Unde the French Napoleonic code of justice you are guilty until proven innocent.
Did you learn that in school or did you vaguely hear about it on the internet somewhere? This is completely false. Presumption of innocence is *more* enshrined in law in France than in the USA:
In France, article 9 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen 1789, which has force as constitutional law, begins: "Any man being presumed innocent until he has been declared guilty...". The Code of Criminal Procedure states in its preliminary article that "any person suspected or prosecuted is presumed innocent for as long as their guilt has not been established"[13] and the jurors' oath repeats this assertion (article 304).[19]
Although the Constitution of the United States does not cite it explicitly, presumption of innocence is widely held to follow from the 5th, 6th, and 14th amendments. See also Coffin v. United States and In re Winship.
The illusion of choice. Right, look up the story of the various athletes in the history of sport who were forced to use performance enhancing drugs through their federation. Most obvious are the former Eastern Germany female swimmers. I doubt they are very happy now. Maybe in a couple hundred years when the world is everywhere a democracy. Even then, people would have to start using drugs very early on, when they are minors. What *choice* would they have ?
The simplest and sanest choice is to ban all performance-enhancing drugs now, and to continue coming up with tests, with retroactive action if somewhere down the road some test shows unambiguously that drugs were used..
This is frequently misunderstood. The principle is similar than in the US, but differently implemented. The idea is that one is completely free to practice whatever religion one wants (there are exceptions for sects who recruit people forcefully), but that in the public space proselytism and displaying outward signs of a religious nature is proscribed. Note that the "public space" does not mean the park or the street, it is quite restricted: it means teaching and being taught in the public system, and interacting with the public systems of law. You see women wearing burqas or crosses or yarmulke everywhere in the streets in France, this is no problem, and of course in private institutions like private schools or colleges or companies this is OK as well.
In the US and most western countries tolerance is in the eye of the beholder. You see someone wearing a burqa and you have to say nothing. In France the tolerance is in the behavior of the religious person: you have to accept that as a teacher or generally as a person interacting with the public for your job, your appearance must not be shocking to anyone, and you must keep your relationship to your deity outside your job. This makes some kind of sense, I think.
The required absence of religious symbols in the school system is restricted to minors. At (public) universities you do what you want as a student. The idea is that people in the school system are young and impressionable and so should be spared religious discussions and segregation. This is more debatable, but the fact is that many religious obligations apply to girls only (burqa, etc) and this was found intolerable. Adult women can definitely do what they want.
1- The medical education example is kind of an extreme case, and is due to the fact that medical education is in the hands of the "order" of medical doctors, who want their profession to remain a societal elite. They have a history of making some poor decisions such as favoring some specialists fields over others, leading to long-term dearths in some fields. At present for instance it is hard to get an appointment with an eye specialist in France, because there are not enough of them. Also there isn't enough doctors in France in general, so many are clamoring for the "order" (in effect like a guild) to be a bit less conservative.
However, this first-year selection process is kind of unique to medicine. Also note that the first year medical exam is a normal exam, one only need an average score to pass, but getting an "average" score is extremely tough.
2- There is way too much involvement of the State in business affairs in France, this is very true. This has led to a small number of large corporations who very much depend on state intervention to survive: EdF, Thales, Dassault, the car manufacturers, etc. This to the detriment of the small-to-medium enterprises. I'm not positive things are all that much better in the US, but they are much better in Germany for instance.
3- In the field of justice, indeed only the most severe cases are judged by a popular jury, and even then the jury is only made of a majority of non-professionals. I don't know whether this is good or bad. This is not the most vexing problem regarding justice in France though, there are many others. For instance, only very recently were lawyers allowed at police interrogation, after the EU intervened. The accusation part of the justice system is handled by the ministry of justice. Only the defense is independent! this has led to some very strange cases recently where old politicians (like Jacques Chirac) were accused of corruption, only to find that the non-independent accusation recommended acquittal. In spite of this, Chirac was recently found guilty by the tribunal and sentenced to two years suspended jail sentence. This, I repeat, even though both accusation and defense (of course) recommended acquittal.
I'm not sure what the point of the submitter is. Open source and open API have little in common. It's not like one could develop an OS kernel based on some documented open API. Open API is also nothing novel.
