Round here there's a lot of those radars which show your speed, and a smiley or frowny face. They all read 5 to 10% high, compared to GPS.
I've been photographed several times by automatic speed traps, and each time my GPS log has shown that I've been driving under the speed limit. I trust the GPS, because I can see that it reads the time and position correctly. Thus I can work out my speed by hand, and compare it to the speed shown by the GPS.
So far no speeding tickets have arrived in the post. Maybe in the speed-camera pictures they can see me with my GPS, pocket calculator, pencil and notepad. And maybe they think, "there goes a safe driver".
Don't mess with nature... or what? Nobody messed with hurricane Katrina, but that did not mollify Mother Nature.
The paths followed by hurricanes are extremely variable and difficult to predict, so it seems likely that they may sensitive enough to be steered with a relatively modest amount of energy.
There is a always a risk of moving the hurricane in an unexpected way. That's not the fault of science, nor is it a reason to spurn the study of hurricanes. Any decent scientist will do the appropriate tests (on hurricanes far from land, for example), and weigh the risks before intervening. If there's a suitably high chance of being able to reduce the misery caused by a storm, then we have a duty to act.
People who complain about Gimp's interface aren't just whingeing for the sake of it. Gimp is immensely capable, but dear god, why is the interface split across so many windows? Photo editing in Gimp is a chore, chasing little windows around the desktop with the mouse.
It's a terrible pity, because so much work has gone into making Gimp. To can do almost everything an amateur photographer could want, but after a few weeks using it I went looking for an alternative and bought Photoshop Elements. Elements is missing a few features, but it's a pleasure to use, and that's why so many people use it instead of Gimp.
open source developers (and other freeware programmers in general) do what they do because they're bored and have nothing better to spend their time on
You could say that about any pastime, from climbing mountains in Tibet, through to watching TV.
We do it because we'd be bored if we didn't.
How hard is it to wake up in the morning? Ya pretty much have to do it every day, so how much practice do you need to do it on time?
Congratulations, you are a Typical Slashdotter.
As user RaguMS observed the first time Clocky was discussed on Slashdot:
The typical things Slashdot users will say:
"Just don't press the snooze button and keep your current alarm clock!"
"Why not just get up when the alarm goes off the first time? I always wake up and face the day with a smile."
"I disabled the snooze button on my clock so I always have to get up"
Of course, it also serves to mark her as a target for the ire of the OSS community. Microsoft collaborator! Boo! Hiss! etc.
This is a big cultural problem, and it's everywhere. It has become almost impossible for individuals to take even minor decisions, because they are vunerable to personal and professional attacks from people with vested interests. Therefore a committee has to decide everything, down to the colour of the office stationary. Committees have their place, but most of the time they are over-conservative and unneeded, except to protect individuals.
We should encourage bright individuals to do their work without constant fear of reprisals, rather than run endless committee meetings. Of course the dim individuals would then have nothing to do...
It sounds dramatic, but doesn't involve any serious commitment to reducing CO2 emissions.
It may even be counter-productive, since fluorescent bulbs contain rare and toxic materials.
But nobody will make any fuss about that.
It's superficial, unfair, cowardly, and contemptible. A politician's solution.
Banning incandescent lamps would have minimal effect on electricity consumption. Electrical heaters, air-conditioning, and industry all use so much more power.
If California's leaders really think that their citizens are using too much electricity, then they should raise the tax on electricity. That, however, would require political courage.
Banning filament lightbulbs will unfairly inconvenience some people; it will increase consumption of dangerous and rare materials; it will have little positive effect. But it'll look good, and that's what counts.
It's so nice to to touch base with the latest bleeding-edge technologies in the field of top-down, user-centred, interpersonal solutions. This bespoke methodology is bound to give proactive leaverage to next-level paradigm shifts in our operating model and incentivise the rationalization process across the enterprise.
Why do theists continually shift the burden of proof back to athiests? If I were to insist that a teapot orbited the Sun (an analogy used by Dawkins), I would have to *prove* this to other people before they'd believe me. Why does religion get a free pass when telling me there's an invisiable man in the sky?
Because the scientific method says so: no free passes. Otherwise, by definition, it isn't science. Likewise, faith without proof is religion: by definition, it gets a free pass.
The two are both necessary, and do not necessarily conflict. Science cannot provide the moral codes we need to live in a civilised society, and religion cannot provide the technology we need to be comfortable.
Problems arise when science or religion are misapplied to issues they cannot address. Since we need both sides, the battle for philosophical territory will never end.
At least, not until humans go extinct and are replaced by giant reptiles.
Inertial confinement fusion is done with short-wavelength lasers. The lasers might be driven by an electron beam, but the electrons themselves are not involved in the fusion. By no stretch of the imagination can this be described as a "compact"
setup, no matter how much you shrink the electron source.
Inertial confinement in a low energy electron beam has been proposed (Biennial National Particle Accelerator Conference, Washington USA, May 1993), but AFAIK the experiment was never carried out.
