Why not use Wikipedia and just ignore articles that still have cleanup tags? With Veropedia, one must first wait until the article is completed, then wait until it's transferred. On Wikipedia, you just have to wait until it's completed. The only advantage I can see in using Veropedia is that you get a "Page not found" error instead of a "This article is in need of cleanup" when you come across an incomplete article... and I'm not sure that's really an advantage.
That isn't to belittle RMS or his works, but for all he put into it, it would have come to naught if Linus or someone else hadn't come along and given the final push.
I guess I didn't make my point clear enough. Why was Linus even pushing at all? The FSF did more than write software. It fostered a community. It created a public license so folks wouldn't have to write their own. It established a list of goals: software that the GNU system sorely needed. Torvalds didn't come up with the paradigm of using open source software nor did he establish the basic rules by which open source projects would operate. The fact that his kernel was the last component to be written before the GNU/Linux system could stand alone isn't at issue here. The question is whether he was responsible for founding a paradigm.
Try this instead: Go out into the street and ask people to name a piece of free software. Odds are, they'll name Firefox. Firefox is the first piece of open source software to attract a userbase of that many non-technical people. Firefox drew the public's eye to OSS in a way that no other software has. But would you say that the Mozilla Foundation was responsible for a paradigm shift? Of course not! They just exposed a larger number of people to the concept. As fine as their software is, it's just software. And right now we're looking for paradigms. The Linux kernel is no more foundational in this respect than is Firefox.
Biggest Paradigm Change in Enterprise Software: Linux kernel
Don't get me wrong: I love Linus and I love Linux. But don't forget what RMS likes to remind us at every opportunity: Linux is part of the GNU system. And GNU predated Linux by a long shot.
Stallman started the GNU project in 1983 and founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985. The Linux kernel appeared in 1991. Where did Torvalds get his compiler? Where did Torvalds get his editor? Where did Torvalds find people to work on his kernel? I understand that it can be pedantic to argue about big, abstract ideas like ``When did the paradigm shift really happen?'' Maybe the paradigm didn't ``shift'' until the Linux kernel came out. But Torvalds wasn't out to change paradigms. Stallman was. If we're going to hail the concept of free software, we should acknowledge the alphabet soup of RMS, the FSF, GNU, ETC. that gave it legs to stand on.
qubit" is short for "quantum binary digit" - which is an oxymoron since quantum digits can be any (or all) of several states, not just on or off (binary). Close but not quite. The "several states" a single qubit can assume are all just combinations of a zero and a one. Think of it as a qubit being an expression like "37% zero, 63% one." Physicists write the percentages as complex numbers (which adds an extra complication called "phase," but we've still got "(0.733+0.431i) zero, (0.375-0.369i) one."
Things do get more complicated when multiple qubits are strung together but they still represent zeroes and ones. A three-qubit system can be described by eight complex numbers that keep track of the probability (called "amplitude") of the states 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111. Qubits are bits.
If you want to be annoying and say, "What about a three-state system, where instead of dealing with spin up and spin down, you get spin up, spin zero, and spin down?" then you would have a valid point. But nobody calls such a system a "qubit," any more than we could say that an ordinary electrical circuit holds an ordinary bit if it's allowed to assume three distinct voltages instead of just the usual "high" and "low."
True, the scientists could still be wrong. But they also have a much better chance of being right than non-scientists.
If most of the available evidence supports an Earth-centered universe, I'm going to believe in an Earth-centered universe. If most of the available evidence supports global climate change, I'm going to believe that, too. Why? Because it's the best we can do. Sure, evidence can be misinterpreted. But there's a huge difference between "We can never be sure" and "Physical truths are unknowable." When you make policy, you do it with the best available information because even if you're wrong every now and then, you generally come out in the lead.
Do we really have to keep arguing about epistomology every time global warming comes up? Suppose you're walking across the savanna and a bunch of photons hit your retina in a way that suggests that a large lion in front of you. Nobody would say, "The best evidence I has indicates that there's a lion in front of me but there is no way to be sure; it could be an illusion." You act under the assumption that the lion is real until something happens that suggests otherwise (i.e. it walks through a tree, as only illusions can do.) There is a general scientific consensus that human activities play an important role in the global climate changes. Read the papers---you will find precious few that disagree, and they haven't been enough to sway the majority opinion.
