Also irrelevant. As humans, we have no choice about which ancient organic matter got turned into petroleum.
On the other hand, we do have a choice about whether to take petroleum and refine it to make gasoline, or whether to take petroleum and other energy resources to grow corn and make it into ethanol. Putting one's thumb on the scale by neglecting to account for *all* of the energy inputs to the ethanol making process will make it impossible to correctly choose the most efficient solution.
And how much energy went into growing the grapes and making it into juice? More or less than you get from burning the ethanol, after distilling it from the mash?
The 1.44MB version of the 3.5 inch floppy is substantially later than the original 1984 Mac. That Mac had 400kB floppies, uprgraded to 800kB floppies around 1986. 1.44MB were introduced sometime around 1987.
It's fair to say the Agreed Framework might not have been workable long-term; however, the covert uranium work probably did not lead to the nuclear device in question.
"inertia to change" is not a simple binary flag that gets set when you are old and crotchety.
The main reason it gets set is because people have to pay bunches of money and do a hell of a lot of work, and the payoff is basically that things work about as well as before, except for a bunch of inevitable glitches that could annoy paying customers.
Not providing a sensible transition mechanism was a major failing of IPv6.
If a theory tells you what you already know to be true, then it is a retrodiction, not a prediction. There is a good reason why scientists demand that theories make predictions: A theory with a sufficient number of degrees of freedom can be made to fit any data set. For example, a polynomial of degree n can always be made to exactly fit n + 1 data points, yet may be completely unable to predict what happens between those data points.
It is not as simple as that. Part of what makes scientific theories useful is that they provide a framework in which scientists can create new results. People knew, for instance, that the precession of Mercury's orbit about the Sun was anomalously large compared to what a simple Newtonian calculation could accomodate. Lots of smart people tried to come up with various additional assumptions to explain it, but unconvincingly enough that it was still considered a problem.
Einstein's theory of General Relativity gave a straightforward calculation that agreed very well with what the astronomers had measured. This was a "retrodiction", but it was still evidence in favor of GR, because it is an unambiguous result.
After GR, people pretty much stopped looking for classical explanations of Mercury's orbit. Instead, they started looking around for sensitive tests to distinguish GR from other possible theories of gravity that usually resembled GR.
The reason people were convinced by the GR explanation, but not by classical attempts was basically aesthetic. Not enough direct evidence for, say, the interior mass distribution of the sun existed to rule out a sufficiently elaborate classical theory. But GR allowed one to stop looking for "ugly" explanations and settle for an "elegant" one.
Scientists basically "demand" that a theory be "satisfying" enough to work on. That's why string theory sticks around.
Sheldon Glashow may make fun of it, but the traditional particle theorists like him don't have anything better to show for the last 20 years of their work. Plus, Shelly's a dork.
Re:The problem with guis is they don't work
on
GUIs Get a Makeover
·
· Score: 1
There's loads of difference between a typical UNIX command-line utility and a menu-based interface, even with equal functionality.
The most important is explorability. Want to know what's in a menu? Click on it and take a look. Things are explained in whole words. Did I last use the program six months ago? I can refresh my memory.
Want to know what command line options?
command --help
Good thing I guessed what command I wanted. I typically get an alphabet soup of single-letter options.
% ls --help ls: illegal option -- - usage: ls [-ABCFGHLPRSTWZabcdefghiklmnopqrstuwx1] [file...]
OK. Now what?
man command
Now I have to read an instruction manual, assuming the man page is actually up-to-date, in my MANPATH, decently written, and documents all of the options the command actually provides. Most man pages are lousy. Oh, and RMS once had a dream that we should use info instead, because man pages have no heirarchical organization and no hyperlinking.
A command line utility doesn't just require "learning"; it requires storing quasi-random knowlege in my head, or digging it out of an inconvenient document. A menu remembers the options for me, and I can read them whenever I need to know what they are.
Hint, to avoid sounding like an idiot, do not mention the idea of "shooting stuff into the sun" as a means of disposal.
Things on Earth do not fall into the sun by themselves; we have to do significant work to decrease the kinetic energy the stuff has by virtue of being here on Earth, where we orbit the sun. Which means we need to build expensive rockets to lift the stuff off of earth, with enough rocket fuel to transfer it to an orbit which intersects the sun. Not cheap, not foolproof, not even particularly safe.
