Pi has survived in mathematics as Pi rather than being subsumed in a new Cir=2*Pi because Pi appears in so many more places than 2Pi does. I sumbit without any proof that if 2Pi was more useful than Pi, that is what we would be using.
This is a bit related to the Planck's constant "h". "h" was efined by Planck for one particular calculation, and it was found to be useful in lots of other places, and to be a fundamental parameter of the univers. However "h" tends to appear in many uses along with an extra factor of 1/2Pi (as an aside, this would be an example where "Cir" might be more "useful" than Pi - if they were more common we might be thinking of Cir as the fundamental unit and Pi as being half of that). Since h/2Pi appears so often, people started to use a new symbol to represent that quantity (drawn as an "h" with a line through it, called "hbar"), and in many situations "hbar" is the preferred constant. Had Planck defined "hbar" instead of "h", we probably would not even talk about "h" at all, but only occasionally use the quantity 2(Pi)(hbar) when it was needed.
In Canada (and most other places?) the political parties choose their leaders by themselves (though I do not doubt that they manage to get some state funding). Thus you can only vote in the "primaries" if you are a properly signed up member of the party. And the party decides how it is going to do the selection, not any government legislation.
I never really understood this whole USA system of candidate selection. I also do not understand why it is not abused more often. Why didn't all of the Republican supporters register as Democrats for the primaries and try to get the worst possible Democrat onto the ticket?
By this point, any answer you get is going to be higher than just using oil or coal
A rough calculation isn't really as difficult as you make it seem, you just need to find out the cost that someone will charge you to supply the raw materials you want. Presumamby they have already done the cost calculations needed to set their price. Also, those prices reflect the energy costs (at least roughly) for producing those products you want to sell.
Of course the tax incentives that certain industries enjoy are not directly reflected in these prices, thus the cost of oil is artificially low. And the military/security costs associated with oil are also not reflected in the "pump price", but rather are born by everyone through tax support of the military, so maybe the accounting is not that simple.
The fact that wind and solar electrical production is even CLOSE to price competitive (within a factor of ten) with the established producers and their many tax incentives and hidden subsidies is pretty amazing.
I think you are missing the point. This is meant to suppliment real neighbourhoods, not replace or emaulate them. If you only have 10 neighbours, then this system is supposed to enhance your interactions with those 10, rather than give you a new group of 10 people to interact with from the other side of town.
You create a neighbourhood group on their system, say "ElmStreet", then you put up a few posters and/or phone and/or call your neighbours and let them know about it. Assuming that they sign up, now you can post the neighbourhood watch meeting schedule, and solicit ideas for the street-wide yard sale, and organize a letter writing campaign to the mayor about the sewer problem, and that sort of thing.
Having a ready-build mail-list server, calendaring application, and similar might be very useful.
Since the system is open fo anyone to self-join, it might not be such a good idea to tell everyone when you are going to be out of town since some "bad guy" might be reading the mailing list and steal all of your stuff, but in general it might be very useful to have an online neighbourhood community.
They claim to do Canadian neighbourhoods, and seem to have registered "i-neighbours.org" as well as "i-neighbors.org", but they spell everything "bors" rather than "bours", even when in a clearly Canadian region...
ast time I checked PCs and Macs were genderless and worked the same in everyones eyes..
It is true that gender would likely play little role in the act of fixing a computer. But user training is not as gender-neutral. Customer service is also not gender neutral. And certainly almost everyone that I know thinks (if they think at all) a computer works in a different way that I think that they do. They may all be wrong, but explaining that to them is a task that requires the ability to have multiple viewpoints.
The decisions on what features to implement and what markets to serve could possibly benifit from a diversity of viewpoints. If all the developers ever like to do is to play Pac-Man, who would come up with the idea of Tetris? If we do not draw on group "X" it is more difficult to serve the needs of group "X", and possibly "Y" and "Z" too.
Generally speaking, we as a society are better served if a broad spectrum (no pun intended) of our population are involved fully in all aspectss of society. If any field is over-dominated by one segment of our population, we run the risk of making errors in decision making and direction and value. Perhaps rather than "error" it would be more accurate to use "sub-optimal decision" or something like that.
