Nice try, but no cookie. A 15th birthday is celebrated 15 years after the birth day. The 0th birthday is usually called celebrating birth, which is an entirely different affair. The former celebrates survival over a period of time, the latter celebrates a beginning of existence. So my point still holds.
What kind of a geek celebrates the 15th of anything? If you had just waited until next year, we'd have a nice round number to be excited about. But 15? Meh...
What I see is a bunch of people who were given a list of long, cumbersomly worded questions, spread over two pages. The second page repeated the questions on the first page, with two of them containing one changed word. I know if I were taking this survey, I'd read the first question on the second page and see that it's the same as one the first one and give it the same answer. Most of us would not read each question very closely for the second time unless we had some expectation of being tricked. The results of the study have nothing to do with morals, but rather expose the fact that we like to skip unnecessary work.
Every cook has to learn how to govern the state.
- Vladimir Lenin
In the early days of the Soviet Union it was a very popular idea that there should be no specialization in work. No man should have to do the same thing over and over every day of his life. Jobs should be changed regularly to keep the worker interested and motivated.
A beowulf cluster of these could surely run that japanese AI that's so good at passing math tests. Once your school's test scores rise, the federal government will give you more money. Profit.
On the other hand, I also don't know many scientists who believe you can trust other scientists without reviewing their work.
The function of peer review is not to legitimize research, but to filter it. A peer reviewed article is less likely to be trash simply because even the dumbest reviewer can recognize at least some of it. If an article has been reviewed by a dozen people and is still around, I can have some confidence that reading it would not be a waste of my time.
This same mechanism works for books (would you read a book with a one star rating?), consumer products (would you buy one that 50 people said was crap?), and pretty much every other area of our lives where we are faced with a mountain of garbage, deceit, and trickery. Sure, you can wade through it all yourself, but you only have so much time in your life. In science as in business, peer review helps filter out the crazies, the idiots, and the quacks. It does not make the research true. It does not make research legitimate. It does not lend authority to the results. It is little more than a glorified spam filter. I wish more people realized that.
With these scientistific experts disagreeing, how are we to decide who is correct? Consensus. Communication. Agreement does not make things true in the world, but it is the best method we have for trying to judge whose truth is the right one.
Oh you poor oversocialized shmuck... The best method we have for judging whose truth is the right one is observation and logic. Consensus is irrelevant to reality, and asking a hundred scientists to effectively guess at the right answer is no different than having you making the guess yourself. Conclusions not based on physical evidence are invalid regardless of how numerous they may be. To know that a theory is correct, all you need is to verify that it's predictions are consistent with observation. If you want to prove the world is not flat, walk around it.
There is always evidence that doesn't quite fit.
Yes, there is, but determining the validity of your evidence and the nature of it not fitting is an entirely separate task from using it to verify your theories. Yes, you need to be careful in your experimentation to ensure you are seeing what you are seeing. That is true of all endeavours you may choose to undertake. The evidence that "doesn't fit" may invalidate your theory or it may be due to another unrelated factor. To know which is which you only need to apply the laws of logic. If you walk around the world in 40 days, you should first check your compass.
Science isn't something "anyone" can do, as you imply: in many cases it takes a lifetime of expert training to be able to assess scientific evidence
Yes, science really is something anyone can do. There is nothing inherently difficult in assessing scientific evidence. If you understand how to think logically, you can do science. An expert merely knows many more factors that may influence an experiment in his field. A layman walking around the world might not know that the magnetic pole is displaced from the rotational one, but that will not prevent him from demonstrating that the world is round. He will, in fact discover this and other relevant facts as he does science his way. The only difference between what he can do and what an expert can do is that an expert can do it faster by not having to learn so many things for himself.
Take your field of expertise. Can anyone make sound judgements? Is the common sense of the amateur dependable? I'll wager not.
Common sense is never dependable, whether in the amateur or an expert. Science is not about making "sound judgements" or using common sense (although these can sometimes help your conclusions come faster). It is about applying logic to observation of reality. You don't pass judgement on what is right - reality passes judgement on what is right. You only need to be able to recognize when this happens.
You have fallen into two errors: First, of believing that once Truth is found that fact can be known and reliably communicated.
And you are still falling into the error of believing that truth needs to be communicated to be true. Once truth is found, you by definition know that you have found it. Whether you can communicate it is irrelevant to science. Reality doesn't care if you are the only one who knows the truth. A truth does not change based on how many people know it, how many people disagree with it, or how many people hate you for knowing it. People are simply irrelevant here. The truth is in your mind, and that's all that matters.