PET scans don't use accelerated positrons. A radioisotope is injected into the patient, which emits a positron when it decays. The positron immediately annihilates with an electron and emits two gamma rays. The gamma rays are detected and used to build the scan. To make the radioisotope you need a proton accelerator, but these are already very compact at 2-3m diameter, and anyway don't need to be near the patient.
Fusion, of course, has nothing to do with accelerating electrons.
I thought geeks knew this stuff, or do they only need to pretend these days?
BBC article is light on the kind of technical details Slashdot readers enjoy
...but not so light as the Slashdot article. Are you telling me that you've built a hurricane machine capable of destroying a building, and the most interesting part is the office PC which controls it?
Approx 1 in 1500 people are diagnosed with a brain tumour every year, and according to the article the tumours were discovered over the past 7 years. The building is big: 17 storeys. If the building contains 1000 people, then you would expect 4-5 brain tumours every 7 years *on average*.
There must be many hundreds of similar buildings in Australia, so it's hardly surprising to find one with slightly more tumours than average.
Human instinct is notoriously poor at judging probability, and the media exploits this to hype-up their stories.
This report is pure craven popularism. Even George Bush's climate scientists
managed to produce a reasonably unbiased
analysis of nuclear power.
"Doubling nuclear capacity" sounds impressive, but Britain doesn't have many nuclear power stations. Twice not-much is still not-much. And they don't say if this proposed doubling includes replacing old power stations which will be soon shut down.
As for the risks, they are far smaller than those cheerfully encountered in the fossil-fuel industry. And getting smaller all the time:
the technology exists now to make nuclear waste less active than the uranium that's dug out of the ground in the first place.
other than satisfying man's desire to have the biggest or fastest thing on the block, what possible uses of real value, other than decryption, could this thing bring to the table?
If only there were an easy way to find out. If only the story had a link to a web page with more information. Sigh...
And in exchange, the Canadian customer gets.. what? The right to copy music CDs? Does that include copy-protected CDs?
The record industry is treating us like the suckers we are. The sooner bands start selling their music directly to their fans, the better for everybody. Presumably the record companies recognise that this will happen, and are therefore screwing us whilst they can.
The analogy is fine: you pay for the speed of your connection, just as you pay for the right to use faster roads. What the telecos are proposing is more subtle, analogous to charging you to use a fast road, and then charging you again depending on who you are, what you're carrying, where you're going, and how fast you're driving. Actually the telecos charge even more: both the sender and the recipient have to pay - and here's where the analogy breaks down.
This is about chopping the internet into smaller markets. It's easier to charge high prices and confuse customers when what was a single service is subdivided into a gazillion different ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Round here there's a lot of those radars which show your speed, and a smiley or frowny face. They all read 5 to 10% high, compared to GPS.
I've been photographed several times by automatic speed traps, and each time my GPS log has shown that I've been driving under the speed limit. I trust the GPS, because I can see that it reads the time and position correctly. Thus I can work out my speed by hand, and compare it to the speed shown by the GPS.
So far no speeding tickets have arrived in the post. Maybe in the speed-camera pictures they can see me with my GPS, pocket calculator, pencil and notepad. And maybe they think, "there goes a safe driver".
Don't mess with nature ... or what? Nobody messed with hurricane Katrina, but that did not mollify Mother Nature.
The paths followed by hurricanes are extremely variable and difficult to predict, so it seems likely that they may sensitive enough to be steered with a relatively modest amount of energy.
There is a always a risk of moving the hurricane in an unexpected way. That's not the fault of science, nor is it a reason to spurn the study of hurricanes. Any decent scientist will do the appropriate tests (on hurricanes far from land, for example), and weigh the risks before intervening. If there's a suitably high chance of being able to reduce the misery caused by a storm, then we have a duty to act.
I'd say anyone actually attempting to use the "recipes" to make explosives should be considered suicidal rather than terrorist.
As we keep seeing, those two states of mind are far from being mutually excusive.
People who complain about Gimp's interface aren't just whingeing for the sake of it. Gimp is immensely capable, but dear god, why is the interface split across so many windows? Photo editing in Gimp is a chore, chasing little windows around the desktop with the mouse.
It's a terrible pity, because so much work has gone into making Gimp. To can do almost everything an amateur photographer could want, but after a few weeks using it I went looking for an alternative and bought Photoshop Elements. Elements is missing a few features, but it's a pleasure to use, and that's why so many people use it instead of Gimp.
Easily yeah, after all it's not rocket sci...
Sorry, I just realised I don't know what I'm talking about.
What would be a truly-random non-quantum process? Come to think of it, what would a non-quantum process be?
I'd pay you to take my mobile phone away. Old-school nerds like their gadgets, but hate talking.
open source developers (and other freeware programmers in general) do what they do because they're bored and have nothing better to spend their time on
You could say that about any pastime, from climbing mountains in Tibet, through to watching TV. We do it because we'd be bored if we didn't.
For further insight into the very, very obvious, check Miss Anne Elk's new theory about the brontosaurus.
