ARM is very good at confusing numbering schemes. There are basically two separate numbers: the architecture version and the cpu model number. The ARMv7 (note the *v*) in the article is about the architecture version (ARMv7 is currently the latest version), while the ARM9 you are talking about is a core that implements the ARMv5 instruction set. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#ARM_cores for a list of ARM cores and the corresponding architecture version they implement.
It would be one of the most expensive and idiotic strategies ever.
That didn't stop Obamacare in the US. I think you underestimate the willingness of politicians to jerk the populace around in return for some short-term gain. 8*)
As far as I'm concerned, the mass hysteria about Obama's health care reform is incredibly sad and hilarious at the same time. Then again, I'm from socialist Europe and probably a communist nazi (whatever that may be), so what do I know...
At least in Belgium, politicians are not allowed to get campaign contributions from companies (it used to be allowed, but it was forbidden after a number of corruption scandals in the seventies and eighties). I don't know about other EU Member States.
Other than that, you still cannot compare the US House of Representatives or the US Senate with the European Parliament, because the MEPs are people from 27 different countries speaking a total of 22 different languages and from I don't know how many different parties, divided into 8 ideological/political families (with several of those families having quite different views on things that can't simply be bought away, since they would lose their identity).
Repeating the standard pub arguments about politics is not the same as "insightful", mods.
The whole ACTA thing is already being negotiated behind closed doors. It's unlikely that anyone is trying to bribe MEPs at this point since the European Parliament is not directly involved in the negotiations itself, and the European Commission is trying its best to keep them as far as possible from the negotiations. Not to mention that it's pretty hard to bribe that many individual MEPs with so many different political backgrounds and nationalities so as to block a written declaration from passing. It would be one of the most expensive and idiotic strategies ever.
And of course MEPs do this because it advances their agenda: they don't want to be kept out by the European Commission from negotiations like this only to be presented with a fait accompli later on. Well, that combined with the fact that several of them also don't like the inclusion of patents in it, and all the stuff about cutting people's Internet access for copyright infringements is also not very popular there.
Note that I'm not saying that it *is* over now. However, that is unrelated to any alleged bribery or selfishness.
These methods you mention surely work for Belgium. When you've got a small country, with a relatively small population size, where vote coercion probably is a very minor issue (if a problem at all), it's much easier. The overhead of e-voting is probably not worth it.
Actually, about half of Belgium has voted electronically during the past elections. The process I described was for the part that still votes on paper, but there are plans to switch everyone to electronic voting.
However, consider a different situation, in which you have voting locations in extreme places such as the middle of the Amazon rainforest (and dropping the containers in the river is a real possibility), in a country of 5500+ cities spread throughout a hufe territory and in a lot of those cities some local authorities are more powerful than the police itself.
Suddenly, all these methods don't work. In the developed areas and large cities, these methods you described would work. In the most remote areas, however, e-voting was able to stop a lot of the election fraud which was going on.
According to the related Wikipedia page it indeed seems to have helped in Brazil, and I indeed assumed a properly working system of checks by society during the election process.
Anyway, I was just explaining why "there is such bias against electronic voting on Slashdot since, in theory, it's a "nerd community"." Most Slashdotters know that it's incredibly hard to write completely bug-free software, and I guess most of them come from places where it is possible to organise elections that are generally guaranteed to be fair by local authorities.
Of course, all of the scandals that have erupted since the introduction of electronic voting don't help (in Belgium we have also already had problems with voting machines registering more cast votes than registered voters in some cases).
Individual paper-trails are actually forbidden by law, as that would make voting non-anonymous.
An individual paper trail would not make the voting non-anonymous (in fact, as of the next election they plan to finally start doing that in Belgium). Such individually printed paper ballots would not contain any indication of who cast them, and they obviously would be deposited into a secure container at the voting office just like regular paper ballots (so they can be counted afterwards if necessary).
I didn't claim it's impossible to commit fraud with paper ballots. But every single person having the capability to verify the process surely is better than only a chose few having that capability.
Yes, e-voting, after a lot of effort can be compromised. Regular paper-ballot voting can be compromised by anyone, skilled or not, with not a lot of effort at all. Any voting system can be compromised. I don't honestly understand why the Slashdot community dislike e-voting that much.
