XML isn't for building gigabyte databases (regardless of whether some people try to use it for that).
But the world is about throwing loads and loads of data around. The problem with XML is that it works great individually, but breaks down to pieces when it has to cooperate with different data-formats. A simple binary format will do fine 99% of the time. It also leaves room open for subtle optimalizations in the way the data is send. In my view, XML only increases development time and decreases CPU utilization, memory utilization, network utilization and programmer utilization. It is a well trodden path right now:
1. Have no clue on how to solve simple world problems 2. Think of another format to describe the world/data/datadefinition/religion 3.... 4. Profit!
(btw, somewhere in 3 you'll see that the state of the world goes back to state 1, but now with even faster/leaner/meaner machines)
Your statement is true when all the parties which participate in the democratic process are in possession of all the facts. The simple fact that 'possesion of facts' is greatly influenced by the media makes this institution one of the foundations of our democratic process. Once you are not an all-knowing individual, trust plays a very important role. Or should I not put it this bluntly?
"I agree that the first dozen or so pages of OT comments demonstrates either a failure in the mod system or a failure in the political system."
I'm afraid it is the latter, which implies the former (as both our political systems are based on votes, which is also demonstrated by the Slashdot moderation system).
No one commented on the story because it is too filthy to be true. But, Maryland gave away alot of power in order to show this scandal and help humanity a little. Because your last line: 'you can't stop human fraud via a machine' isn't true (and in my oppinion VERY unpatriotic). You CAN stop human fraud, with or without machines. This is the basis of a little fragement of that which still makes us human: trust and love, something you might want to look for.
Even if we won't prevail in the end, even if all hope seems lost, we at least can say to ourselfs: 'I tried!'. If this all might sound a little Christian in your ears, it is. And it is Muslim and Budhism, humanism and all of the other religions and philosophies in the world. Because the only thing you can possibly hope for is to have a little trust and love in other people.
For Christ sake, don't you see? Don't you see the terror and horror in all of this? Isn't it the distrust in the goverment or those who rule you, that made them suspisious in the first place? Isn't it your idea of 'right' that has been changed because of distrust?
Yes, there are alot of pricegrabbers our there: they might all fool on us, spy on us, make us feel angry or anxious. But they cannot take one important human trait away, and that is trust and love. Use your mind not to destroy, but use it to create.
The problem is your question: how long do WE have to wait? That's the common attitude of almost all European citizens. We see our rights being taken away one by one, but we don't realize that there is no England, France, Netherlands or bordered country anymore. Our voices are not represented anymore by the government and since all basic welfare goods are in the hands of large corporations they have the power to decide or not decide about our lives. The more power large multinationals will have, the less influence our votes will have on our daily lives.
It IS time for action, you see our communities becoming more and more upset, the universities tensing for a big moment to come. A change of century seldom goes without a change of thought, remember that.
From silence comes wisdom, as one first needs to be silent in order to be able to listen.
Words are mere fragments of our interaction and bad mirrors of our imagination. The more careful you are with them, the more powerful the interaction becomes and the more lively the imagination.
Here exactly lies the problem: you either do, or you don't. Trying is not good enough. I've used PHP4/5 several times in the past and I was continually baffled by the way PHP (mis)handles OOP (like constructor overloading or reflection). It is as if the developers of PHP said at one point: 'hey, lets add OOP since that is a really good programming paradigma', but forgot that the language at first was conceived (not designed) to be iterative.
This not only shows in the sloppy work that has been done on creating a working syntax and context checker, but it also shows in the library. As far as I can see it is partially OO and partially procedural, its flat, it doesn't really create any abstractions. Besides that, I feel that a weakly typed language and OO structures do not go well hand in hand.
I think more and more people are starting to think outside the box
Thats an interesting point you make. The question remains, did the box get smaller, or did people get wider views? As much as I would like to embrace the second option, I do believe that mainstream newschannels are actually shrinking the box (people want to be informed, but are not judgemental on what to be informed about, so news-makers can just as well narrow it down to just the usual wired stories or even less).
Well, apparantly it only reformats the iPod when it detects that it is brand new. Why it reformats is actually beyond me, since it removes functionality and does not add anything in return. Not that I'm a fanatic of the VFAT filesystem though:)
Recently I bought a new iPod Nano. Being at a friends house, I first plugged it into his Mac, since I wanted to try it out as fast as possible. Something I could have better not done. As soon as iTunes on Mac detects a *new* iPod it instantly installs a HFS+ filesystem on it, replacing the VFAT filesystem. Even though the MacOS X iTunes has support for VFAT.
