"As the country that was host to probably the greatest villain in the twentieth century there is going to be a lot of pressure to condemn things that could ever be even remotely like the horrible things that happened there during WWII."
The pressure has less to do with hosting the supposed "greatest villain in the twentieth century" and more to do with the fact that Germany was invaded and has since been occupied by foreign troops until the present day. And contrary to what is shown on the "History" Channel about the postwar events - with commentary about the Marshall Plan, Hershey bars and grainy footage of airplanes dropping off bales of cargo - the reality was much more harsh. Over 4 million Germans were used as slave labour by the Allies after the war. This went on for a period longer than the war's duration!
Meanwhile in Germany after the war in 1945 and 1946, international aid organizations were prevented from sending relief to German civilians. In 1945, the average German civilian received a starvation diet of 1200 calories - in the US and UK occupation zones. In 1946, the average German civilian received 1500 calories, still well below what is considered to be healthy.
Their press and government were also under strict Allied control.
THAT is where the pressure to self-flagellate comes from. Germans knew that if they didn't kowtow to their occupiers, their lives would be forfeit. These attitudes got passed down to the next generation.
Stalin was at least as bad as Hitler ever was. The difference between Russian and German attitudes about their past leaders is that one was occupied by enemies of the prior regime, the other wasn't.
"In Iraq and Afganistan, the problems are quite obviously ones of leadership."
Whose?
As far as I can see, as long as the US isn't willing to commit outright genocide, this war can continue forever. For every Iraqi killed (insurgent or otherwise), several of his cousins are motivated to plant a roadside bomb or take a pot shot at a US soldier. And they keep reproducing at above replacement rates.
And bingo for most of the other countries the US might want to invade and occupy.
For this weapon to be useful in anything other than the conventional invasion phase of another country, it will still require intelligence of what/who to fire at. That will require people on the ground, who will still be vulnerable to roadside bombs. And it will still require torture to get information out of people, winning yet more hearts and minds.
"Staying at home is HARD WORK and it's selfless. Don't demean it."
Exactly. Not only that, it's something that large numbers of women who are intelligent enough to do engineering or anything technically demanding SHOULD be doing. If they are out slaving away... for nothing, ultimately... and women who are too dumb to do those jobs are having more children, we'll end up with a world more and more retarded as a whole.
A world too stupid to invent a way to conquer other planets. A world filled with resource consumers and not enough people smart enough to figure out a way to harness more resources. If an asteroid hits us, that's it.
There will always be outliers. Looks like you are one.
The average increase in scores after retesting is a combined 30 points. That's not a lot.
And for all this supposed gaming of the SAT, the averages haven't gone up over time, and the distributions still seem rather normal at the far right of the curve. You'd expect a big bulge there if it was as easily gameable as you contend.
(The SAT was also re-centered twice, in 1995 and 2005.)
The SAT is a proxy IQ test. It's good enough that most high IQ societies will accept sufficient SAT scores in lieu of an IQ test. The only place IQ has been discredited is in the popular mind. The military and education system are still firm practitioners, simply because the concept works.
The SAT is taken in high school, way before any of these colleges can "work their magic".
Caltech has the pick of the high IQ (but smaller numbers of students), MIT follows, and then come the other Ivy League schools not far behind. See the attached link.
If you notice that IQ is roughly normally distributed (especially in a genetically similar population), look at the population of high IQ college age kids in the USA, and then compare to the populations of the elite US schools, you will see that they are very similar. It did not happen that way by accident.
Hell, put the student population of Caltech in your local community college and you'd find all sorts of revolutionary science suddenly springing from there too.
The US government prevents the corporate world nabbing the A-list by banning IQ tests in job interviews. Thus corporations use the proxy of school (or in the case of companies like M$, they ask questions that serve as a proxy IQ test). In the popular mind, the cause and effect gets confused between the brand (MIT/Harvard/Yale etc.) and the student body (high IQ/SAT scoring individuals). Universities don't exactly have a huge financial incentive to dissuade people either.
