This type of behavior on the part of AGW proponents is why people like me don't take it seriously. The behavior of prominent AGW proponents does not seem to indicate that they really believe in it either.
Or perhaps they are better at math than you are. One 767 more or less won't make any significant difference in the amount of CO2 emitted. The convenience to the owners, OTOH, can make a big difference in the work they perform. If you think of the Google owners income divided per hour, you'll see that the time saved by not having to wait for an available flight is worth a big lot of money.
BTW, TFA says they bought carbon credits to mitigate the fuel their jet burns. Have you bought carbon credits? Or do you just say, "fuck AGW, fuck pollution, i don't believe in any of that."
Actually they said something along the lines of,"Your estimates make the world too small, there's no way you can sail west and reach Asia in the short period of time you are proposing."
Ah, the power of hindsight! If it were only a matter of the size of the earth, Columbus would have retorted "there must exist some islands out there where we can replenish our ships".
Or else, how did Magellan get support for his, much larger, expedition to circumnavigate the earth? By that time they knew that Columbus hadn't reached Asia, so there must exist some lands and seas in between. Balboa had found a sea beyond Central America which, as scientists at the time could calculate, should be thousands of kilometers distant from the coast of Asia. And still Magellan sailed away, funded by the Spanish crown.
No, the fact is that the shape of the earth wasn't believed to be round in Europe in 1492. One might say that it was more or less like the status of biological evolution in Texas today. Educated people knew the scientific theory, but most of the people, including many at the highest offices in government, weren't so sure about it.
According to US copyright law, when you perform a work for hire, such as a painting or a tattoo, the work becomes the property of the person the work is performed for unless otherwise agreed upon.
Tell that to the photographer you hired for your wedding.
Buy 700$ PC, get free XBox360, sell both, buy better PC, get free XBox360, repeat until PC is good enough, sell XBox, buy games.
You mean, it's like that email telling you that for every person you forward it Bill Gates will give ten cents to some charity? Only this time the charity is me? Cool!
The ozone disappearing was a much more pressing and obvious issue than global warming.
Yeah, right. Australians having to use extra sunblock in early spring is a much more pressing issue than droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, everywhere, right?
See, I did say that the fossil fuel industry invests a lot in propaganda. You're buying it.
Why is it that the scientists can detect an ozone hole, provide a fix, show that the fix solved the problem, and then be LOUDLY IGNORED by the liars in congress.
Oh. The CFL manufacturers had less money than the oil people. Sorry. I forgot...
What has one thing to do with the other?
The ozone layer hole was caused by the use of chloro-fluoro-carbon gases that decompose the O3 molecules in the stratosphere.
Global warming is caused by the emission of gases, mostly CO2, that trap infrared radiation in the lower atmosphere.
The ozone layer problem was solved by substituting the CFC gases for other less harmful gases.
Solving the global warming problem is more difficult because it's difficult to replace fuels that generate CO2 with other forms of energy production without affecting some very large corporations. These corporations have created an effective propaganda effort against the idea that global warming exists.
Given enough money, you can fool a lot of people for some time.
Rendering them is different from the object itself.
Even though the pipeline streams objects, the output from the last command of a pipeline is rendered on the terminal
Again, rendering is not the object. I can have a list of different operation I need to do, passing things from one program to the other. If all I can see is the rendering of the last command I cannot see what is actually being passed from one command to the next one.
Developing is incremental. The power of Unix is that this simple fact is everywhere. I need to see all the processes:
In Unix I build up my commands step by step. What I learn in one place can be used somewhere else. The same sort command I use for process numbers is the one I use for my phone book.
If I can't remember exactly how awk works I can test it by typing
A) ToString lists exactly all the properties of the object. Then *why* have the object at all, why not use the string itself?
B) ToString does not list exactly all the properties of the object. So, what if you need something that ToString does not list?
I see this problem with Python objects, they have a __str__ method and a __repr__ method. They are useful as a reference, but they are often incomplete. Unless you have a good documentation you cannot rely on them.
Take a look at Windows PowerShell. Instead of the UNIX 'everything is a file' philosophy, it says 'everything is an object'
The big advantage of the Unix philosophy is that plain text is human readable. 'Objects' have this terrible problem that you always need a specific program to read and write them. With plain text you can see the data structure at a glance, you don't need to get some separate documentation that may be wrong, not up to date, or not even exist.
