String theory works because the math works. There isn't anything special about the string theorists' model of humming cosmic strings that makes it work. All particle behavior is explainable using mathematics.
What makes this interesting is that the model allowed for the construction of mathematical constructs that explain the behavior correctly. But it still doesn't say anything about the predictions that the model completely blows.
What String Theory has, more than anything else, is a great set of marketeers behind it. Michio Kaku is a smart and articulate guy. It's not the steak, it's the sizzle.
Garbage collection is an amazingly boring field of computer science. It's all about tracking references and trying to keep memory from filling up while also trying to keep the overall impact on the running system down. But as boring as it may be, it's also absolutely critical in today's interpreted languages.
Where Java really fails is in the inability to trust the finalize method. At least in C++, the destructor of an object is guaranteed to be called as soon as the object is deleted. Java has no such guarantee, so expecting an object to clean itself up once it goes out of scope is a fool's errand. It will get finalized eventually, but the lack of deterministic behavior in this critical part of the object lifecycle means that there is a very big chance that unacceptable delays may occur in practice.
Give me deterministic behavior over faster GC any day.
This surcharge is $1.70 per year. That's not that much.
I've been to Louisiana. They could definitely use a little extra cash in their coffers for education if their uneducated, violent, and poor urban populace is any indication. Also, their roads are pretty bad, so extra money coming in could allow extra funds to go towards improving that.
I've used Chrome on Windows, but found it to be lacking features like advertisement blocking, pop-up blocking, and NoScript-like functionality.
Luckily, Firefox works great.
And that's what I don't understand about Chrome. It's definitely a great idea to make Javascript faster, and rendering should always be as fast as possible, and the concept of locking each browser instance to a process is not without merit. But why can't they help Firefox?
Firefox is the standard non-Microsoft browser now. It is a serious contender to IE in ways that no other browser ever was. Only Netscape 3 was in anyway comparable, but we know how NS dropped the ball with Navigator 4.
Open Source software is about freedom, and freedom to do your own thing is definitely a big one. But the Open Source market is also unlike the standard free market. Instead of getting better products due to competition, you get worse products due to the split of resources. By taking interest away from Firefox, Google is possibly killing the only serious competitor to IE.
Killing IE's competition is not a good thing. We all saw the stagnant browser world from IE5 through IE6 where there was no Netscape to set Microsoft's feet on fire and Firebird was still a heap of crap trying to dig itself out of the ashes of Netscape. I'm worried that Google's Chrome effort will stick us all with IE8 as the web standard for years to come.
If you consider the fact that most games are constantly looking for the latest and greatest, whether it be hardware or software or (god help us) controllers, there will be only negative results from the lengthening of the console lifecycle. By extending the life of these boxes, console manufacturers are going to face the waning interest of consumers.
In some respects, the decision to keep current consoles longer makes some sense. There has not been any serious change in gameplay since the earliest consoles from Nintendo came out (this is not perfectly true, but I'll come back to that later). In order to keep interest alive, more powerful consoles were needed to bring the graphics capabilities into sync with the gameplay. Now, with the latest batch of consoles, we have seen that level reached. There will still be a few more tweaks that could be applied: anti-aliasing is one technological hurdle that hasn't been tackled satisfactorily.
In effect, the development of consoles has been dictated by the needs of the games. Unfortunately, these games have needed better graphics more than anything else. So what we have now is the situation where graphics are really good, but gameplay has not improved.
Now to come back to the issue of gameplay. There have been only a few true quantum leaps in gameplay. 3D, independent cooperative gaming (as opposed to simple team-play which has been around since R-type), and the latest is motion control as introduced in the Wii. Motion control has been around a long time, but until Wii no one has been able to make it a success. Nintendo used to have a motion activated controller, but it never took off. Para Para Paradise was interesting, but very limited in scope and popularity. And though there were fighting games which attempted to use motion sensors for input, these were also widely criticized. It was the Wii which was able to break through the closed-mindedness and create games that were fun and realistic to the gaming world.
