You idiot. Uranium tipped rounds aren't safe because they are made of...get this...uranium, which in addition to having famously radioactive isotopes, it is a heavy metal and hence poisonous, no matter what form you use. The fact the military is irresponsibly using a heavy metal ammunition and making people sick has nothing at all to do with nuclear anything.
Fuel isn't the only form of waste. Everything that goes into or comes out of a reactor is contaminated.
Everything that goes 'in' a reactor is not 'contaminated'. Being exposed to radiation does not make things radioactive, it does not work that way. Being literally part of the nuclear process can result in atoms gaining a neutron and becoming an unstable isotope...which exist in nature anyway. Most modern nuclear power plants use solely water there, resulting in deuterium, which isn't a danger to anyone at all unless people start drinking the heavy water directly out of the nuclear reactor.(1)
There's hundreds of tons of waste already without ever getting more than 15% of our power from nuclear. Worldwide we are talking about millions of tons of waste over the next hundred years.
No. Wrong. Completely wrong.
The US produces a lot of nuclear waste. Other countries, with much more nuclear investment than us, produce almost none. And when I say 'almost', I actually mean 'none', in that they in theory produce waste, but have yet to use up their initial investment enough to throw anything out. Why?
Because we're using damn stupid 30 year old reactor designs. We refuse to build breeder reactors, we refuse to reprocess anything, we insist on throwing everything away after we've processed it once.
It's people like you that result in so much nuclear waste. You're a guy bitching about how cars pollute, and that building new cars results in pollution, so you won't buy a new car unless it's completely solar-powered. So you continue to drive a gas-guzzling, oil-burning, poorly-timed whale from 1982 with no exhaust pipe.
Actually, because your lack of upgrading the nuclear plants is making us use coal plants, it's a good deal worse than my example. So...some of the country is driving those clunkers, and the rest are driving around in steam engines operated by burning old tires and batteries, and other stuff suitable horrible.
Have you ever heard the expression 'The best is the enemy of the good.'? We have four sources for enough power to operate a random, non-ideally-located city: nuclear, coal, natural gas, and oil. Coal is incredibly dirty and produces more radiotivity in a year than we've ever managed to produce with nuclear plants. Oil and gas are less dirty, but are not long-term solutions. Nuclear power is the cleanest power we have, and, as a bonus, requires almost no transport costs. Period. You come up with something cleaner we can actually operate cities off of, feel free to tell me.
1) It's not a danger because it's radioactive, it's not radioactive at all. It's a danger because it does the same thing as carbon monoxide, except with water instead of oxygen. It takes the place of it, but does not actually work, or at least works poorly, thus screwing up your body, which needs working water. However, you'd have to replace like 25% of the water in your body before anything bad happened, just like you have to replace a large portion of O2 with CO before anything bad happens, and it leaves the body easier than normal water, because it's not doing anything. So you'd have to substain yourself solely on it for few days to run into trouble.
Likewise, we were promised flying cars, so the auto industry is obviously pointless. And we should all have robots in our house.
Get over yourself. The 1950s was the invention of nuclear power. Of course there were a lot of crazy predictions.
Incidentally, we could produce entirely safe (as long as you didn't go opening them up) nuclear reactors to power neighborhoods. You'd hook them to a water line, and the only waste product would be non-radioactive steam. When they stop working, you turn them back in and get another, and that is their only failure mode barring someone going after them with a sledgehammer, which still wouldn't make them explode, just dump enough nuclear waste to make people want to clear out a few miles around them. (Of course, putting them in cars and trains is a bad idea because of this, but that's what batteries are for.)
Why don't we do this?
Because we don't want to give nuclear material out to people. That's it. That's the entire reason we don't have free unlimited power everywhere. That and stupid-ass people who think nuclear power is 'unsafe'.
Nuclear power already is fufilling approx 27% of Georgia's electrical needs, which is more than the 20% national average, and placing us 9th in the nation.
We've also got more nuclear missiles than anywhere but New Mexico.
We've also got an H-bomb lost off the coast, which the military claims was missing its detonation capsule, but there is a letter by Assistant Defense Secretary Jack Howard where, he says it did have the detonation capsule. If it does, and goes off, it will nuke Savannah.
Don't screw with us. We'll make you glow in the dark.
You're a moron. We know exactly how to get rid of nuclear waste...you make breeder reactors, like the French do.
We're just too chicken to do it, because it makes plutonium.
Hell, we don't need to make nuclear waste. We could run for centuries off the damn nuclear waste we already have.
And you cannot operate a major city off solar, period, at least not one on the east coast. We have no ability to store enough power to get through a few cloudy days.
And wind power is stupid to ever propose. It work in like 5% of locations.
And we're already using hydroelectic almost everywhere plausible, although why 'environmentalists' have no problems damming streams and creating huge unnatural lakes is beyond me.
There are always minor abuses of power within the government. It's just this Administration has changed 'minor' to 'near total' and has started doing them outside the law.