Thereafter I plugged my new iPod into my Windows machine, to no avail: Windows iTunes has no support for HFS+ (and trying it under Linux didn't work since 2.6.15 had no support for journalling on HFS+ yet (2.6.16 has)). Ok then, let's try to reformat the iPod to a VFAT filesystem. Strangely, the updater didn't detect my iPod at all.
After going through all the troubleshooting documents on the website, I wasn't any further than knowing every single reboot, restart, filesystem-mode and debug mode of my new iPod. Going through the forums, I read about many other users having the same problem as I had. Odd, why doesn't it show on the support pages? Then it hit me: all the users had no device initially assigned to the C: drive-letter. What would happen if I'd let Windows map C: to another device, and then plug in my iPod? Voila, it worked: my iPod was mapped to the K: drive and the iPod updater could detect my iPod and put another filesystem on the device. And as I was 4-5 hours further from the start of my adventure asking myself: why couldn't they have mentioned this on the Apple support pages? Almost all of the questions on the support forums had to do with this bug in the updater and some of these questions were more than a month old.
So, I decided to find the Apple support line and try to inform them of my simple hack to get the iPod to work and the analysis of the problem. After searching through the website for another hour, trying to find any customer support number or e-mail address, I finally called customer support. Explaining the above story, the tech guy was a bit boggled (probably since his call script didn't work on me, and I was the one explaining the story). Nevertheless, I was thanked for my effort.
Sadly, for me the iPod experience wasn't: 'it works right out of the box'. It took me hours and hours of scrouging through support documents, manuals and forums.
Well, it's not hard to see why it is beneficial to write things down. Studies have shown that matter is best remembered when it is processed in different ways: reading, hearing, writing and thinking about it are all activities which help the brain to remember.
But (and a big but): I do agree that just jotting everything down is not going to help at all. Writing is a precise art that requires much attention. Attention that is better spend at a classroom trying to figure out what a teacher tries to translate to its students. Nevertheless, there are undoubtetly parts of a lecture that are hard to grasp. Making (short) notes so as to not forget that these parts require extra attention or writing down terse questions is something that (imho) should be stimulated. Sometimes making a knowledge-tree during a classroom can also enhance the learning experience.
A simple usability study consist of a series of steps:
1. Make a list of tasks to be performed (this can be done with the subject if you would like an objective list). 2. Think about the range of problems that can occur during the performing of the task. Make a subtask for every possible system failure. 3. Confirm that your subject is in total control. 4. Tell your subject that he or she is not to be judged according to his/her skills, but that the program (or in this case, distribution) is being judged. Faults are not the subjects fault, but the fault of the programmers. 5. Perform every task that has been determined above. 6. During the performance, don't listen to the projected voice of the subject alone, but also look at facial expressions, movemends of body and mouse gestures. Write everything down you see. Don't make any conclusions at this point. 7. Do the same as you did above with at least 15 other subjects to come close at being objective (being objective requires a vastly larger set of subjects and a good process of choosing these at random). 8. Aggregate conclusions using the marks you made before. It is a good idea to have an idea what to test for before commencing so you can quantifice everything better.
Well, it all depends on the intelligence of the reader. Some books I've seen in the bookstore (something like 'Notepad for Dummies'), count multiple inches of book thickness but covering single nano-meters of body. Other books we've had here on the university do the opposite, trying to summerize multiple inches of content in 20-30 pages.
There is also always the option to 'refer to the manual' (or 'leave as an exercise for the reader'). Explaining vi to a noob will take time (and needs to feed the willingness of the learner to learn, it is not easy). The filesystem of Linux isn't so difficult at all, actually it is more comprehensible (everything is a file) than the MS paradigm (everything is a file, except directories and volumes).
Same goes for DB's. When in-depth info on normalization/XML serialization/optimalization/etc.etc. can be left out, SQL can be explained in 20 pages. It's only MySQL which does stuff strangely.
Nevertheless, I find it impressive they have managed to put so much info in 600 pages.
And all I'm saying is that you can make no such comparison since we live in another environment (plus they are explicitly talking about the amount of CO2 in the air).
I am talking about global warming, but I'm telling you that global temperature is not the only influencal parameter to effects which say 'point of no return'.