Plain text is output to the screen and input from the keyboard. Any program that writes text to the console can send data to any program that reads text from the keyboard. This means development and testing is simple, you do it one module at a time, type the input and watch the output. And you can very easily combine different programs in a way that no one tried before.
I don't think powershell offers any advantage over the way Unix has been working for forty years.
why not offer an 'easy' path for those who don't have the shortened commands memorized?
Because you would be encumbering every one with a verbose syntax. After just a few times you'll feel it quite easy to remember that 'move' is 'mv'.
Once you learn the short way to do it you don't want to spend the extra effort in the long command. You may think it only takes one second to type, but you forget how many thousands of times you'll be using the same command again in the future.
In our own cases, that's easy: 99% of the energy we use traces back to the sun in some way or another (geothermal is about the only naturally harnessable source that isn't solar - nuclear fission is available to societies that can harness it).
In the end, all this energy comes from nuclear reactions, either fusion in the sun of fission in the interior of the earth or nuclear reactors.
Assuming an advanced enough technology, it's possible to extract nuclear energy from any atom except iron. It's reasonable to assume that a civilization advanced enough to reach an extra-solar planet would have no problem in extracting energy from it.
I was under the impression that the usual biological analogy for lawyers were sharks. Well, then of course, this being slashdot, someone would ask about lasers...
It's not opening the door, it's keeping it open with the cleaning cart that matters. Unless she was a pervert who enjoys fucking with the door open, of course.
When i was in Colombia I once saw the sky full of small round clouds. The locals told me that was a sign there would be an earthquake, and it effectively happened the next day. I never saw clouds like those again anywhere.
These are the same folks that only change the oil in their cars when the warning light comes on.
When the warning light comes on it's a sign to add oil, not change it.
Although it's a car analogy, this one is not good. Compared to downloading malware, not changing oils is pretty harmless. Most car owners would be able to drive a new car without changing oil at all for ten times the manufacturer recommended mileage.
I myself once used a Geo Prizm for fifty thousand miles without an oil change. It was a company car with a long-term rental. When the time for the first change came, I phone the rental company and they told me to just keep driving.
When you look at corporations these days, the emphasis is all in management. People who rise in the hierarchy are "people people", they are managers, good at getting other people to do what needs to be done.
That's all great and worked well while all the jobs had to be done by people. Now advance to a time when work is done by computers. Who gets computers to do what needs to be done?
Managers today are just middlemen, they are there to get programmers to get computers to do what's needed. I wonder how long it will take for investors to start noticing that. They are used to cutting labor costs by trimming the lower layers, how long till they notice that they can get much better results by cutting the upper layers, where the big salaries are?
Python 3 is death to Python
on
Perl 5.14 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Python 3 is barely different from Python 2
It's different enough to break the language for legacy code.
When you have code by the million lines, it's impossible to have a script that can reliably convert programs like Guido thinks it can. It's not just adding parentheses to print, there are some beastly things, like giving the division operator a different behavior. In Python 2.7, the result of (3 / 2) is 1, in Python 3 it's 1.5. I have absolutely no way to pore through those million lines and checking every division to see which operator should I use, keep the '/' or change it to '//'.
Besides, the changes from Python 2 to 3 are *all* in the direction of making it a more verbose language. I couldn't find any example of code that would be shorter in Python 3 than in 2. That goes against the philosophy of a scripting language, the last thing we need is a new Java.
I had gradually changed from Perl to Python over the years, but this P3k made me reconsider if this was wise. Apparently, there's no good-for-everything language left. So, in the scripting side, where quick results count, I've been considering switching back to Perl. Conciseness is king here, and nothing beats Perl at that.
As for large projects, thank god C is still there, still running K&R style code almost unchanged. Looking back over the years, I find that, for big projects, no language has given me less trouble than C. Once you get it running, it runs forever.
"It has been suggested that a modified driver shield could be used to access original core memory modules - possibly even reading data from salvaged modules that hasn't been read since the early days of computing."
Most likely no interesting info will come out. When memory was so limited, programmers stored as little as possible in core, and it was binary data anyhow.
I still have some paper tapes from the late 1970s with data from my first job at an electric power company. Unfortunately, there's not much there i can understand, not having kept the documentation. It was Fortran column-oriented numeric data, what each column meant was documented in printed manuals.
- provide online help, customer support, and tutorials
- conduct online subscription renewals
- provide for online purchasing of consumable supplies survey users for their impressions of their products and services
- assist customers to customize their products and services display interactive online advertisements
- collect information on how users actually use their products and services
- sell upgrades or complimentary products
- maintain products by providing users notice of available updates and assisting in the installation of those updates.
