you'll find this isn't much of an option when you get to industry-specific stuff (with some exceptions).
Hopefully this will be less true in the future. At $1m-2m/license, there's no reason why buyers couldn't set up a consortium and have to have their boutique software written for them and release as free software. The problem of free riders this would create would probably be outweighed by the benefit of knowing the software will stick around.
I disagree. The author mentioned specific sites for social networking, video sharing, and other categories; it wouldn't scan if it jumped to the general for the political blog category. Huffington Post is just like the other sites the article listed by name, in that it's become something of an icon, and represents political news sites in much of the public's eye.
As for reputable, I'll eat my hat if there is _any_ web-only political news weblog / website that left- and right-wing people agree is trustworthy.
Good movie. Completely different from 2001; more like a traditional space exploration movie. But somewhat realistic, as it's dealing with interplanetary rather than interstellar travel.
And winning the stanley cup is easy - you just have to score the most goals!
All problems can be boiled down to simple essentials, but figuring out the details is usually pretty hard.
RSA and protein folding may seem hard now, but once they're solved, and passed thorough the filters of Nova and New Scientist, boiled down to their most uninformative and simple essentials, people will probably say that cracking RSA was simply applied math and modeling protein just took the principles of biochemistry and a lot of cpu cycles.
OK the part I wrote about the ratio of the major to semi-major axis is wrong on at least two levels... I've been out of school too long. The value I was trying to describe is eccentricity.
I stand by what I said on the definitions, though; note how wiki distinguishes between circular and elliptical.
Your pedantry is of no use here. The GP refers to a specialist vocabulary, which is allowed to have its own definitions.
As I recall, one such definition is 'highly elliptical' = ellipse that's stretched in one direction. In fact ellipticality (I probably got that word wrong) is given a number, the ratio of the major axis to the semi-major axis; a circle is 1, this planet mentioned would be around 30.
I would expect a judicial order requiring the post to be removed, and then that the Secret Service would monitor that service to see if any further posts were made by that individual.
Just from a practical point of view, it seems like finding the poster would be much easier if the server was in your hands and you had full access to it. Relying on the trustworthiness of a third-party administrator for timely access to logs, and _waiting_ for new posts before acting, seems naive and irresponsible.
The cloak that the researchers built works with wavelengths of light ranging from about 1 to 18 gigahertz--a swath as broad as the visible spectrum.
That doesn't sound right... first, the Hertz is a measure of frequency, not wavelength. And the range quoted - 1GHz to 18GHz - seems much wider than frequency range of the visible spectrum, anyway.
... After a little wikipeeing, I find: 'A typical human eye will respond to wavelengths in air from about 380 to 750 nm.[1] The corresponding wavelengths in water and other media are reduced by a factor equal to the refractive index. In terms of frequency, this corresponds to a band in the vicinity of 400-790 terahertz' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_spectrum)
.. which seems to imply that the invisibility cloak won't work in the visible spectrum, anyway. Can someone who knows what they're talking about shed some light on the issue?
So the martians weren't knocking out our probes because they thought we were attacking - they were just embarrassed about the smell. And to be honest, this revelation does lower my opinion of martians. I think a few eons of evolution might help to teach them some manners.
What you need to compare is not salaries, but the value each individual brings to the company.
Not true. It is patently impossible to measure the 'value each individual brings to the company'. Even if it were possible, salaries could still not be based on this. Many positions are secondary or tertiary to the real money-making operations of a company, and do not generate any money directly, wouldn't do well by your measure; but they are required for the company to operate. In truth, a person's salary is determined by many factors: the minimum wage, the amount of training and experience need for the position, the amount of time worked and the responsability of the position are a few.
As regards the pay ratio, US company presidents have gone from earning 40x more than what factory-floor workers did ~50 years ago to ~200x more today. Europe and Japan are still at the 40x level. Why? US business executives are corrupt and self serving.
Why do you think running a company is so hard? Is there some black voodoo magic that's handed down in MBA classes, or is it actually the fact that anyone with enough general intelligence and basic social skills can do the job?
