Q: Should you place a comma in the sentence "Tutorial, continued..."? A: Yes.
Q: When using the dash as a separator for an unordered list, should you place a space character between the dash and the first character of the list item? A: Yes.
Q: Should the sentence following a sentence ending in ellipsis be capitalized? A: Yes.
Q: Can someone "trend towards perfectionist"? A: No. One can either trend towards perfectionists or trend towards perfectionism, the latter presumably being your intended meaning.
Q: Should you place the period inside or outside quotation marks? A: Inside.
Q: Are there any exceptions to the above rule? A: No. Exceptions exist for exclamation or question marks (depending on whether the mark applies to the quote alone or to the whole sentence), but never for commas or periods.
Q: Are any of the above rules relevant to Slashdot comments? A: No, as I stated previously. The objective of communication rules is to facilitate maximally convenient communication between parties, and the rules vary depending on the medium and circumstances. In the case of Slashdot comments, the time required to analyze and correct spelling, grammar, punctuation and stylistic errors is unjustifiably high compared to the meager benefit it provides to the readers. Slashdot articles themselves, which are more formal than comments, have a greater time period to be written and checked, and are read by more people, have a justifiably higher standard applied to them. Still, they will have a lower standard than a formal academic paper. Similarly, in cases where communication speed is much more important than rigorousness, such as instant messaging or online game chat, it is perfectly acceptable that the sentence "lol kthxbye" has a better cost-benefit ratio than the sentence "That was amusing; all right, thank-you, and good-bye." The very definition of a "Grammar Nazi" is not simply one who uses formal grammar, but one who expects its use in situations where the expectation is not justified.
>When my girlfriend was in Cairo a couple of years ago she saw many, many places selling burned CDs and DVDs, all underground, of course.
Is it any different in the USA? The underground market is just that, underground. Different governments can apply different levels of pressure to try and enforce the law, which would depend on how willing they are to enforce it as well as budget, legal, and political popularity concerns, but tracking individual sellers of pirated CDs can be very hard both in Egypt and the US, and you can (illegally) buy a pirated CD for pennies on the dollar in both places. As with any other goods. The US has invested billions (trillions?) in its war against drugs, and they are still widely available in any urban center.
It's different from not being able to control an illegal business, or even to not adequately invest in its control, as opposed to officially declare that the business isn't illegal or that the government isn't even going to try or pretend they try to enforce it.
Egypt doesn't have the power to enforce copyright laws in other countries, but since international copyright is enforced via international treaties, it can take the following stance: "Respect our terms of copyright or we won't respect yours".
For example, the U.S. might reject Egypt's indefinite copyright claim, but Egypt can in retaliation refuse to recognize or enforce US copyright on its territory, essentially legitimazing piracy of any US copyrighted property (including, of course, software).
The international community as well as vast majority of industrialized countries do not recognize copyright longer than author's life + 100 years (in most cases it's 50 or 70). Yes, there is _some_ movement in the US to make copyright indefinite, but (at least for now) it is not close to becoming law.
Use in other countries will be governed by local laws, regardless of whether Egypt likes it or not. The only industry they are going to screw is their own domestic one. And it might, depending on how broadly the law is interpreted, seriously hamper private domestic industry that is heavily focused on promoting those tourist attractions.
Sound's like a 21th-century approach to implementing socialism. Why overthrow it when you can just tax it to death?
As more and more high-bandwidth content traverses the net, in the absense of development of new infrastructure, ISPs and backbone routing providers will arbitrarily throttle "intensive content" to allow other content through. Guess what type traffic to throttle is on the top of the list?
Even if positive infinity wraps around negative infinity (most mathematicians don't agree but there is a minority that thinks that way), this doesn't mean absolute hot means absolute cold, because absolute cold is zero, not negative infinity.
It's funny to see someone bothering to repute claims that Craigslist "kills" newspapers. The question is not whether it does or doesn't (and IMO it does in a way), but why should we care?
It's a free market out there. Craigslist is able to offer services better than newspapers. Newspapers should either adapt to compete, or they deserve to die. Why should there be some kind of welfare state for newspapers where they have to be supported externally, or even more important, why should better technologies be attacked for outcompeting worse ones?