If all doctors are males, perhaps we are less likely to have advances in health issues for females. If all child-care workers are females, perhaps our children will have difficulty creating healthy relationships with males. If all street-seepers are Western Antarticans perhaps no one will ever use the more efficient broom-twist developed in Eastern Antartica.
If all (or an overwealming majority) of any group is homogenous, there is the danger of not having a wide enough number of viewpoints to be able (or likely) to arrive at optimal solutions.
Thus, it is generally a good idea to encourage participation in a variety of fields by a variety of people.
Of course the optimal use of limited resources to encourage diversity, and the optimal level of diversity, and the relative importance of diversity in a variety of fields, is not obviously clear. It is left to the reader as an exercise...
The comp sci numbers quoted seem pretty good comared to physics... I think med school and law school are currently more than 50% female.
When I went looking on amazon.ca and amazon.co.uk yesterday, the.ca site had one review about the domain name (out of 83?), written May 14, 2002, but the co.uk site had only about three reviews in total I think. Today the.ca site has a new negative review about the domain name, but the.co.uk one still has only about three reviews total.
The amazon.com site does show a lot of "votes" for some of the negative reviews though.
nowhere in the DC continuity was Huntress ever related by blood to Batman or Catwoman...
The parent should have said "pre-Crisis". The Huntress fist appeared in about 1976 on Earth-2 as Helena Wayne. Later alterations gave her the mob background.
Jesus, neither you nor the grandparent have ever seen so much as an erect nipple that wasn't first penciled in, have you?
I think that my posting would be the "parent" rather than the "grandparent". But maybe you figure I've seen lots of errect nipples, but the person who confused "Crisis" with "Kingdom Come" has existed in a nipple-free (or at least errect nipple-free) zone?
Just because YOU can't recall anything from the mid 1980's doesn't mean that the rest of us are all brain dead too. Or is you point that you are embarrassed by the fact that you DO rember all this stuff too? Or is it "before your time" or perhaps just too "lowbrow"?
Some of us are not bothered that we are slightly, or not-so-slighly, geeky. It is interesting that you seem to be.
Using some sort of a sexual inexperience insult is interesting. I wonder what it indicates about how our (or more probably your) social conditioning is tied up in sexual role modeling? Should the recipient of such a comment indignantly deny such a thing? Why does it matter one way or another? Does the gender or sexual orientation of the recipient of such a comment come into play? How about age?
According to this bibliogrophy the first issue of Watchmen was published the same month as the Superman stories, Sept. 1986, so it looks like they both happened at the same time.
That would actually be the pre-"Crisis on Infinite Earths" mythos.
Back in the day (before 1985/86 - see http://www.sequart.com/crisis.htm) the "DC Universe" was bifrocated into to "main" universes so as to provide some "logical" reason for the fact that many characters had histories streatching from as early as WWII. The "Earth 1" universe had the "modern" superheroes who's careers started ten or twelve years ago, while the "Earth 2" universe had many older heroes who's careers started before WWII. On Earth 2, many of these heroes were retired and had kids or sidekicks who had taken over their hero-identities. Batman/Bruce Wayne had married (and died?) and had had a daughter (Helena Wayne - see http://my.execpc.com/~icicle/THEHUNTRESS.html. Superman had wed Lois Lane and was in semi-retirement, and many others of the "golden age" heroes/JSA were also "old and grey".
There were many more "earths" to mine for material. Earth-3 had hero and villian roles reversed. Earth-S had the Captain Marvel heroes and others like Spy-Smasher from the Fawcett characters that DC had aquired. There was a world with talking animals that had Hoppy the Marvel Bunny and Captain Carrot and the Zoo crew. There was Earth-Prime that had no superheroes and was where comic books about super heroes were published (supposedly WE are on Earch-Prime). The "Crisis" smushed all of these universes together and re-wrote history to try to simplify it all, and it was stated that there was now only ONE universe.
The idea of parallel universes is however just too useful to not use, and recent DC stories are revived it with "Hyper-Time" and of course the whole "ElseWorlds" storylines are also in some sense alternative universes. Many DC/Marvel or DC/Other crossovers use the ideas of multiple universes too.
