Forget life, try defining something simpler, like what constitutes being a person, for example; you will immediately face hard questions of when an embryo becomes a person, whether the notion should include a brain-damaged individual, etc.
Unfortunately, it seems as though the most a definition can do is give an idea of two topologically separated open sets (one, in the case of trying to define "life", containing "an animal", and the other containing "a rock"); the boundary between these sets remains undefined.
It is hard to believe that Eisenhower would worry so much about international norms as to let the Soviets win the space race, especially given the fact that the US had been violating their airspace using high-altitude U-2s on a regular basis for quite a while by then (until the Soviets shot one down in early 60s).
Bullshit. The whole topic reminds me of heated discussions 40 years ago of how interactive programming using terminals was somehow inferior to batch programming using punch cards; or, later, how using graphical displays for text editing (as opposed to using VI on a dumb terminal) was a perversion.
Grow up people. Leave the character cell mentality in the past - together with dumb terminals and typewriters, and realize already that programs are just that - human readable text. The fact that a program can be fed to a computer is secondary.
And remember: mathematical formulas are not "regular text", either. And yet, fixed-width fonts are never used in typesetting them.
A failure upon impact at 2.68 km/s cold not prove anything, only an actual landing of an unmanned probe could. I am surprised, actually, that NASA gave the green light to the Apollo 11 mission without trying to send an exact copy of the lander on an unmanned landing mission first and, instead, simply trusted the information obtained by the Soviets who landed a probe of a completely different design and who, I am sure, were not eager to share with NASA all the details of how things went.
Other things aside, it just seems that NASA and the media make it all too easy to forget that it was the Soviets who made a major contribution to this success by having landed their Luna 10 there three years earlier and thus proving that it was physically possible to land on the Moon's surface at all. I wonder if the US would send people to the Moon without being reasonably sure if the surface was firm enough to support a lander.
Here is the complete timeline of the Luna missions: Luna Missions.
I wasn't talking about "fundamental units" of chemistry or even physics (physics does not have those); I was talking about elementary particles of Nature. If, comparing quarks with chemical elements, you imply that quarks etc. may turn out to be not elementary, then that's fine; my impression has been that, according to the theory, they are.
Well, a young church - young enthusiasm. Nothing that would surprise me. Maybe, in a few hundred years, it will, too, become just as good as others.
What I would do - if I was enthusiastic enough - I would create a reformationist movement and thus create total chaos by eventually breaking this church up into dozens of tiny sub-confessions. This might speed things up a bit.
Times have changed, of course, but can one possibly guarantee that once-people-burning church has not turned into a government-document-stealing church? That would be a huge improvement, wouldn't it.
at least five kinds of Higgs bosons... but physicists hope many more particles exist
(That's from TFA.) What a mess. The Nature cannot be that complex. Not at that (elementary) level. How many different types of point-like particles do we need to explain things?
This seems to be a situation where the theoretical thinking has taken us nowhere. Or, we may need yet another Periodic Table, this time one for the elementary particles, that would show that they are not, indeed, elementary, or that different particles are nothing but different forms of the same truly basic physical substance.
I have been under the impression that existence of black holes has not yet been proven - at least, not to the degree to which, say, existence of atoms has. So, I was wondering if anyone could clarify whether black holes' existence is still more of a hypothesis (on par with dark matter, for example) or they are real beyond any doubt.
As far as the "space race" goes, a race is over when someone comes first. The Soviets were the first in space; thus, in October 1959, the space race was over. And, in a few years, so was the race to put the man in space. Learn to deal with it, will ya?
Then, the Americans launched a race to be the first on the Moon. "They started a war, but nobody came." It has turned out, the Americans competed against themselves. Oops.
Get your facts straight: in the sense of something being truly important for the science, not propaganda, the Russians were the first to even explore the Moon - with satellites, landers, robots, rovers... You sometimes should read something, something other than whatever you usually happen to read while sitting on the toilet.
Hey, "the Americans are better at exploration of Mars!" Hello! Anybody listening? Hello?..