Paper-ballot voting can also be verified by anyone, skilled or not. That is one of the most important parts of an election: that virtually anyone can check on the process.
There are also no chances of accidental errors with paper-ballot voting, while bugs in electronic voting machines are known to have caused votes to be lost in the past.
Furthermore, you're talking as if paper ballot voting is without any protection at all. At least in Belgium,
all political parties have the right to send a single witness to every voting location
on the morning of the election, at every voting location someone from the local overseeing committee (both appointed citizens and representatives from all political parties) draw a number from 1 to 9 (using basically a papers-in-a-hat principle), and then every ballot is stamped in the grid location corresponding to that number (mentally divide the ballot in a 3 by 3 grid, and number them from top-left to bottom-right). Any ballot with a stamp in a different location is discarded, and a copy of a "master ballot" with the stamp in the right location is part of the official report of the proceedings
the containers in which the ballots have to be deposited have to be clearly visible to all members of the overseeing committee at all times, and at the start of the election it is checked whether they are empty (and after that they are locked)
prior to the start of the voting, the number of available (blank) ballots is counted this is recorded
at the end, number of remaining blank ballots is counted and this is recorded, as well as the total number of people that voted
the cast votes are counted with all of the members of the overseeing committee present
There are more things, but in general every step is observed by a lot of different people with different interests, everyone can understand everything that happens and hence also verify that it happens correctly.
Compare that to a computer. Even the average Slashdotter probably has no idea how to start verifying that it works correctly, contains no bugs or backdoors, and that everything was recorded correctly.
Of course, there is a solution: perform electronic voting *with a paper trail*, so that you can always verify the outcome in case of doubt. But for some reason that's not very popular.
You have to understand that people end up in psych system because collectively we are in denial and don't give much of a fuck about the fate of one another
I'm sure that holds for a number of people (there are also people whose relatives/friends did try to take care of them and simply were not able to handle it). However, I think that defining psychiatric disorders with the purpose of getting socially vulnerable people in the psychiatric system is a very bad approach (now/there's/ a practice that may easily induce people to consider psychiatry to be nonsense).
I'm not saying that such people should not get help, but psychiatry simply does not seem to be the right way, at least not as a first line of help. It can obviously play an important part in the process of getting people back on their feet, although even then I think that psychologists could be more useful and better trained to help than psychiatrists. Psychiatrists are by no means "super" social workers.
Maybe psychiatry is at this point the best alternative there is for such people in certain societies (I'm not convinced it is), but even if that's the case then I believe that confirms what I wrote earlier about the "autism spectrum disorders" (namely that they are not necessarily about people who are mentally ill). Or, to put it terms similar to the ones you used above: it's society and its safety nets that are ill in many of those cases, not those individual people.
I don't think you can fix that situation with psychiatry though, and putting all of those individuals in the psychiatric system is bad both for the system (people who can only be helped via the psychiatric system have to "compete" for the same resources) and for those people (they're not getting the right kind of help).
""we don't know what the problem is and in fact there may not even be any problem, but let's put a stamp on it anyway" (I'm not a psychiatrist, but my father is and I talked about it with him)"
Yeah right, like this qualifies you for saying anything about it.
The above is basically what he told me.
Real severe autism certainly does exist
Of course it does, I never denied that.
Like many things autistic spectrum disorders are over-diagnosed
And that was basically my (father's) point (although he believes it very much over-diagnosed).
Like many things autistic spectrum disorders are over-diagnosed but why why people are diagnosed on the autistic spectrum is in the first place is to get help.
The point is that the fact that someone could use help does not necessarily mean that they suffer from a psychiatric disorder (although maybe for some people it's required to get over the mental barrier to seek help). But just like not diagnosing a problem is bad, starting to diagnose every deviation from whatever is perceived as "the norm" as a psychiatric disorder is very bad too. Being different, no matter how badly accepted the difference is by society, is not the same as being mentally ill (although it can obviously be a symptom/indication).
So it's little wonder why many people think psychiatry is bunkum, they want the other to be easy to understand and to justify their their ignorance and innate prejudices against others.