Global warming is only part of the issue. How difficult can it be? If you live in an area with avalanches, you probably will notice a relationship between snowfall and chances of an avalanche happening. But these are not the only causalities. For example, the amount of previously fallen snow, the amount of sunshine, etc. etc. all have an effect on the chance of an avalanche happening.
The same can be said with global warming: temperature is only part of the equation. However, there are many more causalities which I have noted in my previous post. Just like the weather service can compare with equal situations in the past, it cannot say that the future will be exactly the same as in the past. It can make your predictions stronger nevertheless.
Your comparison with Mars does not seem to be very realistic. Our climate has many different buffers to catch high differences in temperature. Mars does not have such a thing.
Sadly, it is not only about temperature. Temperature is part of the measurement, the 'output' so to say. This does not mean that the 'input' isn't completely different. For example, a higher rate of change in average gas levels and temperatures, lower amount of CO2 buffers and less sunlight reaching earth (read: O2 production, CO2 consumption) are just a small subset of the input parameters.
Unfortunately, I'm not an expert in this area, but it is more than logical to look at more than one factor alone.
Sure, when you and me are in a twin-seat airplane, we make a deal that I will take the only available parachute and you'll just accept that there is such a thing as survival of the fittest.
Hmmm, if I would be interested in the latest games, I would go to my selected gaming site. But this is far below the intended content of Slashdot imvho.
Re:How Israeli Companies Are Succeeding...
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Business Under Fire
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· Score: 1
Farther up in my post you will read:
I would really like to know from you: what danger did the US protect us from the past, uhm, 60 years?
I thought that would more or less cover it. Besides, the US was not alone in the liberation: alongside your troops, British, Australian and Russian soldiers fought the same battle. Your liberation would probably had hit a very hard wall were it not for underground activists (natives) in the occupied countries.
Re:How Israeli Companies Are Succeeding...
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Business Under Fire
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't often comment on the rating for certain posts on this site, but I really cannot understand how this could be rated +4 informative.
First of all: have you ever considered how much you actually pay for people who are unemployed? You think the lack of a social safety net will lower your taxes. But those who are unemployed are not going around doing nothing. It attracts crime, non-educated jobs, etc. etc. You've just paid money for an education for these people, but when they get unemployed that money is let to waste!
Then talk about defense. I would really like to know from you: what danger did the US protect us from the past, uhm, 60 years? Communism? Look carefully my friend. It wasn't the US which stopped it by it's useless war in Vietnam. It was the people of the 'communism' states which did that. Terrorism? As far as I can see, the arrogance of the US actually attracted terrorism. By fighting it you actually proved yourself in your own arrogance.
Your government has made you believe in a fear for terrorism (and communism 40 years ago). These fears were unfounded! Just like Hitler made the people believe to fear certain groups of the population. He used the same arguments: public safety, economic prosperity.
For as far as I can see, dear poster and dear citizen of the US: we here in Europe don't need and have never asked for your protection. Moreover, I think most people here do not believe in the means of protection you are giving.
One last example: as far as I can see, North-Korea seems to be a real threat: chance of manufacturing nuclear bombs, totalirian regime, supression of human-rights, etc. etc. Why are you not 'liberating' this country? Do you miss a certain economic drive in this war? Or do you want to project a 'democracy' in all the countries you're in any way interested in?
Please US citizens, open your eyes. Grab the hints we are giving you. Look at this slashdot page and see what posts are way rated up. Listen to your own fellows who are saying your democratic system is falling apart because of monopolistic and political misuse.
TODO list: remove ignorance, get educated in more than you've been educated in at highschool, learn to think and have an opinion for yourself. Throw TV out of window.
You have more choice, but do you also have more quality?You still can only watch one television show at a time. You can still only go to one new culture at a time.
Don't you think TV-shows or newspapers would have covered the war in Iraq, the tsunami in Indonesia or a murder in New York 50 years ago? They probably did a better job back then than they do nowadays.
I sure hope you're not serious about the hummer thing.
First of all: I'm going to play an advocate for the devil here. Not all my standpoints are entirely my own opinion. Nevertheless, I will hope I will introduce a bit of flux in the way most US citizens think of freedom in their country.
