Reminder, this is the telecom provider market. That means there will ALWAYS be monopolies
Not necessarily. Consider what would happen if the government were to own all the telephone lines between residential houses and exchanges - and then allowed the home owner to decide which company would have control over that line, but did not provide any telecoms services themselves.
It's not completely trivial, but it wouldn't cost very much either (the government pretty much paid for all those lines in the first place, so they would be fully justified in using eminent domain to get them back).
The government imposes *no* restrictions on which service providers can have the line - that decision is left fully to the home owner. The service provider pays rent equal to the actual running costs of the line service (including exchanges and repairs). The result is a deregulated non-monopoly telecoms industry. It may be better or worse, but it would work, so it's possible. There's no regulation here, the government just owns the wires.
You could make a convincing argument that any government-run project is doomed to be a poorly managed bureaucracy with nothing resembling good service, but that's what all the telecoms companies are like already.
(This is roughly the same concept currently applied in the UK for OFCOM/BT, taken to its natural conclusion)
Anyways, I'm rambling. Just wondering if the japanese devs feel the same? Anyone have any insight into this?
Yes. You can't put time pressure on Japanese developers. The Japanese think that a 90-hour working week is normal; there simply aren't enough hours in the week to pressure them with (or at least not like EA do). They're a nation of workaholics.
Exaggerated? Well, a little bit - not all the Japanese are like that. Just most of the professional workers.
It's only a crime if using that software is illegal either where you're downloading it from or where you are located.
I'm sorry, but you seem to have forgotten that copyright exists.
Copyright is a law which says you may not create copies of certain classes of information and then give those copies to other people. It also says that if you give enough copies to other people then it is a crime. Putting a copy of it up on a web server qualifies. Just ask the MPAA and RIAA.
If you do not have the specific, explicit, correctly formulated permission of all the copyright holders, and none of the exemptions apply (fair use), then copying the work on a large scale is a crime.
If the work you are looking at contained GPLed software, and also is controlled by patent licenses or other copyright licenses, then you explicitly do not have permission to copy the work at all. That's one of the terms of the GPL. You may use the software as much as you like, but you may not copy it.
(Using the software, which you were talking about, is an entirely different matter that has nothing to do with copyright - yes, it's possible to commit crimes in this fashion, but they aren't relevant here.)
Further more, it's quite possible that you work for an organisation that has a blanket licence for the patent or you have individually licenced it.
It does not matter whether the organisation that you work for has a license to use the software. Redhat and Debian do not have a license to give you a copy of the software. That is what matters. It's stupid and inconvinient and poorly thought out, but it's the law.
In short : nice doesn't change the total amount of time your processes take (or, at least, not by very much), it just changes which one finishes first.
Actually it does change the total amount of time. The issue in question here is about disk caching. The problem was that, if you run updatedb niced, then it doesn't get to run as often. In fact, it can run so infrequently that between one timeslice and the next, the disk cache has been replaced by other stuff, because of all the processes that ran in between the two.
The result is that updatedb runs with permanently cold cache. That makes it take hours instead of minutes. Hence the problem. It's not immediately obvious because it only happens when there is a moderate amount of background usage of disk resources - like an active mail server, or a backup job.
Nice isn't very nice to disk-intensive processes. This feature of unix was designed for cpu-intensive processes. It doesn't work very well on things like updatedb - you tend to get bad interactions like this one. If the system is truly idle then you're safe, but if it isn't then you're screwed.
This is an old problem, and it's not one that can be solved perfectly in the scheduler, due to race conditions (what if the admin was doing something at the wrong moment?). Fortunately, it can be solved perfectly in the application being run. Just use a pair of flock()ed lock files to ensure that (a) no more than one copy of the process is running at any one time, and (b) no more than one copy is waiting to run at any one time.
Algorithm:
- try to get the 'run' lock. if we get the run lock, then run the job
- otherwise, try to get the 'wait' lock
- if we get the 'wait' lock, then wait and keep trying to get the 'run' lock
- when we eventually get the 'run' lock, release the 'wait' lock, then run the job
- otherwise, just exit
You could just use a single lock, but then you can miss an entire scheduling interval because the last run took a little bit longer than expected. This method ensures that you run the job as often as your system can, without ever running more than one copy at once. We use flock to avoid problems with stale locks. (It's not my idea, I first saw it many years ago - I think it's a very old unix trick, from the days when men were men and computers were bolted to the floor.)