Autism is not prevalent at all. The fairly recently introduced class of "autism spectrum disorders" however are, but that's because it's generally a weasel term for "we don't know what the problem is and in fact there may not even be any problem, but let's put a stamp on it anyway" (I'm not a psychiatrist, but my father is and I talked about it with him). My *personal* opinion is that many people who are somehow not very socially minded or otherwise feel like an outlier want to be diagnosed with something that "explains" that fact. However, nobody is great at everything and the fact that you are less good at certain things does not mean that you suffer from a disorder (just like people who aren't good at maths don't suffer from a "calculation spectrum disorder").
It's similar to the ADHD diagnoses in many cases (note: I'm not saying in all cases). There's a wonderful talk by Ken Robinson at TED that touches on this. It's been a while since I watched it, but at one point the presenter talks about a kid (a few decades ago) that did bad at school, never could sit still, was hard to deal with etc and no one could figure out what was wrong with it. Eventually however, it was diagnosed by a smart guy as suffering from the affliction of being a "dancer". They enrolled it in dancing classes and that person grew up to become a very famous dancer and choreographer. He notes that today the kid would probably have been diagnosed with ADHD, but fortunately that "condition" wasn't invented yet back then.
Apple has not released the fix for the iPod Touch 1G and the iPhone 2G, so the iPhone Dev Team themselves are working on a fix that will work on all devices. So you'll be able to basically jailbreak and then plug the hole that was used to do it.
As Nancy Pelosi said of Obamacare "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it." What she means is that nobody could learn what was in the bill by reading it.
But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.
It seems more likely to me that she meant that all of the nonsense spouted by the extreme right (death panels and whatnot) made it impossible to have a reasonable discussion on what the bill was about. And that once it was passed all of that FUD would probably stop dominating the news so that the real information wouldn't be obscured anymore.
they don't break any stories, send reporters out into the field
Actually, they do send out people in the field from time to time, and then I don't mean "put them in front of a blue or green screen". See e.g. Jason Jones' excellent Behind the Veil series that was recorded in Iran.
The gist of it is that Denmark exports almost all of the wind energy they generate to neighbouring countries, because most of the time the power generated is in excess of the demand.
Denmark is a very small country with lots of wind. I'd guess that they are doing this on purpose, simply producing power as an export product (probably a bit like Oregon in this story).
In Belgium, currently about 55% of our electricity is generated by nuclear plants. The problem? About 55% of the time (from 21h-6h on weekdays and all day on weekends), the power generated is in excess of demand and simply reducing the output of nuclear plants at night and on weekends is apparently not economically feasible (I can't imagine why they wouldn't do it if it were, it's not like Suez/Electrabel are corporations with a bleeding heart).
As a result, electricity is cheaper at night and on weekends, and virtually all of our motorways are lighted at night. Sure, it's nice to have all that light (except if you want to look at the night sky), and in the future this will also be useful for recharging electric cars, but the constant power generation by nuclear plants is not without its problems either.
Granted, that paper is several years old, but it still demonstrates the randomness of wind-based energy-generation pretty well.
It's not really random, but it definitely is variable. What is however generally more important is the predictability of the generation so you can adapt other means of production. And those prediction models get more accurate every year. In fact, the more wind mills are put into operation, the more accurate the models get because you get more measurement locations.
In Belgium, if the wind comes from the East, then based on measurements in Germany they can quite accurately predict the output of Belgian wind farms several hours in advance. This allows them to constantly adjust the power production of other plants (in Belgium it's mainly natural gas, often combined with burning garbage because we don't have room for huge landfills) and keep the grid at a more or less constant load.
Wind can never be used for base load energy generation without some kind of (expensive and impractical) energy-storing gimmicks, so instead of that how about just building a few comparatively cheap nuclear reactors and being set for decades? Perhaps at that point wind energy will be more feasible
One problem is that nuclear does not play nice together with wind/solar power generation because of its inflexibility in terms of output. It does not make sense to put lots of wind mills or solar panels on a grid that is almost completely fed by nuclear plants, because their production patterns cannot be used to complement each other. As a result, you get less investment in wind/solar power research, which is sort of a vicious circle.
It's true that you do need a base load guarantee and that localised wind production can in no way guarantee that. One of the keywords is locally though, because if you look at the wind over large areas of land (and/or water), the variations in total available wind power are reduced quite a bit (lots of nice graphs).
There's no silver bullet, but I think it's incorrect to paint the picture as if wind power is completely unsuited compared to nuclear power. Both have problems in terms of matching the demand and keeping an even grid load.