On the subject of mobility: sure, we have more options open to us. Go and see more places, meet more people, enjoy new cultures. Does it really bring you anything extra? Is this 'freedom of choice' adding anything to your value in life? The only good reason for improved transportation I can find is to form bigger and fewer population centres. Larger malls, more choice in the type of cereal, less choice in finding something really new.
On the subject of 'every US citizen does the same': how can you not oppose this? First you say you enjoy freedom of choice, then you go on that it is natural for every US citizen to wear the same clothes, watch the same TV programmes, etc. etc. You say that if people do not do same things in the same way, we're going back to segregation! Do you know what segregation is? I'm also wondering what exactly you mean with 'cultural values'. The culture of a country is actually ill-defined. Looking at this subject from another perspective: I think differentiation of choice and culture within communities is actually a good thing. It adds strength to a nation as a whole; when one community makes the wrong decisions, the decisions of many others cancel that.
Subject of family tradition and trade: I'm not saying everyone should make a different choice than his or her parents. On the other hand: how much money goes to education nowadays just because people want to do something 'different'? And how much freedom do you actually have to do with your life that what you want? Do you have any idea whatsoever how many people are not content with what they do? Do you have any idea how many people would switch jobs, choose another education, etc. etc. but can't because of family obligations?... skipping two questions...
How many of us will choose not to start worrying about tomorrow as soon as we complete every task and instead take time to enjoy all that life has to offer even for a brief period?
Not many... In our current commercial driven economy, stress is common to workers. You don't 'leave' stress at your work when you get home with your family. There are many who have no job and can only worry about where their next meal comes from.
You say we have made progress in the past decades. Maybe you mean we've made progress since the industrial revolution. But at what cost? Do you really have more freedom now than you had 50 years ago? Do you life in a culture where you can have your own opinions and stand for it in public? And last but not least: what is freedom REALLY?
Next thing: don't forget we're actually dependent on more than oxygen and water alone. We require tremendous amounts of amino-acids only found in higher-order plants. Even if we could synthesize it will require energy and order.
Second of all, on the matter of drinking water. Drinking water is actually not abundant. 99,9% of the water on our planet is salt water which need to be desaltized, which is a difficult and energy intensive process. As our population becomes larger, it is not strange when oil wouldn't be the dominant drive behind our economy, but water. When sea-levels rise, a huge number of natural lakes will become polluted. Modern agriculture is impossible without normal salt-free water. Because of the higher temperatures, desserts will extend to larger areas. The faster extremes will cause more landshifts which will polute even more water.
And on the subject of fear: I agree. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to the dark side to make another quote. When supplies of fresh drinking water, oil reserves and nutritious food because of bad harvests start to diminish, relations between countries will diminish too. With this difference that Einsteins formulas have not been forgotten.
Regarding steady state temperature: actually, the temperature does not 'gradually' increase. Actually, when a constant amount of heat is added to a certain object, this object will receive this heat, turn it into energy and into heat again. It is easy to make miscalculations here because of the experimental setup. For example: if the water is turbulent and there is a fixed position for measuring the temperature it could appear that the water temperature is gradually increasing (the first derivative is not constant but increasing from zero). Unfortunately, the first derivative is constant for the system as a whole. Therefore I regard your question on 'what would the temperature of the earth be if no humans were around' on a different plane: would the temperature be different given no influence from human activities. In that regard I should point you to numerous and numerous research papers (which I have no time to search for right now). All those papers point to a radical increase in the amount of carbon-dioxide in the past 150 years and also a noticeable increase in temperature over the past 50 years (measureable period). Given studies done on ice-samples, these changes are also radical compared with the past 1.5 million years of samples (given CO2 levels). We can thus conclude that at least human activity has an impact on CO2 levels in our atmosphere. Several other studies make believeable claims on the relation between CO2 levels and temperature.
Also, changes in nature are very likely to be attributed to a radical change in our climate: gletchers which increase in speed by an exponential rate, more damage done by nature disasters, changes in climate (for example: our climate in the Netherlands has become more mild during the past 30 years).
And again on fear: I am not afraid of nature, I'm afraid of ignorance of the population. Individualism has brought us the option to choose between a hamburger with and without onions, and it has given us the ignorance on subjects that do matter: democracy, nature, quality of life, freedom in the true sense (freedom to vote, freedom of privacy).
Ok, this has become a long rant as well, hope to continue this discussion!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it will rise, but that's not the problem. Where will we get our ice-cubes to chill our sodas in the summer, huh?
XML isn't for building gigabyte databases (regardless of whether some people try to use it for that).