Actually, you mean critical point: the boiling point is actually a line in the phase diagram, where liquid turns to gas at a particular pressure; critical point marks the maximum temperature where there is a phase transition between liquid and gas, i.e. above which there is no boiling point!
Hydrogen's critical temperature is 33 K, it's boiling point at 1 atm is 20.3 K.
Keep in mind the "do it yourself" route is a perfectly fine way to get a U.S. patent if your idea meets the requirements of the patent process. You'll be able to put it on your resume, on your product, your web-page, your blog, and a nice plaque for your wall. All very nice things. If your ideas and patents are commercially valuable ones, you might even be able to show them to vulture, er, venture capitalists as part of your pitch to get funding.
What you are paying the patent lawyers for is, in principle, their ability to help you craft the claims so as to maximize the coverage of the patent to include as full a conception of your invention as possible, properly using the peculiar jargon specific to patents, while avoiding making it so broad as to be invalidated by prior art. You are also paying for their experience in recognizing how other competitors might try to invalidate, circumvent, bypass, or otherwise make your patent useless in practice, and for advice on what to keep as trade secret rather than disclose in the patent. Finally, you are paying them for their experience or international partners to get through the foreign patent process, which has different rules and processes for each jurisdicition.
That said, even if you get a patent, all it does is give you the right to sue someone who is using your patented invention. It does not guarantee that someone will not just use it anyway, and it does not guarantee your suit will succeed in preventing more grief than it causes.
Unless you are, or are planning to become, a corporation using a patent portfolio as part of its strategy, or doing it for marketing/vanity purposes, it's probably a waste of money and time to patent anything on your own.
Evidence as in a single non-Christian who thinks Christ was an unusually wise teacher, as opposed to an influential one. Christ's actual philosophical teachings are exceedingly sparse, as opposed to his religious message.
As for science, it was invented long after Plato was dead and gone. Science is not mathematics. It is based on actual objective observation of the universe, not mind games. It uses mathematics as a tool, not as an end in itself. To the extent that it lacks observable consequences in nature, it is not science. The closest you can get to Platonism is if you think the mathematical theories serve as something like a Platonic ideal behind the reality they represent. But that is false. They are models, created by humans, not an ideal in the universe itself.
These RTG generators are compact, robust, and long-lived. However, they are not cheap, do not deliver huge quantities of power, decay slowly over time, do not respond to peak load requirements, and are not really efficient. (They use raw heat from radioactive decay, and thermoelectric conversion.)
On Earth, we can pile up a large amount of radioactive material to cause a controlled chain reaction. We can then convert it on an industrial scale to AC electric power for distribution over many miles. You may have seen something called an "electric outlet", where you can pay pennies for a kilowatt hour? And lead-acid batteries to tide you over if the electric grid goes out?
The reason we can "only" get delayed satellite phone calls from the Middle East is probably related to the relative size of the budgets and the flexibility required. NASA used a dedicated facility that could pretty much handle only one moon landing at a time, scheduled far in advance. With a big pile of hardware on the Earth end and very expensive hardware on the far end, and still with the delays implied by the finite speed of light.
The satellite phone system allows anyone with a few hundred bucks to buy a portable, battery powered handset, and make a call anywhere, anytime, without prior scheduling, simultaneous with thousands of other users, and reach anybody on the planet with a telephone.
Very different problem spaces, very different constraints, and very different solutions. No conspiracy necessary.
put Windows applications in a sandbox that only appears to be integrated to the OS (from both the user's and Windows application's perspectives).
If this were possible (i.e., support all Win XP apps with such improvements in the infrastructure) with a small engineering effort, why would MS not have already done so?
Apple does not have software engineers with mystical powers compared to MS engineers. What allows their greater agility is that they don't need to support legacy decisions made long ago in Redmond and a wide range of existing apps with all of the matching cruft.
Pi's not repeating in its expansion is due to it being an irrational.
Transcendental means that it cannot be a root of any polynomial with rational coefficients. The square root of 2 does not repeat, but is the root of the polynomial x^2 - 2.
1) Retail and grocery stores also do not have to individually serve you for each drink or snack; most people bring multiple items to the checkout; you typically don't get bar service. Most of their sales are at the six-pack or case quantity.
