JikesRVM has a small "bootstrap" VM that is used to get the main VM going, but after startup everything is run in the main VM (including the main VM itself).
There's nothing inherently bad about the concept. It's in fact quite interesting to have the JVM optimise itself along with the programs running inside it. And while the JikesRVM, being a research VM, does not run as fast as Sun's VM or IBM's commercial VMs, it's not that slow either (definitely not as slow as you'd first think of a JVM implemented in Java).
The main people negotiating about the ACTA are not the Commission, but the EU Council of Minister (which consists of ministers from the member states). And it is these ministers that refuse to inform their national parliaments of what the hell they are actually negotiating about.
So while it is easy to blame everything on the EU, in this case it's actually the national governments that are to blame. And a single national parliament should be able to derail this whole farce by requiring its government to disclose those documents before they get a mandate from said parliament to sign any agreement.
it is democratic as long as the people doing the negociations are democraticly elected. That is called representative democracy. "We the people" can punish the leaders if they f- up by not re-electing them.
No, that's not how the Dutch or other European democracies work. We have a system whereby you have a government and a parliament (with one or two chambers). While both the people in parliament and in the government are democratically elected, the job of the parliament is to scrutinise the government. It's all part of the checks and balances.
The problem with the ACTA is that the national parliaments have no access whatsoever to the texts under negotiation, and hence are unable to perform their jobs as representatives of the other citizens.
It is this leaking that shifts the balance away from the electoral result, So actually i believe that leaking does more harm to the democratic process than the fact that they do it behind closed doors.
That's only true if you believe that a representative democracy means that you "cast your vote and then forget about everything". That's a very naive and unrealistic view. Voting is only a part (but an important one) of what is necessary to make a representative democracy work.
Constant scrutiny and input from the general public is desirable and I dare say required to keep things functioning properly. After all, the people in government and parliament are not supposed to and cannot rule from an ivory tower, just decreeing what is "best for the populace", without any external input.
They are elected to represent us, but that does not mean that from that point on they will automatically always possess all necessary knowledge to decide about anything that matters. They regularly have to inform themselves about topics they don't know everything about.
So how should they inform themselves? By looking at studies and talking to experts. Studies are written by people and experts are also people. Inevitably, you are going to get some bias. Therefore, it is of paramount importance that they get input from an as broad as possible group of people so that they get an as complete as possible picture (rather than just the picture that one or other special interest group wants them to see).
Hence, public scrutiny and awareness about what is going on is of paramount importance to avoid lock-ins by special interest groups. That doesn't mean it is easy to avoid this, but it is a necessary precondition.
The European Court of Justice recently still stressed the importance of openness in law making in its ruling in the Turco case:
Openness in that respect contributes to strengthening democracy by allowing citizens to scrutinize all the information which has formed the basis of a legislative act. The possibility for citizens to find out the considerations underpinning legislative action is a precondition for the effective exercise of their democratic rights.
That table shows, from left to right, European subsidies to energy production based on resp. fossil fuels, nuclear power and renewable energy. Vertically, the rows read "money transfers and fiscal support", "non-internalised external costs", "transfer of past subsidies", "preferential treatment", and "total".
It's based on numbers from 2001 and I guess in the mean time the fiscal support for alternative energy has increased significantly, but then again it's got quite a bit to make up for...
The Eee PC was able to calculate prime numbers at about 90% of the rate of my existing three-year old laptop. So, on a processor-to-processor comparison, they are about even.
No, they are not. The Atom is an in-order processor. That means it will suck heavily at most regular desktop app code which has not been specifically scheduled for executing on it, because while stalling on memory accesses or waiting for expensive operations to finish it won't be able to do anything useful.
That does not mean that no code exists which may be just as fast on an Atom as on an out-of-order cpu (in case that code is heavily optimised, chances at that will probably increase), but it's far from "about even".
Pick your poison - you can either go the patent route - disclosure in exchange for exclusive control and royalties - or you can go the trade secret route where you risk the equivalent of Fermat's last theorem and risk losing a technology completely if the inventor dies before implementation or the innovation is kept to artificially localized use to keep it a secret.