But what is next? What is the next quantum leap in gaming? Without it, there can't be any new consoles that do anything more than make graphics better. But if console manufacturers think that gamers are going to sit idly by twiddling their thumbs on old consoles, they are going to be in deep trouble. They are damned if they do and damned if they don't. It's better for them to release new consoles, even if it means nothing more than better graphics. The alternative is to simply lose the interest of the gaming public.
Or they could use the traditional method of setting up a factory and dumping tons of toxic waste into the area, eventually degrading the place to a point that no one remembers it ever being pristine.
There is a house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun. No one visits it anymore, but it is a national landmark and can't be torn down to make way for newer high rises. It just gets older and more dilapidated as time goes by. It hasn't been visited since I was a poor boy.
So how many people actually went by to see that footprint or flag in the past year? Decade? 2 decades? 3 decades?
Great tits from the city are higher and perkier than tits from the country. The country tits are lower, and the city tits don't give them the time of day.
It's not really any wonder, though. Everyone prefers perky tits.
Here we have a very interesting inversion of the typical Open vs Closed debate. Although Windows itself may be a closed source OS, it is actually a very open system. And although Android is built on layers of open source components, it is fundamentally a closed system (like iPhone).
The target audience for Android PCs would be one which needs a dedicated internet browsing device. Anything more would mean that they would be looking at Windows.
This strategy has been tried several times before. And it has failed every time. Linux has already been edged out of the netbook market by Windows, so it's going to be interesting to see how an even more crippled system could possibly compete.
I used to drive a Hyundai Sonata. Whenever I took it out, I would get stares because the heap would lay down a huge black cloud of exhaust when I pressed the gas. I would occasionally think about getting it fixed, but never really got around to it. Then one day I was t-boned at an intersection. The car was totaled.
In the business world, things are much the same way. Collision is just as bad as a monopoly.
There are many things that people do as professions that are ethically questionable but undoubtedly legal. Not to harp on Maggie Sanger, but the ethics of abortion are intensely debated. However abortion remains legal in the U.S.A. Telemarketing is almost universally reviled, but people still make a living at it.
You would expect that ethics would take a big role in how the legal system is formulated, and for the most part you'd be right. But due to the creativity of human beings, the fruitful edges of legality and ethics can be sought out and exploited.
The Eastern Roman Empire based in Constantinople lasted as long as the Egyptian empire, but its citizens never felt the same feeling of continuity and stability that the ancient Egyptians felt.
Istanbul is a pretty clever name for a chipmaker who, like the legendary phoenix, dies and then returns from the ashes.
When Planned Parenthood was founded, many people were disgusted at the thought of an agency dedicated to abortion. Worse, though, was the fact that PP was founded in order to control the population of undesirables, and Sanger, the founder of PP, was especially eager to label non-whites as undesirable.
Now, here's the dilemma. If we take the position that speech itself is relatively useless since anyone can do it, and that only actions are important since only those willing to act will effect true change, then how do we reconcile the good which PP has brought while taking into consideration the completely immoral basis upon which it was founded?
Sanchez is wrong in his supposition that speech itself is wrong. Speech leads to debate, and debate can bring out the truth. The ancient Greek sophists knew this, and thus we have the practice of oratory.
The idea that users should give back to the community is absurd. If the "community" was at all concerned about receiving some kind of recompense, surely they would have charged the users for the software.
But Free Software is about freedom. Not only the freedom to give your source code away, but the freedom to modify and adapt software as needed. There is no concept of a user returning source code to the community except as a contributor (which, again, is a freely undertaken venture). The only time someone is required to "give back" to the community is when they seek to propagate their changes. Since the idea is to make sure everyone is able to use and modify the software as they need, it is necessary to require the new source changes.
