I was a little surprised that everyone got excited when the first exoplanets were discovered. I've had the conviction that there must be millions of other planets out there since childhood. The main reason is that it's a logical assumption. Since there are so many planets in our own solar system, why should other stars systems be different? The other reason is probably Star Wars.
But yes, I do realize it's nice that we now have actual proof that they are really there.
Single threaded is the safest way to program. Creating a multithreaded application without a strong multithreaded architecture is asking for trouble.
The only problem with this is the limited performance and the fact that modern computers are packing more and more CPU's whereas individual CPU performance has been stagnating. Sooner or later people will have to work out the tools to create safe multithreaded applications without requiring a special degree in parallellization.
For some reason, when following your link to the 737 roof ripping problem I'm first shown a video of a smoke issue on an Airbus plane, and only after that does the actual 737 video related to the article show up.
One thing to be said about communism is that they built to last, and not to throw away. Once we start drowning in our own waste, the "success" of capitalism and rapant consumerism will be reassessed.
Yes, obviously Berlusconi and what was going on in Italy is one of the worst corruption cases in the world. That is a result of combined media and political control which in my opinion should be prohibited.
Apart from that, the rest what you're talking about is a result of unconstrained capitalism. That's a whole different discussion. I'm sure it's not due to european companies that Assad has killed 4000 people in Syria and Gaddhafi was doing the same until he was finally stopped, with air support from NATO.
There are many things wrong with the world, but if we start to blindly criticise even the little that is done to support oppressed people, because of our own problems with corruption or some double standards that may sometimes apply or not, then the world will truly never get anywere.
Is it really that hard? If there is a concentration of power with lack of democratic structure and widespread censorship, I think those are pretty good indicators.
I'm getting a little tired of this schizophrenic attitude of finger pointing at western governments for their foreign policy and dealings. There is always going to be corruption and power abuse and western governments are not exempt from that. But there are far, far worse things going on in most of the rest of the world. If anyone has the moral authority to define what constitutes a repressive regime and gang up on them to limit the harm they can cause their own people, than it is western Europe. We have our share of problems, but we are also the most important stronghold of democracy and civil rights in the world (I consider the U.S. with its two party system and rampant lobbyism more as an oligarchy as a truly functional democracy). We will make mistakes along the way, but if we don't send signals and push back against what we consider to be repressive regimes, nobody else will because nobody else cares. So stop nitpicking at every action that is taken. At least there are some democratically elected institutions thinking about and trying to deal with these issues.
From my personal experience, I'd say piracy is a pricing AND a service problem. During my student years, I pirated almost every game except a select few I absolutely wanted to have. 50€ was alot of money for me, and downloading something from the internet was more comfortable than getting a copy from a store and sticking the CD in every time I wanted to play. I didn't have Steam back then.
Now I'm using Steam and have a job. I've probably spent around 200-300€ on games this year, taking up many of the special discount offers on Steam, even buying games "legit" that I have pirated CDs lying around. Steam makes it easy, and now that I have the money, I don't think twice about spending 20€ on a game every month or so. From this experience I'd say that piracy has nothing todo with greed, bad intent or trickery. It's just plain lazyness and circumstance. And DRM is a waste of time that only makes things worse for paying customers.
I think you didn't get my point. Perhaps the risk can be made even smaller by installing the latest hardware and following whatnot security procedures. But the risk will never go away and the consequences if something does go wrong remain as unberable as before. Also, not all risks can be calculated. Will the latest hardware protect a nuclear power plant against a terrorist attack? Or a plane crash? Or a crazy, suicidal employee?
Nuclear power deals is a technology that deals with inherently unsafe materials that cause damages that are practically impossible to treat and last for generations. It can not be the solution.
The problem with nuclear power is, that even though the risk of a meltdown may be very small, the consequences if it does happen are unbearable. If a nuclear reactor in France or Germany should experience a meltdown, it would be a catastrophe. France and Germany are relatively small, densly populated countries. A meltdown could expose more than 10% of the countries land area to dangerous radioactive contamination. That could mean evacuating ten million people or more and leaving entire strips of land unusable for decades. The country's economy would collapse, leading to a further economic and social meltdown. It takes just one nuclear reactor to blow to ruin an entire country, with all of the consequences to the european and world economy. Japan was lucky that the wind was blowing the other way and there's nothing but sea on the other side. That is not the case in central europe. The risk is just not worth it.