This does not attempt to tackle the independent problem of a running job that gets stuck. That one, you can fix in the scheduler, or in an independent daemon that monitors process run times.
People are not complaining about the patches, they are complaining about the bugs. The unending stream of horribly horribly bad bugs.
It's not news that IE is full of more security holes than a DHS project. Microsoft have had years to sort this mess out.
Have they?
No. We still have multiple grave remotely-exploitable security holes in IE every year.
That's why people complain.
Ongoing updates are not an indication of "true support". Nor are they an indication of hating Microsoft (although I admit, I find your logic for that part quite nonexistant). True support would be providing software that does not have security holes all the fricking time. You *can* get that kind of service, you just can't get it for Microsoft products (and you're going to have to pay for it, so you won't get it from many free software projects either).
Too complex. I listen to their babble, look thoughtful for a moment, and then say:
"So what you're saying is, you've got a new plan?"
I don't bother telling them that they're being an idiot. I just make it very clear that I am going to reduce their twenty minutes of babble into one or two sentences. Furthermore I then proceed as if that's all they said - it's what the minutes will contain, if we're bothering to keep any, and it's the message I'll pass on to other people.
I find that pretty soon, people catch on to the fact that spending twenty minutes talking to me is a waste of both our time, and they learn to abbreviate themselves. If they want to tell me something complicated, they write it down (if you can't explain yourself in five minutes then I'm not going to remember what you said anyway) - and I send them back a much shorter version with a note attached: "Is this what you mean?". And the short version is the one I always refer to after that.
Basically, when people realise that all their noise is going to get filtered out right away, they stop delivering it. Probably because they don't want management to ask them why they needed an hour-long meeting to convey this paragraph of information. Bullshit cannot survive when it has to compete directly with clarity.
Obviously, it's very unlikely that he would sue Debian for distributing mod_security, and even if he did, I don't think he would be likely to win, considering it does seem like his intensions are for mod_security to be used with apache.
Since copyright violations are now a crime in many countries, Debian could be prosecuted by the government. That's either the DA or DHS in the US. The author would have little or no control over this; it would be a political decision.
That makes these things a lot trickier than they ought to be.
I'm sorry, but saying "I am aware that Redhat is committing a serious crime and absolve them of any responsibility" does not actually stop it being a serious crime or absolve them of any responsibility. Private individuals just can't do that. Talk to your government if you want to do that, and get the stupid laws fixed.
That's the problem. It's probably not illegal for you to receive this software. It's a crime, prosecuted by your government, for Redhat or Debian to give this software to you. Neither you nor Redhat nor Debian has any control over this. The authors of the software only have limited control - they can stop it being a crime (by fixing their license), but they cannot stop the government from prosecuting people for it.
Copyright isn't just a civil offense these days, and that's a big problem here. It means that vendors have to be much more careful about what they give you.
So to say todays computers can't handle it is crap. The problem is purely around not knowing how to process it
That's what I said. Nobody knows a way to process it that today's computers can handle. We *do* know several ways to process it that those computers *can't* handle.
As to your claim that "we're storing hundreds of terabytes of data, obviously we can handle it" - you're just storing data. The problem is computational complexity, not storage. The well-known 'right' answers to most data mining problems are high polynomial time or worse; they would take centuries to run on a data set of that size. So data mining is often an exercise in finding faster approximations.
Ubuntu doesn't actually do anything different for those newbies. What they do is file off the labels from existing software so that it's not quite immediately recognisable, and then tell all the newbies that it's different. Since these people are by definition uninformed, they don't know the difference.
Ubuntu is little more than a successful marketing exercise. They sell products that already existed to people too stupid to know about them. Most of the rest of the stuff they do is just repainting the bikeshed because they didn't like the old colour ("it doesn't use XML", "it's not written in my favorite language", "I just don't like the author").
When you were trying to convert all those friends and loved ones, what you should have done was look important and lie to them.
Unfortunately, I don't believe this law says that they actually have to recycle the computers. They merely can't landfill them in the UK. The lawmakers didn't appear to consider the possibility of shipping the old computers overseas and landfilling them in a third world country.
The classic trick is to set up a company in your target country, which "reuses" old computers. Then ship all your stuff over there, and write it off as 100% recycled (for which you probably get tax benefits). The receiving company will landfill most of them and use a small fraction - it's *their* responsibility, and there's no recycling law in such countries.
