to be seen.
Hey Google! Some people don't live in their homecountries. Yet they fucking want to see results in their own language. It's completely beyond me how a company that has fostered globalisation so much could possibly exclude all ex-pats from their interface.
I've now changed to yahoo (which still has the "results from the web" button). Let's see how long until they will abandon it, too.
It is remarkable how similar the intended future use for scramjet technology is to that described in a Philip K Dick novel by the name of Man in the High Castle, namely passenger airliners and space travel.
What else should it be useful for? Grilling steaks?
I'll make my own prediction: Some time in the future we will have unbelievably fast ocean-going vessels. They will be mostly used for passenger transport and, err, transport of goods. And warfare, of course.
Sorry, but your "coincidences" sound more like pointing out the obvious to me. It's not very difficult to foresee that strong propulsion engines would be used to transport things and people from Alice to Bob at high speed, flying at a high altitude due to advantages in air resistance. Not even for a writer in pre-airtravel times.
I guess not that Germany is a completely a western country, they must learn that the best way to grow a bussiness is to supply products the people want. And, of course, if artificial barriers are erected to try to force consumers to buy stuff they don't want, then those consumers will just find another way to get they stuff they do.
It seems they have already learned how to make products that the rest of the world wants. Now they only have to find out how to make their own people buy stuff.
With that logic, if the $500 MSN/AOL rebates returned to best buy/circuit city, then the $100 laptop goal would be accomplished. those phones aren't $100, their $20-50 per month.
Sorry for being potentially offensive, but it's either me being drunk and a non-native speaker or you writing amok. I don't understand what the hell you are talking about. Could you please use English grammar?
I think the biggest reason for most people contributing to the prize money (you are mistaken to think "someone is willing to pay $12,000 to get someone to make it work", rather a lot of people contributed a few bucks to the prize) is software lockin: Like it or not, there is a lot of software that doesn't work on OS X. Think in-house build software solutions and other rather highly specialised software. Heck, the till at my local pub runs on Windows. It's just not true that everything can be done on OS X that can be done in Windows.
And buying a second Windows-running machine, as you suggest, is just a stupid solution. Who wants to have two computers on his desk? Besides, contributing $20 to a prize that will surely turn out a solution is still cheaper than buying a second Windows-machine.
Does that convince you?
Before Dave has to answer this one as well: May I say, RTFA? It's all there:
Update
The ZDnet article has been updated to include the sentence, "Participants were given local client access to the target computer and invited to try their luck." But might it not have been interesting to explore:
What are the implications of local account access, and under what conditions might a computer be used in that way? How can such access normally be obtained? Do home users behind firewalls and with no ports open need to worry?
How can a vendor fix the claimed local privilege escalation vulnerabilities when they are not informed of the issue? What are the moral and ethical implications of knowing about allegedly severe vulnerabilities in products, like the "hacker" they interviewed, and actively choosing to NOT give the vendor an opportunity to fix the problem(s)?
How might a Linux or BSD distribution, other commercial UNIXes, or Windows stand up to a similar challenge, where anyone who wishes is given local account access?
A discussion about how since much of OS X is closed, this might make it more difficult for the community to discover - and report and fix - potential vulnerabilities in the closed pieces
...and things of that nature, instead of leaving people with the impression that any Mac OS X machine connected to the Internet can be taken over in 30 minutes?
(Rule 2 of slashdot is that if you say "I know I'm going to get moderated down for saying this, but...", you will get moderated up.)
Actually, I've always either downmodded posts including this sentence or left them unmodded, if they were really good. And I am quite sure that a lot of other mods do just the same.
Actually, their player looks worse than the iPod. Look: here.
While it's an obvious rip-off (the menu looks especially familiar, and, oh look, it's a click-square...), it just looks cluttered and cheap compared to the reference product from Cupertino.
Actually, that's why I bought exactly one song about five minutes before the counter hit 1B. Had to get out of bed at 6:40 am to do this. Had been extrapolating (least square approximation with a Gaussian parabola) over the last day. Unfortunately, I didn't win. Was fun though. The hardest part was deciding what song to buy...
In fact you can go something like 26 more levels of magnitude smaller before you start reaching the feasable limit of measurable existance. And yes, subatomic particles could theoretically be used in processors.