No. I'm very pro free speech, but not everything that is said is legitimate and worthy of tolerance. Free speech is fine if you can base your opinions on facts or some kind of rationality. Simply slurting slogans against a minority without sense or reason is not free speech. That is just hate mongering and generally behaving like retarded idiots.
As far as I know, Obama did not vote for the Iraq war and did not start the Afghanistan war, which were the first two big black holes in the budget.
Then along came the banking crisis due to unchecked, rampant capitalism that Fox and Republicans praise so much. So Obama practically had the choice between:
1. Bail out the banks, create economic stimulus package, save 10 million jobs, accumulate huge deficit, be universally hated by everybody.
or
2. Don't bail out the banks, further aggravate the crisis, dont create stimulus package, lose 10 million jobs, be universally hated by everybody.
Entirely valid criticism. Countries like Greece have inflated, corrupt governments that spend money like there's no tomorrow. But what I am meaning to say is that socialism isn't entirely bad and unchecked capitalism isn't entirely good. I think there has to be even balance with checks on both sides. And what is happening in the US is that there is this Fox/Republican fueled prejudice against socialism as if it were the root of all evil.
I respect your standpoint, but I believe that it is egoistical and short-sighted.
As a tax payer, you will benifit in the medium to long term from your money being invested into "the populace" through schools, welfare, education.
Education and welfare funded with your tax dollars means more innovation, less crime, higher paying jobs, new enterprises... a lot of positive feedback that is in turn reinvested and practically pays for itself in the long term. The whole society benefits.
If in turn all wealthy people hoard all their hard earned money and give up on the less fortunate, this will result in poverty, crime, social imbalance, dysfunctional families... a lot of negative feedback that is in turn "reinvested" and creates ever more social instability.
Of course, you can try to keep away from it all. Move to a better neighbourhood, build higher walls, install an alarm system, buy a gun... but it would be so much more productive to support people rather than to shut them out.
You might be right that I am generalizing when perhaps I should not. I am actually not familiar with the regulations of individual states.
But I am talking about a large part of the general american populace, which for some reason believes socialism to be inherently -evil-, anything barely resembling welfare to be -evil-, and giving a little more power to the state to be -evil-. This is an exaggerated, outdated and simplistic view on things that is propagated especially by Republicans and Fox News.
In the last few years I think even americans should have learned that banks and corporations, if left unchecked, will only benefit themselves at great cost to the public and therefore can be just as "evil".
I was trying to provide an example, that more power and control for the state is not necesserily a bad thing.
I think its not as simple as a question of freedom vs. security. First of all, there have to be taxes. Individuals don't build roads between cities, build aircraft carriers, put out fires in the neighbourhood or watch for law and order. There are some things only the state can do.
The real question is how much the state should do and how the state should spend taxes.
As I see it, the Republican Party has a track record of spending money in ways that will benifit their buddies in corprorations (wars- defense industry, Halliburton, oil contracts,...). So during a Republican administration taxes will mostly be funelled into corporations.
Democrats prefer to spend taxes on welfare, social programs and infrastructure, which means that the taxes benefit the people on the street and flow back to the tax payers.
In addition, Republicans like to make big deficits in order to further weaken the state and thereby empower corporations. Democrats try to keep deficits down so that a strong state can keep corporations in check.
I think by now we should all know how important it is to keep corporations in check. And I think that any sane person would prefer to have his taxes be invested back into the populace instead of expensive contracts for defense, logistics, and energy industries
But then in the U.S. you have your privately owned News Corporations that belong to the very same rich folks. And they are able to convince 50% of the american public that Democrats are evil socialists and that buying guns is the way to freedom.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that I see the greatest long-term threat to the U.S. not in terrorism and some guy sitting in the mountains of Afghanistan, but inside the very heart of the U.S. news networks that work so hard and dilligently to keep the american public ignorant and stupid.
In socialist Germany, we have government sponsored universal health care that is alot cheaper and more efficient than in the U.S. I can go to the doc any time I want to and not have to worry about being able to pay the bills. In socialist Germany, we have a state funded independent news organization that reports important facts from around the world from an unbiased standpoint, instead of reporting on the lives of teenaged girl-stars or the most recent, spectacular highway robbery. In socialist Germany, the state grants us legal protection from getting fired without good reason, unemployment benefits, parental benefits, grants for families with children, education sponsorships, the list goes on. In socialist Germany we have low unemployment and a trade surplus.
