http://www.iomguide.com/tynwaldhill.php
[...]
In 1979, Tynwald celebrated its Millennium under the watchful eye of Her Majesty the Queen, Lord of Man. The Queen returned to preside over the ceremony in 2003, a year after her Golden Jubilee. The Isle of Man is not part of UK, but remains a Crown Dependency.
[...]
The most enduring relic of Scandinavian culture in the Isle of Man is the Island’s parliament, Tynwald. After 1,000 years the world’s oldest continuous parliament normally sits in Douglas, but still meets once a year at midsummer on the Tynwald Hill at St. Johns. This was not the only meeting place for Tynwald, and like others it was given legitimacy by its closeness to a burial ground - in this case one of the oldest and most extensive on the Island - and allowed the living to be associated with land owned or administered by their forbears.
But Tynwald is more relevant to the living than the dead. It is a vital social institution, and, after all the past conquests and re-conquests, today it is consolidating the independence of the Isle of Man.
[...]
This 'electron' thingy they have discovered, what's the use of it? It not as though whole industries and millions of jobs will be created to make use of the knowledge!
Essentially, we can not predict in advance what benefits scientific knowledge will bring. Very few, if any, would have predicted the the whole thing with electronics when the electron was first discovered. So lack of imagination, and ability to quantify economic benefits should not be used to hold back the advance of science.
The nature of the Higgs and subsequent research will likely lead to considerable economic benefit, but in ways we cannot really conceive of now.
Or do you want to hasten America's descent into the dark ages of superstition spearheaded by the Creationists?
I started with FORTRAN IV and then COBOL, now I do Java, and I taught C to experienced programmers. I once helped a young woman (who I did not realize at the time, would become my second wife!) debug a Smalltalk example based on a magazine article I had read 2 years previously.
In the last 5 years I have started learning 5 new languages: Python, Octave, & Groovy, plus a couple of others I don't remember the names of - turned out I did not need them, so I never got to mastery level. I also wrote some Lisp to evaluate the Fibonacci sequence of numbers using recursion, though I had only dabbled in Lisp over 20 years prior.
Some years ago I was horrified to meet a young man in his mid twenties who said he was too old to learn programming!
I am now almost 62 and developing a system to store and retrieve images in sophisticated ways at a University, based on PostgreSQL using middleware running on Linux with a web based front end. Some of the technology I need I'm not sure how to spell (a 'slight' exageration!), but I will RTFM when I need to...
I smell troll, lets just look at 2 of his sentences, the other sentences are also wrong (at least the ones before and a few after - after which I stopped reading),
[...]
For every little file move or copying of files, I HAD to get root access and type in a command. There was no GUI way to do some things (as far as I know). And there's really no way to correct a typing mistake in command line.
[...]
Hmm... On Linux:
(1) You don't need to be root to copy or move files.
(2) You can drag and drop files between directory windows
(which is the GUI way of doing things)
(3) It is very easy to correct mistakes in the command line.
Unless someone is way below average intelligence, I could teach most people in 10 minutes to do all of the above.
If you spend 8 to 10 hours a day on a computer and are a developer (or sysAdmin), then sometimes it is more convenient to use the command line to copy files. I know 3 ways using a GUI, and I use at least 2 different command line methods to copy files - the choice depends on what I am doing.
Some of the interpretations of M-Theory involve considering mass to be a topological 'defect' in higher dimensions, and gravity relates to the dynamics of those higher dimensions.
It also appears that time itself a derived quantity. M-Theory I can handle, even if I have very little understanding of it, but this really blows my mid.
Postulating a Creator just complicates things unnecessarily.
We implicitly assume that the Universe had a beginning, then we ask what happened before! So we want to keep our cake & also to eat it. We want a definite start point, we don't like infinities...
Possibly the Universe is some sort of multidimensional sphere - so asking how it started is a sensible as asking what is South of the South Pole, which is a meaningful sounding question that in this context is meaningless!
Claiming that God did it, leads to the question where did God come from, if the answer is that God always existed, then one could also say that the Universe has always existed in some form (Some string theories suggest that the Big Bang was simply a phase change). So insisting on a Creator God, simply complicates things without providing a useful answer. Besides which, no useful explanation is forthcoming on how such a God could create the Universe.