So if I don't steal your car, but only borrow it for a day and return it washed and waxed with the gas tank full, what is the point of claiming damages? That is sheer greed. It is the antithesis of what the Free Software Movement is all about.
These people are being persecuted because of their beliefs and their willingness to stand up for their beliefs.
Do you know which Jews made it through the Holocaust unscathed? It was the ones that joined up with the Nazis as soldiers and police. Through their complicity, these Jews were responsible for the millions that were slaughtered in the camps.
Now, if you want to say that these guys, these mealy-mouthed, race traitor guys, were better than the other Jews because they sought to get along with the establishment... Well, I don't know what that makes you.
Not saying you're wrong, but where does the water in the comets come from? If it can form in comets, isn't it also possible that water is a common compound which can form anywhere conditions allow (i.e. the presence of hydrogen and oxygen and a catalyst to fuse them)?
The comet theory is interesting, but it also begs the question.
As for the salts, the additional minerals would come from the metabolic processes of the life. The life grows by absorbing sunlight (or something) and ingesting the riverbed minerals. The minerals are then released into the water as the lifeforms rid themselves of waste. It isn't a closed system.
Here on earth we have so much water. Where did this water come from? The magical water comet?
No! Water is a naturally occurring compound, like basalt and methane. So water can exist anywhere the conditions are right for it. And Mars is right for it.
We don't need to see the crystallized mineral deposits on the riverbeds to understand there was water running. There were riverbeds!
But if there was salt in the water, there was probably also life in that water. Life living in the salty water making it saltier by pissing in it every single day.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a theory that there must be a joke in here somewhere about strings and superfluid!
Maybe something about David Carradine or Michael Hutchence?
String theory works because the math works. There isn't anything special about the string theorists' model of humming cosmic strings that makes it work. All particle behavior is explainable using mathematics.
What makes this interesting is that the model allowed for the construction of mathematical constructs that explain the behavior correctly. But it still doesn't say anything about the predictions that the model completely blows.
What String Theory has, more than anything else, is a great set of marketeers behind it. Michio Kaku is a smart and articulate guy. It's not the steak, it's the sizzle.
Garbage collection is an amazingly boring field of computer science. It's all about tracking references and trying to keep memory from filling up while also trying to keep the overall impact on the running system down. But as boring as it may be, it's also absolutely critical in today's interpreted languages.
Where Java really fails is in the inability to trust the finalize method. At least in C++, the destructor of an object is guaranteed to be called as soon as the object is deleted. Java has no such guarantee, so expecting an object to clean itself up once it goes out of scope is a fool's errand. It will get finalized eventually, but the lack of deterministic behavior in this critical part of the object lifecycle means that there is a very big chance that unacceptable delays may occur in practice.
Give me deterministic behavior over faster GC any day.
You know. He's just another stupid Republican. Those guys sure don't have any good ideas.
This surcharge is $1.70 per year. That's not that much.
I've been to Louisiana. They could definitely use a little extra cash in their coffers for education if their uneducated, violent, and poor urban populace is any indication. Also, their roads are pretty bad, so extra money coming in could allow extra funds to go towards improving that.
My father was a gambling man down in New Orleans.
I've used Chrome on Windows, but found it to be lacking features like advertisement blocking, pop-up blocking, and NoScript-like functionality.
Luckily, Firefox works great.
And that's what I don't understand about Chrome. It's definitely a great idea to make Javascript faster, and rendering should always be as fast as possible, and the concept of locking each browser instance to a process is not without merit. But why can't they help Firefox?
Firefox is the standard non-Microsoft browser now. It is a serious contender to IE in ways that no other browser ever was. Only Netscape 3 was in anyway comparable, but we know how NS dropped the ball with Navigator 4.
Open Source software is about freedom, and freedom to do your own thing is definitely a big one. But the Open Source market is also unlike the standard free market. Instead of getting better products due to competition, you get worse products due to the split of resources. By taking interest away from Firefox, Google is possibly killing the only serious competitor to IE.