You know, capitalism isn't everything. Basically, the extreme capitalism that the Republican Party and Fox News preach only means that the power is transferred from the government to the corporations and their owners. Problem is that corporations have even less interest in the public than the government. Corporations only want to make more money.
The vast majority of europeans are astounded by the fact that so many americans are so spiteful and disapproving of the best president they've had in a long time. Obama is fighting for reforms that intend to help the middle and lower income classes and yet you people demonstrate against him to keep the system in place that clearly favors the wealthy. And all of this while juggling the tremendous deficit and two wars that Obama inherited from his precursor, and an economic crisis sparked by just these wealthy allmighties which the taxpayer had to step in for.
Us here on the old continent can't understand why in the world anyone would ever vote for the Republican party that so clearly is the political wing of the wealthiest 5%. The only thing that can explain this discrepancy between european and the broad american view on what is going on in your own country, is the tremendous influence held by misinforming "News" Corporations, such as Fox News.
To me, the responsibility of news organizations is to spread news from a neutral, unbiased standpoint in order for people to form their own opinions. So yes, measured by this CNN is better than FoxNews.
CNN mostly reports news whereas FoxNews mostly creates right-wing opinion embedded inside of "news" and "entertainment". This is practically the same difference between Aljazeera.net and Aljazeera.com.
Of course it is almost impossible to be completely unbiased as every news outlet at least "suffers" from a cultural bias.
By the way, compared to our state-funded yet independent communist-socialist German news organization (tagesschau.de), both CNN and FoxNews are bad. Over here we can actually trust our news not to bullshit us and to inform us on relevant subjects instead of the latest happenings in the lives of teenage girl stars.
Slashdot Mirror
Irony does not always have to refer to an intentionally opposite meaning. According to dictionary.com, one definition of irony is:
"an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected."
By this definition the above use of "ironic" makes perfect sense.
Some people are born with aids.
I was a little surprised that everyone got excited when the first exoplanets were discovered. I've had the conviction that there must be millions of other planets out there since childhood. The main reason is that it's a logical assumption. Since there are so many planets in our own solar system, why should other stars systems be different? The other reason is probably Star Wars.
But yes, I do realize it's nice that we now have actual proof that they are really there.
Single threaded is the safest way to program. Creating a multithreaded application without a strong multithreaded architecture is asking for trouble.
The only problem with this is the limited performance and the fact that modern computers are packing more and more CPU's whereas individual CPU performance has been stagnating. Sooner or later people will have to work out the tools to create safe multithreaded applications without requiring a special degree in parallellization.
For some reason, when following your link to the 737 roof ripping problem I'm first shown a video of a smoke issue on an Airbus plane, and only after that does the actual 737 video related to the article show up.
Isn't that funny.
One thing to be said about communism is that they built to last, and not to throw away. Once we start drowning in our own waste, the "success" of capitalism and rapant consumerism will be reassessed.
As with most things, you only need a smartphone once you have it.
Having your own space flight company seems to be the new fad among todays ultra elites.
I suppose it's better than yachting.
Yes, obviously Berlusconi and what was going on in Italy is one of the worst corruption cases in the world. That is a result of combined media and political control which in my opinion should be prohibited.
Apart from that, the rest what you're talking about is a result of unconstrained capitalism. That's a whole different discussion. I'm sure it's not due to european companies that Assad has killed 4000 people in Syria and Gaddhafi was doing the same until he was finally stopped, with air support from NATO.
There are many things wrong with the world, but if we start to blindly criticise even the little that is done to support oppressed people, because of our own problems with corruption or some double standards that may sometimes apply or not, then the world will truly never get anywere.
Is it really that hard? If there is a concentration of power with lack of democratic structure and widespread censorship, I think those are pretty good indicators.
I'm getting a little tired of this schizophrenic attitude of finger pointing at western governments for their foreign policy and dealings. There is always going to be corruption and power abuse and western governments are not exempt from that. But there are far, far worse things going on in most of the rest of the world. If anyone has the moral authority to define what constitutes a repressive regime and gang up on them to limit the harm they can cause their own people, than it is western Europe. We have our share of problems, but we are also the most important stronghold of democracy and civil rights in the world (I consider the U.S. with its two party system and rampant lobbyism more as an oligarchy as a truly functional democracy). We will make mistakes along the way, but if we don't send signals and push back against what we consider to be repressive regimes, nobody else will because nobody else cares. So stop nitpicking at every action that is taken. At least there are some democratically elected institutions thinking about and trying to deal with these issues.
