With a sig like yours, I don't know why I bother arguing with you, but...
I personally know a bunch of religious people who are incredibly intelligent. For example, I knew this 16 year old homeshooler going to law school. He could argue the leg off a chair, without any evidence, either.
It really just depends on how you were brought up. If you accept the bible as your standard of truth, there isn't really a whole lot you can do to argue with that. Their beliefs seems to make them feel better, and it doesn't really hurt anyone, so why not?
It's when they start interfering with my life that it becomes a problem.
I'd argue that science isn't really about finding the "truth"; it's about producing useful models. Otherwise, you can't get around Descarte's demon. So, even though a model might be wrong, it is usually still useful. I mean, look at how widely used newtonian mechanics is.
Yes. "Preserving" stuff (artifacts or information) isn't really just about chucking a bunch of junk in a clean, dry place. To be useful, it must be accessible.
Remember "Raiders of The Lost Ark"? How at the end, some old guy hides the Ark in a government warehouse? You might write your important cultural stuff in stone, but if nobody can find it, it might as well not exist. Another example: the beard of the Sphynx is sitting in a back room somewhere in the British Museum. But nobody knows it's there, so who cares?
Basically, if information isn't easy to get at, it's effectively useless. You might have some very important data stored on one of a thousand CDs, but it's effectively useless. On the other hand, if it was stored on a hard drive somewhere, you might be able to find it. Likewise, there might be some important stuff sitting in a museum somewhere, but if people can't see it, what's the point? If it was online, again, it would be more useful.
Another thing: have you ever tried to find information about things that happened before 1993? For example, NPR has online archives of their shows, but they only go back so far. I'm sure there's a basement somewhere full of analog tapes, but that doesn't do me any good, and again, it might as well not exist. Ultimately, I think that any history that isn't digitized, thrown on the internet, and mirrored, is going to vanish. That's right. When those superintelligent robots look back, 2000 AD is going to be like the beginning of written history.
Besides, the really important information isn't written in stone. Culture can't be "preserved", only kept current. Before we had writing, we had the oral tradition. We stored information through stories. We kept the interesting stuff, and threw away the rest. Admittedly, this method has a good deal of corruption, but it does work: there are stories about Odysseus all the way from Scotland to Iran. Likewise, we still sort of understand the bible after 2000 years, and we're probably going to keep it around for a good bit longer.
But the cultures that don't write anything down, and that nobody gives a shit about anyway, they just get forgotten.
That's because ctrl-c, ctrl-v, and ctrl-x were already reserved for other stuff, long before windows came on the scene. I rarely use Ctrl-V in linux, because it is easier to just select and then middle-click to paste.
Good for them. I'm glad they realized that corn isn't viable from an energy standpoint. The article mentions cellulose ethanol too, but when I researched it for debate, there really wasn't much material on the subject. It's definitely still far in the future, if it it viable at all.
Sure, you can fool around with fuel economy standards, and maybe save 20% if you're lucky. Sure, you can use ethanol, which takes almost as much energy to grow as you get out. No, the real solution is to give up those cars. Even the tiniest british cars have way worse efficiency (in people miles per gallon) compared to a full coach bus. If they really wanted to save energy, they'd make mass transit mandatory.
Of course, that isn't going to happen, but unlike most scenarios, it/would/ actually work.
You failed to take into account the effect that repealing copyright would have on large publishers, and the way they interact with authors. It wouldn't be small publishers that would pick up books, followed by big publishers. That is the model that is followed now.
More likely, the author would publish the book online, and rake in revenue from advertising. Sure, someone could leach the content, but the official site would always have the book out first, so everyone would go there instead of stealing it.
There would be no big publishing houses. Period. If there is enough demand, the author could simply accept preorders, and publish a small run.
This would actually lower the barrier to entry, leading to a greater diversity of stuff, rather than the current system, which is completely controlled by large publishing houses. Of course, it would probably be a good bit harder to make a living off ad revenue, making life difficult for professional creators. But then again, most of the stuff right now is crap anyway, so it's a toss-up.
If you don't mind, I'll copy that post you just made -- It might come in handy for trolling. I'll bite anyway, though.
Actually, I hear this sort of thing a lot. The conservatives like to bring up the Roman Empire. Their argument works something like this: "The Roman Empire declined because they were being immoral. America is immoral, therefore, if we don't want to decline, we need to straighten up"
The liberals do the same thing, except they say that "corporate greed" is causing the decline.