Personally, I think there has been a board room coup over the past 50 years or so, with engineers and accountants thrown out and replaced with scheming MBAs who's only unique trait was 'political' skills (read: lack of morals and short-term vision).
Easter Island. They didn't all die, but the did strand themselves (cut down all the trees, making themselves unable to fish and/or migrate away), and turn to cannibalism. Their population went from ~30k to ~600, if I remember correctly.
Moral of the story: the earth is big, and we don't need to be too worried about overpopulation / overuse of resources, but we should keep the danger in mind.
The two classic counterexamples to your curmudgeonly and frankly unbelievable assertion (seriously, who doesn't listen to music?) are: - Public schools. If you don't have kids, you're paying something for nothing - Gas tax. If you only gas up your lawnmower and don't own a car, you're paying something for nothing.
Neither of these examples are perfect; you do gain something from both public schools and roads (a functioning society, and a quick way for the local FD to get to your house).
The real argument, IMHO, in favour of a media levy (levy on blank CDs etc.) is the practicality of it. It's the only reasonable system I've heard of which can reimburse artists for modern music and film copyright violations. And, given that there's somewhere near zero chance that music filesharing is going to stop, we might as well take Churchill's attitude, and go with a terrible system that's better than all the alternatives.
Isn't this just an effect of reduced sunlight during winter? Or is Spirit near the equator / other hemisphere? I know the Phoenix shutdown is at least partly due to seasonal changes
From the Press Release:
"NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has ceased communications after operating for more than five months. As anticipated, seasonal decline in sunshine at the robot's arctic landing site is not providing enough sunlight for the solar arrays to collect the power necessary to charge batteries that operate the lander's instruments."
I'm guessing he was born sometime around or after 1990. You'd have to have lived in a cave to have missed the Windows 95 marketing (remember how many 'news' stories there were about them buying 'start me up'? Wasn't Gates on Letterman?). They haven't had to do much marketing since Windows 98, granted, because by _that_ point they'd established their ~95% market share.
Just mandate that all physical media has to contain an extra partition with schematics of a drive to read the media (the schematics themselves can be saved as a.DWG). Likewise, mandate that all file contain a binary blob which defines the file format's specifications. That way all media and all files have within them the key to read them.
I agree, but I also honestly think there are a lot of people who would be strongly opposed to the idea, for two reasons.
If life is subsequently found on the planet, it would be much harder to prove that life evolved independently on Mars. The planet would effectively be contaminated. Many people seem to use superlatives like 'most important discovery in history' when discussing finding life (even bacterial life) somewhere else in the universe. Given that there would be no way to go back once life was introduced to mars, I think many people would prefer to wait until more investigation was done.
I think environmentalists would probably object, too, based on the idea that life may exist there and human meddling may harm it. I don't think this argument caries much weight at all, but our culture seems to have developed an instinctive pessimism about any deliberate large-scale changes to the environment, a feeling that would probably carry over to mars.
All of this may be moot, however; there's no saying we haven't already introduced life to Mars: although NASA tries their best to keep the rovers clean of bacteria etc. before launch, life tends to find a way (to quote Ian Malcom). There's already speculation that some microbes can survive deep space and reentry, so, who knows?
But BT search _is_ centralized, and search is what this article is talking about. Downloading material is much less of a crapshoot if you can reliably know who uploaded a file and see what other people say about it. I don't relish the idea of having to sift through pages of unreliable search results again a la gnutella; I'd much rather stick with what's in place.
The decentralization you're talking about all happens after you've chosen what file to download. And it's all predicated on a central tracker, anyway, so it still doesn't fundamentally alter the character of the BT protocol.
There was a similar bandwagon in the 90s, when Mark Andreesen claimed all apps would run through Netscape and windows would become a 'poorly maintained collection of device drivers'.
What's old is new again. It didn't happen then, and I don't expect it to happen now.
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully this will be less true in the future. At $1m-2m/license, there's no reason why buyers couldn't set up a consortium and have to have their boutique software written for them and release as free software. The problem of free riders this would create would probably be outweighed by the benefit of knowing the software will stick around.