Getting rich as an individual is not the point of Open-Source. Getting richer as a software-building community in terms of software availability is.
Actually if the number of qubit we can manage doubles within some time constant, then this is cool, because I was assuming that it would increase *linearly* with time. If the qubits scale linearly and the traditional computers exponentially, ten quantum computers may never catch up to classical ones. However with exponential qubit growth they do have a chance irrespective of the time scale.
Your linked article says that quantum computers will become interesting at about 50 qubits and that it might happen by 2025 or so.
Definitely. However right now we do not have 20 qubits in a device, we have 2 qubits today. If progress in physics and electronics allows us to have 3 qubits in 18 month, 4 qubits in 36 months and so on, we have just reinvented the quantum version of Moore's law.
Actually the American way is not the only way. You can also socialize the costs so that most people get the treatment they *need*, not based on their revenue. I suggest you take a look at Canada, Australia, NZ most of Europe, and so on. There getting cancer or any long-term illness does not necessarily mean bankruptcy or selling your house.
And guess what, it is not that expensive. Certainly less than a few wars here and there.
No it is falsifiable, finite does not mean computable.
Simply look at the fact that quantum mechanics cannot be simulated accurately and efficiently on a classical computer. Yet QM itself is falsifiable and has proven correct so far, outside of some boundary conditions. So the whole world cannot be simulated on a classical computer, no matter how big.
Another example: take a random vector V of 300 values and consider the subset-sum problem: does it exist a partition of V into two subsets A and B such that sum(A) = sum(B). This is a known NP-hard problem. Solving this problem for a given vector V only once would require much more energy than exists in the entire visible universe, for any physical computer. Do the math yourself as an exercise...
Fedora is proving grounds for RHEL. If you are using Fedora, you are basically RedHat's unpaid beta tester. RedHad is not afraid to change very important kernel components for you to test. Their distribution is not stable. They don't offer a server version, only desktop. Plus they leave you cold every 6-9 months (12 months in theory but less in effect) with a no-longer-supported distribution. It's the upgrade-or-bust treadmill for you, so they keep you beta-testing forever.
I did the Fedora thing until Fedora 8 or 9, with which I had so many problems that I had fits of rage. Ubuntu was much better. Now I'm mostly happy with Ubuntu server (kind of a OK hypervisor) and CentOS.
That describes Wordperfect to a T, yet in the end MS-Word won out.
I think most users prefer something that can be learned easily, look reasonably nice, and more or less does everything they need sort-of-OK, to something that works perfectly but is hard to learn (not to use).
FreeNAS is the project that got me finally using FreeBSD. I have it in my 2004-era single core Athlon64 box full of (new) disks. Everything is supported included the newer SATA controller and the Gigabit ethernet NIC. It runs ZFS well in spite of only having 2GB of RAM, and it is hosting my backup. It is easily controllable via its web interface.
I teach at a college-level institution in Europe. Here tuition is not free but nothing like what it is in the US, about ten times less. I have been partly educated at a US college (at the graduate level) so I do know the system a bit.
At age 18, people are still kids. The whole point of going to college is to get an education, not necessarily a degree. At 18 you can finally, for most of us, start making choices that will determine our careers and opportunities for a lifetime. It should be basically available to all those who want. Not just a self-appointed elite. Not only those who can work two jobs at once. College should not be a painful time where one goes from one lecture to another in between bouts of homework or nighttime jobs.
The US has the best collection of higher learning institutions in the world, by a hundred miles.Yet it is becoming increasingly unfair and unpleasant.
Right now college in the US is the surest way to get into a lifetime of debt repayment, unless one's parents are quite rich. I honestly can't see how proposals like these are going to improve the situation, rather than increase the misery of the students and their families.
Steve Jobs got the Whipple procedure. This is totally major surgery, nothing like appendicectomy. The mortality rate from this procedure is close to 17% !
The list of famous people who got this procedure and died anyway is impressive. The median survival rate of neuroendocrine cancers in general is about 8 years. Jobs survived 7 years after his surgery.
1- I don't know of any good-quality power supply below about $60. Good quality means Japanese capacitor, low ripple, good resistance to micro cuts, no lead, good current on the 12V rail, at least bronze-level efficiency, silence, and so on. Cheap no-name PS eventually fail, sometime taking the whole PC with them. Most people dismiss the PS, but it is an essential investment in a piece of equipment that runs all the time.