2) (probably more important) When you buy a drink or snack food at Fry's or Office Depot or the grocery store, you typically take it elsewhere to drink or eat, meaning they don't have to clean up after you.
#2 is probably the main reason movie theaters charge so much for their snacks.
When the Church Fathers read Paul's letters, and they believe them, they are not thereby proving that what Paul wrote is true. They are simply believing them to be true. When they then repeat things that Paul has said, they are simply relying on Paul as a source, not providing independent confirmation of the truth of Paul's writing.
*You* might assume that God let them only believe true things, but that is an external assumption that we most certainly do not apply to historical texts in general. That's what separates theology from history.
I know the Spotlight hook fires on every file change. But I don't believe it is necessarily true (and haven't seen any detailed description) that Time Machine archives at each and every change, as in a classic (VMS/ITS/etc.) versioned file system. My guess is that the hook simply puts the file in the Time Machine queue for scheduled backup, which is more efficient than crawling the whole hard drive checking archived bits or last modified dates.
Very few people, relatively speaking, who did not consider themselves Christian, consider Christ to have been a particularly "wise teacher on the matters of the human heart." Plato's philosophy is not particularly fruitful, nor Sun Tzu's theory of warfare. Who has won an actual war using Sun Tzu's principles? Christ also did not leave any writing of his own; we're left with third-hand collections of quotations and parables.
I do not depend on Einstein's authority "ex cathedra"; I rely on the fact that scientific experimentation agrees with his theories. That is not purely intellectual. It is empirical and tentative, subject to disproof. Einstein's writing by itself is not proof.
To compare scientific thinking with Platonic philosophy is the worst kind of nonsense.
I think the main reason Apple showed Time Machine is to encourage developers to support the relevant APIs to enable the "Time Travel experience" for their apps as well.
The keynote was vague; it is possible that every single file revision gets backed up. However, I think it is more likely the OS hook (used by Spotlight to notice changes to index) is the tool used by Time Machine to efficiently find what is needed for scheduled incremental backups. (I.e., every 12 or 24 hours, or whenever the backup volume gets plugged in, Time Machine can quickly retrieve files needing backup.)
Slashdot Mirror
Also irrelevant. As humans, we have no choice about which ancient organic matter got turned into petroleum.
On the other hand, we do have a choice about whether to take petroleum and refine it to make gasoline, or whether to take petroleum and other energy resources to grow corn and make it into ethanol. Putting one's thumb on the scale by neglecting to account for *all* of the energy inputs to the ethanol making process will make it impossible to correctly choose the most efficient solution.
And how much energy went into growing the grapes and making it into juice? More or less than you get from burning the ethanol, after distilling it from the mash?
The 1.44MB version of the 3.5 inch floppy is substantially later than the original 1984 Mac. That Mac had 400kB floppies, uprgraded to 800kB floppies around 1986. 1.44MB were introduced sometime around 1987.
It's fair to say the Agreed Framework might not have been workable long-term; however, the covert uranium work probably did not lead to the nuclear device in question.
Not trade with Taiwan? Are you kidding me? Anybody who wants a laptop trades with Taiwan. http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/2005103 1145912.html
Now, diplomatic relations, those are another topic.
"inertia to change" is not a simple binary flag that gets set when you are old and crotchety.
The main reason it gets set is because people have to pay bunches of money and do a hell of a lot of work, and the payoff is basically that things work about as well as before, except for a bunch of inevitable glitches that could annoy paying customers.
Not providing a sensible transition mechanism was a major failing of IPv6.
http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html
It is not as simple as that. Part of what makes scientific theories useful is that they provide a framework in which scientists can create new results. People knew, for instance, that the precession of Mercury's orbit about the Sun was anomalously large compared to what a simple Newtonian calculation could accomodate. Lots of smart people tried to come up with various additional assumptions to explain it, but unconvincingly enough that it was still considered a problem.
Einstein's theory of General Relativity gave a straightforward calculation that agreed very well with what the astronomers had measured. This was a "retrodiction", but it was still evidence in favor of GR, because it is an unambiguous result.
After GR, people pretty much stopped looking for classical explanations of Mercury's orbit. Instead, they started looking around for sensitive tests to distinguish GR from other possible theories of gravity that usually resembled GR.
