As for expensive, well, not really. The prices are largely comparable to other energy sources and could be cheaper if the regulatory environment were relaxed comparable to the advances in technology.
The site you link to - Nuclear Tourist, sheesh the name alone should have given away their bias - quotes the subsidized costs. If you care about the free market then you wouldn't promote a 60 year old fuel source that still can't turn a profit without subsidies.
As for "relaxing" the regulations, this is entirely the problem with nuclear power. It requires strict reglations because there are high risks associated with careless management. Trusting capitalists to run a safe nuclear plant is at best naive.
So if you see it in your server logs, it's because the user is using Flock.
What are you, Captain Obvious in disguise? Did you really think anybody on Slashdot would be so technically challenged that they wouldn't know this already?
The rumour on the grapevine is that the problems don't entirely stem from the software. The data entry now requires details (you want what now?) and that makes it impossible to process cargo as quickly as before. The software is just a convenient scapegoat. The reality is that the old system allowed the data entry to be sloppy (and effectively useless).
Nathan, you are being ad hominem again, using my partisanship as a counter to my argument.
Yes, I know what the phrase means, in both the rhetorical sense and in Latin.
Given the way you just used the phrase, I doubt very much that you understand what it means in either Latin or English. Tell me, what do you think it means to be ad hominem?
I encountered many, especially in the main stream media, who were equally blinded by their partisanship.
It is a shame when critical thinking goes out the window on certain subjects. And yes, that statement is an ad hominem comment about you, among others.
If you're implying that I am partisan then you couldn't be further from the truth. I've already mentioned that I didn't vote for either Kerry or Bush. Take a wild guess as to why.
If you would like to see real propaganda, in which Kerry has a starring role, check out this piece which came out during the campaign last year and never made the news. Also note the URL. Maybe you can learn about what real propaganda is: http://vietnamnews.vnagency.com.vn/2004-06/10/Stor ies/16.htm
Partisan politics is for small-minded people. I'm not interested. Neither was Wikipedia.
People may have their stereotypes about the US, but I think roughly are better informed about how the US really is (we would not assume that having computers or access to technology is an imposibility for most USians) than USians are about Africa.
Dude, they're Americans. This is the country that gave us creationists. They think democracy is intrinsically linked to capitalism. Half the population thinks Saddam was responsible for 9/11. I wouldn't waste my time worrying about what they think.
has IBM Good and Apple Bad idea stuck in his head from the 80s
Pardon? IBM was incredibly bad in the 80s, somewhat bad in the 90s, and I'm not entirely convinced they're good today. And Apple was still bad in the 90s. Have people forgotten the hell that was MacOS before MacOS X? Or the wide range of overpriced underpowered unreliable hardware that Apple was shoveling in the mid-90s? Let's not view history through rosy-coloured glasses.
Newsflash: Most Africans do not live in huts on the savannah.
No shit, Sherlock. And most Americans don't wear cowboy hats and rustle cattle. And most Australians don't hop around in the pouch of a kangaroo. What's your fucking point?
I believe that partisans can easily skew Wikipedia, and of course are more likely to do so on controversial subjects.
You were one of those partisans contributing to the skew. By your own admission you posted negative information about Kerry. You blame the deletion on the "anti-Bush" crowd, rather than the much more sensible theory that your comments were inappropriate.
To partisans, Wikipedia can be a very good propaganda tool, since it appears on the surface to be authoritative.
You're just upset because your attempt to (ab)use Wikipedia to spread anti-Kerry propaganda was foiled.
NB: I didn't vote for Kerry or Bush. I think this partisan bickering is childish bullshit that harms the country as a whole. Congratulations to you for contributing to the problem.
Surprise, surprise, you're in it! Truth is, there's been a lot of positive feedback, some of it over the top and flack-like. But there's a constant thread of people looking to do Apple in.
I've read the thread again at -1 and I still don't see it. I think you might be overly sensitive to this particular issue. All I see is the normal push and shove of ideas, nothing more.
