So even when an author says "I didn't mean to represent X as Y", it doesn't make it any less true that X is represented as Y
I disagree. Witness:
The author of parent represents writing, in particular that of Ursula K. LeGuin, as a russian space opera in which elephants control an interstellar parliament whose primary concern is the equitable distribution of custard.
See, it's all well and good to note that commentary and criticism can carry content despite the author's conscious intentions. That taken in stride, that does no magically validate everything such commentary or criticism has to say.
Frankly, if you'd read the books, I would think the scriptwriter's and director's statements would seem rather more absurd than my custard example. The anger in Ursula's voice is not unwarranted, and the closing comment about Frodo and the ring in my opinion is rather an understatement; given what I believe is the total butchering of the books in the form of this miniseries, I would suggest that Ursula could have gone quite a bit further in her exposition of what is essentially a mockery of her work.
I feel for Ursula: she doesn't get the recognition she deserves (before someone points out all the awards, two words: Anne Mc-fuckingCaffery,) and yet when a TV channel finally stumbles across one of the most painfully obvious targets for conversion to miniseries in history, they screw it up to a degree whch would make Soviet Communist censors uncomfortable.
What Kubrick did to 2001 was one thing; he added and created, yet destroyed none of the original content. What was done to Earthsea is, in my opinion, nothing short of criminal.
But of course, 85% of the theories are still utter crap.
Are students and teachers so damn insecure that they feel they need 3-D 24-bit color plots of data with animations and full-blown programming languages...for trig?!?!
Trying to make something easier to learn isn't insecurity. It's the teacher's job.
Amusingly, both the Los Angeles Valley and Mexico City had smog before the invention of the combustion engine. Just because you can see it doesn't mean that you're correctly estimating its origin or its impacts, even if (and in fact often when) it seems totally obvious. To wit, New York City puts out more emissions than Los Angeles, and yet it's barely even hazy.
The bulk of the gasses we currently believe are contributing to global warming are totally invisible. The next time you point to smog and start to tell yourself you can see the roots of global warming, remind yourself that in fact you cannot.
I'm not arguing your point; I agree that reducing emissions is critical. That said, your example is worthless, and your tone towards the parent utterly unwarranted. This is the sort of thing which, if said on the city street, often leads to a missing tooth. It may surprise you to learn that, rather than being seen as insightful and witty, you're actually seen quite differently.
Traffic lights with tarmac pressure sensors to allow presence switching are common. The idea is that the grid system is the default, but when there isn't any cross-traffic at all to justify holding the red, the other street is given a chance to fire anyway. This is common in residential areas with newer streets, and especially in parkway onramp areas (for our non-US friends, Americans use the term parkway to refer to a high-speed high-capacity multiple-lane street which has traffic lights every ten to fifteen miles or so; they're one of our preferred methods of laying infrastructure to remote tiny towns.) On parkways, the benefits are huge; the on-ramps are left green indefinately, and only switch to cross green when there's traffic to justify it. In some areas, even during rush hour the cross on-traffic is borderline nonexistant; the throughput benefits can be huge, and most modern US cities have this in place.
The article describes something very different.
The basis of grid traffic is a planned direction of lights firing in sequence. Though it's possible to establish a block length whose flow rate can be set such that there's a light timing pattern across only two lights, allowing a flow pattern to be encouraged in both directions at once, that sort of thing is generally only useful at speeds of 40+ mph, and at 40 mph the minimum such distance is about three blocks, making that as a general practice undesirable (still, you see the every-third-block-exit system fairly frequently at the edge of planned residential areas, condominiums, very large shopping malls, airports, and other sites with preplanned borders, native access to highways and extremely high expected traffic.
As a result, in dense areas it's much more common to attempt to establish the more frequent direction of flow - usually set by the notion of inbound rush hour and outbound rush hour - and to set the order of the lights to accomodate the larger group of people. This is why it seems like you get the worst luck when you're doing something atypical; often, you're no longer in the portion of the population that the street planner was trying to accomodate.
The scientist suggests dispensing with this system in small to mid-sized cities. The system above is good for very large urban areas, where the number of people and the normalcy of support systems grows to the point where the average behavior of an individual is much more predictable and where aberrant individual time and behavior schedules drop drastically by proportion, as well as where congestion is a significant issue. Because of the prevalence of focus on major cities, it's common to just use major city techniques to build small and middling sized cities, too. Even in large cities, turn overflow lanes are full the one minute, empty the next. Local differentiation in human travel patterns is a real son of a bitch to accomodate for.
The scientist suggests that for small and middling sized cities, it is more efficient to use local sensors to determine traffic flow, and to simply handle each light seperately.
In programmer's terms, which are far clearer for discussion and probably on a site like this better understood, it's a question of competing inefficiencies. Either you handle traffic at a local scale, losing any of the efficiency gained with a large-view schedule, or you handle the traffic from a large view, losing any of the efficiency you could gain from letting those two guys at that light over there go, since there's nobody on the cross street.
It's generally assumed that the large-city approach of giant scheduling will be best, much in the way that novice programmers tend to stick to vectors or lists and nothing else. The scientist is suggesting that that's not the appropriate approach at all scales, much like the programmer which brings up maps, deques and bizarre uses of basic_string.
This isn't a catch 22; it's a question of one size does not fit all.