The minor abuses of power were no real problem. When they got out of hand, there would be laws passed against them. (And now I'm thinking of Clinton's supposed IRS abuses.) Bush, of course, thinks he doesn't have to follow laws passed to stop abuses of power, like FISA, passed after Nixon abused wiretaps.
And 'reclassifying' information isn't automatically an abuse of power. Classification, whether re- or not, can be an abuse, but usually isn't. It's entirely possible that the Clinton administration discovered something that honestly shouldn't have been declassified, and tried to put the cat back in the bag. (Oh, crap, this document talks about something everyone knows, but shows we knew it when we logically could have known only if we were able to listen in on X, which we can, but we don't want them to know!) Silly, but not an abuse of power.
However, one of the rules for classification is that it can't be solely to keep from embarrassing the government. That Korean war example is almost certainly exactly that. It's damn hard to think of anything from that long ago that should still be classified, except maybe the exact specifications and blueprints for military equipment. There's a reason for the 25-year review thingy.
Incidentally, if you accept the arguments of Bush, we are in a police state. It's not rhetoric...he has seperately claimed, and his behavior has backed up the fact he believes these things, that the executive branch has the ability to ignore the law, and the executive branch has the ability to imprison people without trials. That is the defination of a police state, that's all it needs. There's no argument, there's no slippery slope, that is simply what police state means...no laws to regulate police behavior, and no courts to check it either.
Granted, Bush is wrong. We do not live in such a country. But that doesn't change what he is claiming.
It's not about rewriting history, per se, it's about making history and facts debatable by removing the government confirmation of them.
The non-reality-based Administration has been disputing facts more and more, this is only the next logical step.
This government wants to turn everything into an opinion. It's rather amazing that the people supporting it used to argue against moral relativism, that were were simply some behaviors that were Wrong, and now their Lord is into factual relativism, where not only are certain behaviors okay if we do them, but facts everyone's known and acknowledged for thirty years are up for dispute also.
Specifically, they're rewriting government history by continuing to hide parts of it.
They obviously have no power to alter the 1964 World Series winners, but they do have the power to remove the mistakes of the government so they can go and make them again without anyone objecting. (Which is the entire reason the 25 year review window exists.) Or, even more scarily, release only the mistakes that make them look good and people disagreeing with them look bad.
Especially considering this absurd reclassification: All documents referencing the war with Eurasia are now classified. Please declassify the documents referencing the war with Eastasia that happened ten years ago, except any referencing the fact we attacked them.
The line of code to compare with the first part is:
insert_customer("Bob","555-1234");
The second part is, however, quite close to the part that would go inside insert_customer() and the Customer constructor, no matter which you used.
Although most sane people will open the database at the start of the PHP script and put the handle in a global variable, not open it each time you want to do a query or insert. And not close it at all, because that doesn't do anything unless you're running out of memory in the middle of a script.
Also, you should put the database name in the query, like 'insert customers.customers...' in this example, if you're switching between them, instead of using mysql_select_db(). If you're only using one on that connection, you should mysql_select_db() where you opened the connection. Using mysql_select_db() to go back and forth is a good way to screw yourself up.
Why the hell has this been posted for almost three hours and only scored a 3?
You are exactly right about OOP. It's great when you are writing code for yourself. It's even okay in an large project with multiple people. It is craptacular when trying to extend preexisting objects that you can't modify.
And it is incredibly dumb in an environment like PHP. You know, PHP...the language that executes for 20 seconds at a time, and then starts over?
I'm all for things like directory listings and mysql results to be returned in objects. You're just looping over the damn things, and it doesn't really matter how you do it. It's the making your own objects that last for five seconds, and exist entirely within your own code, that seems a bit dodgy to me.
There are, I presume, plenty of other language-based cliques on/. , however the most vocal ones always seem to be the Perl-mongers. They're the ones who seem to pipe-up the most regardless of topic.
They are always upset when anyone chooses any other language for any purpose, because, in any touted feature of any language, you can do exactly the same thing almost exactly the same way in Perl, but better. That is not sarcasm, I am not being ironic, it is flatly true. Often you can literally cut-and-paste the code.
Other languages have an easy way to do something, and a correct way to do something, and a stupid way to do something you get from newbies. You can usually figure out what any line talking about in thirty seconds once you grasp the syntax. (Which, admittedly, can take a bit of time, like with COBOL and Lisp, for examples of languages with semi-odd syntaxes that are not in any other way alike.)
Perl has all those ways, and one hundred others. This is not an exaggeration. You can write BASIC in Perl, you can write PHP in Perl, you can write C in Perl, you can write Lisp in Perl, you can write C++ in Perl.
You sit two programmers of a medium skill level and have them write asm, and they will write identical code. You have them write C, and they will write near-identical code. You have them write PHP, and they will be roughly the same. You have them write Perl, and sometimes one of them will come up with at least one line that the other doesn't immediately recognize, because one of them basically writes PHP in Perl, and the other basically writes C++ in Perl.
