No, he put the hard drive in a big aluminium case, with those gel cooling bags surrounding the drive. Sorry, I just spoiled the whole thing. That's pretty much all it says.
Also, check the Sunday newspaper next week. They often put stories about important events from the week in the Sunday newspaper. Take a look around page seven, if it's a really big event, it might be on page five or even page three. If you can't find any news stories about it in the Sunday newspaper, check the classified ads. There might be an ad in there congratulating the victors.
Other information sources you might like to try are: wait for the 2009 Webster's Encyclopedia to be printed. It should have the 2008 election results in it. (You could try the new-fangled "online encyclopedia called Wikipedia, but it is known to be unreliable.) Or try casually standing around a water cooler in an office building. Somebody is likely to turn up for a drink of water and say "How about them Patriots, eh?" or whatever team it is you're supporting. Then you'll know.
I'm a bit disappointed that you can't kill kids in the game
Somebody should make a mod-pack where the children are replaced by baby goats, and you can kill the kids. Who could possibly complain about baby goats being killed in a video game?
Nah, that wouldn't work. He would have to have the privately hired fire truck and police force drive on public roads built from money that was STOLEN from his neighbors AT GUNPOINT. And if the fire truck company or security company doesn't do their job, he will have to use the SOCIALIZED COURT SYSTEM presided over by judges paid with money STOLEN from his neighbors. Sigh. Some people just don't think things through very well.
No, you've got him all wrong. He's a real individual. He single-handedly built the maternity hospital that he was born in. He built it out of stone he quarried all by himself, and wood that he cut and sawed on his own. He built the machine that goes "bing" and trained all the doctors. Then after all that, he was born.
When he was four years old, he built a school on land he owned and trained some teachers to staff it. Then he went to school there. Of course he made his own crayons out of wax collected from beehives he built himself, and dyes he dug up from some of his other land. He also cut down some of a forest to make paper for his school textbooks, which of course he wrote himself.
He mined some silicon sand, made a computer, wrote his own operating system in a language he invented all by himself. He then used his own personal internet to post his message about self-sufficiency, and how any sort of dependency on others is exactly equal to slavery and chains. Of course he posted it on his own Slashdot, which he wrote himself.
And then you came along and made fun of him, you insensitive clod.
I think it's pretty obvious that they're shooting themselves in the foot here, but I think this also begs the question: What defines internet access?
No, the question is, is our children learning? Your sentence makes no sense to people who know what "begs the question" means. You seem to think it means "raises the question", but it doesn't. Begging the question is making a circular statement to support an argument. The statement relies upon itself as proof. For example, the statement "Global warming is terrible because it's really bad" is begging the question.
EA bought Bioware, so a ban on their forums would also ban you from playing the upcoming Star Wars MMO as well.
Really? You think they'll ban you from all forthcoming releases as well? How will that work? Will somebody be stupid enough to get banned from the forums, then buy another game from EA, and sign up for the new game with the banned account? People will probably start sock puppet accounts so that their main account doesn't get banned. Anybody who buys Bioware and then signs up with a banned account is pretty thick anyway.
Here's a serious question. Why did the US dollar suddenly shoot up against all the other currencies when this global financial crisis started? The USA is where the gigantic financial crisis happened. So why is the US dollar suddenly so much higher than it was before? Any economists out there?
That sounds interesting. Does it run off a live CD? Or do you have to install Windows first, then install nlite, then make the super-install-disk, then do the easy Windows install? Because if you have to install Windows and do a whole bunch of other stuff before you can do a quick and easy Windows install, why not stick with your first Windows install?
Have you seen those "Robot Wars" competitions? They have remote controlled robots fighting each other with weapons such as spikes, hammers, and saws.
If you accept that those are robots, then you must also accept that a Predator UAV armed with a Hellfire missile is a robot. It's the same thing, a remote controlled fighting machine. The difference is that the TV robots only fight other robots. The Predator drones fight people. Therefore, we already have robots that break the laws of robotics. Here, welcome your new robotic overlords.
One day in the near future at Microsoft's new data center... "Okay boss! We've stuck all our servers in the shipping containers! Everything's going great!" "Good work. Let's go to Taco Bell and feast on tacos to celebrate!"
At taco bell... "Mmmm boss this is taco-licious!" "You deserve it kid! You got all those servers into those containers right quick!"