"All patents and copyrights are nonsense and do no social good. And the waters of Noah's flood were held in a vast vapor canopy were held up because the gravity was less in 3500 BC when the flood happened and the dinosaurs drowned)"
This is the strawman holding up your argument. Someone holding a position opposite to yours in this area is NOT arguing that there are aren't any good social or moral reasons for IP laws. They are arguing that the costs outweigh the benefits. And you will need to build a much stronger argument against that than the non sequitor you currently have there.
I can't speak for slashdot, but the biggest problem I can see with IP laws are as follows: 1. IP laws enable monopolies on the distribution of particularly entertaining works. 2. Entertainment and other information type creation and distribution businesses then become big business. 3. The income from those monopolies and economies of scale then enable the creation of works of entertainment that will be more competitive than most. 4. The distribution networks become oligopolies because they control the most addictive entertainment and can price competitors out of the market. 5. There is nothing stopping those entertainment and distribution oligopolies from effectively acting as a monopoly if they are owned and run by people with a similar agenda. 6. That effective monopoly can then practice censorship of information and propaganda they don't like under the guise of "that wouldn't sell" or if pressed "we think our censorship actually benefits society". Even if it would make money, they can choke the information by refusing to fund, promote, or distribute such works.
A prime example is the recent Mike Judge (creator of Beavis and Butthead, Office Space) movie Idiocracy. Google it, read some of the imdb reviews.
Most of this opposition to nuclear power seems to come from the US. Why?
On an international scale, between governments, deals are conducted by intelligent people. They want to exchange scarce, valuable goods for something of equal value. They don't want paper (or bits) that can be produced (and are, google M3 graph) at negligible cost UNLESS it is backed by something that is scarce and of equal value. That used to be gold, until the US became addicted to running trade surpluses and other countries began demanding gold instead of their inflated dollar (because there wasn't enough gold to cover the paper they were printing).
As a result of that, the US effectively became an empire. It has done that by switching a gold backing for the dollar with an oil backing. Before: don't trust paper dollars? Fine, we'll exchange them for gold. Now: don't trust paper dollars? Fine, go exchange them for oil. And the US (or rather, the Federal Reserve Bank) keeps printing more dollars at a cost of next to nothing, effectively taxing the rest of the world.
It has successively put more and more bases in oil producing countries, either through diplomacy (i.e. We'll secure your monarchy as long as you continue to take payment for oil in dollars, otherwise we'll either invade or do a similar deal with your enemy tribe) or outright invasion. See the world map of US bases. Compare to proven oil/uranium reserves. How did those bases get there? Starting to look like an empire by now?
So long as the US maintains control of the currency that most of the world's oil and uranium is sold for, it maintains an ability to tax the world, effectively making it an empire. And so long as it downplays this through propaganda, most the world doesn't really notice. They need oil, they toil to make something that holders of US dollars will want to buy. It's actually quite analogous to the Carthaginian empire and its monopoly on tin, except more efficient. And much like Carthage, Naval dominance is essential.
So why is nuclear played down? Well, the more addicted to oil the world is, the more the US can tax. Oil can still undercut nuclear costs. And when the switch to nuclear is made, look who has spy bases in Australia and borders Canada?
The only reason we think of WWII as "good versus evil" as fought by "the Greatest Generation" is because it gets repeated daily through books, film, computer games, etc. The winners wrote the history books... and for that matter, what passes for entertainment.
And just as well for them, because after they won they quickly organized show trials and hung the enemy leaders for "war crimes", conveniently ignoring their own. At the same time, they installed puppet governments, media and military bases in the countries they defeated, an occupation that continues to this day. Not to mention enslaving or killing millions of those occupied (oh whoops, that was "liberated". Queue up grainy footage of ticker tape parades.).
Yes, much the same "freedom" the USA is heartily extending to Iraq.
Makes you wonder what actually went on at Nuremberg and Guam, both during the trials and the executions. Luckily for the Allies, cell phones with video recording capabilities hadn't been invented yet.
"The truth is that anyone can be taught to be a reasonably good muscian, artist, or blacksmith and with proper motivation anyone can become great."
Only in the movies. In the real world, there are IQ thresholds for skills, and there are upper limits for IQ set by genetics. Only once you are past that will motivation even play a role.
Seeing that posts like this predominate redeems my faith in \.