...
But the world is about throwing loads and loads of data around. The problem with XML is that it works great individually, but breaks down to pieces when it has to cooperate with different data-formats. A simple binary format will do fine 99% of the time. It also leaves room open for subtle optimalizations in the way the data is send. In my view, XML only increases development time and decreases CPU utilization, memory utilization, network utilization and programmer utilization. It is a well trodden path right now:
1. Have no clue on how to solve simple world problems
2. Think of another format to describe the world/data/datadefinition/religion
3.
4. Profit!
(btw, somewhere in 3 you'll see that the state of the world goes back to state 1, but now with even faster/leaner/meaner machines)
Your statement is true when all the parties which participate in the democratic process are in possession of all the facts. The simple fact that 'possesion of facts' is greatly influenced by the media makes this institution one of the foundations of our democratic process. Once you are not an all-knowing individual, trust plays a very important role. Or should I not put it this bluntly?
"I agree that the first dozen or so pages of OT comments demonstrates either a failure in the mod system or a failure in the political system."
I'm afraid it is the latter, which implies the former (as both our political systems are based on votes, which is also demonstrated by the Slashdot moderation system).
No one commented on the story because it is too filthy to be true. But, Maryland gave away alot of power in order to show this scandal and help humanity a little. Because your last line: 'you can't stop human fraud via a machine' isn't true (and in my oppinion VERY unpatriotic). You CAN stop human fraud, with or without machines. This is the basis of a little fragement of that which still makes us human: trust and love, something you might want to look for.
Even if we won't prevail in the end, even if all hope seems lost, we at least can say to ourselfs: 'I tried!'. If this all might sound a little Christian in your ears, it is. And it is Muslim and Budhism, humanism and all of the other religions and philosophies in the world. Because the only thing you can possibly hope for is to have a little trust and love in other people.
For Christ sake, don't you see? Don't you see the terror and horror in all of this? Isn't it the distrust in the goverment or those who rule you, that made them suspisious in the first place? Isn't it your idea of 'right' that has been changed because of distrust?
Yes, there are alot of pricegrabbers our there: they might all fool on us, spy on us, make us feel angry or anxious. But they cannot take one important human trait away, and that is trust and love. Use your mind not to destroy, but use it to create.
The problem is your question: how long do WE have to wait? That's the common attitude of almost all European citizens. We see our rights being taken away one by one, but we don't realize that there is no England, France, Netherlands or bordered country anymore. Our voices are not represented anymore by the government and since all basic welfare goods are in the hands of large corporations they have the power to decide or not decide about our lives. The more power large multinationals will have, the less influence our votes will have on our daily lives.
It IS time for action, you see our communities becoming more and more upset, the universities tensing for a big moment to come. A change of century seldom goes without a change of thought, remember that.
From silence comes wisdom, as one first needs to be silent in order to be able to listen.
Words are mere fragments of our interaction and bad mirrors of our imagination. The more careful you are with them, the more powerful the interaction becomes and the more lively the imagination.
PHP at least tries. (to do OOP).
Here exactly lies the problem: you either do, or you don't. Trying is not good enough. I've used PHP4/5 several times in the past and I was continually baffled by the way PHP (mis)handles OOP (like constructor overloading or reflection). It is as if the developers of PHP said at one point: 'hey, lets add OOP since that is a really good programming paradigma', but forgot that the language at first was conceived (not designed) to be iterative.
This not only shows in the sloppy work that has been done on creating a working syntax and context checker, but it also shows in the library. As far as I can see it is partially OO and partially procedural, its flat, it doesn't really create any abstractions. Besides that, I feel that a weakly typed language and OO structures do not go well hand in hand.
What would keep other nations to equip their satelites with mirrors, pointing down to the earth?
I think more and more people are starting to think outside the box
Thats an interesting point you make. The question remains, did the box get smaller, or did people get wider views? As much as I would like to embrace the second option, I do believe that mainstream newschannels are actually shrinking the box (people want to be informed, but are not judgemental on what to be informed about, so news-makers can just as well narrow it down to just the usual wired stories or even less).
Well, apparantly it only reformats the iPod when it detects that it is brand new. Why it reformats is actually beyond me, since it removes functionality and does not add anything in return. Not that I'm a fanatic of the VFAT filesystem though :)
Recently I bought a new iPod Nano. Being at a friends house, I first plugged it into his Mac, since I wanted to try it out as fast as possible. Something I could have better not done. As soon as iTunes on Mac detects a *new* iPod it instantly installs a HFS+ filesystem on it, replacing the VFAT filesystem. Even though the MacOS X iTunes has support for VFAT.