Killing IE's competition is not a good thing. We all saw the stagnant browser world from IE5 through IE6 where there was no Netscape to set Microsoft's feet on fire and Firebird was still a heap of crap trying to dig itself out of the ashes of Netscape. I'm worried that Google's Chrome effort will stick us all with IE8 as the web standard for years to come.
If you consider the fact that most games are constantly looking for the latest and greatest, whether it be hardware or software or (god help us) controllers, there will be only negative results from the lengthening of the console lifecycle. By extending the life of these boxes, console manufacturers are going to face the waning interest of consumers.
In some respects, the decision to keep current consoles longer makes some sense. There has not been any serious change in gameplay since the earliest consoles from Nintendo came out (this is not perfectly true, but I'll come back to that later). In order to keep interest alive, more powerful consoles were needed to bring the graphics capabilities into sync with the gameplay. Now, with the latest batch of consoles, we have seen that level reached. There will still be a few more tweaks that could be applied: anti-aliasing is one technological hurdle that hasn't been tackled satisfactorily.
In effect, the development of consoles has been dictated by the needs of the games. Unfortunately, these games have needed better graphics more than anything else. So what we have now is the situation where graphics are really good, but gameplay has not improved.
Now to come back to the issue of gameplay. There have been only a few true quantum leaps in gameplay. 3D, independent cooperative gaming (as opposed to simple team-play which has been around since R-type), and the latest is motion control as introduced in the Wii. Motion control has been around a long time, but until Wii no one has been able to make it a success. Nintendo used to have a motion activated controller, but it never took off. Para Para Paradise was interesting, but very limited in scope and popularity. And though there were fighting games which attempted to use motion sensors for input, these were also widely criticized. It was the Wii which was able to break through the closed-mindedness and create games that were fun and realistic to the gaming world.
But what is next? What is the next quantum leap in gaming? Without it, there can't be any new consoles that do anything more than make graphics better. But if console manufacturers think that gamers are going to sit idly by twiddling their thumbs on old consoles, they are going to be in deep trouble. They are damned if they do and damned if they don't. It's better for them to release new consoles, even if it means nothing more than better graphics. The alternative is to simply lose the interest of the gaming public.
Or they could use the traditional method of setting up a factory and dumping tons of toxic waste into the area, eventually degrading the place to a point that no one remembers it ever being pristine.
There is a house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun. No one visits it anymore, but it is a national landmark and can't be torn down to make way for newer high rises. It just gets older and more dilapidated as time goes by. It hasn't been visited since I was a poor boy.
So how many people actually went by to see that footprint or flag in the past year? Decade? 2 decades? 3 decades?
http://www.metalprices.com/FreeSite/metals/cu/cu.asp
Great tits from the city are higher and perkier than tits from the country. The country tits are lower, and the city tits don't give them the time of day.
It's not really any wonder, though. Everyone prefers perky tits.
Here we have a very interesting inversion of the typical Open vs Closed debate. Although Windows itself may be a closed source OS, it is actually a very open system. And although Android is built on layers of open source components, it is fundamentally a closed system (like iPhone).
The target audience for Android PCs would be one which needs a dedicated internet browsing device. Anything more would mean that they would be looking at Windows.
This strategy has been tried several times before. And it has failed every time. Linux has already been edged out of the netbook market by Windows, so it's going to be interesting to see how an even more crippled system could possibly compete.
I used to drive a Hyundai Sonata. Whenever I took it out, I would get stares because the heap would lay down a huge black cloud of exhaust when I pressed the gas. I would occasionally think about getting it fixed, but never really got around to it. Then one day I was t-boned at an intersection. The car was totaled.
In the business world, things are much the same way. Collision is just as bad as a monopoly.
Windows isn't even on my radar. My desktop computer runs Ubuntu. My cellphone runs Android.