(Or at least my faith in the commentariat. The signal to noise ratio of the posted articles is a lot worse. Between slashvertisements, FUD, and "news" that is years old, the SNR seems a lot lower.)
Unfortunately, I can already hear this article being loaded into the mental arsenal of alcoholics everywhere... I'm drinking for health reasons, STUDIES PROVE IT!
What a choice! So now America is free to get a new welfare statist, imperialist big government intent on monitoring every activity of its citizens, disarming them, and aiding the de facto conquest of the USA by Mexico through the lack of any open border policy.
If he smokes it, how will he have any left to sell you?
Seriously though, I swear a lot of these fads are to the computer world as business books are to the PHB world, the computer equivalent of "Seven Habits" or "Who Moved My Cheese". Their primary value is not to make you more productive. Instead, their purpose is to give you something you enjoy that makes you feel like your current mode of procrastination is more productive than, say, playing games or reading slashdot.
Have you read the Agile wiki? You could lose weeks in there learning all the jargon, or you could finish the job you know you really ought to be doing.
I would have thought it would be 8/9, not 1/9. I mean, come on, the whole business model of an MMORPG is to generate sustained income.
Total Profit = Total Number People Playing * (Purchase price + Average Months Subscribed * Monthly Revenue)
Multiply addictiveness and you multiply profit.
And what do you get out of it, really? Thousands of hours of your life down the tubes, with time that could have been spent on your other responsibilities such as family, teaching yourself useful skills, or time to reflect.
Video games are the opium dens of the 21st century.
I can see a carbon tax happening in other countries, but not the US any time soon. A carbon tax would encourage Americans to start seriously investigating energy alternatives (such as fusion, or fast breeder reactors).
That would topple the US empire. The US empire works because of three things: 1. US banks have a monopoly on creating US dollars through consumers borrowing money into existence. 2. The US military prevents nations with major oil supplies and without nuclear weapons from selling oil in anything other than US dollars. 3. As long as the world runs on oil for transport, and many other things, the rest of the world will be forced to make goods, perform services, or steal (difficult) from holders of US dollars.
Because more US dollars keep flooding into existence, (foreign) holders of US dollars get shafted because the dollar keeps dropping in value. This is how the rest of the world gets taxed, through inflation.
Russia is in a somewhat similar boat. It too has largish oil reserves and so doesn't want to lose the power that comes with that.
And that's why the US and Russia, despite having the muscle to do it, are putting forth such measly amounts into the ITER (1/11th each from memory). And the EU, and Japan are putting in such large efforts - because they don't have any oil reserves. Let's face it, if fusion gets off the ground, anyone with access to water to harvest deuterium can start converting mass into energy. And America would have to start making goods for itself again, instead of living large off the rest of the world.
The alternative is not going to the library. The alternative is using a search engine to find a good sampling of articles on the subject, seeing what facts are presented, seeing what the opposing opinions say about those facts, making a judgment as to the reliability of the facts on the table, and seeing which arguments best hold up considering those facts. *
While this takes time, it is of course way better than wikipedia, provided that you have the intelligence to do a good job of the above. If you don't have the smarts to do that, get a smart friend you trust to do the above.
Wikipedia is very useful. Often one of the most useful things is its references to primary sources. But it should never be treated as anything close to gospel, especially for anything remotely politically charged (which pretty much limits it to hard sciences). It's far too easy for politically motivated people with time on their hands to sway things.
*This assumes that your search engine is not politically biased, which is probably a bad assumption.
-100 missions where you patrol an area and nothing happens. -1 mission when an IED goes off, killing half your team. You have no way of figuring out who did it.
It'd be a far better game from the insurgent side. -Find the perfect location to plant your IED after watching the patrols. -Snipe the patrol, after waiting for your perfect opportunity. -Infiltrate your local police department, and kill all the traitorous scum who have sold out to the occupying forces. You could find the secret police uniform stash, kind of like that one mission in GTA.
Tell that to Daniel Brandt, creator of scroogle.org.
Google is at least several orders of magnitude more evil than Microsoft, the only difference is PR.
