I'm glad that they say that "procedures involving XXX are not patentable". Hopefully the XXX will be expanded to say, for example "XXX being done on a computer.
Hey said that it was pretty Gay, not that it was pretty homosexual. English is a flexible language, and the meaning of words changes gradually, as more and more people misuse the canonical definitions of words. By Gay, he means that the OP posted an opinion that he strongly disagrees with.
Actually I took it as a clever play on words, describing the book with words whose original meaning correlate strongly with the title of the book being discussed, Feeling Good, which in common modern parlance would be seen as trolling, the subject of the book. Slight whoosh there.
At one time Bad meant of poor quality, and disagreeable. Now it means like totally the opposite thing, and means actually quite good. e.g 'That is a pretty bad looking car'
Thats a bad example..... sorry I had to.
Ignorance used to be a term denoting a lack of knowledge. Today it is a synonym for stupidity.
That is only the case in America, you will find that most of the rest of the English speaking world are not ignorant of the meaning of the word. It is a pet peeve of mine hearing it misused.
Eventually, I have to interrupt, and explain to the org's leaders that they're hearing from people who don't understand scrollbars, have never seen the events table because they don't scroll down to see it. The users are, of course, confused; they know that there's no such table because they've never seen it. We bring up the site on a handy machine (preferably a laptop or tablet with a small screen), and I show the users that it's there by scrolling down to it. Their response again is confusion, because they don't know what I did or how I did it. "Why's it hidden like that?"
You know, I had a thought when I read that. I imagine that a person from 2500 years ago, used to reading scrolls, if presented with a computer with a web page open, would find the scrollbar intuitively obvious. They might however have a great deal of trouble with a link at the bottom saying "Next Page".
Almost everything in the world currently being done by corporate whores could better be done by wise-beard Unix hacker types; the tiny number of things that couldn't, aren't worth being done at all.
I can think of a few things I'd like corporate whores to do that I most certainly would not ask anyone bearded, Unix hacker or not, to do. And I feel they would be worth getting done.
Just read your linked article. Interesting. Unfortunately, I think things have too large a momentum now to be stopped. But I would like to see something done to have the burden of the fallout rest on the investors, and not the Irish taxpaying public. All the news is about the Irish economy being bailed out by European governments. All I see is international investors being bailed out by Irish taxpayers.
Back on the initial topic that was being discussed in this mini-thread, I think it would be good to further explain one of the other reasons for the property bubble in Ireland, other than governmental ineptitude and the irrelevance of Irish economic needs to the decision making processes in the ECB. The other very, VERY, major factor. Most cultures have aversions to some things, that seem strange to others looking in from outside that culture. There is a reason Irish people payed the inordinate prices being asked for houses during the property bubble. For historical reasons, one of the most reviled words in the English language, from an Irish perspective, is "landlord".
And who bought the overpriced houses in Ireland's real estate bubble? Foreign banks and governments?
Logically it was mostly Irish people who are probably pretty fucked today, i.e. either paying off a underwater mortgage or defaulting and getting foreclosed on.
Mostly Irish people yes. Saying that they had a choice in the matter would be dishonest. People need to live somewhere. We had a property bubble in the Irish economy, because the European Central Bank set interest rates that were inappropriate for our economy, and because most of our politicians are too stupid to understand that bubbles are bad. The shit hasn't really hit the fan though. We still have smug self satisfied politicians who don't really care that they have just screwed over the entire population of the country, their friends are laughing all the way to the newly capitalised by the taxpayer bank. The shit WILL hit the fan, when all the negative equity mortgage defaults start to happen. There are many tens of thousands of mortgages in arrears in the country, and this problem is being largely ignored. Now on top of the negative equity mortgages in arrears, we have rising unemployment and a rising tax bill.
I'm glad I couldnt afford to buy a house a few years ago.
I don't know why you're ranting at the guy. He just said emissions per person is a more meaningful statistic than emissions per area. This is true. Yes, the source of the emissions does count, obviously introducing new carbon into the cycle from burning oil or coal is bad, re-using the stuff thats here aready by growing biofuel crops is good. That is nothing to do with his point. His point was that emissions per area will be lower in sparsely populated areas, while those people can still be the biggest culprits.