If there is a reason for doing something in another way, engineers (and many programmers) will do so by themselves. It's their nature.
You should probably talk to the grandparent, then. He thinks that it's unproductive to do something a different way.
He thinks it's unproductive to be forced to program something in a different way if there's no good technical reason for it, but rather only because someone else thought of/patented it first. I agree.
Maybe your background is programming rather than engineering, but in general, you want to have several different solutions for any problem. One may be optimal in some situations, others may be better elsewhere. But if someone said, "pfff, we already have a solution, let's not investigate any others," we'd be stuck with a one-size-barely-fits-all answer.
History has proven it does not go that way in practice.
Which part?
The part that where you suggest that if people can freely imitate innovation in software that we get stuck with a "one-size-barely-fits-all answer".
And if you say, "oh, ho, copyright only protects that exact code,
Then you'd still be wrong.
then you're still not innovating, and why should we consider your actions at all valuable for advancing the state of the art?
Just like the umpteenth novel about a magician's academy can be a valuable addition to the world of literature, so can the umpteenth app that supports wireless email checking.
And of course, your point is based on the classic fallacy that a single application would only ever use known algorithms or embody known "system and method to do X", or that it would be completely new. No single application in the world is like that.
Well, I guess having computer scientists spending their days finding new (usually suboptimal) algorithms for already solved problems to skirt the dozens of software patents any given project will likely infringe, rather than doing meaningful new work is an innovative concept, but it's certainly not a productive one.
No, it's both innovative and productive.
If there is a reason for doing something in another way, engineers (and many programmers) will do so by themselves. It's their nature.
Maybe your background is programming rather than engineering, but in general, you want to have several different solutions for any problem. One may be optimal in some situations, others may be better elsewhere. But if someone said, "pfff, we already have a solution, let's not investigate any others," we'd be stuck with a one-size-barely-fits-all answer.
History has proven it does not go that way in practice.
If you live your life by "include" statements, then innovating may seem unproductive, but then, if you're constantly copying other people's code, why shouldn't you pay them royalties?
If you copy code, you have to live by the copyright license (which may mandate paying royalties, releasing your source code, or anything else).
It's worth noting that Apple is a big contributor (both financially and technically, I believe) to LLVM.
There's many people on Slashdot who might predict Apple would be the first to branch and "steal" LLVM code. So far, the opposite is true -- they realize the benefit of contributing back.
Those things aren't mutually exclusive (although I wouldn't call it stealing, not even between quotes, unlike the straw men you appear to be referring to). They're both open sourcing large parts of their work based on LLVM and keeping other parts closed (such as their LLVM-based OpenGL stack, and probably other things we don't even know about).
And to be clear, I'm not saying that's wrong, morally or otherwise. I'm just trying to illustrate that the world is not as black and white as you paint it and that the license allows such things (which would not be possible with something like the GPL -- and again, I'm not saying anything about whether this is good, bad or neither).
ARM's RVCT compiler produces code that is 30% faster than GCC (today)!
Since ARM forbids publishing any kind of performance or code size comparisons between RVCT and other compilers, I'm wondering where you got that number.
I would LOVE to see some comparison/benchmark that shows LLVM generated binaries being faster than GCC generated. CLang cries high and low about compiling faster than GCC, but they don't say anything about resulting executable speeds.
GCC still generates faster code overall as far as the SPEC benchmarks are concerned, but LLVM isn't too shabby (and in some cases beats GCC). See http://vmakarov.fedorapeople.org/spec/ (bottom two sub-entries in the left frame, check the SPECINT/SPECFP2000 score graphs)
The state loves to censor people - since nobody really believes in democracy.
Actually, I do, even though it's obviously not flawless. I've even directly seen it in action. In the European Parliament, in fact.
I do agree that being cynical and just railing against "the man" and "the kids" is much less energy intensive and less likely to result in disappointments though. It's also part of the problem.
A written declaration is not preparation any more than a (common) press release or blog post is. It's a rallying document. The preparation for directives happens with white/green papers, consultations amongst the ministers of the member states and externally ordered studies (although the Commission often messes those up, but that's another discussion).
These aren't legislative documents. That written declaration is presented by the MEP who took the initiative as something that simply enables MEPs to simply say "we want the commission to do something about child porn".