Here in France, a "Catastrophe" is something which is mildly irritating, like a crack in the pavement. So for example,
"Sacré bleu, c'est pas possible! Merde alors, c'est le fin de la civilisation! Il nous faut encore un révolution. Quelle catastrophe."
translates into UK English as
"Oh!"
Sooooo very confused.
How hard is it to wake up in the morning? Ya pretty much have to do it every day, so how much practice do you need to do it on time?
Congratulations, you are a Typical Slashdotter.
As user RaguMS observed the first time Clocky was discussed on Slashdot:
Of course, it also serves to mark her as a target for the ire of the OSS community. Microsoft collaborator! Boo! Hiss! etc.
This is a big cultural problem, and it's everywhere. It has become almost impossible for individuals to take even minor decisions, because they are vunerable to personal and professional attacks from people with vested interests. Therefore a committee has to decide everything, down to the colour of the office stationary. Committees have their place, but most of the time they are over-conservative and unneeded, except to protect individuals.
We should encourage bright individuals to do their work without constant fear of reprisals, rather than run endless committee meetings. Of course the dim individuals would then have nothing to do...
The move seems to be the decision of one person, Lisa Rachjel, secretariat of the ISO Joint Technical Committee, according to a comment made by her.
The implication being that committees make better decisions than individuals? Please, be serious!
It sounds dramatic, but doesn't involve any serious commitment to reducing CO2 emissions. It may even be counter-productive, since fluorescent bulbs contain rare and toxic materials. But nobody will make any fuss about that.
It's superficial, unfair, cowardly, and contemptible. A politician's solution.
Banning incandescent lamps would have minimal effect on electricity consumption. Electrical heaters, air-conditioning, and industry all use so much more power.
If California's leaders really think that their citizens are using too much electricity, then they should raise the tax on electricity. That, however, would require political courage.
Banning filament lightbulbs will unfairly inconvenience some people; it will increase consumption of dangerous and rare materials; it will have little positive effect. But it'll look good, and that's what counts.
It's so nice to to touch base with the latest bleeding-edge technologies in the field of top-down, user-centred, interpersonal solutions. This bespoke methodology is bound to give proactive leaverage to next-level paradigm shifts in our operating model and incentivise the rationalization process across the enterprise.
Endo-atmospherically yours,
A. T. Bun
Why do theists continually shift the burden of proof back to athiests? If I were to insist that a teapot orbited the Sun (an analogy used by Dawkins), I would have to *prove* this to other people before they'd believe me. Why does religion get a free pass when telling me there's an invisiable man in the sky?
Because the scientific method says so: no free passes. Otherwise, by definition, it isn't science. Likewise, faith without proof is religion: by definition, it gets a free pass.
The two are both necessary, and do not necessarily conflict. Science cannot provide the moral codes we need to live in a civilised society, and religion cannot provide the technology we need to be comfortable.
Problems arise when science or religion are misapplied to issues they cannot address. Since we need both sides, the battle for philosophical territory will never end.
At least, not until humans go extinct and are replaced by giant reptiles.
Tyrannosaurs on a boat? Hey, I just had a great idea for a Hollywood blockbuster. Get me my agent...
Inertial confinement fusion is done with short-wavelength lasers. The lasers might be driven by an electron beam, but the electrons themselves are not involved in the fusion. By no stretch of the imagination can this be described as a "compact" setup, no matter how much you shrink the electron source.
Inertial confinement in a low energy electron beam has been proposed (Biennial National Particle Accelerator Conference, Washington USA, May 1993), but AFAIK the experiment was never carried out.
PET scans don't use accelerated positrons. A radioisotope is injected into the patient, which emits a positron when it decays. The positron immediately annihilates with an electron and emits two gamma rays. The gamma rays are detected and used to build the scan. To make the radioisotope you need a proton accelerator, but these are already very compact at 2-3m diameter, and anyway don't need to be near the patient.
Fusion, of course, has nothing to do with accelerating electrons.
I thought geeks knew this stuff, or do they only need to pretend these days?
Approx 1 in 1500 people are diagnosed with a brain tumour every year, and according to the article the tumours were discovered over the past 7 years. The building is big: 17 storeys. If the building contains 1000 people, then you would expect 4-5 brain tumours every 7 years *on average*.
There must be many hundreds of similar buildings in Australia, so it's hardly surprising to find one with slightly more tumours than average. Human instinct is notoriously poor at judging probability, and the media exploits this to hype-up their stories.
As for the risks, they are far smaller than those cheerfully encountered in the fossil-fuel industry. And getting smaller all the time: the technology exists now to make nuclear waste less active than the uranium that's dug out of the ground in the first place.
If only there were an easy way to find out. If only the story had a link to a web page with more information. Sigh...
The record industry is treating us like the suckers we are. The sooner bands start selling their music directly to their fans, the better for everybody. Presumably the record companies recognise that this will happen, and are therefore screwing us whilst they can.
This is about chopping the internet into smaller markets. It's easier to charge high prices and confuse customers when what was a single service is subdivided into a gazillion different ones.