Exactly. This budget increase is about 1 billion dollars.
More like four, once you do the math.
That's nothing.
Bwahahhaha. You really think, in the age where amateurs without aerospace degrees with teams of less than ten can make it to space for five million bucks, that four billion dollars is nothing?
the real costs of developing (and most critically, *testing*) a massive radiation-resistant space-borne liferaft designed to keep many people alive in isolation for most of a year (something we have trouble doing even on the surface) while flinging it toward a planet that's eaten about half of the spacecraft that have been sent to it throughout history (the Soviets had even worse luck than we did) using To-Be-Determined-But-Undoubtedly-Complex) engines, with a descent/ascent module, base, mini-refinery, etc, is not a simple task.
Luckily, we already paid for most of it in the early 1980s as propulsion to get stable flight and in the late 1990s as weapons to get clean charges. Nuclear-driven spaceships, as a concept, are well-understood; what remains is testing.
NASA took over 1% of our nation's entire GDP for a decade to get a small brief manned mission to the moon.
In an era where rocket trajectories were worked out on paper.
The Soviets never got people to the moon and back, despite having an extensive program (it was largely cut back after we succeeded, but they did work on it for as long as we did).
This is largely horseshit - the Soviet program was almost solely based on getting people into space. The reason we went to the moon is that they were just barely beating us in the space race, and moving the endpoint slightly into a different gravity well made it seem much more significant.
Maybe to your shock and horror, reaching the moon isn't that much more difficult than reaching a lagrange point; getting out of the moon's gravity isn't very hard. It's Earth which is difficult. Yes, there is some difficulty involed in having to spend for a lifeoff system in your weight budget, but the difficulty isn't anywhere near as big as you're implying.
The Chinese recently scrapped their planned moon mission because the numbers coming back for the cost of it were just too high (and Chinese space tech is relatively cheap).
This is much less potent, when you remember that China was planing this as an economic mission. What you meant to say was "China was going to start putting sattelites up, until it realized that the cost of setting up a launch infrastructure wasn't justified by the profit of undercutting the Americans and Russians on payloads." Sounds much less dramatic when you don't carefully ignore information to pretend that there are significances there which aren't really there. Hint: the Anasari X-Prize isn't bigger than the Chinese economy, yet people are profiting from it. Try to maintain a sense of scale.
We're talking about the moon here; the problems concerning a trip to Mars that takes almost a year are an order of magnitude greater.
No, they aren't. You have to include a much larger lift system, except that the first time we probably won't hit the surface anyway. The only other two new concerns are long-term storage and long-term reliability. The issues faced by the potential Mars mission aren't even as great as those already successfully faced by the International Space Station, and NASA won't be condending with a too many cooks problem if/when considering Mars.
Our sense of priorities as a nation are all wrong.
Yes, because clearly all of the well schooled high-end bureaucracy of every major nation on Earth are childishly unable to prioritize their resources in comparison to a single SlashDotter, and the various economic researchers which have suggested that it was dangerous to divert a single percent of the GDP to a single program for so long despite the percentage which is fed to the military are c
That's deliberate and criminal negligence on the part of the company officers because they knew the systems were disabled and put their profits ahead of the safety of both their employees and everyone living in the surrounding area.
Do you really believe they were making money off of leaving plates hanging by ropes instead of putting them into slots, or by leaving valves open? Do you think that they were somehow producing more... storage? I mean, this doesn't make sense.
It was negligence, not profiteering. Don't take the lamb to the slaughter until you've checked to make sure it's a lamb.
As long as we continue to allow company officers to bear no responsibility for the actions of a company we will continue to see events like this.
Wake me when you have a clue what happened. The fault was the local plant manager's, not corporate. Simple things like check plates were missing, and safety valves were just left open (which is probably how the water got into the tank in the first place.)
Point fingers when you know what happened, and no earlier.
In the United States, that would be roughly the difference between first- and second-degree murder
Murder is killing intentionally. This is manslaughter, whether it's a genuine accident or the result of irresponsibility.
This is true, but it does not absolve Union Carbide and its executives of responsibility.
No, but the facts of the case do. The problem was caused by water leakage into the tank which caused a detonation - the result of safety valves simply left open, and check plates simply not in where they were supposed to be.
The problem was local management. Whereas Dow was making irresponsible decisions, such as an immensely oversized storage tank, what caused the error was a local manager's total lack of responsibility. This is not Dow's fault, no matter how badly you want for it to be.
You'll want to look into something called "piercing the corporate veil," which became common in British-derived legal systems in the late 1800s. India almost certainly has a similar mechanism.
The real problem here is not knowing the details of the UC incident. The people at fault were the local managers, not the corporate head. Whereas there's no question that Dow does some scumbag things in third world countries, what caused the UC incident was a series of simple mechanical errors, including safety valves left open, stop checks (little metal plates that go into the pipe sideways) weren't in place, et cetera.
Look, I'm not defending Dow. Still, get your facts straight before you start pointing fingers. There's a good reason that this hasn't gone up the chain, and it's not because of corporate legal abuse. You would do well to watch for the History Channel special on the incident, which will give you a bunch of facts you're missing; whereas it's hardly a comprehensive view of the situation, it's fairly clear that you'd benefit from the very basics.