Brin and Page started immediately with the Orwellian doublespeak. Like the US government naming their War Department the Department of Defense, they make their motto "Don't be evil", while doing all manner of evil things. They record everything you've ever searched on, your emails on gmail, they know who your friends are, they actively hire and work with the NSA and CIA, they decide what are newsworthy sources, what sections of news you care about, and what should be news on any given day.
And while all this is going on, they are running defense by publicizing that google refuses subpoenas. How noble! As if that is going to make the slightest difference to how the government tracks the citizenry, Democrat or Republican. The only difference is that the illusion of google being "unmicrosoft-like" is maintained. If the government wants the information, it's going to get it.
And as far as the government is concerned, if google didn't exist it would have to be invented. The one stop shop of information gathering, profiling and opinion shaping. Reality to most people is rapidly becoming the first 10 search results of any google search and the daily google news page. That's a scary thought.
Just as scary is the profiling. It would be trivial to compile a list of crimes and or suspects, and match the reason for suspicion/type of crime with their search history. Just do a large enough sample, maybe ten thousand people. Correlate the search terms with the crimes and suspects. Now for the general populace, add up the frequencies of search terms, multiply by the high correlations found in your previous experiment, and you have an easily ranked list of who to watch.
The moment there is large scale unrest, guess who gets a one way ticket to Guantanamo, guilty or otherwise. It's just like Stalin executing the Polish Officers at Katyn forest, only more precise. Rather than liquidate anyone who could mount resistance, this way you can leave the docile (or paranoid) intelligentsia. You will need someone to run your factories, after all.
Google is capable of orders of magnitude more evil than Microsoft. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. But they have a nice uncluttered UI, and different colored letters! How cute! And isn't google earth cool!
In upgrading a mission critical MS Access database, I first looked at MySQL, then after a month more of research I ended up going with Postgres (aka PostgreSQL). It will always be free due to the BSD license. It does what a database should do, supports things like referential integrity without the need for hacked on tables ala MySQL, and has few gotchas. Seems very quick to me.
And did I mention free? If you have a boss who is a real tightwad and doesn't understand computers let alone databases, Postgres is a godsend. Especially if he'd rather pay your salary than Larry Ellison. Some bosses would rather pay $100k in employee salary than spend $10k on software. I'm not saying that Postgres will take $100k worth of employee salary to figure out, I'm just making the point that there are bosses who only like to fork out money for tangible things, like hardware or employees. If you need to accomplish something at work and don't want to go through the stress of going hat in hand to your boss to buy something he will not understand and begrudge you for, Postgres is just what you need.
The market leaders have had to put out a free intro product to compete. So what. Eventually your needs may expand, and then Ellison or Gates (or MySQL) start holding you up by the ankles to see how much money drops out. Postgres will still likely be happily chugging along. Any features it lacks will probably come online by the time you need them anyway.
So, you might have to spend a month or three learning all the setup and maintenance aspects of Postgres (and Linux or FreeBSD, if you are unfamiliar with them). The good thing is, you only have to learn it once. Then you are up to speed and you should be as effective as with any other RDBMS. Now you can roll out highly scalable, rock solid internal business applications. I'm not even a CS major. I'm just a EE who has taken 3 or 4 CS classes, none of which involved databases.
Not everything is amazon.com. It may not be glamorous, but there are huge numbers of small - large businesses and departments struggling away using Excel for things that need a database, dealing with questionable data and lots of double entry (or more!) due to inherent problems with flat files. Sure, you could use Access, but it's a bit like buying a goldfish bowl for your new pet baby shark. Or you could go with MSDE or whatever "free" intro thingy Oracle has. But why would you bother? Postgres does all that and scales to most conceivable sizes for such businesses.
I've found the support to be very good, from both IRC and the mailing list. Just make sure you do some googling, RTFMing and possibly buying one of the existing books out there.
In fact, I think that Postgres really only lacks a couple things. One is a really good book. The other is the name, which is confusing. If you need to google for info, PostgreSQL gets the most hits.