US publicly repeals Patriot Act, and signs in a secret law!
The the US already has secret laws - besides which, would you really trust the US not to peek at your data even if they said they wouldn't???
I remember an American president saying they had "No intention of bombing Hanoi!", shortly before they did so! In fact, Hanoi became the most heavily defended city to ever experience an air attack. The Vietnamese managed to shoot down B-52 bombers - not every bombing raid, but enough to worry the US.
You obviously do not need half the fuel to slow down.
The initial mass of the ship is very high, most of that mass is fuel. In accelerating, the mass reduces considerably, and the mass also decreases when you are slowing down. I suspect the mass of fuel to slow down will be a lot less than a 1/3 of the initial fuel load.
My first computer at home, was a BBC micro with 32K RAM 32K ROM, and a 2MHz 6502 8 bit processor.
The first computer I programmed in BASIC at a trade show was the size of a filing cabinet and had 8K of memory - 1971?
I started my computing career with FORTRAN on PDP minicomputers, and later COBOL & Assembler on an ICL mainframe (a massive 1 Megabyte of core memory).
At work I now a have dual quad core Xeon processors with 12GigaBytes of memory running Fedora 16 Linux.
I have been installing Linux myself for over 19 years, and I regularly compile applications like sage (mathematical package) and PostgreSQL betas..
I am currently the software architect for developing a virtual clinic for teaching optometrists, based on JBoss/PostgreSQL/Linux with a web front end. I am 61, my main problem is these young students (5th years, early 20's) and professors, are a bit slow in picking up the concepts - so I am forced to feed them concepts slowly and with examples.
Yesterday I got my first program to successfully extract something for an XML file, part of an OpenDocument produced by LIbreOffice.
I don't have a Facebook account (security & privacy nightmare), nor do I have a smart phone, nor do I contribute to twitter.
So who is/are the digital native(s) - me or the young students?
Re:How does it compare to Chrome?
on
Firefox 10 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
In preferences ==> General
Set
'When firefox starts'
to be
Show my windows and tabs from last time''
and tick the checkbox
'Don't load tabs until selected'
This vastly reduces the RAM used by Firefox, I often carry over a 100 tabs from one login to the next.
Re:Checking for the release of a new version
on
Unicode 6.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
Since oxygen and hydrogen can be obtained from the moon, by using Sun light for energy to crack water - it would seem to make sense to export oxygen and hydrogen to Low Earth Orbit, as it requires less energy to get to LEO from the moon than from the Earth. This would reduce the size of rockets required to deliver payload from the Earth's surface to the Moon!
I think longer term getting to the Moon will be a 3 stage journey:
(1) from Earth to LEO station
(2) from LEO to a Moon orbiting station
(3) from the Moon orbiting station to the Moon's surface
Why spend the energy repeatedly lifting a new heavy vehicle required for people to live a week from the Earth's surface and throw it away after each journey? The 3 vehicles for the 3 stages are very different in function, leaving 2 of them in space best way reuse them. Reusing the Earth to LEO rocket is the most difficult.
In the last 10 years I have done 3 searches on the Internet to compare MySQL with PostgreSQL, and PostgreSQL came first in all the categories I checked (reliability, performance, and ease of development).
For any major project, I would recommend PostgreSQL. I have client with MySQL, and had worked on a project were I had to do some DBA stuff and SQL queries using MySQL - my conclusion is that PostgreSQL is far superior and easier to use.
Also with PostgreSQL: you are not limited to Microsoft O/S's, but can upgrade to Linux for even greater performance and reliability!
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.iomguide.com/tynwaldhill.php
[...]
In 1979, Tynwald celebrated its Millennium under the watchful eye of Her Majesty the Queen, Lord of Man. The Queen returned to preside over the ceremony in 2003, a year after her Golden Jubilee. The Isle of Man is not part of UK, but remains a Crown Dependency.
[...]
http://www.gov.im/mnh/heritage/story/tynwald.xml
[...]
The World’s Oldest Continuous Parliament.