Yes, people who sign it without looking up all references are lazy. However, that does not exclude the fact that they are also misled. It also has nothing to do with whether or not the process in unnecessarily complex (there is nothing complex about this particular process).
Slashdot Mirror
ARM is very good at confusing numbering schemes. There are basically two separate numbers: the architecture version and the cpu model number. The ARMv7 (note the *v*) in the article is about the architecture version (ARMv7 is currently the latest version), while the ARM9 you are talking about is a core that implements the ARMv5 instruction set. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#ARM_cores for a list of ARM cores and the corresponding architecture version they implement.
It would be one of the most expensive and idiotic strategies ever.
That didn't stop Obamacare in the US. I think you underestimate the willingness of politicians to jerk the populace around in return for some short-term gain. 8*)
As far as I'm concerned, the mass hysteria about Obama's health care reform is incredibly sad and hilarious at the same time. Then again, I'm from socialist Europe and probably a communist nazi (whatever that may be), so what do I know...
At least in Belgium, politicians are not allowed to get campaign contributions from companies (it used to be allowed, but it was forbidden after a number of corruption scandals in the seventies and eighties). I don't know about other EU Member States.
Other than that, you still cannot compare the US House of Representatives or the US Senate with the European Parliament, because the MEPs are people from 27 different countries speaking a total of 22 different languages and from I don't know how many different parties, divided into 8 ideological/political families (with several of those families having quite different views on things that can't simply be bought away, since they would lose their identity).
Repeating the standard pub arguments about politics is not the same as "insightful", mods.
The whole ACTA thing is already being negotiated behind closed doors. It's unlikely that anyone is trying to bribe MEPs at this point since the European Parliament is not directly involved in the negotiations itself, and the European Commission is trying its best to keep them as far as possible from the negotiations. Not to mention that it's pretty hard to bribe that many individual MEPs with so many different political backgrounds and nationalities so as to block a written declaration from passing. It would be one of the most expensive and idiotic strategies ever.
And of course MEPs do this because it advances their agenda: they don't want to be kept out by the European Commission from negotiations like this only to be presented with a fait accompli later on. Well, that combined with the fact that several of them also don't like the inclusion of patents in it, and all the stuff about cutting people's Internet access for copyright infringements is also not very popular there.
Note that I'm not saying that it *is* over now. However, that is unrelated to any alleged bribery or selfishness.
These methods you mention surely work for Belgium. When you've got a small country, with a relatively small population size, where vote coercion probably is a very minor issue (if a problem at all), it's much easier. The overhead of e-voting is probably not worth it.
Actually, about half of Belgium has voted electronically during the past elections. The process I described was for the part that still votes on paper, but there are plans to switch everyone to electronic voting.
However, consider a different situation, in which you have voting locations in extreme places such as the middle of the Amazon rainforest (and dropping the containers in the river is a real possibility), in a country of 5500+ cities spread throughout a hufe territory and in a lot of those cities some local authorities are more powerful than the police itself.
Suddenly, all these methods don't work. In the developed areas and large cities, these methods you described would work. In the most remote areas, however, e-voting was able to stop a lot of the election fraud which was going on.
According to the related Wikipedia page it indeed seems to have helped in Brazil, and I indeed assumed a properly working system of checks by society during the election process.
Anyway, I was just explaining why "there is such bias against electronic voting on Slashdot since, in theory, it's a "nerd community"." Most Slashdotters know that it's incredibly hard to write completely bug-free software, and I guess most of them come from places where it is possible to organise elections that are generally guaranteed to be fair by local authorities.
Of course, all of the scandals that have erupted since the introduction of electronic voting don't help (in Belgium we have also already had problems with voting machines registering more cast votes than registered voters in some cases).
Individual paper-trails are actually forbidden by law, as that would make voting non-anonymous.
An individual paper trail would not make the voting non-anonymous (in fact, as of the next election they plan to finally start doing that in Belgium). Such individually printed paper ballots would not contain any indication of who cast them, and they obviously would be deposited into a secure container at the voting office just like regular paper ballots (so they can be counted afterwards if necessary).
I didn't claim it's impossible to commit fraud with paper ballots. But every single person having the capability to verify the process surely is better than only a chose few having that capability.