Meanwhile, back at the data center... Beep! Beep! Beep! The night air is pierced by the sound of a large truck reversing. Soon, the truck which arrived empty, leaves in a cloud of diesel smoke with a shipping container full of servers on the back. "Hey Sergei, it was nice of Microsoft to put all their servers into a shipping container to make them easier to steal!" "Yes Pamela, those suckers at Microsoft must have thought long and hard about this."
CERN advisory: Systems administrators are warned of a truck-related denial of service attack. Thieves load a container full of servers onto a truck and drive away.
I like to use git because I find it easy to make a branch for testing out some new code, and easy to merge the branch into the trunk if I want to keep it. Here are some aliases I wrote that cover pretty much all the git I use. If I decide to change version control systems, I can change the aliases.
alias vca='git add.';
alias vcb='git branch';
alias vcc='git commit -a';
alias vcd='git diff';
alias vcm='git merge';
alias vco='git checkout';
As for choosing between git and subversion, why not try both? It's pretty unlikely that somebody will tell you what you like best. You have to find out for yourself. Considering that they are free software, easy to install, and pretty easy to use, you can try both and see if one of them seems better to you. I tried both, and I chose git. But I don't mind if other people use subversion, RCS, SCCS, or whatever they feel like using.
Subversion and git have different models. Subversion has a client-server model with the repository accessible by http. Git uses a distributed model, with each user getting their own copy of the repository, and the possibility of merging things from one repository to another. This might make git work better if the users' computers aren't always able to connect to a remote repository.
Thanks mate, you're doing a great job. I downloaded Parrot and gave it a go. Perl6 is looking good. But, Parrot tells me that Larry got one of his perl6 programs wrong. If you look at Apocalypse 12, Larry has this:
class Point { has $.x; has $.y is rw; method clear () { $.x = 0; $.y = 0; } }
Note that x is read-only, and y is read-write. I assume that if you don't put rw after an attribute, it's read-only. Otherwise, there's not much point having rw. Later in the example program, Larry wrote this:
$point.x = -1; # illegal, default is read-only $point.clear; # reset to 0,0
The first line is illegal, because you can't change the read-only value of x. But the second line calls clear(), which tries to change the value of x. At this point, Parrot barfs with: "Cannot assign to readonly variable
current instr.: 'parrot;Point;clear' pc 609 (EVAL_13:181)" and then lots more barf. So is this correct? If you make an object attribute which is rw, you can change it either in a method or by calling $object.attrname(42) for example, but if it's not rw, you can't change it ever, even in a method.
Is Apocalypse 12 wrong when it has a method that changes a non-rw attribute? Or is the compiler wrong in not letting the method change the attribute? I think Apocalypse 12 is wrong, because since rw means read-write, the lack of rw should be read-only. And read-only is not the same as private, so a method should not be able to change a read-only attribute.
Anyway, that's the answer to "Will we ever see Parrot?". You can see it right now. Or wait until Tuesday like chromatic says.
The move towards VMs is going to make programming easier. Everybody saw what happened with Java and write once, run anywhere. It didn't quite work out, but it was pretty close. If we can have perl code being compiled into bytecode, that'll give us speed improvements comparable to switching from CGI to mod_perl or FastCGI. Since so many people talk about the speed of running code, that's important.
If the same VM can run code from different languages, that's going to produce some very interesting effects. Why have a language flamewar when the VM can run any language? Instead of endless flaming, we can encourage people to use whichever language they like to write their code, then get the VM to do the dirty work.
In the article, it says that in the future, operating systems might ship with a generic VM that can run code from any language. This is a great idea, when you link it with the idea of high-level-language VMs. The more code you write, the more bugs you get. High level languages let you do the same thing with less code. Less code means less bugs.
Imagine what we can achieve when we have VMs available to run pure functional code, and you link that with the advances in storage technology. Since a pure function returns the same result given the same parameters, we can create something like rainbow tables to cache the function results. This is going to be so much better than calling malloc and free and using pointers.
The best thing we can do is attempt to convince people and that starts first and foremost with acknowledging the legitimacy of their position
What if their position isn't legitimate? Consider this scenario: A terrorist gets on a flight to the USA. On arriving in the USA, he gets his laptop seized for searching, but he is still allowed into the country. Then he wants to catch his connecting flight to Darwin Minnesota to blow up the largest ball of string in the world. Because you see, this terrorist group is deeply offended by people worshiping large balls of string. Or wool. But he's on the no-fly list, so they don't let him on the plane. Victory for the DHS policies and procedures! Right?