In this case, Dow had the safety hardware in place. Granted the underground tanks were irresponsibly large, and granted that would eventually have led to a similar catastrophe, that is not what happened here. Just because they were on the path to negligence doesn't mean that everything that goes wrong is their fault. This was local error, not international greed.
Who invented the CFC's which destroy the ozone layer?
Dupont, in the US, 1928.
Who invented the non-biodegradable plastic wrap which created gigantic garbage dumps?
Germany.
Who began to anihilate species on masse just to get economical advantage?
Humanity, pretty much unilaterally. Every color, every culture, every time period. "But the buddhists!" Bullshit: they just didn't eat them. "But the native americans!" *cough* etc.
"Economic," by the way.
Who invented the dangerous chemicals that are poured onto rivers and oceans?
Arguably China in ~500bc, when it was discovered that very early large-scale boar effluent ferilization built up toxic levels of what weren't understood for thousands of years to be chemical toxins. The cases for Macchu Picchu, Carthage, Rome and Londinium can also be made.
Well the developed nations, of course. DOH!
You're one for six. I can see that you watch a lot of history channel.
So if a nation can reduce its levels of pollution, it's the developed nations alright.
Bzzt. As many other people have pointed out, agricultural and population pollution are significant long before the industrial age, and with the right geography (as LA is famous for) simple wood fires caused smog long before coal was even a common fuel, let alone the internal combustion engine that we now blame everything upon.
Whereas the US' pollution output is the highest on earth, our pollution per production is near the lowest. Yes, we can do a lot to improve. So can China.
If you put the obligation on ALL countries, the developed nations will OBVIOUSLY have an economical advantage, because they'll be the first to comply with the standards.
Whereas if you ask the developed nations to foot the bill for the undeveloped nations, the economic burden is supposedly spread out, because obviously the fact that it's on taxable income doesn't matter when Americans already make orders of magnitude more money than the rest of the world, so clearly they need a few more orders of magnitude to stack on top.
You're misunderstanding the resistance. We don't want Uganda to kick in their fair share; we'd get more money from the guy with the nice house on the corner. The problem is the way in which the exceptions are doled out. China is treated as a developing nation, when their economy is already nearly as large as ours, and faces incredible development due to a potential for infrastructure layout for a good fifty years or more. You want Jamaica to skip their bill? Morocco? Siam? Great, fine, foot them all, no big deal.
But China? There's no country on earth which is looking at as bountiful a future century as China. If anything (and god am I going to get flamed/modded into the ground for saying this,) China should be footing our bill. We're doing the bulk of both their raw material and fine manufacturing, providing the bulk of their resources other than oil, copper and stone, and even doing a decent job of feeding them. The reason the US is crapping out all the world's dirt is that we're the people with the facilities to turn coal into coke, pig into steel, bauxite into aluminum. We're sucking the world's electricity because almost all the world's electricity goes into manufacturing or materials catalysis (notably aluminum and hydrogen.) We lead radioactive detritus because we have the resources, the processing facilities, the reactors and the waste storage.
Why? Because they got the MONEY in the first place.
And exactly how do you think we got that money? Through the very industrial output that you're now blaming the world's problems on us for.
Yes, we create a lot of problems, but a hell of a lot of
Oh honestly. That's true of pretty much every gas but the noble gases, because as long as you stick on the "at high enough concentrations," you've guaranteed that this gas is burning the flesh off of the cartilege.
Here's a hint for you. You can't smell pain. That pain isn't a smell. It's a pain. The reasons you can't smell anything but pain are 1) because the pain would drown out the smell, and 2) because the parts of your nose which do the smelling just got burnt off, causing pain.
It's a little like me accusing your attempt at criticism by specificity of giving me this headache, when in fact it's because a little bit of my soul and faith in my fellow man just died.
Lung tissue will react the exact same way.
Yeah, and lungs can't smell in the first place. Still think it's the smell of pain? (If posts could smell, at least in a more literal fashion than parent, then we might have a definitive answer...)
Isn't it cruelly coincidental that the person mocking someone for not knowing the difference between a memorandum and a referendum doesn't know what irony is?
Insert complaint about predictable jokes, slashdot going downhill since it's had more than two dozen users, and something involving hot grits clusters.
Actually, steel and quartz are both Moh 7. Glass, on the other hand, is Moh 5. You should check your numbers before hitting submit. In fact, for the very reason that steel, quartz crystal and silica have the same Moh characteristics, the steel wool is a near-ideal example medium.
Maybe more importantly, you can't bring old CDs within three feet of steel wool, or they catch fire, immediately destroying all other music within 10 feet and causing a Save Versus Nerd Jokes at dc40 to 50 feet for all non-magical non-living items in range.
However, I do wondering how you can label the ones you burn yourself...
Presumably by putting the label on before the two 8000-RPM hot silicon and toxic plastic gas vapor depisition passes. Alternately, single-sided coat them, use thermal laser printing, use patterned burnout printing, print the interior ring, or do what the rest of us do and throw them unlabelled into a half-full spindle of other unlabelled cds full of god only knows what.
There seems to be a lot of these con artists pretending to be business men
This guy was the project leader for one of the longest lived and most commercially successful operating systems in history. He is legitimate. Please do basic research before engaging the soap box.
