Well, really, it's the misshapen chimera all of the anti-evolution people demand to see, but it's too cute and mild-mannered to want to upset anyone's world view.
Well, that's the funny thing about a world view, isn't it? The same facts can be considered "evidence" of 2 different views. An evolutionist might say, "look! a transitional species! a product of geographical isolation and unique environmental pressures!". A creationist might say, "look, a totally unique creation that defies your attempts at taxonomy!". It is what it is, but how you think it got here is probably going to be determined by how you already think everything else got here.
I still find it amusing that so many people think that if you put OSX on a OC you'll get the same experience as you do on Mac hardware... You folks know that if Mac ran on anything it would be just a buggy and fucked up as windows right? The only reason it runs smoothly now is because Apple controls the hardware.
That is just a hypothesis (granted it's a very plausible and reasonable one). OSX already does run on a variety of hardware -- just not as big a variety as Windows. While you probably can't run OSX on just any PC, you could probably spec a system out for it specifically (as Psystar has apparently done). The most interesting thing about this company might be that it is a chance to see the hypothesis tested. Linux users are already quite willing to accept hardware limitations to avoid OS instability.
For only $10, I'll probably buy it, and not care if I get a discount on the final game. If they want to generate even more community content, they could offer to pay $20 to the creator of any creatures they incorporate into their game universe.
It's a sad thing to state, a capitalist, money-driven system cannot accomodate for everyone having lots of money.
Compare, say, the U.S. standard of living (even in our current economic state) with the 3rd world. Heck, compare the U.S. to itself 100 years ago. Nearly everyone in the U.S. has "lots of money" compared to much of the world. I'm not saying that's necessarily because of capitalism, I'm just saying that people CAN all have a "lot of money", depending on how you define "a lot". "Rich" is always relative to something else, and obviously no system can make everyone richer than everyone else (except in Lake Woebegon, of course).
Come on the Drake Equation has been around for a long time now guys.
The Drake Equation would be interesting if we didn't have to make wild guesses at all of the parameters. I think it's better at showing how far we are from knowing the likelihood of extraterrestrial life.
I don't like how dismissive Hawking is of people who claim to have seen aliens. If you're gonna allow for aliens in your world view... or rather universe view..., then I think you have to entertain the possibility that some of the sightings could be real.
C.S. Lewis said that based on biblical writings, Jesus must be one of the following 3 things: the Lord, a liar, or a lunatic. So yes, if you disbelieve His claims to Deity, then He sounds amazingly conceited.
I think you are misunderstanding the parable about the woman caught in adultery. When Jesus says, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone", his point wasn't (in my opinion) that the guiltless may condemn, but that none of us are guiltless! Jesus also taught, "Judge not lest ye be judged." You'll also notice that Jesus himself, though he is regarded as sinless, when the woman's accusers left said, "then neither do I condemn you".
Jesus did say basically "leave everything and follow me" several times in scripture, and the very early Christian church does seem to have had a communal structure ("everyone owned everything in common"). But I don't see anywhere in scripture where this is said to be THE way to run society. The incident where He cleared out the temple doesn't seem to me to say that He hates merchants, just He doesn't want them IN the temple.
I don't know if this is a factor in the move to wide screens or not, but supposedly the golden rectangle is the most visually pleasing rectangle. It has an aspect ratio of 1.618.
Exactly! You young whipper-snappers and your high resolution monitors. When I started out we could only see 24 lines on our terminals, and we were THANKFUL!
It is not just email. A lot of web pages have a 'pay me by paypal' button. I am sure that it is possible for a dishonest web author to link to a phishing site instead of the real paypal.
In that case, the blocking wouldn't help, because the fake paypal wouldn't block.
A "do not track"... registry? Is this a late April fool's day joke? It sounds like it could backfire. Wouldn't it mean that websites that track at all would be LEGALLY REQUIRED to obtain some piece of identifying information about you to check against the registry? And how could you prove a violation? Wouldn't it still pretty much rely on "self-regulation"?
