The article talks about how this could be a harbinger of massive climactic change.
Pfft. The media talks about how EVERYTHING could be a harbinger of massive climactic change, and furthermore how it's OBVIOUSLY the fault of technology and Western democracy.
I've quit listening to their made-up crap. It's blips of statistical noise overlying a long-term cycle of temperature variations that pre-existed any human life.
Climate change has become grant-grubbing junk science harnessed to the service of failed leftist political ideologies.
Pay no attention to the watermelon wackos. Buy that SUV if you want one and drive on without guilt!
They have this tendency to think that because someone reads a particular author, teaches or studies a particular subject, belongs to some demographic group or simply has friends/neighbors/relatives to whom any of the above apply, he or she is actively plotting against the government.
This happens most often in dictatorial regimes, but democracies are not immune, and the US has its history (cold war? remember?).
Yeah, like the Rosenbergs!
Whoops, guess not. Turns out the Venona transcripts show pretty clearly that they were in fact spying against our nation, that the American Communists were in fact lackeys of Moscow, and that many of Joe McCarthy's allegations were correct.
I'm glad the Communists were persecuted during the Cold War. It is clear they were enemies of this nation, and deserved all they got and then some.
this should not prevent any government from having regulatory authority over the naming and addressing of the internet within its own borders.
I disagree. I'm in favor of anything that weakens the control of central government-- any government-- and bleeds it of taxes, and encourages its citizens to hate and scorn anyone who believes in so-called 'good government.'
Governmental authority is the source of most of the world's problems. We should encourage anything that undermines the very concept of governmental regulation.
Death to collectivism!
-ccm
Shove your Marxist fantasies up your ass...
on
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This is what capitalism does, people - it tends to monopoly, and restricts human development.
Rubbish. Whenever you find restrictive monopolies, you will always find they are backed up by the anti-capitalist forces of collectivist government.
When capitalism fails, it is usually the fault of government-worshiping Democrats and other leftist idiots who never saw a regulation they didn't like, in an unholy alliance with crooked businessmen who care not a whit about politics except insofar as they can use the sovereign power of government to run their competitors out of town.
Every monopoly is an argument for smashing some government agency to bits, and firing worthless regulators and parasitic bureaucrats by the tens of thousands.
The great pity is that the left - and nowhere more so than in the US - seem unable to produce a decent theory of politics - the theory of praxis as it was once called - that connects the frustrations of those who post these articles on/. with proposals to change the world.
Nor will they ever. Leftism and collectivism is the ideology of fools and children. It must be utterly destroyed and the powers of government undermined, whenever and however it can. Devil take the hindmost.
I am teaching my children to hate the government and all who propose its expansion. That's the only way anything will ever change.
Capitalism is still making us pay for the Soviet Union's experience of repression.
Yep. Still a ways to go yet, about 200 million human souls sacrificed on the altar of collectivism is a debt that 20th century government-loving idiocy is going to have a tough time paying off.
Poor, pitiful, pathetic Marxists see everything through the lens of the class struggle. They remind me of medieval scientists who thought that Aristotle had it all figured out fifteen hundred years previously. To them, all of science and medicine was mere commentary on Aristotle's theories, and as a result, reality passed them by and now we laugh at them for their ignorance.
You stupid Marxists are next. There are only a few of you ridiculous buffoons left, mostly on college campuses. Anyone who has ever met a payroll or owned company stock-- and that is more and more of the public every year-- knows you are totally full of shit. Your descendants will consider you on a par with Torquemada and the Salem witch burners.
This is somewhat off topic, but please read up on the facts on the McDonald's Scalding Coffee incident. Look here [lawandhelp.com] or do a quick search on Google.
Then when you get done looking at this self-serving flackery put out by filthy greedy trial lawyer pirates, look at Overlawyered to see how these dirty bastards are screwing every other sector of American society.
Most everywhere else in the world porn and sex aren't that big of a deal.
I know you meant to say "Most everywhere else in Europe porn and sex aren't that big of a deal."
Otherwise, your statement would be laughable in a world where "everywhere else" includes places like Saudi Arabia, Singapore and China.
The ten amendments which make up the Bill of Rights are qualitatively different from the others. They were not added to the Constitution after it was in place, like all the others. They were part of the original document ratified by the existing States.
