Even if you do "own" the property, that does not constitute an unlimited right to do with it as you wish. It is not hereditary property, nor is it held by sovereign right. Your interest in the property is defined wholly by financial terms -- cash on the barrel-head. If someone else wants to spend more money to acquire that same property, so be it.
I don't wish to entirely repeat myself, but I found a metaphor that I feel particularly apt: this influx of wealth is like a rising tide. One may protest this (as demonstrated by Canute), but the flow of dollars, as with the tide, will not be swayed by argument, vandalism, nor rioting. To my mind, a far more productive use of time would be to recall that 'a rising tide lifts all boats', and apply oneself to learning programming. I did. Programming (albeit in its meanest form) is being taught to schoolchildren. Failing that, find a good excuse to separate these techies from their money -- real estate can't be their only interest. Failing that, "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche": this is how markets work. I would be receptive to the idea that markets are not an appropriate solution for allocating housing, but no one seems to be making that argument, and frankly it's going to be a hard sell to the rest of the world.
The idiots in question seem to be these protesters, who like Canute rail against the rising tide, and as effectively. We may recall the adage concerning the lifting abilities of the rising tide, and I might stretch the metaphor to suggest that these gentlemen take up boat-building. Programming to some mean degree is accessible even to schoolchildren; I myself have in these recent years taken up the profession.
I may guess at the purpose of your tautology about one's home, and surmise that you are implying that one has a right to continued occupation of one's primary residence. That this is not so is a well established principle of law, and also a natural consequence. As I have explained, no man has a greater natural right to a piece of this Earth than any other man. We come into this world without property, and any property gained before our deaths is merely the chance of fate. However, as far as the law governing that span is concerned, we mark a difference between property held in fee simple, and lands held by hereditary title or sovereign right. If you purchase property, then it should be abundantly obvious that any man may acquire it by the same means. It is wholly a matter of finance; no natural right enters into it.
I have sympathy towards those ousted from their homes, although I neither have a permanent residence nor should I choose to do so in the Bay Area. Yet my sympathies stop well short of supporting rioting in the streets, and in this case it's absurdly indefensible; it's not as if there are not already rent controls. If this absurd rabble cannot help itself I continue to ask what they imagine may be done to stem this tide.
My opinion used to be highly colored by a vocal medical doctor, who held that the title should only properly be applied to doctors medicinae. He reasoned that in dire accidents, the cry, "Is there a doctor in the house?" might only be answered by an M.D., and consequently those engaged in less vital studies were undeserving of the title.
My respect for the memory this physician is boundless; the world will not see his like again. However, in this matter he was entirely wrong: that all medical professionals have Ph. Ds is a relatively recent phenomenon. The word itself means, "I teach," and properly represents the highest degree of academic accomplishment. It does not confer such status, but recognizes it, and the idea that honorary recognition is somehow of less value is patent nonsense.
Dr. Richard Stallman has contributed greatly to the field of computer science. It is in the nature of computer code that, while itself unchanging, its utility declines with time. His code contributions often stand in exception to that rule, for which he deserves considerable respect. However, his greatest accomplishments have been (ironically) social: whatever you may think of the man, he occupies a fixed point in morality, and the entire world been shaped by it. He has done more to earn the title than most who claim it.
In point of fact, he has received this recognition of his contributions no less than fourteen times. Give the man his due.
Thank you for posting. I know that, while you are a GOOG employee, you're not any variation on Community Outreach, and posting here presumably represents your own personal time. I have been following the development of these technologies but not closely enough to have any appreciation of the issues the GP AC raised, and you have been wonderfully informative. Not that your normal standard is at all bad; you're often a source of fair commentary, and very good at both disclosing and setting aside your biases.
I spent my mod points elsewhere today: you'll have to settle for my paltry accolades. Nevertheless, your efforts are quite appreciated.
Why? What right do you have to keep living there? No human has any more natural interest in any parcel of land than any other. Perhaps you are confused as to what exactly your interest in your home is, because if that is not an arrangement subject primarily to the laws of commercial supply and demand, I would be surprised to hear of it.
No one cares that you are harmed by gentrification any more than any one cares about the loss of buggy whip manufacturers' incomes. Sometimes change is destructive, and becoming angry and destructive in turn is very easy. That does not mean that doing so will be effective, and in this case, it is highly unlikely that vandalism will have any effect whatsoever on the cause of the issue. Turn back the clock, if you can. Use whatever political demagoguery you may, to tax those you dislike and subsidize your friends, but let's not paint the breaking of a god-damned window as a productive activity. I think your cause is hopeless and deluded, even as supportive of social justice as I am, but if you are to realize any aims, you must first rise above "sound and fury".
What a vacuous truth! All societies inculcate their values to the next generation. The only ones who take issue with this are deluded individualists. I would strongly encourage any one who so believes to break from the herd, to live as an island of selfdom -- to have the courage of their convictions.
The individual person is as much a meaningless abstraction as a single atom. I rest serene in the confidence that, in the absurdly chance that there is a true individualist, they will have no effect on humanity.
IMO, the best pre-iPod mp3 player was the Rio Karma. It had FLAC and Ogg support, came with a half-decent set of songs on it, gapless playback, cross-fade, and you could create playlists on the device itself. Apparently you can still buy them here and there. I'd forgotten the (included) base station had ethernet, usb 2.0, and stereo RCA out.
The one major downside was that the scroll wheel was flimsy. Still, the iPod was in many senses a step backwards for the industry.