As an aside, I used to work in a marketing department that had separate "do not call", "do not mail", and "do not email" flags for all their customers. Our group's policy (I can't speak for the whole company) was that if any of those flags were set, we wouldn't put them on any kind of contact list. I think the decision was still based on economics -- they figured the benefit of marketing to a few more people was outweighed by the risk of angering those people: "I'm sorry, sir, I see that you asked not to be mailed or emailed any more offers, but you didn't say we couldn't CALL you!"
One thing the article appears to imply that I question is that hitting a satellite will necessarily cause it to hit the earth next time around. I would think it could just as well cause it to miss the earth by more than it would have otherwise.
Keeping us blind folded, my brother switched out the Belden wire (are you ready for this) with simple coat hanger wire! Unknown to me and our 12 audiophile buddies, prior to the ABX blind test, he took apart four coat hangers, reconnectd them and twisted them into a pair of speaker cables.
In June 2007, Nevada Solar One, the state's first CSP plant, went online. On 275 acres near Boulder City, it provides 64 MW of electricity from 98 percent solar power and 2 percent natural gas.
That's an awful lot of power from a reasonably sized parcel of land. It seems quite reasonable that many of such sites placed strategically around the country could cumulatively add up to the 8464 square miles needed.
Okay, I ran the numbers (correctly, I hope). I get ((92 mi)(5280 ft/mi))^2 / (43560 ft^2/acre) / (275 acre/plant) = 19,698 power plants! That seems like a lot to me. That's also assuming the 275 acre plant is as efficient as the hypothetical 92mi square worth of plants. Not to detract from your point at all, just trying to be <moderator hint> informative </moderator hint>.
... It seems to me they are using the term "open source" descriptively, not pejoratively. I really doubt they are trying to put the open source movement in a bad light in any way. I mean, it's not like we equate the words "closed source" or "corporate" with evil, right?... right?
Makes me think of probably the most famous psychologist, Dr. Phil. He got hugely popular pretty much just telling people what they needed to hear. Nothing he says is profound or thought provoking.He basically just tells you the way it is. Most people aren't really to do that, so I applaud him for doing that. However, I don't think that he's really doing that much that anybody else couldn't do.
You may be right, but I used to watch that show pretty regularly, and I got the impression it's not just WHAT he says, but HOW he says it. I would sometimes wonder why he would verbally beat up some quiet, gentle sounding guest and then be very gentle with some hotheaded jerk. But then after a while you would see that the quiet person was in denial and not wanting to really deal with his problem, and the hothead just felt like the whole world was against him, but the host's patience breaks through by the end of the show. Anyway, I don't think I could host that show.
It seems like I read a sci-fi short story along these lines. Only I don't think it was a "black hole reignition". It was a "sun-like" object, only on a much larger scale. Scientists had verified it's existence and determined that, coincidentally, the first light from that object would soon reach earth (I don't know how they discovered it before the light from it reached us, but that's beside the point). Anyway, everyone's watching waiting to see this amazing new thing when it appears... and it burns everyone up.
... will include the first decimal floating-point unit integrated in silicon
I've never heard of such a thing! I can't imagine what kind of application would get enough benefit from native decimal FP calculations to justify the extra silicon. And how does that look when you're programming it? Do you declare "decimal float" and "decimal int"?
I'm a transplant to New England, and hear "wicked" used with some frequency.
Oh, I didn't know it was a regional expression. Come to think of it, last time I was in New England was... in the 80s. It's interesting that I got modded "+5 insightful" for an apparently unjustified criticism. Such is karma, I guess.
The 80s called ...
on
Wicked Cool PHP
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
... they want their slang back. "Wicked cool"? Seriously? While it's entirely possible that this phrase has made a comeback of which I am unaware, I would think using the word "wicked" totally cancels out (or possibly negates) the word "cool". Why not name it "Totally far out PHP"? "Really swell PHP"? From a marketing POV, the slang used in the title of a programming language book should probably not pre-date the programming language itself.
Correction - I was unaware that the 18 bit displays automatically dither the colors, so the test patterns I linked to make the difference between 18 bit and 24 bit seem bigger than it is. Anyone know of a better test image that would let me see the difference?