We could be at the beginning of a new era in visual media, and the iPod and the iTMS is right there at the beginning.
I think we could all do without the hyperbole; both the "Apple sucks" and "Apple is wunderkind" variety. Pay-for-view media has been around for a very long time. Portable video has been around for a very long time. The ability to pay money to TV companies and receive digital copies on demand has been around for a very long time. There's no rhyme nor reason behind these This Is The Second Coming fantasies.
The difference here is that iTunes is a very good product, while the early versions of IE sucked.
No, that's not the difference that matters. The important difference is that Microsoft was selling Windows to OEMs (such as Dell) to rebadge with their PCs. The OEMs were installing Netscape - because at the time it was a better browser, recall this was IE2 vs NS2 - and Microsoft was flat outright telling the OEMs to not install Netscape or their OEM agreement might suffer a nasty accident, know what I mean? Those prices could go right up, and we wouldn't want that to happen, not if ya knows what is good for ya.
Apple doesn't sell their OS to OEMs. Arguably they'll never be in the same position that Microsoft was in over IE.
What on *earth* have the execs at the affiliates being doing the past few years that they've missed the fact that the music business in is absolute turmoil over digital distribution?
What on Earth are you talking about? The affiliates gave you Video On Demand (downloadable DVD-quality content via broadband) nearly a decade ago. I'm in Australia - the technological backwaters of the universe - and even we have VoD. Where do you get off claiming that the affiliates are in turmoil over digital distribution? It seems to me they've already embraced it. It was only the RIAA that didn't have the foresight to embrace digital distribution.
Yes, Thank you Apple! Finnally someone has done what the consumers have been screaming for for years! So many nay-sayers look at the iPod Video and say it is some gimmick, but what they dont realise is exactly this pandoras box being opened!
I've seen perhaps a half-dozen naysayers in total and an overwhelming majority praising Apple as if they've just solved world hunger. Where do you get the idea that "so many nay-sayers" are calling this a gimmick? Is there a special thread for naysayers that I haven't seen yet?
I'm sure Apple did some heavy focus group stuff and found that people would pay more for a tv show, but not that much more.
I'm sure they didn't. I've observed decisions like this being made before, and it usually involves the CEO saying something like "we'll charge twice as much for video as we do for audio" and that's the end of the argument. Focus groups are for pansies.
But then who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of 'Lost' from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your television and record that same episode free?
Who would pay $0.99 to download a song from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your radio and record that same song for free?
But wait, people do pay $0.99 to download a song from iTunes. It seems the convenience of downloading the song outweighs the inconvenience of recording it yourself.
Even more myopic, the author neglects that in the "same episode free" scenario, Apple only makes money on the initial sale of the iPod. In the "pay $1.99" scenario, Apple keeps making money after the initial sale of the iPod. Why would Apple encourage the former at the expense of the latter?
The reality is that Apple isn't the first company to produce a handheld video device. Treo can play videos. PSP can play videos. iRiver can play videos. Getting the content onto those devices isn't a walk in the park. Apple is betting that people will pay for the convenience of iTunes for video. Given their past success with iTunes and MP3s (which are relatively easy to rip) I say their chances are good.
It's a comms theory problem. Assume the simple case where n=2. Prisoner 0 (p0) needs to communicate an "I've been in the room" message to prisoner 1 (p1). Once p1 receives that message he can answer "yes" and both prisoners go free.
However the only communication method is a chalice which is a lossy channel because the King can introduce k errors per message. In other words, for every k+1 bits communicated, only 1 bit is reliably transmitted. Fortunately the problem of transmitting data over a lossy channel was solved decades ago. It's called Error Detection and something simple like parity will do nicely. One parity bit can detect one bit error in the message. To detect potentially k errors you'll need k parity bits and to correct the message you'll need k+1 parity bits in addition to however many bits are in the message.