This isn't limited to Perl. Programmers often write C in C++, or PHP 4 in PHP 5. When languages get new, better ways to do something, you end up with an 'old style' and a 'new style' and people can upgrade the language itself without upgrading the style they write in. Other people work on their codebase and put in 'new' stuff, and the old guys are baffled.
Perl is merely the only language that has ever deliberately done this. Perl is like being able to write in any programming style you want, at any time, using a semi-consistent syntax, along with features that no other language likes, like $_. Perl fanatics are under the mistaken impression this is somehow a feature, as opposed to making it fucking impossible to ever read any Perl code unless it happens to be written in the style you know.
Hey, I'm mostly with you. It's amazing how there are sane people who self-identify with either party, but are mostly in the middle.
The reason I think of myself as having mostly Republican ideals is that I thought we needed to strip most welfare things down to their basics, and then build them back up.
Of course, this new Medicaid fiasco is making me reconsider some of that. And the realization that we could fund fifty times the social services we do now, if we got rid of corporate welfare. So those really aren't that important in the vast scheme of things.
Basically, anyone thinking either party is the solution was ignoring the tremendious brokenness of the system. Fix that, and then we can get back to arguing over philosophical differences.
Not that that is is important any more, of course. Now we first have to get rid of the neocon cult, and then fix the system that it replaced, and then we can sit down and have a long reasoned debate about socialized medicine.(1)
1) Something I, in fact, am for. Our existing system often spends more controlling what doctors can and cannot do than it would cost to just do the damn thing. This is because people are not, in fact, expected to pay for their medical care, which is modern first-world concept and fairly socialist, but instead of having the government do it, we have random companies do it, that have every incentive not to help, and unlike car insurance, where there are really only two options, people are not expected to be able to understand the medical industry and every single test and procedure.
The Libertarians are insane fantics, that's why. They'd do exactly what they say, which would pretty much take the country back to 1890. No labor laws, no unions, no aid to the poor, nothing.
However, I vote for them.
Which ought to tell you how I view the other parties, which are trying to destroy the country in a different way, and having a lot more success at it. When the Libertarians shows up to take the libraries away, we'd actually be annoyed and get rid of them, unlike the other parties who can hand money out to big businesses left and right and the media, which is owned by said big businesses, just yawns.
Although I admit if I had had a chance to get Bush out of office in 2004, I would have voted for Kerry. I probably would have voted for Dan Quayle or a trained marmoset or a lump of coal if they had had a chance of winning against Bush.
The problem there isn't the Republican party, which I, in theory, agree with more often than not. The problem there is the Cult of the Neocon that's risen in the past six years, and the fact the GOP leadership got all the GOP Senators rowing in whatever direction they want, which is fine when they are actually doing something useful, but is not a good thing right now.
The framework is breaking. Yes, individual examples always have good reasons, or have people acting 'outside their authority', or were started by 'overeager' people.
Fuck. That.
The framework is the problem. The idea that anyone in the government can do anything they want for 'security' reasons, like torturing innocent people and wiretapping in violation of the law, is the problem,. The mouthpieces of the Right constantly calling anyone who says 'whoa, hold on, let's back off a bit' a 'traitor' is the problem. The Federal government constantly driving this government into hitherto unseen levels of incompetance by hiring partisan hacks instead of people with actual skills, where 'incompetance' often translates into 'instead of doing my job, I'll harrass people I don't like' is the problem.
We know this specific instance is unacceptable. We don't need to have a damn discussion about it.
What we need to have is a discussion about what the hell Maryland thought they were doing creating this force, and why this 'Homeland Security' force thought that enforcing morality is part of 'security'. (I don't mean that exactly how that sounds. Even if enforcing morality was something the goverment was doing, it would not be the job of 'Homeland Security'.)
And I don't give a damn if they're a blue state or a red state. The problem, the attitude of the government and the framework in which they see themselves, is trickling down from the very top of the government. Our local governments have always taken cues from the Feds, which is normally a good thing when the Fed create programs like Medicaid (Mildly ironic example now), but not that great when the Feds decide to take the country down the road it's going now.
To be technical, in the 'United States of America', there are no such things as counties, or even cities. There are merely states. (Erm, and districts and Indian reservations and stuff like that.)
Within states, there are often things called counties, or districts, and things called cities and towns. Their existences, and what power they have, is entirely up to the state they are within. (This is opposed to the USA vs. state relationship, where states, in theory, have rights that cannot be taken away.) Legally, these Federal government recognizes these solely to the level of "Come up with some area and call it the 'state capital' so we can put some Federal buildings there for you.", and that's about it.
So putting this, ultimately, on Maryland, is probably correct. Maryland's letting its counties run around with these sort of law enforcement.
Let's take each wire as it comes off the circuit breaker and goes to a room. Where it hits the first outlet, let's put a transformer, with wires coming off it for different voltages. (I suggest at least 12, 5, and possibly 1.5 for trivial things and standby, and of course a separate ground.) This transformer only turns on if there's a drain on the wire.
As the room is wired for AC, bring the DC wire along with it, and put in a new kind of outlet for it, also. (Either one socket of each, or double-wide plugs with two of each.)