Do you attack cars for "killing" horse-and-carriage? Do you attack e-mail for reducing profits of snail mail/fax sales (and it did by a very large margin)? If the technology is able to better provide the service, it is the one that deserves to get the market.
I understand that many people base the argument like that "Newspapers offer content we like, but can only be funded by ads. Now people use craigslist for ads instead of papers, so papers have no money to publish other content with". While this may seem more indirect, I don't see why this is any more valid than the earlier example. If people are not willing to pay for the content on its own (via newspaper sales), then maybe you should move out of the market, or actually make your content worthwhile.
The "broadsheet" papers which actually offer content you don't see on a typical news site for free (such as in-depth editorials) are the ones that are still selling. If all your paper had is a bulletpoint list of recent events and a local buy-sell section, then why does it deserve to live in the first place, when you can get both free online (the first from any news site, the second from Craigslist). And if you claim your paper supposedly brings some value to the "good old mom-and-pop local community", then get the community to pay for it, either through a local tax the community agrees on, or through increased paper prices. If the community is not willing to pay either, than guess what, the value your paper provides to the community just isn't good enough for them to pay for.
Either offer something that's good on its own (and better than the competition), or get the hell out of the business. The protectionist neoluddism of "papers being oppressed by the evil Craigslist" is seriously pissing me off.
One of the fundamental qualities of any digital media is the separation of abstract data from the means of it's storage and expression. Analog media is inevitably related to the physical way of expressing or recording it. Copying a vinyl disk is identical to copying the physical shape of the tracts on the disk; referring to analog "music" is identical to referring to the wavelengths we hear.
With digital, data and medium are separate. By itself, data is just an abstract collection of ones and zeroes. While technically data cannot "exist" without a medium, we logically pretend that it can (much like we can refer to the mathematical integers, even though in nature there is no such thing as just "1", only "1 of something"). As long as any physical device is able to transmit and recieve the exact set of 1s and 0s, it doesn't matter what technology that device uses to store or reproduce the data. Of course, any two devices that share the data must use a protocol both understand. But this bears no restriction to the protocol the devices would each use with a 3rd party.
The advantage of digital, therefore, is its liquidity. Data can long outlive any physical medium it is stored on, by simply flowing around different devices, and while physical technology of storage and expression can change from era to era, the data itself remains constant.
On the downside, this opens a new set of challenges - degrees of -logical- as opposed to physical openness, and these include the question of open or closed media and restrictions placed on its use by the logical software that processes it (AKA DRM). While analog media is pretty much restricted to either available as is or not available at all (in the form of encryption for example), digital media can be much more manipulated with regard to what and how is available to access.
Digital media relies on people (or devices) that are actually going to use it. If you dump a recording in a time capsule for generations, there is little advantage between digital and analog. Digital vs. analog is like abstract money vs. barter trade - it means nothing on its own, but it is a logical expression of a particular value (rather than the physical object itself), and works best when it is flowing around, able to represent the value of physical objects that are seemingly incomparable to one another, and requires people to have acceptance of that logical value and common ways of exchanging it for it to have any advantage.
This has nothing to do with bible school, but a simple knowledge about rudimentary statistics.
The there is life on OUR planet (by itself) says absolutely nothing about an increased chance it would be on other planets. For the simple reason - in the hypothetical scenario where there was only one planet in the universe to harbor life, the inhabitants of that planet would be in a similar position to us - they know life exists on their planet, and nothing about the rest. But what about the billions of other planets? Well, since there is no life on them (in that scenario), there is nobody there to compare.
If there was even one OTHER planet than our own that has life, we could deduce an average statistics based on the distance between the planets and the size of the universe (e.g. if our max visibility is 100 light years and we found one planet in that bubble, and the universe is 100 billion light years across, then statistically there is (even if a very very very crude approximation which may be way way way off) about a billion planets that have life (in a given 1-D vector actually, if you look at it from visible volume vs invisible volume, the number will be even much larger).