Why do they call things "inventions"? What about prior art? What about obviousness? Methinks there should be a law against ridiculous and/or frivolous patents.
I find it quite boring that so many discussions on Slashdot end with someone being modded "insightful" for bashing the free market.
Yup, the Free Market does work awesomely well. it might not be the ideal system, but it's like Winston Curchill said about democracy, it's the worst possible system, with the exception of all others.
Having said that, I never mentioned free market in my post. You should be modded (-1, offtopic). What I said was that the current regulations are holding back the nuclear power industry.
I didn't say the nuclear power industry should be left to the free market alone, with no regulations. What i said is that the current regulations are obsolete and inadequate.
Unfortunately, people like you and those who modded you up seem to suffer from a severe reading impairment in your haste to deny any harmful effect on any sort of government regulation. Sure, let's regulate everything without limits, any regulation is better than no regulation at all, right? If I mention any fault in any regulation it means I'm a Sarah Palin follower, ain't that so?
When the nuclear power industry was stopped in its tracks by regulations about 30 years ago, development in nuclear power stopped.
However, no alternative exists for nuclear power in many places. All other sources are either too expensive, too polluting, or impractical. Therefore they kept using the same old designs and refurbishing old power plants that, by their original design, should have been decommissioned decades ago.
The first thing to do should be to remove the arbitrary regulations that make it impossible to develop and built new power plants.
These are what keep us SAFE because it lets power companies notify law enforcement when our neighbors are growing marijuana! We NEED these to keep us SAFE!
Slashdot Mirror
This type of behavior on the part of AGW proponents is why people like me don't take it seriously. The behavior of prominent AGW proponents does not seem to indicate that they really believe in it either.
Or perhaps they are better at math than you are. One 767 more or less won't make any significant difference in the amount of CO2 emitted. The convenience to the owners, OTOH, can make a big difference in the work they perform. If you think of the Google owners income divided per hour, you'll see that the time saved by not having to wait for an available flight is worth a big lot of money.
BTW, TFA says they bought carbon credits to mitigate the fuel their jet burns. Have you bought carbon credits? Or do you just say, "fuck AGW, fuck pollution, i don't believe in any of that."
Actually they said something along the lines of,"Your estimates make the world too small, there's no way you can sail west and reach Asia in the short period of time you are proposing."
Ah, the power of hindsight! If it were only a matter of the size of the earth, Columbus would have retorted "there must exist some islands out there where we can replenish our ships".
Or else, how did Magellan get support for his, much larger, expedition to circumnavigate the earth? By that time they knew that Columbus hadn't reached Asia, so there must exist some lands and seas in between. Balboa had found a sea beyond Central America which, as scientists at the time could calculate, should be thousands of kilometers distant from the coast of Asia. And still Magellan sailed away, funded by the Spanish crown.
No, the fact is that the shape of the earth wasn't believed to be round in Europe in 1492. One might say that it was more or less like the status of biological evolution in Texas today. Educated people knew the scientific theory, but most of the people, including many at the highest offices in government, weren't so sure about it.
According to US copyright law, when you perform a work for hire, such as a painting or a tattoo, the work becomes the property of the person the work is performed for unless otherwise agreed upon.
Tell that to the photographer you hired for your wedding.
Let them taste their own poison
Better yet!
Buy 700$ PC, get free XBox360, sell both, buy better PC, get free XBox360, repeat until PC is good enough, sell XBox, buy games.
You mean, it's like that email telling you that for every person you forward it Bill Gates will give ten cents to some charity? Only this time the charity is me? Cool!
The ozone disappearing was a much more pressing and obvious issue than global warming.
Yeah, right. Australians having to use extra sunblock in early spring is a much more pressing issue than droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, everywhere, right?
See, I did say that the fossil fuel industry invests a lot in propaganda. You're buying it.
Global warming is caused by the emission of gases, mostly CO2, but also CFC replacements that are 1000s of times more potent than CO2.
Fixed that for ya. Apparently Nature doesn't provide free lunches :(
No, you fixed nothing, you just failed to take into account numbers.
CO2 isn't harmful just because it's a global warming gas. It's so harmful because it's emitted in several orders of magnitude more than other gases.
Another gas may be 1000 times more potent, but if only a billionth as much as CO2 is being emitted, then so what?
Why is it that the scientists can detect an ozone hole, provide a fix, show that the fix solved the problem, and then be LOUDLY IGNORED by the liars in congress.