Such misunderstandings lie at the root of anti-evolutionary belief, and sustain conviction that climate change science is a fraud. A non-expert believes he has found the one critical piece of evidence that disproves the consensus, and becomes convinced that this overturns the science. Science isn't calculus. It doesn't work like that.
Back in the 19th century people believed in science. Science is based on the belief that there is a real world out there that has properties anyone can discover. What made this world "real" was that these properties did not depend on anybody's opinion, so you didn't have to give a damn about anybody else's opinion of your research either; you could discover the truth yourself, and be right even if everybody in the world disagreed with you.
In the 21st century we no longer have science. Now we have social science. It's based on the belief that reality is defined by majority opinion. Naturally, one man's opinion is worthless, and only when a consensus is reached can you state that you know anything.
If you are not interested in trying something new that may give you a way to do things faster and easier than you are currently doing, why are you using my new UI?
Because you stopped supporting the old one.
Support is not free. You want to keep your old ways, while I want to move on. If I am a commercial developer, I'd weigh the value of keeping you as a customer and offer you a support contract to compensate me for the work required to keep you comfortably in the past. If I am an open source developer, you are not likely to be interested in paying for my efforts, so what incentive have I to do things your way when I believe I can do things better my way? That's what forks are for. GNOME 2 has been forked and people like you who love the old interface can keep working on it. GNOME 3 in the meantime can continue trying new things that may bring about an easier and more comfortable future for users who are not already set in the ways of GNOME 2. If you want GNOME 3 developers to instead support your old ways, why not put your money where you complaints are? How much are you willing to pay for continuing GNOME2-style UI support? Nothing? Well, what did you expect for that? Slavery is not cool.
As a "rogue programmer who forces everybody to use the software the same way that I use it", I also have a complaint from my side of the story. Every time I make a UI change that I believe makes the software easier to use, you complain that you can't keep doing things exactly the way you have been doing. And it's true, you often can't; but the other side of this complaint is stagnation. If you are not interested in trying something new that may give you a way to do things faster and easier than you are currently doing, why are you using my new UI? It's either innovation and having to learn new things, or the stagnation of keeping things exactly as they used to be. While you're thinking about this choice, keep in mind that I'm not holding your nose here; you are free to use a multitude of alternative applications, or to keep the application version you currently have. If you dislike GNOME 3, use Xfce or whatever GNOME 2 fork suits your taste. Why are you trying to force us all to keep using the same UI you are using just because you're so used to it?
If this is false advertising, what is true advertising? Can you think of a single ad out there where the company told the complete and clear truth about a product? Anybody?
Stop spreading FUD. 64 bit executables have smaller code. The larger executable size is due not to the increase in code size but to the unwind tables. On i386 executables are typically compiled with the frame pointer model, where functions store the current frame address (the start point for local variables) on the stack. On x86_64 the normal method is to let the compiler figure out where the local variables are based on the stack pointer. This way there is at least one memory access removed.
Omitting frame pointers incurs the cost of emitting a table of function information to allow C++ exceptions to walk back up the stack. This information is stored in the.ehframe section of the executable and only needs to be loaded when the application throws an exception. This section is not part of the working set. It is also not used by pure C programs. So, although the executable size is larger on x86_64, the extra space it is consuming is on the disk, not your CPU cache.
Yes, you always benefit from building everything for x86_64 if your OS is x86_64. And unless you are running some application where benchmarks definitively show a performance decrease in the 64 bit version, there is no reason whatsoever to run 32 bit any more. Drivers are no longer a problem. So stop spreading FUD!
> Paid for by the "Protect the Appendix" campaign.
Educate yourself: the appendix serves as a haven for useful bacteria when illness flushes those bacteria from the rest of the intestines, and thereby helps maintain normal intestinal flora.
Life expectancy has nothing to do with longevity. A hundred years ago plenty of people lived past 80. Even many cavemen lived to 80. The reason life expectancy is under 50 is not because people now magically survive past 50 due to medicine or whatever, but because fewer children die in the first year. Decreasing infant mortality increases life expectancy at birth, but does not let you live longer. The sooner you understand this, the sooner you'll stop bringing up life expectancy increase as evidence that people are living longer.