I need to brew enough coffee to fill an Olympic-length pool. I was planning on inviting the Paris metro area over for a cuppa, if you must know. I know that I'll need about 105 metric tons of coffee (~$200k) for this adventure, but the coffee pot I have is a bit undersized for the task. Any idea how one would go about generating that much java?
Say! I'll need somewhere to keep it, too! It may take quite some time to serve coffee to that many Frenchmen. I am sure there would be time for high society to snub the endeavor and for a mob of cafe owners to lynch me before I was halfway through, but in the hypothetical meanwhile I'd certainly want some way to keep the coffee hot. I understand that there are active heating methods both ancient and novel, but I'd like to keep my operating costs down. What kind of container could I put it in? What is the longest amount of time I'm likely to be able to serve hot coffee to Frenchmen?
Look, maybe you can find some nuance to where a branch of the military running an intelligence operation against the People it is sworn to protect and defend, does not qualify as treason. Rest assured the NSA is equally concerned with the subject, so you may want to let them know if you have some discovery there.
I happen to call that treason, and the documents of whatever nation in question are not particularly relevant to my definition. It is purest folly to have military specialists employed against their own society, in whatever form. The persons responsible for this program deserve to hang as traitors, and Justice will not be served by any lesser charge. May God have mercy on their souls.
Why are foreign adversaries a justification for domestic policy? We outspend the world's militaries, what exactly should we be afraid of?
The American people are not and should not be the legitimate target for the State intelligence apparatus. If you have done something against the interests of the State, it would be a matter for our police. If you have not done something against the interests of the State, if you are merely thinking about doing that, or even taking steps towards doing so, you have not yet in actual fact committed that crime. The choice is fundamentally whether to permit people to commit crime, or to treat everyone as if they were a criminal. We can't guarantee that we can catch criminals after the fact, and it's hardly possible to keep people from committing criminal acts in jail, let alone in the greater society. This suggests that a police state is not a good value proposition: trying to stop people before they commit crimes is flawed, in principle and in practice.
But we are not speaking of common crimes, we are speaking of crimes against the State, and correspondingly the bodies we have endowed with the right to pursue those who have committed such malefactions. The NSA has become not only the foremost intelligence body of the US Military, but as such it is undeniably the most effective intelligence body that the world has ever seen. It is wrong for the police to pursue men who have not committed criminal acts, but it is far more wrong to be treated as an enemy of the State, and investigated as such, without an inarguably just cause, or existential necessity. Not only does this rule out mass surveillence entirely, but it is difficult to describe how few external existential threats these United States face. So far the internal police appear to be adequate to the task of containing whatever terrorist uprising we may be in danger of.
The parent poster is not being facetious. The American People, and our Allies, are being targetted by the Signals Intelligence branch of the United States Government. There are quite excellent reasons this is forbidden, which have nothing in particular to do with our laws, and a plenitude of historical examples which bear this point out. Mass surveillance of the American public is nothing less than enormitous treason.
The D1 discussion system still works the same way. You don't have to worry about posting to undo moderation (although forgetting to moderate is more of a risk). On the possibly-negative side, you will tend to use a lot of tabs to see threads below your threshold. I recommend a tree view tab organizer, which has the additional benefit of being a far more sensible way to browse online source code.
It is a few mouse clicks and a registration form away. For interested account holders, from your Account menu, select Discussions, and then 'Classic Discussion System (D1)'. Choosing not to sign in is an option, but I would tend to expect that the interface provided to the unauthenticated masses would be geared towards, well, mass appeal. The interface you're after still exists and is just as useful as it ever was -- I hope signing in isn't too much of a bother. I haven't noticed any UI changes.
Depending on what exactly you define as an OS, you can either look at Puppy or Damn Small Linux, both of which are (more or less) full desktop OSes, and which have far lower system requirements than any recent versions of Windows.
Stretching the definition of terms a little, there are a half-dozen linux distributions meant to fit on floppy disks. It's extremely common to use Linux in low-spec or embedded devices like routers. The lowest system requirements are on the order of one megabyte of RAM, and the same for persistent storage, and whatever CPU fits within your power envelope at that point. Linux is fairly competitive as an embedded OS, and used on billions of low-spec devices. Windows and OSX are not competitive in the embedded space.
Measuring application performance over a broad range of hardware and OSes is impossible, even if you limit yourself to a single application, due to binary incompatibilities. So with the important caveat that a evaluation of application performance between OSes is likely to be meaningless, we may feel safe in saying that as far as the OS functions are concerned, and all other things being held equal, Linux will use less system resources than Windows/OSX.
Please remedy your incredible ignorance, and refrain from invective, and if you can't do either, please stop polluting this forum with your drivel.
On the more general topic at hand, I concur with rubycodez on the subject of web applications, specifically to note that the comparison (while ill-defined) between web applications and desktop applications of similar functionality, should consider that HTTP is inherently stateless. Your C++ application is going to be best suited to a single user environment, and probably the curves of 'system resources required per number of users n' would intersect at a very low n. Lastly we observe that the exact amount of time required to execute a set of instructions rarely matters, and the choice of programming language is unlikely to be a first-order effect.
The difference between the power user and the programmer is that for the latter the entire graphical system of the computer can be considered to some degree optional. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of the perspective of the "gnu/linux power users"; the concerns are not aesthetic. The principle that graphics are optional is not a secondary function of Unix either, but a core tenet. To whatever degree that the goals of the graphical user interface and the textual interface conflict, the TUI will pretty much always win, in Linux.