However it gets worse. The King is under no obligation to alternate between p0 and p1, so p1 doesn't necessarily know that p0 has had an opportunity to send a new bit since the last time that p1 was in the room. Similarly p0 doesn't know that p1 has been in the room to observe the bit that p0 tried to transmit. So you need a self-clocking encoding scheme, such as Manchester Codes, and an acknowledgement message from p1 back to p0 for every bit. The acknowledgement could be something as simple as returning the chalice upright and choosing codes that ensure that zero-bits and one-bits both result in the chalice facing down.
To extend this out to more than two prisoners, the prisoners need to agree to not touch the chalice unless they're participating in a communication with the prisoner immediately before them in the sequence. To do this you can prefix the message with an address (just like a MAC). The address can be something simple, such as the numeric sequence of the prisoner. Each pair of prisoners takes it in turn to transmit their message to the next prisoner in the sequence, with the final prisoner saying "yes" after he has received the message from the second last prisoner.
There would be a hell of a lot of trips to the central room though.
It's commonly agreed that if Earth was warmer, humans would be better off while many animals would go extinct.
Commonly agreed by whom? The common agreement that I've read is that if the Earth was warmer, then rainfall patterns would shift dramatically, leading to rainfall on land which cannot support food crops, leading to widespread crop failures and famine. There's not much point there being 25mm of rain if it lands on the Sahara desert. It takes thousands of years for soil profiles to change, for deserts to become grasslands, for rainforests to grow. It's not a simple matter of waiting for the glaciers to retreat and then setting up a farm in the space left behind; it doesn't work like that.
People seem to forget that global warming isn't about turning off your heater during winter. It's about dramatic changes in the weather. We are still highly susceptible to the weather; if the past two years haven't proven that to you then there's no hope.
On the other side, we'd consume much less energy for heating. 1000 less marines would die every year extracting heating oil from terrorists. Russia and Canadia would become inhabitable.
Fuck, there is no hope. The insane are running the asylum.
I certainly wouldn't notice the difference, and so much productivity would be saved by everyone not having to rehash the same old arguments again.
There are no "arguments". There are a bunch of head-in-the-sand dolts who repeat false claims, and a bunch of frustrated people who wonder how in hell those dolts managed to stop drooling long enough to write their inane crap. For example, I'm waiting for somebody to post the inevitable "St Helens volcano produced more greenhouse gases than 200 years of human industrialisation" myth. It doesn't matter how many times that myth is debunked; the faith-based morons that seem to represent the majority of the USA believe it with a passion.
I personally blame this stupid obsession the yankees have with "fair and balanced" reporting, which has been perverted to mean giving equal time to "two sides of the debate". The first mistake is in thinking there are only two sides. The second mistake is in thinking that each side has equal merit. I have no other explanation for (what seems to me) the majority of Slashdotters thinking that global warming is a myth (how do such people manage to survive a whole day without killing themselves?) and using bullshit "arguments" such as "we only have temperature records going back 100 years".
Then again, I've read comments from Slashdotters who honestly believe that Columbus proved the world was round, so it certainly seems the USA faith-based education system is doing a bang up job of turning your population into a pack of retards.
And what is wrong with an individual INI file per app and/or per user? I mean, *nix has been using that for a long time, and it sure makes down-and-dirty administration ten times easier.
Unless, of course, you are a Gnome use, in which case you get GConf. What is GConf? Well, it's a nice implmentation of a registry.:)
Gconf is arguably a registry: that's not something I care to debate. However Gconf stores information in the way grandparent describes in that each application gets its own "INI file". For example:
nathanh@finlandia:~/.gconf/apps$ ls s*/*xml
same-gnome/%gconf.xml sound-juicer/%gconf.xml
seahorse/%gconf.xml stardict/%gconf.xml
Gconf offers a common API for storing and retrieving configuration data, callback events for when data changes, and the opportunity for different backends (eg, LDAP instead of files). However it achieves all that without sacrificing the benefits of human-readable (and text-editable) files and each application still gets its own configuration file.