Oh. The CFL manufacturers had less money than the oil people. Sorry. I forgot...
What has one thing to do with the other?
The ozone layer hole was caused by the use of chloro-fluoro-carbon gases that decompose the O3 molecules in the stratosphere.
Global warming is caused by the emission of gases, mostly CO2, that trap infrared radiation in the lower atmosphere.
The ozone layer problem was solved by substituting the CFC gases for other less harmful gases.
Solving the global warming problem is more difficult because it's difficult to replace fuels that generate CO2 with other forms of energy production without affecting some very large corporations. These corporations have created an effective propaganda effort against the idea that global warming exists.
Given enough money, you can fool a lot of people for some time.
Objects can be rendered on the terminal as well
Rendering them is different from the object itself.
Even though the pipeline streams objects, the output from the last command of a pipeline is rendered on the terminal
Again, rendering is not the object. I can have a list of different operation I need to do, passing things from one program to the other. If all I can see is the rendering of the last command I cannot see what is actually being passed from one command to the next one.
Developing is incremental. The power of Unix is that this simple fact is everywhere. I need to see all the processes:
ps aux
Which ones are owned by boris?
ps aux | egrep '^boris'
What are the process numbers and creation time?
ps aux | egrep '^boris' | awk '{print $2, $9}'
OK, sort that by process number
ps aux | egrep '^boris' | awk '{print $2, $9}' | sort -n
In Unix I build up my commands step by step. What I learn in one place can be used somewhere else. The same sort command I use for process numbers is the one I use for my phone book.
If I can't remember exactly how awk works I can test it by typing
echo "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11" | awk '{print $2, $9}'
It would not work if 'echo' showed a representation on the terminal that is not exactly the same thing it pipes to 'awk'
I'll grant that PowerShell is a more natural fit for Windows given that so much of the OS and applications are exposed as objects.
That's a shortcoming of windows, not an advantage of powershell.
Every object has a mandatory .ToString() method
Two possibilities:
A) ToString lists exactly all the properties of the object. Then *why* have the object at all, why not use the string itself?
B) ToString does not list exactly all the properties of the object. So, what if you need something that ToString does not list?
I see this problem with Python objects, they have a __str__ method and a __repr__ method. They are useful as a reference, but they are often incomplete. Unless you have a good documentation you cannot rely on them.
Take a look at Windows PowerShell. Instead of the UNIX 'everything is a file' philosophy, it says 'everything is an object'
The big advantage of the Unix philosophy is that plain text is human readable. 'Objects' have this terrible problem that you always need a specific program to read and write them. With plain text you can see the data structure at a glance, you don't need to get some separate documentation that may be wrong, not up to date, or not even exist.
Plain text is output to the screen and input from the keyboard. Any program that writes text to the console can send data to any program that reads text from the keyboard. This means development and testing is simple, you do it one module at a time, type the input and watch the output. And you can very easily combine different programs in a way that no one tried before.
I don't think powershell offers any advantage over the way Unix has been working for forty years.
why not offer an 'easy' path for those who don't have the shortened commands memorized?
Because you would be encumbering every one with a verbose syntax. After just a few times you'll feel it quite easy to remember that 'move' is 'mv'.
Once you learn the short way to do it you don't want to spend the extra effort in the long command. You may think it only takes one second to type, but you forget how many thousands of times you'll be using the same command again in the future.
In our own cases, that's easy: 99% of the energy we use traces back to the sun in some way or another (geothermal is about the only naturally harnessable source that isn't solar - nuclear fission is available to societies that can harness it).
In the end, all this energy comes from nuclear reactions, either fusion in the sun of fission in the interior of the earth or nuclear reactors.
Assuming an advanced enough technology, it's possible to extract nuclear energy from any atom except iron. It's reasonable to assume that a civilization advanced enough to reach an extra-solar planet would have no problem in extracting energy from it.
I was under the impression that the usual biological analogy for lawyers were sharks. Well, then of course, this being slashdot, someone would ask about lasers...
It's not opening the door, it's keeping it open with the cleaning cart that matters. Unless she was a pervert who enjoys fucking with the door open, of course.
When i was in Colombia I once saw the sky full of small round clouds. The locals told me that was a sign there would be an earthquake, and it effectively happened the next day. I never saw clouds like those again anywhere.
These are the same folks that only change the oil in their cars when the warning light comes on.
When the warning light comes on it's a sign to add oil, not change it.
