KDE is technically way ahead of Gnome, which is a bloated pile of rubbish. If you're on Gentoo just compare the number of packages and total amount of sources needed of both, KDE is smaller by an order of magnitude.
Rubbish, you're just trolling, KDE takes far longer to compile. It took me a whole weekend to compile KDE, Gnome took half that time.
That's funny, sand is the remains of eroded/weathered rock. Also, most of the Earth's mantle and crust are made up of silicate rocks (wiki).
My sand is made of up of local random silicate minerals, maybe some feldspar, quartz, biotite and muscovite (my sand is weathered/eroded granite).
The silicates are the largest, the most interesting and the most complicated class of minerals by far. Approximately 30% of all minerals are silicates and some geologists estimate that 90% of the Earth's crust is made up of silicates. With oxygen and silicon the two most abundant elements in the earth's crust silicates abundance is no real surprise.
Japan doesn't make good pickups, Detroit does, people and businesses buy pickups from Detroit instead of Japan.
The Toyota Hilux refutes that statement. Having near-legendary reliability (check out BBC Top Gear's attmept to destroy one Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3). This reliability manifests itself in the popularity of the Hilux (or whatever it's called in the States these days) throughout the developing world. From the Horn of Africa over to Central Asia, they are used as general purpose pickups, and in some local wars as technicals.
On a personal note (and yes 1 anecdote != data), when my father was in Yugoslavia during its breakup in the early 90s, if they had to use a Landrover or a Jeep they'd send out a Hilux with it. They never broke down, the others did.
Depending on who you talk to, that's not strictly true.
It is possible to have a negative Kelvin temperature, you can approach absolute zero asymptotically from either direction, you just can't reach 0 K.
The most common example is the laser. When the active layer is excited, there is a population inversion where there are more excited states than ground states (in this case electrons sitting on higher energy levels). This is reversed on the emission of coherent photons, which brings the electrons back down to their ground state.
Note: This ground state is still higher than that at 0 K, thermal energy excites some of the electrons, just not the majority.
Another way of looking at it, is that something with a negative temperature is hotter than anything with a positive temperature. This is because energy will flow from the unstable negative temperature to the positive temperature.
This allows users of Lynx in a captive situation (where the Lynx user does not normally have access to a shell prompt, or to a menu system that allows the user to run arbitrary commands) to get access to a shell prompt. This includes public Lynxes as well as situations in which users are restricted to a menu interface of some sort with Lynx.
This vulnerability can be exploited by anyone who can provide Lynx a carefully crafted URL. This can be done from the G'oto prompt, or by activating the URL on a world wide web page. The user can launch a shell on the machine running Lynx.
This could also conceivably allow malicious webmasters to add these carefully crafted URLs to their pages to cause unsuspecting Lynx users (in captive accounts or otherwise) to execute arbitrary commands.
Of course, anyone who chooses to use Lynx these days knows what they are doing and wouldn't let the above occur (plus there is a workaround in the above link).
As many, many people have said here already, even if you have a mature, solid codebase, malicious code combined with careless users can foobar your system.
He hadn't seen the house earlier, but it's hard to see when you are skydiving on dark rainy night. He hadn't even seen the tree coming at him as he crashed.
Nor had the bowl of petunias as it muttered 'Oh no, not again'
I have a Creative Jukebox Zen Xtra (the 60Gb version). I bought it in Japan in 2004, for ~$100 cheaper than the 30Gb iPod at the time. It's a bit of a beast size-wise, but it still works, and when the battery started dying (6months ago) I bought a replacement for $15, and a 120 Gb 2.5" HD for 40 Euro. I now have a huge (in size and capacity) mp3 player for 60Euro so I'm a happy camper:).
The older HD mp3 players are big, but as long as you can get replacement batteries and HDs they'll never die on you....Well that is assuming nothing dies on it's mainboard, or you're not afraid to redo the power jack or headphone jack occasionally:)
Windows Se7en
It'll kill your wife, cut her head off, gift wrap it, send it to you, and allow you to edit the movie in Windows Movie Maker like never before!
I finally get around to renting Se7en, avoiding any spoilers, threatening my friends if they tell me any details and then I get pwned on/.
Sounds terrible, it's going to lead to tonnes of dihydrogen monoxide being released into the environment. We need to educate people on the facts, and stop big nasty factories polluting us.