Thereafter I plugged my new iPod into my Windows machine, to no avail: Windows iTunes has no support for HFS+ (and trying it under Linux didn't work since 2.6.15 had no support for journalling on HFS+ yet (2.6.16 has)). Ok then, let's try to reformat the iPod to a VFAT filesystem. Strangely, the updater didn't detect my iPod at all.
After going through all the troubleshooting documents on the website, I wasn't any further than knowing every single reboot, restart, filesystem-mode and debug mode of my new iPod. Going through the forums, I read about many other users having the same problem as I had. Odd, why doesn't it show on the support pages? Then it hit me: all the users had no device initially assigned to the C: drive-letter. What would happen if I'd let Windows map C: to another device, and then plug in my iPod? Voila, it worked: my iPod was mapped to the K: drive and the iPod updater could detect my iPod and put another filesystem on the device. And as I was 4-5 hours further from the start of my adventure asking myself: why couldn't they have mentioned this on the Apple support pages? Almost all of the questions on the support forums had to do with this bug in the updater and some of these questions were more than a month old.
So, I decided to find the Apple support line and try to inform them of my simple hack to get the iPod to work and the analysis of the problem. After searching through the website for another hour, trying to find any customer support number or e-mail address, I finally called customer support. Explaining the above story, the tech guy was a bit boggled (probably since his call script didn't work on me, and I was the one explaining the story). Nevertheless, I was thanked for my effort.
Sadly, for me the iPod experience wasn't: 'it works right out of the box'. It took me hours and hours of scrouging through support documents, manuals and forums.
Well, it's not hard to see why it is beneficial to write things down. Studies have shown that matter is best remembered when it is processed in different ways: reading, hearing, writing and thinking about it are all activities which help the brain to remember.
But (and a big but): I do agree that just jotting everything down is not going to help at all. Writing is a precise art that requires much attention. Attention that is better spend at a classroom trying to figure out what a teacher tries to translate to its students. Nevertheless, there are undoubtetly parts of a lecture that are hard to grasp. Making (short) notes so as to not forget that these parts require extra attention or writing down terse questions is something that (imho) should be stimulated. Sometimes making a knowledge-tree during a classroom can also enhance the learning experience.
A simple usability study consist of a series of steps:
1. Make a list of tasks to be performed (this can be done with the subject if you would like an objective list).
2. Think about the range of problems that can occur during the performing of the task. Make a subtask for every possible system failure.
3. Confirm that your subject is in total control.
4. Tell your subject that he or she is not to be judged according to his/her skills, but that the program (or in this case, distribution) is being judged. Faults are not the subjects fault, but the fault of the programmers.
5. Perform every task that has been determined above.
6. During the performance, don't listen to the projected voice of the subject alone, but also look at facial expressions, movemends of body and mouse gestures. Write everything down you see. Don't make any conclusions at this point.
7. Do the same as you did above with at least 15 other subjects to come close at being objective (being objective requires a vastly larger set of subjects and a good process of choosing these at random).
8. Aggregate conclusions using the marks you made before. It is a good idea to have an idea what to test for before commencing so you can quantifice everything better.
Success!
I wonder if employees of Apple used some simple techniques to boost TigerDirect's ranking on Google. Would be a simple and smart thing to do.
Well, it all depends on the intelligence of the reader. Some books I've seen in the bookstore (something like 'Notepad for Dummies'), count multiple inches of book thickness but covering single nano-meters of body. Other books we've had here on the university do the opposite, trying to summerize multiple inches of content in 20-30 pages.
There is also always the option to 'refer to the manual' (or 'leave as an exercise for the reader'). Explaining vi to a noob will take time (and needs to feed the willingness of the learner to learn, it is not easy). The filesystem of Linux isn't so difficult at all, actually it is more comprehensible (everything is a file) than the MS paradigm (everything is a file, except directories and volumes).
Same goes for DB's. When in-depth info on normalization/XML serialization/optimalization/etc.etc. can be left out, SQL can be explained in 20 pages. It's only MySQL which does stuff strangely.
Nevertheless, I find it impressive they have managed to put so much info in 600 pages.
