The advantage of democracy (as its usually implemented, i.e. with regular elections) is that you only have to wait a little while before you can get rid of the sleazebag.
I don't think anybody has yet managed to come up with a system that would be both effective and safe.
The Europeans have come up with a model that is safe - proportional representation - but there are arguments about its effectiveness, based on the precept that you need *strong* government, a government with its hands tied by the alliances it needed to make to form a working majority cannot get anything done.
Personally that would suit me just fine in most circumstances, I don't want a government that gets things "done". I want a government that will just leave me the hell alone. I'm a big advocate of PR.
That's in most circumstances. But there are difficult times coming, the like of which we have not seen since the middle ages, as a result of climate change and worldwide fuel shortages, and very likely water shortages, and as a result of all of these there will also be drastic food shortages. Global war, famine and disease will be our lot in both hemispheres, probably within twenty years. Only the fittest will survive and the weak will perish. It will most certainly be nation against nation. With such circumstances coming, would you prefer a government that can act quickly or a goverment that is hostage to months of political horse trading? Bear in mind that the public are *always* more inclined to believe those who are saying "everything is fine, we don't need to endure such hardships". And history teaches us that there will always be people willing to take that line, if only in order to exploit the ignorance and cowardliness of the masses and so further their own political careers.
The problems with dust and micro-organisms go away if you live on a gravitational body or a rotating space platform. If you don't then you'll have far bigger problems to worry about as the long term effects on health of living in microgravity are quite serious and currently intractable.
You can't just shoot the majority of the population because you think they are wrong. Things have to get a lot worse before you start shooting. That's just the way it is,
Yes, yes I agree, the institutions in the book are like todays power hungry neocon goverments moves taken to their logical extremes. And yes, wilful ignorance is about the worst sin there is because if you are ignorant you cannot act responsibly.
However thats as far as I can go. I am not yet ready to start shooting people for being stupid or ignorant. We are morally obliged to conduct this battle, at least for now, by attempting to educate people and raise their political awareness.
By listing "telescreens, thought police, Minitrue" etc. I was referring, as was the OP, to what's in the book. There is no opportunity in the book for the reader, whatever their stripe, to sympathize with the Ingsoc regime. To argue otherwise is just plain stupid.
Where we are now is worrying enough for those of us who have read 1984 because we can see where it will lead. The real problem is that people don't read 1984. Those that don't, fail to understand the danger in allowing the government to know too much and control the media too much.
Before you can deal with this kind of problem you need to first understand the problem. That means realizing what people mean, when they say what they say. My SysAdmin friend is no totalitarian, he just buys into the security argument he's being fed. That doesn't make him evil, just misguided. The same probably applies to that police chief.
I think your anger is clouding your judgement here. I really don't believe this police chief - or hardly anybody for that matter - would read 1984 and think that telescreens, thought police, Minitrue etc are a good thing, Did you even read the book yourself? Consider the part where O'Brien himself likens their regime to a boot stamping on a human face forever. How is anybody going to react to that positively?
No I feel sure that the problem here is a lack of education and a consequent lack of political maturity. This fellow very likely is one of those people of limited imagination who finds it very difficult to read books. There are a lot of people like that who appear completely normal otherwise.
There is someone close to me who is the senior systems administrator for the UK division of a medium sized multinational company who fits that very description. He's bright, hard working, sociable, a loving husband and father. He spends his weekends working on his house. He loves Science Fiction and has installed a projector and a kick ass audio system to go with it. But he can't read books at all, and he also subscribes to the view that "if you've nothing to hide then what's there to worry about?" on the subject of state surveillance of the citizenry. There's nothing evil in this guy except for his stubborn ignorance.
Of course that may be enough to justify shooting him, but not until the revolution starts. And you never know, maybe he and your police chief will see sense by then.