From my personal experience, I'd say piracy is a pricing AND a service problem. During my student years, I pirated almost every game except a select few I absolutely wanted to have. 50€ was alot of money for me, and downloading something from the internet was more comfortable than getting a copy from a store and sticking the CD in every time I wanted to play. I didn't have Steam back then.
Now I'm using Steam and have a job. I've probably spent around 200-300€ on games this year, taking up many of the special discount offers on Steam, even buying games "legit" that I have pirated CDs lying around. Steam makes it easy, and now that I have the money, I don't think twice about spending 20€ on a game every month or so. From this experience I'd say that piracy has nothing todo with greed, bad intent or trickery. It's just plain lazyness and circumstance. And DRM is a waste of time that only makes things worse for paying customers.
I think you didn't get my point. Perhaps the risk can be made even smaller by installing the latest hardware and following whatnot security procedures. But the risk will never go away and the consequences if something does go wrong remain as unberable as before. Also, not all risks can be calculated. Will the latest hardware protect a nuclear power plant against a terrorist attack? Or a plane crash? Or a crazy, suicidal employee?
Nuclear power deals is a technology that deals with inherently unsafe materials that cause damages that are practically impossible to treat and last for generations. It can not be the solution.
The problem with nuclear power is, that even though the risk of a meltdown may be very small, the consequences if it does happen are unbearable.
If a nuclear reactor in France or Germany should experience a meltdown, it would be a catastrophe. France and Germany are relatively small, densly populated countries. A meltdown could expose more than 10% of the countries land area to dangerous radioactive contamination. That could mean evacuating ten million people or more and leaving entire strips of land unusable for decades. The country's economy would collapse, leading to a further economic and social meltdown. It takes just one nuclear reactor to blow to ruin an entire country, with all of the consequences to the european and world economy. Japan was lucky that the wind was blowing the other way and there's nothing but sea on the other side. That is not the case in central europe. The risk is just not worth it.
In Lustig’s view, sugar should be thought of, like cigarettes and alcohol, as something that’s killing us.
Time is something that's killing us. You have to decide if you want to live to reach the 100 or if you want to live to live.
The are so few Linux games not because there is no DirectX on Linux, but because it's not cost-efficient to produce for 2% of desktop systems.
No. I'm very pro free speech, but not everything that is said is legitimate and worthy of tolerance. Free speech is fine if you can base your opinions on facts or some kind of rationality. Simply slurting slogans against a minority without sense or reason is not free speech. That is just hate mongering and generally behaving like retarded idiots.
As far as I know, Obama did not vote for the Iraq war and did not start the Afghanistan war, which were the first two big black holes in the budget.
Then along came the banking crisis due to unchecked, rampant capitalism that Fox and Republicans praise so much. So Obama practically had the choice between:
1. Bail out the banks, create economic stimulus package, save 10 million jobs, accumulate huge deficit, be universally hated by everybody.
or
2. Don't bail out the banks, further aggravate the crisis, dont create stimulus package, lose 10 million jobs, be universally hated by everybody.
So, well, yeah. He went for No. 1.
Entirely valid criticism. Countries like Greece have inflated, corrupt governments that spend money like there's no tomorrow. But what I am meaning to say is that socialism isn't entirely bad and unchecked capitalism isn't entirely good. I think there has to be even balance with checks on both sides. And what is happening in the US is that there is this Fox/Republican fueled prejudice against socialism as if it were the root of all evil.
I respect your standpoint, but I believe that it is egoistical and short-sighted.
As a tax payer, you will benifit in the medium to long term from your money being invested into "the populace" through schools, welfare, education.
Education and welfare funded with your tax dollars means more innovation, less crime, higher paying jobs, new enterprises... a lot of positive feedback that is in turn reinvested and practically pays for itself in the long term. The whole society benefits.
If in turn all wealthy people hoard all their hard earned money and give up on the less fortunate, this will result in poverty, crime, social imbalance, dysfunctional families... a lot of negative feedback that is in turn "reinvested" and creates ever more social instability.
Of course, you can try to keep away from it all. Move to a better neighbourhood, build higher walls, install an alarm system, buy a gun... but it would be so much more productive to support people rather than to shut them out.