And all I'm saying is that you can make no such comparison since we live in another environment (plus they are explicitly talking about the amount of CO2 in the air).
I am talking about global warming, but I'm telling you that global temperature is not the only influencal parameter to effects which say 'point of no return'.
Global warming is only part of the issue. How difficult can it be? If you live in an area with avalanches, you probably will notice a relationship between snowfall and chances of an avalanche happening. But these are not the only causalities. For example, the amount of previously fallen snow, the amount of sunshine, etc. etc. all have an effect on the chance of an avalanche happening.
The same can be said with global warming: temperature is only part of the equation. However, there are many more causalities which I have noted in my previous post. Just like the weather service can compare with equal situations in the past, it cannot say that the future will be exactly the same as in the past. It can make your predictions stronger nevertheless.
Your comparison with Mars does not seem to be very realistic. Our climate has many different buffers to catch high differences in temperature. Mars does not have such a thing.
Where did I made an anthropogenic hypothesis?
Sadly, it is not only about temperature. Temperature is part of the measurement, the 'output' so to say. This does not mean that the 'input' isn't completely different. For example, a higher rate of change in average gas levels and temperatures, lower amount of CO2 buffers and less sunlight reaching earth (read: O2 production, CO2 consumption) are just a small subset of the input parameters.
Unfortunately, I'm not an expert in this area, but it is more than logical to look at more than one factor alone.
Sure, when you and me are in a twin-seat airplane, we make a deal that I will take the only available parachute and you'll just accept that there is such a thing as survival of the fittest.
Hmmm, if I would be interested in the latest games, I would go to my selected gaming site. But this is far below the intended content of Slashdot imvho.
Farther up in my post you will read:
I would really like to know from you: what danger did the US protect us from the past, uhm, 60 years?
I thought that would more or less cover it. Besides, the US was not alone in the liberation: alongside your troops, British, Australian and Russian soldiers fought the same battle. Your liberation would probably had hit a very hard wall were it not for underground activists (natives) in the occupied countries.
I don't often comment on the rating for certain posts on this site, but I really cannot understand how this could be rated +4 informative.
First of all: have you ever considered how much you actually pay for people who are unemployed? You think the lack of a social safety net will lower your taxes. But those who are unemployed are not going around doing nothing. It attracts crime, non-educated jobs, etc. etc. You've just paid money for an education for these people, but when they get unemployed that money is let to waste!
Then talk about defense. I would really like to know from you: what danger did the US protect us from the past, uhm, 60 years? Communism? Look carefully my friend. It wasn't the US which stopped it by it's useless war in Vietnam. It was the people of the 'communism' states which did that. Terrorism? As far as I can see, the arrogance of the US actually attracted terrorism. By fighting it you actually proved yourself in your own arrogance.
Your government has made you believe in a fear for terrorism (and communism 40 years ago). These fears were unfounded! Just like Hitler made the people believe to fear certain groups of the population. He used the same arguments: public safety, economic prosperity.
For as far as I can see, dear poster and dear citizen of the US: we here in Europe don't need and have never asked for your protection. Moreover, I think most people here do not believe in the means of protection you are giving.
One last example: as far as I can see, North-Korea seems to be a real threat: chance of manufacturing nuclear bombs, totalirian regime, supression of human-rights, etc. etc. Why are you not 'liberating' this country? Do you miss a certain economic drive in this war? Or do you want to project a 'democracy' in all the countries you're in any way interested in?
Please US citizens, open your eyes. Grab the hints we are giving you. Look at this slashdot page and see what posts are way rated up. Listen to your own fellows who are saying your democratic system is falling apart because of monopolistic and political misuse.
TODO list: remove ignorance, get educated in more than you've been educated in at highschool, learn to think and have an opinion for yourself. Throw TV out of window.
You have more choice, but do you also have more quality?You still can only watch one television show at a time. You can still only go to one new culture at a time.
Don't you think TV-shows or newspapers would have covered the war in Iraq, the tsunami in Indonesia or a murder in New York 50 years ago? They probably did a better job back then than they do nowadays.
I sure hope you're not serious about the hummer thing.
First of all: I'm going to play an advocate for the devil here. Not all my standpoints are entirely my own opinion. Nevertheless, I will hope I will introduce a bit of flux in the way most US citizens think of freedom in their country.
... skipping two questions ...