Slashdot Mirror
"As the country that was host to probably the greatest villain in the twentieth century there is going to be a lot of pressure to condemn things that could ever be even remotely like the horrible things that happened there during WWII."
n _POWs#American_food_policy_in_Germany_shortly_afte r_the_war
The pressure has less to do with hosting the supposed "greatest villain in the twentieth century" and more to do with the fact that Germany was invaded and has since been occupied by foreign troops until the present day. And contrary to what is shown on the "History" Channel about the postwar events - with commentary about the Marshall Plan, Hershey bars and grainy footage of airplanes dropping off bales of cargo - the reality was much more harsh. Over 4 million Germans were used as slave labour by the Allies after the war. This went on for a period longer than the war's duration!
Meanwhile in Germany after the war in 1945 and 1946, international aid organizations were prevented from sending relief to German civilians. In 1945, the average German civilian received a starvation diet of 1200 calories - in the US and UK occupation zones. In 1946, the average German civilian received 1500 calories, still well below what is considered to be healthy.
Their press and government were also under strict Allied control.
THAT is where the pressure to self-flagellate comes from. Germans knew that if they didn't kowtow to their occupiers, their lives would be forfeit. These attitudes got passed down to the next generation.
Stalin was at least as bad as Hitler ever was. The difference between Russian and German attitudes about their past leaders is that one was occupied by enemies of the prior regime, the other wasn't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower_and_Germa
"In Iraq and Afganistan, the problems are quite obviously ones of leadership."
n _iraq.html
Whose?
As far as I can see, as long as the US isn't willing to commit outright genocide, this war can continue forever. For every Iraqi killed (insurgent or otherwise), several of his cousins are motivated to plant a roadside bomb or take a pot shot at a US soldier. And they keep reproducing at above replacement rates.
And bingo for most of the other countries the US might want to invade and occupy.
For this weapon to be useful in anything other than the conventional invasion phase of another country, it will still require intelligence of what/who to fire at. That will require people on the ground, who will still be vulnerable to roadside bombs. And it will still require torture to get information out of people, winning yet more hearts and minds.
The War Nerd has a good article on this.
http://www.exile.ru/2006-November-17/how_to_win_i
"Staying at home is HARD WORK and it's selfless. Don't demean it."
Exactly. Not only that, it's something that large numbers of women who are intelligent enough to do engineering or anything technically demanding SHOULD be doing. If they are out slaving away... for nothing, ultimately... and women who are too dumb to do those jobs are having more children, we'll end up with a world more and more retarded as a whole.
A world too stupid to invent a way to conquer other planets. A world filled with resource consumers and not enough people smart enough to figure out a way to harness more resources. If an asteroid hits us, that's it.
There will always be outliers. Looks like you are one.
n ews_info/cbsenior/yr2006/national-report.pdf
The average increase in scores after retesting is a combined 30 points. That's not a lot.
And for all this supposed gaming of the SAT, the averages haven't gone up over time, and the distributions still seem rather normal at the far right of the curve. You'd expect a big bulge there if it was as easily gameable as you contend.
(The SAT was also re-centered twice, in 1995 and 2005.)
http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/about/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT
The SAT is a proxy IQ test. It's good enough that most high IQ societies will accept sufficient SAT scores in lieu of an IQ test. The only place IQ has been discredited is in the popular mind. The military and education system are still firm practitioners, simply because the concept works.
The SAT is taken in high school, way before any of these colleges can "work their magic".
Caltech has the pick of the high IQ (but smaller numbers of students), MIT follows, and then come the other Ivy League schools not far behind. See the attached link.
If you notice that IQ is roughly normally distributed (especially in a genetically similar population), look at the population of high IQ college age kids in the USA, and then compare to the populations of the elite US schools, you will see that they are very similar. It did not happen that way by accident.
Hell, put the student population of Caltech in your local community college and you'd find all sorts of revolutionary science suddenly springing from there too.
The US government prevents the corporate world nabbing the A-list by banning IQ tests in job interviews. Thus corporations use the proxy of school (or in the case of companies like M$, they ask questions that serve as a proxy IQ test). In the popular mind, the cause and effect gets confused between the brand (MIT/Harvard/Yale etc.) and the student body (high IQ/SAT scoring individuals). Universities don't exactly have a huge financial incentive to dissuade people either.