These Unix principles are as much as anything else agreements between developers, that computer systems should be designed along certain lines. Compliance with any standard is more or less optional, and compliance with open source licenses, while not optional in the strictest legal sense, are as often 'honored in the breach as the observance'. It can be hard to detect when a license has been violated; refer also to the issue of public code lacking an explicit license. Generally though, if you agree to play nice with others, they will let you use their code without any financial consideration whatsoever. Linux is merely one example of the fruits of these agreements.
Bear with me here: because of the inability to simultaneously optimize for both TUI and GUI, making Unix palatable to the masses involves in some fundamental ways making it not Unix. Apple has been very successful with this strategy -- would you imagine that iPods and iTunes don't even have their own scripting language? -- and Canonical has been only a moderate success. The difference between the two is that no one would ever think to interact with an Apple machine exclusively by way of the command line.
On the one hand, Canonical needs Linux to serve as the basis for Ubuntu. On the other hand, they need Ubuntu to be different from Linux/Unix, because Unix isn't really built for normal people to find it usable. You can make it into something like that, but the more you do, the less Unixy it is. Also in doing so, you're going to end up violating Linux standards, and particularly where concerns the GUI. You may rely upon this generating ill will.
My opinion is that at some point, Ubuntu will be better served by describing itself as a Linux-compatible OS, rather than a Linux distribution per se. The Moblin/Meego/Sailfish fiasco seems to have resulted in precisely that animal, I'm afraid, and SteamOS never pretended to be anything different. Canonical needs to divorce Linux, but it needs to keep living in the same house for as long as possible.
P.S. On an unfortunate persona note I must add that you seem to be under the idea that you are in the group of users for which Linux is primarily intended to be useful, or that your use case is to some large degree compatible, and I regret to say that such is unlikely to be the case.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean to imply. It's wonderful that you can quote-mine to support an arbitrary point, but be so good as to include that point with the quotation.
At a guess to your intent, I'd suggest that If you'd read further than the lede, you might have encountered quotations from judges who considered that they had no right to stop the practice, and given the legal status of women at the time, I'm afraid that the matter is rather less certain than you seem to be implying, without even delving into the distinction between legality and failure to prosecute. Certainly it was illegal at one time, and illegal at another time, and in between? A semantic argument, firmly grounded in opinion. I presume we both showed up to this party to hear ourselves and score abstruse points on trivial details of the subject at hand -- opine away, if you would.
The smallest viruses are well within the storage capacity of a QR code, and an exploit could be a mere handful of bytes; what makes you think that they are somehow inherently secure?
As an example of how this institution has varied, consider that in the mid nineteenth century in England it was considered legal for a man to try to sell his wife.
At another sale in September 1815, at Staines market, "only three shillings and four pence were offered for the lot, no one choosing to contend with the bidder, for the fair object, whose merits could only be appreciated by those who knew them. This the purchaser could boast, from a long and intimate acquaintance."
Ye gods, what a way to describe someone! So you don't like your wife, you lead her to some public place in a halter, the halter being considered particularly important to the legality of the affair, and sell her at auction to any bidder. This was considered legal by many judges; women couldn't own property, and were owned themselves -- and some Englishmen even told themselves that this arrangement was out of some sort of protective benevolence. Anyway, it was held that a man could do what he wished with his property, at least until the practice began to be seen as vulgar, at which point the legal argument became, "Uh...hey! You can't do that!"
All it would take to revive the custom in America today would be if it made a good TV show.
As a web developer, I have no sympathy for anyone that tries for pixel perfection. Assuming that you handle all the idiosyncracies of the browsers and imperfections in the speciifcations correctly, you either get the choice of limiting yourself to whatever the oldest target browser provides, or backporting the features you want with javascript. From an artistic perspective, you can't control the viewport size or whether the client is using a browser that supports anything but raw html. The ultimate goal is therefore out of reach.
It's not entirely invalid to argue that artistic or technical perfection should be pursued without regard to whether it is attainable, but let's face it: your website may be many things, but the next La Gioconde it is not. It's probably not even Piet Mondrian, although hopefully it escapes being Jackson Pollock. It's okay that it doesn't look the same on everyone's screen.
In point of fact, you should expect it. Because, you know, it's entirely guaranteed to happen to some degree. Thus, responsive web design is usually a pretty good idea.
Also good: having a well-documented API. You know, for kids.
On the other hand, someone who can do complex, unit tested, well-structured application code, in PHP, Javascript, or any language, is worth substantially more than that, and doesn't have to fuck with elance.
Also, you can take your restrictive covenants and shove them. You wouldn't try to include that in a contract with Apple, or have much room to argue about it if they decided to compete with you anyway. Likewise, the majority of NDAs don't cover anything worth the time it takes to read about them (God forbid you have to sit through a presentation).
Thanks for using your own country's labor only when you really want to screw them. I'm touched; you shouldn't have.
No, he was completely accurate in his description. The seeds of WWI were sown in the calamitous defeat of the French in 1870 at Sedan, when Napoleon III was captured. Whoops, there goes that government.
Not that either the German nor the French governments had existed long at the time (and the French in particular had gone through quite a run of them) but though the Germans had won the strategic victory, there was no way they could effectively conquer the French. Their armies were tiny by comparison with WWI & WWII, and wars in that era were more about exchanging territorial control of commerce. In point of fact, they were just as often dominated by naval combat over ports of trade.
In any case, German forces took the territories of Alsace and Lorraine from France, which had been the largest, most populous and powerful country in Europe between, say, CE 800 and CE 1815. It wasn't the sort of thing that countries usually let slide, and France certainly was not going to forget it. The seeds of the next war were founded in the armistice of 1870, and likewise with the armistice of 1918.