You know, Steam knows not only every game you install, but also every time you play it. That's an even greater intrusion into your privacy, so why aren't you as worried about it?
Slashdot Mirror
The kind who understands the difference between cardinal and ordinal numbers, of course.
Nice try, but no cookie. A 15th birthday is celebrated 15 years after the birth day. The 0th birthday is usually called celebrating birth, which is an entirely different affair. The former celebrates survival over a period of time, the latter celebrates a beginning of existence. So my point still holds.
What kind of a geek celebrates the 15th of anything? If you had just waited until next year, we'd have a nice round number to be excited about. But 15? Meh...
What I see is a bunch of people who were given a list of long, cumbersomly worded questions, spread over two pages. The second page repeated the questions on the first page, with two of them containing one changed word. I know if I were taking this survey, I'd read the first question on the second page and see that it's the same as one the first one and give it the same answer. Most of us would not read each question very closely for the second time unless we had some expectation of being tricked. The results of the study have nothing to do with morals, but rather expose the fact that we like to skip unnecessary work.
Every cook has to learn how to govern the state.
- Vladimir Lenin
In the early days of the Soviet Union it was a very popular idea that there should be no specialization in work. No man should have to do the same thing over and over every day of his life. Jobs should be changed regularly to keep the worker interested and motivated.
Here you go: http://xkcd.com/850/
It clearly labels Gibraltar as a country.
But mom, I can't make my bed until I kill the zombies guarding it! And I can't possibly clean up my room until they stop bleeding on the carpet.
A beowulf cluster of these could surely run that japanese AI that's so good at passing math tests. Once your school's test scores rise, the federal government will give you more money. Profit.
Fiber allows longer links with fewer repeaters, which is a nice alternative to simple Comcast coax cable links which go down every time it rains.
The function of peer review is not to legitimize research, but to filter it. A peer reviewed article is less likely to be trash simply because even the dumbest reviewer can recognize at least some of it. If an article has been reviewed by a dozen people and is still around, I can have some confidence that reading it would not be a waste of my time.
This same mechanism works for books (would you read a book with a one star rating?), consumer products (would you buy one that 50 people said was crap?), and pretty much every other area of our lives where we are faced with a mountain of garbage, deceit, and trickery. Sure, you can wade through it all yourself, but you only have so much time in your life. In science as in business, peer review helps filter out the crazies, the idiots, and the quacks. It does not make the research true. It does not make research legitimate. It does not lend authority to the results. It is little more than a glorified spam filter. I wish more people realized that.
Oh you poor oversocialized shmuck... The best method we have for judging whose truth is the right one is observation and logic. Consensus is irrelevant to reality, and asking a hundred scientists to effectively guess at the right answer is no different than having you making the guess yourself. Conclusions not based on physical evidence are invalid regardless of how numerous they may be. To know that a theory is correct, all you need is to verify that it's predictions are consistent with observation. If you want to prove the world is not flat, walk around it.
Yes, there is, but determining the validity of your evidence and the nature of it not fitting is an entirely separate task from using it to verify your theories. Yes, you need to be careful in your experimentation to ensure you are seeing what you are seeing. That is true of all endeavours you may choose to undertake. The evidence that "doesn't fit" may invalidate your theory or it may be due to another unrelated factor. To know which is which you only need to apply the laws of logic. If you walk around the world in 40 days, you should first check your compass.
Yes, science really is something anyone can do. There is nothing inherently difficult in assessing scientific evidence. If you understand how to think logically, you can do science. An expert merely knows many more factors that may influence an experiment in his field. A layman walking around the world might not know that the magnetic pole is displaced from the rotational one, but that will not prevent him from demonstrating that the world is round. He will, in fact discover this and other relevant facts as he does science his way. The only difference between what he can do and what an expert can do is that an expert can do it faster by not having to learn so many things for himself.
Common sense is never dependable, whether in the amateur or an expert. Science is not about making "sound judgements" or using common sense (although these can sometimes help your conclusions come faster). It is about applying logic to observation of reality. You don't pass judgement on what is right - reality passes judgement on what is right. You only need to be able to recognize when this happens.
And you are still falling into the error of believing that truth needs to be communicated to be true. Once truth is found, you by definition know that you have found it. Whether you can communicate it is irrelevant to science. Reality doesn't care if you are the only one who knows the truth. A truth does not change based on how many people know it, how many people disagree with it, or how many people hate you for knowing it. People are simply irrelevant here. The truth is in your mind, and that's all that matters.