Wrong! The terrorist notices a nearby sign on a bus which reads "Come to Cawker City Kansas and see the largest ball of twine in the world!". He realises that since he's at Kansas City International Airport, he's probably already in Kansas! Or at least really close! Surely! And twine, that's pretty much like string! So he gets on the bus, goes to Cawker City Kansas, and blows up the largest ball of twine in the world.
This string-related tragedy would not be stopped by the DHS's policies of seizing laptops from terrorists or putting people (including terrorists) on no-fly lists. How can anybody think that seizing laptops or putting people on lists will stop terrorists? Arrest them, give them a fair trial, and if they're guilty, put them in jail. That might work!
Well, for starteers, assign most of the cost of our military to oil, since their main job is to keep volatile parts of the world stable enough to ship oil to us.
Then, assign the cost of cleaning up mercury pollution in most of the nation's lakes and treating a good percentage of repiratory illnesses to coal.
You've calculated your costs of using fossil fuels. Let's call the costs C. Now add up the benefits of using fossil fuel. Let's call that B. Therefore, your net benefit from using fossil fuels is NB = B - C. Do you think that NB is positive or negative? I think it's positive. In other words, using fossil fuels is overall good for humanity.
There are a lot of people who seem to want everybody else to change their behavior, such as by not using fossil fuels any more. Why would people stop using fossil fuels when they receive a net benefit from using them?
Secondly, the best way to get people to stop doing something is not to hector, berate, and frighten them into stopping. It's to give them something better to do. People stopped using whale oil in their lamps because something better came along. They didn't just turn their lamps off and say "Oh well, we have to sit in the dark now because otherwise whales will go extinct".
That's why it's much better to put your energy into developing alternatives to things you don't like. Like Solyndra thin film solar cells for example. Making those solar panels might well cause a decrease in fossil fuel usage. Global warming campaigns use politics and fear to try to change things. Much better to use technology, science, and engineering to provide alternatives that are better all around.
This is the one I'd go for. Toshiba press release: "Toshiba to Launch Innovative Rechargeable Battery Business" dated 11 December, 2007. From Toshiba press release to slashdot in under 10 months. Impressive!
It's pretty much the same thing, all the specs are in there like voltage, capacity, size, weight.
NEVER PUT ANYTHING IN A LINK THAT MODIFIES DATA. NEVER. EVER.
What about if you're running a stock market price website? In your database, you store some html pages for each ticker symbol. When the user goes to http://example.org/stocks/get-latest/ENRON it checks if the last update time on the pages in the database is more than 1 minute ago. If the pages are less than one minute old, it serves the pages from the database. If the pages are more than 1 minute old, it gets the new stock data from the stock database, and makes new pages and puts them in the page database. Then it serves the fresh pages.
Using the link might modify the data, by making it up-to-date. What would you do? Program it so that the user has to submit a form to get current data, or they can only get old data if they got there by a link? Why can't they just follow a link to get the information they want? Obviously you would want to make the user submit a form, since you said "NEVER! EVER! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!". Look! Yahoo's doing it!
Set up your captcha so that people can tell which site it's from. Put the correct site name in the captcha, like this:
SeCreT TeXt from example.org
People might still answer the captcha, but at least they'll know they're helping spammers. And other people can tell by looking at the captcha that it's on the wrong site, therefore the site is probably bad in some way.
You've still got the energy cost of disposing of the CO2, by burying it or whatever. It has to be taken out of the carbon cycle completely.
Then only way you can take it completely out of the carbon cycle is to blast it into space on a rocket. Carbon, being the fourth most abundant element in the universe, is everywhere on the planet. Fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, are made of fossilized plants and animals. In other words, fossil fuels are just as much part of the carbon cycle as carbon dioxide, plants, limestone, marble, kittens, and methane. Think about how the carbon got into the coal. It's part of a cycle. A very long cycle.
Ryskin wrote about methane erupting from the ocean like a volcano. Probably there would be very high concentrations of methane in the atmosphere just above the middle of the ocean. At the edges of the ocean, methane would pour out across the land. Somewhere at the front of the methane fog cloud on the land, the methane/air mixture would get to about 5-15%, and be the right conditions for exploding. If the methane levels get over 15%, it won't explode, it'll just burn.
CH4 + 2 O2 => CO2 + 2 H2O.
You need twice as much oxygen as methane to get a clean burn. Since the atmosphere is normally about 20% oxygen, anything over 10% methane burning or exploding, is going to cause a localised shortage of oxygen. The methane cloud rolls in, explodes or burns, and suddenly, all the oxygen is gone from that area. Yow. It'll be like the ocean is tossing fuel-air bombs at the land.