But you need at least one other planet for this to work. If there is only one planet you know that has life, and you are sitting on that planet, the fact your planet has life makes absolutely no statistical difference on the chance of life on other planets (other than of course knowing it's POSSIBLE for life to exist, and estimating favorable conditions for it to happen). But you can't say that since we have life here, it must exist somewhere else, without having at least one other comparison point.
The simple thing that's wrong with that tactic is that instead of having to provide security for one OS, they now have to provide security for both.
When protecting data, think "serial" and not "parallel". You won't get extra security by diversifying your OSs because hackers don't need to hack ALL of them, but just ONE of them, to compromise data. This is not a case of "redundant systems", but rather a case of "the weakest link". The more OSs are supported the more chances that AN OS will get hacked (as opposed to ALL OSs), but when it comes to protecting data, hacking that ONE OS is all it takes. Hackers are certainly more agile than the government, and the government should try to minimize its profile, together with hacking avenues, rather than build redundant systems where redundancy is not the solution for the problem at hand.
In other cases when the issue IS parallel, such as protecting a mission-critical system (think Space Shuttle), then yes, multiple OS's increase the chance that any one will survive. But this doesn't apply to data security. They should stick to one OS as well as one of everything else, preferably as secure as possible (NetBSD, some Linux distros, etc). But even JUST Windows is more secure than Windows and OTHER stuff together, because you keep all the risks of Windows while adding the extra (even if relatively smaller) risk of the other system on top of the original risk.
This is a collective reply to all the "you forgot thermodynamics" replies (I'm the author of the parent post). I probably should have clarified that in the original.
I did not forget the laws, and I'm well aware that eventually all energy becomes heat one way or another.
But consider this:
- If you burn coal, you get heat energy from the following sources: 1. The heat produced by burning the coal itself 2. The heat produced by trapping more of the sun's heat in the atmosphere (if you reject global warming theory you may not agree with this one, but I'm not going to bother arguing with you on that point) 3. The heat produced by the end usage of electricity
- If you use solar panels instead of burning coal, yes, you STILL get heat from source 3 since you use the same appliances, but you don't get excess heat from the first TWO sources. That's what I meant by "bonus advantage" - you cut down both the heat from burning the coal itself, and from the greenhouse effect as well.
Why did I use the phrasing I did? Because I meant to say that the Sun's heat will strike the Earth whether you burn coal or not, so you can use the energy produced anyways instead of producing extra energy (from coal) which then adds on top of the original heat from the Sun. The argument is along the lines of "a penny saved is a penny earned".
In hotter climates people use solar roofings already, especially for electric water boilers. But with sufficiently cheap and available coating, people could make entire roofs covered with solar panels. You'd also of course have to think about things like durability and waterproofing.
(Up front, I apologize to all the yanks for being an insensitive clod that doesn't use imperial measurements).
Earth's surface is absorbing ~90 petawatts of electricity any give time (Wikipedia), and with 510 million square kilometers of surface area, an incredibly rough generalized calculation says that each square meter absorbs 175 watts (this is a 24-hour average, even though obviously it's all absorbed during daytime). Of course, not all or even most of it can be converted to electricity, but still, that's a huge resource tap. I'd estimate an average home to have a roof surface area of about 50 square meters, which means that on average the sun sends 8kW on your roof. Next, the average American household uses 8900 kWh/year, which produces, again, an average usage of about 1 kilowatt per household. If you tile your entire roof with solar panels, you'd need to be able to convert 12% of heat/light energy to electricity in order to be fully self-sufficient.
An extra bonus is that the more you absorb the sun's energy as electricity, the less of it is converted to heat which dissipates around the planet, and that in and of itself reduces the effect global warming. So you are being twice as productive - not rely on heat-trapping coal, and reduce the amount of heat that saturates on the planet in the first place.
Of course, this would have to be done on a truly massive scale to have any effect, but every bit helps, and if the industry can make it profitable to the consumer (and of course overcome the interests of evil megalomaniac neofascistliberal Big Oil corporations, as any/. troll will point out), it'll grow on its own.