P = power dissipation I = current R = resistance V = potential difference (voltage)
We know that power is a function of power and current. For direct current,
(1) P = V * I
By Ohm's Law,
(2) V = I * R
Therefore
(3) P = I ** R
So power dissipation is proportional to the square of the current. Given a requirement to deliver some arbitrary amount of usable power to the devices you have plugged in, by (1) you know that if you halve the voltage you must double the current to deliver the same amount of power. But, by (3) you also know that if you double the current you square the power dissipated by the resistance in the cabling. Hence if you step down from say 120V to 12V, you must deliver ten times the current and hence power losses are multiplied by a factor of 100.
This still wouldn't amount to much in reality as the sort of devices you're talking about are generally rated between 1-10W and therefore you're only delivering current on the order of an Ampere or two per device. Plus of course the resistance in your domestic cabling should be absolutely negligible.
However, it does explain why the power companies use high tension power lines (tens or hundreds of kilovolts) to transport electricity over long distances. Imagine the amount of current these things carry. When they step the voltage up by a factor of a thousand, the power loss due to resistance in the cables (and over hundreds of miles it'll be a lot) is reduced to a millionth of what it would be if transported at domestic voltage.
Try this calculator to see the highly nonlinear effect of increasing distance on elapsed shipbord journey time. With acceleration equivalent to earth-normal gravity throughout the trip (switching to deceleration as you pass the half way mark) it takes 9 years to travel 100LY. It only takes half as much again to travel ten times as far. So you may as well just point your ship in a direction where there are plenty of stars, launch, and decide where you're going while you're actually en-route.
I'm probably not on the same level as some of the people here, but here are a few strategies I've learned along the way:
1. Exception handlers - bracket every functional unit with exception handlers to catch any situation that hasn't been provided for explicitly. It's worthwhile thinking hard about what to do when an exception is caught though. For the sake of code maintainability you need to figure these in as a fundamental part of the design and think in terms of a hierarchy of handlers where at each point you make a decision whether to handle locally or pass the problem back up the chain.
2. Safe memory allocation - avoid allocating "big enough" static structures - take the GNU coding guidelines' advice and avoid arbitrary constants. And use a decent third party safe malloc() implementation.
3. Bounds checking. You should do your own bounds checking to preserve the logical integrity of your execution path, but ideally you should link in with a well proven third party bounds checking library as well.
4. Waypoints - there might be places in the code where you can save valid partial results to disk in order to minimize reprocessing when a thread has to be restarted after an exception handler has passed control back to a caller some way up the line.
for heavens sake - out of 27 stories on the front page, ten of them are about games. That's just too many. Slashdot editorship: could we have a bit more balance please?
Terrorism will never go away, because there will always be some people with a grudge that the system can't or won't accommodate. That's life.
It always amazes me to see people in certain countries shitting their pants because of some terrorist action in a city near them. Life is risk. Unless you live in Baghdad or Jerusalem - and probably even then - you are far more likely to die in a road accident or from illness than from a terrorist act. People need to get a sense of perspective.
I'm often critical of the way politics works in the US but this is one valuable thing you Yanks do have over us Brits - the ability to sue the government. In the UK we have something called "Crown Immunity" which basically means a British subject can't sue an institution run by the "Crown" i.e. the UK government (IANAL though). It's a real pisser being a "subject" sometimes. Though it hardly needs to be said there are plenty of republics where "citizens" are treated rather worse.
The article says more distant objects fail to elicit a "wow" but the Ring Nebula as seen from my daughters 10 inch Dobsonian is kind of cool. You do have to stare at it really hard to see it though (well... stare hard just off to the side of it actually).
However, note that the Andromeda galaxy is actually a very distended object, fairly large you might say, even as viewed from here. But most of it is so faint you can only really see a fairly small centre portion of it even with the ten inch aperture. Hence fairly total lack of "wow". Bugger!
I have some appropriate Orion filters for nebula viewing but where I live just outside London, even though I have only fields between my back yard and the horizon, there is so much light pollution from city lights (and moisture in the air) that you can't see shit. Hence my roster of wow-eliciting nebulae I can actually claim to have eyeballed meaningfully is pretty short.