I have to commend you on your honesty and generosity. It's people like you that makes a big difference to the overheads of the F/OSS community. Just like every vote counts (as we saw the other day) every donation counts, and people like me who've contributed neither time nor money benefit greatly from it all.
As you said, it would be nice if there was a centralised portal for donating to the various projects that make up a distro like Ubuntu. The biggest problem is deciding where it goes, and how much would go to each group, essentially deciding how valuable (or valued) a particular project is to the F/OSS community at large. That's a flamewar waiting to happen, but maybe a worthwhile one.
that is a fair point, I don't know much about the types of cases they use:) and when I read magnesium I read it as the metal rather than an alloy. On the upshot, I never did say it was pure Ti either, and in my line of work/study I have to be precise with what I mean when I start throwing around element names. Othwerwise it's like saying FePt and NiFe are the same, since they are both made of iron.
One's a hard magnet, FePt in the right phase which might be used for high density perpendicular recording in the future, possibly as nanowires, or nanoparticleslink 2, and the other's a soft magnet, NiFe, or permalloy, which can be one of the layers in a TMR read head.
The lid in the T40 was metal (magnesium or titanium, can't remember)
I think we can discount magnesium:P
It'll react with water, and if you scratch it, the flakes can ignite very easily. It is pretty to look at flaming magnesium strips, but I wouldn't like a laptop made of it.
Back on topic, my fiance used to have a thinkpad of some sort. I never bothered to check what model, but I remember the heavy docking port she used to lug around with it just to read floppies. It also had no trackpad, used to annoy me when I had to use it.
I feel your pain! and there are valid arguments about how bloated Ubuntu is getting. I stick to vanilla Debian because of many old dependencies of some computational physics packages I use.
Because Ubuntu uses generic kernel builds and starts up unneeded shit at boot time. You also have frontend apps for a lot of apps that don't really need it - that can explain the reason the memory is being eaten up. Suggestions? Learn how to compile a kernel, or use a distribution that doesn't have a list of memory eating apps specific to itself, like Slackware for example. I've never had issues with it, and I've gotten the kernel to finish booting in 6-7 seconds with only the device support and services i only need.
Yeah I know - all these new Linux users don't like Slackware. It's so.. Linux like, and not Windows like. Perhaps Ubuntu can work on optimization and take care of the problem.
Because Ubuntu uses generic kernel builds and starts up unneeded shit at boot time. You also have frontend apps for a lot of apps that don't really need it - that can explain the reason the memory is being eaten up. Suggestions? Learn how to compile a kernel, or use a distribution that doesn't have a list of memory eating apps specific to itself, like Slackware for example. I've never had issues with it, and I've gotten the kernel to finish booting in 6-7 seconds with only the device support and services i only need.
Yeah I know - all these new Linux users don't like Slackware. It's so.. Linux like, and not Windows like. Perhaps Ubuntu can work on optimization and take care of the problem.
what a way to waste my mod points but anyway here goes...
There's no need to be so smug and condescending. If you're a supporter of F/OSS, then you should be happy people are trying out some distro. Of course you'll never get the same performance out of the one-size-fits-all approach of Ubuntu, but that's not the point of the more newbie friendly distros. The whole point of them (i'd include openSUSE, Mandriva and Scientific Linux) is to 'just work', or with as little mucking about in the terminal as possible. It takes time to learn the intricacies of a different OS, especially if you've never used any *NIX OS. Personally I started on a Sinclair Spectrum:)
If you have the time, desire, or need to have a highly optimised kernel, the you have the choice to use something like Gentoo or Slackware. For the rest of us, precompiled binaries work fine, thank you (with exceptions of course), and that kind of negative attitude puts people off trying out, and learning about GNU/Linux.
First among them treason. Agents of a US corporation have subverted major agencies of sovereign nations. Those government employees of non-US nations have by their participation betrayed their nation, the public trust they held in their positions, and their duty. They've done it to preserve the profitability of a foreign enterprise, and by extension line their own pockets.
It's only a matter of time before this is figured out. Heads will roll - in some cases figuratively and in some cases literally.
I wish this was true, but sadly most people, including politicians have no interest in OOXML debacle. Politicians have paid "experts" to direct them, and tell them what their opinion should be. It doesn't help matters in a country like Ireland where MS have a relatively large presence and have people on the advisory committees.
