Re: As I say every year

> over people who actually achieved real things in the messy real world

Hah. Who remembers Georg and Edvard Scheutz who - contrary to the perfectionist Babbage - actually built working difference engines - 3 of them?

Even their Wikipedia page is crummy.

"Aryan students want Aryan mathematics and not Jewish mathematics"

Unwise - especially if Jewish Mathematics kicks Austrian 99-percenter ass. On the other hand, Nazis were interested in retaining "jewish" Heinz Haber [famous for applying gas warfare for the benefit of the Kaiser somewhat earlier] or even on pilfering smelly ideology from "jewish" philosophers. Very practical people, those Nazis, in a "bully who failed at any original thought" way.

Such things happen in ideologically oriented regimes all the time. Einstein's Relativity was no-go era in the Soviet Union for a long time and later Norbert Wiener's 'Cybernetics' went straight to the 'secret archives' as being incompatible with Marxism ("Cybernetics serves the reactionaries of bourgeois society and idealistic philosphy" - 'Problems of Philosophy', 1953) were no-go areas in the Soviet Union for a long time.

Re: Random burglary or professional job?

> HELICOPTERS

Don't you mean fuel drums and jerrycans?

Re: Recognition of Mary Somerville

> better going

Not sure whether all that naming can be totally ordered, but if you want to go down that road I actually prefer a live language than a random building.

> a programming language that's now hardly used outside the military

Really! What are all these safety-criticial systems written in then? Futzy C and its bastard offpsrings? Must be all those fresh graduates full of illusions regarding their mad hacker skills.

For what it's worth: Ada on Place 15 for general purpose programming.

''Dr. King agreed that mathematics kept sexual longings at bay.''

> the Navy uses JOVIAL to disguise what is really a bad situation for gays in the field.

Fixed for you.

In truth [follow the link to Tracy Kidder's review, it's a good read] Dorothy Stein's statement was made in 1985. We have come some ways since then, although the complaining goes on.

In another truth, we love our mascots! Now, can I have an Ada Lovelace Action Figurine, please. No, not the US ones that are 'Made In China', they suck, the Japanese ones. Not, not Sheldon!! ARRRGH!!

Re: Where is Patrick McGoohan when you need him?

Yeah but it will only stop you getting out of the parking until you cough up.

[Bonus if accompanied by two hired muscle goons in gay outfits coming at you in a golf cart.]

Re: May explain SOME ocurrences

Citation needed!

Re: "will take any necessary disciplinary action"

In the present case, that would be Diego Garcia.

Re: How many more Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plants exist around the world?

"The Japanese disaster came at a propitious time for VietNam"

Who the hell writes Vietnam in CamelCase?

Re: Baron Samedi FTW!

But that was in "Mona Lisa Overdrive"?

Re: Novartis CEO?

Not sure whether antivaxer....

supicious_dog.jpg

Additionally, a CEO is just a CEO. He changes and works for the shareholders. So it should be the shareholders wot done it.

Re: SSDs and HDDs both require backup...

You have the SMART value "reallocated sector count" which tells you the number of remaps performed so far. You also have the self-tests which you should run regularly via smartd or whatever.

Google says this:

"Our results confirm the findings of previous smaller population studies that suggest that some of the SMART parameters are well-correlated with higher failure probabilities. We find, for example, that after their first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives with no such errors. First errors in reallocations, offline reallocations, and probational counts are also strongly correlated to higher failure probabilities. Despite those strong correlations, we find that failure prediction models based on SMART parameters alone are likely to be severely limited in their prediction accuracy, given that a large fraction of our failed drives have shown no SMART error signals whatsoever."

So it's pretty useful.

Ceterum censeo, not being able to get SMART data from USB-attached disks, varying/obscure/properietary interpretation and differences in commands and reporting between ATA and SCSI is frankly retarded. Disk industry is controlled by lazy jerks who can't into usable software and who should be visited by Vlad Tepes for some attitude adjustment.

Re: "Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think." – Ayn Rand

Insurances insure, film at 11!

So you pay or someone else may or may not pay more. So what? Too costly? Stop being insured or go to insurance company with better rates (which is the company which is luckier or insures better-controlled risks).

Meanwhile, another container of QE3 dollars hits the road and your savings are inflated away.

Re: Don't you go hijacking this topic.

In a sense, in a sense. We have to keep on going because changing demands quantum tunnelling of the painful sort.

In reality, we are in the Economic Matrix, where Krugman types pretend that things are perfectly all right and the uncomfortable feeling of the unseen feeding tubes starting to run on empty is just a by-effect of the Good Hand of Wise Economic Planning.

Follow the <del>White Rabbit</del>Ludwig von Mises.

Re: Swiss Neutrality ?

> Switzerland will still providing Nazi Germany with weapons and especially munitions in early 1944

Citation needed.

While I'm not big on Switzerland in WWII [turning away Jews at the border as per official policy was a dick move], this sounds unlikely.

They would certainly accept a train of Gold from Bavaria though. Gnomes love Gold.

Re: Precision?!

> I'd have assumed they use the electric grid.

You could have provided a link you lazy bastard.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43532031/ns/technology_and_science-innovation/t/power-grid-experiment-could-confuse-electric-clocks/

Well, anyone who uses the 50Hz signal on the power supply line to synch time for serious applications (i.e. anything else than a coffeemaker) deserves what he gets.

When you wish upon a star...

> Trademarks are a company's intellectual property even if not registered

Good luck defending those though.

TM stands for "Totally Meaningless"

Re: Is Toyota now an American company, then?