"Disaster" is a pretty hypy label for an event which led to no known loss of human life or property, and caused no significant environmental damage (yes, a lot of trees fell and some wildlife may have died, but it's not like it destroyed an ecosystem or led to an extinction of any species).
Most modern industrial projects are a bigger "disaster" in this sense than Tunguska. The event should be referred to as "phenomenon", or maybe just a "boom", but not a "disaster".
Chinese Democracy has been vaporware for 96 years and counting. The first beta was delivered in 1911, but numerous bugs caused it to eventually crash. Then they shipped another version for a completely different platform in 1949, but critics complain that it doesn't really deliver what was promised, and thus is vaporware. They tried to apply a major service pack in 1989, but it failed due to Insufficient Privileges error. Will the real version ever ship? Maybe, but I'm keeping my money on Duke.
Couldn't you just license your work under CC-*, and then license out commercial licenses anyway, given that you're the copyright holder?
That license addresses exactly what you said:-/ (highlighted in bold). It's useful to be combined with CC-NC, and does nothing more than lay out the terms of what you have to do to obtain a commercial license.
BTW, waiting for all the Stallmanians to start flaming about how the license (together with CC-NC) is not "free" and thus 3v1l!!!1111.
2 + "3" == 5 (not a TypeError as in Python)
"2" + 3 == 5 (not "23" as in JavaScript)
And this is intuitive, useful, or best practice, how exactly?
Implicit parsing a num to a string is straightforward and will pretty much always work, even if you may get wierd results like "1.66666666666666666667". But the other way is just too careless to let be implicitly done. You may unexpected errors when for some reason the string you use cannot be parsed, and you may get either an unexpected datatype or a truncated result when a parsed string would not match the other num you add to it (such as int a = x+5 where x is a string "3.5").
Casting from string to number should always be done explicitly, with precise definition of the data type you cast to, and ideally with an error catching block in case something goes wrong. Letting it be done implicitly is a recipe for headache.
Slashdot Mirror
Tutorial, continued further...
Q: Should you place a comma in the sentence "Tutorial, continued..."?
A: Yes.
Q: When using the dash as a separator for an unordered list, should you place a space character between the dash and the first character of the list item?
A: Yes.
Q: Should the sentence following a sentence ending in ellipsis be capitalized?
A: Yes.
Q: Can someone "trend towards perfectionist"?
A: No. One can either trend towards perfectionists or trend towards perfectionism, the latter presumably being your intended meaning.
Q: Should you place the period inside or outside quotation marks?
A: Inside.
Q: Are there any exceptions to the above rule?
A: No. Exceptions exist for exclamation or question marks (depending on whether the mark applies to the quote alone or to the whole sentence), but never for commas or periods.
Q: Are any of the above rules relevant to Slashdot comments?
A: No, as I stated previously. The objective of communication rules is to facilitate maximally convenient communication between parties, and the rules vary depending on the medium and circumstances. In the case of Slashdot comments, the time required to analyze and correct spelling, grammar, punctuation and stylistic errors is unjustifiably high compared to the meager benefit it provides to the readers. Slashdot articles themselves, which are more formal than comments, have a greater time period to be written and checked, and are read by more people, have a justifiably higher standard applied to them. Still, they will have a lower standard than a formal academic paper. Similarly, in cases where communication speed is much more important than rigorousness, such as instant messaging or online game chat, it is perfectly acceptable that the sentence "lol kthxbye" has a better cost-benefit ratio than the sentence "That was amusing; all right, thank-you, and good-bye." The very definition of a "Grammar Nazi" is not simply one who uses formal grammar, but one who expects its use in situations where the expectation is not justified.
Tutorial:
Q: Should the word "Nazi" be capitalized?
A: Yes.
Q: Do you hold article comments to the same grammatical standards as the articles themselves?
A: No.
Q: What do you call someone who does the above for no reason other than to attract attention and cause disruption?
A: A troll.
Doesn't having a law college student handle your court case feel like having a med. college student do surgery on you?
>When my girlfriend was in Cairo a couple of years ago she saw many, many places selling burned CDs and DVDs, all underground, of course.