I disagree. The author mentioned specific sites for social networking, video sharing, and other categories; it wouldn't scan if it jumped to the general for the political blog category. Huffington Post is just like the other sites the article listed by name, in that it's become something of an icon, and represents political news sites in much of the public's eye.
As for reputable, I'll eat my hat if there is _any_ web-only political news weblog / website that left- and right-wing people agree is trustworthy.
Good movie. Completely different from 2001; more like a traditional space exploration movie. But somewhat realistic, as it's dealing with interplanetary rather than interstellar travel.
Colonel: And that dim sum fighting in the warehouse yesterday?
Topper: I just do that for the extra money. And to satisfy my male cravings to kill and win.
Why would you care if Linux had NTFS support if you're running windows in a VM?
It's helpful to be able to access the files on your virtual disk from your main OS. Being able to mount your virtual disk in GNU would be sweet.
And winning the stanley cup is easy - you just have to score the most goals!
All problems can be boiled down to simple essentials, but figuring out the details is usually pretty hard.
RSA and protein folding may seem hard now, but once they're solved, and passed thorough the filters of Nova and New Scientist, boiled down to their most uninformative and simple essentials, people will probably say that cracking RSA was simply applied math and modeling protein just took the principles of biochemistry and a lot of cpu cycles.
OK the part I wrote about the ratio of the major to semi-major axis is wrong on at least two levels... I've been out of school too long. The value I was trying to describe is eccentricity.
I stand by what I said on the definitions, though; note how wiki distinguishes between circular and elliptical.
Your pedantry is of no use here. The GP refers to a specialist vocabulary, which is allowed to have its own definitions.
As I recall, one such definition is 'highly elliptical' = ellipse that's stretched in one direction. In fact ellipticality (I probably got that word wrong) is given a number, the ratio of the major axis to the semi-major axis; a circle is 1, this planet mentioned would be around 30.
I would expect a judicial order requiring the post to be removed, and then that the Secret Service would monitor that service to see if any further posts were made by that individual.
Just from a practical point of view, it seems like finding the poster would be much easier if the server was in your hands and you had full access to it. Relying on the trustworthiness of a third-party administrator for timely access to logs, and _waiting_ for new posts before acting, seems naive and irresponsible.
The cloak that the researchers built works with wavelengths of light ranging from about 1 to 18 gigahertz--a swath as broad as the visible spectrum.
That doesn't sound right... first, the Hertz is a measure of frequency, not wavelength. And the range quoted - 1GHz to 18GHz - seems much wider than frequency range of the visible spectrum, anyway.
.. which seems to imply that the invisibility cloak won't work in the visible spectrum, anyway. Can someone who knows what they're talking about shed some light on the issue?
So the martians weren't knocking out our probes because they thought we were attacking - they were just embarrassed about the smell. And to be honest, this revelation does lower my opinion of martians. I think a few eons of evolution might help to teach them some manners.
And we all know Galileo's only achievement was mapping the moon. It's not like he did anything else to cement his place in history.
What you need to compare is not salaries, but the value each individual brings to the company.
Not true. It is patently impossible to measure the 'value each individual brings to the company'. Even if it were possible, salaries could still not be based on this. Many positions are secondary or tertiary to the real money-making operations of a company, and do not generate any money directly, wouldn't do well by your measure; but they are required for the company to operate. In truth, a person's salary is determined by many factors: the minimum wage, the amount of training and experience need for the position, the amount of time worked and the responsability of the position are a few.
As regards the pay ratio, US company presidents have gone from earning 40x more than what factory-floor workers did ~50 years ago to ~200x more today. Europe and Japan are still at the 40x level. Why? US business executives are corrupt and self serving.
Why do you think running a company is so hard? Is there some black voodoo magic that's handed down in MBA classes, or is it actually the fact that anyone with enough general intelligence and basic social skills can do the job?
Personally, I think there has been a board room coup over the past 50 years or so, with engineers and accountants thrown out and replaced with scheming MBAs who's only unique trait was 'political' skills (read: lack of morals and short-term vision).