Right... I have been puzzled over this for some time. Why, when the Russians are coming out every kitchen sink and every toilet trying to conquer America, why would we suddenly want to announce the presence of our defenseless souls at a particular point in the spacetime to whoever is willing to listen? What if they, too, are just as evil?
I wonder if storing photons should be actually seen as storing their energy (say, as that of an electron in an atom), rather than "storing" the photons themselves, as particles.
Please do not raise copyright to the rank of something absolute. You have to realize that copyright is just a particular implementation of the idea of licensing based on the technological capabilities available when it was invented. And, as such, copyright is doomed. The world is moving towards using more advanced, media-independent, forms of licensing. When you legitimately (e. g. as a "copyright holder") copy a video game, you are, in fact, creating a new license (for example, in a form of a unique "product code" someone has to type in when you install it). In principle, copying (or transferring) the media has nothing to do with the transfer of the license. And, the cost of the media is nothing compared to the what you have to pay for the license.
when you purchase a book, you are not making a copy
Have you heard of on-demand printing?
That book is yours.
Well - yes, the paper the book is printed on is mine. But that's about it. It is more like a sandwich wrapper. What would you say about the right to let somebody have the sandwich you have just eaten.
Please resist the urge to voluntarily give up your rights.
A right is a law; laws should be reasonable and fair (both towards consumers and manufacturers).
To me, an e-book reader device looks almost like a retro-futuristic object -- like an automobile that resembles a horse-drawn carriage or a airplane looking like a giant feathery bird. Nonetheless, I have been somewhat of a fan of the idea of e-reading - that is until recently, when, after having held a Sony reader in my hands for a minute, I have suddenly realized that I do not want to just read; rather, I want to be able to work with the book in a more interactive way. Also, it is likely that I will want to use a (full-featured) computer at the same time. But since I do not want to have to carry two gadgets around, I have to stick to a computer, using it as the reader (which is nothing new). Thus, I find the idea of a standalone e-book reader device somehow fundamentally flawed.
As far as licensing is concerned, what has always puzzled me is why the ease of the media exchange between, say, people makes sharing of the content legitimate? When you buy a book or, say, a video game, 90% of what you pay is the license. Once *you* have played the game, or have read the book, you have used up *your* license, and so selling the game or the book, or even giving it away, would seem to be illegal.
Human rights based on anonymity is an evil and, in fact, an absurd idea. I was just stating something that should be obvious. Why should everyone seek anonymity to be able to exercise his or her human rights - the ones that should be guaranteed under the law? Quite simple, really.
Imagine, N. Koreans (say) discovered a way of staying anonymous while speaking publicly. Would that mean that freedom of speech now exist in N. Korea?
What you seem to not understand is that freedom, in general, is not merely a physical ability to do something without consequences; rather, it is a human right and, to count as such, it must be granted by the law and guaranteed by the authorities.
Does anybody here realize that if you have to be anonymous to be able to speak freely, it is not free speech.
Anonymous speech is just as good as a lie.
Anybody who speaks out must be personally accountable for what he or she says; please note that the accountability is not equivalent to a form of harassment.
What, as a programmer, can I do with KDE/Qt that I can't do with, say, Xlib and Unix APIs? I mean, why do we need all this bloat, all this added complexity, all this cruft? I understand that Qt is portable, but so are Xlib and POSIX, that, too, have been ported to (for example) Windows. How much better off we programmers have become now that we have access to the multitude of non-standard development environments, libraries and tools?
As sort of a disclaimer, I can say that do not find the desktop metaphor useful; an environment consisting of openbox/xterm and a text editor is all that I need most of the time.
What you are saying sounds like it makes sense, but, unfortunately, it does not.
regional variations... Euler was Swiss.
Ok, I understand: Germans had hard time understanding him. (He wrote in Latin, by the way, not in his "regional variant" of German; in any case, this problem, when it does exist, is solved by the method known as translation.)
any reasons
Stupidity?