If you were really clever, these 'transformers' would be AC/DC sockets that take in 110 volts, transform the voltage, provide a DC socket, and provide DC out also. One socket like that, the rest having the DC wire run to them just like the AC.
There could even be some sort of length limit on the wire, so that if you are wiring a single circuit but need more than X feet of wire, you put in two transformers. Although most rooms shouldn't need it, because you should need less wires than the wall amount of the room.
And, of course, there would be outlet transformers that plug in over the outlet and convert the power, exactly like existing wallwarts, but use the new standard plug and standard voltages. Start selling those first, and people will start expecting the outlets in their new homes.
As for amps, the best bet would be to just require said devices to have fuses. AC seems to get along fine with just a central circuit break for each room, although that idea is kinda tricky in my system of randomly placed convertors in the walls. Perhaps have an internal breaker that would reset back on if the power was cut off to the converter, so if the DC convertor went out, you could flip the breaker to the room off and on to get it back?
Converting household AC to DC at the device is almost a good idea, it's at least not as bad as people think. The fact it's not centralized does not make it dumb, it's the fact it's completely non-standard and people tend to have five devices doing conversion at the same place that make it rather dumb. Just do it once per room, provide a low voltage option for standby and have it cut off when not in use, and it's fine.
(And this is completely ignoring the toxic PCBs that said convertors give off. Much much better to pump those into the walls where there are no people than the room.)
I seem to recall something about 80,000 dollars. This could have been the 'full-upright' model though, although I don't think that was ever sold commercially.
However, his tall stair-walking model is damn cool by itself, although it is still pretty bulky because people are sitting down. That was the point of the fully upright one, you sit in a harness and your legs go almost straight down, so you don't take up so much space, ideally just like six inches extra in the back for the motor (Or the front?I forget) and a few inches on the side for the wheels.
Which was one of the major selling points of the Segway, the size. The upright wheel-'chair' was just basically replacing the handle of the Segway with a harness you set in, and having the flippy stair-climbing wheels. (And now why am I thinking one of the Segway models had flippy wheels?)
How the fuck is it 'not doing your homework correctly in advance'? Or have you simply not been paying attention to this?
This isn't some minor quibble or some partial functionality. They said 'HDCP'. HDCP requires a hardware key in a special chip. They did not bother to actually put such a chip on their video card, and hence HDCP can never work for them. Nor can their be a firmware upgrade.
It doesn't matter if they have some HDCP code in the chipset. It cannot output HDCP, which is, after all, a protocol, not some hypothetical standard, and hence it is not actually HDCP complient.
They only got away with it for this long because no one had damn HDCP-capable monitors so couldn't try to talk to the cards.
And, incidentally, it is completely ethical to purchase a wifi adapter for use in Linux, and when you get home and discover they've changed the chipset on you without changing the product name or id, to take it back. If they want that to stop, they can stop changing the damn chipset without changing the model number. It is fraud to represent two products as identical to each other when they are not.
The 'common cold' is not the same of a disease, smallpox already was wiped out, cancer is indeed often caused by pollutants, and thus could be removed this way, diabetes is not something that African villages have to worry about, as they have no sugar, ebola could removed this way, HIV/AIDS cannot, Alzheimers' cause is not know, but might be polluntants, and thus would be removed this way, Creutzfeldt-Jakob's is the same as Alzheimers', Marburg would be wiped out this was, as would Botulism.
So, to recap:
Three diseases that could definately be removed this way: Ebola, Marburg, and bolutism
Three diseases with unknown causes that it is postulated or known they can be caused by pollutants: cancer, Alzheimers, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob
Two diseases that no one in Africa has to worry about: diabetes and smallpox
One disease that is not the list bit important: common cold
And one disease that cannot be affected by this: HIV/AIDS
It really looks like clean water could definately remove three(1), and reduce the chance of three others, out of seven of those diseases, and the other three are either not something African villagers get, or are not important enough to worry about. That looks like 85% to me, good job there disproving his point.
However, this is rather idiotic, because he wasn't talking to you. He was probably talking to someone who knew what diseases kill people in Africa, which you rather obviously don't. These diseases are two things: AIDS, and things found in the drinking water. That's the entire list that I know of. No one there dies of Creutzfeldt-Jakob, no one there dies of Marburg, (In fact, the amount of people who have those diseases in the whole world is basically negligable.) no one there dies of diabetes, no one there dies of Alzheimers. It's either AIDS, or it's something they got from the water. Otfen times we can't be more specific than that, because they die before they manage to get any medical care.
1) Of course, you have to make sure they don't get it from other places besides the water, like the food, but the electricity is to help take care of that.
Oh, and before people get confused, I think he's currently selling another wheelchair, that has the stair-climbing ability with the flippy wheels, but not upright. Or maybe he's selling a way to add said wheels to existing wheel chairs.
He's constantly having to strip down his plans because they are too expensive.
He's got an amazing grasp of the possible and the useful, and the engineering skills to back them up, and he makes inventions to benefit the disabled and the sick. He's just got almost no grasp of the practical and money side of the equation.