The Gconf model works well in practise. Recently I had an application that I needed to move to another system. Rather than diving into "registry tools" and using "registry backups" - which is what I would have had to do with a traditional registry - I just copied the relevant %gconf.xml file out of my home directory and onto the new machine. Similarly I had an application that I wanted to reset to factory defaults, so I simply renamed the %gconf.xml file and restarted the application. This works exactly like the traditional UNIX way of dealing with configuration data.
How about LRRP - Linux, Ruby on Rails and Postgresql - pronounced "lurp" as in "burp". Has some similarity to LAMP though is distinctive enough to not be confused.
With each damning new report and every shred if indicting evidence that indeed the earth is entering into massive warming because of human activity So you now have proof that's it's HUMAN (code word for U.S.A.) it doing it? Then how do you explain the warming that is also taking place on MARS?? http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_ice-age _031208.html [space.com]
I explain it as people looking for any excuse to justify their wasteful SUV.
Then it occured to me. If someone is reporting fair and balanced news, then it would come up as middle of the road. And to a right-winger, that looks left-wing, and to a left-winger that lookes right-wing.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking Fox News is centrist. The reality is that over several decades the USA has become so right-wing - both democrats and republicans - that strongly right-wing media like Fox News seems centrist by comparison. Slightly right-wing media (eg, CNN) seems left-wing by comparison even though they never discuss left-wing politics. The reality is that you've been given a fool's choice between right-wing democrats and very-right-wing republicans and the media reflects that. You need look no further than a comparison between the BBC and CNN to realise how right-wing the USA media really is (and I'm not holding the BBC up as an example of centrist).
Slashdot Mirror
The site you link to - Nuclear Tourist, sheesh the name alone should have given away their bias - quotes the subsidized costs. If you care about the free market then you wouldn't promote a 60 year old fuel source that still can't turn a profit without subsidies.
As for "relaxing" the regulations, this is entirely the problem with nuclear power. It requires strict reglations because there are high risks associated with careless management. Trusting capitalists to run a safe nuclear plant is at best naive.
The more education you have regarding nuclear fission power, the more you protest.
And nobody wants a nuclear reactor in their backyard. End of discussion.
What are you, Captain Obvious in disguise? Did you really think anybody on Slashdot would be so technically challenged that they wouldn't know this already?
The rumour on the grapevine is that the problems don't entirely stem from the software. The data entry now requires details (you want what now?) and that makes it impossible to process cargo as quickly as before. The software is just a convenient scapegoat. The reality is that the old system allowed the data entry to be sloppy (and effectively useless).
Given the way you just used the phrase, I doubt very much that you understand what it means in either Latin or English. Tell me, what do you think it means to be ad hominem?
If you're implying that I am partisan then you couldn't be further from the truth. I've already mentioned that I didn't vote for either Kerry or Bush. Take a wild guess as to why.
Partisan politics is for small-minded people. I'm not interested. Neither was Wikipedia.
Dude, they're Americans. This is the country that gave us creationists. They think democracy is intrinsically linked to capitalism. Half the population thinks Saddam was responsible for 9/11. I wouldn't waste my time worrying about what they think.
Pardon? IBM was incredibly bad in the 80s, somewhat bad in the 90s, and I'm not entirely convinced they're good today. And Apple was still bad in the 90s. Have people forgotten the hell that was MacOS before MacOS X? Or the wide range of overpriced underpowered unreliable hardware that Apple was shoveling in the mid-90s? Let's not view history through rosy-coloured glasses.
You don't know what the phrase means.
Which is probably why you don't realise that your anti-Kerry propaganda was inappropriate.
No shit, Sherlock. And most Americans don't wear cowboy hats and rustle cattle. And most Australians don't hop around in the pouch of a kangaroo. What's your fucking point?
You were one of those partisans contributing to the skew. By your own admission you posted negative information about Kerry. You blame the deletion on the "anti-Bush" crowd, rather than the much more sensible theory that your comments were inappropriate.
You're just upset because your attempt to (ab)use Wikipedia to spread anti-Kerry propaganda was foiled.