The problem is, of course, that the american empire is going to fall anyway, no matter what you do. Decadence and greed have nothing to do with it. A nation in decline is like an organism that has neared the end of its life-cycle: all kinds of diseases appear, but the real problem is that it is simply too old. In an old empire, bueracracy becomes intrenched, and people start to take the empire for granted. This leads to great stability, but ultimately, it causes that empire's death.
"Personally, I think nothing looks as cheap (in a bad way) or shadier than a burnt CD-R especially with permanent marker on there."
Geek: Hey. You wanna buy some linux disks? Obi-Wan: You don't want to sell me linux disks. Geek: I don't want to sell you linux disks. Obi-Wan: you want to go home and rethink your life.
Well, yeah. Thumbnailing is one of those niche little things that can at times be quite useful, but the rest of the time only gives you grief. The big problem, of course, is that it makes folders really slow to load, but the other problem is that the icon doesn't tell you the file type.
Smosh never really was all that good anyway. Just because someone makes a viral video doesn't mean that the video is any good or the makers are any good. It just means that people liked something about the video. And IMHO, smosh is just exploiting their previous fame with the pokemon theme video. It's much harder to make videos that is consistently interesting.
And yes, there is consistently interesting stuff on youtube. LG15 isn't all that bad, despite the backlash. And Ian Crossland is always good, if only to laugh at.
But the real appeal of youtube isn't in watching videos, it's in making videos. Did you ever want to have your own TV show, and be watched by thousands? Youtube appeals to the vanity in people.
They're just stalling. Sometimes it's easier to delay the affirmative plan indefinitely than to actually defeat it. Of course, it costs money, but it's "taxpayers" money, so that's all right.
In northern california, we could really use a light rail system, as there are a lot of people who commute all the way to san francisco. Every year, there is a proposal to implement this. What happens is, they spend a couple more million on "studies", and spend the rest on widening the existing roads. This is like a contractor's wet dream, and probably pays well for the politicians, but does not ultimately solve the problem.
No. The buffer overflows would still be there, emulated perfectly. Of course, if you ran it in a sandbox, it wouldn't make a difference -- but if it was that restricted, it wouldn't be able to do anything useful.
I mean, if your copy of windows running on VMWare on linux gets rooted, it still sucks, especially if you're really using that instance of windows. If data gets stolen, it's still stolen. If you get hacked, you're still hacked.
In a VM, you can revert to a clean image, but you can also revert the actual box to a clean image. It's just harder. It's not like there's some magical thing about emulators or VMs that makes security problems go away.
If you don't tell me what I got wrong, how am I going to know you're not just making stuff up, or wrong yourself? You didn't link to anything either.
Besides, it isn't really that complicated. Rods and cones have response curves. Paint has a reflectance function. The color of the incident light is described by a curve. The response in each channel is just the dot product of the curves. The hard part is describing how the brain perceives different colors.
That problem held me up for a while too, but I figured out that you can use linest to do curve fitting. It's the "real" way to do it anyway. See my other post
The other graphing limitations are much worse, IMHO.
I wonder if they will be able to do a similar thing to humans so that we can see in four or more colors. Just imagine how much it would screw up graphics programmers and monitor manufacturers if they had to add a UV channel. Fortunately, people serious about color (like paint manufacturers) consider the full spectrum. And fashion changes so quickly anyway that it wouldn't make a difference at all there.
But just think how interesting kindergarden colorimetry would get. What do you get when you mix ultra-blue and magenta? Quick, figure it out without using a piece of paper.
You can work around this using the LINEST function. And it is good for much more than lines -- you can fit any linear combination of functions. For example, suppose this is your data:
LINEST is much more powerful than reading the equation off the chart, even if it is harder to set up. You can also use your estimated values in equations, so that if you change your data, you don't need to plug in your estimated values again. The only thing is that LINEST returns an array, which requires a bit of reading to learn how to extract values from.
And if your function isn't a linear combination of functions, sometimes you can play with logarithms until it is. But that's way beyond what excel's curve fitting does anyway.
That doesn't cut it. I need to be able to select exactly which cells make up my domain, and exactly which cells go into each range. "data in rows", and "data in columns" doesn't do that, it just tries to figure out which is the domain and which is the range automatically.