There are very pressing reasons why the White House are suppressing *informed* debate on this topic. It's not just about global warming though, it's about global peak oil, and the future of the US dollar. If you allow conversation about global warming, the subject will necessarily soon turn to peak oil - and once that enters the mainstream the dollar is in big trouble.
Except that history is written by the victors. So from the standpoint of what people will remember, it has very little to do with the factual truth and everything to do with who wins the argument.
I just discovered a volume of spacetime in my bathroom that's approx. 13.7 billion years old. I win!
Re:What does this have to do with my original poin
on
Plants Produce Methane
·
· Score: 1
I dont get my information from the mass media, not without corroborating it from more reliable sources.
That crackpot theory about oil not being a fossil fuel smells like horseshit to me. The Russians are always at this crazy stuff. Twenty years ago you would have been all about how full of crap they were. But its the same crazy shit now that it was back then.
I'm sure the US would just steal the oil if they thought they could spin it in todays world. But the war wasn't about stealing it, it was about controlling it, which in an oil-depleted world is going to be the most important of part of owning it anyway. And in tomorrows oil depleted world they will be able to steal it anyway if they have to because by then they really REALLY wont give a shit what anyone thinks. Read about Peak Oil to understand why this is so.
Why is the US hooked on oil? Because it is the only natural resource that can power the engines of economy. Can you name any other substance that is naturally occurring that when delivered to the furthest corners of the nation still deliver more energy than it cost to deliver? Only oil, coal, and a few other substances can do this, but oil is far better than the others, and far cheaper to refine to the highly energy-dense gasoline our cars use. Any country that wants to have televisions, cheap food, and the amenities of civilization MUST use oil to do so. There is no other way
Global Peak Oil. And when oil becomes too expensive to use for most of those things? This has already started and will be undeniable within 5-10 years
I'm not trying to substance capitalism for common sense. Capitalism IS common sense. If global warming truly is a problem that affects everyone, then they will pay the necessary price to overcome it. What you asking the US to do by abandoning oil is to give up EVERYTHING we have so that we have a few more days of winter each year. Does that make sense? No!
Global Peak Oil. You will not be able to afford the necessary price. It is elementary economics. If oil extraction is declining at 3% per year and demand fuelled by economic growth is growing at 3% per year, what do you think will happen to the price? Did you think somebody would just keep going "oh look, there's some more". Fact is that within the next two years it is estimated that we will have used up 50% of all the oil there ever was. And that was the half that was easy to get out of the ground. The remaining half of the oil will put up a fight and be increasingly expensive to get at. And it will be the heavy, sulfurated stuff, the light sweet crude which floats on top will be all gone. At some point during the coming 50 years we reach a break even point where it costs more energy to extract the remaining, poorer quality oil than you can release by burning it.
Well its too bad you feel that way. I'm no troll and I didn't set out to get up anybody's nose - though I will admit that I didn't go out of my way to avoid it either; I'm not on this soapbox to make myself popular and win friends, just to make people think about some very serious issues that don't seem to get any airtime. And it's been hard work! Especially when jammed into a week of 14-hour shifts and managing only two or three hours of sleep each night. So yes in some way I believe I am trying to do a favour, a public good.
Hopefully not everybody will take my remarks as personally as you did. You really did go off the deep end there in a way I've never seen before which was very odd coming from someone who purports not to love the establishment too deeply. I obviously touched a nerve - some conversations just get off on the wrong foot.
Stonecypher, we may have disagreed about whether it can be considered "ad hominem" to challenge someone's sources and we may have disagreed about the level of intelligence of the general public and the argument may have become a tad heated but I never developed any ill will toward you personally. So I'm sorry if I upset you. But your outraged defense of the least respectable of your countrymen seems to have been fuelled principally by a patriotic desire to accept no such critiques from an impudent foreigner. If you're that sort of patriot then I doubt any conversation between us could end well. I see it such patriotism as atavistic and thuggish. My complaints were about a group of people who have to my mind made a poor choice of worldview and lack the intellectual capability to better themselves.