After months of intensive review, analysis and discussion, NSAI has voted Disapproval - with Technical Comments, in respect of the OOXML submission. This effectively is a qualified yes, whereby Ireland has some technical issues with the submission. If the Technical Comments are satisfactorily resolved and incorporated into a new draft, the vote is subsequently amended to Approval.
Half of the UK's choosing to move their finances over to Ireland because the government (up until this afternoon) was only guaranteeing to protect up to £35,000 of savings should their bank collapse whereas Ireland will guarantee 100%...
It's not quite as simple as that, the government has increased the savings protection from €20,000 to €100,000 for the 6 wholly Irish owned banks. This happened only a few days ago, and it is planned to last for 2 years. The biggest influence is on the banks liabilities, i.e. all it's deposits, commercial, retail (you and me) etc. According to the bankers, and the central bank, the bank's problem is with liquidity, not solvency. This means the banks need to attract deposits so they have short term funding. It also means they can borrow cheaper, and the hope is that banks can starting giving loans to each other again.
The government here don't want any of our banks to crash like in the states, the economy is already in a recession with the crash in the housing market (which was the governments fault in the first place). If one of the banks were to become insolvent it would cause serious problems here (one out of the six banks might have been close to insolvency).
The risk taken on by the government is huge, our national debt is just under €40bn, and the six banks owe €440 billion (but have €520 billion in assets). It equates to ~ €100,000 being potentially spent per person in Ireland, compared to ~ $2,000 per person in the US.
While Sarkozy is trying to convince European governments to have a pan-EU rescue plan (especially the German gov who are against such a system), there is a possibility more banks may fail, and after the worst performance of Irish banks on the stock market in history (shares dropped by as much as 36% on Monday) it scared the government into action.
Admittedly, it's not very competition-friendly to look after only Irish-owned banks, but there are supposed to be some discussions with the UK, Dutch and Belgian owned banks operating in Ireland to equalise the playing-field.
On another note, it's about time governments moved in to shake up these parts of the banking sector, where there hasn't been enough regulation, and this last year has shown what happens when we let the mystical, magical "market forces" to run rampant, governments have to step in to fix other peoples mistakes.
Disclaimer: I am not a supporter of the current Irish government, a lot of the current economic problems can be directly attributed to their pumping of the property and construction sector, along with the usual dose of mis-management and wastage, but I do agree with their move to support the Irish banking system in part.
Here in Ireland one of the supermaket chains (later bought out by Tesco) had a promotion for the Barcode Battler which some of you might be familiar with. For a kid whose idea of fun was to let out a really loud moo and have a herd of cattle chase after him and his mate, the Barcode Battler was fucking insanely brilliant. You scanned random barcodes to get characters, powerups etc and then fight against your friends. Piss poor compared to a gameboy or gamegear (or lynx), but was great to play for a few weeks. However to quote one randomer:
When your can of beans barcode can beat up your friends tampons barcode it's just too hard to take seriously.
On the other hand, we have an ever-growing government-paid science-base who wants more money to further their own cushy lives. Both disgust me, both are trying to use force to further their own lives.
Very few government-paid science jobs are well paid. I take offence to statements such as yours. On average, we work long hours, for poor pay compared to what researchers in industry get paid with similar experience-levels. We spend around 8 years (depending on the system) as a student with no money (EUR12,000 pa for a PhD student), and come out with the possibility to get a post-doc position that pays EUR28,000-34,000.
That might seem like a lot to you, but in a country like Ireland where half of that will go on rent (not even a mortgage), it doesnt go very far.
If you look at the breakdown of where money is spent in academia, the vast majority is spent on equipment and supplies. Researchers are fighting for money to do experiments. If you look at NSF funding in the US for example, even though the amount of funding available has increased over the last 50 years, in real spending power it hasn't changed much at all. On top of that there are now more facilities and researchers all fighting for essentially a smaller and smalller pie.
Doing research is not a cushy job, the work can be interesting, but also dangerous (toxic chemicals, radiation exposure -eg. Mossbauer Spectroscopy, and more simple hazzards like water & electricity). We are derided by the public as nerds and geeks, and look down on us.