And in case you think you can "save the planet" by not burning any more coal, read this carefully: "Upon release of a significant portion of the dissolved methane,
the ocean settles down, and the entire sequence of events (i.e., development of anoxia, accumulation of dissolved methane, the metastable
state, eruption) begins anew. No external cause is required to bring
about a methane-driven eruption--its mechanism is self-contained, and
implies that eruptions are likely to occur repeatedly at the same
location." Yes that's right, it just happens naturally.
Really fascinating reading in Ryskin's paper. Here's another chunk:
"Because methane is isotopically light, its fast release must result
in a negative carbon isotope excursion in the geological record. Knowing the magnitude of the excursion, one can estimate the amount of
methane that could have produced it. Such calculations (prompted by
the methane-hydrate-dissociation model, but equally applicable here)
have been performed for several global events in the geological record;
the results range from 10^18 to 10^19 grams of released methane (e.g., Katz
et al., 1999; Kennedy et al., 2001; de Wit et al., 2002). These are very
large amounts: the total carbon content of today's terrestrial biomass
is ~ 2 x 10^18 grams. Nevertheless, relatively small regions of the deep
ocean could contain such amounts of dissolved methane; e.g., the Black
Sea alone (volume ~ 0.4 x 10^-3 of the ocean total; maximum depth
only 2.2 km) could hold, at saturation, ~ 0.5 x 10^18 grams. A similar region
of the deep ocean could contain much more (the amount grows quadratically with depth). Released in a geological instant (weeks, perhaps), 10^18 to 10^19 grams of methane could destroy the terrestrial life almost
entirely. Combustion and explosion of 0.75 x 10^19 grams of methane would
liberate energy equivalent to 108 Mt of TNT, 10,000 times greater
than the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons, implicated in the nuclear-
winter scenario (Turco et al., 1991)."
Many people are very worried about global warming and the effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, most people don't consider the ocean. The ocean contains much more carbon dioxide than the atmosphere. Many gases transfer very easily from the atmosphere to the ocean, or the other way. The ocean is huge compared to the atmosphere. What happens in the ocean will have a very great effect on human activity. But most people never think about the ocean. Won't somebody please think about the ocean?
This scenario leads to the death of most terrestrial life. It might be time to build some of those giant underwater cities like Jar Jar Binks lives in.
How much methane would need to be released to create mixtures of between 5 and 15%? That's a hell of a lot of methane. Would the air even still be easily breathable at those concentrations?
Ryskin is talking about methane being loaded with water droplets, since it came from the ocean. He says that the water makes humid methane heavier than air. That makes the methane pool up on the surface of the land. Since it's pools of humid methane, it could easily get into the range 5-15% if there is enough methane coming out of the ocean.
You would be able to breathe that air pretty easily. Methane doesn't smell, and is non-toxic. You would probably be able to smell other gases coming out of the ocean, like hydrogen sulphide. It would only kill you by suffocation in an area where the methane displaced most of the oxygen, so there wasn't enough oxygen to breathe. And if there's enough oxygen for you to breathe, there's enough to explode with the methane, if there's a spark or fire.
humanity dies from a giant fart. I seriously didn't see it coming.
Actually humanity dies from lighting the fart. Consider what Professor Gregory Ryskin wrote:
"The consequences of a methane-driven oceanic eruption for marine and terrestrial life are likely to be catastrophic. Figuratively speaking, the erupting region "boils over," ejecting a large amount of methane and other gases (e.g., CO2, H2S) into the atmosphere, and flooding large areas of land. Whereas pure methane is lighter than air, methane loaded with water droplets is much heavier, and thus spreads over the land, mixing with air in the process (and losing water as rain). The air-methane mixture is explosive at methane concentrations between 5% and 15%; as such mixtures form in different locations near the ground and are ignited by lightning, explosions and conflagrations destroy most of the terrestrial life, and also produce great amounts of smoke and of carbon dioxide. Firestorms carry smoke and dust into the upper atmosphere, where they may remain for several years; the resulting darkness and global cooling may provide an additional kill mechanism. Conversely, carbon dioxide and the remaining methane create the greenhouse effect, which may lead to global warming. The outcome of the competition between the cooling and the warming tendencies is difficult to predict."
You can see there's no real need to worry about global warming. If the "explosions and conflagrations" don't get you, the smoke and dust might cause global cooling. Or global warming, it could go either way. But the methane explosions are predicted to be the biggest killer.
Tsunamis only get tall when they approach land. The danger to oil platforms is the massive energy involved, not the height of the wave. So this would only be impractical for structures close to the shore.
