bh_doc

You'd get about $84 for the materials in a human body. Apparently

I was expecting one of those silly web quizzes: "What sort of atom are you!" I was a little disappointed, actually.

What? Maybe I'm just ignorant... Again; What?

I use and love my Debian install, but I would only recommend it to someone who has already had a bit of experience using Linux. It's quite a "purist's" distro.

AFAIK, that's pretty much the case. (The more knowledgable here can correct me.) Classical momentum and relativistic momentum are two different, but related, beasts.

You will have to partition, but the installer should help you do that. It sounds like something else. It could be that you have a bad image burnt, but I don't know.

It's not quite the same thing, but it is definitely related. (Magnetic and electric fields are propagated via EM, are they not?) Take light. Light is a wave. Light has a frequency. Humans can see a range of these frequencies. Some animals can see ranges of frequencies different to humans. Now what about those frequencies beyond that which humans can see? This is where all those other things you mentioned turn up. They are just light (technically electromagnetic) waves of different frequencies that we can't see. That's how they fit in.

Yep, that was it. And it's likely made from a mixture of mostly silicon and some other stuff ("doping agents", I think) that direct the flow of electrons. IIRC, that little metal square is called the "die". Dies are very small, and have chemically etched into them the microscopic transistors you're trying to find. You have NO hope of seeing them with the naked eye - you'd need a pretty decent microscope to see the changes in the metal, if you can see them at all. A magnifying glass is probably not powerful enough. These integrated circuits are tiny!

Uh, shouldn't that be f(g(x)) = x for all x?

A long time ago a guy named Richard Stallman decided all software ought to be open source and free. So he started writing a bunch of UNIX utility programs, some new, some clones of old ones. So you may ask, why write another one? Well, why have more than one of anything? The reason there are some many similar commands between Linux and UNIX is the same reason there are so many similar commands between Linux and Windows. Think about it, there's rm/delete, cd/cd, ls/dir, etc. There's still such commonality between these systems (which work in starkly contrasting ways) that a number of commands to maintain them are almost identical. Since Linux is meant to be very similar to UNIX, it's even more so in that case, but this applies generally to all operating systems. There really isn't a huge deal of uniqueness between operating systems, they're almost fundametally all the same.

That article was written three years ago. A lot, particularly in the Linux camp, has changed since then. Perhaps you should look at a (much) more recent article.

Good ol' Gaussian. Though I haven't had to deal with particularly complex matrices.

Feel free to come up with a mathematical interpretation of your assertions that we might be able to better understand than several pages of prose. If you're right, it should be able to predict stuff better than current relativity theory. Until that happens, I reserve the right to call you a nutter.

WTF have you been smoking? Pass me some. I was gonna write a long-winded rebuttal, but I can't be stuffed.

Light travels through aether, of course!

The C language IS portable: Any system that supports the C language supports the set of standard C libraries. The problem is that the C language libraries only go so far, and important additions made by third parties, not the C standards body, are not necessarily portable since they often use internal features that are unique to each system. Also understand that many functions in the C libraries are implemented by different means on different systems. They have common interfaces, but for some functions their implementation is undefined by the standard. (It doesn't matter how these functions do their job, just so long as their results for given inputs are according to the standard.) Window, graphics, sound and input device functions are not part of the standard library, that is why those particular aspects are often not portable. There are a number of efforts to make portable libraries that take care of these things, however. SDL, wXWindows, et al. These supply common interfaces to OS specific functions, but they are not part of the C standard, there are some things that may be available on the OS but these libraries can't supply, and not everyone uses them. I hope that finally answers your question.

Yes, all versions of C language supply these standard libraries. However, these libraries, while reasonably large and useful in their own right, are not complete, and much functionality that is crucial to a modern OS and its applications (graphics and windowing functions, for example) are not defined in standard C. Thus, it is up to the implementers of the OS to supply their own libraries for such tasks. Linux has X libraries, and Windows has its GDI libraries.

C, I think. But no, they are not C language constructs. They are unique to bat files and the bat file interpreter (ie command.com)

Specifically addressing this quote: Windows is generally NOT 64 bits. On most systems it is 32 bits, as is Linux. On some obscure (becoming less so) systems it is 64 bits, AS IS LINUX. The major reason Windows programs cannot work under DOS is exactly my previous post. The EXE formats are different, and the libraries are different. BTW, Linux is predominantly C. The kernel (strictly speaking, the kernel is what you should be referring to when you say "Linux") is C, GNOME is C, GIMP is C, KDE is C++, you get the idea. Mostly C. Windows is also mostly C. The fact that both are mostly C has no bearing on what language is better (use the right tool for the job), or what systems any given laguage might support. GCC (compiler collection - it supports MANY languages) can target Windows.

It all comes down to libraries and formats. Windows has certain collections of functions (libraries) that Linux does not, and vice-versa. Linux uses formats and protocols that are different to the ones Windows uses. Take for example the executable format - EXE file on Windows, ELF on Linux. These files ARE NOT straight machine code that gets pumped into the CPU - the go through several stages of (simple) translation to load necessary dynamic libraries, reinterpret memory pointers, and other important stuff like that. EXE and ELF contain this interpretation information in different formats, and that's the single biggest reason why you can't run one as the other. There are emulators (such as Wine for running EXEs on Linux) that will do their best to translate one to another. Wine also tries to implement Windows' libraries. Recompilation of the program is another option (the language used to make the program is entirely irrelevant - all you need is a compiler for that language that can target the other platform) but recompilation requires compatible library interfaces. For example, SDL is a commonly used "cross-platform" library that can be used to make games. With it you can write (with a bit of care) code that can compile successfully using the SDL libraries on BOTH Windows and Linux. (Technically, SDL has COMPATIBLE Windows and Linux libraries since externally, ie to your code, they look the same, but internally they do things by different methods that are specific to each OS). Decisions on the fundamental operation and design of the two operating systems have made formats, libraries, and other similar things incompatible, and that's why one can't run on the other.

This is off the top of my head, and might not be exactly correct. You know radio is a form of light (ie photons). They make radio waves by pumping a rapidly oscillating current through a wire. We know moving current begets mangetism, thus magnetism is transmitted via photons. That's just to show how one could conclude the magnetism = photons bit. A light wave is made up of an electric and magnetic wave travelling together that are orthogonal to each other and push each other along. Thats how light travels. As for where the energy comes from in a permanent magnet, I believe that they do infact lose their magnetism over time. I'm not too sure about the answer to that one, however.

*cringe* Be very careful how you compare Dos and Unix. Sure, the command line in Unix, as in Dos, is used much more than it is in Windows, but it is also a hell of a lot more powerful than Dos. (You also get the benefit of choosing which of several different command line shells your script uses, so you can choose if you want to have that extra power or not.) It's important that the right impression comes across, here.

All that system is doing is taking the coefficients and placing them into the equation for x just above. Some coefficients make the unique solution impossible to find. NaN stands for Not a Number, it is the way computers generally say "undefined". It comes about since the system tries to find the unique result of 0/0. The system isn't designed to handle sets at all, so in this case you could interpret NaN to mean "the set of all real numbers", or "I don't have enough info to be able to tell", etc. You get infinity since it tries to calculate 1/0. You get -infinity since it tries to calculate -1/0. You are right in thinking it is a null set, but computers don't think like that.