NB: I didn't vote for Kerry or Bush. I think this partisan bickering is childish bullshit that harms the country as a whole. Congratulations to you for contributing to the problem.
I've read the thread again at -1 and I still don't see it. I think you might be overly sensitive to this particular issue. All I see is the normal push and shove of ideas, nothing more.
I think we could all do without the hyperbole; both the "Apple sucks" and "Apple is wunderkind" variety. Pay-for-view media has been around for a very long time. Portable video has been around for a very long time. The ability to pay money to TV companies and receive digital copies on demand has been around for a very long time. There's no rhyme nor reason behind these This Is The Second Coming fantasies.
No, that's not the difference that matters. The important difference is that Microsoft was selling Windows to OEMs (such as Dell) to rebadge with their PCs. The OEMs were installing Netscape - because at the time it was a better browser, recall this was IE2 vs NS2 - and Microsoft was flat outright telling the OEMs to not install Netscape or their OEM agreement might suffer a nasty accident, know what I mean? Those prices could go right up, and we wouldn't want that to happen, not if ya knows what is good for ya.
Apple doesn't sell their OS to OEMs. Arguably they'll never be in the same position that Microsoft was in over IE.
What on Earth are you talking about? The affiliates gave you Video On Demand (downloadable DVD-quality content via broadband) nearly a decade ago. I'm in Australia - the technological backwaters of the universe - and even we have VoD. Where do you get off claiming that the affiliates are in turmoil over digital distribution? It seems to me they've already embraced it. It was only the RIAA that didn't have the foresight to embrace digital distribution.
I've seen perhaps a half-dozen naysayers in total and an overwhelming majority praising Apple as if they've just solved world hunger. Where do you get the idea that "so many nay-sayers" are calling this a gimmick? Is there a special thread for naysayers that I haven't seen yet?
I'm sure they didn't. I've observed decisions like this being made before, and it usually involves the CEO saying something like "we'll charge twice as much for video as we do for audio" and that's the end of the argument. Focus groups are for pansies.
Who would pay $0.99 to download a song from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your radio and record that same song for free?
But wait, people do pay $0.99 to download a song from iTunes. It seems the convenience of downloading the song outweighs the inconvenience of recording it yourself.
Even more myopic, the author neglects that in the "same episode free" scenario, Apple only makes money on the initial sale of the iPod. In the "pay $1.99" scenario, Apple keeps making money after the initial sale of the iPod. Why would Apple encourage the former at the expense of the latter?
The reality is that Apple isn't the first company to produce a handheld video device. Treo can play videos. PSP can play videos. iRiver can play videos. Getting the content onto those devices isn't a walk in the park. Apple is betting that people will pay for the convenience of iTunes for video. Given their past success with iTunes and MP3s (which are relatively easy to rip) I say their chances are good.
It's a comms theory problem. Assume the simple case where n=2. Prisoner 0 (p0) needs to communicate an "I've been in the room" message to prisoner 1 (p1). Once p1 receives that message he can answer "yes" and both prisoners go free.
However the only communication method is a chalice which is a lossy channel because the King can introduce k errors per message. In other words, for every k+1 bits communicated, only 1 bit is reliably transmitted. Fortunately the problem of transmitting data over a lossy channel was solved decades ago. It's called Error Detection and something simple like parity will do nicely. One parity bit can detect one bit error in the message. To detect potentially k errors you'll need k parity bits and to correct the message you'll need k+1 parity bits in addition to however many bits are in the message.
However it gets worse. The King is under no obligation to alternate between p0 and p1, so p1 doesn't necessarily know that p0 has had an opportunity to send a new bit since the last time that p1 was in the room. Similarly p0 doesn't know that p1 has been in the room to observe the bit that p0 tried to transmit. So you need a self-clocking encoding scheme, such as Manchester Codes, and an acknowledgement message from p1 back to p0 for every bit. The acknowledgement could be something as simple as returning the chalice upright and choosing codes that ensure that zero-bits and one-bits both result in the chalice facing down.