The reason people were convinced by the GR explanation, but not by classical attempts was basically aesthetic. Not enough direct evidence for, say, the interior mass distribution of the sun existed to rule out a sufficiently elaborate classical theory. But GR allowed one to stop looking for "ugly" explanations and settle for an "elegant" one.
Scientists basically "demand" that a theory be "satisfying" enough to work on. That's why string theory sticks around.
Sheldon Glashow may make fun of it, but the traditional particle theorists like him don't have anything better to show for the last 20 years of their work. Plus, Shelly's a dork.
There's loads of difference between a typical UNIX command-line utility and a menu-based interface, even with equal functionality.
...]
The most important is explorability. Want to know what's in a menu? Click on it and take a look. Things are explained in whole words.
Did I last use the program six months ago? I can refresh my memory.
Want to know what command line options?
command --help
Good thing I guessed what command I wanted.
I typically get an alphabet soup of single-letter options.
% ls --help
ls: illegal option -- -
usage: ls [-ABCFGHLPRSTWZabcdefghiklmnopqrstuwx1] [file
OK. Now what?
man command
Now I have to read an instruction manual, assuming the man page is actually up-to-date, in my MANPATH, decently written, and documents all of the options the command actually provides. Most man pages are lousy. Oh, and RMS once had a dream that we should use info instead, because man pages have no heirarchical organization and no hyperlinking.
A command line utility doesn't just require "learning"; it requires storing quasi-random knowlege in my head, or digging it out of an inconvenient document. A menu remembers the options for me, and I can read them whenever I need to know what they are.
Urgh. It should return #t. Sorry, Schemers.
No, it should be something more like
(welcome? I (make-new-overlord us 'Scheme))
--> T
Hint, to avoid sounding like an idiot, do not mention the idea of "shooting stuff into the sun" as a means of disposal.
Things on Earth do not fall into the sun by themselves; we have to do significant work to decrease the kinetic energy the stuff has by virtue of being here on Earth, where we orbit the sun. Which means we need to build expensive rockets to lift the stuff off of earth, with enough rocket fuel to transfer it to an orbit which intersects the sun. Not cheap, not foolproof, not even particularly safe.
Actually, you mean critical point: the boiling point is actually a line in the phase diagram, where liquid turns to gas at a particular pressure; critical point marks the maximum temperature where there is a phase transition between liquid and gas, i.e. above which there is no boiling point!
Hydrogen's critical temperature is 33 K, it's boiling point at 1 atm is 20.3 K.
Keep in mind the "do it yourself" route is a perfectly fine way to get a U.S. patent if your idea meets the requirements of the patent process. You'll be able to put it on your resume, on your product, your web-page, your blog, and a nice plaque for your wall. All very nice things. If your ideas and patents are commercially valuable ones, you might even be able to show them to vulture, er, venture capitalists as part of your pitch to get funding.
What you are paying the patent lawyers for is, in principle, their ability to help you craft the claims so as to maximize the coverage of the patent to include as full a conception of your invention as possible, properly using the peculiar jargon specific to patents, while avoiding making it so broad as to be invalidated by prior art. You are also paying for their experience in recognizing how other competitors might try to invalidate, circumvent, bypass, or otherwise make your patent useless in practice, and for advice on what to keep as trade secret rather than disclose in the patent. Finally, you are paying them for their experience or international partners to get through the foreign patent process, which has different rules and processes for each jurisdicition.
That said, even if you get a patent, all it does is give you the right to sue someone who is using your patented invention. It does not guarantee that someone will not just use it anyway, and it does not guarantee your suit will succeed in preventing more grief than it causes.
Unless you are, or are planning to become, a corporation using a patent portfolio as part of its strategy, or doing it for marketing/vanity purposes, it's probably a waste of money and time to patent anything on your own.
Evidence as in a single non-Christian who thinks Christ was an unusually wise teacher, as opposed to an influential one. Christ's actual philosophical teachings are exceedingly sparse, as opposed to his religious message.
As for science, it was invented long after Plato was dead and gone. Science is not mathematics. It is based on actual objective observation of the universe, not mind games. It uses mathematics as a tool, not as an end in itself. To the extent that it lacks observable consequences in nature, it is not science. The closest you can get to Platonism is if you think the mathematical theories serve as something like a Platonic ideal behind the reality they represent. But that is false. They are models, created by humans, not an ideal in the universe itself.