If by "these guys" you mean BP, I wouldn't really be any more worried by that than any other drilling company, in fact I might actually feel a bit better about it. One thing that became clear during the whole recent fuckup in the gulf, was that despite the involvement of numerous companies in the monumental screw up, many of them equally culpable, the only ones with the balls to stand up and say "we could have done better" was vilified as an evil foreign company, while government officials were quite happy to let the indiginous companies who pay them fat wads of cash in brown paper bags weasel their way out of any responsibility, and let the press denounce dem greedy furriners and villify them in the eyes of the public. A company that at least took the heat and didn't try to wriggle their way out of it has some redeeming qualities, despite what I may think of them in general.
In fact, thinking about it a little more, we really don't want to send carbon dioxide into the earth. We need the oxygen. Any largescale carbon sequestration effort should probably try to emulate how nature has done it in the past, in the form of calcium carbonates.
There is one slight problem with that though. The carbon sources that were originally subsumed beneath the surface by geological activity millions of years ago were already what would today be considered potential energy sources; mostly peat bogs and highly stacked layers of humus that had not decomposed as fully as it would today due to a different bacterial ecology predicated by an alternate atmospheric makeup. Oil is simply a liquid mixture that has come about by slow decomposition of this material underground. It would make much more sense in terms of energy efficiency to just use any such energy sources here on the surface, rather than bury them under miles of rock for a million years or so, and then pumping any oil that resulted back to the surface. You could probably pump in vast quantities of CO2 into the crust, and hope that chemical reactions with the surrounding environment could, fueled by geothermal energy, produce something worth extracting, but the timescales involved would make any such endeavour pointless.
I dont think it would be viable to build LOTS of these, but I can see some excellent uses that can be made of cities like this. One large problem with modern ocean transport is that it is very noisy underwater; it plays havoc with marine life echo-location and navigation. One way to solve this would be the construction of extremely large bulk carriers for non-perishable goods, that are wind and wave propelled (these are viable but slow; i'm thinking along the lines of raw materials transport; metals, chemicals, etc.). Floating cities like these dotted about the edge of the oceans (a few hundred miles out from land) would make great deep water berthing facilities for cargo transfers to smaller ships destined to normal harbours.
I agree, but the article is from the BBC, which isn't intended for scientists or nerds.
On that note, does anyone know of a good news site that covers stuff like this in an informed and reasonably detailed and lengthy way but for people who aren't theoretical physicists? You know, something more than the BBC's usual "Scientists did something cool I don't understand! YAY!"
hybrid is too expensive now for most uses unless you have a lead foot or you live in your car and drive 50,000 miles a year.
What I'm curious about is why I never hear about hybrid engines in articulated lorries. You know, big rig 8mpg pulling along 50 tonnes of cargo type things. They are banned from travelling over 55 or 60 mph even on the 75 mph roads over here in europe, and have massive fuel costs due to the way we tax fuels in the EU. Are there hybrids in these machines these days? I've never heard of them, and they would provide significant fuel savings to an industry where fuel is the single highest cost.
Advanced research is and always has been funded by governments.
Not quite true. We get a lot of valuable research funded by various governments, and this should continue, but a lot of groundbreaking work is done with little or no governmental support. As an example, the first nuclear accelerator, and the first experimental verification of e=mc^2, was in Trinity College, Dublin, on what was then considered an extravagant budget of about £5, using some parts from a bicycle repair shop.
Slashdot Mirror
You must be a really nice guy. Personally, I'd hate to have thousands of other people about who are always right about everything.
There is a difference between information and noise. Granted, it depends which brains you look at....
I'm glad that they say that "procedures involving XXX are not patentable". Hopefully the XXX will be expanded to say, for example "XXX being done on a computer.
Hey said that it was pretty Gay, not that it was pretty homosexual. English is a flexible language, and the meaning of words changes gradually, as more and more people misuse the canonical definitions of words. By Gay, he means that the OP posted an opinion that he strongly disagrees with.