Yes, it does work exactly
Back in the 19th century people believed in science. Science is based on the belief that there is a real world out there that has properties anyone can discover. What made this world "real" was that these properties did not depend on anybody's opinion, so you didn't have to give a damn about anybody else's opinion of your research either; you could discover the truth yourself, and be right even if everybody in the world disagreed with you.
In the 21st century we no longer have science. Now we have social science. It's based on the belief that reality is defined by majority opinion. Naturally, one man's opinion is worthless, and only when a consensus is reached can you state that you know anything.
If you actually RTFA, you'll discover that this error was made by fresh-out-of-college newbie programmers working crunchtime with no supervision.
Support is not free. You want to keep your old ways, while I want to move on. If I am a commercial developer, I'd weigh the value of keeping you as a customer and offer you a support contract to compensate me for the work required to keep you comfortably in the past. If I am an open source developer, you are not likely to be interested in paying for my efforts, so what incentive have I to do things your way when I believe I can do things better my way? That's what forks are for. GNOME 2 has been forked and people like you who love the old interface can keep working on it. GNOME 3 in the meantime can continue trying new things that may bring about an easier and more comfortable future for users who are not already set in the ways of GNOME 2. If you want GNOME 3 developers to instead support your old ways, why not put your money where you complaints are? How much are you willing to pay for continuing GNOME2-style UI support? Nothing? Well, what did you expect for that? Slavery is not cool.
As a "rogue programmer who forces everybody to use the software the same way that I use it", I also have a complaint from my side of the story. Every time I make a UI change that I believe makes the software easier to use, you complain that you can't keep doing things exactly the way you have been doing. And it's true, you often can't; but the other side of this complaint is stagnation. If you are not interested in trying something new that may give you a way to do things faster and easier than you are currently doing, why are you using my new UI? It's either innovation and having to learn new things, or the stagnation of keeping things exactly as they used to be. While you're thinking about this choice, keep in mind that I'm not holding your nose here; you are free to use a multitude of alternative applications, or to keep the application version you currently have. If you dislike GNOME 3, use Xfce or whatever GNOME 2 fork suits your taste. Why are you trying to force us all to keep using the same UI you are using just because you're so used to it?
If this is false advertising, what is true advertising? Can you think of a single ad out there where the company told the complete and clear truth about a product? Anybody?
Stop spreading FUD. 64 bit executables have smaller code. The larger executable size is due not to the increase in code size but to the unwind tables. On i386 executables are typically compiled with the frame pointer model, where functions store the current frame address (the start point for local variables) on the stack. On x86_64 the normal method is to let the compiler figure out where the local variables are based on the stack pointer. This way there is at least one memory access removed.
Omitting frame pointers incurs the cost of emitting a table of function information to allow C++ exceptions to walk back up the stack. This information is stored in the .ehframe section of the executable and only needs to be loaded when the application throws an exception. This section is not part of the working set. It is also not used by pure C programs. So, although the executable size is larger on x86_64, the extra space it is consuming is on the disk, not your CPU cache.
Yes, you always benefit from building everything for x86_64 if your OS is x86_64. And unless you are running some application where benchmarks definitively show a performance decrease in the 64 bit version, there is no reason whatsoever to run 32 bit any more. Drivers are no longer a problem. So stop spreading FUD!
This gene wouldn't be the one responsible for blond hair, would it?
> Paid for by the "Protect the Appendix" campaign.
Educate yourself: the appendix serves as a haven for useful bacteria when illness flushes those bacteria from the rest of the intestines, and thereby helps maintain normal intestinal flora.
So, does Firefox support WebGL on Linux yet?
I, for one, am glad to have overlords confident enough to legislate physics.
According to OkCupid, 10% of women (and 5% of men) believe that the Earth is bigger than the Sun.
Life expectancy has nothing to do with longevity. A hundred years ago plenty of people lived past 80. Even many cavemen lived to 80. The reason life expectancy is under 50 is not because people now magically survive past 50 due to medicine or whatever, but because fewer children die in the first year. Decreasing infant mortality increases life expectancy at birth, but does not let you live longer. The sooner you understand this, the sooner you'll stop bringing up life expectancy increase as evidence that people are living longer.
Isn't this what parents are for?
You know, Steam knows not only every game you install, but also every time you play it. That's an even greater intrusion into your privacy, so why aren't you as worried about it?