IANAProcessor Designer, but from what I've learned in undergraduate quantum mechanics, the problem is not the "limit of measurable existance" (I assume you are referring to the Planck Length here) but Heisenberg's uncertainty principle:
The Electrons in your transistors are "blurry". When the walls of their potential wells (i.e. the width of the wires) get to low, they will start to tunnel between them in a number that is inacceptable for the operation of a logical circuit. Note that tunneling probability is proportional to something like e to minus the potential well height, so there is no critical limit, rather a smooth transition from "no problem" to "show-stopper".
So the real question here, which is left to the audience, is at what width do we get a real problem with tunneling currents. (I assume that on contemporary CPUs, the effect is already measurable, yet correctable).
The reason why all your ideas have not been realised is economical: It makes sense to develop a very expensive piece of technology that can help a lot of people, thereby bringing the price per treatment into an acceptable range. However, it doesn't make sense (yet) to use such complicated technologies to clean windshields because nobody is prepared to pay 200 k$ for a windshield cleaner (while a specialised ophthalmologist would certainly be prepared to pay as much for such a machine).
This technology is certainly no "pie in the sky". It's actually quite close to the market. I'd send you to this site, but it seems they spend more time on developing their machines than updating their site.:-) It's even more a pity that this press release is available in German only. Believe me, this is serious business.
I agree wholeheartedly with you that the Bible is a very interesting source of moral concepts (I am a baptised protestant, having been raised in a predominantly protestant part of central Europe. It's not like I haven't read the Bible). But I see it -- like you, it seems -- as just that: A big book about ethics. To me, it is of no higher authority than, say, Kant's criticism of pure reason, or Nietzsche's "Thus spoke Zarathustra". And it certainly is useless when trying to explain the inner workings of the physical world around us. Nevertheless, this is what many radical christians want it to be used for: As an infallible source of truth. And that's just wrong. That's what I wanted to say with my original post: Nothing in the Bible will help us understand how the physical world works (in the sense that we can use this understanding to raise our quality of life by means of technology and increased enlightenment). Physics will.
This is something that can be viewed as a flaw with both theories. With the creation, God was around, and with the big bang, there were some dust particles. If that's not entirely accurate, bear with me, as the exact details of evolution theory do not matter here. Point is, something existed before the beginning of time in both thoeries, so they both must be false. That is the scientific method, right? It's quite obvious that no person will EVER be able to explain the beginning of time.
I will have to disagree. You have mixed up a view things you've read about Big Bang Models.
"The point is", to use your words, that the contemporary standard model of cosmology describes space and time as one combined object (a so-called manifold) which converges to a singularity the closer we get to the Big Bang (which is sometimes called a "white hole": A time-reversed black hole). Hence, nothing existed "before time" because the concept "before time" makes no sense in the first place.
(Aside: There are some new models being discussed during the past years that assume that "our" big bang was not actually a singularity but a compactification of spacetime to a four-dimensional Planck-Volume. This is a technicality which is no problem to my following argumentation since it either merely shifts the "beginning of time" backwards by a few Aeons or includes the complete deletion of all information about predecessor universes).
If you believe in this (and yes, I do. And also yes, the word "believe" is properly chosen, as the scientific data is still somewhat shaky, albeit growing strongly over the past few years), you have to do away with any external "intelligence" creating this universe which is even the least bit understandable from our point of view. (Me, I am challenged with understanding the world I see around me. I won't try to understand divine intentions). That's were we both agree. But if I accept that we have no way of understanding this world's "cosmic causation", then I also have to accept that there's no point in making God an authority to me. There's no point in praying, worshipping or using him for moral guidance, simply because I have no way of finding out what his intentions or wishes for my behaviour are. (Don't come waving a bible. Someone making a world so complicated and then giving people a handbook is a ridiculous story. Besides, there are a few of these books, depending on which religion you ask). So, screw God. I'll try and find my way alone.
Since you're talking about it: Reading about stories like this one, I get the feeling that modern brain science has singled out three areas of the brain that are not busy with boring stuff like moving limbs, vision or vegetative control: One for "Logic", one for "feeling good" (as in "reward") and one for "feeling bad (as in "anger"). Now the guys go about, shoving random groups of people into functional NMR scanners and pointing out obvious correlations: "When this guy hears his personal political role model talk, he feels good." Huh! And: "People who disagree strongly with what $candidate$ says feel anger when listening to him". Now, of course these statements don't quite sound like brain science, so you simply spice them up a bit with fun facts like "activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix." Note that this does not the least mean that all political activists are crackpots, but it makes for guaranteed media success.