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V111/N41/usnews.41n.html
"All patents and copyrights are nonsense and do no social good. And the waters of Noah's flood were held in a vast vapor canopy were held up because the gravity was less in 3500 BC when the flood happened and the dinosaurs drowned)"
This is the strawman holding up your argument. Someone holding a position opposite to yours in this area is NOT arguing that there are aren't any good social or moral reasons for IP laws. They are arguing that the costs outweigh the benefits. And you will need to build a much stronger argument against that than the non sequitor you currently have there.
I can't speak for slashdot, but the biggest problem I can see with IP laws are as follows:
1. IP laws enable monopolies on the distribution of particularly entertaining works.
2. Entertainment and other information type creation and distribution businesses then become big business.
3. The income from those monopolies and economies of scale then enable the creation of works of entertainment that will be more competitive than most.
4. The distribution networks become oligopolies because they control the most addictive entertainment and can price competitors out of the market.
5. There is nothing stopping those entertainment and distribution oligopolies from effectively acting as a monopoly if they are owned and run by people with a similar agenda.
6. That effective monopoly can then practice censorship of information and propaganda they don't like under the guise of "that wouldn't sell" or if pressed "we think our censorship actually benefits society". Even if it would make money, they can choke the information by refusing to fund, promote, or distribute such works.
A prime example is the recent Mike Judge (creator of Beavis and Butthead, Office Space) movie Idiocracy. Google it, read some of the imdb reviews.
Most of this opposition to nuclear power seems to come from the US. Why?
p g
On an international scale, between governments, deals are conducted by intelligent people. They want to exchange scarce, valuable goods for something of equal value. They don't want paper (or bits) that can be produced (and are, google M3 graph) at negligible cost UNLESS it is backed by something that is scarce and of equal value. That used to be gold, until the US became addicted to running trade surpluses and other countries began demanding gold instead of their inflated dollar (because there wasn't enough gold to cover the paper they were printing).
As a result of that, the US effectively became an empire. It has done that by switching a gold backing for the dollar with an oil backing. Before: don't trust paper dollars? Fine, we'll exchange them for gold. Now: don't trust paper dollars? Fine, go exchange them for oil. And the US (or rather, the Federal Reserve Bank) keeps printing more dollars at a cost of next to nothing, effectively taxing the rest of the world.
It has successively put more and more bases in oil producing countries, either through diplomacy (i.e. We'll secure your monarchy as long as you continue to take payment for oil in dollars, otherwise we'll either invade or do a similar deal with your enemy tribe) or outright invasion. See the world map of US bases. Compare to proven oil/uranium reserves. How did those bases get there? Starting to look like an empire by now?
http://respectsacredland.org/no-us-bases/draft3.j
So long as the US maintains control of the currency that most of the world's oil and uranium is sold for, it maintains an ability to tax the world, effectively making it an empire. And so long as it downplays this through propaganda, most the world doesn't really notice. They need oil, they toil to make something that holders of US dollars will want to buy. It's actually quite analogous to the Carthaginian empire and its monopoly on tin, except more efficient. And much like Carthage, Naval dominance is essential.
So why is nuclear played down? Well, the more addicted to oil the world is, the more the US can tax. Oil can still undercut nuclear costs. And when the switch to nuclear is made, look who has spy bases in Australia and borders Canada?
Well said.
The only reason we think of WWII as "good versus evil" as fought by "the Greatest Generation" is because it gets repeated daily through books, film, computer games, etc. The winners wrote the history books... and for that matter, what passes for entertainment.
And just as well for them, because after they won they quickly organized show trials and hung the enemy leaders for "war crimes", conveniently ignoring their own. At the same time, they installed puppet governments, media and military bases in the countries they defeated, an occupation that continues to this day. Not to mention enslaving or killing millions of those occupied (oh whoops, that was "liberated". Queue up grainy footage of ticker tape parades.).
Yes, much the same "freedom" the USA is heartily extending to Iraq.
Makes you wonder what actually went on at Nuremberg and Guam, both during the trials and the executions. Luckily for the Allies, cell phones with video recording capabilities hadn't been invented yet.
"The truth is that anyone can be taught to be a reasonably good muscian, artist, or blacksmith and with proper motivation anyone can become great." Only in the movies. In the real world, there are IQ thresholds for skills, and there are upper limits for IQ set by genetics. Only once you are past that will motivation even play a role.