It's also going to be impractical for structures that aren't close to shore. You have to build artificial islands all around the structure. It will cost a lot to build artificial islands in deep water. Therefore, it's impractical in shallow water, and impractical in deep water. Nobody's going to build one, it's just an interesting application of wave physics, transferring the idea of being invisible to light waves to being invisible to ocean waves.
What I did was remap the Command key to generate a Control key event under X. That way, the shortcuts that work using Command under OS X and using Control under X can be accessed with the same key.
What happens when you're using an xterm or terminal, and you push command-c? What happens if you push control-c? Because in a terminal, I'd expect control-c to stop the currently running program, or terminate and discard the current line of entry. Of course, if you don't use xterms or terminals, you probably don't care about this sort of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
No, he put the hard drive in a big aluminium case, with those gel cooling bags surrounding the drive. Sorry, I just spoiled the whole thing. That's pretty much all it says.
Also, check the Sunday newspaper next week. They often put stories about important events from the week in the Sunday newspaper. Take a look around page seven, if it's a really big event, it might be on page five or even page three. If you can't find any news stories about it in the Sunday newspaper, check the classified ads. There might be an ad in there congratulating the victors.
Other information sources you might like to try are: wait for the 2009 Webster's Encyclopedia to be printed. It should have the 2008 election results in it. (You could try the new-fangled "online encyclopedia called Wikipedia, but it is known to be unreliable.) Or try casually standing around a water cooler in an office building. Somebody is likely to turn up for a drink of water and say "How about them Patriots, eh?" or whatever team it is you're supporting. Then you'll know.
Somebody should make a mod-pack where the children are replaced by baby goats, and you can kill the kids. Who could possibly complain about baby goats being killed in a video game?
No, you've got him all wrong. He's a real individual. He single-handedly built the maternity hospital that he was born in. He built it out of stone he quarried all by himself, and wood that he cut and sawed on his own. He built the machine that goes "bing" and trained all the doctors. Then after all that, he was born.
When he was four years old, he built a school on land he owned and trained some teachers to staff it. Then he went to school there. Of course he made his own crayons out of wax collected from beehives he built himself, and dyes he dug up from some of his other land. He also cut down some of a forest to make paper for his school textbooks, which of course he wrote himself.
He mined some silicon sand, made a computer, wrote his own operating system in a language he invented all by himself. He then used his own personal internet to post his message about self-sufficiency, and how any sort of dependency on others is exactly equal to slavery and chains. Of course he posted it on his own Slashdot, which he wrote himself.
And then you came along and made fun of him, you insensitive clod.
No, the question is, is our children learning? Your sentence makes no sense to people who know what "begs the question" means. You seem to think it means "raises the question", but it doesn't. Begging the question is making a circular statement to support an argument. The statement relies upon itself as proof. For example, the statement "Global warming is terrible because it's really bad" is begging the question.
http://begthequestion.info/
Really? You think they'll ban you from all forthcoming releases as well? How will that work? Will somebody be stupid enough to get banned from the forums, then buy another game from EA, and sign up for the new game with the banned account? People will probably start sock puppet accounts so that their main account doesn't get banned. Anybody who buys Bioware and then signs up with a banned account is pretty thick anyway.
Here's a serious question. Why did the US dollar suddenly shoot up against all the other currencies when this global financial crisis started? The USA is where the gigantic financial crisis happened. So why is the US dollar suddenly so much higher than it was before? Any economists out there?
Here are some graphs: http://www.x-rates.com/d/USD/EUR/graph120.html http://www.x-rates.com/d/USD/GBP/graph120.html http://www.x-rates.com/d/USD/BRL/graph120.html
WHY???
That sounds interesting. Does it run off a live CD? Or do you have to install Windows first, then install nlite, then make the super-install-disk, then do the easy Windows install? Because if you have to install Windows and do a whole bunch of other stuff before you can do a quick and easy Windows install, why not stick with your first Windows install?
Have you seen those "Robot Wars" competitions? They have remote controlled robots fighting each other with weapons such as spikes, hammers, and saws.
If you accept that those are robots, then you must also accept that a Predator UAV armed with a Hellfire missile is a robot. It's the same thing, a remote controlled fighting machine. The difference is that the TV robots only fight other robots. The Predator drones fight people. Therefore, we already have robots that break the laws of robotics. Here, welcome your new robotic overlords.