Now, I am not a lawyer; that said, I have a basic familiarity with it, so I feel I must whack you with el ClueBat a few times.
What you're doing here talking about your former boss is libellious. You're behaving unethically and illegally, whether or not you're correct. As far as a slander lawsuit, my dear boy, you're also engaging in that right now; the lawsuit is in his hands, not yours. Furthermore, you're publicly threatening legal action as a consequence of any behavior of his with which you disagree; this is barratry, also quite illegal. Should his lawyers see this snippet, which with google and his last name they will, you've just shot your lawsuit straight to hell, quite possibly alongside a decade of your life and a significant chunk of money to cover reparations to a web business, for whom image is so immensely important that his damage estimates can be stratospheric and still be considered accurate.
Don't kid yourself about understanding the law. You've just broken it four times (two counts of libel, one of slander, one of barratry, the last a serious offense actionable by the state without Mr. Esrig's intervention.)
Yes, but not for that comment. What it's saying is clear as day: he wants the functionality of Linux in a form that's usable in commercial and closed-source situations, and he's willing to provide seed funding to make it happen.
If he weren't such an untrustworthy unreliable scumbag, I'd be trying to get other people to show similar support. Whereas I disagree with him as a whole, on this issue I agree strongly; many customer products would be suddenly Much Betterererer (tm) if certain tools which are not currently available to them became available to them, and as convergence progresses, it's going to become a bigger and bigger issue.
Anyone who has a ReplayTV and knows what GUI tools are available to free software knows exactly what I'm talking about.
The trouble with the BSD licence is that it does not oblige you to distribute the source code with any derivative work {unless you go for the two-clause, source-only distribution licence..... which is fine for stuff written in an interpreted language, but not much cop for something like an OS kernel}. This means that someone else can take all your hard work -- which you intended to be for the benefit of everyone -- and "fence it in" by distributing a modified version in binary form only, and not giving anybody the source code. While it may well be a trivial matter to reproduce their effort and release a functional equivalent in source code form, it's still work that you shouldn't have to do. This is one of the things meant by "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance" -- in this case, if you give other people too much freedom with your code, then you have to watch over them forever to make sure they don't compromise any further people's freedom.
Some of us see this quite differently. I've released a bunch of source under the MIT license, some of it to fairly extensive systems (>25kLoc of dense C++.) One of the things I released was a large string manipulation library for Delphi. Someone else turned around, made it into a component, and sold it - that is, they just added an interface, maybe 50 lines of code - and asked for money for it. I asked them once whether they'd done well; they claimed to have netted about three grand for 50 lines of code.
And you know what? More power to them. I really don't give a rat's ass. I required that my library's name and the original author's title be prominently displayed, and he did me proud: I was everywhere, from a mark on the front page of the documentation to a string in the component itself which could be read right from within the IDE.
What he did was to one-up me at marketing. He took a product, made it look much simpler to use, gave it a better name, and re-released. I'm not out any money: I wasn't selling it in the first place. And if someone buys a library without checking out the free library it's based on, they're dumbasses or there's added value (or both) and so in either case it's not my place to bitch.
I don't think the other programmer did anything wrong.
The trouble with the BSD license is that it doesn't do what you want for your code. That's fine. Nobody cares. Do whatever you want with your code. That's not actually trouble with the license; it works quite well for what it's supposed to do, and many people are quite happy with it. The trouble with the BSD license is that it carries provisions which don't cater to your needs and desires. In other words, there's no trouble at all.
Of course, not everyone who uses the BSD licence is a fencer-in. But why give them the chance?
Because I don't think budding engineers should have to reinvent every wheel they find. Why do you care what I allow on my code?
If you think the right of the majority to make use of the code you wrote overrides the supposed right of a minority to keep that code to themselves, then use a strong copyleft licence such as the GPL or ShareAlike. If on the other hand you think that the owner of a knife {howsoever it may have come into their possession} has the right to decide who they stab with it, and you don't mind that it might be you or your friends or family they stab, then go ahead and use a weak copyleft licence such as the BSD licence. And watch your back.
This doesn't make any sense at all. You seem to be stuck on the idea that if I release code and someone uses it in a closed source fashion I have been somehow taken advantage of. I chose this license with open eyes, and I'm perfectly aware of what its provisions are.
As a small entrepreneur, the restrictions of my clients have occasionally forbidden GPL products (especially common in the gaming industry where publishers often outright forbid any source release in order to defend pl
As long as it can live in free countries like Brazil it will be unkillable.
In other words, until the day after tomorrow, when Jeb rapes Florida again? Brazil's closer than Madagascar; it makes a better site for the new presidential golf course.
Slashdot Mirror
So even when an author says "I didn't mean to represent X as Y", it doesn't make it any less true that X is represented as Y
I disagree. Witness:
The author of parent represents writing, in particular that of Ursula K. LeGuin, as a russian space opera in which elephants control an interstellar parliament whose primary concern is the equitable distribution of custard.
See, it's all well and good to note that commentary and criticism can carry content despite the author's conscious intentions. That taken in stride, that does no magically validate everything such commentary or criticism has to say.