In the last issues of the Superman comics before the rewrite of Crisis, "Superman# 423 and Action Comics #583, was a story about the future of the non-Crisis Superman's world. http://theages.superman.ws/History/whatever.php. It opens with one of my favourite quotes " This is an imaginary story... Aren't they all? "
They could claim that the cost is $70 and that they are giving some people a gift of $20 - companies give preferred customers coupons and discounts and rebates and freebees all of the time - sometimes losing money on a single transaction in the hopes of generating goodwill and future profits.
If they can justify $50, they can probably justify $70.
Sveasoft has stated that they will only sell the $50 source code disc to customers who have bought the $20 subscription. This seems to violate the "any third party" requirement of section 3b.
Perhaps they might claim that the distribution cost is $70, but that subscribers get a $20 coupon. This would seem to get around the requirement violation you state.
last I checked, the snail mail system was not profitable
Well, by law the USPS is supposed to break even, and as far as I can tell, it has not received any tax dollars for more than a couple of decades (since the 1970s perhaps?). If you google about you can find lots of compalints that the USPS is making too much money and should drop their rates. Similarly Canada Post has been making profits (and PAYING taxes) for the past few years.
Annual report USPS $3+billion profits - http://www.usps.com/history/anrpt03/This scheme and every scheme that tries to make email cost money or cpu cycles, which is the same thing, is just a way to push the little guy out of the market and replace him with the big guy.
Email DOES cost money, and we all pay for it in our ISP and connection fees. The problem is that bulk emailers use a disproportionate fraction of the resources while not paying a proportionate amount of the costs. This type of proposed scheme creates ecconomic disincentives to sending bulk email. I don't know who these "little guys" are that you are worried about, but I do not want these little guys sending bulk email to me. At least the "big guys" have disincentives to promoting fraudulent crap - the big guys are easy to find and prosecute.
By now you have probably realized that the article referenced refers to "paying", not with money, but with doing a bit of computation that slows down the email. Bulk email senders who are not on whitelists cannot do enough calculations to send humungous masses of email.
As to your reference to regular mail advertisements, I think you are very incorrrect. The amount of junk snail mail being sent is no where near the type of problem that junk email is. Junk snail mail does not clog up the postal system and make it unusable, in fact it finances large portions of the snail mail system. The costs associated with snail mail encourage advertisers to target their campaigns and reduce the illegitimate businesses who send direct advertisements.
There is an extensive listing (with ratings) of free books at http://www.theassayer.org/. This listing is administered by Ben Crowell a physics prof out in California who has some physics texts available at http://www.lightandmatter.com/ with an open source license. Some of the other listed books are free of cost but not open source.
His "Light and Matter" physics series is "an introductory physics textbook for life-science students" available in PDF as well as some sections in LaTeX format.
His "Simple Nature" text is "a physics textbook intended for students in a three-semester introductory calculus-based course. It's free in digital form, but is not yet available in print." This complete text is available in PDF as well as LaTeX format.
There is also "Discover Physics" which is "a conceptual physics textbook intended for students in a nonmathematical one-semester general-education course."
There is also a text by Raymond (also free as in speech) called "A Radically Modern Approach to Introductory Physics" from http://kestrel.nmt.edu/~raymond/teaching.html in LaTeX format.
There is an extensive listing (with ratings) of free books at . This listing is administered by Ben Crowell a physics prof out in California who has some texts available at with an open source license. Some of the other listed books are free of cost but not open source.
His "Light and Matter" physics series is "an introductory physics textbook for life-science students" available in PDF as well as some sections in LaTeX format.
His "Simple Nature" text is "a physics textbook intended for students in a three-semester introductory calculus-based course. It's free in digital form, but is not yet available in print." This complete text is available in PDF as well as LaTeX format.
There is also "Discover Physics" which is "a conceptual physics textbook intended for students in a nonmathematical one-semester general-education course."
There is also a text by Raymond (also free as in speech) called "A Radically Modern Approach to Introductory Physics" from in LaTeX format.
It does not directly follow that freedom of religion implies that the state cannot fund a religion through taxes. Freedom of peaceful assembly does not imply that the state cannot fund a gathering that you do not want them to. There are many people who's thoughts, belief, opinion and expression directly oppose certain state sponsored activities, such as for example the military, yet the state can and does financially support them.
Similarly freedom of expression does not prevent the state from promoting the use of english and french languages.
Of course, if there were a court challenge, they could interpret freedom of religion more broadly and use it to prevent the state from "promoting" any particular religious views, but I do not think that that is a guaranteed outcome.