Is there anyone on this website who cares a whit about Windows 7?
If you believe that the U.S. will control the DNS system in perpetuity, then this seems like a fine idea.
The whole point is that this is illegal in most everywhere in the world.
So is the death penalty, but I don't see how something illegal elsewhere makes an iota of difference here.
There are many things that people do as professions that are ethically questionable but undoubtedly legal. Not to harp on Maggie Sanger, but the ethics of abortion are intensely debated. However abortion remains legal in the U.S.A. Telemarketing is almost universally reviled, but people still make a living at it.
You would expect that ethics would take a big role in how the legal system is formulated, and for the most part you'd be right. But due to the creativity of human beings, the fruitful edges of legality and ethics can be sought out and exploited.
The Eastern Roman Empire based in Constantinople lasted as long as the Egyptian empire, but its citizens never felt the same feeling of continuity and stability that the ancient Egyptians felt.
Istanbul is a pretty clever name for a chipmaker who, like the legendary phoenix, dies and then returns from the ashes.
When Planned Parenthood was founded, many people were disgusted at the thought of an agency dedicated to abortion. Worse, though, was the fact that PP was founded in order to control the population of undesirables, and Sanger, the founder of PP, was especially eager to label non-whites as undesirable.
Now, here's the dilemma. If we take the position that speech itself is relatively useless since anyone can do it, and that only actions are important since only those willing to act will effect true change, then how do we reconcile the good which PP has brought while taking into consideration the completely immoral basis upon which it was founded?
Sanchez is wrong in his supposition that speech itself is wrong. Speech leads to debate, and debate can bring out the truth. The ancient Greek sophists knew this, and thus we have the practice of oratory.
The idea that users should give back to the community is absurd. If the "community" was at all concerned about receiving some kind of recompense, surely they would have charged the users for the software.
But Free Software is about freedom. Not only the freedom to give your source code away, but the freedom to modify and adapt software as needed. There is no concept of a user returning source code to the community except as a contributor (which, again, is a freely undertaken venture). The only time someone is required to "give back" to the community is when they seek to propagate their changes. Since the idea is to make sure everyone is able to use and modify the software as they need, it is necessary to require the new source changes.
So if I don't steal your car, but only borrow it for a day and return it washed and waxed with the gas tank full, what is the point of claiming damages? That is sheer greed. It is the antithesis of what the Free Software Movement is all about.
These people are being persecuted because of their beliefs and their willingness to stand up for their beliefs.
Do you know which Jews made it through the Holocaust unscathed? It was the ones that joined up with the Nazis as soldiers and police. Through their complicity, these Jews were responsible for the millions that were slaughtered in the camps.
Now, if you want to say that these guys, these mealy-mouthed, race traitor guys, were better than the other Jews because they sought to get along with the establishment... Well, I don't know what that makes you.
Not saying you're wrong, but where does the water in the comets come from? If it can form in comets, isn't it also possible that water is a common compound which can form anywhere conditions allow (i.e. the presence of hydrogen and oxygen and a catalyst to fuse them)?
The comet theory is interesting, but it also begs the question.
As for the salts, the additional minerals would come from the metabolic processes of the life. The life grows by absorbing sunlight (or something) and ingesting the riverbed minerals. The minerals are then released into the water as the lifeforms rid themselves of waste. It isn't a closed system.
Steve Jobs is not the world's most famous tech CEO.
Bill Gates has better name recognition than Jobs, if only because his philanthropy reaches so many more people than Jobs' work does.
Here on earth we have so much water. Where did this water come from? The magical water comet?
No! Water is a naturally occurring compound, like basalt and methane. So water can exist anywhere the conditions are right for it. And Mars is right for it.
We don't need to see the crystallized mineral deposits on the riverbeds to understand there was water running. There were riverbeds!
But if there was salt in the water, there was probably also life in that water. Life living in the salty water making it saltier by pissing in it every single day.