Stop saying "they could be wrong." I'm tired of it. If you think they're wrong, tell us why you think they're wrong. Find a better explanation for the temperature increases, back it up with evidence, and refute the challenges that the rest of the scientific community presents to you. Otherwise, you have nothing to say. Scientists know they can be wrong. That's why scientists ultimately did reject geocentrism. That's also why they rejected heliocentrism and a million other ideas that turned out to be incorrect. Stop cluttering up the public debate with philosophical musings about certainty. It contributes nothing but gives ammunition to the FUDmongering interest groups who are trying to keep us from fixing the problem.
Says PiSquared: This would probably be political suicide even in America, a country that seems more inclined to take away people's rights.
Says the summary: 'We have among the most drastic censorship rules for games,' said Frank Sliwka, head of the Deutsche E-Sport Bund, an umbrella federation for German online gaming teams.
While it's true that Americans raise the greatest fuss when folks try to take away our rights, are you sure your allegations are correct? Are we really more inclined to take away people's rights? Gay marriage aside, America is actually pretty good about censorship compared to some places. Especially Europe.
There are three ideas here and each is worth addressing individually:
At some point, doesn't it make sense to stop spending Billions of dollars of taxpayer money on Big Bang research?
At some point, yes. Diminishing marginal returns eventually bring down everything. But I wouldn't say we've gone too far; this program doesn't sound like it would cost anywhere near a billion dollars and the chips will probably be useful in other weak-signal applications.
How much does it benefit us to know what happened.3 seconds after the big bang vs. 3 seconds vs. 10 million years?
Newton couldn't have developed his universal law of gravitation without the observations of Galileo and Kepler that planets are attracted to each other. But now we use his law of gravity all the time. Relativity drew on the results of experiments that involved light reflecting back from the moons of Jupiter; now we need relativity to calibrate the electron guns in our televsion sets. Our understanding of nuclear physics got a huge boost from studies of the stars and the fusion processes going on out there. And nuclear power (and weapons) have impacted society in a grand way. How much does it benefit us to know what happened 0.3 seconds after the Big Bang? It helps us because the closer we get to the Big Bang, the closer we get to observing quantum gravity (in whatever form it takes). And while quantum gravity might not seem terribly useful right now, I have little doubt that it will have useful applications eventually. Basic research is important.
I'd rather see all this money fund research into advanced propulsion systems, robotics, and solar power technologies that will help us explore the Universe, rather than just gaze at it with ever more powerful equipment.
I can't help thinking "why?". At some point, doesn't it make sense to stop spending Billions of dollars of taxpayer money on Space exploration? After all, if looking at the universe with a cheap telescope is a waste of time, wouldn't going out and touching it in an expensive spaceship be an even bigger waste?
Whoa, folks, what are we saying? One way of looking at this is that the government is asking the recording industry to give up its "rights" to save lives and to strengthen homeland security. Tell me... If the government asked you to give up something that was legally yours (say, protection from random wiretappings) when there are "severe doubts" about whether it threatens critical infrastructure or lives? (And don't say I'm pulling this out of nowhere -- more police powers can make it easier to catch criminals who want to kill folks.)
I'm not in favor of DRM, but we can't just pull out the "it risks lives" card whenever we want to. A major part of American philosophy is that we allow people and organizations to maintain certain rights even if there's a chance that someone may die indirectly as a result.
I really hope that fifteen people reply with thorough explanations of why I'm wrong here, because I really don't want the **AA to be right...
But if these people would have spent a little more time working with their representatives, or mobilizing petitions, or SOMETHING that actually affected the political systems, they might actually have what they want. Now, they've got a much talked about game, and rights are still just as infringed-upon.
Do you really think that if these people had petitioned their representatives, the Guantanamo/Patriot Act/everything else issues would be solved? I used to write letters to government officials when I was in high school, but that didn't accomplish much. Right now, we need to educate the voting public about the serious issues facing them. And the gamemakers did exactly that.
The sun has gotten brighter and in particularly it has also been much more electrically active in the last few years. There were 2 massive solar flares only a few days before Hurricans Katriana and Rita flared up. Wilma has a strong match to several solar flares.