The military buildup that preceded both was a tolerably open secret. You can't hide the construction of e.g. large battleships, especially when said battleships are limited in number by treaty. The propaganda machine needed to fire up the populace for war takes some time to effect, as well. Hitler was astoundingly effective at leading the German people to war, but that he was doing so certainly escaped no one's attention.
And, most pertinent to the subject, WWI is essentially a very finely detailed refutation by counterexample of your statement that no one wants war. There's a little room for waffling about the Kaiser's inner feelings, but not with his actions, and the Allies reasons have been mentioned. The situation is best described by Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, which provides a good background to the opening of that conflict, but omits information concerning the histories of the French and German states in the seven or eight decades prior which would give Sedan more context.
Bitcoins as Money (and Gold as Not) keywords: gold, silver, petrodollar, bitcoin, us government, dollar, cryptocurrency
Objecively, gold and silver are commodities. Some cultures have a system of coinage involving these metals. Gold with sufficient proofs to its purity might be exchanged at something equivalent to its spot price on the open exchange, perhaps if you were a pirate? I'm sure it happens, but trading e.g. krugerrands must surely be easier.
Gold and silver are commodities. Money, in the context of this discussion, has a formal definition. I will for expediency quote wikipedia:
The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, occasionally in the past, a standard of deferred payment.
Something that changes value all the time can be used as money, but it generally makes transactions difficult, so it's not a good idea. Another terrible idea is basing a national currency on the trade of a commodity that said nation does not control. The US has been doing pretty good on the petrodollar, but gold and silver were a pretty stupid idea, sorry.
Bitcoin is fairly interesting in being an international currency, albeit one that is struggling to escape the influence of the US Dollar. It's not quite safe to say that it fails to qualify as money at this point, but it has some interesting feedback loops built in which may allow it to actually bootstrap itself. I think that in the long run they are more likely to end up promoting the idea of cryptocurrencies than to actually succeed as one; the advantage gained by the first miners is at this point a market flaw. However, barring that or some mathematical attack, it may be in use for some time, as other cryptocurrencies gain mindshare.
Now, at what price in Bitcoins may I purchase a smarter AC?
Quantum physics is indeed absurd, but do read up on the observer effect; there's very little fundamental difference between observing a quantum phenomenon and interacting with it. 'Infinite are the arguments of sages'*, but for the purposes of the layman, not only is an observer a requirement of quantum physics, but before you observe things, they are not just in one state or the other (but unknown to you), they are in a state of superposition, i.e. simultaneously occupying both states. This superposition is as real as any other phenomenon in the universe. "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it." Another relevant Bohr quote: "Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems."
To me the thought that, by observing distant stars or the CMBR, I am interacting with the deeps of time, is pretty cool.
Morals have strong effects on survival and survivability for groups and individuals, and thus far H. sapiens is a social animal. At the very least, society is necessary for child bearing and rearing. More to the point, thus far we as societies have no problems killing members of our own who consider themselves above the common morality.
I mean, sure, as far as your own mind is concerned, morality is no more or less mutable than any other phenomenon. Let's not confuse that as being relevant to the topic of morality as a structural part of human culture.
Frankly I think the point is beyond debate; you are subject to, and you obey the moral whims of those around you. Your delusions of rationality and free will are irrelevant even within your own life, and have no effect whatsoever on the people around you. You should be glad they're only delusions, too, for if you really believed that strongly in your individualism, this must surely be the purest living hell.
His profile doesn't seem to have Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon listed as major contributors, so I'd guess this man is honestly trying to do something for his constituents. It's also worth noting that he is doing this in spite of Verizon being a major source of funding. Also related and notable, he is retiring at the end of the current Congress -- he came out in favor of gay marriage this year too, and in West Virginia that probably means something. I get the impression he's trying to leave a good legacy, and it's nice to see that.
Look at the life expectancy? I go there often; my sister lives there. I'm living in Anchorage at the moment. Yeah, maybe it doesn't factor into the life expectancy, and maybe there are other masking factors, like people not wanting to live there for very long because it's cold as hell and has terrible air pollution. Maybe there are other factors short of outright killing people which might provide sufficient reason to regulate these particular pollutants.
That there are other pollutants, by the way, is a red herring and completely irrelevant.
Tell you what. Why don't you take five minutes to get over whatever knee-jerk hatefest the church of the free market is trying to shovel your way, and maybe we can agree that, "Gosh! It's really terrible how bad the air can get in places like Fairbanks! Maybe we should work out some way to fix the air quality there!"
I can't tell you what idiots you all look like arguing about this.
The French won the War of American Independence, which is really better looked at as an important but not decisive campaign in a proxy war. Some historians have used the phrase "Second Hundred Years War". The French supplied many tens of thousands of rifles, an army nearly the size of the American one, most of the cannon and gunpowder, especially in the early stages of the war, and all of the naval power. Twenty French ships of the line were involved in the Battle of the Chesapeake, which led directly to the colonial's victory. Also, the French spent over a billion livres on the war, out of a total debt of about three billion livres.
Americans get taught a fucked-up version of history; the reason why is left as an exercise to the reader. Regardless, the reason the Americans won that war had less to do with any particular virtue of the Americans, nor yet any failure of the British. When the country which has been the largest and most powerful in Europe for centuries, coming off its all-time peak (Louis XIV), decides to get seriously involved in one side of a revolution in order to hurt its rival, they tend to win. Panama has just as big a reason to celebrate its revolutionaries.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if you do "own" the property, that does not constitute an unlimited right to do with it as you wish. It is not hereditary property, nor is it held by sovereign right. Your interest in the property is defined wholly by financial terms -- cash on the barrel-head. If someone else wants to spend more money to acquire that same property, so be it.