Everyone else who has taken a pop at me during this conversation seemed to be your stereotypical right wing flag waving nutjob who just can't stand having the official orthodoxy challenged. Not too much of a loss there, then!
Slashdot Mirror
The advantage of democracy (as its usually implemented, i.e. with regular elections) is that you only have to wait a little while before you can get rid of the sleazebag.
I don't think anybody has yet managed to come up with a system that would be both effective and safe.
The Europeans have come up with a model that is safe - proportional representation - but there are arguments about its effectiveness, based on the precept that you need *strong* government, a government with its hands tied by the alliances it needed to make to form a working majority cannot get anything done.
Personally that would suit me just fine in most circumstances, I don't want a government that gets things "done". I want a government that will just leave me the hell alone. I'm a big advocate of PR.
That's in most circumstances. But there are difficult times coming, the like of which we have not seen since the middle ages, as a result of climate change and worldwide fuel shortages, and very likely water shortages, and as a result of all of these there will also be drastic food shortages. Global war, famine and disease will be our lot in both hemispheres, probably within twenty years. Only the fittest will survive and the weak will perish. It will most certainly be nation against nation. With such circumstances coming, would you prefer a government that can act quickly or a goverment that is hostage to months of political horse trading? Bear in mind that the public are *always* more inclined to believe those who are saying "everything is fine, we don't need to endure such hardships". And history teaches us that there will always be people willing to take that line, if only in order to exploit the ignorance and cowardliness of the masses and so further their own political careers.
Well, I can agree with you on that much.
The problems with dust and micro-organisms go away if you live on a gravitational body or a rotating space platform. If you don't then you'll have far bigger problems to worry about as the long term effects on health of living in microgravity are quite serious and currently intractable.
You can't just shoot the majority of the population because you think they are wrong. Things have to get a lot worse before you start shooting. That's just the way it is,
Yes, yes I agree, the institutions in the book are like todays power hungry neocon goverments moves taken to their logical extremes. And yes, wilful ignorance is about the worst sin there is because if you are ignorant you cannot act responsibly.
However thats as far as I can go. I am not yet ready to start shooting people for being stupid or ignorant. We are morally obliged to conduct this battle, at least for now, by attempting to educate people and raise their political awareness.
By listing "telescreens, thought police, Minitrue" etc. I was referring, as was the OP, to what's in the book. There is no opportunity in the book for the reader, whatever their stripe, to sympathize with the Ingsoc regime. To argue otherwise is just plain stupid.
Where we are now is worrying enough for those of us who have read 1984 because we can see where it will lead. The real problem is that people don't read 1984. Those that don't, fail to understand the danger in allowing the government to know too much and control the media too much.
Before you can deal with this kind of problem you need to first understand the problem. That means realizing what people mean, when they say what they say. My SysAdmin friend is no totalitarian, he just buys into the security argument he's being fed. That doesn't make him evil, just misguided. The same probably applies to that police chief.
I think your anger is clouding your judgement here. I really don't believe this police chief - or hardly anybody for that matter - would read 1984 and think that telescreens, thought police, Minitrue etc are a good thing, Did you even read the book yourself? Consider the part where O'Brien himself likens their regime to a boot stamping on a human face forever. How is anybody going to react to that positively?
No I feel sure that the problem here is a lack of education and a consequent lack of political maturity. This fellow very likely is one of those people of limited imagination who finds it very difficult to read books. There are a lot of people like that who appear completely normal otherwise.
There is someone close to me who is the senior systems administrator for the UK division of a medium sized multinational company who fits that very description. He's bright, hard working, sociable, a loving husband and father. He spends his weekends working on his house. He loves Science Fiction and has installed a projector and a kick ass audio system to go with it. But he can't read books at all, and he also subscribes to the view that "if you've nothing to hide then what's there to worry about?" on the subject of state surveillance of the citizenry. There's nothing evil in this guy except for his stubborn ignorance.