The most enduring relic of Scandinavian culture in the Isle of Man is the Island’s parliament, Tynwald. After 1,000 years the world’s oldest continuous parliament normally sits in Douglas, but still meets once a year at midsummer on the Tynwald Hill at St. Johns. This was not the only meeting place for Tynwald, and like others it was given legitimacy by its closeness to a burial ground - in this case one of the oldest and most extensive on the Island - and allowed the living to be associated with land owned or administered by their forbears.
But Tynwald is more relevant to the living than the dead. It is a vital social institution, and, after all the past conquests and re-conquests, today it is consolidating the independence of the Isle of Man.
[...]
This 'electron' thingy they have discovered, what's the use of it? It not as though whole industries and millions of jobs will be created to make use of the knowledge!
Essentially, we can not predict in advance what benefits scientific knowledge will bring. Very few, if any, would have predicted the the whole thing with electronics when the electron was first discovered. So lack of imagination, and ability to quantify economic benefits should not be used to hold back the advance of science.
The nature of the Higgs and subsequent research will likely lead to considerable economic benefit, but in ways we cannot really conceive of now.
Or do you want to hasten America's descent into the dark ages of superstition spearheaded by the Creationists?
Hmm...
I started with FORTRAN IV and then COBOL, now I do Java, and I taught C to experienced programmers. I once helped a young woman (who I did not realize at the time, would become my second wife!) debug a Smalltalk example based on a magazine article I had read 2 years previously.
In the last 5 years I have started learning 5 new languages: Python, Octave, & Groovy, plus a couple of others I don't remember the names of - turned out I did not need them, so I never got to mastery level. I also wrote some Lisp to evaluate the Fibonacci sequence of numbers using recursion, though I had only dabbled in Lisp over 20 years prior.
Some years ago I was horrified to meet a young man in his mid twenties who said he was too old to learn programming!
I am now almost 62 and developing a system to store and retrieve images in sophisticated ways at a University, based on PostgreSQL using middleware running on Linux with a web based front end. Some of the technology I need I'm not sure how to spell (a 'slight' exageration!), but I will RTFM when I need to...
Adapt or Die!
Tractors beams have been proven to work...
...the catch is,
they only work on very small particles,
nothing the size a spaceship!
Anyone know who the first programmer was, and when/where they where born?
Hint: Not America!
The people at the LHC might disagree with you!
I smell troll, lets just look at 2 of his sentences, the other sentences are also wrong (at least the ones before and a few after - after which I stopped reading),
[...]
For every little file move or copying of files, I HAD to get root access and type in a command. There was no GUI way to do some things (as far as I know). And there's really no way to correct a typing mistake in command line.
[...]
Hmm... On Linux:
(1) You don't need to be root to copy or move files.
(2) You can drag and drop files between directory windows
(which is the GUI way of doing things)
(3) It is very easy to correct mistakes in the command line.
Unless someone is way below average intelligence, I could teach most people in 10 minutes to do all of the above.
If you spend 8 to 10 hours a day on a computer and are a developer (or sysAdmin), then sometimes it is more convenient to use the command line to copy files. I know 3 ways using a GUI, and I use at least 2 different command line methods to copy files - the choice depends on what I am doing.
Yes! Protons and Neutrons are straight up & down particles - not like the ones that are strange or have charm... :-)
Where did gravity cone from?
Some of the interpretations of M-Theory involve considering mass to be a topological 'defect' in higher dimensions, and gravity relates to the dynamics of those higher dimensions.
It also appears that time itself a derived quantity. M-Theory I can handle, even if I have very little understanding of it, but this really blows my mid .
Who created the Creator?
Postulating a Creator just complicates things unnecessarily.
We implicitly assume that the Universe had a beginning, then we ask what happened before! So we want to keep our cake & also to eat it. We want a definite start point, we don't like infinities...
Possibly the Universe is some sort of multidimensional sphere - so asking how it started is a sensible as asking what is South of the South Pole, which is a meaningful sounding question that in this context is meaningless!
Claiming that God did it, leads to the question where did God come from, if the answer is that God always existed, then one could also say that the Universe has always existed in some form (Some string theories suggest that the Big Bang was simply a phase change). So insisting on a Creator God, simply complicates things without providing a useful answer. Besides which, no useful explanation is forthcoming on how such a God could create the Universe.
The key point the parent is making: is that regardless of his views on abortion, he feels climate change is something too important to ignore.
The abortion issue pale into insignificance compared to the survival of the whole human race.