... Apple's market segment are probably the people who would most notice the difference between 18 bit color and 24 bit color. This is one reason I don't like to shop for displays online -- specs are nice, but I want to SEE it. Personally, IANA graphic artist, and I wasn't sure if I'd be able to tell the difference, but I found this page that has an 18 bit and 24 bit test pattern. Apparently, the difference is quite noticeable.
...it makes sense to start with some of the most exotic substances we know of.
I was with you right up to the end. I'd like to think the substances in question were chosen for the experiment because of their physical characteristics, and not JUST because they are exotic.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's the funny thing about a world view, isn't it? The same facts can be considered "evidence" of 2 different views. An evolutionist might say, "look! a transitional species! a product of geographical isolation and unique environmental pressures!". A creationist might say, "look, a totally unique creation that defies your attempts at taxonomy!". It is what it is, but how you think it got here is probably going to be determined by how you already think everything else got here.
That is just a hypothesis (granted it's a very plausible and reasonable one). OSX already does run on a variety of hardware -- just not as big a variety as Windows. While you probably can't run OSX on just any PC, you could probably spec a system out for it specifically (as Psystar has apparently done). The most interesting thing about this company might be that it is a chance to see the hypothesis tested. Linux users are already quite willing to accept hardware limitations to avoid OS instability.
For only $10, I'll probably buy it, and not care if I get a discount on the final game. If they want to generate even more community content, they could offer to pay $20 to the creator of any creatures they incorporate into their game universe.
Compare, say, the U.S. standard of living (even in our current economic state) with the 3rd world. Heck, compare the U.S. to itself 100 years ago. Nearly everyone in the U.S. has "lots of money" compared to much of the world. I'm not saying that's necessarily because of capitalism, I'm just saying that people CAN all have a "lot of money", depending on how you define "a lot". "Rich" is always relative to something else, and obviously no system can make everyone richer than everyone else (except in Lake Woebegon, of course).
The Drake Equation would be interesting if we didn't have to make wild guesses at all of the parameters. I think it's better at showing how far we are from knowing the likelihood of extraterrestrial life.
I don't like how dismissive Hawking is of people who claim to have seen aliens. If you're gonna allow for aliens in your world view ... or rather universe view ..., then I think you have to entertain the possibility that some of the sightings could be real.
C.S. Lewis said that based on biblical writings, Jesus must be one of the following 3 things: the Lord, a liar, or a lunatic. So yes, if you disbelieve His claims to Deity, then He sounds amazingly conceited.
I think you are misunderstanding the parable about the woman caught in adultery. When Jesus says, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone", his point wasn't (in my opinion) that the guiltless may condemn, but that none of us are guiltless! Jesus also taught, "Judge not lest ye be judged." You'll also notice that Jesus himself, though he is regarded as sinless, when the woman's accusers left said, "then neither do I condemn you".
Jesus did say basically "leave everything and follow me" several times in scripture, and the very early Christian church does seem to have had a communal structure ("everyone owned everything in common"). But I don't see anywhere in scripture where this is said to be THE way to run society. The incident where He cleared out the temple doesn't seem to me to say that He hates merchants, just He doesn't want them IN the temple.
I don't know if this is a factor in the move to wide screens or not, but supposedly the golden rectangle is the most visually pleasing rectangle. It has an aspect ratio of 1.618.
Exactly! You young whipper-snappers and your high resolution monitors. When I started out we could only see 24 lines on our terminals, and we were THANKFUL!
In that case, the blocking wouldn't help, because the fake paypal wouldn't block.
A "do not track" ... registry? Is this a late April fool's day joke? It sounds like it could backfire. Wouldn't it mean that websites that track at all would be LEGALLY REQUIRED to obtain some piece of identifying information about you to check against the registry? And how could you prove a violation? Wouldn't it still pretty much rely on "self-regulation"?