These RTG generators are compact, robust, and long-lived. However, they are not cheap, do not deliver huge quantities of power, decay slowly over time, do not respond to peak load requirements, and are not really efficient. (They use raw heat from radioactive decay, and thermoelectric conversion.)
On Earth, we can pile up a large amount of radioactive material to cause a controlled chain reaction. We can then convert it on an industrial scale to AC electric power for distribution over many miles. You may have seen something called an "electric outlet", where you can pay pennies for a kilowatt hour? And lead-acid batteries to tide you over if the electric grid goes out?
The reason we can "only" get delayed satellite phone calls from the Middle East is probably related to the relative size of the budgets and the flexibility required. NASA used a dedicated facility that could pretty much handle only one moon landing at a time, scheduled far in advance. With a big pile of hardware on the Earth end and very expensive hardware on the far end, and still with the delays implied by the finite speed of light.
The satellite phone system allows anyone with a few hundred bucks to buy a portable, battery powered handset, and make a call anywhere, anytime, without prior scheduling, simultaneous with thousands of other users, and reach anybody on the planet with a telephone.
Very different problem spaces, very different constraints, and very different solutions. No conspiracy necessary.
Perhaps you could have addressed any of my points with actual contrary evidence.
put Windows applications in a sandbox that only appears to be integrated to the OS (from both the user's and Windows application's perspectives).
If this were possible (i.e., support all Win XP apps with such improvements in the infrastructure) with a small engineering effort, why would MS not have already done so?
Apple does not have software engineers with mystical powers compared to MS engineers. What allows their greater agility is that they don't need to support legacy decisions made long ago in Redmond and a wide range of existing apps with all of the matching cruft.
Pi's not repeating in its expansion is due to it being an irrational.
Transcendental means that it cannot be a root of any polynomial with rational coefficients. The square root of 2 does not repeat, but is the root of the polynomial x^2 - 2.
1) Retail and grocery stores also do not have to individually serve you for each drink or snack; most people bring multiple items to the checkout; you typically don't get bar service. Most of their sales are at the six-pack or case quantity.
2) (probably more important) When you buy a drink or snack food at Fry's or Office Depot or the grocery store, you typically take it elsewhere to drink or eat, meaning they don't have to clean up after you.
#2 is probably the main reason movie theaters charge so much for their snacks.
As long as you repeat this stupidity less that 2^32 times, we should be fine.
You are highly confused.
When the Church Fathers read Paul's letters, and they believe them, they are not thereby proving that what Paul wrote is true. They are simply believing them to be true. When they then repeat things that Paul has said, they are simply relying on Paul as a source, not providing independent confirmation of the truth of Paul's writing.
*You* might assume that God let them only believe true things, but that is an external assumption that we most certainly do not apply to historical texts in general. That's what separates theology from history.
I know the Spotlight hook fires on every file change. But I don't believe it is necessarily true (and haven't seen any detailed description) that Time Machine archives at each and every change, as in a classic (VMS/ITS/etc.) versioned file system. My guess is that the hook simply puts the file in the Time Machine queue for scheduled backup, which is more efficient than crawling the whole hard drive checking archived bits or last modified dates.
Very few people, relatively speaking, who did not consider themselves Christian, consider Christ to have been a particularly "wise teacher on the matters of the human heart." Plato's philosophy is not particularly fruitful, nor Sun Tzu's theory of warfare. Who has won an actual war using Sun Tzu's principles? Christ also did not leave any writing of his own; we're left with third-hand collections of quotations and parables.
I do not depend on Einstein's authority "ex cathedra"; I rely on the fact that scientific experimentation agrees with his theories. That is not purely intellectual. It is empirical and tentative, subject to disproof. Einstein's writing by itself is not proof.
To compare scientific thinking with Platonic philosophy is the worst kind of nonsense.
I think the main reason Apple showed Time Machine is to encourage developers to support the relevant APIs to enable the "Time Travel experience" for their apps as well.
The keynote was vague; it is possible that every single file revision gets backed up. However, I think it is more likely the OS hook (used by Spotlight to notice changes to index) is the tool used by Time Machine to efficiently find what is needed for scheduled incremental backups. (I.e., every 12 or 24 hours, or whenever the backup volume gets plugged in, Time Machine can quickly retrieve files needing backup.)