I would suggest that, in practice, the real difficulty is that the problems that need to really be solved for data mining to be as effective as some people seem to wish it was are, when you actually get down to it, issues of pure mathematics.
That's part of the problem.
Another part is computational complexity. No, I'm not kidding. These things are often in like the second and third powers of the data set size. The data sets are often terabytes in size. We don't have computers that big, and by the time we do, we'll probably have bigger data sets. Contemporary data mining is an exercise in finding a fast enough approximation that is accurate enough to look convincing. We're not really sure how accurate they actually are - most of the time, there's no way to find out for certain. "Probably good enough" is the best you normally get. Some researchers can put a number on that 'probably' for you, eventually. Mostly they just compare the available approximations and tell you which one works the best.
The biggest problem is the inability to figure out intelligent things to do with it. Computers aren't smart. You can't just hand them a heap of data and say "find me the things I want to know". You have to work out what the patterns in the data are for yourself, then do pure math research to turn those patterns into a mathematical model. Then you have to come up with useful questions to ask that model. That's two major insights plus several years of work - and most researchers only have one major insight in their entire career. Just to figure out what question to ask. Data mining is then the process of repeatedly answering that question for all possible values of the parameters. And the answers you get out will only be as good as the model you invented. The current method for discovering usable patterns in data is trial and error.
I think that 'data mining' is more or less a frontier by definition. It's all the things we don't yet know about the data we currently have which would take a huge amount of effort to discover. Most unsolved problems in mathematics could probably be called 'data mining problems': if an answer exists, it can be derived from the existing body of theory. Most decisions that people make, from deciding whether to eat now or later, to deciding whether to invade a foreign nation, can also qualify. The sheer range of things it could cover means that there will probably always be vastly more unsolved problems than solved ones.
I like a crypto-fascist conspiracy as much as the next guy, but wouldn't that be an awfully big marketing risk for IBM to take?
Which is precisely why the NSA would not tell IBM that they were inserting a backdoor into the chip. Oh, some IBM employees would doubtless have to know about it, but they would be in the employ of the NSA - IBM as an organisation, and specifically their management, would be unaware that this was happening. You don't really need to control a large number of people to pull it off - there would just be a little extra bit added to the chip designs right before they go to manufacturing, and removed again before the test results are sent back.
Big&bloated Microsoft Word starts in under 2 seconds on modern hardware.
This is not true. On 'modern' hardware, the nforce4 board with a regular old althon64 sitting under my desk, Word (from office XP) takes a little under ten seconds to start.
It takes under two seconds to open a new window if you allowed it to start on boot, which it does in the default configuration when you install many versions of Office (although some recent versions no longer do this - office then loads when you start your first office application, and then stays resident).
Openoffice is extremely slow in comparison to Microsoft Office
When you correct for the above behaviour (disable office-load-on-boot or enable the equivalent functionality for openoffice), then this is not true.
You get the same stuff for "save in background" vs "tell me when you're done saving", and dozens of other features. Word isn't faster, it just appears to be (to the untrained observer).
Republicans are evil. So are Democrats, Libertarians and Anarchists. In fact, anyone who willingly subscribes to any doctrine to represent them entirely, as opposed to thinking freely and clearly based on the plethora of information made freely available to all of us, is evil.
To point out the obvious, most breeds of anarchists are anti-doctrine by definition, and the only thing they really have in common is that none of them support systems of centralised control. Real anarchists don't form political parties, although they might sometimes arrange to get together and mob some politicians. If they want to.
So the conclusion appears to be that all people who are not anarchists are evil.
The professor, as well as the author of the textbook we used, were very adamant about telling us that sexual addiction is not real. It is not scientific, it is used by those crazy conservative christians (aliteration pun intended...) to scare everyone and control them.
There are two definitions of the term 'addiction'. One is a medical term, with specifically defined parameters and requirements. The other is a layman's term, which refers to a whole group of concepts, some of which are real but which the laymen mostly do not understand correctly (psychologists use terms like 'reinforcement' and 'conditioning' for this).
Pretty much everybody who understands what it means agrees that medical addiction is bad for you. Your professor was using this definition. He's right. 'Sexual addiction' has been studied and it has not been found to be a medical addiction. That's not to say that it can't be, but it would have to be relatively rare.