And OO doesn't do 3D charts either. And before you ask, yes, some people actually use them.
Openoffice writer is mostly good, and works at least as well as word, if a bit slower.
On the other hand, openoffice calc, the spreadsheet, has serious problems. It has nowhere near the functionality of excel for doing charts. As I recall, it doesn't have the ability to select arbitrary rows for your dataset. This is a killer for me. Sure, I could use a real plotting package, but that's more work than I want to go to.
I've also heard reports that calc is missing functions that are present in excel. This isn't really a big deal -- mainly because excel doesn't have all that many functions either. But I suppose for an excel "pro" it could be irritating.
If you're really planning to do pro video editing with linux, you're either extremely misguided or out of your mind. When I start up cinelerra, the "pro" video app for linux, I'm told I need to run echo "0x7fffffff" > proc/kernel/shmax as root. Wtf? I try to open a video clip. It crashes. This stuff isn't stable. It isn't even beta, or alpha. This is pre-alpha software, being marketed as stable.
To be fair, audio is ok, and blender is pretty good too. But steer clear of video, unless you're just trying to play or transcode it, because you won't get very far. Of course, Ubuntu studio may manage to stabilize the shifting mess of crap and make a solid distro, but I'm not very hopeful.
You kind of picked a bad example, as vorbis is actually quite popular in some domains (games, for example), is supported by several hardware players, and gives better compression than mp3.
Of course, the idea of rebuilding the internet is a load of bull. The article lists a bunch of things you supposedly can't do with regular protocols, and takes those as reasons for change. They seem to think we can't do multicast, QOS, or security with current protocols. They also seem to think that, since wireless is so different from land lines, we should need new protocols. Their plans also happen to destroy any possibility of network neutrality.
I sincerely hope this project doesn't get any government funding.
Slashdot Mirror
With a sig like yours, I don't know why I bother arguing with you, but...
I personally know a bunch of religious people who are incredibly intelligent. For example, I knew this 16 year old homeshooler going to law school. He could argue the leg off a chair, without any evidence, either.
It really just depends on how you were brought up. If you accept the bible as your standard of truth, there isn't really a whole lot you can do to argue with that. Their beliefs seems to make them feel better, and it doesn't really hurt anyone, so why not?
It's when they start interfering with my life that it becomes a problem.
I'd argue that science isn't really about finding the "truth"; it's about producing useful models. Otherwise, you can't get around Descarte's demon. So, even though a model might be wrong, it is usually still useful. I mean, look at how widely used newtonian mechanics is.
But yeah, it does usually give the right answers.
Yes. "Preserving" stuff (artifacts or information) isn't really just about chucking a bunch of junk in a clean, dry place. To be useful, it must be accessible.
Remember "Raiders of The Lost Ark"? How at the end, some old guy hides the Ark in a government warehouse? You might write your important cultural stuff in stone, but if nobody can find it, it might as well not exist. Another example: the beard of the Sphynx is sitting in a back room somewhere in the British Museum. But nobody knows it's there, so who cares?
Basically, if information isn't easy to get at, it's effectively useless. You might have some very important data stored on one of a thousand CDs, but it's effectively useless. On the other hand, if it was stored on a hard drive somewhere, you might be able to find it. Likewise, there might be some important stuff sitting in a museum somewhere, but if people can't see it, what's the point? If it was online, again, it would be more useful.
Another thing: have you ever tried to find information about things that happened before 1993? For example, NPR has online archives of their shows, but they only go back so far. I'm sure there's a basement somewhere full of analog tapes, but that doesn't do me any good, and again, it might as well not exist. Ultimately, I think that any history that isn't digitized, thrown on the internet, and mirrored, is going to vanish. That's right. When those superintelligent robots look back, 2000 AD is going to be like the beginning of written history.
Besides, the really important information isn't written in stone. Culture can't be "preserved", only kept current. Before we had writing, we had the oral tradition. We stored information through stories. We kept the interesting stuff, and threw away the rest. Admittedly, this method has a good deal of corruption, but it does work: there are stories about Odysseus all the way from Scotland to Iran. Likewise, we still sort of understand the bible after 2000 years, and we're probably going to keep it around for a good bit longer.
But the cultures that don't write anything down, and that nobody gives a shit about anyway, they just get forgotten.