Seeing that posts like this predominate redeems my faith in \. (Or at least my faith in the commentariat. The signal to noise ratio of the posted articles is a lot worse. Between slashvertisements, FUD, and "news" that is years old, the SNR seems a lot lower.) Unfortunately, I can already hear this article being loaded into the mental arsenal of alcoholics everywhere... I'm drinking for health reasons, STUDIES PROVE IT!
"WE VOTED OUT THE PARTY IN POWER."
What a choice! So now America is free to get a new welfare statist, imperialist big government intent on monitoring every activity of its citizens, disarming them, and aiding the de facto conquest of the USA by Mexico through the lack of any open border policy.
If he smokes it, how will he have any left to sell you?
Seriously though, I swear a lot of these fads are to the computer world as business books are to the PHB world, the computer equivalent of "Seven Habits" or "Who Moved My Cheese". Their primary value is not to make you more productive. Instead, their purpose is to give you something you enjoy that makes you feel like your current mode of procrastination is more productive than, say, playing games or reading slashdot.
Have you read the Agile wiki? You could lose weeks in there learning all the jargon, or you could finish the job you know you really ought to be doing.
I would have thought it would be 8/9, not 1/9. I mean, come on, the whole business model of an MMORPG is to generate sustained income. Total Profit = Total Number People Playing * (Purchase price + Average Months Subscribed * Monthly Revenue) Multiply addictiveness and you multiply profit. And what do you get out of it, really? Thousands of hours of your life down the tubes, with time that could have been spent on your other responsibilities such as family, teaching yourself useful skills, or time to reflect. Video games are the opium dens of the 21st century.
I can see a carbon tax happening in other countries, but not the US any time soon. A carbon tax would encourage Americans to start seriously investigating energy alternatives (such as fusion, or fast breeder reactors).
That would topple the US empire. The US empire works because of three things:
1. US banks have a monopoly on creating US dollars through consumers borrowing money into existence.
2. The US military prevents nations with major oil supplies and without nuclear weapons from selling oil in anything other than US dollars.
3. As long as the world runs on oil for transport, and many other things, the rest of the world will be forced to make goods, perform services, or steal (difficult) from holders of US dollars.
Because more US dollars keep flooding into existence, (foreign) holders of US dollars get shafted because the dollar keeps dropping in value. This is how the rest of the world gets taxed, through inflation.
Russia is in a somewhat similar boat. It too has largish oil reserves and so doesn't want to lose the power that comes with that.
And that's why the US and Russia, despite having the muscle to do it, are putting forth such measly amounts into the ITER (1/11th each from memory). And the EU, and Japan are putting in such large efforts - because they don't have any oil reserves. Let's face it, if fusion gets off the ground, anyone with access to water to harvest deuterium can start converting mass into energy. And America would have to start making goods for itself again, instead of living large off the rest of the world.
The alternative is not going to the library. The alternative is using a search engine to find a good sampling of articles on the subject, seeing what facts are presented, seeing what the opposing opinions say about those facts, making a judgment as to the reliability of the facts on the table, and seeing which arguments best hold up considering those facts. *
While this takes time, it is of course way better than wikipedia, provided that you have the intelligence to do a good job of the above. If you don't have the smarts to do that, get a smart friend you trust to do the above.
Wikipedia is very useful. Often one of the most useful things is its references to primary sources. But it should never be treated as anything close to gospel, especially for anything remotely politically charged (which pretty much limits it to hard sciences). It's far too easy for politically motivated people with time on their hands to sway things.
*This assumes that your search engine is not politically biased, which is probably a bad assumption.
Exactly. Realism would suck.
-100 missions where you patrol an area and nothing happens.
-1 mission when an IED goes off, killing half your team. You have no way of figuring out who did it.
It'd be a far better game from the insurgent side.
-Find the perfect location to plant your IED after watching the patrols.
-Snipe the patrol, after waiting for your perfect opportunity.
-Infiltrate your local police department, and kill all the traitorous scum who have sold out to the occupying forces. You could find the secret police uniform stash, kind of like that one mission in GTA.