Pardon? Solar flares? What's this "match" you're talking about? I can understand how human-generated carbon dioxide can trap heat in the atmosphere -- we've established the greenhouse effect. I can also understand how warmer water makes more intense hurricanes, given that hurricanes form as a result of moist air rising over the ocean. These results match the rest of science. But solar flares?
The first chart isn't exactly solar flares... It's more along the lines of sunspots because I couldn't find a good solar flare chart. But at first glance, I don't really see the correlation. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong charts and maybe I'm not looking closely enough at the charts I have, but I think the warm ocean theory matches the data better than the solar flare theory.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not use Wikipedia and just ignore articles that still have cleanup tags? With Veropedia, one must first wait until the article is completed, then wait until it's transferred. On Wikipedia, you just have to wait until it's completed. The only advantage I can see in using Veropedia is that you get a "Page not found" error instead of a "This article is in need of cleanup" when you come across an incomplete article... and I'm not sure that's really an advantage.
Most print publications would have known to end that title with a question mark.
I guess I didn't make my point clear enough. Why was Linus even pushing at all? The FSF did more than write software. It fostered a community. It created a public license so folks wouldn't have to write their own. It established a list of goals: software that the GNU system sorely needed. Torvalds didn't come up with the paradigm of using open source software nor did he establish the basic rules by which open source projects would operate. The fact that his kernel was the last component to be written before the GNU/Linux system could stand alone isn't at issue here. The question is whether he was responsible for founding a paradigm.
Try this instead: Go out into the street and ask people to name a piece of free software. Odds are, they'll name Firefox. Firefox is the first piece of open source software to attract a userbase of that many non-technical people. Firefox drew the public's eye to OSS in a way that no other software has. But would you say that the Mozilla Foundation was responsible for a paradigm shift? Of course not! They just exposed a larger number of people to the concept. As fine as their software is, it's just software. And right now we're looking for paradigms. The Linux kernel is no more foundational in this respect than is Firefox.
Don't get me wrong: I love Linus and I love Linux. But don't forget what RMS likes to remind us at every opportunity: Linux is part of the GNU system. And GNU predated Linux by a long shot.
Stallman started the GNU project in 1983 and founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985. The Linux kernel appeared in 1991. Where did Torvalds get his compiler? Where did Torvalds get his editor? Where did Torvalds find people to work on his kernel? I understand that it can be pedantic to argue about big, abstract ideas like ``When did the paradigm shift really happen?'' Maybe the paradigm didn't ``shift'' until the Linux kernel came out. But Torvalds wasn't out to change paradigms. Stallman was. If we're going to hail the concept of free software, we should acknowledge the alphabet soup of RMS, the FSF, GNU, ETC. that gave it legs to stand on.
Things do get more complicated when multiple qubits are strung together but they still represent zeroes and ones. A three-qubit system can be described by eight complex numbers that keep track of the probability (called "amplitude") of the states 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111. Qubits are bits.
If you want to be annoying and say, "What about a three-state system, where instead of dealing with spin up and spin down, you get spin up, spin zero, and spin down?" then you would have a valid point. But nobody calls such a system a "qubit," any more than we could say that an ordinary electrical circuit holds an ordinary bit if it's allowed to assume three distinct voltages instead of just the usual "high" and "low."
Good job getting one of the first posts, though.
True, the scientists could still be wrong. But they also have a much better chance of being right than non-scientists.
If most of the available evidence supports an Earth-centered universe, I'm going to believe in an Earth-centered universe. If most of the available evidence supports global climate change, I'm going to believe that, too. Why? Because it's the best we can do. Sure, evidence can be misinterpreted. But there's a huge difference between "We can never be sure" and "Physical truths are unknowable." When you make policy, you do it with the best available information because even if you're wrong every now and then, you generally come out in the lead.
Do we really have to keep arguing about epistomology every time global warming comes up? Suppose you're walking across the savanna and a bunch of photons hit your retina in a way that suggests that a large lion in front of you. Nobody would say, "The best evidence I has indicates that there's a lion in front of me but there is no way to be sure; it could be an illusion." You act under the assumption that the lion is real until something happens that suggests otherwise (i.e. it walks through a tree, as only illusions can do.) There is a general scientific consensus that human activities play an important role in the global climate changes. Read the papers---you will find precious few that disagree, and they haven't been enough to sway the majority opinion.