Horse shit. The Constitution was written by the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and ratified in 1788. The Bill of Rights was proposed in Congress in 1789 and ratified in 1791. Two minutes spent reviewing the National Archives website would have shown you this.
the order in which they appear was almost as contentious a subject of debate as what they actually say. It is no coincidence that they appear in the order they do.
More rubbish. There were originally 17 amendments proposed in Congress by James Madison. Five of these were dropped or amalgamated in the Congress. Twelve of them were sent to the states for ratification. The first two were not ratified; if they had been, then today's First Amendment would actually be the Third. And the most important Amendments, at least to those discussing the issue at the time they were proposed, were the current Ninth and Tenth amendments (originally the Elevenbth and Twelfth) -- yet they were placed last.
There is no historical justification for supposing that the First Amendment, or for that matter the Second, is of any more importance or inviolability than the others, simply because of the order in which it appears in the Bill. I defy you to produce any support for your opinions.
"People will start looking for it elsewhere and we don't want that," said Schreyer, adding that Deutsche Bahn will also take action against other sites that host the Radikal articles.
This has got to be the funniest thing I have ever seen in Infoworld. Short of an advertisement during the Super Bowl, I can't think of anything else they could do that would be more likely to make people want to look for it elsewhere. Have they learned nothing from the idiocy of the Scientology copyright wars?
The German (and European) love for the "common good" over the individual rights of Man is why their ground is soaked with the blood of millions. Collectivism always ends in hatred, oppression, war and death.
Fellow Americans! We have NOTHING to learn from Euro-trash socialists and collectivists. Their century has passed, and with it the souls of hundreds of millions of individuals sacrificed on the altar of the "common good." It is a remnant of feudalism, when it was assumed that by the mere fact of your birth you owed service and duty to the benefit of someone else.
Our nation was founded in order to leave all the tribal hatreds and social castes and religious dogmatism of Europe behind. We're better than that! We're Americans! Theirs is an inferior, decaying, stagnant culture of overbearing government control and oppression. Ours is a dynamic, thriving, shining city on a hill that will only continue to improve. We will leave them on the ash heap of history: the place that invented civilization and human liberty and then pissed it all away for the mess of pottage known as the "common good."
To hell with the common good! Undermine big government, and teach your kids to hate it! Smash statism and collectivism and communitarianism in all their forms! Liberty! Liberty! Liberty!
English is only the 3rd most widely spoken language in the world
You are not quite correct here. English may be the 3rd most common native language (or more likely 2nd), but when you count those who speak it as a second or third language, it is by far the most commonly spoken language in the world. At least a billion people are conversant in English.
around 320 million.
I have a hard time believing that the English-speaking populations of North America, the British Isles, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Caribbean, etc. add up to only 320 million, even if you count only mother-tongue speakers. In fact, I know this is horse shit. Where do you get such numbers? The true number is closer to 380 million.
(and how convenient that it comes in just under the supposed 330 million Spanish speakers. I smell a leftist political agenda...)
If you include all the different dialects of Indian languages, I'm sure they would well surpass English as well.
If your auntie had bollocks, she'd be your uncle. We're talking about individual languages here. There are hundreds of dialects in India, but they are not necessarily mutually intelligible or even from the same language family, and it makes no sense to lump them as one language. Hindi has more in common with the Urdu spoken in Pakistan than it does with the Dravidian languages of southern India, to take only the most obvious example.
Lotteries by and large are just a tax on stupidity. However, you are on to something here.
If you wait until there have been a few rollovers, the expected return per dollar of investment will eventually be positive-- assuming you are the only winner; you still want to keep from having to share it with others...
So when I play Powerball, once or twice a year when there is a huge jackpot, I play consecutive runs of numbers > 31. Nobody would EVER deliberately pick 35-36-37-38-39-40, and it's as likely as any other combination.
i believe they americans hit the targets they mean to however they're just aiming at the wrong things
What does this mean? Who would you try to hit if not the Taliban and its assets? Do you think the Chinese Embassy bombing was anything other than a mistake in target selection, and why?