Someone needs to give that guy ten billion dollars and watch him invent a device that lets blind people see or kills cancer.
Anyone making fun of his Segway does need to realize that, and yeah, his wheelchair was fucking brilliant. If you haven't seen it, it's a upright wheel-'chair'.
People in it are the same height as people who can walk (Thus, he says, elimating a lot of prejudice.) and can go over bumps and up and down stairs. It doesn't take up any more horizontal space than a fat person.
Think of it as a segway made into a wheeled mech suit for the lower half of your body. And I read somewhere that he planned to slim it down once it caught on, so it would be basically leg braces with wheels at the end. People might come up to you, and you wouldn't even notice their legs aren't moving.
And this isn't some pipe dream, these things actually work, balancing the same way as the segway, with two wheels on each side, so they can flip forward and move you up or down stairs. They're just too expensive right now. He was hoping to use the same parts as the segway to cut the cost down,but that didn't work out, obviously.
Slashdot Mirror
Fuel isn't the only form of waste. Everything that goes into or comes out of a reactor is contaminated.
Everything that goes 'in' a reactor is not 'contaminated'. Being exposed to radiation does not make things radioactive, it does not work that way. Being literally part of the nuclear process can result in atoms gaining a neutron and becoming an unstable isotope...which exist in nature anyway. Most modern nuclear power plants use solely water there, resulting in deuterium, which isn't a danger to anyone at all unless people start drinking the heavy water directly out of the nuclear reactor.(1)
There's hundreds of tons of waste already without ever getting more than 15% of our power from nuclear. Worldwide we are talking about millions of tons of waste over the next hundred years.
No. Wrong. Completely wrong.
The US produces a lot of nuclear waste. Other countries, with much more nuclear investment than us, produce almost none. And when I say 'almost', I actually mean 'none', in that they in theory produce waste, but have yet to use up their initial investment enough to throw anything out. Why?
Because we're using damn stupid 30 year old reactor designs. We refuse to build breeder reactors, we refuse to reprocess anything, we insist on throwing everything away after we've processed it once.
It's people like you that result in so much nuclear waste. You're a guy bitching about how cars pollute, and that building new cars results in pollution, so you won't buy a new car unless it's completely solar-powered. So you continue to drive a gas-guzzling, oil-burning, poorly-timed whale from 1982 with no exhaust pipe.
Actually, because your lack of upgrading the nuclear plants is making us use coal plants, it's a good deal worse than my example. So...some of the country is driving those clunkers, and the rest are driving around in steam engines operated by burning old tires and batteries, and other stuff suitable horrible.
Have you ever heard the expression 'The best is the enemy of the good.'? We have four sources for enough power to operate a random, non-ideally-located city: nuclear, coal, natural gas, and oil. Coal is incredibly dirty and produces more radiotivity in a year than we've ever managed to produce with nuclear plants. Oil and gas are less dirty, but are not long-term solutions. Nuclear power is the cleanest power we have, and, as a bonus, requires almost no transport costs. Period. You come up with something cleaner we can actually operate cities off of, feel free to tell me.
1) It's not a danger because it's radioactive, it's not radioactive at all. It's a danger because it does the same thing as carbon monoxide, except with water instead of oxygen. It takes the place of it, but does not actually work, or at least works poorly, thus screwing up your body, which needs working water. However, you'd have to replace like 25% of the water in your body before anything bad happened, just like you have to replace a large portion of O2 with CO before anything bad happens, and it leaves the body easier than normal water, because it's not doing anything. So you'd have to substain yourself solely on it for few days to run into trouble.
Get over yourself. The 1950s was the invention of nuclear power. Of course there were a lot of crazy predictions.
Incidentally, we could produce entirely safe (as long as you didn't go opening them up) nuclear reactors to power neighborhoods. You'd hook them to a water line, and the only waste product would be non-radioactive steam. When they stop working, you turn them back in and get another, and that is their only failure mode barring someone going after them with a sledgehammer, which still wouldn't make them explode, just dump enough nuclear waste to make people want to clear out a few miles around them. (Of course, putting them in cars and trains is a bad idea because of this, but that's what batteries are for.)
Why don't we do this?
Because we don't want to give nuclear material out to people. That's it. That's the entire reason we don't have free unlimited power everywhere. That and stupid-ass people who think nuclear power is 'unsafe'.
We've also got more nuclear missiles than anywhere but New Mexico.
We've also got an H-bomb lost off the coast, which the military claims was missing its detonation capsule, but there is a letter by Assistant Defense Secretary Jack Howard where, he says it did have the detonation capsule. If it does, and goes off, it will nuke Savannah.
Don't screw with us. We'll make you glow in the dark.
We're just too chicken to do it, because it makes plutonium.
Hell, we don't need to make nuclear waste. We could run for centuries off the damn nuclear waste we already have.
And you cannot operate a major city off solar, period, at least not one on the east coast. We have no ability to store enough power to get through a few cloudy days.