2- On a homebrew NAS you want to run ZFS, you really do. In fact this is the number one reason to build a homebrew NAS because the commercial ones never support it. This requires approximately 1GB of RAM per terabyte of data for good performance. ZFS essentially eliminates the possibility that your RAID becomes invalid and unrecoverable due to too many bad silent blocks. Read this.
3- For ZFS, the recommended setup is the equivalent of RAID6 as soon as you hit 4 disks of data, and to split arrays beyond 6 disks of data.
RAID 6 is only needed when it's possible for a drive to fail, and then for another to fail while the array is still recovering
That is precisely the problem. Your array may have already failed without you knowing it. If there is a single unreadable bad block anywhere on the "good" disks while your array is being rebuilt, the reconstruction is impossible with most hardware and software RAID solutions. You have already lost your array completely.
RAID is far from the panacea it is sold to be, in fact it is now an obsolete solution to a real problem.
This has been said before in this thread, but here is is a great quote:
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Georges Bernard Shaw, "man and superman", 1903.
This applies to both Jobs and Stallman. We can all learn from both.
Wolfgang Pauli, of exclusion principle fame, won the 1945 Nobel prize in physics. Pauli is indeed one of the greatest. If you want to pick a particular science communicator who was also a well-respected researcher, maybe Carl Sagan would have been a great choice.
Are you sure you can compare deep narrow search (google) with wide shallow ones (pre-google) ? I fail to see the logic step between this and the long tail issue.
You are speaking of an age before the printing press. Gutenberg's press became available in 1450, he finished printing his first bibles in 1455. I am guessing the invention and the subsequent widespread availability of the movable type press has more to do with the spread of books than copyright issues.
Neutrinos do have mass, this is why they oscillate between 3 states. However the mass is very slight.
Also the neutrinos arrived ahead of the photons in SN1997 by a small amount (days, IIRC. it should be years at the speed discrepancy quoted by CERN). This different is explained by the fact that neutrinos hardly interact with matter and so could escape the core of the supernova before the photons could.
The article claims they had to move a device between the two locations to synchronize the clocks, and that not all GRT effects have been taken into account while this device was moving.
Slashdot Mirror
Hello,
Did you learn that in school or did you vaguely hear about it on the internet somewhere? This is completely false. Presumption of innocence is *more* enshrined in law in France than in the USA:
(source wikipedia)
The illusion of choice. Right, look up the story of the various athletes in the history of sport who were forced to use performance enhancing drugs through their federation. Most obvious are the former Eastern Germany female swimmers. I doubt they are very happy now. Maybe in a couple hundred years when the world is everywhere a democracy. Even then, people would have to start using drugs very early on, when they are minors. What *choice* would they have ?
The simplest and sanest choice is to ban all performance-enhancing drugs now, and to continue coming up with tests, with retroactive action if somewhere down the road some test shows unambiguously that drugs were used..
This is frequently misunderstood. The principle is similar than in the US, but differently implemented. The idea is that one is completely free to practice whatever religion one wants (there are exceptions for sects who recruit people forcefully), but that in the public space proselytism and displaying outward signs of a religious nature is proscribed. Note that the "public space" does not mean the park or the street, it is quite restricted: it means teaching and being taught in the public system, and interacting with the public systems of law. You see women wearing burqas or crosses or yarmulke everywhere in the streets in France, this is no problem, and of course in private institutions like private schools or colleges or companies this is OK as well.
In the US and most western countries tolerance is in the eye of the beholder. You see someone wearing a burqa and you have to say nothing. In France the tolerance is in the behavior of the religious person: you have to accept that as a teacher or generally as a person interacting with the public for your job, your appearance must not be shocking to anyone, and you must keep your relationship to your deity outside your job. This makes some kind of sense, I think.
The required absence of religious symbols in the school system is restricted to minors. At (public) universities you do what you want as a student. The idea is that people in the school system are young and impressionable and so should be spared religious discussions and segregation. This is more debatable, but the fact is that many religious obligations apply to girls only (burqa, etc) and this was found intolerable. Adult women can definitely do what they want.