If you want to have a family, settle down and buy a house it's hard. You have to spend a fews years as a postdoc researcher, essentially a journeyman, trying to get good papers so that you can get a decent position. So money is tight.
another nickel popped out of my paycheck to some goon who continues to manipulate the data to scare others into more funding for his or her pocket
You have no idea what is going on in research, or how funding proposals work. Scaremongering rarely (if ever) works. A lot of funding is now towards applied research rather than fundamental studies. So a lot of it is benefitting people like you. Where do you think the latest hard-drives came from? Fundamental studies on the effect of magnetic fields on anti-ferromagnetically coupled multilayers (GMR, now maybe obsolete) and tunnel barriers between ferromagnetic layers. Along with developing high density granular material to record on.
If you were genuinely interested in science then you would learn more about the world around you and some of the amazing work being carried out by people in a vast array of fields. Just because you don't understand the data doesn't mean it's not important. It can take some time to percolate through the community, but sometimes the small details can change how people study a particular topic. eg. In the case of TMR (Tunnel Magnetoresistance) it was first seen in 1975, but it was only a curiosity (it had to be carried out at low temperatures) no one saw a use for it, and now all the read heads in recent hard drives use TMR stacks.
In essence, don't criticise what you don't understand, you end up as bad as the creationists.
Actually, the parent is partially correct.
One of the hypotheses put forward to explain the Pioneer acceleration anomalies include thermal gradients across the craft. According to one group in JPL:
Turyshevs team calculated the emissions from the Pioneer spacecraft, it found that heat is given off in some directions preferentially, enough to account for 28-36% of the anomalous acceleration.
Source .
The mainstream view is that the effect is most likely due to outgassing from the surface, or thermal radiation pressure Ubiquitous Wiki Link. Having said that, I'm not fully convinced by the pre-print. They still need to make sure they have covered more conventional effects, such as ambient temperature effects on detectors. The variation is small, if significant, and I'd rather wait til it gets through peer review (and their hopefully insightful) comments. If their hypothesis is true, then it's certainly very interesting.
My interest in computers came from video games (child of the 80s). I've generally disliked science fiction most of my life, only recently getting into some of it. Still can't take Star Trek, Asimov, or Bradbury (though I have enjoyed Bradbury's fantasy stuff).
I can understand you not enjoying any of the above, however as in any genre/medium there is a huge variety of styles to choose from.
If you want more action orientated (some might say pulp, I say fun) sci-fi there is Peter F. Hamilton.
Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light is fantastic. Alastair Reynolds, if you enjoy character driven gothic work (Chasm City) or his more expansive Revelation Space 'series'.
John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar is another classic, with its idiosyncratic style is a cynical and bitter take on the modern world (written in the late 60s, set around now).
Most of Dan Simmons work is highly enjoyable, especially if you like his continous references to Shakespeare, Proust, WWI poets, and many many other literary giants, along with being very playful with lit. theory. His series, like the Hyperion Cantos, and his Illium/Olympos work are amongst the most personal of any scifi novel I have read.
There are many other sci-fi authors that I have read that are equally great in different ways, but halfway through typing this I realised, what's the point in trying to force my opinion on someone else? All I can/should do is point out some worthwile authors to read, but there is no point in essentially wasting you time reading something if you do not enjoy it or learn anything from it. Personally I ignore genre definitions when I choose what to read, 'genres' have a purpose in classification, and easy identification between different lit. techniques and styles, but it can also pigeon-hole great works into obscurity (such as Stand on Zanzibar).
Ian Banks/M. Banks is a good example of main stream lit. ignoring his more interesting (and in some cases less frivolous) novels because they were sci-fi.
While Star Trek encapsulates a type of sci-fi that quite a lot of people dislike, all sci-fi truly is, is a plot device to allow a good author to talk about the modern world, and to ask hard questions about our preconceptions (or to give us a highly entertaining yarn).
At the end of this ramble, all I can say is, don't read sci-fi, just try to find interesting, entertaining, and thought provoking works.
Slashdot Mirror
KDE is technically way ahead of Gnome, which is a bloated pile of rubbish. If you're on Gentoo just compare the number of packages and total amount of sources needed of both, KDE is smaller by an order of magnitude.
Rubbish, you're just trolling, KDE takes far longer to compile. It took me a whole weekend to compile KDE, Gnome took half that time.
Even the maintainers of the gentoo quick install guide time a Gnome compile as:
real 520m44.532s
user 339m21.144s
sys 146m22.337s
and a KDE compile as:
real 1171m25.318s
user 851m26.393s
sys 281m45.629s
That's funny. My computer is made from sand.