And wind power is stupid to ever propose. It work in like 5% of locations.
And we're already using hydroelectic almost everywhere plausible, although why 'environmentalists' have no problems damming streams and creating huge unnatural lakes is beyond me.
The minor abuses of power were no real problem. When they got out of hand, there would be laws passed against them. (And now I'm thinking of Clinton's supposed IRS abuses.) Bush, of course, thinks he doesn't have to follow laws passed to stop abuses of power, like FISA, passed after Nixon abused wiretaps.
And 'reclassifying' information isn't automatically an abuse of power. Classification, whether re- or not, can be an abuse, but usually isn't. It's entirely possible that the Clinton administration discovered something that honestly shouldn't have been declassified, and tried to put the cat back in the bag. (Oh, crap, this document talks about something everyone knows, but shows we knew it when we logically could have known only if we were able to listen in on X, which we can, but we don't want them to know!) Silly, but not an abuse of power.
However, one of the rules for classification is that it can't be solely to keep from embarrassing the government. That Korean war example is almost certainly exactly that. It's damn hard to think of anything from that long ago that should still be classified, except maybe the exact specifications and blueprints for military equipment. There's a reason for the 25-year review thingy.
Incidentally, if you accept the arguments of Bush, we are in a police state. It's not rhetoric...he has seperately claimed, and his behavior has backed up the fact he believes these things, that the executive branch has the ability to ignore the law, and the executive branch has the ability to imprison people without trials. That is the defination of a police state, that's all it needs. There's no argument, there's no slippery slope, that is simply what police state means...no laws to regulate police behavior, and no courts to check it either.
Granted, Bush is wrong. We do not live in such a country. But that doesn't change what he is claiming.
It's not about rewriting history, per se, it's about making history and facts debatable by removing the government confirmation of them.
The non-reality-based Administration has been disputing facts more and more, this is only the next logical step.
This government wants to turn everything into an opinion. It's rather amazing that the people supporting it used to argue against moral relativism, that were were simply some behaviors that were Wrong, and now their Lord is into factual relativism, where not only are certain behaviors okay if we do them, but facts everyone's known and acknowledged for thirty years are up for dispute also.
They obviously have no power to alter the 1964 World Series winners, but they do have the power to remove the mistakes of the government so they can go and make them again without anyone objecting. (Which is the entire reason the 25 year review window exists.) Or, even more scarily, release only the mistakes that make them look good and people disagreeing with them look bad.
Especially considering this absurd reclassification: All documents referencing the war with Eurasia are now classified. Please declassify the documents referencing the war with Eastasia that happened ten years ago, except any referencing the fact we attacked them.
"It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea." -Robert Anton Wilson
That was true the last 100 years. Now, it would be more apt to say:
It only took the last 10 years for a conservative to become a liberal without changing a single idea.
insert_customer("Bob","555-1234");
The second part is, however, quite close to the part that would go inside insert_customer() and the Customer constructor, no matter which you used.
Although most sane people will open the database at the start of the PHP script and put the handle in a global variable, not open it each time you want to do a query or insert. And not close it at all, because that doesn't do anything unless you're running out of memory in the middle of a script.
Also, you should put the database name in the query, like 'insert customers.customers ...' in this example, if you're switching between them, instead of using mysql_select_db(). If you're only using one on that connection, you should mysql_select_db() where you opened the connection. Using mysql_select_db() to go back and forth is a good way to screw yourself up.
You are exactly right about OOP. It's great when you are writing code for yourself. It's even okay in an large project with multiple people. It is craptacular when trying to extend preexisting objects that you can't modify.
And it is incredibly dumb in an environment like PHP. You know, PHP...the language that executes for 20 seconds at a time, and then starts over?
I'm all for things like directory listings and mysql results to be returned in objects. You're just looping over the damn things, and it doesn't really matter how you do it. It's the making your own objects that last for five seconds, and exist entirely within your own code, that seems a bit dodgy to me.
They are always upset when anyone chooses any other language for any purpose, because, in any touted feature of any language, you can do exactly the same thing almost exactly the same way in Perl, but better. That is not sarcasm, I am not being ironic, it is flatly true. Often you can literally cut-and-paste the code.
Other languages have an easy way to do something, and a correct way to do something, and a stupid way to do something you get from newbies. You can usually figure out what any line talking about in thirty seconds once you grasp the syntax. (Which, admittedly, can take a bit of time, like with COBOL and Lisp, for examples of languages with semi-odd syntaxes that are not in any other way alike.)
Perl has all those ways, and one hundred others. This is not an exaggeration. You can write BASIC in Perl, you can write PHP in Perl, you can write C in Perl, you can write Lisp in Perl, you can write C++ in Perl.
You sit two programmers of a medium skill level and have them write asm, and they will write identical code. You have them write C, and they will write near-identical code. You have them write PHP, and they will be roughly the same. You have them write Perl, and sometimes one of them will come up with at least one line that the other doesn't immediately recognize, because one of them basically writes PHP in Perl, and the other basically writes C++ in Perl.