Yes, e-voting, after a lot of effort can be compromised. Regular paper-ballot voting can be compromised by anyone, skilled or not, with not a lot of effort at all. Any voting system can be compromised. I don't honestly understand why the Slashdot community dislike e-voting that much.
Paper-ballot voting can also be verified by anyone, skilled or not. That is one of the most important parts of an election: that virtually anyone can check on the process.
There are also no chances of accidental errors with paper-ballot voting, while bugs in electronic voting machines are known to have caused votes to be lost in the past.
Furthermore, you're talking as if paper ballot voting is without any protection at all. At least in Belgium,
There are more things, but in general every step is observed by a lot of different people with different interests, everyone can understand everything that happens and hence also verify that it happens correctly.
Compare that to a computer. Even the average Slashdotter probably has no idea how to start verifying that it works correctly, contains no bugs or backdoors, and that everything was recorded correctly.
Of course, there is a solution: perform electronic voting *with a paper trail*, so that you can always verify the outcome in case of doubt. But for some reason that's not very popular.
You have to understand that people end up in psych system because collectively we are in denial and don't give much of a fuck about the fate of one another
I'm sure that holds for a number of people (there are also people whose relatives/friends did try to take care of them and simply were not able to handle it). However, I think that defining psychiatric disorders with the purpose of getting socially vulnerable people in the psychiatric system is a very bad approach (now /there's/ a practice that may easily induce people to consider psychiatry to be nonsense).
I'm not saying that such people should not get help, but psychiatry simply does not seem to be the right way, at least not as a first line of help. It can obviously play an important part in the process of getting people back on their feet, although even then I think that psychologists could be more useful and better trained to help than psychiatrists. Psychiatrists are by no means "super" social workers.
Maybe psychiatry is at this point the best alternative there is for such people in certain societies (I'm not convinced it is), but even if that's the case then I believe that confirms what I wrote earlier about the "autism spectrum disorders" (namely that they are not necessarily about people who are mentally ill). Or, to put it terms similar to the ones you used above: it's society and its safety nets that are ill in many of those cases, not those individual people.
I don't think you can fix that situation with psychiatry though, and putting all of those individuals in the psychiatric system is bad both for the system (people who can only be helped via the psychiatric system have to "compete" for the same resources) and for those people (they're not getting the right kind of help).
""we don't know what the problem is and in fact there may not even be any problem, but let's put a stamp on it anyway" (I'm not a psychiatrist, but my father is and I talked about it with him)"
Yeah right, like this qualifies you for saying anything about it.
The above is basically what he told me.
Real severe autism certainly does exist
Of course it does, I never denied that.
Like many things autistic spectrum disorders are over-diagnosed
And that was basically my (father's) point (although he believes it very much over-diagnosed).
Like many things autistic spectrum disorders are over-diagnosed but why why people are diagnosed on the autistic spectrum is in the first place is to get help.
The point is that the fact that someone could use help does not necessarily mean that they suffer from a psychiatric disorder (although maybe for some people it's required to get over the mental barrier to seek help). But just like not diagnosing a problem is bad, starting to diagnose every deviation from whatever is perceived as "the norm" as a psychiatric disorder is very bad too. Being different, no matter how badly accepted the difference is by society, is not the same as being mentally ill (although it can obviously be a symptom/indication).
So it's little wonder why many people think psychiatry is bunkum, they want the other to be easy to understand and to justify their their ignorance and innate prejudices against others.
I don't think it's bunkum.
Autism is not prevalent at all. The fairly recently introduced class of "autism spectrum disorders" however are, but that's because it's generally a weasel term for "we don't know what the problem is and in fact there may not even be any problem, but let's put a stamp on it anyway" (I'm not a psychiatrist, but my father is and I talked about it with him). My *personal* opinion is that many people who are somehow not very socially minded or otherwise feel like an outlier want to be diagnosed with something that "explains" that fact. However, nobody is great at everything and the fact that you are less good at certain things does not mean that you suffer from a disorder (just like people who aren't good at maths don't suffer from a "calculation spectrum disorder").