Of course that may be enough to justify shooting him, but not until the revolution starts. And you never know, maybe he and your police chief will see sense by then.
Let:
P = power dissipation
I = current
R = resistance
V = potential difference (voltage)
We know that power is a function of power and current. For direct current,
(1) P = V * I
By Ohm's Law,
(2) V = I * R
Therefore
(3) P = I ** R
So power dissipation is proportional to the square of the current. Given a requirement to deliver some arbitrary amount of usable power to the devices you have plugged in, by (1) you know that if you halve the voltage you must double the current to deliver the same amount of power. But, by (3) you also know that if you double the current you square the power dissipated by the resistance in the cabling. Hence if you step down from say 120V to 12V, you must deliver ten times the current and hence power losses are multiplied by a factor of 100.
This still wouldn't amount to much in reality as the sort of devices you're talking about are generally rated between 1-10W and therefore you're only delivering current on the order of an Ampere or two per device. Plus of course the resistance in your domestic cabling should be absolutely negligible.
However, it does explain why the power companies use high tension power lines (tens or hundreds of kilovolts) to transport electricity over long distances. Imagine the amount of current these things carry. When they step the voltage up by a factor of a thousand, the power loss due to resistance in the cables (and over hundreds of miles it'll be a lot) is reduced to a millionth of what it would be if transported at domestic voltage.
Try this calculator to see the highly nonlinear effect of increasing distance on elapsed shipbord journey time. With acceleration equivalent to earth-normal gravity throughout the trip (switching to deceleration as you pass the half way mark) it takes 9 years to travel 100LY. It only takes half as much again to travel ten times as far. So you may as well just point your ship in a direction where there are plenty of stars, launch, and decide where you're going while you're actually en-route.
New Testament - Revelations - the Mark of the Beast.
Try this for size - google for these three words: digital angel track
I'm probably not on the same level as some of the people here, but here are a few strategies I've learned along the way:
1. Exception handlers - bracket every functional unit with exception handlers to catch any situation that hasn't been provided for explicitly. It's worthwhile thinking hard about what to do when an exception is caught though. For the sake of code maintainability you need to figure these in as a fundamental part of the design and think in terms of a hierarchy of handlers where at each point you make a decision whether to handle locally or pass the problem back up the chain.
2. Safe memory allocation - avoid allocating "big enough" static structures - take the GNU coding guidelines' advice and avoid arbitrary constants. And use a decent third party safe malloc() implementation.
3. Bounds checking. You should do your own bounds checking to preserve the logical integrity of your execution path, but ideally you should link in with a well proven third party bounds checking library as well.
4. Waypoints - there might be places in the code where you can save valid partial results to disk in order to minimize reprocessing when a thread has to be restarted after an exception handler has passed control back to a caller some way up the line.
All I can think of right now...
for heavens sake - out of 27 stories on the front page, ten of them are about games. That's just too many. Slashdot editorship: could we have a bit more balance please?
geeks...sun...geeks...sun
it does not compute
Terrorism will never go away, because there will always be some people with a grudge that the system can't or won't accommodate. That's life.
It always amazes me to see people in certain countries shitting their pants because of some terrorist action in a city near them. Life is risk. Unless you live in Baghdad or Jerusalem - and probably even then - you are far more likely to die in a road accident or from illness than from a terrorist act. People need to get a sense of perspective.
...that he's arrived - he has a 64-bit fortune.
Ah. Sounds like only the big boys can play. I should have guessed.
I'm often critical of the way politics works in the US but this is one valuable thing you Yanks do have over us Brits - the ability to sue the government. In the UK we have something called "Crown Immunity" which basically means a British subject can't sue an institution run by the "Crown" i.e. the UK government (IANAL though). It's a real pisser being a "subject" sometimes. Though it hardly needs to be said there are plenty of republics where "citizens" are treated rather worse.
The article says more distant objects fail to elicit a "wow" but the Ring Nebula as seen from my daughters 10 inch Dobsonian is kind of cool. You do have to stare at it really hard to see it though (well... stare hard just off to the side of it actually).