To add to your remarks
1- The medical education example is kind of an extreme case, and is due to the fact that medical education is in the hands of the "order" of medical doctors, who want their profession to remain a societal elite. They have a history of making some poor decisions such as favoring some specialists fields over others, leading to long-term dearths in some fields. At present for instance it is hard to get an appointment with an eye specialist in France, because there are not enough of them. Also there isn't enough doctors in France in general, so many are clamoring for the "order" (in effect like a guild) to be a bit less conservative.
However, this first-year selection process is kind of unique to medicine. Also note that the first year medical exam is a normal exam, one only need an average score to pass, but getting an "average" score is extremely tough.
2- There is way too much involvement of the State in business affairs in France, this is very true. This has led to a small number of large corporations who very much depend on state intervention to survive: EdF, Thales, Dassault, the car manufacturers, etc. This to the detriment of the small-to-medium enterprises. I'm not positive things are all that much better in the US, but they are much better in Germany for instance.
3- In the field of justice, indeed only the most severe cases are judged by a popular jury, and even then the jury is only made of a majority of non-professionals. I don't know whether this is good or bad. This is not the most vexing problem regarding justice in France though, there are many others. For instance, only very recently were lawyers allowed at police interrogation, after the EU intervened. The accusation part of the justice system is handled by the ministry of justice. Only the defense is independent! this has led to some very strange cases recently where old politicians (like Jacques Chirac) were accused of corruption, only to find that the non-independent accusation recommended acquittal. In spite of this, Chirac was recently found guilty by the tribunal and sentenced to two years suspended jail sentence. This, I repeat, even though both accusation and defense (of course) recommended acquittal.
I'm not sure what the point of the submitter is. Open source and open API have little in common. It's not like one could develop an OS kernel based on some documented open API. Open API is also nothing novel.
Getting rich as an individual is not the point of Open-Source. Getting richer as a software-building community in terms of software availability is.
Actually if the number of qubit we can manage doubles within some time constant, then this is cool, because I was assuming that it would increase *linearly* with time. If the qubits scale linearly and the traditional computers exponentially, ten quantum computers may never catch up to classical ones. However with exponential qubit growth they do have a chance irrespective of the time scale.
Your linked article says that quantum computers will become interesting at about 50 qubits and that it might happen by 2025 or so.
Definitely. However right now we do not have 20 qubits in a device, we have 2 qubits today. If progress in physics and electronics allows us to have 3 qubits in 18 month, 4 qubits in 36 months and so on, we have just reinvented the quantum version of Moore's law.
Actually the American way is not the only way. You can also socialize the costs so that most people get the treatment they *need*, not based on their revenue. I suggest you take a look at Canada, Australia, NZ most of Europe, and so on. There getting cancer or any long-term illness does not necessarily mean bankruptcy or selling your house.
And guess what, it is not that expensive. Certainly less than a few wars here and there.
No it is falsifiable, finite does not mean computable.
Simply look at the fact that quantum mechanics cannot be simulated accurately and efficiently on a classical computer. Yet QM itself is falsifiable and has proven correct so far, outside of some boundary conditions. So the whole world cannot be simulated on a classical computer, no matter how big.
Another example: take a random vector V of 300 values and consider the subset-sum problem: does it exist a partition of V into two subsets A and B such that sum(A) = sum(B). This is a known NP-hard problem. Solving this problem for a given vector V only once would require much more energy than exists in the entire visible universe, for any physical computer. Do the math yourself as an exercise...
What are you complaining about, this is exactly what is going on now. Plus no one is blaming you for anything. Should they ?
Solaris 10 still works and is still supported on this hardware.
Fedora is proving grounds for RHEL. If you are using Fedora, you are basically RedHat's unpaid beta tester. RedHad is not afraid to change very important kernel components for you to test. Their distribution is not stable. They don't offer a server version, only desktop. Plus they leave you cold every 6-9 months (12 months in theory but less in effect) with a no-longer-supported distribution. It's the upgrade-or-bust treadmill for you, so they keep you beta-testing forever.
I did the Fedora thing until Fedora 8 or 9, with which I had so many problems that I had fits of rage. Ubuntu was much better. Now I'm mostly happy with Ubuntu server (kind of a OK hypervisor) and CentOS.
That describes Wordperfect to a T, yet in the end MS-Word won out.