Easter Island. They didn't all die, but the did strand themselves (cut down all the trees, making themselves unable to fish and/or migrate away), and turn to cannibalism. Their population went from ~30k to ~600, if I remember correctly.
Moral of the story: the earth is big, and we don't need to be too worried about overpopulation / overuse of resources, but we should keep the danger in mind.
The two classic counterexamples to your curmudgeonly and frankly unbelievable assertion (seriously, who doesn't listen to music?) are:
- Public schools. If you don't have kids, you're paying something for nothing
- Gas tax. If you only gas up your lawnmower and don't own a car, you're paying something for nothing.
Neither of these examples are perfect; you do gain something from both public schools and roads (a functioning society, and a quick way for the local FD to get to your house).
The real argument, IMHO, in favour of a media levy (levy on blank CDs etc.) is the practicality of it. It's the only reasonable system I've heard of which can reimburse artists for modern music and film copyright violations. And, given that there's somewhere near zero chance that music filesharing is going to stop, we might as well take Churchill's attitude, and go with a terrible system that's better than all the alternatives.
Shouldn't that be Pleistocene Park?
Isn't this just an effect of reduced sunlight during winter? Or is Spirit near the equator / other hemisphere? I know the Phoenix shutdown is at least partly due to seasonal changes
From the Press Release:
"NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has ceased communications
after operating for more than five months. As anticipated, seasonal
decline in sunshine at the robot's arctic landing site is not
providing enough sunlight for the solar arrays to collect the power
necessary to charge batteries that operate the lander's instruments."
I thought you were being cynical, but then I found http://www.fart-joke.com/ . Ah, well, all good things must come to an end.
How ironic that the uselessness of the web as a serious communications tool should be discussed on the web.
I'm guessing he was born sometime around or after 1990. You'd have to have lived in a cave to have missed the Windows 95 marketing (remember how many 'news' stories there were about them buying 'start me up'? Wasn't Gates on Letterman?). They haven't had to do much marketing since Windows 98, granted, because by _that_ point they'd established their ~95% market share.
Just mandate that all physical media has to contain an extra partition with schematics of a drive to read the media (the schematics themselves can be saved as a .DWG). Likewise, mandate that all file contain a binary blob which defines the file format's specifications. That way all media and all files have within them the key to read them.
Problem solved!
I agree, but I also honestly think there are a lot of people who would be strongly opposed to the idea, for two reasons.
If life is subsequently found on the planet, it would be much harder to prove that life evolved independently on Mars. The planet would effectively be contaminated. Many people seem to use superlatives like 'most important discovery in history' when discussing finding life (even bacterial life) somewhere else in the universe. Given that there would be no way to go back once life was introduced to mars, I think many people would prefer to wait until more investigation was done.
I think environmentalists would probably object, too, based on the idea that life may exist there and human meddling may harm it. I don't think this argument caries much weight at all, but our culture seems to have developed an instinctive pessimism about any deliberate large-scale changes to the environment, a feeling that would probably carry over to mars.
All of this may be moot, however; there's no saying we haven't already introduced life to Mars: although NASA tries their best to keep the rovers clean of bacteria etc. before launch, life tends to find a way (to quote Ian Malcom). There's already speculation that some microbes can survive deep space and reentry, so, who knows?
But BT search _is_ centralized, and search is what this article is talking about. Downloading material is much less of a crapshoot if you can reliably know who uploaded a file and see what other people say about it. I don't relish the idea of having to sift through pages of unreliable search results again a la gnutella; I'd much rather stick with what's in place.
The decentralization you're talking about all happens after you've chosen what file to download. And it's all predicated on a central tracker, anyway, so it still doesn't fundamentally alter the character of the BT protocol.
Is it official yet, or do the other contenders still have a shot at avoiding humiliation?
There was a similar bandwagon in the 90s, when Mark Andreesen claimed all apps would run through Netscape and windows would become a 'poorly maintained collection of device drivers'.
What's old is new again. It didn't happen then, and I don't expect it to happen now.