This isn't limited to Perl. Programmers often write C in C++, or PHP 4 in PHP 5. When languages get new, better ways to do something, you end up with an 'old style' and a 'new style' and people can upgrade the language itself without upgrading the style they write in. Other people work on their codebase and put in 'new' stuff, and the old guys are baffled.
Perl is merely the only language that has ever deliberately done this. Perl is like being able to write in any programming style you want, at any time, using a semi-consistent syntax, along with features that no other language likes, like $_. Perl fanatics are under the mistaken impression this is somehow a feature, as opposed to making it fucking impossible to ever read any Perl code unless it happens to be written in the style you know.
The reason I think of myself as having mostly Republican ideals is that I thought we needed to strip most welfare things down to their basics, and then build them back up.
Of course, this new Medicaid fiasco is making me reconsider some of that. And the realization that we could fund fifty times the social services we do now, if we got rid of corporate welfare. So those really aren't that important in the vast scheme of things.
Basically, anyone thinking either party is the solution was ignoring the tremendious brokenness of the system. Fix that, and then we can get back to arguing over philosophical differences.
Not that that is is important any more, of course. Now we first have to get rid of the neocon cult, and then fix the system that it replaced, and then we can sit down and have a long reasoned debate about socialized medicine.(1)
1) Something I, in fact, am for. Our existing system often spends more controlling what doctors can and cannot do than it would cost to just do the damn thing. This is because people are not, in fact, expected to pay for their medical care, which is modern first-world concept and fairly socialist, but instead of having the government do it, we have random companies do it, that have every incentive not to help, and unlike car insurance, where there are really only two options, people are not expected to be able to understand the medical industry and every single test and procedure.
Don't those words mean the same thing?
However, I vote for them.
Which ought to tell you how I view the other parties, which are trying to destroy the country in a different way, and having a lot more success at it. When the Libertarians shows up to take the libraries away, we'd actually be annoyed and get rid of them, unlike the other parties who can hand money out to big businesses left and right and the media, which is owned by said big businesses, just yawns.
Although I admit if I had had a chance to get Bush out of office in 2004, I would have voted for Kerry. I probably would have voted for Dan Quayle or a trained marmoset or a lump of coal if they had had a chance of winning against Bush.
The problem there isn't the Republican party, which I, in theory, agree with more often than not. The problem there is the Cult of the Neocon that's risen in the past six years, and the fact the GOP leadership got all the GOP Senators rowing in whatever direction they want, which is fine when they are actually doing something useful, but is not a good thing right now.
Exactly. All the way up to the Commander in Chief. Read my post here.
The framework is breaking. Yes, individual examples always have good reasons, or have people acting 'outside their authority', or were started by 'overeager' people.
Fuck. That.
The framework is the problem. The idea that anyone in the government can do anything they want for 'security' reasons, like torturing innocent people and wiretapping in violation of the law, is the problem,. The mouthpieces of the Right constantly calling anyone who says 'whoa, hold on, let's back off a bit' a 'traitor' is the problem. The Federal government constantly driving this government into hitherto unseen levels of incompetance by hiring partisan hacks instead of people with actual skills, where 'incompetance' often translates into 'instead of doing my job, I'll harrass people I don't like' is the problem.
We know this specific instance is unacceptable. We don't need to have a damn discussion about it.
What we need to have is a discussion about what the hell Maryland thought they were doing creating this force, and why this 'Homeland Security' force thought that enforcing morality is part of 'security'. (I don't mean that exactly how that sounds. Even if enforcing morality was something the goverment was doing, it would not be the job of 'Homeland Security'.)
And I don't give a damn if they're a blue state or a red state. The problem, the attitude of the government and the framework in which they see themselves, is trickling down from the very top of the government. Our local governments have always taken cues from the Feds, which is normally a good thing when the Fed create programs like Medicaid (Mildly ironic example now), but not that great when the Feds decide to take the country down the road it's going now.
Within states, there are often things called counties, or districts, and things called cities and towns. Their existences, and what power they have, is entirely up to the state they are within. (This is opposed to the USA vs. state relationship, where states, in theory, have rights that cannot be taken away.) Legally, these Federal government recognizes these solely to the level of "Come up with some area and call it the 'state capital' so we can put some Federal buildings there for you.", and that's about it.
So putting this, ultimately, on Maryland, is probably correct. Maryland's letting its counties run around with these sort of law enforcement.
Let's take each wire as it comes off the circuit breaker and goes to a room. Where it hits the first outlet, let's put a transformer, with wires coming off it for different voltages. (I suggest at least 12, 5, and possibly 1.5 for trivial things and standby, and of course a separate ground.) This transformer only turns on if there's a drain on the wire.
As the room is wired for AC, bring the DC wire along with it, and put in a new kind of outlet for it, also. (Either one socket of each, or double-wide plugs with two of each.)
If you were really clever, these 'transformers' would be AC/DC sockets that take in 110 volts, transform the voltage, provide a DC socket, and provide DC out also. One socket like that, the rest having the DC wire run to them just like the AC.