You are like everyone else, you work as little as you can, for as much as you can get.
You must live in a not very happy world. Most people I know in all professions actually take some pride and enjoyment from their jobs, independant of the pay.
I suggest perhaps you could benefit from some anger management. And if things are so great for a particular profession maybe you would be well served in switching careers?
I think that there are almost as many Francaphones in Ontario (485,630) as there are Anglophones in Quebec (557,040) according to statscan. Granted the total population is about four times greater in ON.
I think we can only call all of the money a "waste" if we can demonstrate that the extra boards are needlessly duplicating services that would be more efficiently delivered with a single board. I suspect that is the case, but it is not automatically so.
Slashdot Mirror
Pi has survived in mathematics as Pi rather than being subsumed in a new Cir=2*Pi because Pi appears in so many more places than 2Pi does. I sumbit without any proof that if 2Pi was more useful than Pi, that is what we would be using. This is a bit related to the Planck's constant "h". "h" was efined by Planck for one particular calculation, and it was found to be useful in lots of other places, and to be a fundamental parameter of the univers. However "h" tends to appear in many uses along with an extra factor of 1/2Pi (as an aside, this would be an example where "Cir" might be more "useful" than Pi - if they were more common we might be thinking of Cir as the fundamental unit and Pi as being half of that). Since h/2Pi appears so often, people started to use a new symbol to represent that quantity (drawn as an "h" with a line through it, called "hbar"), and in many situations "hbar" is the preferred constant. Had Planck defined "hbar" instead of "h", we probably would not even talk about "h" at all, but only occasionally use the quantity 2(Pi)(hbar) when it was needed.
I never really understood this whole USA system of candidate selection. I also do not understand why it is not abused more often. Why didn't all of the Republican supporters register as Democrats for the primaries and try to get the worst possible Democrat onto the ticket?
A rough calculation isn't really as difficult as you make it seem, you just need to find out the cost that someone will charge you to supply the raw materials you want. Presumamby they have already done the cost calculations needed to set their price. Also, those prices reflect the energy costs (at least roughly) for producing those products you want to sell. Of course the tax incentives that certain industries enjoy are not directly reflected in these prices, thus the cost of oil is artificially low. And the military/security costs associated with oil are also not reflected in the "pump price", but rather are born by everyone through tax support of the military, so maybe the accounting is not that simple. The fact that wind and solar electrical production is even CLOSE to price competitive (within a factor of ten) with the established producers and their many tax incentives and hidden subsidies is pretty amazing.
I like that one.
Maybe mc^2mail or mc2mail or mccmail (pronounced "mic-cee-mail" perhaps?)
You create a neighbourhood group on their system, say "ElmStreet", then you put up a few posters and/or phone and/or call your neighbours and let them know about it. Assuming that they sign up, now you can post the neighbourhood watch meeting schedule, and solicit ideas for the street-wide yard sale, and organize a letter writing campaign to the mayor about the sewer problem, and that sort of thing.
Having a ready-build mail-list server, calendaring application, and similar might be very useful.
Since the system is open fo anyone to self-join, it might not be such a good idea to tell everyone when you are going to be out of town since some "bad guy" might be reading the mailing list and steal all of your stuff, but in general it might be very useful to have an online neighbourhood community.
They claim to do Canadian neighbourhoods, and seem to have registered "i-neighbours.org" as well as "i-neighbors.org", but they spell everything "bors" rather than "bours", even when in a clearly Canadian region...
It is true that gender would likely play little role in the act of fixing a computer. But user training is not as gender-neutral. Customer service is also not gender neutral. And certainly almost everyone that I know thinks (if they think at all) a computer works in a different way that I think that they do. They may all be wrong, but explaining that to them is a task that requires the ability to have multiple viewpoints.
The decisions on what features to implement and what markets to serve could possibly benifit from a diversity of viewpoints. If all the developers ever like to do is to play Pac-Man, who would come up with the idea of Tetris? If we do not draw on group "X" it is more difficult to serve the needs of group "X", and possibly "Y" and "Z" too.
Generally speaking, we as a society are better served if a broad spectrum (no pun intended) of our population are involved fully in all aspectss of society. If any field is over-dominated by one segment of our population, we run the risk of making errors in decision making and direction and value. Perhaps rather than "error" it would be more accurate to use "sub-optimal decision" or something like that.