The layman's sense of 'addiction' is more problematic, because psychologists know that there's little or no real difference between that, and 'teaching' as practiced in schools for the under 11s (rewarded by being praised, punished by being sent to stand in the corner, and you'll get those same neurotransmitters you were talking about), or any of the other systems of reward and punishment that you encounter in life. Conditioning is all the same thing regardless of whether you're being conditioned to eat chocolate or do math. You are using this definition. You are making some kind of subjective judgement that some forms of conditioning are good and some forms are bad. This is based entirely on your own sense of morality.
Kindly keep your sense of morality in the bedroom where it belongs, and don't attempt to inflict it on other people.
nobody who has or has attempted to commit an act of terrorism in the UK in history, including Guy Fawkews
I resemble that remark. Guy Fawkes wasn't a terrorist, he was a patriot. After all, he was attempting to blow up the houses of parliament. It doesn't matter what your political leanings are, your world would be vastly improved if it didn't have all those politicians in it.
The shipbuilding industry. There's nothing like military spending to keep the economy looking good.
Re:A solution in search of a problem.
on
New Jet Engine Tested
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· Score: 4, Informative
Furthermore - a scramjet is nearly useless as the first stage of an orbital launcher, because it wants to cruise at a steady speed. An orbital launcher wants to be steadily accelerating.
That's not really true - or at least, it's highly confusing. All jet engines are accelerating whenever they are not idling: they exert a force on the craft causing it to accelerate at a rate of the force exerted divided by the mass of the craft. The apparent acceleration of the craft is reduced by drag and gravity. An orbital launcher has two requirements: that it gain sufficient height to reduce drag to near-zero, and sufficient velocity to actually be in orbit. There's numerous paths that will get you there and few of them involve 'steady acceleration' - a conventional 'great big rocket' launcher has steady thrust, but apparent acceleration to a ground observer is constantly changing with height, since the effects of drag reduce at higher altitudes.
A scramjet does not cruise at a steady speed. It runs at a fixed level of incoming air pressure. It has to run at that level because a scramjet does not contain moving parts to control the air flow. That means, as the surrounding air pressure decreases, the scramjet goes faster. It effectively operates at a fixed speed for a given altitude, and goes faster as you get higher. This is ideal for an orbital launcher.
However: the first stage of an orbital launcher is the one that gets it off the ground. A scramjet is completely useless as the first stage because it doesn't do anything when you aren't moving.
A scramjet path to orbit looks rather different to the old 'big rocket' system. You start with a conventional turbojet aircraft, which takes off and lands normally, using a horizontal path and wings. That's the first stage. You use it to climb to turbojet cruising altitude, and maybe accelerate to your maximum operating velocity (about mach 2 to mach 3). Then you fire a ramjet engine (or small rocket booster - this can be a solid rocket) to get you up to mach 5, which is the breakeven point for a scramjet. Then you fire the scramjet as the third stage, which carries you from mach 5 up to about mach 10 or 12, and most importantly, to near-orbital altitude.
At this point, the orbital craft that was piggybacking you breaks away, and boosts to orbit on one of the conventional late-stage rocket engines, like those used by the shuttle once it has discarded all its booster engines and is in the final orbiter configuration. It's already nearly there, so it doesn't need much fuel. The conventional aircraft that got it up here descends again and lands under turbojets, just like every other jet craft; the orbital craft has its own crew and operates independently.
The two advantages of this design are that it should be largely reusable (because you haven't discarded half the craft on the way up), and it requires significantly less total thrust to get up there. A 'big rocket' craft has to fight the force of gravity all the way up; an aircraft with wings is supported by aerodynamic lift, and merely has to accelerate. The disadvantages are that jet aircraft have more drag than rockets (but aircraft fly all the time; this isn't a fatal problem, it just reduces the advantage), and nobody knows how to build a useful scramjet aircraft yet (the X-43 testing craft just prove the scramjet concept, they aren't useful in their own right). Whether or not anybody can build such a craft that can lift a useful payload weight to orbit is unknown, but the theory says it should be possible.
wears a turtleneck and makes innovative computer products
You mean 'wears a turtleneck and talks about computer products'. Steve Jobs may have worked on them in the past, but he's all PR nowadays. Other people make the products.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminder, this is the telecom provider market. That means there will ALWAYS be monopolies
Not necessarily. Consider what would happen if the government were to own all the telephone lines between residential houses and exchanges - and then allowed the home owner to decide which company would have control over that line, but did not provide any telecoms services themselves.