To extend this out to more than two prisoners, the prisoners need to agree to not touch the chalice unless they're participating in a communication with the prisoner immediately before them in the sequence. To do this you can prefix the message with an address (just like a MAC). The address can be something simple, such as the numeric sequence of the prisoner. Each pair of prisoners takes it in turn to transmit their message to the next prisoner in the sequence, with the final prisoner saying "yes" after he has received the message from the second last prisoner.
There would be a hell of a lot of trips to the central room though.
Commonly agreed by whom? The common agreement that I've read is that if the Earth was warmer, then rainfall patterns would shift dramatically, leading to rainfall on land which cannot support food crops, leading to widespread crop failures and famine. There's not much point there being 25mm of rain if it lands on the Sahara desert. It takes thousands of years for soil profiles to change, for deserts to become grasslands, for rainforests to grow. It's not a simple matter of waiting for the glaciers to retreat and then setting up a farm in the space left behind; it doesn't work like that.
People seem to forget that global warming isn't about turning off your heater during winter. It's about dramatic changes in the weather. We are still highly susceptible to the weather; if the past two years haven't proven that to you then there's no hope.
Fuck, there is no hope. The insane are running the asylum.
There are no "arguments". There are a bunch of head-in-the-sand dolts who repeat false claims, and a bunch of frustrated people who wonder how in hell those dolts managed to stop drooling long enough to write their inane crap. For example, I'm waiting for somebody to post the inevitable "St Helens volcano produced more greenhouse gases than 200 years of human industrialisation" myth. It doesn't matter how many times that myth is debunked; the faith-based morons that seem to represent the majority of the USA believe it with a passion.
I personally blame this stupid obsession the yankees have with "fair and balanced" reporting, which has been perverted to mean giving equal time to "two sides of the debate". The first mistake is in thinking there are only two sides. The second mistake is in thinking that each side has equal merit. I have no other explanation for (what seems to me) the majority of Slashdotters thinking that global warming is a myth (how do such people manage to survive a whole day without killing themselves?) and using bullshit "arguments" such as "we only have temperature records going back 100 years".
Then again, I've read comments from Slashdotters who honestly believe that Columbus proved the world was round, so it certainly seems the USA faith-based education system is doing a bang up job of turning your population into a pack of retards.
Gconf is arguably a registry: that's not something I care to debate. However Gconf stores information in the way grandparent describes in that each application gets its own "INI file". For example:
Gconf offers a common API for storing and retrieving configuration data, callback events for when data changes, and the opportunity for different backends (eg, LDAP instead of files). However it achieves all that without sacrificing the benefits of human-readable (and text-editable) files and each application still gets its own configuration file.
The Gconf model works well in practise. Recently I had an application that I needed to move to another system. Rather than diving into "registry tools" and using "registry backups" - which is what I would have had to do with a traditional registry - I just copied the relevant %gconf.xml file out of my home directory and onto the new machine. Similarly I had an application that I wanted to reset to factory defaults, so I simply renamed the %gconf.xml file and restarted the application. This works exactly like the traditional UNIX way of dealing with configuration data.
How about LRRP - Linux, Ruby on Rails and Postgresql - pronounced "lurp" as in "burp". Has some similarity to LAMP though is distinctive enough to not be confused.
I explain it as people looking for any excuse to justify their wasteful SUV.
As to the science, there is no evidence to warrant the conclusion there is global warming on Mars.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking Fox News is centrist. The reality is that over several decades the USA has become so right-wing - both democrats and republicans - that strongly right-wing media like Fox News seems centrist by comparison. Slightly right-wing media (eg, CNN) seems left-wing by comparison even though they never discuss left-wing politics. The reality is that you've been given a fool's choice between right-wing democrats and very-right-wing republicans and the media reflects that. You need look no further than a comparison between the BBC and CNN to realise how right-wing the USA media really is (and I'm not holding the BBC up as an example of centrist).
Internetworks had tabs first (1994), then NetCaptor (1997), and Opera much later (2000). Wikipedia knows all.