One day in the near future at Microsoft's new data center... "Okay boss! We've stuck all our servers in the shipping containers! Everything's going great!" "Good work. Let's go to Taco Bell and feast on tacos to celebrate!"
At taco bell... "Mmmm boss this is taco-licious!" "You deserve it kid! You got all those servers into those containers right quick!"
Meanwhile, back at the data center... Beep! Beep! Beep! The night air is pierced by the sound of a large truck reversing. Soon, the truck which arrived empty, leaves in a cloud of diesel smoke with a shipping container full of servers on the back. "Hey Sergei, it was nice of Microsoft to put all their servers into a shipping container to make them easier to steal!" "Yes Pamela, those suckers at Microsoft must have thought long and hard about this."
CERN advisory: Systems administrators are warned of a truck-related denial of service attack. Thieves load a container full of servers onto a truck and drive away.
I like to use git because I find it easy to make a branch for testing out some new code, and easy to merge the branch into the trunk if I want to keep it. Here are some aliases I wrote that cover pretty much all the git I use. If I decide to change version control systems, I can change the aliases. alias vca='git add .';
alias vcb='git branch';
alias vcc='git commit -a';
alias vcd='git diff';
alias vcm='git merge';
alias vco='git checkout';
As for choosing between git and subversion, why not try both? It's pretty unlikely that somebody will tell you what you like best. You have to find out for yourself. Considering that they are free software, easy to install, and pretty easy to use, you can try both and see if one of them seems better to you. I tried both, and I chose git. But I don't mind if other people use subversion, RCS, SCCS, or whatever they feel like using.
Subversion and git have different models. Subversion has a client-server model with the repository accessible by http. Git uses a distributed model, with each user getting their own copy of the repository, and the possibility of merging things from one repository to another. This might make git work better if the users' computers aren't always able to connect to a remote repository.
Try them both, see which one you prefer.
Thanks mate, you're doing a great job. I downloaded Parrot and gave it a go. Perl6 is looking good. But, Parrot tells me that Larry got one of his perl6 programs wrong. If you look at Apocalypse 12, Larry has this:
Note that x is read-only, and y is read-write. I assume that if you don't put rw after an attribute, it's read-only. Otherwise, there's not much point having rw. Later in the example program, Larry wrote this:
The first line is illegal, because you can't change the read-only value of x. But the second line calls clear(), which tries to change the value of x. At this point, Parrot barfs with: "Cannot assign to readonly variable current instr.: 'parrot;Point;clear' pc 609 (EVAL_13:181)" and then lots more barf. So is this correct? If you make an object attribute which is rw, you can change it either in a method or by calling $object.attrname(42) for example, but if it's not rw, you can't change it ever, even in a method.
Is Apocalypse 12 wrong when it has a method that changes a non-rw attribute? Or is the compiler wrong in not letting the method change the attribute? I think Apocalypse 12 is wrong, because since rw means read-write, the lack of rw should be read-only. And read-only is not the same as private, so a method should not be able to change a read-only attribute.
Anyway, that's the answer to "Will we ever see Parrot?". You can see it right now. Or wait until Tuesday like chromatic says.
The move towards VMs is going to make programming easier. Everybody saw what happened with Java and write once, run anywhere. It didn't quite work out, but it was pretty close. If we can have perl code being compiled into bytecode, that'll give us speed improvements comparable to switching from CGI to mod_perl or FastCGI. Since so many people talk about the speed of running code, that's important.
If the same VM can run code from different languages, that's going to produce some very interesting effects. Why have a language flamewar when the VM can run any language? Instead of endless flaming, we can encourage people to use whichever language they like to write their code, then get the VM to do the dirty work.
In the article, it says that in the future, operating systems might ship with a generic VM that can run code from any language. This is a great idea, when you link it with the idea of high-level-language VMs. The more code you write, the more bugs you get. High level languages let you do the same thing with less code. Less code means less bugs.
Imagine what we can achieve when we have VMs available to run pure functional code, and you link that with the advances in storage technology. Since a pure function returns the same result given the same parameters, we can create something like rainbow tables to cache the function results. This is going to be so much better than calling malloc and free and using pointers.
What if their position isn't legitimate? Consider this scenario: A terrorist gets on a flight to the USA. On arriving in the USA, he gets his laptop seized for searching, but he is still allowed into the country. Then he wants to catch his connecting flight to Darwin Minnesota to blow up the largest ball of string in the world. Because you see, this terrorist group is deeply offended by people worshiping large balls of string. Or wool. But he's on the no-fly list, so they don't let him on the plane. Victory for the DHS policies and procedures! Right?
