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Education

Most People Have Never Heard of CTRL+F 567

Hugh Pickens writes "Google search anthropologist Dan Russell says that 90 percent of people in his studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page. 'I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for,' says Russell, who has studied thousands of people on how they search for stuff. 'At the end I'll say to them, "Let me show one little trick here," and very often people will say, "I can't believe I've been wasting my life!"' Just like we learn to skim tables of content or look through an index or just skim chapter titles to find what we're looking for, we need to teach people about this CTRL+F thing, says Alexis Madrigal. 'I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all,' writes Madrigal. 'We're talking about the future of almost all knowledge acquisition and yet schools don't spend nearly as much time on this skill as they do on other equally important areas.'"

Comment Re:I thought they already knew why corona is hotte (Score 3, Informative) 111

from what I know, all that is based on heavy numerical simulations (prone to errors in the assumptions, lack of more thorough numerics, etc). The simulations are based on parameters determined from measurements made from distances longer than those that will be reached with this new probe, and on assumptions also extrapolated from everything observed "from here". Summed up, that explanation could be right or completely wrong. We have to measure more and from smaller distances.

Comment Re:US abuse (Score 1) 966

It's funny that you feel this way about conspiracy theories (I mean US people), because the subject transforms into either not believing *at all* in conspiracies, or believing *all* of them. Don't you think the world is more complicated? Don't you think that with your attitude you'll be missing real complots when they happen? Oddly enough, this attitude is only present in the US, any idea why?

Comment Re:Translation: (Score 1) 840

You didn't read the actual speech did you? If not, you are speaking from ignorance.

would you read a speech from a Mullah speaking of internet? no, why? you don't care a shit about that illiterate piece of ...

On slashdot, people will believe anything negative claimed about that Pope.

wow! this is an amazing fact... why should that be? The pope is an idiot, obviously, no one intelligent will ever defend the want of substituting reality with a fairy tale; it is coward and childish, and well studied in psychology. In the future this kind of people will be treated, and of course no one will ever read on their opinions, as if they had something important to say.

Oh my fucking god.... we are so willing that all those fucking believers disappear and lets us build a world without dellusions...

Linux

Good, Portable "Virtual" Linux Distro? 261

Prof. Nix writes "I have been given the opportunity to redesign the Linux course for the community college I work for. This course will be taking students from the 'What's Lee-nux?' stage to (hopefully) Linux+ Certifiable in about three to four months. However, one issue I haven't solved is finding a semi-stable, highly portable, and readily accessible platform the students may pound on, and have root access, independently of their peers. The powers-that-be have already vetoed any sort of server environment accessible from off campus. We've already tried live USB drives, but we ran into many issues with non-supported hardware on students' home computers. So I'm left with the idea of virtual machines run from flash drives. My ultimate goal is to have some sort of portable system that students can use with equal ease on lab systems and personal laptops — regardless of hardware. Preferably this system would be installable on a 4GB flash drive and run an Ubuntu- or Fedora-derived OS. So I ask the people who have been in the trenches a lot longer than I — what distros should I look at?"

Comment optimal control theory (Score 1) 116

Optimal control theory gives you a function (trajectory over time, or acceleration vector over time) which minimizes a given functional (a function of functions) in this case I imagine that the total amount of fuelt spent (with the constraint that it reaches the lifetime desired). Summary: find the trajectory x(t) such that Fuel(x(t)) is minimized. This algorithm is well developed, you can even use it in quantum mechanics (give the desired hamiltonian(t) such that the evolution of the state is such and such at the end of the evolution, with the minimum of $whatever achieved along time).

Comment life (Score 1) 141

I bet that in a thousand years from now we will consider life as anything having a)enough presence of nonequilibrium thermodynamics states, and b)the ability to perform universal computation (either classical or quantum, or maybe another yet undiscovered more general thing). This could include, as foreseen by Asimov, lakes of superconducting metals in remote planets. Will vegetarianism in the future include moral attitudes for superconducting helium inside high field magnets? Will we see an invasion of Earth by superconducting metal intelligent beings on a hunt-those-superconducting-torturers/bastards?

Maybe in Pluto there is a colony of intelligent robots (which communicate through gravity waves, i.e. civilizations withouth a theory of quantum gravity wouldn't detect their communications) and they are waiting for our civilization to build enough autonomous electronic components, so that at a given point they will send a signal/virus, take control of all our electronic infracstructure and take on planet's control. The threats of civilization always come from possibilities that we weren't able to imagine.

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FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed -- it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer. -- A.J. Perlis

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