Sorry be nitpickenen, but the proper German verb would be "zerbröseln", with the correct form for use in this sentence being "zerbröselt". "Hast Du deinen iMac zerbröselt?"
I've been trying to think up ways of explaining why the object in your linked picture is _not_ a Klein Bottle for a while now. Now, you've brought up the reason yourself. Thank you very much:
What you have linked to is an immersion of the Klein Bottle in R^3, the three-dimensional vectorspace. (And before someone rants on the "the": All k-dimensional vectorspaces are isomorphic to each other.) An actual Klein Bottle is a three-dimensional submanifold of the four-dimensional vectorspace. And while an actual Klein Bottle does have no inside and outside, yours definitely has both: You can fill it with alcohol, can't you? Now, all you have to do is define "inside" as "the volume where the booze sits", and outside as "aw, no booze".
(And for the record: Yes, this definition is not quite analogous to the topological definition of inside and outside. But on using this definition, none of the usual drinking surfaces (i.e. cylinders with a bottom and deformations thereof) do have in- and outsides).
Hence, never forget: A Klein Bottle lives in four dimensions!
Since the average traffic density is much higher in Germany (we have the world's third most crowded road network, after Hong Kong and the Emirates, with 194.5 cars per km of road, and yes, I have looked that up. The States, to give you an idea, have 34.1 vehicles per km of road, making them number 42 on the list, right after Serbia...[1]), giant car pileups happen once in a while, just because they are possible at all (how long would it take on an interstate highway in the Middle West for 30 cars to pile up?:-). Those normally produce a huge load of scrap metal, yet only minor injuries (and maybe one or two lethalities, most often in the car right in front, where the impact speed was highest). I've been summoned to one accident with about 30 cars once (and that was the only one of this scale I've seen so far) where the only "casualty" was a pregnant woman who was somewhat frightened of a possible injury for her unborn child, which fortunately turned out to be an unnecessary fear.
By the way: Germany and the States have about the same number of injured people per 100 million vehicle kilometres. (81 in Germany, 74 in the states, making us number 29 and 30 on the list, respectively. The UK have 94 (number 25), Japan 149 (number 14), India 333 (number 6) [1]).
And, hell yes, passing on the right is one of the worst offences. You don't want to find out some idiot has just decided to pass you on your right (i.e. the middle lane) when you're scrambling of the fast lane because some other idiot in a BMW is shooting up to you from behind at 140 mph. On the other hand, people who drive on the fast lane nearly always drive (much) faster than the cars on the middle lane, so there's no need to overtake them anyway.
[1] source: 'The Economist' Pocket World in Figures 2005
Slashdot Mirror
Then, I see this little blue link at the top. "Moderate Safe Search is on". So I switch it off. Ergo: Maybe I should try that trick with my own name once in a while...
You forget that OS X is now the most important reason to by a Mac for most of the users. Personally, I would never buy a Mac because of the looks. I bought mine because it's the most easy to use and best supported Unix platform out there. And, arguably, it's about the most stable as well (and yes, I have tried Debian. For three years...). If Apple abandoned OS X, they would lose the majority of their users (especially in Academia and Education) instantly.
When I show people my Mac, I don't tell them "Look how beautiful and silent it is". They can see and hear that for themselves. I tell them "It's practically immune to viruses; it runs MS Office AND emacs natively and it hasn't been rebooted for a month."
And here we go: Random /. Latin-Nazi telling even more random AC how to spell "ad hominem" correctly. ;-)
Google has changed a lot in its interface over the past year. Has anyone else had the following problem?:
I'm living in one country but want to see results from another (in my case, I'm in Germany but I want to see English results). In the good old days, google had a radiobutton that let you choose between "results from the web" and "results in German" (or, rather, "Deutsche Ergebnisse"). But not anymore. Now, even if I explicitly type "www.google.com" in my address bar (firefox, in English, with locale set to US), the stupid server hands me back a google.de redirect. The radiobutton is gone. So is the point in the preferences where I could, back in the day, decide that I wanted results in all languages. It's been replaced by a list of checkboxes where I can, in principle say I only want results in English. But, heavens, I want results in German AND English. Okay, so I check "English" and "German".
Guess what I get? A preordered list with all the German results first (since I'm on google.de. What else could I want anyway?), then the English ones. Like, first the result from de.wikipedia.org, while the English one is nowhere to be seen.
Hey Google! Some people don't live in their homecountries. Yet they fucking want to see results in their own language. It's completely beyond me how a company that has fostered globalisation so much could possibly exclude all ex-pats from their interface.