Wrong! The terrorist notices a nearby sign on a bus which reads "Come to Cawker City Kansas and see the largest ball of twine in the world!". He realises that since he's at Kansas City International Airport, he's probably already in Kansas! Or at least really close! Surely! And twine, that's pretty much like string! So he gets on the bus, goes to Cawker City Kansas, and blows up the largest ball of twine in the world.
This string-related tragedy would not be stopped by the DHS's policies of seizing laptops from terrorists or putting people (including terrorists) on no-fly lists. How can anybody think that seizing laptops or putting people on lists will stop terrorists? Arrest them, give them a fair trial, and if they're guilty, put them in jail. That might work!
You've calculated your costs of using fossil fuels. Let's call the costs C. Now add up the benefits of using fossil fuel. Let's call that B. Therefore, your net benefit from using fossil fuels is NB = B - C. Do you think that NB is positive or negative? I think it's positive. In other words, using fossil fuels is overall good for humanity.
There are a lot of people who seem to want everybody else to change their behavior, such as by not using fossil fuels any more. Why would people stop using fossil fuels when they receive a net benefit from using them?
Secondly, the best way to get people to stop doing something is not to hector, berate, and frighten them into stopping. It's to give them something better to do. People stopped using whale oil in their lamps because something better came along. They didn't just turn their lamps off and say "Oh well, we have to sit in the dark now because otherwise whales will go extinct".
That's why it's much better to put your energy into developing alternatives to things you don't like. Like Solyndra thin film solar cells for example. Making those solar panels might well cause a decrease in fossil fuel usage. Global warming campaigns use politics and fear to try to change things. Much better to use technology, science, and engineering to provide alternatives that are better all around.
It's because all their old code breaks. And that hurts.
This is the one I'd go for. Toshiba press release: "Toshiba to Launch Innovative Rechargeable Battery Business" dated 11 December, 2007. From Toshiba press release to slashdot in under 10 months. Impressive! It's pretty much the same thing, all the specs are in there like voltage, capacity, size, weight.
What about if you're running a stock market price website? In your database, you store some html pages for each ticker symbol. When the user goes to http://example.org/stocks/get-latest/ENRON it checks if the last update time on the pages in the database is more than 1 minute ago. If the pages are less than one minute old, it serves the pages from the database. If the pages are more than 1 minute old, it gets the new stock data from the stock database, and makes new pages and puts them in the page database. Then it serves the fresh pages.
Using the link might modify the data, by making it up-to-date. What would you do? Program it so that the user has to submit a form to get current data, or they can only get old data if they got there by a link? Why can't they just follow a link to get the information they want? Obviously you would want to make the user submit a form, since you said "NEVER! EVER! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!". Look! Yahoo's doing it!
Set up your captcha so that people can tell which site it's from. Put the correct site name in the captcha, like this:
People might still answer the captcha, but at least they'll know they're helping spammers. And other people can tell by looking at the captcha that it's on the wrong site, therefore the site is probably bad in some way.
Then only way you can take it completely out of the carbon cycle is to blast it into space on a rocket. Carbon, being the fourth most abundant element in the universe, is everywhere on the planet. Fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, are made of fossilized plants and animals. In other words, fossil fuels are just as much part of the carbon cycle as carbon dioxide, plants, limestone, marble, kittens, and methane. Think about how the carbon got into the coal. It's part of a cycle. A very long cycle.
Newsflash! Reagan was shot!
Ryskin wrote about methane erupting from the ocean like a volcano. Probably there would be very high concentrations of methane in the atmosphere just above the middle of the ocean. At the edges of the ocean, methane would pour out across the land. Somewhere at the front of the methane fog cloud on the land, the methane/air mixture would get to about 5-15%, and be the right conditions for exploding. If the methane levels get over 15%, it won't explode, it'll just burn.
CH4 + 2 O2 => CO2 + 2 H2O. You need twice as much oxygen as methane to get a clean burn. Since the atmosphere is normally about 20% oxygen, anything over 10% methane burning or exploding, is going to cause a localised shortage of oxygen. The methane cloud rolls in, explodes or burns, and suddenly, all the oxygen is gone from that area. Yow. It'll be like the ocean is tossing fuel-air bombs at the land.
And in case you think you can "save the planet" by not burning any more coal, read this carefully: "Upon release of a significant portion of the dissolved methane, the ocean settles down, and the entire sequence of events (i.e., development of anoxia, accumulation of dissolved methane, the metastable state, eruption) begins anew. No external cause is required to bring about a methane-driven eruption--its mechanism is self-contained, and implies that eruptions are likely to occur repeatedly at the same location." Yes that's right, it just happens naturally.