The UAW isn't too strong at Toyata. Maybe it's not an "American Company" in that sense?

It also makes money.

Re: On the otherhand this could be a good thing

That was back then. This is now.

DVD is a product of the 70s/80s mindset - centrally controlled, with "content producers" on one hand, and "consumers" on the hand. The "content producers" would impose their idea of what's permissible on the reader device maufacturers, and that would be that - a closed system to pump movies to the consumers under tight supervisions. So tight in fact that they went so far as to have "region codes". Yes, the world would be balkanized with content staying in each cell. How MBA-carrying retarded can you be? Of course, politicians and lawmakers enable this kind of bilking (then call it a "free market with consistent IP protection") and one should apply the Mongols' idea of using of a large plank and several horses for good effect on these people, but I digress...

What I am saying is, 3D printing is nothing special. No special "disk format" for interoperability, no special file format, no special filesystem. In 2012, people know how to create open, interoperable descriptions (if need by in XML) that can be exchanged on USB sticks or downloaded/uploaded. The situation is totally different. Competing devices will be made interoperable by software conversion. Those that don't want to play ball and DRM everything will either die of find a niche among buyers that have more money than good sense.

Re: disable secure boot on non-ARM platforms

> People who honestly prefer to see Linux beaten down so they can complain about that

Linux Liberals!

Solid info though, thank you.

Re: Franz Sanchez - Most realistic, most violent

The guy is now in charge...

http://www.elpasotimes.com/ci_21389331/even-more-brutal-leader-takes-over-mexicos-zetas

MEXICO CITY (AP) - A falling out between the leaders of the hyper-violent Zetas cartel appears to have put the gang in the hands of a brutal and feared gangster who has been blamed for an eruption of bloodshed in Mexico's once relatively calm central states. Miguel Angel Trevino Morales is a former cartel enforcer who apparently won a showdown with Zetas founder Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano for leadership, law enforcement officials say. Lawmen and even competing drug capos picture Trevino as a brutal assassin who favors getting rid of foes by stuffing them into oil drums, dousing them with gasoline and setting them on fire - a practice known as a "guiso," a Spanish word for "stew."

Re: I would comment, but...

I hereby insult you!!

Re: Blofeld

What about Corinne Dufour then? It was all KILL THE CUTIE. Sob!

I just noticed Corinne also starred in "Story of O". Ah-HA!

Re: Where's Renard?

Slav-looking evil, actually from the UK.

Beds Sophie Marceau (HNGGG!!)

Holds Plutonium with bare hands (ok, that's not hard to do).

Nonchalantly poisons his country fellows.

ALL MY POINTS!

I think trolls do need a good kicking, perhaps then they would stop trolling others.

Re: Here We Go Again

Yes we got that...? Mais encore?

> Penguins have been clamoring that this locks them out because of the GNU and other licences that require them to be "open" which secure boot is not.

NOPE. Do you hear "penguins clamoring"? Are we in Antarctica? No.

What happens is that the bootloader has to be signed [by someone who owns the private key the public counterpart of which is on the motherboard]. Apparently this is MANDATORY on ARM machines for some reason.

This as far as I can see has nothing to do with GNU licensing.

It has to do with someone [who?] going to the keyholder guy [who owns the private key the public counterpart of which is on the motherboard] with a compiled version of GRUB2, then asking nicely whether he would like to sign this binary thank you very much and can we come back once the next bugfix release is due.

Now the keyholder guy may want to get paid or the outfit which manages the certificate chain involved might. Apparently in this case the latter is Verisign and someone [who?] will come up with the cash.

Re: Slow

> The speed of light does seem rather slow, cosmically speaking.

It has exactly the value it needs: 1

Oh the huge manatee!

> Labs are boring some people have a life.

Translation: Too dumb to learn. Will watch Lindsay's arse instead.

> Either way, speculation is all we have at this point

Yes, you are on Youtube.

Re: we have yet to understand light

Why are so many cranks emerging in this thread, seemingly from before the french revolution considering their state of knowledge of contemporary physics and Lorentz boost operators?

Has someone opened a Portal by testing FTL devices again??

IGOR!!!!

The VERY short answer... photons don't need to know, they just try it all

1) Check out Feynman's books on QED (there is one for the lay public and one called "Feynman Path Integrals" or something). The idea:

You "just" need to add the complex amplitudes (at the target) of EVERY POSSIBLE PATH that a photon might take from source to the target. Square the value, which gives you a classical probability density function. A photon will be detected according to this PDF.

Everything (shortest path through spacetime, diffraction, refraction, Heisenberg uncertainty, interference, the works) can be explained by this simple principle - use EVERY POSSIBLE PATH (also the fractal ones - especially the fractal ones, though Feynman didn't know about that adjective, I think - and even the ones going faster-than-light, to the edge of the universe and back) AND SUM OVER THEM. For every photon. There are exponentially more paths in case you have more particles. Tremendous computational capability in this universe, wouldn't you think (but sadly NP-hard problems stay unsolvable even so)

2) In classical mechanics, you have the "Lagrangian formalism" which gives you the path an object takes through (flat) spacetime by requiring that INTEGRATION OVER TIME OF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN KINETIC ENERGY AND POTENTIAL ENERGY SHALL YIELD AN EXTREMUM. Simple as that. And it works bombers. Time disappears and the classical trajectories are simple solutions of a minimization procedure. Great stuff! (not so great that it would allow you do NP-hard problems efficiently though)

What does it all mean? Nobody knows.