Except everyone has firehose now, so you don't need to subscribe.
That's because ctrl-c, ctrl-v, and ctrl-x were already reserved for other stuff, long before windows came on the scene. I rarely use Ctrl-V in linux, because it is easier to just select and then middle-click to paste.
Good for them. I'm glad they realized that corn isn't viable from an energy standpoint. The article mentions cellulose ethanol too, but when I researched it for debate, there really wasn't much material on the subject. It's definitely still far in the future, if it it viable at all.
/would/ actually work.
Sure, you can fool around with fuel economy standards, and maybe save 20% if you're lucky. Sure, you can use ethanol, which takes almost as much energy to grow as you get out. No, the real solution is to give up those cars. Even the tiniest british cars have way worse efficiency (in people miles per gallon) compared to a full coach bus. If they really wanted to save energy, they'd make mass transit mandatory.
Of course, that isn't going to happen, but unlike most scenarios, it
You failed to take into account the effect that repealing copyright would have on large publishers, and the way they interact with authors. It wouldn't be small publishers that would pick up books, followed by big publishers. That is the model that is followed now.
More likely, the author would publish the book online, and rake in revenue from advertising. Sure, someone could leach the content, but the official site would always have the book out first, so everyone would go there instead of stealing it.
There would be no big publishing houses. Period. If there is enough demand, the author could simply accept preorders, and publish a small run.
This would actually lower the barrier to entry, leading to a greater diversity of stuff, rather than the current system, which is completely controlled by large publishing houses. Of course, it would probably be a good bit harder to make a living off ad revenue, making life difficult for professional creators. But then again, most of the stuff right now is crap anyway, so it's a toss-up.
If you don't mind, I'll copy that post you just made -- It might come in handy for trolling. I'll bite anyway, though.
Actually, I hear this sort of thing a lot. The conservatives like to bring up the Roman Empire. Their argument works something like this: "The Roman Empire declined because they were being immoral. America is immoral, therefore, if we don't want to decline, we need to straighten up"
The liberals do the same thing, except they say that "corporate greed" is causing the decline.
The problem is, of course, that the american empire is going to fall anyway, no matter what you do. Decadence and greed have nothing to do with it. A nation in decline is like an organism that has neared the end of its life-cycle: all kinds of diseases appear, but the real problem is that it is simply too old. In an old empire, bueracracy becomes intrenched, and people start to take the empire for granted. This leads to great stability, but ultimately, it causes that empire's death.
Read the Foundation Trilogy, or something.
"Personally, I think nothing looks as cheap (in a bad way) or shadier than a burnt CD-R especially with permanent marker on there."
Geek: Hey. You wanna buy some linux disks?
Obi-Wan: You don't want to sell me linux disks.
Geek: I don't want to sell you linux disks.
Obi-Wan: you want to go home and rethink your life.
Well, yeah. Thumbnailing is one of those niche little things that can at times be quite useful, but the rest of the time only gives you grief. The big problem, of course, is that it makes folders really slow to load, but the other problem is that the icon doesn't tell you the file type.
Smosh never really was all that good anyway. Just because someone makes a viral video doesn't mean that the video is any good or the makers are any good. It just means that people liked something about the video. And IMHO, smosh is just exploiting their previous fame with the pokemon theme video. It's much harder to make videos that is consistently interesting.
And yes, there is consistently interesting stuff on youtube. LG15 isn't all that bad, despite the backlash. And Ian Crossland is always good, if only to laugh at.
But the real appeal of youtube isn't in watching videos, it's in making videos. Did you ever want to have your own TV show, and be watched by thousands? Youtube appeals to the vanity in people.
They're just stalling. Sometimes it's easier to delay the affirmative plan indefinitely than to actually defeat it. Of course, it costs money, but it's "taxpayers" money, so that's all right. In northern california, we could really use a light rail system, as there are a lot of people who commute all the way to san francisco. Every year, there is a proposal to implement this. What happens is, they spend a couple more million on "studies", and spend the rest on widening the existing roads. This is like a contractor's wet dream, and probably pays well for the politicians, but does not ultimately solve the problem.
Embedded, buddy. When you're running a computer like this, you're looking at KB, not gigs.
sigh. I know.
Exactly. IMHO, slashdot should have an "offtopic" section for stuff like this.
