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Comment Re:But WHY? (Score 2) 93

I like how you can plug the Ubuntu phone to a display and maybe a mouse and keyboard and it becomes a full desktop computer. I do believe that phone CPUs are getting performant enough to pull this off and for most people it will have enough computing power. Of course, there are drawbacks such as what happens when someone steals the phone with all your data or shitty battery life. It will probably not have enough public appeal to become mainstream. But the idea itself is quite nice IMO.

Comment Re:Crap (Score 2) 177

Not only are gasoline engines inefficient, they require fuel be trucked to stations wasting even more fuel.

And with solar power, until an efficient energy storage method is created (batteries and other methods available now are crappy), transmission problem is going to last and even grow bigger. In my opinion, the only sensible solution to powering all the world from solar would be to build power plants on opposite sites of the globe, so some part of them is ALWAYS on the dayside. Transmitting their energy to those parts of world that are currently on the nightside is even bigger a problem.

Comment Re:They are both as good (Score 3, Interesting) 437

Eclipse is much more user-friendly and stable than NetBeans in every iteration I have used it.

That is interesting, my experience is completely opposite -- Netbeans is better focused on most often used functionality than on some niche stuff and extreme configurability almost noone needs, has shorter menus, less cluttered toolbars, has more intelligent and intuitive text editor (variable names guessing is so brilliant you don't notice it until you go back to other editors), has Alt-Tab that works instantly, etc. etc.

It is also periodically reviewed for performance and tuned up, which results in amazing improvements between, say, version 6.5 and 7.2.

Netbeans doesn't require me to get and configure additional plugins for SVN or Maven. It is much better integrated with application servers.

etc, etc

Have you tried Netbeans recently, or do you base your Eclipse preference on Netbeans 3.5? Because I have been forced to use Eclipse Juno for past 3 months and it is slow as hell, unintuitive, has menus that still require scrolling in full hd and still proposes arg0 as variable names...

Comment Re:I don't get it (Score 1) 105

That's something I don't fully understand and probably I won't without appropriate amount of math :-) But what popular science writers say about it is that Einstein's limit applies to movement relative to space. If you imagine your self glued to a point on a baloon and another galaxy glued to another point, when the baloon expands neither you nor the galaxy move relative to the baloon. But you move away from each other. You cannot move faster than light relative to the baloon. But the baloon can expand so fast that there are points on its surface that move faster than light relative to each other (but not relative to the baloon). If you're going to ask in what does the baloon expand, I don't know :-) Into nothingness ;-)

Comment Re:I don't get it (Score 4, Informative) 105

The speed limit of c only applies to matter inside of the spacetime. The spacetime itself can expand faster than light and in fact there might be galaxies that we'll never be able to reach or see because they move away from us faster than light. Moreover, the idea of inflation stage of universe growth seems to explain well some problems with standard "big bang" theory and is widely accepted. Inflation means that there was a shot period in universe history when it expanded very quickly, faster than light speed in fact.

Comment Re:Invent your own exercises (Score 1) 284

I don't know about other countries, here in Poland there are so many utterly useless subjects on college that I myself find it normal to cheat. If all it gives you is a mark ticked, why would you spend time on it instead of on subjects that DO matter for you and your future.
Of course it's not the only reason people cheat.

Comment Re:Teaching evolution and science to young childre (Score 1) 1142

By "damaging" I mean -- learning something that will be hard to unlearn. Religious themes are present in many many places, fairytales, poems for small children, etc. I don't want to censor them because that would make my children's life poorer. It's easy to balance the violence from fairytales (cutting through wolve's insides?) but when it comes to religion - there's not enough counterbalance in my opinion. There are no "Scientific fairytales for small children" that I've heard of (I'm sometimes thinking of writing such thing but am not good enough in writing; I would love to see people that have "light pens" like Dawkins and specialists from other fields writing a book of short "fairytales" that would have some kind of scientific background; think of Lem's "robot fairytales" kind). Such book would try to "smuggle" a bit of scientific consiousness at a pretext of a fun story -- exactly how religion puts its roots in young minds.

But maybe I'm overthinking stuff. Both me and my wife are atheists and it will be different with my kids than it was with me. I grew up among believers and used to strongly believe in god, too. I never suffered too much because of it or because I stopped believing at one point, but from today's perspective I can see that this religious belief did took away some of things from my youth. I'd love to spare my daughter from this but maybe I cannot or it will Just Work :-)

Comment Re:Teaching evolution and science to young childre (Score 1) 1142

Are most of your family and your kids' school teachers atheists, too? I don't think so, but if they do -- I envy you. I don't have really strong believers among my friends, perhaps because most of them I know from college. But there are grandmas and there will be teachers that speak of gods as they are real. One of my kid's grandmas even takes her to church when she's with her for a few days. If I escalate it, I think she'll just stop telling me about this. And I'm not going to prevent grandmas "access" to my daughter over religion. I'd love to give my daughter a right perspective on religion, but you know, you won't find that many books on what is psychologically "approved" way to talk to little children about that. My daughter's just 2, she still thinks that adults are always right, etc. -- I'd love to get some insight on what damage can talking about religion to kids so young make.

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