I've now changed to yahoo (which still has the "results from the web" button). Let's see how long until they will abandon it, too.
I'll make my own prediction: Some time in the future we will have unbelievably fast ocean-going vessels. They will be mostly used for passenger transport and, err, transport of goods. And warfare, of course.
Sorry, but your "coincidences" sound more like pointing out the obvious to me. It's not very difficult to foresee that strong propulsion engines would be used to transport things and people from Alice to Bob at high speed, flying at a high altitude due to advantages in air resistance. Not even for a writer in pre-airtravel times.
Even better link. Sorry.
Who would ever wear such a thing? It looks ridiculous. Completely style-free. The girls would laugh at you.
Oh wait...
I think the biggest reason for most people contributing to the prize money (you are mistaken to think "someone is willing to pay $12,000 to get someone to make it work", rather a lot of people contributed a few bucks to the prize) is software lockin: Like it or not, there is a lot of software that doesn't work on OS X. Think in-house build software solutions and other rather highly specialised software. Heck, the till at my local pub runs on Windows. It's just not true that everything can be done on OS X that can be done in Windows.
And buying a second Windows-running machine, as you suggest, is just a stupid solution. Who wants to have two computers on his desk? Besides, contributing $20 to a prize that will surely turn out a solution is still cheaper than buying a second Windows-machine.
Does that convince you?
Update
The ZDnet article has been updated to include the sentence, "Participants were given local client access to the target computer and invited to try their luck." But might it not have been interesting to explore:
What are the implications of local account access, and under what conditions might a computer be used in that way? How can such access normally be obtained? Do home users behind firewalls and with no ports open need to worry?
How can a vendor fix the claimed local privilege escalation vulnerabilities when they are not informed of the issue? What are the moral and ethical implications of knowing about allegedly severe vulnerabilities in products, like the "hacker" they interviewed, and actively choosing to NOT give the vendor an opportunity to fix the problem(s)?
How might a Linux or BSD distribution, other commercial UNIXes, or Windows stand up to a similar challenge, where anyone who wishes is given local account access?
A discussion about how since much of OS X is closed, this might make it more difficult for the community to discover - and report and fix - potential vulnerabilities in the closed pieces
...and things of that nature, instead of leaving people with the impression that any Mac OS X machine connected to the Internet can be taken over in 30 minutes?
Actually, their player looks worse than the iPod. Look: here. While it's an obvious rip-off (the menu looks especially familiar, and, oh look, it's a click-square...), it just looks cluttered and cheap compared to the reference product from Cupertino.
Actually, that's why I bought exactly one song about five minutes before the counter hit 1B. Had to get out of bed at 6:40 am to do this. Had been extrapolating (least square approximation with a Gaussian parabola) over the last day. Unfortunately, I didn't win. Was fun though. The hardest part was deciding what song to buy...
What? Why are you looking at me like this?
The Electrons in your transistors are "blurry". When the walls of their potential wells (i.e. the width of the wires) get to low, they will start to tunnel between them in a number that is inacceptable for the operation of a logical circuit. Note that tunneling probability is proportional to something like e to minus the potential well height, so there is no critical limit, rather a smooth transition from "no problem" to "show-stopper".
So the real question here, which is left to the audience, is at what width do we get a real problem with tunneling currents. (I assume that on contemporary CPUs, the effect is already measurable, yet correctable).
The reason why all your ideas have not been realised is economical: It makes sense to develop a very expensive piece of technology that can help a lot of people, thereby bringing the price per treatment into an acceptable range. However, it doesn't make sense (yet) to use such complicated technologies to clean windshields because nobody is prepared to pay 200 k$ for a windshield cleaner (while a specialised ophthalmologist would certainly be prepared to pay as much for such a machine).
:-) It's even more a pity that this press release is available in German only. Believe me, this is serious business.
This technology is certainly no "pie in the sky". It's actually quite close to the market. I'd send you to this site, but it seems they spend more time on developing their machines than updating their site.
Right. I'll try and keep this short.
I agree wholeheartedly with you that the Bible is a very interesting source of moral concepts (I am a baptised protestant, having been raised in a predominantly protestant part of central Europe. It's not like I haven't read the Bible). But I see it -- like you, it seems -- as just that: A big book about ethics. To me, it is of no higher authority than, say, Kant's criticism of pure reason, or Nietzsche's "Thus spoke Zarathustra". And it certainly is useless when trying to explain the inner workings of the physical world around us. Nevertheless, this is what many radical christians want it to be used for: As an infallible source of truth. And that's just wrong. That's what I wanted to say with my original post: Nothing in the Bible will help us understand how the physical world works (in the sense that we can use this understanding to raise our quality of life by means of technology and increased enlightenment). Physics will.
