What are the alternative models if gravity waves simply don't exist?
It's important to have alternative hypotheses, among other reasons, in order to be able to determine when you got a null result. Until the theoreticians have done their homework and provided a reasonable and plausible alternative hypothesis, perhaps we shouldn't be investing millions of dollars (euros) in these kinds of experiments.
I fly a lot and I have yet to be able to get a WiFi connection on a plane. And given the astronomical prices of in-flight phone service, I suspect it would be too expensive even if I could.
If Boeing wants WiFi to happen on planes, they need to make sure it's universally available, they need to include it free in first/business class, and they need to charge 128kbps) in economy class.
They should be against companies running buggy or insecure servers and end up exposing customer data or causing hassles to their customers.
As for "hackers", they should be held responsible under existing fraud laws if they commit fraud; the mere act of "breaking into" a computer system should not be a violation of law.
I find it odd that some of the biggest capitalists think that the proper way of dealing with social problems is through the kind of central planning that the communist contries were using. Whether the planning is done by the central committee or by a $60b foundation really makes little difference--it's still a solution that involves a few unelected people doing economic and social planning with little accountability to the public and no market forces.
Mind you, given that our government just wasted $320b on a useless war that has made us less safe, it's probably still better that this money ends up in the Gates foundation than in our government, but long term, there is something more fundamentally wrong with the way we deal with problems than can be fixed by donations, no matter how big.
Well, you're some character: first you claim authority and tell people incorrectly and without any justification that "X is the correct way of doing Y", and when others tell you you're wrong you get testy. Justify your claims, demonstrate that you know at least something about a field, and then--maybe--others will take the time to give you explanations.
I wasn't joking, this is exactly how you'd do it correctly.
Convolving with a Gaussian in order to downsample an image is not a correct way of doing it. It is, however, a reasonable and practical way that will usually give visually good results.
Is this what grad school does to you?
I dunno. If you're in grad school and you do image processing, then you really should know the correct way of downsampling images, but you apparently don't.
Well, I think it's not sufficient merely to demonstrate that string theorists advanced some areas of mathematics, but also that those advances have been useful in important other application areas. After all, it's easy to come up with new mathematics, it's hard to come up with interesting new mathematics.
The idea of making file systems more database-like has been around for as long as there have been databases. There have been dozens of implementations. The upshot? It doesn't seem to work well for general purpose computing.
Where it does work is some niche areas of business computing. Integrating WinFS into SQL Server makes sense. Of course, other database vendors have had equivalent technology for a long time.
All in all, with WinFS and SQL Server, Microsoft has retraced the evolution of the industry--only a few decades late. So, it's business as usual.
Many physicists stopped being scientists some time in the 20th century; they stopped following the scientific method, their experimental methods became sloppy, and so became their reasoning. They started valuing theoretical elegance more than testable hypotheses, and they became more enamored with formulas than data.
I think Einstein may have been responsible for that development: while relativity was a great insight and made useful, testable predictions, it falsely instilled the belief in physicists that Einstein's way of doing physics was the way they should all follow. The problem with that is that most physicists aren't as smart as Einstein, and even if they were, there is only a small number of self-styled visionary scientists any field can comfortably accommodate before becoming unscientfic.
Using Parallels is an easy way of installing Linux or Windows. In terms of raw CPU, it works efficiently, with little overhead. However, OSX has a hell of a time with paging and big processes, so get a lot of memory and still be prepared to watch the spinning cursor for a while while switching to/from Parallels.
Photographers deal with bright light falling on the lens all the time--it's what lens shades are for. Furthermore, increasingly, modern cameras have smaller and smaller lenses and openings, making them harder to detect and block. there are lots of other technologies this will fail with.
Altogether, this kind of system is hopeless and pointless. People will be able to tke images anywhere--better get used to it.
They are. That's why they are favoring open standards.
But, perhaps more importantly, if open source were just a commercial competitor to Microsoft, states would have to favor open source, simply because they generally have to buy the cheapest of a choice of equivalent products. So, even if MA actually mandated open source software, that would certainly be in line with their duty to tax payers.
Students are supposed to learn concepts, not specific commands (that's what vocational training is for).