Is it any different in the USA? The underground market is just that, underground. Different governments can apply different levels of pressure to try and enforce the law, which would depend on how willing they are to enforce it as well as budget, legal, and political popularity concerns, but tracking individual sellers of pirated CDs can be very hard both in Egypt and the US, and you can (illegally) buy a pirated CD for pennies on the dollar in both places. As with any other goods. The US has invested billions (trillions?) in its war against drugs, and they are still widely available in any urban center.
It's different from not being able to control an illegal business, or even to not adequately invest in its control, as opposed to officially declare that the business isn't illegal or that the government isn't even going to try or pretend they try to enforce it.
Egypt doesn't have the power to enforce copyright laws in other countries, but since international copyright is enforced via international treaties, it can take the following stance: "Respect our terms of copyright or we won't respect yours".
For example, the U.S. might reject Egypt's indefinite copyright claim, but Egypt can in retaliation refuse to recognize or enforce US copyright on its territory, essentially legitimazing piracy of any US copyrighted property (including, of course, software).
The international community as well as vast majority of industrialized countries do not recognize copyright longer than author's life + 100 years (in most cases it's 50 or 70). Yes, there is _some_ movement in the US to make copyright indefinite, but (at least for now) it is not close to becoming law.
Use in other countries will be governed by local laws, regardless of whether Egypt likes it or not. The only industry they are going to screw is their own domestic one. And it might, depending on how broadly the law is interpreted, seriously hamper private domestic industry that is heavily focused on promoting those tourist attractions.
Sound's like a 21th-century approach to implementing socialism. Why overthrow it when you can just tax it to death?
I for one welcome our new oil-drilling robotic overlords.
I've been taking a mind doping drug every morning for decades. It's called coffee.
As more and more high-bandwidth content traverses the net, in the absense of development of new infrastructure, ISPs and backbone routing providers will arbitrarily throttle "intensive content" to allow other content through. Guess what type traffic to throttle is on the top of the list?
Even if positive infinity wraps around negative infinity (most mathematicians don't agree but there is a minority that thinks that way), this doesn't mean absolute hot means absolute cold, because absolute cold is zero, not negative infinity.
It's funny to see someone bothering to repute claims that Craigslist "kills" newspapers. The question is not whether it does or doesn't (and IMO it does in a way), but why should we care?
It's a free market out there. Craigslist is able to offer services better than newspapers. Newspapers should either adapt to compete, or they deserve to die. Why should there be some kind of welfare state for newspapers where they have to be supported externally, or even more important, why should better technologies be attacked for outcompeting worse ones?
Do you attack cars for "killing" horse-and-carriage? Do you attack e-mail for reducing profits of snail mail/fax sales (and it did by a very large margin)? If the technology is able to better provide the service, it is the one that deserves to get the market.
I understand that many people base the argument like that "Newspapers offer content we like, but can only be funded by ads. Now people use craigslist for ads instead of papers, so papers have no money to publish other content with". While this may seem more indirect, I don't see why this is any more valid than the earlier example. If people are not willing to pay for the content on its own (via newspaper sales), then maybe you should move out of the market, or actually make your content worthwhile.
The "broadsheet" papers which actually offer content you don't see on a typical news site for free (such as in-depth editorials) are the ones that are still selling. If all your paper had is a bulletpoint list of recent events and a local buy-sell section, then why does it deserve to live in the first place, when you can get both free online (the first from any news site, the second from Craigslist). And if you claim your paper supposedly brings some value to the "good old mom-and-pop local community", then get the community to pay for it, either through a local tax the community agrees on, or through increased paper prices. If the community is not willing to pay either, than guess what, the value your paper provides to the community just isn't good enough for them to pay for.
Either offer something that's good on its own (and better than the competition), or get the hell out of the business. The protectionist neoluddism of "papers being oppressed by the evil Craigslist" is seriously pissing me off.
Never underestimate human ingenuity.
One of the fundamental qualities of any digital media is the separation of abstract data from the means of it's storage and expression. Analog media is inevitably related to the physical way of expressing or recording it. Copying a vinyl disk is identical to copying the physical shape of the tracts on the disk; referring to analog "music" is identical to referring to the wavelengths we hear.