I don't wish to entirely repeat myself, but I found a metaphor that I feel particularly apt: this influx of wealth is like a rising tide. One may protest this (as demonstrated by Canute), but the flow of dollars, as with the tide, will not be swayed by argument, vandalism, nor rioting. To my mind, a far more productive use of time would be to recall that 'a rising tide lifts all boats', and apply oneself to learning programming. I did. Programming (albeit in its meanest form) is being taught to schoolchildren. Failing that, find a good excuse to separate these techies from their money -- real estate can't be their only interest. Failing that, "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche": this is how markets work. I would be receptive to the idea that markets are not an appropriate solution for allocating housing, but no one seems to be making that argument, and frankly it's going to be a hard sell to the rest of the world.
The idiots in question seem to be these protesters, who like Canute rail against the rising tide, and as effectively. We may recall the adage concerning the lifting abilities of the rising tide, and I might stretch the metaphor to suggest that these gentlemen take up boat-building. Programming to some mean degree is accessible even to schoolchildren; I myself have in these recent years taken up the profession.
I may guess at the purpose of your tautology about one's home, and surmise that you are implying that one has a right to continued occupation of one's primary residence. That this is not so is a well established principle of law, and also a natural consequence. As I have explained, no man has a greater natural right to a piece of this Earth than any other man. We come into this world without property, and any property gained before our deaths is merely the chance of fate. However, as far as the law governing that span is concerned, we mark a difference between property held in fee simple, and lands held by hereditary title or sovereign right. If you purchase property, then it should be abundantly obvious that any man may acquire it by the same means. It is wholly a matter of finance; no natural right enters into it.
I have sympathy towards those ousted from their homes, although I neither have a permanent residence nor should I choose to do so in the Bay Area. Yet my sympathies stop well short of supporting rioting in the streets, and in this case it's absurdly indefensible; it's not as if there are not already rent controls. If this absurd rabble cannot help itself I continue to ask what they imagine may be done to stem this tide.
My opinion used to be highly colored by a vocal medical doctor, who held that the title should only properly be applied to doctors medicinae. He reasoned that in dire accidents, the cry, "Is there a doctor in the house?" might only be answered by an M.D., and consequently those engaged in less vital studies were undeserving of the title.
My respect for the memory this physician is boundless; the world will not see his like again. However, in this matter he was entirely wrong: that all medical professionals have Ph. Ds is a relatively recent phenomenon. The word itself means, "I teach," and properly represents the highest degree of academic accomplishment. It does not confer such status, but recognizes it, and the idea that honorary recognition is somehow of less value is patent nonsense.
Dr. Richard Stallman has contributed greatly to the field of computer science. It is in the nature of computer code that, while itself unchanging, its utility declines with time. His code contributions often stand in exception to that rule, for which he deserves considerable respect. However, his greatest accomplishments have been (ironically) social: whatever you may think of the man, he occupies a fixed point in morality, and the entire world been shaped by it. He has done more to earn the title than most who claim it.
In point of fact, he has received this recognition of his contributions no less than fourteen times. Give the man his due.
Thank you for posting. I know that, while you are a GOOG employee, you're not any variation on Community Outreach, and posting here presumably represents your own personal time. I have been following the development of these technologies but not closely enough to have any appreciation of the issues the GP AC raised, and you have been wonderfully informative. Not that your normal standard is at all bad; you're often a source of fair commentary, and very good at both disclosing and setting aside your biases.
I spent my mod points elsewhere today: you'll have to settle for my paltry accolades. Nevertheless, your efforts are quite appreciated.
Why? What right do you have to keep living there? No human has any more natural interest in any parcel of land than any other. Perhaps you are confused as to what exactly your interest in your home is, because if that is not an arrangement subject primarily to the laws of commercial supply and demand, I would be surprised to hear of it.
No one cares that you are harmed by gentrification any more than any one cares about the loss of buggy whip manufacturers' incomes. Sometimes change is destructive, and becoming angry and destructive in turn is very easy. That does not mean that doing so will be effective, and in this case, it is highly unlikely that vandalism will have any effect whatsoever on the cause of the issue. Turn back the clock, if you can. Use whatever political demagoguery you may, to tax those you dislike and subsidize your friends, but let's not paint the breaking of a god-damned window as a productive activity. I think your cause is hopeless and deluded, even as supportive of social justice as I am, but if you are to realize any aims, you must first rise above "sound and fury".
What a vacuous truth! All societies inculcate their values to the next generation. The only ones who take issue with this are deluded individualists. I would strongly encourage any one who so believes to break from the herd, to live as an island of selfdom -- to have the courage of their convictions.
The individual person is as much a meaningless abstraction as a single atom. I rest serene in the confidence that, in the absurdly chance that there is a true individualist, they will have no effect on humanity.
IMO, the best pre-iPod mp3 player was the Rio Karma. It had FLAC and Ogg support, came with a half-decent set of songs on it, gapless playback, cross-fade, and you could create playlists on the device itself. Apparently you can still buy them here and there. I'd forgotten the (included) base station had ethernet, usb 2.0, and stereo RCA out.
The one major downside was that the scroll wheel was flimsy. Still, the iPod was in many senses a step backwards for the industry.
I need to brew enough coffee to fill an Olympic-length pool. I was planning on inviting the Paris metro area over for a cuppa, if you must know. I know that I'll need about 105 metric tons of coffee (~$200k) for this adventure, but the coffee pot I have is a bit undersized for the task. Any idea how one would go about generating that much java?