I don't think the leftist thumb-suckers and Chomskyites and dissipated Euro-trash and all the other anti-American moral relativists and nitpickers give the US enough credit for trying to keep the loss of innocent lives to a minimum. Compare the anti-Taliban war with Russian actions in Chechnya if you don't believe this.
We want to kill Al-qaeda and Taliban officials, oh my yes, we want them to suffer and die after what they did to us. And if there's anyone in other countries with similar plans who can't be stopped by normal criminal justice procedures, then I hope we can give them the same treatment without any squeamishness or hesitation. If this laser beam device helps us do that without hurting anybody else then it is a most excellent piece of equipment.
Look for the usual lefty thumb-suckers to slam the big bad American meanies for developing Darth Vader technology. However, this machine is as unlike the Death Star as it is possible to be. The Death Star was about collective punishment, destroying whole planets. This device will let us single out particular bad guys who need killing, without all the collateral damage. I'm entirely supportive of this effort.
they are not taking a viewpoint that this is rubbish without knowing how the device functions
I am. This is rubbish and I don't care how the device supposedly functions, it is NOT going to violate the 2nd Law. If it seems to, that is because it is a clever scam with some hidden source of electric or chemical power (like 4 12-volt car batteries for "startup" power only.)
for a long time people thought the world was flat and they accepted it without question, you never know, the 2nd law of thermodynamics may be looked upon this way in 1e3 years.
More rubbish. Interesting you should use the flat earth analogy, because this was used to good effect in an essay about science by Isaac Asimov. He noted the progression in cosmology from primitive times, when man imagined the earth was a flat disk, to a sphere, to an oblate spheroid, to today's concept of a slightly eccentric oblate spheroid.
It is true that science shows that the concept of Earth as a perfect oblate spheroid is wrong, just as the flat earth model is wrong. But these are different degrees of wrongness. The flat disk is the first approximation, the sphere is the second, and the oblate spheroid is the third. Each is a special case of the next. While it is wrong to say the earth is a sphere, it is less wrong than saying it is flat.
Similar phenomena are seen in Einstein's law of special relativity. While we know that Newtonian mechanics are, strictly speaking, "wrong," we use them to a high degree of approximation at non-relativistic speeds of ~0.1c or less. And as velocity approaches zero, Einstein's laws of motion approach Newton's.
So, bottom line, if the Second Law of thermodynamics comes to be seen as an anachronism, it will still be true that the old equations are valid in the special case of ordinary pressures and temperatures and states of matter. The second law will be less wrong than the perpetual motion cranks in the very same sense that the spherical-Earth model is less wrong than the flat-earth cranks.
This article should have never seen print. It's crap.
This industry also moves faster than any academic course can keep up with.
I think you are wrong, not in your conclusion but in your premises.
Academic CS departments do not need to keep up with the latest iteration of C++ or Java and should not even try. Their job is to impart the fundamental knowledge of algorithms and systems that allow graduates to adapt to any particular application.
Self-taught gurus often have knowledge that is a mile wide but an inch deep, or they may be highly specialized in one particular field and know nothing whatsoever of anything else.
CS graduates avoid these two extremes, and can pick up new languages and concepts faster because of their grounding in basic science.
As an analogy close to my experience, it would be theoretically possible for a non-physician to become so skilled at a certain narrow field (for example reading mammograms) that most of the time the results would be as good as a board-certified doctor. However, every once in a while a really tough case comes along that requires knowledge of basic human medical science to interpret and integrate correctly. This is why you wouldn't want anyone but a doctor reading your wife's mammograms.
That's why we have the MD and by the same token, that's why we have CS degrees. However, the consequences of a mistake are rarely so dire as in medicine, and so the dilettantes and autodidacts of the CS world are free to flit from company to company, leaving half-baked useless projects in their wake wherever they go.
Yeah, I said that shortly after the terrorist attacks. I stand by it, too. The "group of people" being referred to is specifically the Al-Qaeda suicide cult, and I still hope we killed as many of the sons of bitches as possible before they got a chance to kill us.
A sociopath acts completely without empathy for the feelings of his fellow man, which is the exact opposite of how I feel about this issue. The horror inflicted on thousands of innocent victims and their tens of thousands of orphans and widows cuts me to the bone, and I want to prevent it from happening again by any means necessary.