What you are essentially saying is that each and every calculus textbook is a worthy read, if you want to learn calculus, even if you have read all other book on this topic. Yes, Ok, in the morning I am to work on exercises; in the evening, I can read calculus "prose". And I can do this happily for years (however many I have left). Ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
Forget life, try defining something simpler, like what constitutes being a person, for example; you will immediately face hard questions of when an embryo becomes a person, whether the notion should include a brain-damaged individual, etc. Unfortunately, it seems as though the most a definition can do is give an idea of two topologically separated open sets (one, in the case of trying to define "life", containing "an animal", and the other containing "a rock"); the boundary between these sets remains undefined.
You mean, it won't run NetBSD?
According to the elementary math. logic, "A implies B" is the same as "not A or B".
Question: Why does one need a head? Answer: One eats with it.
It is hard to believe that Eisenhower would worry so much about international norms as to let the Soviets win the space race, especially given the fact that the US had been violating their airspace using high-altitude U-2s on a regular basis for quite a while by then (until the Soviets shot one down in early 60s).
Bullshit. The whole topic reminds me of heated discussions 40 years ago of how interactive programming using terminals was somehow inferior to batch programming using punch cards; or, later, how using graphical displays for text editing (as opposed to using VI on a dumb terminal) was a perversion.
Grow up people. Leave the character cell mentality in the past - together with dumb terminals and typewriters, and realize already that programs are just that - human readable text. The fact that a program can be fed to a computer is secondary.
And remember: mathematical formulas are not "regular text", either. And yet, fixed-width fonts are never used in typesetting them.
A failure upon impact at 2.68 km/s cold not prove anything, only an actual landing of an unmanned probe could. I am surprised, actually, that NASA gave the green light to the Apollo 11 mission without trying to send an exact copy of the lander on an unmanned landing mission first and, instead, simply trusted the information obtained by the Soviets who landed a probe of a completely different design and who, I am sure, were not eager to share with NASA all the details of how things went.
Here is the complete timeline of the Luna missions: Luna Missions.
How many more web browsers do we need?
I wasn't talking about "fundamental units" of chemistry or even physics (physics does not have those); I was talking about elementary particles of Nature. If, comparing quarks with chemical elements, you imply that quarks etc. may turn out to be not elementary, then that's fine; my impression has been that, according to the theory, they are.
Well, a young church - young enthusiasm. Nothing that would surprise me. Maybe, in a few hundred years, it will, too, become just as good as others.
What I would do - if I was enthusiastic enough - I would create a reformationist movement and thus create total chaos by eventually breaking this church up into dozens of tiny sub-confessions. This might speed things up a bit.
Times have changed, of course, but can one possibly guarantee that once-people-burning church has not turned into a government-document-stealing church? That would be a huge improvement, wouldn't it.
Churches used to tend to burn people alive, remember?
(That's from TFA.) What a mess. The Nature cannot be that complex. Not at that (elementary) level. How many different types of point-like particles do we need to explain things?
This seems to be a situation where the theoretical thinking has taken us nowhere. Or, we may need yet another Periodic Table, this time one for the elementary particles, that would show that they are not, indeed, elementary, or that different particles are nothing but different forms of the same truly basic physical substance.
At least, such is my expectation as a layman.
I have been under the impression that existence of black holes has not yet been proven - at least, not to the degree
to which, say, existence of atoms has. So, I was wondering if anyone could clarify whether black holes' existence is still more of a hypothesis (on par with dark matter, for example) or they are real beyond any doubt.
Thanks
As far as the "space race" goes, a race is over when someone comes first. The Soviets were the first in space; thus, in October 1959, the space race was over. And, in a few years, so was the race to put the man in space. Learn to deal with it, will ya?
Then, the Americans launched a race to be the first on the Moon. "They started a war, but nobody came." It has turned out, the Americans competed against themselves. Oops.
Get your facts straight: in the sense of something being truly important for the science, not propaganda, the Russians were the first to even explore the Moon - with satellites, landers, robots, rovers... You sometimes should read something, something other than whatever you usually happen to read while sitting on the toilet.
Hey, "the Americans are better at exploration of Mars!" Hello! Anybody listening? Hello?..