Say! I'll need somewhere to keep it, too! It may take quite some time to serve coffee to that many Frenchmen. I am sure there would be time for high society to snub the endeavor and for a mob of cafe owners to lynch me before I was halfway through, but in the hypothetical meanwhile I'd certainly want some way to keep the coffee hot. I understand that there are active heating methods both ancient and novel, but I'd like to keep my operating costs down. What kind of container could I put it in? What is the longest amount of time I'm likely to be able to serve hot coffee to Frenchmen?
Yours,
Man with 1.057 x 10^7 Coffee Cups
Look, maybe you can find some nuance to where a branch of the military running an intelligence operation against the People it is sworn to protect and defend, does not qualify as treason. Rest assured the NSA is equally concerned with the subject, so you may want to let them know if you have some discovery there.
I happen to call that treason, and the documents of whatever nation in question are not particularly relevant to my definition. It is purest folly to have military specialists employed against their own society, in whatever form. The persons responsible for this program deserve to hang as traitors, and Justice will not be served by any lesser charge. May God have mercy on their souls.
Why are foreign adversaries a justification for domestic policy? We outspend the world's militaries, what exactly should we be afraid of?
The American people are not and should not be the legitimate target for the State intelligence apparatus. If you have done something against the interests of the State, it would be a matter for our police. If you have not done something against the interests of the State, if you are merely thinking about doing that, or even taking steps towards doing so, you have not yet in actual fact committed that crime. The choice is fundamentally whether to permit people to commit crime, or to treat everyone as if they were a criminal. We can't guarantee that we can catch criminals after the fact, and it's hardly possible to keep people from committing criminal acts in jail, let alone in the greater society. This suggests that a police state is not a good value proposition: trying to stop people before they commit crimes is flawed, in principle and in practice.
But we are not speaking of common crimes, we are speaking of crimes against the State, and correspondingly the bodies we have endowed with the right to pursue those who have committed such malefactions. The NSA has become not only the foremost intelligence body of the US Military, but as such it is undeniably the most effective intelligence body that the world has ever seen. It is wrong for the police to pursue men who have not committed criminal acts, but it is far more wrong to be treated as an enemy of the State, and investigated as such, without an inarguably just cause, or existential necessity. Not only does this rule out mass surveillence entirely, but it is difficult to describe how few external existential threats these United States face. So far the internal police appear to be adequate to the task of containing whatever terrorist uprising we may be in danger of.
The parent poster is not being facetious. The American People, and our Allies, are being targetted by the Signals Intelligence branch of the United States Government. There are quite excellent reasons this is forbidden, which have nothing in particular to do with our laws, and a plenitude of historical examples which bear this point out. Mass surveillance of the American public is nothing less than enormitous treason.
So sign in.
The D1 discussion system still works the same way. You don't have to worry about posting to undo moderation (although forgetting to moderate is more of a risk). On the possibly-negative side, you will tend to use a lot of tabs to see threads below your threshold. I recommend a tree view tab organizer, which has the additional benefit of being a far more sensible way to browse online source code.
It is a few mouse clicks and a registration form away. For interested account holders, from your Account menu, select Discussions, and then 'Classic Discussion System (D1)'. Choosing not to sign in is an option, but I would tend to expect that the interface provided to the unauthenticated masses would be geared towards, well, mass appeal. The interface you're after still exists and is just as useful as it ever was -- I hope signing in isn't too much of a bother. I haven't noticed any UI changes.
Depending on what exactly you define as an OS, you can either look at Puppy or Damn Small Linux, both of which are (more or less) full desktop OSes, and which have far lower system requirements than any recent versions of Windows.
Stretching the definition of terms a little, there are a half-dozen linux distributions meant to fit on floppy disks. It's extremely common to use Linux in low-spec or embedded devices like routers. The lowest system requirements are on the order of one megabyte of RAM, and the same for persistent storage, and whatever CPU fits within your power envelope at that point. Linux is fairly competitive as an embedded OS, and used on billions of low-spec devices. Windows and OSX are not competitive in the embedded space.
Measuring application performance over a broad range of hardware and OSes is impossible, even if you limit yourself to a single application, due to binary incompatibilities. So with the important caveat that a evaluation of application performance between OSes is likely to be meaningless, we may feel safe in saying that as far as the OS functions are concerned, and all other things being held equal, Linux will use less system resources than Windows/OSX.
Please remedy your incredible ignorance, and refrain from invective, and if you can't do either, please stop polluting this forum with your drivel.
On the more general topic at hand, I concur with rubycodez on the subject of web applications, specifically to note that the comparison (while ill-defined) between web applications and desktop applications of similar functionality, should consider that HTTP is inherently stateless. Your C++ application is going to be best suited to a single user environment, and probably the curves of 'system resources required per number of users n' would intersect at a very low n. Lastly we observe that the exact amount of time required to execute a set of instructions rarely matters, and the choice of programming language is unlikely to be a first-order effect.
The difference between the power user and the programmer is that for the latter the entire graphical system of the computer can be considered to some degree optional. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of the perspective of the "gnu/linux power users"; the concerns are not aesthetic. The principle that graphics are optional is not a secondary function of Unix either, but a core tenet. To whatever degree that the goals of the graphical user interface and the textual interface conflict, the TUI will pretty much always win, in Linux.