OOo is a standard modern office suite. In fact, OOo is probably a better tool for learning the concepts because many features are available more cleanly and rationally in OOo than in MS Office. Furthermore, because OOo is so similar so MS Office, students actually do effectively learn MS Office as well.
Teaching MS Office is also a disservice because it basically puts students on a path where they will end up paying thousands of dollars over their lifetime to Microsoft, for functionality they could get for free.
Unfortunately, Octave is much less powerful than Matlab. In fact, professional use of Matlab usually involves third party packages (many open source, some commercial), and almost none of them will run on Octave without significant porting. Therefore, in reality, people who learn Matlab at university are generally stuck with it.
Another problem with Matlab is that it sucks technically: both the language and its implementation have major issues.
I hope open source can come to the rescue sooner or later, but Octave isn't the solution, unless people invest a lot more work in it.
Ultimately, it's the ability to fork a project and take it away from its original creators that is responsible for the positive qualities of open source software. If you can't (realistically) fork the software, it isn't "open source" in any useful sense.
One can have a lengthy debate about whether the term "open source" should still apply to such source-available software, but people who are trying to (mis-)apply the term to such software are simply trying to mislead potential users.
This won't be meaningful until a converted python script is compared to efficient code written natively in C++ in the first place.
That's the wrong comparison to make, because it assumes that the C++ programmer has unlimited time to make his C++ code efficient and correct. In real life, programmers have time constraints, and under given time constraints, the Python program will often be faster than the C++ program.
In fact, even without time constraints, C++ code often ends up far less efficient than the optimum possible, simply because using the optimal algorithm or memory management strategy is so hard in C++ that programmers can't do it.
I'm not sure what all this "outreach" is supposed to be about. FOSS licensed software is there for all to use, including Microsoft. FOSS developers are making enormous efforts to accomodate Microsoft already, to interoperate with Microsoft software, and even to reverse engineer Microsoft's protocols.
If Microsoft wants even more cooperation from FOSS developers, all they have to do is dedicate patents in areas like FAT,.NET, and SMB to the public domain (so that people can create interoperable implementations without nagging legal questions), and document and stabilize formats and protocols like those used by SMB, Exchange, Office, Sharepoint, and others.
So, open source is already doing all it can do under the limits that Microsoft itself is setting for open source. If they want open source to support Microsoft products even better, it's in their hands.
Ham radio used to be a vibrant community that introduced many people (myself included) to technology, and that was unique in the kind of open, global communication it created. While there are still ham operators, it just doesn't serve that function anymore.
People like you who, the kind who will say 'Open Source is now big business' want to think it's dead, of course.
I don't "want to think" anything; it's just a fact that open source is now big business. You must be living under a rock if you think otherwise.
Ham radio wasn't killed by the cell phone, it was killed by the Internet, because the Internet gave people what they were using ham radio for previously: chatting, getting to know new people, communicating over large distances, etc.
Furthermore, open source is not based on "a subculture of people who like tinkering"; that may be what it started out as, but it's now big business.
It's probably better to use hardware encryption in the drive, with a removable hardware encryption key. That way, you can "erase" the data simply by removing the key.
I think the patent is of dubious validity; it's basically a patent on applying a class of welll-known technologies to relational databases instead of in-memory databases. It doesn't contain any significant intellectual insights.
Microsoft got targeted by this patent because they have money. But, in the end, that's good: Microsoft has been such a big proponent of "intellectual property protection" in recent years that they should realize that they have a lot to lose themselves from bogus patent claims, probably more than any of their competitors. Let's hope they'll change their lobbying as a result of such claims.
(Incidentally, this is a US patent case; the only thing Guatemalan about it is the inventor.)
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What are the alternative models if gravity waves simply don't exist?
It's important to have alternative hypotheses, among other reasons, in order to be able to determine when you got a null result. Until the theoreticians have done their homework and provided a reasonable and plausible alternative hypothesis, perhaps we shouldn't be investing millions of dollars (euros) in these kinds of experiments.
I fly a lot and I have yet to be able to get a WiFi connection on a plane. And given the astronomical prices of in-flight phone service, I suspect it would be too expensive even if I could.