Actually I took it as a clever play on words, describing the book with words whose original meaning correlate strongly with the title of the book being discussed, Feeling Good, which in common modern parlance would be seen as trolling, the subject of the book. Slight whoosh there.
At one time Bad meant of poor quality, and disagreeable. Now it means like totally the opposite thing, and means actually quite good. e.g 'That is a pretty bad looking car'
Thats a bad example..... sorry I had to.
Ignorance used to be a term denoting a lack of knowledge. Today it is a synonym for stupidity.
That is only the case in America, you will find that most of the rest of the English speaking world are not ignorant of the meaning of the word. It is a pet peeve of mine hearing it misused.
Eventually, I have to interrupt, and explain to the org's leaders that they're hearing from people who don't understand scrollbars, have never seen the events table because they don't scroll down to see it. The users are, of course, confused; they know that there's no such table because they've never seen it. We bring up the site on a handy machine (preferably a laptop or tablet with a small screen), and I show the users that it's there by scrolling down to it. Their response again is confusion, because they don't know what I did or how I did it. "Why's it hidden like that?"
You know, I had a thought when I read that. I imagine that a person from 2500 years ago, used to reading scrolls, if presented with a computer with a web page open, would find the scrollbar intuitively obvious. They might however have a great deal of trouble with a link at the bottom saying "Next Page".
0 / 0 * 100 = undefined
Because you can not divide by zero.
0 / 0 * 100 = 0 * ( K / 0 * 100) = 0 * ( undefined) So we have zero undefined things. Sorry I'll get back in my box now.
Weather and climate are not the same thing. It's stupid to even bring them up in the same sentence.
No they are not the same. However you obviously don't understand what the distinction is.
Almost everything in the world currently being done by corporate whores could better be done by wise-beard Unix hacker types; the tiny number of things that couldn't, aren't worth being done at all.
I can think of a few things I'd like corporate whores to do that I most certainly would not ask anyone bearded, Unix hacker or not, to do. And I feel they would be worth getting done.
Just read your linked article. Interesting. Unfortunately, I think things have too large a momentum now to be stopped. But I would like to see something done to have the burden of the fallout rest on the investors, and not the Irish taxpaying public. All the news is about the Irish economy being bailed out by European governments. All I see is international investors being bailed out by Irish taxpayers.
Back on the initial topic that was being discussed in this mini-thread, I think it would be good to further explain one of the other reasons for the property bubble in Ireland, other than governmental ineptitude and the irrelevance of Irish economic needs to the decision making processes in the ECB. The other very, VERY, major factor. Most cultures have aversions to some things, that seem strange to others looking in from outside that culture. There is a reason Irish people payed the inordinate prices being asked for houses during the property bubble. For historical reasons, one of the most reviled words in the English language, from an Irish perspective, is "landlord".
Logically it was mostly Irish people who are probably pretty fucked today, i.e. either paying off a underwater mortgage or defaulting and getting foreclosed on.
Mostly Irish people yes. Saying that they had a choice in the matter would be dishonest. People need to live somewhere. We had a property bubble in the Irish economy, because the European Central Bank set interest rates that were inappropriate for our economy, and because most of our politicians are too stupid to understand that bubbles are bad. The shit hasn't really hit the fan though. We still have smug self satisfied politicians who don't really care that they have just screwed over the entire population of the country, their friends are laughing all the way to the newly capitalised by the taxpayer bank. The shit WILL hit the fan, when all the negative equity mortgage defaults start to happen. There are many tens of thousands of mortgages in arrears in the country, and this problem is being largely ignored. Now on top of the negative equity mortgages in arrears, we have rising unemployment and a rising tax bill. I'm glad I couldnt afford to buy a house a few years ago.
I don't know why you're ranting at the guy. He just said emissions per person is a more meaningful statistic than emissions per area. This is true. Yes, the source of the emissions does count, obviously introducing new carbon into the cycle from burning oil or coal is bad, re-using the stuff thats here aready by growing biofuel crops is good. That is nothing to do with his point. His point was that emissions per area will be lower in sparsely populated areas, while those people can still be the biggest culprits.