These Unix principles are as much as anything else agreements between developers, that computer systems should be designed along certain lines. Compliance with any standard is more or less optional, and compliance with open source licenses, while not optional in the strictest legal sense, are as often 'honored in the breach as the observance'. It can be hard to detect when a license has been violated; refer also to the issue of public code lacking an explicit license. Generally though, if you agree to play nice with others, they will let you use their code without any financial consideration whatsoever. Linux is merely one example of the fruits of these agreements.
Bear with me here: because of the inability to simultaneously optimize for both TUI and GUI, making Unix palatable to the masses involves in some fundamental ways making it not Unix. Apple has been very successful with this strategy -- would you imagine that iPods and iTunes don't even have their own scripting language? -- and Canonical has been only a moderate success. The difference between the two is that no one would ever think to interact with an Apple machine exclusively by way of the command line.
On the one hand, Canonical needs Linux to serve as the basis for Ubuntu. On the other hand, they need Ubuntu to be different from Linux/Unix, because Unix isn't really built for normal people to find it usable. You can make it into something like that, but the more you do, the less Unixy it is. Also in doing so, you're going to end up violating Linux standards, and particularly where concerns the GUI. You may rely upon this generating ill will.
My opinion is that at some point, Ubuntu will be better served by describing itself as a Linux-compatible OS, rather than a Linux distribution per se. The Moblin/Meego/Sailfish fiasco seems to have resulted in precisely that animal, I'm afraid, and SteamOS never pretended to be anything different. Canonical needs to divorce Linux, but it needs to keep living in the same house for as long as possible.
P.S.
On an unfortunate persona note I must add that you seem to be under the idea that you are in the group of users for which Linux is primarily intended to be useful, or that your use case is to some large degree compatible, and I regret to say that such is unlikely to be the case.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean to imply. It's wonderful that you can quote-mine to support an arbitrary point, but be so good as to include that point with the quotation.
At a guess to your intent, I'd suggest that If you'd read further than the lede, you might have encountered quotations from judges who considered that they had no right to stop the practice, and given the legal status of women at the time, I'm afraid that the matter is rather less certain than you seem to be implying, without even delving into the distinction between legality and failure to prosecute. Certainly it was illegal at one time, and illegal at another time, and in between? A semantic argument, firmly grounded in opinion. I presume we both showed up to this party to hear ourselves and score abstruse points on trivial details of the subject at hand -- opine away, if you would.
The smallest viruses are well within the storage capacity of a QR code, and an exploit could be a mere handful of bytes; what makes you think that they are somehow inherently secure?
As an example of how this institution has varied, consider that in the mid nineteenth century in England it was considered legal for a man to try to sell his wife.
At another sale in September 1815, at Staines market, "only three shillings and four pence were offered for the lot, no one choosing to contend with the bidder, for the fair object, whose merits could only be appreciated by those who knew them. This the purchaser could boast, from a long and intimate acquaintance."
Ye gods, what a way to describe someone! So you don't like your wife, you lead her to some public place in a halter, the halter being considered particularly important to the legality of the affair, and sell her at auction to any bidder. This was considered legal by many judges; women couldn't own property, and were owned themselves -- and some Englishmen even told themselves that this arrangement was out of some sort of protective benevolence. Anyway, it was held that a man could do what he wished with his property, at least until the practice began to be seen as vulgar, at which point the legal argument became, "Uh...hey! You can't do that!"
All it would take to revive the custom in America today would be if it made a good TV show.
Quite rightly said.
As a web developer, I have no sympathy for anyone that tries for pixel perfection. Assuming that you handle all the idiosyncracies of the browsers and imperfections in the speciifcations correctly, you either get the choice of limiting yourself to whatever the oldest target browser provides, or backporting the features you want with javascript. From an artistic perspective, you can't control the viewport size or whether the client is using a browser that supports anything but raw html. The ultimate goal is therefore out of reach.
It's not entirely invalid to argue that artistic or technical perfection should be pursued without regard to whether it is attainable, but let's face it: your website may be many things, but the next La Gioconde it is not. It's probably not even Piet Mondrian, although hopefully it escapes being Jackson Pollock. It's okay that it doesn't look the same on everyone's screen.
In point of fact, you should expect it. Because, you know, it's entirely guaranteed to happen to some degree. Thus, responsive web design is usually a pretty good idea.
Also good: having a well-documented API. You know, for kids.
On the other hand, someone who can do complex, unit tested, well-structured application code, in PHP, Javascript, or any language, is worth substantially more than that, and doesn't have to fuck with elance.
Also, you can take your restrictive covenants and shove them. You wouldn't try to include that in a contract with Apple, or have much room to argue about it if they decided to compete with you anyway. Likewise, the majority of NDAs don't cover anything worth the time it takes to read about them (God forbid you have to sit through a presentation).
Thanks for using your own country's labor only when you really want to screw them. I'm touched; you shouldn't have.
No, he was completely accurate in his description. The seeds of WWI were sown in the calamitous defeat of the French in 1870 at Sedan, when Napoleon III was captured. Whoops, there goes that government.
Not that either the German nor the French governments had existed long at the time (and the French in particular had gone through quite a run of them) but though the Germans had won the strategic victory, there was no way they could effectively conquer the French. Their armies were tiny by comparison with WWI & WWII, and wars in that era were more about exchanging territorial control of commerce. In point of fact, they were just as often dominated by naval combat over ports of trade.
In any case, German forces took the territories of Alsace and Lorraine from France, which had been the largest, most populous and powerful country in Europe between, say, CE 800 and CE 1815. It wasn't the sort of thing that countries usually let slide, and France certainly was not going to forget it. The seeds of the next war were founded in the armistice of 1870, and likewise with the armistice of 1918.