If Boeing wants WiFi to happen on planes, they need to make sure it's universally available, they need to include it free in first/business class, and they need to charge 128kbps) in economy class.
They should be against companies running buggy or insecure servers and end up exposing customer data or causing hassles to their customers.
As for "hackers", they should be held responsible under existing fraud laws if they commit fraud; the mere act of "breaking into" a computer system should not be a violation of law.
I find it odd that some of the biggest capitalists think that the proper way of dealing with social problems is through the kind of central planning that the communist contries were using. Whether the planning is done by the central committee or by a $60b foundation really makes little difference--it's still a solution that involves a few unelected people doing economic and social planning with little accountability to the public and no market forces.
Mind you, given that our government just wasted $320b on a useless war that has made us less safe, it's probably still better that this money ends up in the Gates foundation than in our government, but long term, there is something more fundamentally wrong with the way we deal with problems than can be fixed by donations, no matter how big.
Well, you're some character: first you claim authority and tell people incorrectly and without any justification that "X is the correct way of doing Y", and when others tell you you're wrong you get testy. Justify your claims, demonstrate that you know at least something about a field, and then--maybe--others will take the time to give you explanations.
I wasn't joking, this is exactly how you'd do it correctly.
Convolving with a Gaussian in order to downsample an image is not a correct way of doing it. It is, however, a reasonable and practical way that will usually give visually good results.
Is this what grad school does to you?
I dunno. If you're in grad school and you do image processing, then you really should know the correct way of downsampling images, but you apparently don't.
Well, I think it's not sufficient merely to demonstrate that string theorists advanced some areas of mathematics, but also that those advances have been useful in important other application areas. After all, it's easy to come up with new mathematics, it's hard to come up with interesting new mathematics.
The idea of making file systems more database-like has been around for as long as there have been databases. There have been dozens of implementations. The upshot? It doesn't seem to work well for general purpose computing.
Where it does work is some niche areas of business computing. Integrating WinFS into SQL Server makes sense. Of course, other database vendors have had equivalent technology for a long time.
All in all, with WinFS and SQL Server, Microsoft has retraced the evolution of the industry--only a few decades late. So, it's business as usual.
Many physicists stopped being scientists some time in the 20th century; they stopped following the scientific method, their experimental methods became sloppy, and so became their reasoning. They started valuing theoretical elegance more than testable hypotheses, and they became more enamored with formulas than data.
I think Einstein may have been responsible for that development: while relativity was a great insight and made useful, testable predictions, it falsely instilled the belief in physicists that Einstein's way of doing physics was the way they should all follow. The problem with that is that most physicists aren't as smart as Einstein, and even if they were, there is only a small number of self-styled visionary scientists any field can comfortably accommodate before becoming unscientfic.
Even if ST is proved wrong in some way the math that resulted from ST is still worthwhile.
Can you give specific examples of the kind of math you're talking about?
Okay, so because a theory (or more an idea or almost a philosiphy) cannot be disproven, it becomes a disaster for modern science?
No, it becomes a disaster for physics because it ends up being an unscientific pursuit.
I suppose we should stop looking for what started the universe, since we can't disprove the existance of God or anything. What a load of BS.
Looking for God is not the domain of physics; if physicists start looking for God, that, too, is a disaster for physics.
Sure, the remedies aren't going to be 100%, but if we waited for them to be perfect, we'd still have extremely short life expectancies.
Almost all the gain in life expectancy is due to (no risk) public health measures, not (potentially risky) medical procedures.
Using Parallels is an easy way of installing Linux or Windows. In terms of raw CPU, it works efficiently, with little overhead. However, OSX has a hell of a time with paging and big processes, so get a lot of memory and still be prepared to watch the spinning cursor for a while while switching to/from Parallels.
Photographers deal with bright light falling on the lens all the time--it's what lens shades are for. Furthermore, increasingly, modern cameras have smaller and smaller lenses and openings, making them harder to detect and block. there are lots of other technologies this will fail with.
Altogether, this kind of system is hopeless and pointless. People will be able to tke images anywhere--better get used to it.
They are. That's why they are favoring open standards.