"The point is", to use your words, that the contemporary standard model of cosmology describes space and time as one combined object (a so-called manifold) which converges to a singularity the closer we get to the Big Bang (which is sometimes called a "white hole": A time-reversed black hole). Hence, nothing existed "before time" because the concept "before time" makes no sense in the first place.
(Aside: There are some new models being discussed during the past years that assume that "our" big bang was not actually a singularity but a compactification of spacetime to a four-dimensional Planck-Volume. This is a technicality which is no problem to my following argumentation since it either merely shifts the "beginning of time" backwards by a few Aeons or includes the complete deletion of all information about predecessor universes).
If you believe in this (and yes, I do. And also yes, the word "believe" is properly chosen, as the scientific data is still somewhat shaky, albeit growing strongly over the past few years), you have to do away with any external "intelligence" creating this universe which is even the least bit understandable from our point of view. (Me, I am challenged with understanding the world I see around me. I won't try to understand divine intentions). That's were we both agree. But if I accept that we have no way of understanding this world's "cosmic causation", then I also have to accept that there's no point in making God an authority to me. There's no point in praying, worshipping or using him for moral guidance, simply because I have no way of finding out what his intentions or wishes for my behaviour are. (Don't come waving a bible. Someone making a world so complicated and then giving people a handbook is a ridiculous story. Besides, there are a few of these books, depending on which religion you ask). So, screw God. I'll try and find my way alone.
Disclaimer: I'm a theoretical physicist.
Right. That was definitely übernitpickt.
Sorry be nitpickenen, but the proper German verb would be "zerbröseln", with the correct form for use in this sentence being "zerbröselt". "Hast Du deinen iMac zerbröselt?"
I've been trying to think up ways of explaining why the object in your linked picture is _not_ a Klein Bottle for a while now. Now, you've brought up the reason yourself. Thank you very much:
What you have linked to is an immersion of the Klein Bottle in R^3, the three-dimensional vectorspace. (And before someone rants on the "the": All k-dimensional vectorspaces are isomorphic to each other.) An actual Klein Bottle is a three-dimensional submanifold of the four-dimensional vectorspace. And while an actual Klein Bottle does have no inside and outside, yours definitely has both: You can fill it with alcohol, can't you? Now, all you have to do is define "inside" as "the volume where the booze sits", and outside as "aw, no booze".
(And for the record: Yes, this definition is not quite analogous to the topological definition of inside and outside. But on using this definition, none of the usual drinking surfaces (i.e. cylinders with a bottom and deformations thereof) do have in- and outsides).
Hence, never forget: A Klein Bottle lives in four dimensions!
Since the average traffic density is much higher in Germany (we have the world's third most crowded road network, after Hong Kong and the Emirates, with 194.5 cars per km of road, and yes, I have looked that up. The States, to give you an idea, have 34.1 vehicles per km of road, making them number 42 on the list, right after Serbia...[1]), giant car pileups happen once in a while, just because they are possible at all (how long would it take on an interstate highway in the Middle West for 30 cars to pile up? :-). Those normally produce a huge load of scrap metal, yet only minor injuries (and maybe one or two lethalities, most often in the car right in front, where the impact speed was highest). I've been summoned to one accident with about 30 cars once (and that was the only one of this scale I've seen so far) where the only "casualty" was a pregnant woman who was somewhat frightened of a possible injury for her unborn child, which fortunately turned out to be an unnecessary fear.
By the way: Germany and the States have about the same number of injured people per 100 million vehicle kilometres. (81 in Germany, 74 in the states, making us number 29 and 30 on the list, respectively. The UK have 94 (number 25), Japan 149 (number 14), India 333 (number 6) [1]).
And, hell yes, passing on the right is one of the worst offences. You don't want to find out some idiot has just decided to pass you on your right (i.e. the middle lane) when you're scrambling of the fast lane because some other idiot in a BMW is shooting up to you from behind at 140 mph. On the other hand, people who drive on the fast lane nearly always drive (much) faster than the cars on the middle lane, so there's no need to overtake them anyway.
[1] source: 'The Economist' Pocket World in Figures 2005