I would consider myself "European". My nationality is not German, I grew up in 3 different countries, but I have lived mostly in Germany.
You might be right that I am generalizing when perhaps I should not. I am actually not familiar with the regulations of individual states.
But I am talking about a large part of the general american populace, which for some reason believes socialism to be inherently -evil-, anything barely resembling welfare to be -evil-, and giving a little more power to the state to be -evil-. This is an exaggerated, outdated and simplistic view on things that is propagated especially by Republicans and Fox News.
In the last few years I think even americans should have learned that banks and corporations, if left unchecked, will only benefit themselves at great cost to the public and therefore can be just as "evil".
I was trying to provide an example, that more power and control for the state is not necesserily a bad thing.
I think its not as simple as a question of freedom vs. security. First of all, there have to be taxes. Individuals don't build roads between cities, build aircraft carriers, put out fires in the neighbourhood or watch for law and order. There are some things only the state can do.
The real question is how much the state should do and how the state should spend taxes.
As I see it, the Republican Party has a track record of spending money in ways that will benifit their buddies in corprorations (wars- defense industry, Halliburton, oil contracts, ...). So during a Republican administration taxes will mostly be funelled into corporations.
Democrats prefer to spend taxes on welfare, social programs and infrastructure, which means that the taxes benefit the people on the street and flow back to the tax payers.
In addition, Republicans like to make big deficits in order to further weaken the state and thereby empower corporations. Democrats try to keep deficits down so that a strong state can keep corporations in check.
I think by now we should all know how important it is to keep corporations in check. And I think that any sane person would prefer to have his taxes be invested back into the populace instead of expensive contracts for defense, logistics, and energy industries
But then in the U.S. you have your privately owned News Corporations that belong to the very same rich folks. And they are able to convince 50% of the american public that Democrats are evil socialists and that buying guns is the way to freedom.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that I see the greatest long-term threat to the U.S. not in terrorism and some guy sitting in the mountains of Afghanistan, but inside the very heart of the U.S. news networks that work so hard and dilligently to keep the american public ignorant and stupid.
In socialist Germany, we have government sponsored universal health care that is alot cheaper and more efficient than in the U.S. I can go to the doc any time I want to and not have to worry about being able to pay the bills.
In socialist Germany, we have a state funded independent news organization that reports important facts from around the world from an unbiased standpoint, instead of reporting on the lives of teenaged girl-stars or the most recent, spectacular highway robbery.
In socialist Germany, the state grants us legal protection from getting fired without good reason, unemployment benefits, parental benefits, grants for families with children, education sponsorships, the list goes on.
In socialist Germany we have low unemployment and a trade surplus.
You know, capitalism isn't everything. Basically, the extreme capitalism that the Republican Party and Fox News preach only means that the power is transferred from the government to the corporations and their owners. Problem is that corporations have even less interest in the public than the government. Corporations only want to make more money.
The vast majority of europeans are astounded by the fact that so many americans are so spiteful and disapproving of the best president they've had in a long time. Obama is fighting for reforms that intend to help the middle and lower income classes and yet you people demonstrate against him to keep the system in place that clearly favors the wealthy. And all of this while juggling the tremendous deficit and two wars that Obama inherited from his precursor, and an economic crisis sparked by just these wealthy allmighties which the taxpayer had to step in for.
Us here on the old continent can't understand why in the world anyone would ever vote for the Republican party that so clearly is the political wing of the wealthiest 5%. The only thing that can explain this discrepancy between european and the broad american view on what is going on in your own country, is the tremendous influence held by misinforming "News" Corporations, such as Fox News.
Everybody except people who watch Fox News already know this.
To me, the responsibility of news organizations is to spread news from a neutral, unbiased standpoint in order for people to form their own opinions. So yes, measured by this CNN is better than FoxNews.
CNN mostly reports news whereas FoxNews mostly creates right-wing opinion embedded inside of "news" and "entertainment". This is practically the same difference between Aljazeera.net and Aljazeera.com.
Of course it is almost impossible to be completely unbiased as every news outlet at least "suffers" from a cultural bias.
By the way, compared to our state-funded yet independent communist-socialist German news organization (tagesschau.de), both CNN and FoxNews are bad. Over here we can actually trust our news not to bullshit us and to inform us on relevant subjects instead of the latest happenings in the lives of teenage girl stars.