That's funny, sand is the remains of eroded/weathered rock. Also, most of the Earth's mantle and crust are made up of silicate rocks (wiki). My sand is made of up of local random silicate minerals, maybe some feldspar, quartz, biotite and muscovite (my sand is weathered/eroded granite).
The silicates are the largest, the most interesting and the most complicated class of minerals by far. Approximately 30% of all minerals are silicates and some geologists estimate that 90% of the Earth's crust is made up of silicates. With oxygen and silicon the two most abundant elements in the earth's crust silicates abundance is no real surprise.
Ref
Wow, well fair point, I can't argue with that :) It's a pity, because in the rest of the world the Hilux is/was a beast.
Japan doesn't make good pickups, Detroit does, people and businesses buy pickups from Detroit instead of Japan.
The Toyota Hilux refutes that statement. Having near-legendary reliability (check out BBC Top Gear's attmept to destroy one Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3). This reliability manifests itself in the popularity of the Hilux (or whatever it's called in the States these days) throughout the developing world. From the Horn of Africa over to Central Asia, they are used as general purpose pickups, and in some local wars as technicals.
On a personal note (and yes 1 anecdote != data), when my father was in Yugoslavia during its breakup in the early 90s, if they had to use a Landrover or a Jeep they'd send out a Hilux with it. They never broke down, the others did.
There's no such thing as -20 K
Depending on who you talk to, that's not strictly true.
It is possible to have a negative Kelvin temperature, you can approach absolute zero asymptotically from either direction, you just can't reach 0 K.
The most common example is the laser. When the active layer is excited, there is a population inversion where there are more excited states than ground states (in this case electrons sitting on higher energy levels). This is reversed on the emission of coherent photons, which brings the electrons back down to their ground state.
Note: This ground state is still higher than that at 0 K, thermal energy excites some of the electrons, just not the majority.
Another way of looking at it, is that something with a negative temperature is hotter than anything with a positive temperature. This is because energy will flow from the unstable negative temperature to the positive temperature.
This allows users of Lynx in a captive situation (where the Lynx user does not normally have access to a shell prompt, or to a menu system that allows the user to run arbitrary commands) to get access to a shell prompt. This includes public Lynxes as well as situations in which users are restricted to a menu interface of some sort with Lynx.
This vulnerability can be exploited by anyone who can provide Lynx a carefully crafted URL. This can be done from the G'oto prompt, or by activating the URL on a world wide web page. The user can launch a shell on the machine running Lynx. This could also conceivably allow malicious webmasters to add these carefully crafted URLs to their pages to cause unsuspecting Lynx users (in captive accounts or otherwise) to execute arbitrary commands.
Of course, anyone who chooses to use Lynx these days knows what they are doing and wouldn't let the above occur (plus there is a workaround in the above link).
As many, many people have said here already, even if you have a mature, solid codebase, malicious code combined with careless users can foobar your system.
He hadn't seen the house earlier, but it's hard to see when you are skydiving on dark rainy night. He hadn't even seen the tree coming at him as he crashed.
Nor had the bowl of petunias as it muttered 'Oh no, not again'
I have a Creative Jukebox Zen Xtra (the 60Gb version). I bought it in Japan in 2004, for ~$100 cheaper than the 30Gb iPod at the time. It's a bit of a beast size-wise, but it still works, and when the battery started dying (6months ago) I bought a replacement for $15, and a 120 Gb 2.5" HD for 40 Euro. I now have a huge (in size and capacity) mp3 player for 60Euro so I'm a happy camper :).
:)
The older HD mp3 players are big, but as long as you can get replacement batteries and HDs they'll never die on you....Well that is assuming nothing dies on it's mainboard, or you're not afraid to redo the power jack or headphone jack occasionally
Shouldn't something along the line of "we don't know whether they taste nice" be in there?
There have been some reports of Russians eating frozen Mammoth, but I'm not sure how true that is (I read it somewhere, but I can't remember where).
Here are some quick links I found on the topic:
link 1
link 2
Windows Se7en It'll kill your wife, cut her head off, gift wrap it, send it to you, and allow you to edit the movie in Windows Movie Maker like never before!
I finally get around to renting Se7en, avoiding any spoilers, threatening my friends if they tell me any details and then I get pwned on /.
:P
There's a moral in the lesson somewhere.