This is no more than a sensible public-health measure. The Al-Qaeda are in fact sociopaths, clearly dangerous to every non-Muslim and most Muslims in the world, and they should be hunted down and slaughtered with no more moral concern or regret than we would feel in killing a rabid dog.
Regards,
-ccm
PS. why are you an anonymous coward? I am stating my own controversial opinions under my own name without any apology or bush-beating. Your failure to do likewise suggests that you know I am right and you are wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Pfft. The media talks about how EVERYTHING could be a harbinger of massive climactic change, and furthermore how it's OBVIOUSLY the fault of technology and Western democracy.
I've quit listening to their made-up crap. It's blips of statistical noise overlying a long-term cycle of temperature variations that pre-existed any human life.
Climate change has become grant-grubbing junk science harnessed to the service of failed leftist political ideologies.
Pay no attention to the watermelon wackos. Buy that SUV if you want one and drive on without guilt!
-ccm
This happens most often in dictatorial regimes, but democracies are not immune, and the US has its history (cold war? remember?).
Yeah, like the Rosenbergs!
Whoops, guess not. Turns out the Venona transcripts show pretty clearly that they were in fact spying against our nation, that the American Communists were in fact lackeys of Moscow, and that many of Joe McCarthy's allegations were correct.
I'm glad the Communists were persecuted during the Cold War. It is clear they were enemies of this nation, and deserved all they got and then some.
-ccm
I disagree. I'm in favor of anything that weakens the control of central government-- any government-- and bleeds it of taxes, and encourages its citizens to hate and scorn anyone who believes in so-called 'good government.'
Governmental authority is the source of most of the world's problems. We should encourage anything that undermines the very concept of governmental regulation.
Death to collectivism!
-ccm
Rubbish. Whenever you find restrictive monopolies, you will always find they are backed up by the anti-capitalist forces of collectivist government.
When capitalism fails, it is usually the fault of government-worshiping Democrats and other leftist idiots who never saw a regulation they didn't like, in an unholy alliance with crooked businessmen who care not a whit about politics except insofar as they can use the sovereign power of government to run their competitors out of town.
Every monopoly is an argument for smashing some government agency to bits, and firing worthless regulators and parasitic bureaucrats by the tens of thousands.
The great pity is that the left - and nowhere more so than in the US - seem unable to produce a decent theory of politics - the theory of praxis as it was once called - that connects the frustrations of those who post these articles on /. with proposals to change the world.
Nor will they ever. Leftism and collectivism is the ideology of fools and children. It must be utterly destroyed and the powers of government undermined, whenever and however it can. Devil take the hindmost.
I am teaching my children to hate the government and all who propose its expansion. That's the only way anything will ever change.
Capitalism is still making us pay for the Soviet Union's experience of repression.
Yep. Still a ways to go yet, about 200 million human souls sacrificed on the altar of collectivism is a debt that 20th century government-loving idiocy is going to have a tough time paying off.
Poor, pitiful, pathetic Marxists see everything through the lens of the class struggle. They remind me of medieval scientists who thought that Aristotle had it all figured out fifteen hundred years previously. To them, all of science and medicine was mere commentary on Aristotle's theories, and as a result, reality passed them by and now we laugh at them for their ignorance.
You stupid Marxists are next. There are only a few of you ridiculous buffoons left, mostly on college campuses. Anyone who has ever met a payroll or owned company stock-- and that is more and more of the public every year-- knows you are totally full of shit. Your descendants will consider you on a par with Torquemada and the Salem witch burners.
-ccm
Then when you get done looking at this self-serving flackery put out by filthy greedy trial lawyer pirates, look at Overlawyered to see how these dirty bastards are screwing every other sector of American society.
-ccm
I can tell you who the fuck they are:
- Dirty politicians
- meddlesome bureaucrats
- priggish killjoy public-interest groups
- scum sucking trial lawyers -- ESPECIALLY the trial lawyers.
We have let these busybodies and pirates push us around for too long. They are destroying America.-ccm
I know you meant to say "Most everywhere else in Europe porn and sex aren't that big of a deal." Otherwise, your statement would be laughable in a world where "everywhere else" includes places like Saudi Arabia, Singapore and China.