Stop saying "they could be wrong." I'm tired of it. If you think they're wrong, tell us why you think they're wrong. Find a better explanation for the temperature increases, back it up with evidence, and refute the challenges that the rest of the scientific community presents to you. Otherwise, you have nothing to say. Scientists know they can be wrong. That's why scientists ultimately did reject geocentrism. That's also why they rejected heliocentrism and a million other ideas that turned out to be incorrect. Stop cluttering up the public debate with philosophical musings about certainty. It contributes nothing but gives ammunition to the FUDmongering interest groups who are trying to keep us from fixing the problem.
The same thing applies to global war
Says PiSquared:
This would probably be political suicide even in America, a country that seems more inclined to take away people's rights.
Says the summary:
'We have among the most drastic censorship rules for games,' said Frank Sliwka, head of the Deutsche E-Sport Bund, an umbrella federation for German online gaming teams.
While it's true that Americans raise the greatest fuss when folks try to take away our rights, are you sure your allegations are correct? Are we really more inclined to take away people's rights? Gay marriage aside, America is actually pretty good about censorship compared to some places. Especially Europe.
There are three ideas here and each is worth addressing individually:
.3 seconds after the big bang vs. 3 seconds vs. 10 million years?
At some point, doesn't it make sense to stop spending Billions of dollars of taxpayer money on Big Bang research?
At some point, yes. Diminishing marginal returns eventually bring down everything. But I wouldn't say we've gone too far; this program doesn't sound like it would cost anywhere near a billion dollars and the chips will probably be useful in other weak-signal applications.
How much does it benefit us to know what happened
Newton couldn't have developed his universal law of gravitation without the observations of Galileo and Kepler that planets are attracted to each other. But now we use his law of gravity all the time. Relativity drew on the results of experiments that involved light reflecting back from the moons of Jupiter; now we need relativity to calibrate the electron guns in our televsion sets. Our understanding of nuclear physics got a huge boost from studies of the stars and the fusion processes going on out there. And nuclear power (and weapons) have impacted society in a grand way. How much does it benefit us to know what happened 0.3 seconds after the Big Bang? It helps us because the closer we get to the Big Bang, the closer we get to observing quantum gravity (in whatever form it takes). And while quantum gravity might not seem terribly useful right now, I have little doubt that it will have useful applications eventually. Basic research is important.
I'd rather see all this money fund research into advanced propulsion systems, robotics, and solar power technologies that will help us explore the Universe, rather than just gaze at it with ever more powerful equipment.
I can't help thinking "why?". At some point, doesn't it make sense to stop spending Billions of dollars of taxpayer money on Space exploration? After all, if looking at the universe with a cheap telescope is a waste of time, wouldn't going out and touching it in an expensive spaceship be an even bigger waste?
In related news, Microsoft announced the development of a robotic chair-thrower to be bundled with Windows Vista.
lemme guess, the chips are gonna be called... "Beta"?
Of course! What don't they call "Beta"?
Whoa, folks, what are we saying? One way of looking at this is that the government is asking the recording industry to give up its "rights" to save lives and to strengthen homeland security. Tell me... If the government asked you to give up something that was legally yours (say, protection from random wiretappings) when there are "severe doubts" about whether it threatens critical infrastructure or lives? (And don't say I'm pulling this out of nowhere -- more police powers can make it easier to catch criminals who want to kill folks.)
I'm not in favor of DRM, but we can't just pull out the "it risks lives" card whenever we want to. A major part of American philosophy is that we allow people and organizations to maintain certain rights even if there's a chance that someone may die indirectly as a result.
I really hope that fifteen people reply with thorough explanations of why I'm wrong here, because I really don't want the **AA to be right...
RJPardon? Solar flares? What's this "match" you're talking about? I can understand how human-generated carbon dioxide can trap heat in the atmosphere -- we've established the greenhouse effect. I can also understand how warmer water makes more intense hurricanes, given that hurricanes form as a result of moist air rising over the ocean. These results match the rest of science. But solar flares?
Lomnicky Coronal Index
Accumulated Cyclone Energy Chart
The first chart isn't exactly solar flares... It's more along the lines of sunspots because I couldn't find a good solar flare chart. But at first glance, I don't really see the correlation. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong charts and maybe I'm not looking closely enough at the charts I have, but I think the warm ocean theory matches the data better than the solar flare theory.
RJ