Ah well
Sounds terrible, it's going to lead to tonnes of dihydrogen monoxide being released into the environment. We need to educate people on the facts, and stop big nasty factories polluting us.
I have to commend you on your honesty and generosity. It's people like you that makes a big difference to the overheads of the F/OSS community. Just like every vote counts (as we saw the other day) every donation counts, and people like me who've contributed neither time nor money benefit greatly from it all.
As you said, it would be nice if there was a centralised portal for donating to the various projects that make up a distro like Ubuntu. The biggest problem is deciding where it goes, and how much would go to each group, essentially deciding how valuable (or valued) a particular project is to the F/OSS community at large.
That's a flamewar waiting to happen, but maybe a worthwhile one.
that is a fair point, I don't know much about the types of cases they use :) and when I read magnesium I read it as the metal rather than an alloy. On the upshot, I never did say it was pure Ti either, and in my line of work/study I have to be precise with what I mean when I start throwing around element names. Othwerwise it's like saying FePt and NiFe are the same, since they are both made of iron.
One's a hard magnet, FePt in the right phase which might be used for high density perpendicular recording in the future, possibly as nanowires, or nanoparticles link 2, and the other's a soft magnet, NiFe, or permalloy, which can be one of the layers in a TMR read head.
The lid in the T40 was metal (magnesium or titanium, can't remember)
I think we can discount magnesium :P
It'll react with water, and if you scratch it, the flakes can ignite very easily. It is pretty to look at flaming magnesium strips, but I wouldn't like a laptop made of it.
Back on topic, my fiance used to have a thinkpad of some sort. I never bothered to check what model, but I remember the heavy docking port she used to lug around with it just to read floppies. It also had no trackpad, used to annoy me when I had to use it.
It really put me off thinkpads
fair point :P
I feel your pain! and there are valid arguments about how bloated Ubuntu is getting. I stick to vanilla Debian because of many old dependencies of some computational physics packages I use.
Because Ubuntu uses generic kernel builds and starts up unneeded shit at boot time. You also have frontend apps for a lot of apps that don't really need it - that can explain the reason the memory is being eaten up. Suggestions? Learn how to compile a kernel, or use a distribution that doesn't have a list of memory eating apps specific to itself, like Slackware for example. I've never had issues with it, and I've gotten the kernel to finish booting in 6-7 seconds with only the device support and services i only need. Yeah I know - all these new Linux users don't like Slackware. It's so.. Linux like, and not Windows like. Perhaps Ubuntu can work on optimization and take care of the problem.
Because Ubuntu uses generic kernel builds and starts up unneeded shit at boot time. You also have frontend apps for a lot of apps that don't really need it - that can explain the reason the memory is being eaten up. Suggestions? Learn how to compile a kernel, or use a distribution that doesn't have a list of memory eating apps specific to itself, like Slackware for example. I've never had issues with it, and I've gotten the kernel to finish booting in 6-7 seconds with only the device support and services i only need. Yeah I know - all these new Linux users don't like Slackware. It's so.. Linux like, and not Windows like. Perhaps Ubuntu can work on optimization and take care of the problem.
what a way to waste my mod points but anyway here goes...
:)
There's no need to be so smug and condescending. If you're a supporter of F/OSS, then you should be happy people are trying out some distro. Of course you'll never get the same performance out of the one-size-fits-all approach of Ubuntu, but that's not the point of the more newbie friendly distros. The whole point of them (i'd include openSUSE, Mandriva and Scientific Linux) is to 'just work', or with as little mucking about in the terminal as possible. It takes time to learn the intricacies of a different OS, especially if you've never used any *NIX OS. Personally I started on a Sinclair Spectrum
If you have the time, desire, or need to have a highly optimised kernel, the you have the choice to use something like Gentoo or Slackware. For the rest of us, precompiled binaries work fine, thank you (with exceptions of course), and that kind of negative attitude puts people off trying out, and learning about GNU/Linux.
Really??? Wow!
10 Trillion debt => GDP ~ 14 trillion so 71% debt to GDP ! HA!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_debt
Sorting by debt to GDP, US is 27th best (last year!, now worse)
I see a lot of coutries better than 70% :)
* Spain? (30%) * Iran! (25%) * Mexico (22%) * New Zealand (20%)
How about external debt??
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_external_debt
US is world's worst total debt. holder. Per capita, it is still on first page.. Nasty anyway you look at it. And no one is talking about it.