It's not completely trivial, but it wouldn't cost very much either (the government pretty much paid for all those lines in the first place, so they would be fully justified in using eminent domain to get them back).
The government imposes *no* restrictions on which service providers can have the line - that decision is left fully to the home owner. The service provider pays rent equal to the actual running costs of the line service (including exchanges and repairs). The result is a deregulated non-monopoly telecoms industry. It may be better or worse, but it would work, so it's possible. There's no regulation here, the government just owns the wires.
You could make a convincing argument that any government-run project is doomed to be a poorly managed bureaucracy with nothing resembling good service, but that's what all the telecoms companies are like already.
(This is roughly the same concept currently applied in the UK for OFCOM/BT, taken to its natural conclusion)
Anyways, I'm rambling. Just wondering if the japanese devs feel the same? Anyone have any insight into this?
Yes. You can't put time pressure on Japanese developers. The Japanese think that a 90-hour working week is normal; there simply aren't enough hours in the week to pressure them with (or at least not like EA do). They're a nation of workaholics.
Exaggerated? Well, a little bit - not all the Japanese are like that. Just most of the professional workers.
In all seriousness, how many good reasons could there be for a US citizen to have an account in a tax haven?
Tax evasion, of course.
If the only way you can remain gainfully employed is to talk bullshit all day so that people like you, then all I have to say is this:
FIND A NEW JOB WITH A DIFFERENT COMPANY
Seriously.
It's only a crime if using that software is illegal either where you're downloading it from or where you are located.
I'm sorry, but you seem to have forgotten that copyright exists.
Copyright is a law which says you may not create copies of certain classes of information and then give those copies to other people. It also says that if you give enough copies to other people then it is a crime. Putting a copy of it up on a web server qualifies. Just ask the MPAA and RIAA.
If you do not have the specific, explicit, correctly formulated permission of all the copyright holders, and none of the exemptions apply (fair use), then copying the work on a large scale is a crime.
If the work you are looking at contained GPLed software, and also is controlled by patent licenses or other copyright licenses, then you explicitly do not have permission to copy the work at all. That's one of the terms of the GPL. You may use the software as much as you like, but you may not copy it.
(Using the software, which you were talking about, is an entirely different matter that has nothing to do with copyright - yes, it's possible to commit crimes in this fashion, but they aren't relevant here.)
Further more, it's quite possible that you work for an organisation that has a blanket licence for the patent or you have individually licenced it.
It does not matter whether the organisation that you work for has a license to use the software. Redhat and Debian do not have a license to give you a copy of the software. That is what matters. It's stupid and inconvinient and poorly thought out, but it's the law.
In short : nice doesn't change the total amount of time your processes take (or, at least, not by very much), it just changes which one finishes first.
Actually it does change the total amount of time. The issue in question here is about disk caching. The problem was that, if you run updatedb niced, then it doesn't get to run as often. In fact, it can run so infrequently that between one timeslice and the next, the disk cache has been replaced by other stuff, because of all the processes that ran in between the two.
The result is that updatedb runs with permanently cold cache. That makes it take hours instead of minutes. Hence the problem. It's not immediately obvious because it only happens when there is a moderate amount of background usage of disk resources - like an active mail server, or a backup job.
Nice isn't very nice to disk-intensive processes. This feature of unix was designed for cpu-intensive processes. It doesn't work very well on things like updatedb - you tend to get bad interactions like this one. If the system is truly idle then you're safe, but if it isn't then you're screwed.
This is an old problem, and it's not one that can be solved perfectly in the scheduler, due to race conditions (what if the admin was doing something at the wrong moment?). Fortunately, it can be solved perfectly in the application being run. Just use a pair of flock()ed lock files to ensure that (a) no more than one copy of the process is running at any one time, and (b) no more than one copy is waiting to run at any one time.
Algorithm:
- try to get the 'run' lock. if we get the run lock, then run the job
- otherwise, try to get the 'wait' lock
- if we get the 'wait' lock, then wait and keep trying to get the 'run' lock
- when we eventually get the 'run' lock, release the 'wait' lock, then run the job
- otherwise, just exit
You could just use a single lock, but then you can miss an entire scheduling interval because the last run took a little bit longer than expected. This method ensures that you run the job as often as your system can, without ever running more than one copy at once. We use flock to avoid problems with stale locks. (It's not my idea, I first saw it many years ago - I think it's a very old unix trick, from the days when men were men and computers were bolted to the floor.)