But, perhaps more importantly, if open source were just a commercial competitor to Microsoft, states would have to favor open source, simply because they generally have to buy the cheapest of a choice of equivalent products. So, even if MA actually mandated open source software, that would certainly be in line with their duty to tax payers.
Students are supposed to learn concepts, not specific commands (that's what vocational training is for).
OOo is a standard modern office suite. In fact, OOo is probably a better tool for learning the concepts because many features are available more cleanly and rationally in OOo than in MS Office. Furthermore, because OOo is so similar so MS Office, students actually do effectively learn MS Office as well.
Teaching MS Office is also a disservice because it basically puts students on a path where they will end up paying thousands of dollars over their lifetime to Microsoft, for functionality they could get for free.
Unfortunately, Octave is much less powerful than Matlab. In fact, professional use of Matlab usually involves third party packages (many open source, some commercial), and almost none of them will run on Octave without significant porting. Therefore, in reality, people who learn Matlab at university are generally stuck with it.
Another problem with Matlab is that it sucks technically: both the language and its implementation have major issues.
I hope open source can come to the rescue sooner or later, but Octave isn't the solution, unless people invest a lot more work in it.
you could just use the built-in camera, which lets you measure not just light levels, but even light levels at hundreds of thousands of pixels!
Ultimately, it's the ability to fork a project and take it away from its original creators that is responsible for the positive qualities of open source software. If you can't (realistically) fork the software, it isn't "open source" in any useful sense.
One can have a lengthy debate about whether the term "open source" should still apply to such source-available software, but people who are trying to (mis-)apply the term to such software are simply trying to mislead potential users.
This won't be meaningful until a converted python script is compared to efficient code written natively in C++ in the first place.
That's the wrong comparison to make, because it assumes that the C++ programmer has unlimited time to make his C++ code efficient and correct. In real life, programmers have time constraints, and under given time constraints, the Python program will often be faster than the C++ program.
In fact, even without time constraints, C++ code often ends up far less efficient than the optimum possible, simply because using the optimal algorithm or memory management strategy is so hard in C++ that programmers can't do it.
I'm not sure what all this "outreach" is supposed to be about. FOSS licensed software is there for all to use, including Microsoft. FOSS developers are making enormous efforts to accomodate Microsoft already, to interoperate with Microsoft software, and even to reverse engineer Microsoft's protocols.
.NET, and SMB to the public domain (so that people can create interoperable implementations without nagging legal questions), and document and stabilize formats and protocols like those used by SMB, Exchange, Office, Sharepoint, and others.
If Microsoft wants even more cooperation from FOSS developers, all they have to do is dedicate patents in areas like FAT,
So, open source is already doing all it can do under the limits that Microsoft itself is setting for open source. If they want open source to support Microsoft products even better, it's in their hands.
Ham Radio wasn't killed.
Ham radio used to be a vibrant community that introduced many people (myself included) to technology, and that was unique in the kind of open, global communication it created. While there are still ham operators, it just doesn't serve that function anymore.
People like you who, the kind who will say 'Open Source is now big business' want to think it's dead, of course.
I don't "want to think" anything; it's just a fact that open source is now big business. You must be living under a rock if you think otherwise.
Ham radio wasn't killed by the cell phone, it was killed by the Internet, because the Internet gave people what they were using ham radio for previously: chatting, getting to know new people, communicating over large distances, etc.
Furthermore, open source is not based on "a subculture of people who like tinkering"; that may be what it started out as, but it's now big business.
It's probably better to use hardware encryption in the drive, with a removable hardware encryption key. That way, you can "erase" the data simply by removing the key.
I think the patent is of dubious validity; it's basically a patent on applying a class of welll-known technologies to relational databases instead of in-memory databases. It doesn't contain any significant intellectual insights.
Microsoft got targeted by this patent because they have money. But, in the end, that's good: Microsoft has been such a big proponent of "intellectual property protection" in recent years that they should realize that they have a lot to lose themselves from bogus patent claims, probably more than any of their competitors. Let's hope they'll change their lobbying as a result of such claims.
(Incidentally, this is a US patent case; the only thing Guatemalan about it is the inventor.)