-ccm
Horse shit. The Constitution was written by the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and ratified in 1788. The Bill of Rights was proposed in Congress in 1789 and ratified in 1791. Two minutes spent reviewing the National Archives website would have shown you this.
the order in which they appear was almost as contentious a subject of debate as what they actually say. It is no coincidence that they appear in the order they do.
More rubbish. There were originally 17 amendments proposed in Congress by James Madison. Five of these were dropped or amalgamated in the Congress. Twelve of them were sent to the states for ratification. The first two were not ratified; if they had been, then today's First Amendment would actually be the Third. And the most important Amendments, at least to those discussing the issue at the time they were proposed, were the current Ninth and Tenth amendments (originally the Elevenbth and Twelfth) -- yet they were placed last.
There is no historical justification for supposing that the First Amendment, or for that matter the Second, is of any more importance or inviolability than the others, simply because of the order in which it appears in the Bill. I defy you to produce any support for your opinions.
-ccm
This has got to be the funniest thing I have ever seen in Infoworld. Short of an advertisement during the Super Bowl, I can't think of anything else they could do that would be more likely to make people want to look for it elsewhere. Have they learned nothing from the idiocy of the Scientology copyright wars?
-ccm
Fellow Americans! We have NOTHING to learn from Euro-trash socialists and collectivists. Their century has passed, and with it the souls of hundreds of millions of individuals sacrificed on the altar of the "common good." It is a remnant of feudalism, when it was assumed that by the mere fact of your birth you owed service and duty to the benefit of someone else.
Our nation was founded in order to leave all the tribal hatreds and social castes and religious dogmatism of Europe behind. We're better than that! We're Americans! Theirs is an inferior, decaying, stagnant culture of overbearing government control and oppression. Ours is a dynamic, thriving, shining city on a hill that will only continue to improve. We will leave them on the ash heap of history: the place that invented civilization and human liberty and then pissed it all away for the mess of pottage known as the "common good."
To hell with the common good! Undermine big government, and teach your kids to hate it! Smash statism and collectivism and communitarianism in all their forms! Liberty! Liberty! Liberty!
-ccm
You are not quite correct here. English may be the 3rd most common native language (or more likely 2nd), but when you count those who speak it as a second or third language, it is by far the most commonly spoken language in the world. At least a billion people are conversant in English.
around 320 million.
I have a hard time believing that the English-speaking populations of North America, the British Isles, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Caribbean, etc. add up to only 320 million, even if you count only mother-tongue speakers. In fact, I know this is horse shit. Where do you get such numbers? The true number is closer to 380 million.
(and how convenient that it comes in just under the supposed 330 million Spanish speakers. I smell a leftist political agenda...)
If you include all the different dialects of Indian languages, I'm sure they would well surpass English as well.
If your auntie had bollocks, she'd be your uncle. We're talking about individual languages here. There are hundreds of dialects in India, but they are not necessarily mutually intelligible or even from the same language family, and it makes no sense to lump them as one language. Hindi has more in common with the Urdu spoken in Pakistan than it does with the Dravidian languages of southern India, to take only the most obvious example.
-ccm
If you wait until there have been a few rollovers, the expected return per dollar of investment will eventually be positive-- assuming you are the only winner; you still want to keep from having to share it with others...
So when I play Powerball, once or twice a year when there is a huge jackpot, I play consecutive runs of numbers > 31. Nobody would EVER deliberately pick 35-36-37-38-39-40, and it's as likely as any other combination.
But what do I know? I've never won more than $40.
-ccm
If the government and state militia of Texas were hiding and protecting him, HELL YES.
Fucking idiot.
-ccm
Like the Cold War, it will have been worth every penny when all is said and done.
-ccm
What does this mean? Who would you try to hit if not the Taliban and its assets? Do you think the Chinese Embassy bombing was anything other than a mistake in target selection, and why?
I don't think the leftist thumb-suckers and Chomskyites and dissipated Euro-trash and all the other anti-American moral relativists and nitpickers give the US enough credit for trying to keep the loss of innocent lives to a minimum. Compare the anti-Taliban war with Russian actions in Chechnya if you don't believe this.