This does not attempt to tackle the independent problem of a running job that gets stuck. That one, you can fix in the scheduler, or in an independent daemon that monitors process run times.
People are not complaining about the patches, they are complaining about the bugs. The unending stream of horribly horribly bad bugs.
It's not news that IE is full of more security holes than a DHS project. Microsoft have had years to sort this mess out.
Have they?
No. We still have multiple grave remotely-exploitable security holes in IE every year.
That's why people complain.
Ongoing updates are not an indication of "true support". Nor are they an indication of hating Microsoft (although I admit, I find your logic for that part quite nonexistant). True support would be providing software that does not have security holes all the fricking time. You *can* get that kind of service, you just can't get it for Microsoft products (and you're going to have to pay for it, so you won't get it from many free software projects either).
Too complex. I listen to their babble, look thoughtful for a moment, and then say:
"So what you're saying is, you've got a new plan?"
I don't bother telling them that they're being an idiot. I just make it very clear that I am going to reduce their twenty minutes of babble into one or two sentences. Furthermore I then proceed as if that's all they said - it's what the minutes will contain, if we're bothering to keep any, and it's the message I'll pass on to other people.
I find that pretty soon, people catch on to the fact that spending twenty minutes talking to me is a waste of both our time, and they learn to abbreviate themselves. If they want to tell me something complicated, they write it down (if you can't explain yourself in five minutes then I'm not going to remember what you said anyway) - and I send them back a much shorter version with a note attached: "Is this what you mean?". And the short version is the one I always refer to after that.
Basically, when people realise that all their noise is going to get filtered out right away, they stop delivering it. Probably because they don't want management to ask them why they needed an hour-long meeting to convey this paragraph of information. Bullshit cannot survive when it has to compete directly with clarity.
Obviously, it's very unlikely that he would sue Debian for distributing mod_security, and even if he did, I don't think he would be likely to win, considering it does seem like his intensions are for mod_security to be used with apache.
Since copyright violations are now a crime in many countries, Debian could be prosecuted by the government. That's either the DA or DHS in the US. The author would have little or no control over this; it would be a political decision.
That makes these things a lot trickier than they ought to be.
I'm sorry, but saying "I am aware that Redhat is committing a serious crime and absolve them of any responsibility" does not actually stop it being a serious crime or absolve them of any responsibility. Private individuals just can't do that. Talk to your government if you want to do that, and get the stupid laws fixed.
That's the problem. It's probably not illegal for you to receive this software. It's a crime, prosecuted by your government, for Redhat or Debian to give this software to you. Neither you nor Redhat nor Debian has any control over this. The authors of the software only have limited control - they can stop it being a crime (by fixing their license), but they cannot stop the government from prosecuting people for it.
Copyright isn't just a civil offense these days, and that's a big problem here. It means that vendors have to be much more careful about what they give you.
So to say todays computers can't handle it is crap. The problem is purely around not knowing how to process it
That's what I said. Nobody knows a way to process it that today's computers can handle. We *do* know several ways to process it that those computers *can't* handle.
As to your claim that "we're storing hundreds of terabytes of data, obviously we can handle it" - you're just storing data. The problem is computational complexity, not storage. The well-known 'right' answers to most data mining problems are high polynomial time or worse; they would take centuries to run on a data set of that size. So data mining is often an exercise in finding faster approximations.
Ubuntu doesn't actually do anything different for those newbies. What they do is file off the labels from existing software so that it's not quite immediately recognisable, and then tell all the newbies that it's different. Since these people are by definition uninformed, they don't know the difference.
Ubuntu is little more than a successful marketing exercise. They sell products that already existed to people too stupid to know about them. Most of the rest of the stuff they do is just repainting the bikeshed because they didn't like the old colour ("it doesn't use XML", "it's not written in my favorite language", "I just don't like the author").
When you were trying to convert all those friends and loved ones, what you should have done was look important and lie to them.
Unfortunately, I don't believe this law says that they actually have to recycle the computers. They merely can't landfill them in the UK. The lawmakers didn't appear to consider the possibility of shipping the old computers overseas and landfilling them in a third world country.
The classic trick is to set up a company in your target country, which "reuses" old computers. Then ship all your stuff over there, and write it off as 100% recycled (for which you probably get tax benefits). The receiving company will landfill most of them and use a small fraction - it's *their* responsibility, and there's no recycling law in such countries.
