IME, the more beautiful you believe something to be, the more offended you are at the idea that it can be boxed up and sold.

Are you suggesting that they wrote PHP to avoid code reuse, that there hasn't been an attempt at a cross-platform language since Java, and that Python is complicated, all in the same paragraph?

ASE doesn't let you package scripts as .apk's. Google is your friend.

Came here to say this. If I can make python work using the escape hatch, you can make anything work using it.

Seems pretty obvious to me. Those making the most noise about this imply that if one research group's conclusions predate their data, then all those who reached similar conclusions must have done the same. In the end the general public is unsure of who to trust, and the political impetus to make any real headway on environmental issues evaporates. Those who crowed about it publicly gain support, and those who produced research that supported these results suffer.

I've always wondered why there's never been a push to distribute wikipedia's surver burden. It would be easy with today's technology.

I've purchased new cell phones for less than $20 without a contract before. They suck, but they do exist.

You seem to have some knowledge here, so if you don't mind (and will forgive the pun) I'd like to pick your brain about this.

Lets say we have a tabby, an ocelot, and a simulation that we are told models one of the two. Given that we're able to perform any kind of scan or procedure on the two animals, could we determine which species the simulation was using only that data?

As I see it, there's several problems here.

The first is that we don't really understand neurology all that well- higher level thought is, for the most part, a mystery to us, so identifying the "right set" isn't really possible for us at this point.

The second is that even if we were able to select the "right set", I don't think we have the imaging technology necessary to distinguish between correct and incorrect states without inducing a margin of error that would qualify our hypothesis out of existence. I may be wrong about that- it's been known to happen, and I'm not an expert.

The third is that because many different regions of the brain are involved in high level thought, the degree of confidence you can gain from any one observation matching the model is relatively low, even if you could have confidence that you're measuring the right thing and that your measurements are accurate.

Putting all of this together, the only way I can see to verify correctness would be to ensure a very tight correlation between total model state and total simulation state. AFAICT, that will require incredibly good nondestructive resolution to be practical. I don't know for sure, but as far as I do know we aren't there yet- which brings me back to the question of why they said anything if they weren't sure.

I don't really see how they would have verified that they were able to simulate a cat's brain. AFAIK, we don't have single-neuron level imaging, and the resolution on FMRI and EEG put those right out. Looking at macro level behavior would be pretty absurd- I too, can write a program that will decide to play with yarn. Unless there's something I'm missing, IBM seems to have made a claim it can't support.

The plural of anecdote obviously isn't data, but most of the people who do image editing that I know are already aware that gimp exists, and the expectations as to what programs are installed are different coming from windows. I just don't see this as a valid point.

1) Color schemes are a matter of personal preference.
2) Nobody cares about the name.
3) Its called 'sudo', and its a good idea. Barring that, there's only about a million ways to get actual root if you neeeeeeed it, which I doubt you do.
4) sudo apt-get install build-essential

If you found any of that difficult to grasp, I'm glad you stuck with opensuse too.

I've been developing for years on Ubuntu, and find it quite comparable to the experience of developing on other .deb and .rpm systems. Don't know what you're doing with it obviously, but given the list of problems you presented I'm doubting the problem is with Ubuntu.

That's weird- back when people didn't know better than to ask me to help them with it I had to wrestle with it all the time. Cultural difference, maybe?

Seriously, there's not a lot of people who can claim to have gone toe-to-toe with those bastards and come out the better for it. More power to you, NYCL- and if you'll tell me what you drink you've got one of them headed your way.

I won't lie- I do think I'm right here, but I apologize for the snideness. You had your point of view and I had mine and I should have treated your opinion with the respect it deserved. Again, my apologies.