No. The buffer overflows would still be there, emulated perfectly. Of course, if you ran it in a sandbox, it wouldn't make a difference -- but if it was that restricted, it wouldn't be able to do anything useful.
I mean, if your copy of windows running on VMWare on linux gets rooted, it still sucks, especially if you're really using that instance of windows. If data gets stolen, it's still stolen. If you get hacked, you're still hacked.
In a VM, you can revert to a clean image, but you can also revert the actual box to a clean image. It's just harder. It's not like there's some magical thing about emulators or VMs that makes security problems go away.
If you don't tell me what I got wrong, how am I going to know you're not just making stuff up, or wrong yourself? You didn't link to anything either.
Besides, it isn't really that complicated. Rods and cones have response curves. Paint has a reflectance function. The color of the incident light is described by a curve. The response in each channel is just the dot product of the curves. The hard part is describing how the brain perceives different colors.
What part of that is wrong?
That problem held me up for a while too, but I figured out that you can use linest to do curve fitting. It's the "real" way to do it anyway. See my other post
The other graphing limitations are much worse, IMHO.
I wonder if they will be able to do a similar thing to humans so that we can see in four or more colors. Just imagine how much it would screw up graphics programmers and monitor manufacturers if they had to add a UV channel. Fortunately, people serious about color (like paint manufacturers) consider the full spectrum. And fashion changes so quickly anyway that it wouldn't make a difference at all there.
But just think how interesting kindergarden colorimetry would get. What do you get when you mix ultra-blue and magenta? Quick, figure it out without using a piece of paper.
You can work around this using the LINEST function. And it is good for much more than lines -- you can fit any linear combination of functions. For example, suppose this is your data:
x y
----
1 4
2 5
3 6
and you want to fit it to y = A e^x + B e^-x
then, you just fit a plane to the data:
e^x e^-x y
----------
e^1 e^-1 4
e^2 e^-2 5
e^3 e^-3 6
LINEST is much more powerful than reading the equation off the chart, even if it is harder to set up. You can also use your estimated values in equations, so that if you change your data, you don't need to plug in your estimated values again. The only thing is that LINEST returns an array, which requires a bit of reading to learn how to extract values from.
And if your function isn't a linear combination of functions, sometimes you can play with logarithms until it is. But that's way beyond what excel's curve fitting does anyway.
That doesn't cut it. I need to be able to select exactly which cells make up my domain, and exactly which cells go into each range. "data in rows", and "data in columns" doesn't do that, it just tries to figure out which is the domain and which is the range automatically.
And OO doesn't do 3D charts either. And before you ask, yes, some people actually use them.
Openoffice writer is mostly good, and works at least as well as word, if a bit slower.
On the other hand, openoffice calc, the spreadsheet, has serious problems. It has nowhere near the functionality of excel for doing charts. As I recall, it doesn't have the ability to select arbitrary rows for your dataset. This is a killer for me. Sure, I could use a real plotting package, but that's more work than I want to go to.
I've also heard reports that calc is missing functions that are present in excel. This isn't really a big deal -- mainly because excel doesn't have all that many functions either. But I suppose for an excel "pro" it could be irritating.
If you're really planning to do pro video editing with linux, you're either extremely misguided or out of your mind. When I start up cinelerra, the "pro" video app for linux, I'm told I need to run echo "0x7fffffff" > proc/kernel/shmax as root. Wtf? I try to open a video clip. It crashes. This stuff isn't stable. It isn't even beta, or alpha. This is pre-alpha software, being marketed as stable.
To be fair, audio is ok, and blender is pretty good too. But steer clear of video, unless you're just trying to play or transcode it, because you won't get very far. Of course, Ubuntu studio may manage to stabilize the shifting mess of crap and make a solid distro, but I'm not very hopeful.
For God's sake, stick with windows, man.
You kind of picked a bad example, as vorbis is actually quite popular in some domains (games, for example), is supported by several hardware players, and gives better compression than mp3.
Of course, the idea of rebuilding the internet is a load of bull. The article lists a bunch of things you supposedly can't do with regular protocols, and takes those as reasons for change. They seem to think we can't do multicast, QOS, or security with current protocols. They also seem to think that, since wireless is so different from land lines, we should need new protocols. Their plans also happen to destroy any possibility of network neutrality.
I sincerely hope this project doesn't get any government funding.