If all doctors are males, perhaps we are less likely to have advances in health issues for females. If all child-care workers are females, perhaps our children will have difficulty creating healthy relationships with males. If all street-seepers are Western Antarticans perhaps no one will ever use the more efficient broom-twist developed in Eastern Antartica.
If all (or an overwealming majority) of any group is homogenous, there is the danger of not having a wide enough number of viewpoints to be able (or likely) to arrive at optimal solutions.
Thus, it is generally a good idea to encourage participation in a variety of fields by a variety of people.
Of course the optimal use of limited resources to encourage diversity, and the optimal level of diversity, and the relative importance of diversity in a variety of fields, is not obviously clear. It is left to the reader as an exercise...
The comp sci numbers quoted seem pretty good comared to physics... I think med school and law school are currently more than 50% female.
The amazon.com site does show a lot of "votes" for some of the negative reviews though.
It looks like neither amazon.ca nor amazon.co.uk have attracted many such reviews yet.
The parent should have said "pre-Crisis". The Huntress fist appeared in about 1976 on Earth-2 as Helena Wayne. Later alterations gave her the mob background.
See here for more details and links.
I think that my posting would be the "parent" rather than the "grandparent". But maybe you figure I've seen lots of errect nipples, but the person who confused "Crisis" with "Kingdom Come" has existed in a nipple-free (or at least errect nipple-free) zone?
Just because YOU can't recall anything from the mid 1980's doesn't mean that the rest of us are all brain dead too. Or is you point that you are embarrassed by the fact that you DO rember all this stuff too? Or is it "before your time" or perhaps just too "lowbrow"?
Some of us are not bothered that we are slightly, or not-so-slighly, geeky. It is interesting that you seem to be.
Using some sort of a sexual inexperience insult is interesting. I wonder what it indicates about how our (or more probably your) social conditioning is tied up in sexual role modeling? Should the recipient of such a comment indignantly deny such a thing? Why does it matter one way or another? Does the gender or sexual orientation of the recipient of such a comment come into play? How about age?
According to this bibliogrophy the first issue of Watchmen was published the same month as the Superman stories, Sept. 1986, so it looks like they both happened at the same time.
That would actually be the pre-"Crisis on Infinite Earths" mythos.
Back in the day (before 1985/86 - see http://www.sequart.com/crisis.htm) the "DC Universe" was bifrocated into to "main" universes so as to provide some "logical" reason for the fact that many characters had histories streatching from as early as WWII. The "Earth 1" universe had the "modern" superheroes who's careers started ten or twelve years ago, while the "Earth 2" universe had many older heroes who's careers started before WWII. On Earth 2, many of these heroes were retired and had kids or sidekicks who had taken over their hero-identities. Batman/Bruce Wayne had married (and died?) and had had a daughter (Helena Wayne - see http://my.execpc.com/~icicle/THEHUNTRESS.html. Superman had wed Lois Lane and was in semi-retirement, and many others of the "golden age" heroes/JSA were also "old and grey".
There were many more "earths" to mine for material. Earth-3 had hero and villian roles reversed. Earth-S had the Captain Marvel heroes and others like Spy-Smasher from the Fawcett characters that DC had aquired. There was a world with talking animals that had Hoppy the Marvel Bunny and Captain Carrot and the Zoo crew. There was Earth-Prime that had no superheroes and was where comic books about super heroes were published (supposedly WE are on Earch-Prime). The "Crisis" smushed all of these universes together and re-wrote history to try to simplify it all, and it was stated that there was now only ONE universe.
The idea of parallel universes is however just too useful to not use, and recent DC stories are revived it with "Hyper-Time" and of course the whole "ElseWorlds" storylines are also in some sense alternative universes. Many DC/Marvel or DC/Other crossovers use the ideas of multiple universes too.
In the last issues of the Superman comics before the rewrite of Crisis, "Superman# 423 and Action Comics #583, was a story about the future of the non-Crisis Superman's world. http://theages.superman.ws/History/whatever.php. It opens with one of my favourite quotes " This is an imaginary story... Aren't they all? "
Alternatively, you could connect via some other port than 25 to the SMTP server you want, assuming earthlink is filtering on the port number.