With digital, data and medium are separate. By itself, data is just an abstract collection of ones and zeroes. While technically data cannot "exist" without a medium, we logically pretend that it can (much like we can refer to the mathematical integers, even though in nature there is no such thing as just "1", only "1 of something"). As long as any physical device is able to transmit and recieve the exact set of 1s and 0s, it doesn't matter what technology that device uses to store or reproduce the data. Of course, any two devices that share the data must use a protocol both understand. But this bears no restriction to the protocol the devices would each use with a 3rd party.
The advantage of digital, therefore, is its liquidity. Data can long outlive any physical medium it is stored on, by simply flowing around different devices, and while physical technology of storage and expression can change from era to era, the data itself remains constant.
On the downside, this opens a new set of challenges - degrees of -logical- as opposed to physical openness, and these include the question of open or closed media and restrictions placed on its use by the logical software that processes it (AKA DRM). While analog media is pretty much restricted to either available as is or not available at all (in the form of encryption for example), digital media can be much more manipulated with regard to what and how is available to access.
Digital media relies on people (or devices) that are actually going to use it. If you dump a recording in a time capsule for generations, there is little advantage between digital and analog. Digital vs. analog is like abstract money vs. barter trade - it means nothing on its own, but it is a logical expression of a particular value (rather than the physical object itself), and works best when it is flowing around, able to represent the value of physical objects that are seemingly incomparable to one another, and requires people to have acceptance of that logical value and common ways of exchanging it for it to have any advantage.
This has nothing to do with bible school, but a simple knowledge about rudimentary statistics.
The there is life on OUR planet (by itself) says absolutely nothing about an increased chance it would be on other planets. For the simple reason - in the hypothetical scenario where there was only one planet in the universe to harbor life, the inhabitants of that planet would be in a similar position to us - they know life exists on their planet, and nothing about the rest. But what about the billions of other planets? Well, since there is no life on them (in that scenario), there is nobody there to compare.
If there was even one OTHER planet than our own that has life, we could deduce an average statistics based on the distance between the planets and the size of the universe (e.g. if our max visibility is 100 light years and we found one planet in that bubble, and the universe is 100 billion light years across, then statistically there is (even if a very very very crude approximation which may be way way way off) about a billion planets that have life (in a given 1-D vector actually, if you look at it from visible volume vs invisible volume, the number will be even much larger).
But you need at least one other planet for this to work. If there is only one planet you know that has life, and you are sitting on that planet, the fact your planet has life makes absolutely no statistical difference on the chance of life on other planets (other than of course knowing it's POSSIBLE for life to exist, and estimating favorable conditions for it to happen). But you can't say that since we have life here, it must exist somewhere else, without having at least one other comparison point.
No, I prefer people who bother to read posts before a kneejerk reaction at replying to them. :-)
The simple thing that's wrong with that tactic is that instead of having to provide security for one OS, they now have to provide security for both.
When protecting data, think "serial" and not "parallel". You won't get extra security by diversifying your OSs because hackers don't need to hack ALL of them, but just ONE of them, to compromise data. This is not a case of "redundant systems", but rather a case of "the weakest link". The more OSs are supported the more chances that AN OS will get hacked (as opposed to ALL OSs), but when it comes to protecting data, hacking that ONE OS is all it takes. Hackers are certainly more agile than the government, and the government should try to minimize its profile, together with hacking avenues, rather than build redundant systems where redundancy is not the solution for the problem at hand.
In other cases when the issue IS parallel, such as protecting a mission-critical system (think Space Shuttle), then yes, multiple OS's increase the chance that any one will survive. But this doesn't apply to data security. They should stick to one OS as well as one of everything else, preferably as secure as possible (NetBSD, some Linux distros, etc). But even JUST Windows is more secure than Windows and OTHER stuff together, because you keep all the risks of Windows while adding the extra (even if relatively smaller) risk of the other system on top of the original risk.
This is a collective reply to all the "you forgot thermodynamics" replies (I'm the author of the parent post). I probably should have clarified that in the original.