It's similar to the ADHD diagnoses in many cases (note: I'm not saying in all cases). There's a wonderful talk by Ken Robinson at TED that touches on this. It's been a while since I watched it, but at one point the presenter talks about a kid (a few decades ago) that did bad at school, never could sit still, was hard to deal with etc and no one could figure out what was wrong with it. Eventually however, it was diagnosed by a smart guy as suffering from the affliction of being a "dancer". They enrolled it in dancing classes and that person grew up to become a very famous dancer and choreographer. He notes that today the kid would probably have been diagnosed with ADHD, but fortunately that "condition" wasn't invented yet back then.
Apple has not released the fix for the iPod Touch 1G and the iPhone 2G, so the iPhone Dev Team themselves are working on a fix that will work on all devices. So you'll be able to basically jailbreak and then plug the hole that was used to do it.
As Nancy Pelosi said of Obamacare "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it." What she means is that nobody could learn what was in the bill by reading it.
Here's the full quote:
But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.
It seems more likely to me that she meant that all of the nonsense spouted by the extreme right (death panels and whatnot) made it impossible to have a reasonable discussion on what the bill was about. And that once it was passed all of that FUD would probably stop dominating the news so that the real information wouldn't be obscured anymore.
You might want to let her watch this: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1329362959167995041
they don't break any stories, send reporters out into the field
Actually, they do send out people in the field from time to time, and then I don't mean "put them in front of a blue or green screen". See e.g. Jason Jones' excellent Behind the Veil series that was recorded in Iran.
The gist of it is that Denmark exports almost all of the wind energy they generate to neighbouring countries, because most of the time the power generated is in excess of the demand.
Denmark is a very small country with lots of wind. I'd guess that they are doing this on purpose, simply producing power as an export product (probably a bit like Oregon in this story).
In Belgium, currently about 55% of our electricity is generated by nuclear plants. The problem? About 55% of the time (from 21h-6h on weekdays and all day on weekends), the power generated is in excess of demand and simply reducing the output of nuclear plants at night and on weekends is apparently not economically feasible (I can't imagine why they wouldn't do it if it were, it's not like Suez/Electrabel are corporations with a bleeding heart).
As a result, electricity is cheaper at night and on weekends, and virtually all of our motorways are lighted at night. Sure, it's nice to have all that light (except if you want to look at the night sky), and in the future this will also be useful for recharging electric cars, but the constant power generation by nuclear plants is not without its problems either.
Granted, that paper is several years old, but it still demonstrates the randomness of wind-based energy-generation pretty well.
It's not really random, but it definitely is variable. What is however generally more important is the predictability of the generation so you can adapt other means of production. And those prediction models get more accurate every year. In fact, the more wind mills are put into operation, the more accurate the models get because you get more measurement locations.
In Belgium, if the wind comes from the East, then based on measurements in Germany they can quite accurately predict the output of Belgian wind farms several hours in advance. This allows them to constantly adjust the power production of other plants (in Belgium it's mainly natural gas, often combined with burning garbage because we don't have room for huge landfills) and keep the grid at a more or less constant load.
Wind can never be used for base load energy generation without some kind of (expensive and impractical) energy-storing gimmicks, so instead of that how about just building a few comparatively cheap nuclear reactors and being set for decades? Perhaps at that point wind energy will be more feasible
One problem is that nuclear does not play nice together with wind/solar power generation because of its inflexibility in terms of output. It does not make sense to put lots of wind mills or solar panels on a grid that is almost completely fed by nuclear plants, because their production patterns cannot be used to complement each other. As a result, you get less investment in wind/solar power research, which is sort of a vicious circle.
It's true that you do need a base load guarantee and that localised wind production can in no way guarantee that. One of the keywords is locally though, because if you look at the wind over large areas of land (and/or water), the variations in total available wind power are reduced quite a bit (lots of nice graphs).
There's no silver bullet, but I think it's incorrect to paint the picture as if wind power is completely unsuited compared to nuclear power. Both have problems in terms of matching the demand and keeping an even grid load.
If there is a reason for doing something in another way, engineers (and many programmers) will do so by themselves. It's their nature.
You should probably talk to the grandparent, then. He thinks that it's unproductive to do something a different way.
He thinks it's unproductive to be forced to program something in a different way if there's no good technical reason for it, but rather only because someone else thought of/patented it first. I agree.