Right... I have been puzzled over this for some time. Why, when the Russians are coming out every kitchen sink and every toilet trying to conquer America, why would we suddenly want to announce the presence of our defenseless souls at a particular point in the spacetime to whoever is willing to listen? What if they, too, are just as evil?
I wonder if storing photons should be actually seen as storing their energy (say, as that of an electron in an atom), rather than "storing" the photons themselves, as particles.
Please do not raise copyright to the rank of something absolute. You have to realize that copyright is just a particular implementation of the idea of licensing based on the technological capabilities available when it was invented. And, as such, copyright is doomed. The world is moving towards using more advanced, media-independent, forms of licensing. When you legitimately (e. g. as a "copyright holder") copy a video game, you are, in fact, creating a new license (for example, in a form of a unique "product code" someone has to type in when you install it). In principle, copying (or transferring) the media has nothing to do with the transfer of the license. And, the cost of the media is nothing compared to the what you have to pay for the license.
when you purchase a book, you are not making a copy
Have you heard of on-demand printing?
That book is yours.
Well - yes, the paper the book is printed on is mine. But that's about it. It is more like a sandwich wrapper. What would you say about the right to let somebody have the sandwich you have just eaten.
Please resist the urge to voluntarily give up your rights.
A right is a law; laws should be reasonable and fair (both towards consumers and manufacturers).
To me, an e-book reader device looks almost like a retro-futuristic object -- like an automobile that resembles a horse-drawn carriage or a airplane looking like a giant feathery bird. Nonetheless, I have been somewhat of a fan of the idea of e-reading - that is until recently, when, after having held a Sony reader in my hands for a minute, I have suddenly realized that I do not want to just read; rather, I want to be able to work with the book in a more interactive way. Also, it is likely that I will want to use a (full-featured) computer at the same time. But since I do not want to have to carry two gadgets around, I have to stick to a computer, using it as the reader (which is nothing new). Thus, I find the idea of a standalone e-book reader device somehow fundamentally flawed.
As far as licensing is concerned, what has always puzzled me is why the ease of the media exchange between, say, people makes sharing of the content legitimate? When you buy a book or, say, a video game, 90% of what you pay is the license. Once *you* have played the game, or have read the book, you have used up *your* license, and so selling the game or the book, or even giving it away, would seem to be illegal.
Human rights based on anonymity is an evil and, in fact, an absurd idea. I was just stating something that should be obvious. Why should everyone seek anonymity to be able to exercise his or her human rights - the ones that should be guaranteed under the law? Quite simple, really.
No free speech, then. Exactly my point.
Imagine, N. Koreans (say) discovered a way of staying anonymous while speaking publicly. Would that mean that freedom of speech now exist in N. Korea?
What you seem to not understand is that freedom, in general, is not merely a physical ability to do something without consequences; rather, it is a human right and, to count as such, it must be granted by the law and guaranteed by the authorities.
Does anybody here realize that if you have to be anonymous to be able to speak freely, it is not free speech.
Anonymous speech is just as good as a lie.
Anybody who speaks out must be personally accountable for what he or she says; please note that the accountability is not equivalent to a form of harassment.
What, as a programmer, can I do with KDE/Qt that I can't do with, say, Xlib and Unix APIs? I mean, why do we need all this bloat, all this added complexity, all this cruft? I understand that Qt is portable, but so are Xlib and POSIX, that, too, have been ported to (for example) Windows. How much better off we programmers have become now that we have access to the multitude of non-standard development environments, libraries and tools?
As sort of a disclaimer, I can say that do not find the desktop metaphor useful; an environment consisting of openbox/xterm and a text editor is all that I need most of the time.
regional variations... Euler was Swiss.
Ok, I understand: Germans had hard time understanding him. (He wrote in Latin, by the way, not in his "regional variant" of German; in any case, this problem, when it does exist, is solved by the method known as translation.)
any reasons
Stupidity?
What you are essentially saying is that each and every calculus textbook is a worthy read, if you want to learn calculus, even if you have read all other book on this topic. Yes, Ok, in the morning I am to work on exercises; in the evening, I can read calculus "prose". And I can do this happily for years (however many I have left). Ridiculous.