Frankly, if you'd read the books, I would think the scriptwriter's and director's statements would seem rather more absurd than my custard example. The anger in Ursula's voice is not unwarranted, and the closing comment about Frodo and the ring in my opinion is rather an understatement; given what I believe is the total butchering of the books in the form of this miniseries, I would suggest that Ursula could have gone quite a bit further in her exposition of what is essentially a mockery of her work.
I feel for Ursula: she doesn't get the recognition she deserves (before someone points out all the awards, two words: Anne Mc-fuckingCaffery,) and yet when a TV channel finally stumbles across one of the most painfully obvious targets for conversion to miniseries in history, they screw it up to a degree whch would make Soviet Communist censors uncomfortable.
What Kubrick did to 2001 was one thing; he added and created, yet destroyed none of the original content. What was done to Earthsea is, in my opinion, nothing short of criminal.
But of course, 85% of the theories are still utter crap.
#include <boost/statistics>
template<MadeUp&> float GetPercentage(const statistic& NumberOnSlashdot) { return 0.931; }
Are students and teachers so damn insecure that they feel they need 3-D 24-bit color plots of data with animations and full-blown programming languages...for trig?!?!
Trying to make something easier to learn isn't insecurity. It's the teacher's job.
Amusingly, both the Los Angeles Valley and Mexico City had smog before the invention of the combustion engine. Just because you can see it doesn't mean that you're correctly estimating its origin or its impacts, even if (and in fact often when) it seems totally obvious. To wit, New York City puts out more emissions than Los Angeles, and yet it's barely even hazy.
The bulk of the gasses we currently believe are contributing to global warming are totally invisible. The next time you point to smog and start to tell yourself you can see the roots of global warming, remind yourself that in fact you cannot.
I'm not arguing your point; I agree that reducing emissions is critical. That said, your example is worthless, and your tone towards the parent utterly unwarranted. This is the sort of thing which, if said on the city street, often leads to a missing tooth. It may surprise you to learn that, rather than being seen as insightful and witty, you're actually seen quite differently.
Partly left handed? You mean you've got three dominant fingers on the left hand, but one on the right?
The described system is more complex than this.
Traffic lights with tarmac pressure sensors to allow presence switching are common. The idea is that the grid system is the default, but when there isn't any cross-traffic at all to justify holding the red, the other street is given a chance to fire anyway. This is common in residential areas with newer streets, and especially in parkway onramp areas (for our non-US friends, Americans use the term parkway to refer to a high-speed high-capacity multiple-lane street which has traffic lights every ten to fifteen miles or so; they're one of our preferred methods of laying infrastructure to remote tiny towns.) On parkways, the benefits are huge; the on-ramps are left green indefinately, and only switch to cross green when there's traffic to justify it. In some areas, even during rush hour the cross on-traffic is borderline nonexistant; the throughput benefits can be huge, and most modern US cities have this in place.
The article describes something very different.
The basis of grid traffic is a planned direction of lights firing in sequence. Though it's possible to establish a block length whose flow rate can be set such that there's a light timing pattern across only two lights, allowing a flow pattern to be encouraged in both directions at once, that sort of thing is generally only useful at speeds of 40+ mph, and at 40 mph the minimum such distance is about three blocks, making that as a general practice undesirable (still, you see the every-third-block-exit system fairly frequently at the edge of planned residential areas, condominiums, very large shopping malls, airports, and other sites with preplanned borders, native access to highways and extremely high expected traffic.
As a result, in dense areas it's much more common to attempt to establish the more frequent direction of flow - usually set by the notion of inbound rush hour and outbound rush hour - and to set the order of the lights to accomodate the larger group of people. This is why it seems like you get the worst luck when you're doing something atypical; often, you're no longer in the portion of the population that the street planner was trying to accomodate.
The scientist suggests dispensing with this system in small to mid-sized cities. The system above is good for very large urban areas, where the number of people and the normalcy of support systems grows to the point where the average behavior of an individual is much more predictable and where aberrant individual time and behavior schedules drop drastically by proportion, as well as where congestion is a significant issue. Because of the prevalence of focus on major cities, it's common to just use major city techniques to build small and middling sized cities, too. Even in large cities, turn overflow lanes are full the one minute, empty the next. Local differentiation in human travel patterns is a real son of a bitch to accomodate for.
The scientist suggests that for small and middling sized cities, it is more efficient to use local sensors to determine traffic flow, and to simply handle each light seperately.
In programmer's terms, which are far clearer for discussion and probably on a site like this better understood, it's a question of competing inefficiencies. Either you handle traffic at a local scale, losing any of the efficiency gained with a large-view schedule, or you handle the traffic from a large view, losing any of the efficiency you could gain from letting those two guys at that light over there go, since there's nobody on the cross street.
It's generally assumed that the large-city approach of giant scheduling will be best, much in the way that novice programmers tend to stick to vectors or lists and nothing else. The scientist is suggesting that that's not the appropriate approach at all scales, much like the programmer which brings up maps, deques and bizarre uses of basic_string.
This isn't a catch 22; it's a question of one size does not fit all.
Exactly. This budget increase is about 1 billion dollars.
More like four, once you do the math.
That's nothing.