First among them treason. Agents of a US corporation have subverted major agencies of sovereign nations. Those government employees of non-US nations have by their participation betrayed their nation, the public trust they held in their positions, and their duty. They've done it to preserve the profitability of a foreign enterprise, and by extension line their own pockets.
It's only a matter of time before this is figured out. Heads will roll - in some cases figuratively and in some cases literally.
I wish this was true, but sadly most people, including politicians have no interest in OOXML debacle. Politicians have paid "experts" to direct them, and tell them what their opinion should be. It doesn't help matters in a country like Ireland where MS have a relatively large presence and have people on the advisory committees.
It also doesn't help when you read comments like this from the official National Standards of Ireland website
After months of intensive review, analysis and discussion, NSAI has voted Disapproval - with Technical Comments, in respect of the OOXML submission. This effectively is a qualified yes, whereby Ireland has some technical issues with the submission. If the Technical Comments are satisfactorily resolved and incorporated into a new draft, the vote is subsequently amended to Approval.
Half of the UK's choosing to move their finances over to Ireland because the government (up until this afternoon) was only guaranteeing to protect up to £35,000 of savings should their bank collapse whereas Ireland will guarantee 100%...
It's not quite as simple as that, the government has increased the savings protection from €20,000 to €100,000 for the 6 wholly Irish owned banks. This happened only a few days ago, and it is planned to last for 2 years. The biggest influence is on the banks liabilities, i.e. all it's deposits, commercial, retail (you and me) etc. According to the bankers, and the central bank, the bank's problem is with liquidity, not solvency. This means the banks need to attract deposits so they have short term funding. It also means they can borrow cheaper, and the hope is that banks can starting giving loans to each other again.
The government here don't want any of our banks to crash like in the states, the economy is already in a recession with the crash in the housing market (which was the governments fault in the first place). If one of the banks were to become insolvent it would cause serious problems here (one out of the six banks might have been close to insolvency).
The risk taken on by the government is huge, our national debt is just under €40bn, and the six banks owe €440 billion (but have €520 billion in assets). It equates to ~ €100,000 being potentially spent per person in Ireland, compared to ~ $2,000 per person in the US.
While Sarkozy is trying to convince European governments to have a pan-EU rescue plan (especially the German gov who are against such a system), there is a possibility more banks may fail, and after the worst performance of Irish banks on the stock market in history (shares dropped by as much as 36% on Monday) it scared the government into action.
Admittedly, it's not very competition-friendly to look after only Irish-owned banks, but there are supposed to be some discussions with the UK, Dutch and Belgian owned banks operating in Ireland to equalise the playing-field.
On another note, it's about time governments moved in to shake up these parts of the banking sector, where there hasn't been enough regulation, and this last year has shown what happens when we let the mystical, magical "market forces" to run rampant, governments have to step in to fix other peoples mistakes.
Disclaimer: I am not a supporter of the current Irish government, a lot of the current economic problems can be directly attributed to their pumping of the property and construction sector, along with the usual dose of mis-management and wastage, but I do agree with their move to support the Irish banking system in part.
When your can of beans barcode can beat up your friends tampons barcode it's just too hard to take seriously.
Personally I'm a big fan of JabRef which uses the BibTeX package in LaTeX.
There is a way to get JabRef working with Word 2003 but I've never tried it, I mostly stick to LaTeX.
JabRef is a nice little Java app, nice easy to use interface, smart search functions, runs happily under my xp and *nix accounts, and is open source.
Happy Days
On the other hand, we have an ever-growing government-paid science-base who wants more money to further their own cushy lives. Both disgust me, both are trying to use force to further their own lives.
Very few government-paid science jobs are well paid. I take offence to statements such as yours. On average, we work long hours, for poor pay compared to what researchers in industry get paid with similar experience-levels. We spend around 8 years (depending on the system) as a student with no money (EUR12,000 pa for a PhD student), and come out with the possibility to get a post-doc position that pays EUR28,000-34,000.
That might seem like a lot to you, but in a country like Ireland where half of that will go on rent (not even a mortgage), it doesnt go very far.
If you look at the breakdown of where money is spent in academia, the vast majority is spent on equipment and supplies. Researchers are fighting for money to do experiments. If you look at NSF funding in the US for example, even though the amount of funding available has increased over the last 50 years, in real spending power it hasn't changed much at all. On top of that there are now more facilities and researchers all fighting for essentially a smaller and smalller pie.