On the subject of mobility: sure, we have more options open to us. Go and see more places, meet more people, enjoy new cultures. Does it really bring you anything extra? Is this 'freedom of choice' adding anything to your value in life? The only good reason for improved transportation I can find is to form bigger and fewer population centres. Larger malls, more choice in the type of cereal, less choice in finding something really new.
On the subject of 'every US citizen does the same': how can you not oppose this? First you say you enjoy freedom of choice, then you go on that it is natural for every US citizen to wear the same clothes, watch the same TV programmes, etc. etc. You say that if people do not do same things in the same way, we're going back to segregation! Do you know what segregation is? I'm also wondering what exactly you mean with 'cultural values'. The culture of a country is actually ill-defined. Looking at this subject from another perspective: I think differentiation of choice and culture within communities is actually a good thing. It adds strength to a nation as a whole; when one community makes the wrong decisions, the decisions of many others cancel that.
Subject of family tradition and trade: I'm not saying everyone should make a different choice than his or her parents. On the other hand: how much money goes to education nowadays just because people want to do something 'different'? And how much freedom do you actually have to do with your life that what you want? Do you have any idea whatsoever how many people are not content with what they do? Do you have any idea how many people would switch jobs, choose another education, etc. etc. but can't because of family obligations?
How many of us will choose not to start worrying about tomorrow as soon as we complete every task and instead take time to enjoy all that life has to offer even for a brief period?
Not many... In our current commercial driven economy, stress is common to workers. You don't 'leave' stress at your work when you get home with your family. There are many who have no job and can only worry about where their next meal comes from.
You say we have made progress in the past decades. Maybe you mean we've made progress since the industrial revolution. But at what cost? Do you really have more freedom now than you had 50 years ago? Do you life in a culture where you can have your own opinions and stand for it in public? And last but not least: what is freedom REALLY?
Hmm, first of all: paragraphs are useful!
Next thing: don't forget we're actually dependent on more than oxygen and water alone. We require tremendous amounts of amino-acids only found in higher-order plants. Even if we could synthesize it will require energy and order.
Second of all, on the matter of drinking water. Drinking water is actually not abundant. 99,9% of the water on our planet is salt water which need to be desaltized, which is a difficult and energy intensive process. As our population becomes larger, it is not strange when oil wouldn't be the dominant drive behind our economy, but water. When sea-levels rise, a huge number of natural lakes will become polluted. Modern agriculture is impossible without normal salt-free water. Because of the higher temperatures, desserts will extend to larger areas. The faster extremes will cause more landshifts which will polute even more water.
And on the subject of fear: I agree. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to the dark side to make another quote. When supplies of fresh drinking water, oil reserves and nutritious food because of bad harvests start to diminish, relations between countries will diminish too. With this difference that Einsteins formulas have not been forgotten.
Regarding steady state temperature: actually, the temperature does not 'gradually' increase. Actually, when a constant amount of heat is added to a certain object, this object will receive this heat, turn it into energy and into heat again. It is easy to make miscalculations here because of the experimental setup. For example: if the water is turbulent and there is a fixed position for measuring the temperature it could appear that the water temperature is gradually increasing (the first derivative is not constant but increasing from zero). Unfortunately, the first derivative is constant for the system as a whole. Therefore I regard your question on 'what would the temperature of the earth be if no humans were around' on a different plane: would the temperature be different given no influence from human activities. In that regard I should point you to numerous and numerous research papers (which I have no time to search for right now). All those papers point to a radical increase in the amount of carbon-dioxide in the past 150 years and also a noticeable increase in temperature over the past 50 years (measureable period). Given studies done on ice-samples, these changes are also radical compared with the past 1.5 million years of samples (given CO2 levels). We can thus conclude that at least human activity has an impact on CO2 levels in our atmosphere. Several other studies make believeable claims on the relation between CO2 levels and temperature.
Also, changes in nature are very likely to be attributed to a radical change in our climate: gletchers which increase in speed by an exponential rate, more damage done by nature disasters, changes in climate (for example: our climate in the Netherlands has become more mild during the past 30 years).
And again on fear: I am not afraid of nature, I'm afraid of ignorance of the population. Individualism has brought us the option to choose between a hamburger with and without onions, and it has given us the ignorance on subjects that do matter: democracy, nature, quality of life, freedom in the true sense (freedom to vote, freedom of privacy).
Ok, this has become a long rant as well, hope to continue this discussion!