I would suggest that, in practice, the real difficulty is that the problems that need to really be solved for data mining to be as effective as some people seem to wish it was are, when you actually get down to it, issues of pure mathematics.
That's part of the problem.
Another part is computational complexity. No, I'm not kidding. These things are often in like the second and third powers of the data set size. The data sets are often terabytes in size. We don't have computers that big, and by the time we do, we'll probably have bigger data sets. Contemporary data mining is an exercise in finding a fast enough approximation that is accurate enough to look convincing. We're not really sure how accurate they actually are - most of the time, there's no way to find out for certain. "Probably good enough" is the best you normally get. Some researchers can put a number on that 'probably' for you, eventually. Mostly they just compare the available approximations and tell you which one works the best.
The biggest problem is the inability to figure out intelligent things to do with it. Computers aren't smart. You can't just hand them a heap of data and say "find me the things I want to know". You have to work out what the patterns in the data are for yourself, then do pure math research to turn those patterns into a mathematical model. Then you have to come up with useful questions to ask that model. That's two major insights plus several years of work - and most researchers only have one major insight in their entire career. Just to figure out what question to ask. Data mining is then the process of repeatedly answering that question for all possible values of the parameters. And the answers you get out will only be as good as the model you invented. The current method for discovering usable patterns in data is trial and error.
I think that 'data mining' is more or less a frontier by definition. It's all the things we don't yet know about the data we currently have which would take a huge amount of effort to discover. Most unsolved problems in mathematics could probably be called 'data mining problems': if an answer exists, it can be derived from the existing body of theory. Most decisions that people make, from deciding whether to eat now or later, to deciding whether to invade a foreign nation, can also qualify. The sheer range of things it could cover means that there will probably always be vastly more unsolved problems than solved ones.
I like a crypto-fascist conspiracy as much as the next guy, but wouldn't that be an awfully big marketing risk for IBM to take?
Which is precisely why the NSA would not tell IBM that they were inserting a backdoor into the chip. Oh, some IBM employees would doubtless have to know about it, but they would be in the employ of the NSA - IBM as an organisation, and specifically their management, would be unaware that this was happening. You don't really need to control a large number of people to pull it off - there would just be a little extra bit added to the chip designs right before they go to manufacturing, and removed again before the test results are sent back.
Big&bloated Microsoft Word starts in under 2 seconds on modern hardware.
This is not true. On 'modern' hardware, the nforce4 board with a regular old althon64 sitting under my desk, Word (from office XP) takes a little under ten seconds to start.
It takes under two seconds to open a new window if you allowed it to start on boot, which it does in the default configuration when you install many versions of Office (although some recent versions no longer do this - office then loads when you start your first office application, and then stays resident).
Openoffice is extremely slow in comparison to Microsoft Office
When you correct for the above behaviour (disable office-load-on-boot or enable the equivalent functionality for openoffice), then this is not true.
You get the same stuff for "save in background" vs "tell me when you're done saving", and dozens of other features. Word isn't faster, it just appears to be (to the untrained observer).
Republicans are evil. So are Democrats, Libertarians and Anarchists. In fact, anyone who willingly subscribes to any doctrine to represent them entirely, as opposed to thinking freely and clearly based on the plethora of information made freely available to all of us, is evil.
To point out the obvious, most breeds of anarchists are anti-doctrine by definition, and the only thing they really have in common is that none of them support systems of centralised control. Real anarchists don't form political parties, although they might sometimes arrange to get together and mob some politicians. If they want to.
So the conclusion appears to be that all people who are not anarchists are evil.
The professor, as well as the author of the textbook we used, were very adamant about telling us that sexual addiction is not real. It is not scientific, it is used by those crazy conservative christians (aliteration pun intended...) to scare everyone and control them.
There are two definitions of the term 'addiction'. One is a medical term, with specifically defined parameters and requirements. The other is a layman's term, which refers to a whole group of concepts, some of which are real but which the laymen mostly do not understand correctly (psychologists use terms like 'reinforcement' and 'conditioning' for this).
Pretty much everybody who understands what it means agrees that medical addiction is bad for you. Your professor was using this definition. He's right. 'Sexual addiction' has been studied and it has not been found to be a medical addiction. That's not to say that it can't be, but it would have to be relatively rare.