I did not forget the laws, and I'm well aware that eventually all energy becomes heat one way or another.
But consider this:
- If you burn coal, you get heat energy from the following sources:
1. The heat produced by burning the coal itself
2. The heat produced by trapping more of the sun's heat in the atmosphere (if you reject global warming theory you may not agree with this one, but I'm not going to bother arguing with you on that point)
3. The heat produced by the end usage of electricity
- If you use solar panels instead of burning coal, yes, you STILL get heat from source 3 since you use the same appliances, but you don't get excess heat from the first TWO sources. That's what I meant by "bonus advantage" - you cut down both the heat from burning the coal itself, and from the greenhouse effect as well.
Why did I use the phrasing I did? Because I meant to say that the Sun's heat will strike the Earth whether you burn coal or not, so you can use the energy produced anyways instead of producing extra energy (from coal) which then adds on top of the original heat from the Sun. The argument is along the lines of "a penny saved is a penny earned".
Sorry if I was ambiguous.
In hotter climates people use solar roofings already, especially for electric water boilers. But with sufficiently cheap and available coating, people could make entire roofs covered with solar panels. You'd also of course have to think about things like durability and waterproofing.
/. troll will point out), it'll grow on its own.
(Up front, I apologize to all the yanks for being an insensitive clod that doesn't use imperial measurements).
Earth's surface is absorbing ~90 petawatts of electricity any give time (Wikipedia), and with 510 million square kilometers of surface area, an incredibly rough generalized calculation says that each square meter absorbs 175 watts (this is a 24-hour average, even though obviously it's all absorbed during daytime). Of course, not all or even most of it can be converted to electricity, but still, that's a huge resource tap. I'd estimate an average home to have a roof surface area of about 50 square meters, which means that on average the sun sends 8kW on your roof. Next, the average American household uses 8900 kWh/year, which produces, again, an average usage of about 1 kilowatt per household. If you tile your entire roof with solar panels, you'd need to be able to convert 12% of heat/light energy to electricity in order to be fully self-sufficient.
An extra bonus is that the more you absorb the sun's energy as electricity, the less of it is converted to heat which dissipates around the planet, and that in and of itself reduces the effect global warming. So you are being twice as productive - not rely on heat-trapping coal, and reduce the amount of heat that saturates on the planet in the first place.
Of course, this would have to be done on a truly massive scale to have any effect, but every bit helps, and if the industry can make it profitable to the consumer (and of course overcome the interests of evil megalomaniac neofascistliberal Big Oil corporations, as any
"Disaster" is a pretty hypy label for an event which led to no known loss of human life or property, and caused no significant environmental damage (yes, a lot of trees fell and some wildlife may have died, but it's not like it destroyed an ecosystem or led to an extinction of any species).
Most modern industrial projects are a bigger "disaster" in this sense than Tunguska. The event should be referred to as "phenomenon", or maybe just a "boom", but not a "disaster".
Chinese Democracy has been vaporware for 96 years and counting. The first beta was delivered in 1911, but numerous bugs caused it to eventually crash. Then they shipped another version for a completely different platform in 1949, but critics complain that it doesn't really deliver what was promised, and thus is vaporware. They tried to apply a major service pack in 1989, but it failed due to Insufficient Privileges error. Will the real version ever ship? Maybe, but I'm keeping my money on Duke.
Implicit parsing a num to a string is straightforward and will pretty much always work, even if you may get wierd results like "1.66666666666666666667". But the other way is just too careless to let be implicitly done. You may unexpected errors when for some reason the string you use cannot be parsed, and you may get either an unexpected datatype or a truncated result when a parsed string would not match the other num you add to it (such as int a = x+5 where x is a string "3.5").
Casting from string to number should always be done explicitly, with precise definition of the data type you cast to, and ideally with an error catching block in case something goes wrong. Letting it be done implicitly is a recipe for headache.
"Perl" and "readability" don't fit in the same sentence to begin with. :)
So if before I was only worried about law enforcement violating my privacy, now I can add the entire US population to the list.
Sorry, I just don't see how two wrongs can make a right here.