It is not relevant to his point if we agree with his view on a abortion, or not - please focus on his main point.
Simply!
US publicly repeals Patriot Act, and signs in a secret law!
The the US already has secret laws - besides which, would you really trust the US not to peek at your data even if they said they wouldn't???
I remember an American president saying they had "No intention of bombing Hanoi!", shortly before they did so! In fact, Hanoi became the most heavily defended city to ever experience an air attack. The Vietnamese managed to shoot down B-52 bombers - not every bombing raid, but enough to worry the US.
So long as it is small and doesn't get itself hot and bothered!
The bigger the star, the shorted its life span - and being small and close to a supernova doesn't do much for your life expectancy!
Slashdot is an illusion wrapped up in an illusion.
I think in this case it refers to stolen property, for a 'fence' is someone who buys or sells stolen property. :-)
You obviously do not need half the fuel to slow down.
The initial mass of the ship is very high, most of that mass is fuel. In accelerating, the mass reduces considerably, and the mass also decreases when you are slowing down. I suspect the mass of fuel to slow down will be a lot less than a 1/3 of the initial fuel load.
I think you are all just being petty!
(Ducks real quick)
Hmm...
My first computer at home, was a BBC micro with 32K RAM 32K ROM, and a 2MHz 6502 8 bit processor.
The first computer I programmed in BASIC at a trade show was the size of a filing cabinet and had 8K of memory - 1971?
I started my computing career with FORTRAN on PDP minicomputers, and later COBOL & Assembler on an ICL mainframe (a massive 1 Megabyte of core memory).
At work I now a have dual quad core Xeon processors with 12GigaBytes of memory running Fedora 16 Linux.
I have been installing Linux myself for over 19 years, and I regularly compile applications like sage (mathematical package) and PostgreSQL betas..
I am currently the software architect for developing a virtual clinic for teaching optometrists, based on JBoss/PostgreSQL/Linux with a web front end. I am 61, my main problem is these young students (5th years, early 20's) and professors, are a bit slow in picking up the concepts - so I am forced to feed them concepts slowly and with examples.
Yesterday I got my first program to successfully extract something for an XML file, part of an OpenDocument produced by LIbreOffice.
I don't have a Facebook account (security & privacy nightmare), nor do I have a smart phone, nor do I contribute to twitter.
So who is/are the digital native(s) - me or the young students?
In preferences ==> General
Set
'When firefox starts'
to be
Show my windows and tabs from last time''
and tick the checkbox
'Don't load tabs until selected'
This vastly reduces the RAM used by Firefox, I often carry over a 100 tabs from one login to the next.
Shift+3 is the 'hash' symbol '#' for me!
Please supply evidence that there actually was a Christ as per Christian Bible!
Since oxygen and hydrogen can be obtained from the moon, by using Sun light for energy to crack water - it would seem to make sense to export oxygen and hydrogen to Low Earth Orbit, as it requires less energy to get to LEO from the moon than from the Earth. This would reduce the size of rockets required to deliver payload from the Earth's surface to the Moon!
I think longer term getting to the Moon will be a 3 stage journey:
(1) from Earth to LEO station
(2) from LEO to a Moon orbiting station
(3) from the Moon orbiting station to the Moon's surface
Why spend the energy repeatedly lifting a new heavy vehicle required for people to live a week from the Earth's surface and throw it away after each journey? The 3 vehicles for the 3 stages are very different in function, leaving 2 of them in space best way reuse them. Reusing the Earth to LEO rocket is the most difficult.
In the last 10 years I have done 3 searches on the Internet to compare MySQL with PostgreSQL, and PostgreSQL came first in all the categories I checked (reliability, performance, and ease of development).
For any major project, I would recommend PostgreSQL. I have client with MySQL, and had worked on a project were I had to do some DBA stuff and SQL queries using MySQL - my conclusion is that PostgreSQL is far superior and easier to use.
Also with PostgreSQL: you are not limited to Microsoft O/S's, but can upgrade to Linux for even greater performance and reliability!
I have read the 3 volumes of the "Lord of the Rings" 7 times. When reading, your mind is also aware of the overall tapestry of the tale.
ER: Elizabeth Rex
(Queen Elizabeth)