The layman's sense of 'addiction' is more problematic, because psychologists know that there's little or no real difference between that, and 'teaching' as practiced in schools for the under 11s (rewarded by being praised, punished by being sent to stand in the corner, and you'll get those same neurotransmitters you were talking about), or any of the other systems of reward and punishment that you encounter in life. Conditioning is all the same thing regardless of whether you're being conditioned to eat chocolate or do math. You are using this definition. You are making some kind of subjective judgement that some forms of conditioning are good and some forms are bad. This is based entirely on your own sense of morality.
Kindly keep your sense of morality in the bedroom where it belongs, and don't attempt to inflict it on other people.
nobody who has or has attempted to commit an act of terrorism in the UK in history, including Guy Fawkews
I resemble that remark. Guy Fawkes wasn't a terrorist, he was a patriot. After all, he was attempting to blow up the houses of parliament. It doesn't matter what your political leanings are, your world would be vastly improved if it didn't have all those politicians in it.
Meanwhile, I'm sitting here thinking, well, what the heck would they sell if we weren't creating products?
Products that you don't have. Which is probably not very different to what they sell today.
Who exactly is this aimed at?
The shipbuilding industry. There's nothing like military spending to keep the economy looking good.
Furthermore - a scramjet is nearly useless as the first stage of an orbital launcher, because it wants to cruise at a steady speed. An orbital launcher wants to be steadily accelerating.
That's not really true - or at least, it's highly confusing. All jet engines are accelerating whenever they are not idling: they exert a force on the craft causing it to accelerate at a rate of the force exerted divided by the mass of the craft. The apparent acceleration of the craft is reduced by drag and gravity. An orbital launcher has two requirements: that it gain sufficient height to reduce drag to near-zero, and sufficient velocity to actually be in orbit. There's numerous paths that will get you there and few of them involve 'steady acceleration' - a conventional 'great big rocket' launcher has steady thrust, but apparent acceleration to a ground observer is constantly changing with height, since the effects of drag reduce at higher altitudes.
A scramjet does not cruise at a steady speed. It runs at a fixed level of incoming air pressure. It has to run at that level because a scramjet does not contain moving parts to control the air flow. That means, as the surrounding air pressure decreases, the scramjet goes faster. It effectively operates at a fixed speed for a given altitude, and goes faster as you get higher. This is ideal for an orbital launcher.
However: the first stage of an orbital launcher is the one that gets it off the ground. A scramjet is completely useless as the first stage because it doesn't do anything when you aren't moving.
A scramjet path to orbit looks rather different to the old 'big rocket' system. You start with a conventional turbojet aircraft, which takes off and lands normally, using a horizontal path and wings. That's the first stage. You use it to climb to turbojet cruising altitude, and maybe accelerate to your maximum operating velocity (about mach 2 to mach 3). Then you fire a ramjet engine (or small rocket booster - this can be a solid rocket) to get you up to mach 5, which is the breakeven point for a scramjet. Then you fire the scramjet as the third stage, which carries you from mach 5 up to about mach 10 or 12, and most importantly, to near-orbital altitude.
At this point, the orbital craft that was piggybacking you breaks away, and boosts to orbit on one of the conventional late-stage rocket engines, like those used by the shuttle once it has discarded all its booster engines and is in the final orbiter configuration. It's already nearly there, so it doesn't need much fuel. The conventional aircraft that got it up here descends again and lands under turbojets, just like every other jet craft; the orbital craft has its own crew and operates independently.
The two advantages of this design are that it should be largely reusable (because you haven't discarded half the craft on the way up), and it requires significantly less total thrust to get up there. A 'big rocket' craft has to fight the force of gravity all the way up; an aircraft with wings is supported by aerodynamic lift, and merely has to accelerate. The disadvantages are that jet aircraft have more drag than rockets (but aircraft fly all the time; this isn't a fatal problem, it just reduces the advantage), and nobody knows how to build a useful scramjet aircraft yet (the X-43 testing craft just prove the scramjet concept, they aren't useful in their own right). Whether or not anybody can build such a craft that can lift a useful payload weight to orbit is unknown, but the theory says it should be possible.
wears a turtleneck and makes innovative computer products
You mean 'wears a turtleneck and talks about computer products'. Steve Jobs may have worked on them in the past, but he's all PR nowadays. Other people make the products.
> > This election sponsored by Diebold
> s/sponsored/decided/
This election sponsored by the winning party. Or the other way around.