Although it's a car analogy, this one is not good. Compared to downloading malware, not changing oils is pretty harmless. Most car owners would be able to drive a new car without changing oil at all for ten times the manufacturer recommended mileage.
I myself once used a Geo Prizm for fifty thousand miles without an oil change. It was a company car with a long-term rental. When the time for the first change came, I phone the rental company and they told me to just keep driving.
When you look at corporations these days, the emphasis is all in management. People who rise in the hierarchy are "people people", they are managers, good at getting other people to do what needs to be done.
That's all great and worked well while all the jobs had to be done by people. Now advance to a time when work is done by computers. Who gets computers to do what needs to be done?
Managers today are just middlemen, they are there to get programmers to get computers to do what's needed. I wonder how long it will take for investors to start noticing that. They are used to cutting labor costs by trimming the lower layers, how long till they notice that they can get much better results by cutting the upper layers, where the big salaries are?
Python 3 is barely different from Python 2
It's different enough to break the language for legacy code.
When you have code by the million lines, it's impossible to have a script that can reliably convert programs like Guido thinks it can. It's not just adding parentheses to print, there are some beastly things, like giving the division operator a different behavior. In Python 2.7, the result of (3 / 2) is 1, in Python 3 it's 1.5. I have absolutely no way to pore through those million lines and checking every division to see which operator should I use, keep the '/' or change it to '//'.
Besides, the changes from Python 2 to 3 are *all* in the direction of making it a more verbose language. I couldn't find any example of code that would be shorter in Python 3 than in 2. That goes against the philosophy of a scripting language, the last thing we need is a new Java.
I had gradually changed from Perl to Python over the years, but this P3k made me reconsider if this was wise. Apparently, there's no good-for-everything language left. So, in the scripting side, where quick results count, I've been considering switching back to Perl. Conciseness is king here, and nothing beats Perl at that.
As for large projects, thank god C is still there, still running K&R style code almost unchanged. Looking back over the years, I find that, for big projects, no language has given me less trouble than C. Once you get it running, it runs forever.
"It has been suggested that a modified driver shield could be used to access original core memory modules - possibly even reading data from salvaged modules that hasn't been read since the early days of computing."
Most likely no interesting info will come out. When memory was so limited, programmers stored as little as possible in core, and it was binary data anyhow.
I still have some paper tapes from the late 1970s with data from my first job at an electric power company. Unfortunately, there's not much there i can understand, not having kept the documentation. It was Fortran column-oriented numeric data, what each column meant was documented in printed manuals.
Take a look at their patent portfolio:
- provide online help, customer support, and tutorials
- conduct online subscription renewals
- provide for online purchasing of consumable supplies
survey users for their impressions of their products and services
- assist customers to customize their products and services
display interactive online advertisements
- collect information on how users actually use their products and services
- sell upgrades or complimentary products
- maintain products by providing users notice of available updates and assisting in the installation of those updates.
Why do they call things "inventions"? What about prior art? What about obviousness? Methinks there should be a law against ridiculous and/or frivolous patents.
...they want their Soviet Union back.
I find it quite boring that so many discussions on Slashdot end with someone being modded "insightful" for bashing the free market.
Yup, the Free Market does work awesomely well. it might not be the ideal system, but it's like Winston Curchill said about democracy, it's the worst possible system, with the exception of all others.
Having said that, I never mentioned free market in my post. You should be modded (-1, offtopic). What I said was that the current regulations are holding back the nuclear power industry.
I didn't say the nuclear power industry should be left to the free market alone, with no regulations. What i said is that the current regulations are obsolete and inadequate.
Unfortunately, people like you and those who modded you up seem to suffer from a severe reading impairment in your haste to deny any harmful effect on any sort of government regulation. Sure, let's regulate everything without limits, any regulation is better than no regulation at all, right? If I mention any fault in any regulation it means I'm a Sarah Palin follower, ain't that so?
When the nuclear power industry was stopped in its tracks by regulations about 30 years ago, development in nuclear power stopped.
However, no alternative exists for nuclear power in many places. All other sources are either too expensive, too polluting, or impractical. Therefore they kept using the same old designs and refurbishing old power plants that, by their original design, should have been decommissioned decades ago.
The first thing to do should be to remove the arbitrary regulations that make it impossible to develop and built new power plants.
What's Canada?
Probalby it's the country you call Canuckistan.
These are what keep us SAFE because it lets power companies notify law enforcement when our neighbors are growing marijuana! We NEED these to keep us SAFE!
I grow marijuana, you insensitive clod!