Maybe your background is programming rather than engineering, but in general, you want to have several different solutions for any problem. One may be optimal in some situations, others may be better elsewhere. But if someone said, "pfff, we already have a solution, let's not investigate any others," we'd be stuck with a one-size-barely-fits-all answer.
History has proven it does not go that way in practice.
Which part?
The part that where you suggest that if people can freely imitate innovation in software that we get stuck with a "one-size-barely-fits-all answer".
And if you say, "oh, ho, copyright only protects that exact code,
Then you'd still be wrong.
then you're still not innovating, and why should we consider your actions at all valuable for advancing the state of the art?
Just like the umpteenth novel about a magician's academy can be a valuable addition to the world of literature, so can the umpteenth app that supports wireless email checking.
And of course, your point is based on the classic fallacy that a single application would only ever use known algorithms or embody known "system and method to do X", or that it would be completely new. No single application in the world is like that.
Well, I guess having computer scientists spending their days finding new (usually suboptimal) algorithms for already solved problems to skirt the dozens of software patents any given project will likely infringe, rather than doing meaningful new work is an innovative concept, but it's certainly not a productive one.
No, it's both innovative and productive.
If there is a reason for doing something in another way, engineers (and many programmers) will do so by themselves. It's their nature.
Maybe your background is programming rather than engineering, but in general, you want to have several different solutions for any problem. One may be optimal in some situations, others may be better elsewhere. But if someone said, "pfff, we already have a solution, let's not investigate any others," we'd be stuck with a one-size-barely-fits-all answer.
History has proven it does not go that way in practice.
If you live your life by "include" statements, then innovating may seem unproductive, but then, if you're constantly copying other people's code, why shouldn't you pay them royalties?
If you copy code, you have to live by the copyright license (which may mandate paying royalties, releasing your source code, or anything else).
Monsanto can suck my dick.
Given Monsanto's business model, that might render you infertile more quickly than you can say "Monsanto's SuperSperm Discount Pack".
Apple didn't create Rosetta, but a small UK company called Transitive did (which in the mean time has been acquired by IBM)
It's worth noting that Apple is a big contributor (both financially and technically, I believe) to LLVM.
There's many people on Slashdot who might predict Apple would be the first to branch and "steal" LLVM code. So far, the opposite is true -- they realize the benefit of contributing back.
Those things aren't mutually exclusive (although I wouldn't call it stealing, not even between quotes, unlike the straw men you appear to be referring to). They're both open sourcing large parts of their work based on LLVM and keeping other parts closed (such as their LLVM-based OpenGL stack, and probably other things we don't even know about).
And to be clear, I'm not saying that's wrong, morally or otherwise. I'm just trying to illustrate that the world is not as black and white as you paint it and that the license allows such things (which would not be possible with something like the GPL -- and again, I'm not saying anything about whether this is good, bad or neither).
ARM's RVCT compiler produces code that is 30% faster than GCC (today)!
Since ARM forbids publishing any kind of performance or code size comparisons between RVCT and other compilers, I'm wondering where you got that number.
I would LOVE to see some comparison/benchmark that shows LLVM generated binaries being faster than GCC generated. CLang cries high and low about compiling faster than GCC, but they don't say anything about resulting executable speeds.
GCC still generates faster code overall as far as the SPEC benchmarks are concerned, but LLVM isn't too shabby (and in some cases beats GCC). See http://vmakarov.fedorapeople.org/spec/ (bottom two sub-entries in the left frame, check the SPECINT/SPECFP2000 score graphs)
The state loves to censor people - since nobody really believes in democracy.
Actually, I do, even though it's obviously not flawless. I've even directly seen it in action. In the European Parliament, in fact.
I do agree that being cynical and just railing against "the man" and "the kids" is much less energy intensive and less likely to result in disappointments though. It's also part of the problem.
A written declaration is not preparation any more than a (common) press release or blog post is. It's a rallying document. The preparation for directives happens with white/green papers, consultations amongst the ministers of the member states and externally ordered studies (although the Commission often messes those up, but that's another discussion).
These aren't legislative documents. That written declaration is presented by the MEP who took the initiative as something that simply enables MEPs to simply say "we want the commission to do something about child porn".
Yes, people who sign it without looking up all references are lazy. However, that does not exclude the fact that they are also misled. It also has nothing to do with whether or not the process in unnecessarily complex (there is nothing complex about this particular process).