I think most users prefer something that can be learned easily, look reasonably nice, and more or less does everything they need sort-of-OK, to something that works perfectly but is hard to learn (not to use).
FreeNAS is the project that got me finally using FreeBSD. I have it in my 2004-era single core Athlon64 box full of (new) disks. Everything is supported included the newer SATA controller and the Gigabit ethernet NIC. It runs ZFS well in spite of only having 2GB of RAM, and it is hosting my backup. It is easily controllable via its web interface.
No way I'm using this on the desktop though.
Yes it does, because for the USPTO, prior art is what is in their patents database, not out there in the real world.
I teach at a college-level institution in Europe. Here tuition is not free but nothing like what it is in the US, about ten times less. I have been partly educated at a US college (at the graduate level) so I do know the system a bit.
At age 18, people are still kids. The whole point of going to college is to get an education, not necessarily a degree. At 18 you can finally, for most of us, start making choices that will determine our careers and opportunities for a lifetime. It should be basically available to all those who want. Not just a self-appointed elite. Not only those who can work two jobs at once. College should not be a painful time where one goes from one lecture to another in between bouts of homework or nighttime jobs.
The US has the best collection of higher learning institutions in the world, by a hundred miles.Yet it is becoming increasingly unfair and unpleasant.
Right now college in the US is the surest way to get into a lifetime of debt repayment, unless one's parents are quite rich. I honestly can't see how proposals like these are going to improve the situation, rather than increase the misery of the students and their families.
Steve Jobs got the Whipple procedure. This is totally major surgery, nothing like appendicectomy. The mortality rate from this procedure is close to 17% !
The list of famous people who got this procedure and died anyway is impressive. The median survival rate of neuroendocrine cancers in general is about 8 years. Jobs survived 7 years after his surgery.
1- I don't know of any good-quality power supply below about $60. Good quality means Japanese capacitor, low ripple, good resistance to micro cuts, no lead, good current on the 12V rail, at least bronze-level efficiency, silence, and so on. Cheap no-name PS eventually fail, sometime taking the whole PC with them. Most people dismiss the PS, but it is an essential investment in a piece of equipment that runs all the time.
Read this for instance.
2- On a homebrew NAS you want to run ZFS, you really do. In fact this is the number one reason to build a homebrew NAS because the commercial ones never support it. This requires approximately 1GB of RAM per terabyte of data for good performance. ZFS essentially eliminates the possibility that your RAID becomes invalid and unrecoverable due to too many bad silent blocks. Read this.
3- For ZFS, the recommended setup is the equivalent of RAID6 as soon as you hit 4 disks of data, and to split arrays beyond 6 disks of data.
That is precisely the problem. Your array may have already failed without you knowing it. If there is a single unreadable bad block anywhere on the "good" disks while your array is being rebuilt, the reconstruction is impossible with most hardware and software RAID solutions. You have already lost your array completely.
RAID is far from the panacea it is sold to be, in fact it is now an obsolete solution to a real problem.
This has been said before in this thread, but here is is a great quote:
Georges Bernard Shaw, "man and superman", 1903.
This applies to both Jobs and Stallman. We can all learn from both.
Yes but he didn't end up curing cancer.
Wolfgang Pauli, of exclusion principle fame, won the 1945 Nobel prize in physics. Pauli is indeed one of the greatest. If you want to pick a particular science communicator who was also a well-respected researcher, maybe Carl Sagan would have been a great choice.
Are you sure you can compare deep narrow search (google) with wide shallow ones (pre-google) ? I fail to see the logic step between this and the long tail issue.
You are speaking of an age before the printing press. Gutenberg's press became available in 1450, he finished printing his first bibles in 1455. I am guessing the invention and the subsequent widespread availability of the movable type press has more to do with the spread of books than copyright issues.
Neutrinos do have mass, this is why they oscillate between 3 states. However the mass is very slight.
Also the neutrinos arrived ahead of the photons in SN1997 by a small amount (days, IIRC. it should be years at the speed discrepancy quoted by CERN). This different is explained by the fact that neutrinos hardly interact with matter and so could escape the core of the supernova before the photons could.
The article claims they had to move a device between the two locations to synchronize the clocks, and that not all GRT effects have been taken into account while this device was moving.