Bwahahhaha. You really think, in the age where amateurs without aerospace degrees with teams of less than ten can make it to space for five million bucks, that four billion dollars is nothing?
the real costs of developing (and most critically, *testing*) a massive radiation-resistant space-borne liferaft designed to keep many people alive in isolation for most of a year (something we have trouble doing even on the surface) while flinging it toward a planet that's eaten about half of the spacecraft that have been sent to it throughout history (the Soviets had even worse luck than we did) using To-Be-Determined-But-Undoubtedly-Complex) engines, with a descent/ascent module, base, mini-refinery, etc, is not a simple task.
Luckily, we already paid for most of it in the early 1980s as propulsion to get stable flight and in the late 1990s as weapons to get clean charges. Nuclear-driven spaceships, as a concept, are well-understood; what remains is testing.
NASA took over 1% of our nation's entire GDP for a decade to get a small brief manned mission to the moon.
In an era where rocket trajectories were worked out on paper.
The Soviets never got people to the moon and back, despite having an extensive program (it was largely cut back after we succeeded, but they did work on it for as long as we did).
This is largely horseshit - the Soviet program was almost solely based on getting people into space. The reason we went to the moon is that they were just barely beating us in the space race, and moving the endpoint slightly into a different gravity well made it seem much more significant.
Maybe to your shock and horror, reaching the moon isn't that much more difficult than reaching a lagrange point; getting out of the moon's gravity isn't very hard. It's Earth which is difficult. Yes, there is some difficulty involed in having to spend for a lifeoff system in your weight budget, but the difficulty isn't anywhere near as big as you're implying.
The Chinese recently scrapped their planned moon mission because the numbers coming back for the cost of it were just too high (and Chinese space tech is relatively cheap).
This is much less potent, when you remember that China was planing this as an economic mission. What you meant to say was "China was going to start putting sattelites up, until it realized that the cost of setting up a launch infrastructure wasn't justified by the profit of undercutting the Americans and Russians on payloads." Sounds much less dramatic when you don't carefully ignore information to pretend that there are significances there which aren't really there. Hint: the Anasari X-Prize isn't bigger than the Chinese economy, yet people are profiting from it. Try to maintain a sense of scale.
We're talking about the moon here; the problems concerning a trip to Mars that takes almost a year are an order of magnitude greater.
No, they aren't. You have to include a much larger lift system, except that the first time we probably won't hit the surface anyway. The only other two new concerns are long-term storage and long-term reliability. The issues faced by the potential Mars mission aren't even as great as those already successfully faced by the International Space Station, and NASA won't be condending with a too many cooks problem if/when considering Mars.
Our sense of priorities as a nation are all wrong.
Yes, because clearly all of the well schooled high-end bureaucracy of every major nation on Earth are childishly unable to prioritize their resources in comparison to a single SlashDotter, and the various economic researchers which have suggested that it was dangerous to divert a single percent of the GDP to a single program for so long despite the percentage which is fed to the military are c
That's deliberate and criminal negligence on the part of the company officers because they knew the systems were disabled and put their profits ahead of the safety of both their employees and everyone living in the surrounding area.
... storage? I mean, this doesn't make sense.
Do you really believe they were making money off of leaving plates hanging by ropes instead of putting them into slots, or by leaving valves open? Do you think that they were somehow producing more
It was negligence, not profiteering. Don't take the lamb to the slaughter until you've checked to make sure it's a lamb.
As long as we continue to allow company officers to bear no responsibility for the actions of a company we will continue to see events like this.
Wake me when you have a clue what happened. The fault was the local plant manager's, not corporate. Simple things like check plates were missing, and safety valves were just left open (which is probably how the water got into the tank in the first place.)
Point fingers when you know what happened, and no earlier.
In the United States, that would be roughly the difference between first- and second-degree murder
Murder is killing intentionally. This is manslaughter, whether it's a genuine accident or the result of irresponsibility.
This is true, but it does not absolve Union Carbide and its executives of responsibility.
No, but the facts of the case do. The problem was caused by water leakage into the tank which caused a detonation - the result of safety valves simply left open, and check plates simply not in where they were supposed to be.
The problem was local management. Whereas Dow was making irresponsible decisions, such as an immensely oversized storage tank, what caused the error was a local manager's total lack of responsibility. This is not Dow's fault, no matter how badly you want for it to be.
Mod parent down.
You'll want to look into something called "piercing the corporate veil," which became common in British-derived legal systems in the late 1800s. India almost certainly has a similar mechanism.
The real problem here is not knowing the details of the UC incident. The people at fault were the local managers, not the corporate head. Whereas there's no question that Dow does some scumbag things in third world countries, what caused the UC incident was a series of simple mechanical errors, including safety valves left open, stop checks (little metal plates that go into the pipe sideways) weren't in place, et cetera.
Look, I'm not defending Dow. Still, get your facts straight before you start pointing fingers. There's a good reason that this hasn't gone up the chain, and it's not because of corporate legal abuse. You would do well to watch for the History Channel special on the incident, which will give you a bunch of facts you're missing; whereas it's hardly a comprehensive view of the situation, it's fairly clear that you'd benefit from the very basics.
In this case, Dow had the safety hardware in place. Granted the underground tanks were irresponsibly large, and granted that would eventually have led to a similar catastrophe, that is not what happened here. Just because they were on the path to negligence doesn't mean that everything that goes wrong is their fault. This was local error, not international greed.
Mod parent subterranean.
Who invented the steam machine powered by coal?
The ancient Greeks.