The military buildup that preceded both was a tolerably open secret. You can't hide the construction of e.g. large battleships, especially when said battleships are limited in number by treaty. The propaganda machine needed to fire up the populace for war takes some time to effect, as well. Hitler was astoundingly effective at leading the German people to war, but that he was doing so certainly escaped no one's attention.
And, most pertinent to the subject, WWI is essentially a very finely detailed refutation by counterexample of your statement that no one wants war. There's a little room for waffling about the Kaiser's inner feelings, but not with his actions, and the Allies reasons have been mentioned. The situation is best described by Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, which provides a good background to the opening of that conflict, but omits information concerning the histories of the French and German states in the seven or eight decades prior which would give Sedan more context.
Bitcoins as Money
(and Gold as Not)
keywords: gold, silver, petrodollar, bitcoin, us government, dollar, cryptocurrency
Objecively, gold and silver are commodities. Some cultures have a system of coinage involving these metals. Gold with sufficient proofs to its purity might be exchanged at something equivalent to its spot price on the open exchange, perhaps if you were a pirate? I'm sure it happens, but trading e.g. krugerrands must surely be easier.
Gold and silver are commodities. Money, in the context of this discussion, has a formal definition. I will for expediency quote wikipedia:
The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, occasionally in the past, a standard of deferred payment.
Something that changes value all the time can be used as money, but it generally makes transactions difficult, so it's not a good idea. Another terrible idea is basing a national currency on the trade of a commodity that said nation does not control. The US has been doing pretty good on the petrodollar, but gold and silver were a pretty stupid idea, sorry.
Bitcoin is fairly interesting in being an international currency, albeit one that is struggling to escape the influence of the US Dollar. It's not quite safe to say that it fails to qualify as money at this point, but it has some interesting feedback loops built in which may allow it to actually bootstrap itself. I think that in the long run they are more likely to end up promoting the idea of cryptocurrencies than to actually succeed as one; the advantage gained by the first miners is at this point a market flaw. However, barring that or some mathematical attack, it may be in use for some time, as other cryptocurrencies gain mindshare.
Now, at what price in Bitcoins may I purchase a smarter AC?
Quantum physics is indeed absurd, but do read up on the observer effect; there's very little fundamental difference between observing a quantum phenomenon and interacting with it. 'Infinite are the arguments of sages'*, but for the purposes of the layman, not only is an observer a requirement of quantum physics, but before you observe things, they are not just in one state or the other (but unknown to you), they are in a state of superposition, i.e. simultaneously occupying both states. This superposition is as real as any other phenomenon in the universe. "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it." Another relevant Bohr quote: "Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems."
To me the thought that, by observing distant stars or the CMBR, I am interacting with the deeps of time, is pretty cool.
*Apologies to UKL
Morals have strong effects on survival and survivability for groups and individuals, and thus far H. sapiens is a social animal. At the very least, society is necessary for child bearing and rearing. More to the point, thus far we as societies have no problems killing members of our own who consider themselves above the common morality.
I mean, sure, as far as your own mind is concerned, morality is no more or less mutable than any other phenomenon. Let's not confuse that as being relevant to the topic of morality as a structural part of human culture.
Frankly I think the point is beyond debate; you are subject to, and you obey the moral whims of those around you. Your delusions of rationality and free will are irrelevant even within your own life, and have no effect whatsoever on the people around you. You should be glad they're only delusions, too, for if you really believed that strongly in your individualism, this must surely be the purest living hell.
His profile doesn't seem to have Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon listed as major contributors, so I'd guess this man is honestly trying to do something for his constituents. It's also worth noting that he is doing this in spite of Verizon being a major source of funding. Also related and notable, he is retiring at the end of the current Congress -- he came out in favor of gay marriage this year too, and in West Virginia that probably means something. I get the impression he's trying to leave a good legacy, and it's nice to see that.
Look at the life expectancy? I go there often; my sister lives there. I'm living in Anchorage at the moment. Yeah, maybe it doesn't factor into the life expectancy, and maybe there are other masking factors, like people not wanting to live there for very long because it's cold as hell and has terrible air pollution. Maybe there are other factors short of outright killing people which might provide sufficient reason to regulate these particular pollutants.
That there are other pollutants, by the way, is a red herring and completely irrelevant.
Tell you what. Why don't you take five minutes to get over whatever knee-jerk hatefest the church of the free market is trying to shovel your way, and maybe we can agree that, "Gosh! It's really terrible how bad the air can get in places like Fairbanks! Maybe we should work out some way to fix the air quality there!"
I can't tell you what idiots you all look like arguing about this.
The French won the War of American Independence, which is really better looked at as an important but not decisive campaign in a proxy war. Some historians have used the phrase "Second Hundred Years War". The French supplied many tens of thousands of rifles, an army nearly the size of the American one, most of the cannon and gunpowder, especially in the early stages of the war, and all of the naval power. Twenty French ships of the line were involved in the Battle of the Chesapeake, which led directly to the colonial's victory. Also, the French spent over a billion livres on the war, out of a total debt of about three billion livres.
Americans get taught a fucked-up version of history; the reason why is left as an exercise to the reader. Regardless, the reason the Americans won that war had less to do with any particular virtue of the Americans, nor yet any failure of the British. When the country which has been the largest and most powerful in Europe for centuries, coming off its all-time peak (Louis XIV), decides to get seriously involved in one side of a revolution in order to hurt its rival, they tend to win. Panama has just as big a reason to celebrate its revolutionaries.