However, note that the Andromeda galaxy is actually a very distended object, fairly large you might say, even as viewed from here. But most of it is so faint you can only really see a fairly small centre portion of it even with the ten inch aperture. Hence fairly total lack of "wow". Bugger!
I have some appropriate Orion filters for nebula viewing but where I live just outside London, even though I have only fields between my back yard and the horizon, there is so much light pollution from city lights (and moisture in the air) that you can't see shit. Hence my roster of wow-eliciting nebulae I can actually claim to have eyeballed meaningfully is pretty short.
There are very pressing reasons why the White House are suppressing *informed* debate on this topic. It's not just about global warming though, it's about global peak oil, and the future of the US dollar. If you allow conversation about global warming, the subject will necessarily soon turn to peak oil - and once that enters the mainstream the dollar is in big trouble.
Except that history is written by the victors. So from the standpoint of what people will remember, it has very little to do with the factual truth and everything to do with who wins the argument.
I just discovered a volume of spacetime in my bathroom that's approx. 13.7 billion years old. I win!
I dont get my information from the mass media, not without corroborating it from more reliable sources.
That crackpot theory about oil not being a fossil fuel smells like horseshit to me. The Russians are always at this crazy stuff. Twenty years ago you would have been all about how full of crap they were. But its the same crazy shit now that it was back then.
I'm sure the US would just steal the oil if they thought they could spin it in todays world. But the war wasn't about stealing it, it was about controlling it, which in an oil-depleted world is going to be the most important of part of owning it anyway. And in tomorrows oil depleted world they will be able to steal it anyway if they have to because by then they really REALLY wont give a shit what anyone thinks.
Read about Peak Oil to understand why this is so.
Global Peak Oil. And when oil becomes too expensive to use for most of those things? This has already started and will be undeniable within 5-10 years
Global Peak Oil. You will not be able to afford the necessary price. It is elementary economics. If oil extraction is declining at 3% per year and demand fuelled by economic growth is growing at 3% per year, what do you think will happen to the price? Did you think somebody would just keep going "oh look, there's some more". Fact is that within the next two years it is estimated that we will have used up 50% of all the oil there ever was. And that was the half that was easy to get out of the ground. The remaining half of the oil will put up a fight and be increasingly expensive to get at. And it will be the heavy, sulfurated stuff, the light sweet crude which floats on top will be all gone. At some point during the coming 50 years we reach a break even point where it costs more energy to extract the remaining, poorer quality oil than you can release by burning it.
Well its too bad you feel that way. I'm no troll and I didn't set out to get up anybody's nose - though I will admit that I didn't go out of my way to avoid it either; I'm not on this soapbox to make myself popular and win friends, just to make people think about some very serious issues that don't seem to get any airtime. And it's been hard work! Especially when jammed into a week of 14-hour shifts and managing only two or three hours of sleep each night. So yes in some way I believe I am trying to do a favour, a public good.
Hopefully not everybody will take my remarks as personally as you did. You really did go off the deep end there in a way I've never seen before which was very odd coming from someone who purports not to love the establishment too deeply. I obviously touched a nerve - some conversations just get off on the wrong foot.
Stonecypher, we may have disagreed about whether it can be considered "ad hominem" to challenge someone's sources and we may have disagreed about the level of intelligence of the general public and the argument may have become a tad heated but I never developed any ill will toward you personally. So I'm sorry if I upset you. But your outraged defense of the least respectable of your countrymen seems to have been fuelled principally by a patriotic desire to accept no such critiques from an impudent foreigner. If you're that sort of patriot then I doubt any conversation between us could end well. I see it such patriotism as atavistic and thuggish. My complaints were about a group of people who have to my mind made a poor choice of worldview and lack the intellectual capability to better themselves.
Everyone else who has taken a pop at me during this conversation seemed to be your stereotypical right wing flag waving nutjob who just can't stand having the official orthodoxy challenged. Not too much of a loss there, then!