Tell that to Daniel Brandt, creator of scroogle.org.
Google is at least several orders of magnitude more evil than Microsoft, the only difference is PR.
Brin and Page started immediately with the Orwellian doublespeak. Like the US government naming their War Department the Department of Defense, they make their motto "Don't be evil", while doing all manner of evil things. They record everything you've ever searched on, your emails on gmail, they know who your friends are, they actively hire and work with the NSA and CIA, they decide what are newsworthy sources, what sections of news you care about, and what should be news on any given day.
And while all this is going on, they are running defense by publicizing that google refuses subpoenas. How noble! As if that is going to make the slightest difference to how the government tracks the citizenry, Democrat or Republican. The only difference is that the illusion of google being "unmicrosoft-like" is maintained. If the government wants the information, it's going to get it.
And as far as the government is concerned, if google didn't exist it would have to be invented. The one stop shop of information gathering, profiling and opinion shaping. Reality to most people is rapidly becoming the first 10 search results of any google search and the daily google news page. That's a scary thought.
Just as scary is the profiling. It would be trivial to compile a list of crimes and or suspects, and match the reason for suspicion/type of crime with their search history. Just do a large enough sample, maybe ten thousand people. Correlate the search terms with the crimes and suspects. Now for the general populace, add up the frequencies of search terms, multiply by the high correlations found in your previous experiment, and you have an easily ranked list of who to watch.
The moment there is large scale unrest, guess who gets a one way ticket to Guantanamo, guilty or otherwise. It's just like Stalin executing the Polish Officers at Katyn forest, only more precise. Rather than liquidate anyone who could mount resistance, this way you can leave the docile (or paranoid) intelligentsia. You will need someone to run your factories, after all.
Google is capable of orders of magnitude more evil than Microsoft. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. But they have a nice uncluttered UI, and different colored letters! How cute! And isn't google earth cool!
This article should mention Postgres.
In upgrading a mission critical MS Access database, I first looked at MySQL, then after a month more of research I ended up going with Postgres (aka PostgreSQL). It will always be free due to the BSD license. It does what a database should do, supports things like referential integrity without the need for hacked on tables ala MySQL, and has few gotchas. Seems very quick to me.
And did I mention free? If you have a boss who is a real tightwad and doesn't understand computers let alone databases, Postgres is a godsend. Especially if he'd rather pay your salary than Larry Ellison. Some bosses would rather pay $100k in employee salary than spend $10k on software. I'm not saying that Postgres will take $100k worth of employee salary to figure out, I'm just making the point that there are bosses who only like to fork out money for tangible things, like hardware or employees. If you need to accomplish something at work and don't want to go through the stress of going hat in hand to your boss to buy something he will not understand and begrudge you for, Postgres is just what you need.
The market leaders have had to put out a free intro product to compete. So what. Eventually your needs may expand, and then Ellison or Gates (or MySQL) start holding you up by the ankles to see how much money drops out. Postgres will still likely be happily chugging along. Any features it lacks will probably come online by the time you need them anyway.
So, you might have to spend a month or three learning all the setup and maintenance aspects of Postgres (and Linux or FreeBSD, if you are unfamiliar with them). The good thing is, you only have to learn it once. Then you are up to speed and you should be as effective as with any other RDBMS. Now you can roll out highly scalable, rock solid internal business applications. I'm not even a CS major. I'm just a EE who has taken 3 or 4 CS classes, none of which involved databases.
Not everything is amazon.com. It may not be glamorous, but there are huge numbers of small - large businesses and departments struggling away using Excel for things that need a database, dealing with questionable data and lots of double entry (or more!) due to inherent problems with flat files. Sure, you could use Access, but it's a bit like buying a goldfish bowl for your new pet baby shark. Or you could go with MSDE or whatever "free" intro thingy Oracle has. But why would you bother? Postgres does all that and scales to most conceivable sizes for such businesses.
I've found the support to be very good, from both IRC and the mailing list. Just make sure you do some googling, RTFMing and possibly buying one of the existing books out there.
In fact, I think that Postgres really only lacks a couple things. One is a really good book. The other is the name, which is confusing. If you need to google for info, PostgreSQL gets the most hits.