Doing research is not a cushy job, the work can be interesting, but also dangerous (toxic chemicals, radiation exposure -eg. Mossbauer Spectroscopy, and more simple hazzards like water & electricity). We are derided by the public as nerds and geeks, and look down on us.
If you want to have a family, settle down and buy a house it's hard. You have to spend a fews years as a postdoc researcher, essentially a journeyman, trying to get good papers so that you can get a decent position. So money is tight.
another nickel popped out of my paycheck to some goon who continues to manipulate the data to scare others into more funding for his or her pocket
You have no idea what is going on in research, or how funding proposals work. Scaremongering rarely (if ever) works. A lot of funding is now towards applied research rather than fundamental studies. So a lot of it is benefitting people like you. Where do you think the latest hard-drives came from? Fundamental studies on the effect of magnetic fields on anti-ferromagnetically coupled multilayers (GMR, now maybe obsolete) and tunnel barriers between ferromagnetic layers. Along with developing high density granular material to record on.
If you were genuinely interested in science then you would learn more about the world around you and some of the amazing work being carried out by people in a vast array of fields. Just because you don't understand the data doesn't mean it's not important. It can take some time to percolate through the community, but sometimes the small details can change how people study a particular topic. eg. In the case of TMR (Tunnel Magnetoresistance) it was first seen in 1975, but it was only a curiosity (it had to be carried out at low temperatures) no one saw a use for it, and now all the read heads in recent hard drives use TMR stacks.
In essence, don't criticise what you don't understand, you end up as bad as the creationists.
One of the hypotheses put forward to explain the Pioneer acceleration anomalies include thermal gradients across the craft. According to one group in JPL:
Turyshevs team calculated the emissions from the Pioneer spacecraft, it found that heat is given off in some directions preferentially, enough to account for 28-36% of the anomalous acceleration.
Source
. The mainstream view is that the effect is most likely due to outgassing from the surface, or thermal radiation pressure Ubiquitous Wiki Link. Having said that, I'm not fully convinced by the pre-print. They still need to make sure they have covered more conventional effects, such as ambient temperature effects on detectors. The variation is small, if significant, and I'd rather wait til it gets through peer review (and their hopefully insightful) comments. If their hypothesis is true, then it's certainly very interesting.
My interest in computers came from video games (child of the 80s). I've generally disliked science fiction most of my life, only recently getting into some of it. Still can't take Star Trek, Asimov, or Bradbury (though I have enjoyed Bradbury's fantasy stuff).
I can understand you not enjoying any of the above, however as in any genre/medium there is a huge variety of styles to choose from.
If you want more action orientated (some might say pulp, I say fun) sci-fi there is Peter F. Hamilton.
Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light is fantastic.
Alastair Reynolds, if you enjoy character driven gothic work (Chasm City) or his more expansive Revelation Space 'series'.
John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar is another classic, with its idiosyncratic style is a cynical and bitter take on the modern world (written in the late 60s, set around now).
Most of Dan Simmons work is highly enjoyable, especially if you like his continous references to Shakespeare, Proust, WWI poets, and many many other literary giants, along with being very playful with lit. theory. His series, like the Hyperion Cantos, and his Illium/Olympos work are amongst the most personal of any scifi novel I have read.
There are many other sci-fi authors that I have read that are equally great in different ways, but halfway through typing this I realised, what's the point in trying to force my opinion on someone else? All I can/should do is point out some worthwile authors to read, but there is no point in essentially wasting you time reading something if you do not enjoy it or learn anything from it. Personally I ignore genre definitions when I choose what to read, 'genres' have a purpose in classification, and easy identification between different lit. techniques and styles, but it can also pigeon-hole great works into obscurity (such as Stand on Zanzibar). Ian Banks/M. Banks is a good example of main stream lit. ignoring his more interesting (and in some cases less frivolous) novels because they were sci-fi.
While Star Trek encapsulates a type of sci-fi that quite a lot of people dislike, all sci-fi truly is, is a plot device to allow a good author to talk about the modern world, and to ask hard questions about our preconceptions (or to give us a highly entertaining yarn).
At the end of this ramble, all I can say is, don't read sci-fi, just try to find interesting, entertaining, and thought provoking works.