There could even be some sort of length limit on the wire, so that if you are wiring a single circuit but need more than X feet of wire, you put in two transformers. Although most rooms shouldn't need it, because you should need less wires than the wall amount of the room.
And, of course, there would be outlet transformers that plug in over the outlet and convert the power, exactly like existing wallwarts, but use the new standard plug and standard voltages. Start selling those first, and people will start expecting the outlets in their new homes.
As for amps, the best bet would be to just require said devices to have fuses. AC seems to get along fine with just a central circuit break for each room, although that idea is kinda tricky in my system of randomly placed convertors in the walls. Perhaps have an internal breaker that would reset back on if the power was cut off to the converter, so if the DC convertor went out, you could flip the breaker to the room off and on to get it back?
Converting household AC to DC at the device is almost a good idea, it's at least not as bad as people think. The fact it's not centralized does not make it dumb, it's the fact it's completely non-standard and people tend to have five devices doing conversion at the same place that make it rather dumb. Just do it once per room, provide a low voltage option for standby and have it cut off when not in use, and it's fine.
(And this is completely ignoring the toxic PCBs that said convertors give off. Much much better to pump those into the walls where there are no people than the room.)
However, his tall stair-walking model is damn cool by itself, although it is still pretty bulky because people are sitting down. That was the point of the fully upright one, you sit in a harness and your legs go almost straight down, so you don't take up so much space, ideally just like six inches extra in the back for the motor (Or the front?I forget) and a few inches on the side for the wheels.
Which was one of the major selling points of the Segway, the size. The upright wheel-'chair' was just basically replacing the handle of the Segway with a harness you set in, and having the flippy stair-climbing wheels. (And now why am I thinking one of the Segway models had flippy wheels?)
This isn't some minor quibble or some partial functionality. They said 'HDCP'. HDCP requires a hardware key in a special chip. They did not bother to actually put such a chip on their video card, and hence HDCP can never work for them. Nor can their be a firmware upgrade.
It doesn't matter if they have some HDCP code in the chipset. It cannot output HDCP, which is, after all, a protocol, not some hypothetical standard, and hence it is not actually HDCP complient.
They only got away with it for this long because no one had damn HDCP-capable monitors so couldn't try to talk to the cards.
And, incidentally, it is completely ethical to purchase a wifi adapter for use in Linux, and when you get home and discover they've changed the chipset on you without changing the product name or id, to take it back. If they want that to stop, they can stop changing the damn chipset without changing the model number. It is fraud to represent two products as identical to each other when they are not.
Sadly, my S3 Virge has gone missing somewhere. Now all I have is some lame Trident TGUI-9680.
So, to recap:
Three diseases that could definately be removed this way: Ebola, Marburg, and bolutism
Three diseases with unknown causes that it is postulated or known they can be caused by pollutants: cancer, Alzheimers, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob
Two diseases that no one in Africa has to worry about: diabetes and smallpox
One disease that is not the list bit important: common cold
And one disease that cannot be affected by this: HIV/AIDS
It really looks like clean water could definately remove three(1), and reduce the chance of three others, out of seven of those diseases, and the other three are either not something African villagers get, or are not important enough to worry about. That looks like 85% to me, good job there disproving his point.
However, this is rather idiotic, because he wasn't talking to you. He was probably talking to someone who knew what diseases kill people in Africa, which you rather obviously don't. These diseases are two things: AIDS, and things found in the drinking water. That's the entire list that I know of. No one there dies of Creutzfeldt-Jakob, no one there dies of Marburg, (In fact, the amount of people who have those diseases in the whole world is basically negligable.) no one there dies of diabetes, no one there dies of Alzheimers. It's either AIDS, or it's something they got from the water. Otfen times we can't be more specific than that, because they die before they manage to get any medical care.
1) Of course, you have to make sure they don't get it from other places besides the water, like the food, but the electricity is to help take care of that.
He's constantly having to strip down his plans because they are too expensive.
He's got an amazing grasp of the possible and the useful, and the engineering skills to back them up, and he makes inventions to benefit the disabled and the sick. He's just got almost no grasp of the practical and money side of the equation.
Someone needs to give that guy ten billion dollars and watch him invent a device that lets blind people see or kills cancer.
People in it are the same height as people who can walk (Thus, he says, elimating a lot of prejudice.) and can go over bumps and up and down stairs. It doesn't take up any more horizontal space than a fat person.
Think of it as a segway made into a wheeled mech suit for the lower half of your body. And I read somewhere that he planned to slim it down once it caught on, so it would be basically leg braces with wheels at the end. People might come up to you, and you wouldn't even notice their legs aren't moving.
And this isn't some pipe dream, these things actually work, balancing the same way as the segway, with two wheels on each side, so they can flip forward and move you up or down stairs. They're just too expensive right now. He was hoping to use the same parts as the segway to cut the cost down,but that didn't work out, obviously.
I'd rather hunt with Dick Cheney than ride with Ted Kennedy.
Is that still valid if you remove the 'with's?