In the very worst case, you could set up some SSH tunnel or VPN connection to the SMTP server in question and use that.
If they can justify $50, they can probably justify $70.
Perhaps they might claim that the distribution cost is $70, but that subscribers get a $20 coupon. This would seem to get around the requirement violation you state.
Where are you located? Perhaps Québec is closer?
Well, by law the USPS is supposed to break even, and as far as I can tell, it has not received any tax dollars for more than a couple of decades (since the 1970s perhaps?). If you google about you can find lots of compalints that the USPS is making too much money and should drop their rates. Similarly Canada Post has been making profits (and PAYING taxes) for the past few years.
Annual report Canada Post $250+million profits - http://www.canadapost.ca/corporate/about/annual_re port/highlights2003-e.asp
Annual report USPS $3+billion profits - http://www.usps.com/history/anrpt03/ This scheme and every scheme that tries to make email cost money or cpu cycles, which is the same thing, is just a way to push the little guy out of the market and replace him with the big guy.
Email DOES cost money, and we all pay for it in our ISP and connection fees. The problem is that bulk emailers use a disproportionate fraction of the resources while not paying a proportionate amount of the costs. This type of proposed scheme creates ecconomic disincentives to sending bulk email. I don't know who these "little guys" are that you are worried about, but I do not want these little guys sending bulk email to me. At least the "big guys" have disincentives to promoting fraudulent crap - the big guys are easy to find and prosecute.
As to your reference to regular mail advertisements, I think you are very incorrrect. The amount of junk snail mail being sent is no where near the type of problem that junk email is. Junk snail mail does not clog up the postal system and make it unusable, in fact it finances large portions of the snail mail system. The costs associated with snail mail encourage advertisers to target their campaigns and reduce the illegitimate businesses who send direct advertisements.
There is an extensive listing (with ratings) of free books at http://www.theassayer.org/. This listing is administered by Ben Crowell a physics prof out in California who has some physics texts available at http://www.lightandmatter.com/ with an open source license. Some of the other listed books are free of cost but not open source.
His "Light and Matter" physics series is "an introductory physics textbook for life-science students" available in PDF as well as some sections in LaTeX format.
His "Simple Nature" text is "a physics textbook intended for students in a three-semester introductory calculus-based course. It's free in digital form, but is not yet available in print." This complete text is available in PDF as well as LaTeX format.
There is also "Discover Physics" which is "a conceptual physics textbook intended for students in a nonmathematical one-semester general-education course."
There is also a text by Raymond (also free as in speech) called "A Radically Modern Approach to Introductory Physics" from http://kestrel.nmt.edu/~raymond/teaching.html in LaTeX format.
There is an extensive listing (with ratings) of free books at . This listing is administered by Ben Crowell a physics prof out in California who has some texts available at with an open source license. Some of the other listed books are free of cost but not open source. His "Light and Matter" physics series is "an introductory physics textbook for life-science students" available in PDF as well as some sections in LaTeX format. His "Simple Nature" text is "a physics textbook intended for students in a three-semester introductory calculus-based course. It's free in digital form, but is not yet available in print." This complete text is available in PDF as well as LaTeX format. There is also "Discover Physics" which is "a conceptual physics textbook intended for students in a nonmathematical one-semester general-education course." There is also a text by Raymond (also free as in speech) called "A Radically Modern Approach to Introductory Physics" from in LaTeX format.
Similarly freedom of expression does not prevent the state from promoting the use of english and french languages.
Of course, if there were a court challenge, they could interpret freedom of religion more broadly and use it to prevent the state from "promoting" any particular religious views, but I do not think that that is a guaranteed outcome.
You must live in a not very happy world. Most people I know in all professions actually take some pride and enjoyment from their jobs, independant of the pay.
I suggest perhaps you could benefit from some anger management. And if things are so great for a particular profession maybe you would be well served in switching careers?
I think that there are almost as many Francaphones in Ontario (485,630) as there are Anglophones in Quebec (557,040) according to statscan. Granted the total population is about four times greater in ON.
I think we can only call all of the money a "waste" if we can demonstrate that the extra boards are needlessly duplicating services that would be more efficiently delivered with a single board. I suspect that is the case, but it is not automatically so.