As an aside, I used to work in a marketing department that had separate "do not call", "do not mail", and "do not email" flags for all their customers. Our group's policy (I can't speak for the whole company) was that if any of those flags were set, we wouldn't put them on any kind of contact list. I think the decision was still based on economics -- they figured the benefit of marketing to a few more people was outweighed by the risk of angering those people: "I'm sorry, sir, I see that you asked not to be mailed or emailed any more offers, but you didn't say we couldn't CALL you!"
One thing the article appears to imply that I question is that hitting a satellite will necessarily cause it to hit the earth next time around. I would think it could just as well cause it to miss the earth by more than it would have otherwise.
Sorry, I'll be more careful in the future.
Already posted a few days ago.
Well, with twisted pair coat hanger wires, sure!
From TFA:
In June 2007, Nevada Solar One, the state's first CSP plant, went online. On 275 acres near Boulder City, it provides 64 MW of electricity from 98 percent solar power and 2 percent natural gas.
That's an awful lot of power from a reasonably sized parcel of land. It seems quite reasonable that many of such sites placed strategically around the country could cumulatively add up to the 8464 square miles needed.
Okay, I ran the numbers (correctly, I hope). I get ((92 mi)(5280 ft/mi))^2 / (43560 ft^2/acre) / (275 acre/plant) = 19,698 power plants! That seems like a lot to me. That's also assuming the 275 acre plant is as efficient as the hypothetical 92mi square worth of plants. Not to detract from your point at all, just trying to be <moderator hint> informative </moderator hint>.
... It seems to me they are using the term "open source" descriptively, not pejoratively. I really doubt they are trying to put the open source movement in a bad light in any way. I mean, it's not like we equate the words "closed source" or "corporate" with evil, right? ... right?
You may be right, but I used to watch that show pretty regularly, and I got the impression it's not just WHAT he says, but HOW he says it. I would sometimes wonder why he would verbally beat up some quiet, gentle sounding guest and then be very gentle with some hotheaded jerk. But then after a while you would see that the quiet person was in denial and not wanting to really deal with his problem, and the hothead just felt like the whole world was against him, but the host's patience breaks through by the end of the show. Anyway, I don't think I could host that show.
It seems like I read a sci-fi short story along these lines. Only I don't think it was a "black hole reignition". It was a "sun-like" object, only on a much larger scale. Scientists had verified it's existence and determined that, coincidentally, the first light from that object would soon reach earth (I don't know how they discovered it before the light from it reached us, but that's beside the point). Anyway, everyone's watching waiting to see this amazing new thing when it appears ... and it burns everyone up.
I've never heard of such a thing! I can't imagine what kind of application would get enough benefit from native decimal FP calculations to justify the extra silicon. And how does that look when you're programming it? Do you declare "decimal float" and "decimal int"?
Oh, I didn't know it was a regional expression. Come to think of it, last time I was in New England was ... in the 80s. It's interesting that I got modded "+5 insightful" for an apparently unjustified criticism. Such is karma, I guess.
... they want their slang back. "Wicked cool"? Seriously? While it's entirely possible that this phrase has made a comeback of which I am unaware, I would think using the word "wicked" totally cancels out (or possibly negates) the word "cool". Why not name it "Totally far out PHP"? "Really swell PHP"? From a marketing POV, the slang used in the title of a programming language book should probably not pre-date the programming language itself.
Just my opinion. I'm not an author or a marketer.
Citation?
Correction - I was unaware that the 18 bit displays automatically dither the colors, so the test patterns I linked to make the difference between 18 bit and 24 bit seem bigger than it is. Anyone know of a better test image that would let me see the difference?
... Apple's market segment are probably the people who would most notice the difference between 18 bit color and 24 bit color. This is one reason I don't like to shop for displays online -- specs are nice, but I want to SEE it. Personally, IANA graphic artist, and I wasn't sure if I'd be able to tell the difference, but I found this page that has an 18 bit and 24 bit test pattern. Apparently, the difference is quite noticeable.
...it makes sense to start with some of the most exotic substances we know of.I was with you right up to the end. I'd like to think the substances in question were chosen for the experiment because of their physical characteristics, and not JUST because they are exotic.