Who invented the internal combustion engine?
16th century Britain.
Who invented the CFC's which destroy the ozone layer?
Dupont, in the US, 1928.
Who invented the non-biodegradable plastic wrap which created gigantic garbage dumps?
Germany.
Who began to anihilate species on masse just to get economical advantage?
Humanity, pretty much unilaterally. Every color, every culture, every time period. "But the buddhists!" Bullshit: they just didn't eat them. "But the native americans!" *cough* etc.
"Economic," by the way.
Who invented the dangerous chemicals that are poured onto rivers and oceans?
Arguably China in ~500bc, when it was discovered that very early large-scale boar effluent ferilization built up toxic levels of what weren't understood for thousands of years to be chemical toxins. The cases for Macchu Picchu, Carthage, Rome and Londinium can also be made.
Well the developed nations, of course. DOH!
You're one for six. I can see that you watch a lot of history channel.
So if a nation can reduce its levels of pollution, it's the developed nations alright.
Bzzt. As many other people have pointed out, agricultural and population pollution are significant long before the industrial age, and with the right geography (as LA is famous for) simple wood fires caused smog long before coal was even a common fuel, let alone the internal combustion engine that we now blame everything upon.
Whereas the US' pollution output is the highest on earth, our pollution per production is near the lowest. Yes, we can do a lot to improve. So can China.
If you put the obligation on ALL countries, the developed nations will OBVIOUSLY have an economical advantage, because they'll be the first to comply with the standards.
Whereas if you ask the developed nations to foot the bill for the undeveloped nations, the economic burden is supposedly spread out, because obviously the fact that it's on taxable income doesn't matter when Americans already make orders of magnitude more money than the rest of the world, so clearly they need a few more orders of magnitude to stack on top.
You're misunderstanding the resistance. We don't want Uganda to kick in their fair share; we'd get more money from the guy with the nice house on the corner. The problem is the way in which the exceptions are doled out. China is treated as a developing nation, when their economy is already nearly as large as ours, and faces incredible development due to a potential for infrastructure layout for a good fifty years or more. You want Jamaica to skip their bill? Morocco? Siam? Great, fine, foot them all, no big deal.
But China? There's no country on earth which is looking at as bountiful a future century as China. If anything (and god am I going to get flamed/modded into the ground for saying this,) China should be footing our bill. We're doing the bulk of both their raw material and fine manufacturing, providing the bulk of their resources other than oil, copper and stone, and even doing a decent job of feeding them. The reason the US is crapping out all the world's dirt is that we're the people with the facilities to turn coal into coke, pig into steel, bauxite into aluminum. We're sucking the world's electricity because almost all the world's electricity goes into manufacturing or materials catalysis (notably aluminum and hydrogen.) We lead radioactive detritus because we have the resources, the processing facilities, the reactors and the waste storage.
Why? Because they got the MONEY in the first place.
And exactly how do you think we got that money? Through the very industrial output that you're now blaming the world's problems on us for.
Yes, we create a lot of problems, but a hell of a lot of
Oh honestly. That's true of pretty much every gas but the noble gases, because as long as you stick on the "at high enough concentrations," you've guaranteed that this gas is burning the flesh off of the cartilege.
Here's a hint for you. You can't smell pain. That pain isn't a smell. It's a pain. The reasons you can't smell anything but pain are 1) because the pain would drown out the smell, and 2) because the parts of your nose which do the smelling just got burnt off, causing pain.
It's a little like me accusing your attempt at criticism by specificity of giving me this headache, when in fact it's because a little bit of my soul and faith in my fellow man just died.
Lung tissue will react the exact same way.
Yeah, and lungs can't smell in the first place. Still think it's the smell of pain? (If posts could smell, at least in a more literal fashion than parent, then we might have a definitive answer...)
Oh no, the slashdotter's mortal enemy: someone which knows what the fuck they're talking about and can link to data.
/>&flee;
<response class="x-supernatural/hiss"
Anyone find it extremely ironic
No.
Isn't it cruelly coincidental that the person mocking someone for not knowing the difference between a memorandum and a referendum doesn't know what irony is?
In my opinion, this is similar to Microsoft entering the console market with the XBox.
Isn't it a little more like their entering the market with UltimateTV?
Oh, right, I'm the only person that seems to remember that this is their third attempt to take TiVo on.
Insert complaint about predictable jokes, slashdot going downhill since it's had more than two dozen users, and something involving hot grits clusters.
Actually, I'm modding it down because it's totally offtopic, not because I disagree. (Though, he's only actually won one election...)
Actually, steel and quartz are both Moh 7. Glass, on the other hand, is Moh 5. You should check your numbers before hitting submit. In fact, for the very reason that steel, quartz crystal and silica have the same Moh characteristics, the steel wool is a near-ideal example medium.
Maybe more importantly, you can't bring old CDs within three feet of steel wool, or they catch fire, immediately destroying all other music within 10 feet and causing a Save Versus Nerd Jokes at dc40 to 50 feet for all non-magical non-living items in range.
Mod parent down, metamoderate modders down.
Our new indestructable plastic overlords!
;-p
Sorry, had to be said.
No, it didn't.
However, I do wondering how you can label the ones you burn yourself...