If by "these guys" you mean BP, I wouldn't really be any more worried by that than any other drilling company, in fact I might actually feel a bit better about it. One thing that became clear during the whole recent fuckup in the gulf, was that despite the involvement of numerous companies in the monumental screw up, many of them equally culpable, the only ones with the balls to stand up and say "we could have done better" was vilified as an evil foreign company, while government officials were quite happy to let the indiginous companies who pay them fat wads of cash in brown paper bags weasel their way out of any responsibility, and let the press denounce dem greedy furriners and villify them in the eyes of the public. A company that at least took the heat and didn't try to wriggle their way out of it has some redeeming qualities, despite what I may think of them in general.
Sorry for replying so much to myself. I just checked, calcium carbonate is CaCO3. Scratch that idea.
In fact, thinking about it a little more, we really don't want to send carbon dioxide into the earth. We need the oxygen. Any largescale carbon sequestration effort should probably try to emulate how nature has done it in the past, in the form of calcium carbonates.
There is one slight problem with that though. The carbon sources that were originally subsumed beneath the surface by geological activity millions of years ago were already what would today be considered potential energy sources; mostly peat bogs and highly stacked layers of humus that had not decomposed as fully as it would today due to a different bacterial ecology predicated by an alternate atmospheric makeup. Oil is simply a liquid mixture that has come about by slow decomposition of this material underground. It would make much more sense in terms of energy efficiency to just use any such energy sources here on the surface, rather than bury them under miles of rock for a million years or so, and then pumping any oil that resulted back to the surface. You could probably pump in vast quantities of CO2 into the crust, and hope that chemical reactions with the surrounding environment could, fueled by geothermal energy, produce something worth extracting, but the timescales involved would make any such endeavour pointless.
That says it is unlikely it was captured from a Milky Way star. Says nothing about the odds it was captured from another star in the Helmi stream.
The Bible makes no claims as to the age of the galaxy, only the age of the earth.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. First line of genesis from whichever version of the bible google pulled up for me.
I was wondering about that too. Interesting indeed.
I dont think it would be viable to build LOTS of these, but I can see some excellent uses that can be made of cities like this. One large problem with modern ocean transport is that it is very noisy underwater; it plays havoc with marine life echo-location and navigation. One way to solve this would be the construction of extremely large bulk carriers for non-perishable goods, that are wind and wave propelled (these are viable but slow; i'm thinking along the lines of raw materials transport; metals, chemicals, etc.). Floating cities like these dotted about the edge of the oceans (a few hundred miles out from land) would make great deep water berthing facilities for cargo transfers to smaller ships destined to normal harbours.
I heard there was an entire gang of scientists involved...
I agree, but the article is from the BBC, which isn't intended for scientists or nerds.
On that note, does anyone know of a good news site that covers stuff like this in an informed and reasonably detailed and lengthy way but for people who aren't theoretical physicists? You know, something more than the BBC's usual "Scientists did something cool I don't understand! YAY!"
hybrid is too expensive now for most uses unless you have a lead foot or you live in your car and drive 50,000 miles a year.
What I'm curious about is why I never hear about hybrid engines in articulated lorries. You know, big rig 8mpg pulling along 50 tonnes of cargo type things. They are banned from travelling over 55 or 60 mph even on the 75 mph roads over here in europe, and have massive fuel costs due to the way we tax fuels in the EU. Are there hybrids in these machines these days? I've never heard of them, and they would provide significant fuel savings to an industry where fuel is the single highest cost.
Advanced research is and always has been funded by governments.
Not quite true. We get a lot of valuable research funded by various governments, and this should continue, but a lot of groundbreaking work is done with little or no governmental support. As an example, the first nuclear accelerator, and the first experimental verification of e=mc^2, was in Trinity College, Dublin, on what was then considered an extravagant budget of about £5, using some parts from a bicycle repair shop.
Fortunately, government's interest is the public's interest.
In theory.
Cart before the horse son. Monopolies create a lack of competition, not the other way round.