We want to kill Al-qaeda and Taliban officials, oh my yes, we want them to suffer and die after what they did to us. And if there's anyone in other countries with similar plans who can't be stopped by normal criminal justice procedures, then I hope we can give them the same treatment without any squeamishness or hesitation. If this laser beam device helps us do that without hurting anybody else then it is a most excellent piece of equipment.
-ccm
Yes, passive stability does have a few small advantages, like being able to fly the aircraft without killing yourself...
-ccm
-ccm
I cut up ready-made cables and stripped the ends to attach to the protoboard via cable ties; there's no point in making more work than necessary.
You don't say...
-ccm
I am. This is rubbish and I don't care how the device supposedly functions, it is NOT going to violate the 2nd Law. If it seems to, that is because it is a clever scam with some hidden source of electric or chemical power (like 4 12-volt car batteries for "startup" power only.)
for a long time people thought the world was flat and they accepted it without question, you never know, the 2nd law of thermodynamics may be looked upon this way in 1e3 years.
More rubbish. Interesting you should use the flat earth analogy, because this was used to good effect in an essay about science by Isaac Asimov. He noted the progression in cosmology from primitive times, when man imagined the earth was a flat disk, to a sphere, to an oblate spheroid, to today's concept of a slightly eccentric oblate spheroid.
It is true that science shows that the concept of Earth as a perfect oblate spheroid is wrong, just as the flat earth model is wrong. But these are different degrees of wrongness. The flat disk is the first approximation, the sphere is the second, and the oblate spheroid is the third. Each is a special case of the next. While it is wrong to say the earth is a sphere, it is less wrong than saying it is flat.
Similar phenomena are seen in Einstein's law of special relativity. While we know that Newtonian mechanics are, strictly speaking, "wrong," we use them to a high degree of approximation at non-relativistic speeds of ~0.1c or less. And as velocity approaches zero, Einstein's laws of motion approach Newton's.
So, bottom line, if the Second Law of thermodynamics comes to be seen as an anachronism, it will still be true that the old equations are valid in the special case of ordinary pressures and temperatures and states of matter. The second law will be less wrong than the perpetual motion cranks in the very same sense that the spherical-Earth model is less wrong than the flat-earth cranks.
This article should have never seen print. It's crap.
-ccm
I think you are wrong, not in your conclusion but in your premises.
Academic CS departments do not need to keep up with the latest iteration of C++ or Java and should not even try. Their job is to impart the fundamental knowledge of algorithms and systems that allow graduates to adapt to any particular application.
Self-taught gurus often have knowledge that is a mile wide but an inch deep, or they may be highly specialized in one particular field and know nothing whatsoever of anything else.
CS graduates avoid these two extremes, and can pick up new languages and concepts faster because of their grounding in basic science.
As an analogy close to my experience, it would be theoretically possible for a non-physician to become so skilled at a certain narrow field (for example reading mammograms) that most of the time the results would be as good as a board-certified doctor. However, every once in a while a really tough case comes along that requires knowledge of basic human medical science to interpret and integrate correctly. This is why you wouldn't want anyone but a doctor reading your wife's mammograms.
That's why we have the MD and by the same token, that's why we have CS degrees. However, the consequences of a mistake are rarely so dire as in medicine, and so the dilettantes and autodidacts of the CS world are free to flit from company to company, leaving half-baked useless projects in their wake wherever they go.
-ccm
A sociopath acts completely without empathy for the feelings of his fellow man, which is the exact opposite of how I feel about this issue. The horror inflicted on thousands of innocent victims and their tens of thousands of orphans and widows cuts me to the bone, and I want to prevent it from happening again by any means necessary.
This is no more than a sensible public-health measure. The Al-Qaeda are in fact sociopaths, clearly dangerous to every non-Muslim and most Muslims in the world, and they should be hunted down and slaughtered with no more moral concern or regret than we would feel in killing a rabid dog.
Regards,
-ccm
PS. why are you an anonymous coward? I am stating my own controversial opinions under my own name without any apology or bush-beating. Your failure to do likewise suggests that you know I am right and you are wrong.
That said, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are traditionally covered by our Jewish colleagues.
-ccm
http://users.erols.com/tdg/hercules.html
Not quite a B-52 but impressive nonetheless.
-ccm
Not to mention the expedient of setting the clock on your client machine so it's always prime time for p0rn!
-ccm
-ccm