Really fascinating reading in Ryskin's paper. Here's another chunk: "Because methane is isotopically light, its fast release must result in a negative carbon isotope excursion in the geological record. Knowing the magnitude of the excursion, one can estimate the amount of methane that could have produced it. Such calculations (prompted by the methane-hydrate-dissociation model, but equally applicable here) have been performed for several global events in the geological record; the results range from 10^18 to 10^19 grams of released methane (e.g., Katz et al., 1999; Kennedy et al., 2001; de Wit et al., 2002). These are very large amounts: the total carbon content of today's terrestrial biomass is ~ 2 x 10^18 grams. Nevertheless, relatively small regions of the deep ocean could contain such amounts of dissolved methane; e.g., the Black Sea alone (volume ~ 0.4 x 10^-3 of the ocean total; maximum depth only 2.2 km) could hold, at saturation, ~ 0.5 x 10^18 grams. A similar region of the deep ocean could contain much more (the amount grows quadratically with depth). Released in a geological instant (weeks, perhaps), 10^18 to 10^19 grams of methane could destroy the terrestrial life almost entirely. Combustion and explosion of 0.75 x 10^19 grams of methane would liberate energy equivalent to 108 Mt of TNT, 10,000 times greater than the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons, implicated in the nuclear- winter scenario (Turco et al., 1991)."
Many people are very worried about global warming and the effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, most people don't consider the ocean. The ocean contains much more carbon dioxide than the atmosphere. Many gases transfer very easily from the atmosphere to the ocean, or the other way. The ocean is huge compared to the atmosphere. What happens in the ocean will have a very great effect on human activity. But most people never think about the ocean. Won't somebody please think about the ocean?
This scenario leads to the death of most terrestrial life. It might be time to build some of those giant underwater cities like Jar Jar Binks lives in.
Ryskin is talking about methane being loaded with water droplets, since it came from the ocean. He says that the water makes humid methane heavier than air. That makes the methane pool up on the surface of the land. Since it's pools of humid methane, it could easily get into the range 5-15% if there is enough methane coming out of the ocean.
You would be able to breathe that air pretty easily. Methane doesn't smell, and is non-toxic. You would probably be able to smell other gases coming out of the ocean, like hydrogen sulphide. It would only kill you by suffocation in an area where the methane displaced most of the oxygen, so there wasn't enough oxygen to breathe. And if there's enough oxygen for you to breathe, there's enough to explode with the methane, if there's a spark or fire.
So, how much methane is in the ocean?
Actually humanity dies from lighting the fart. Consider what Professor Gregory Ryskin wrote:
"The consequences of a methane-driven oceanic eruption for marine and terrestrial life are likely to be catastrophic. Figuratively speaking, the erupting region "boils over," ejecting a large amount of methane and other gases (e.g., CO2, H2S) into the atmosphere, and flooding large areas of land. Whereas pure methane is lighter than air, methane loaded with water droplets is much heavier, and thus spreads over the land, mixing with air in the process (and losing water as rain). The air-methane mixture is explosive at methane concentrations between 5% and 15%; as such mixtures form in different locations near the ground and are ignited by lightning, explosions and conflagrations destroy most of the terrestrial life, and also produce great amounts of smoke and of carbon dioxide. Firestorms carry smoke and dust into the upper atmosphere, where they may remain for several years; the resulting darkness and global cooling may provide an additional kill mechanism. Conversely, carbon dioxide and the remaining methane create the greenhouse effect, which may lead to global warming. The outcome of the competition between the cooling and the warming tendencies is difficult to predict."
You can see there's no real need to worry about global warming. If the "explosions and conflagrations" don't get you, the smoke and dust might cause global cooling. Or global warming, it could go either way. But the methane explosions are predicted to be the biggest killer.
It's also going to be impractical for structures that aren't close to shore. You have to build artificial islands all around the structure. It will cost a lot to build artificial islands in deep water. Therefore, it's impractical in shallow water, and impractical in deep water. Nobody's going to build one, it's just an interesting application of wave physics, transferring the idea of being invisible to light waves to being invisible to ocean waves.
What happens when you're using an xterm or terminal, and you push command-c? What happens if you push control-c? Because in a terminal, I'd expect control-c to stop the currently running program, or terminate and discard the current line of entry. Of course, if you don't use xterms or terminals, you probably don't care about this sort of thing.