Presumably by putting the label on before the two 8000-RPM hot silicon and toxic plastic gas vapor depisition passes. Alternately, single-sided coat them, use thermal laser printing, use patterned burnout printing, print the interior ring, or do what the rest of us do and throw them unlabelled into a half-full spindle of other unlabelled cds full of god only knows what.
There seems to be a lot of these con artists pretending to be business men
This guy was the project leader for one of the longest lived and most commercially successful operating systems in history. He is legitimate. Please do basic research before engaging the soap box.
Now, I am not a lawyer; that said, I have a basic familiarity with it, so I feel I must whack you with el ClueBat a few times.
What you're doing here talking about your former boss is libellious. You're behaving unethically and illegally, whether or not you're correct. As far as a slander lawsuit, my dear boy, you're also engaging in that right now; the lawsuit is in his hands, not yours. Furthermore, you're publicly threatening legal action as a consequence of any behavior of his with which you disagree; this is barratry, also quite illegal. Should his lawyers see this snippet, which with google and his last name they will, you've just shot your lawsuit straight to hell, quite possibly alongside a decade of your life and a significant chunk of money to cover reparations to a web business, for whom image is so immensely important that his damage estimates can be stratospheric and still be considered accurate.
Don't kid yourself about understanding the law. You've just broken it four times (two counts of libel, one of slander, one of barratry, the last a serious offense actionable by the state without Mr. Esrig's intervention.)
Yes, but not for that comment. What it's saying is clear as day: he wants the functionality of Linux in a form that's usable in commercial and closed-source situations, and he's willing to provide seed funding to make it happen.
If he weren't such an untrustworthy unreliable scumbag, I'd be trying to get other people to show similar support. Whereas I disagree with him as a whole, on this issue I agree strongly; many customer products would be suddenly Much Betterererer (tm) if certain tools which are not currently available to them became available to them, and as convergence progresses, it's going to become a bigger and bigger issue.
Anyone who has a ReplayTV and knows what GUI tools are available to free software knows exactly what I'm talking about.
The trouble with the BSD licence is that it does not oblige you to distribute the source code with any derivative work {unless you go for the two-clause, source-only distribution licence ..... which is fine for stuff written in an interpreted language, but not much cop for something like an OS kernel}. This means that someone else can take all your hard work -- which you intended to be for the benefit of everyone -- and "fence it in" by distributing a modified version in binary form only, and not giving anybody the source code. While it may well be a trivial matter to reproduce their effort and release a functional equivalent in source code form, it's still work that you shouldn't have to do. This is one of the things meant by "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance" -- in this case, if you give other people too much freedom with your code, then you have to watch over them forever to make sure they don't compromise any further people's freedom.
.) One of the things I released was a large string manipulation library for Delphi. Someone else turned around, made it into a component, and sold it - that is, they just added an interface, maybe 50 lines of code - and asked for money for it. I asked them once whether they'd done well; they claimed to have netted about three grand for 50 lines of code.
Some of us see this quite differently. I've released a bunch of source under the MIT license, some of it to fairly extensive systems (>25kLoc of dense C++
And you know what? More power to them. I really don't give a rat's ass. I required that my library's name and the original author's title be prominently displayed, and he did me proud: I was everywhere, from a mark on the front page of the documentation to a string in the component itself which could be read right from within the IDE.
What he did was to one-up me at marketing. He took a product, made it look much simpler to use, gave it a better name, and re-released. I'm not out any money: I wasn't selling it in the first place. And if someone buys a library without checking out the free library it's based on, they're dumbasses or there's added value (or both) and so in either case it's not my place to bitch.
I don't think the other programmer did anything wrong.
The trouble with the BSD license is that it doesn't do what you want for your code. That's fine. Nobody cares. Do whatever you want with your code. That's not actually trouble with the license; it works quite well for what it's supposed to do, and many people are quite happy with it. The trouble with the BSD license is that it carries provisions which don't cater to your needs and desires. In other words, there's no trouble at all.
Of course, not everyone who uses the BSD licence is a fencer-in. But why give them the chance?
Because I don't think budding engineers should have to reinvent every wheel they find. Why do you care what I allow on my code?
If you think the right of the majority to make use of the code you wrote overrides the supposed right of a minority to keep that code to themselves, then use a strong copyleft licence such as the GPL or ShareAlike. If on the other hand you think that the owner of a knife {howsoever it may have come into their possession} has the right to decide who they stab with it, and you don't mind that it might be you or your friends or family they stab, then go ahead and use a weak copyleft licence such as the BSD licence. And watch your back.
This doesn't make any sense at all. You seem to be stuck on the idea that if I release code and someone uses it in a closed source fashion I have been somehow taken advantage of. I chose this license with open eyes, and I'm perfectly aware of what its provisions are.
As a small entrepreneur, the restrictions of my clients have occasionally forbidden GPL products (especially common in the gaming industry where publishers often outright forbid any source release in order to defend pl
And, (AFAIK, IANAL) isn't it illegal to repeatedly threaten legal action without following it up?
In most countries, yes. In the United States it's called "barratry," and it doesn't have to be repeated.
As long as it can live in free countries like Brazil it will be unkillable.
In other words, until the day after tomorrow, when Jeb rapes Florida again? Brazil's closer than Madagascar; it makes a better site for the new presidential golf course.