Given that so many people argue that they need patents because otherwise their competitors would immediate "steal their inventions", the above very much sounds like a false dichotimy.
But unfortunately this does not answer the question
Not if he can't look beyond patents, no. Concrete example of an alternative: we have a Ford factory in Genk, Belgium. Every year, it gives a prize to any employee of the factory who came u with the idea that saved the most money without having an impact on the quality of the production. It gives them great PR, people are happily and actively helping to improve the production processes, used materials etc, and they immediately get concrete results rather than that they are paying to obtain a bunch of "rights" that hopefully, at one time in the future, will pay for themselves.
This may be bad for companies whose entire business plan is 'buy patents and sell them', 'patent things and then sue people', or 'buy patents and sue people', but not necessarily bad for companies whose business plan is 'invest billions of dollars on research and then patent the invention to recoup the investment (and the investment on research that didn't work out) so we can invest in more research', so I don't see a problem:)
Yes, just like banks that did not invest so much in junk bonds, or indeed, the entire world economy at large, are completely unaffected by the current credit crisis. Also, the purpose for which you get patents is irrelevant, it's the nature of the patents and number of the patents you get that counts.
Do you really think that those companies that actually need patents to recoup their investments won't care that the general valuation of patents suddenly implodes due to the overvaluation of the massive amounts of junk patents that have been granted over the years?
Additionally, certain patent acquirement strategies significantly increasethe risk of being the target of patent lawsuits, because they paint a bullseye on your company's strategic development, enabling patent trolls to predict it, patent "alongside" your development and sue you based on that.
And then there's still this whole patent bubble that's still forming, fairly similar to how the whole credit crisis came to be. In time, the value of patents is going to come crashing down just as spectacularly, regardless of how many times you repeat the holy yet hollow mantra "but our intellectual property must be protected!"
Re:Just do what your parents did..
on
Good Email For Kids?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Maybe you are too young to realize this, but there was a time when this thing called the internet and email didn't exist, and it wasn't that long ago...
And before that there was time when there wasn't tv to corrupt the kids. And before that there was a time when weren't any "bad" magazines. Every generation has its own new "evils" which didn't exist when they were young and from which they think they need to protect their kids.
That's exactly how I ftp'd during my first steps on the Internet, when all I had was a dial-up account with email access. FTP Mail, aka everything that's old will be new again...
And if the patient has no money, he gives them several free samples.
If the patient has no money then they get virtually all costs back from our (Belgian) national healthcare system. Promotional samples don't even register as a blip on the radar when tackling healthcare challenges faced by "patients with no money". Trying to dress this up as some form of socially responsible charity is, as you like to say, disingenuous.
Since free samples make drugs cheaper (in aggregate)
Oh, please. Companies don't give stuff away to make things cheaper. That's all calculated into the price of the products they sell.
Obviously, medicins that are more successful (as in: more people buy them, not necessarily "more effective") may be sold cheaper than the rest since they can make the same profits in aggregate anyway. That's a general business principle, and marketing (including handing out free samples) may be one way to get there.
That does not mean that the best marketed product is also the best product though, nor that overall prices will be lower than if less money were spent on marketing by all parties involved and some other product got very popular for whatever reason.
The basic complaint is that drug companies spend too much on promotion and not enough on R&D.
No, the basic complaint is that drug companies always justify their needs for continuation patents, shaky lawsuits against generic medicin companies, high prices, patents on research largely performed by/in cooperation with public institutions, etc., by their huge R&D budgets. When it then turns out that they spend more on marketing than on R&D, I think it's logical that people are a bit miffed.
After all, they appear to need all that money more for marketing than for R&D. And if that's the case, overall healthcare quality may actually be better served with less exclusivity.
I think that it is at the least disingenuous to count them as overspending in promotion
Yes, it's clear you like the pharma industry a lot and want to discredit that study as much as possible, but I've seen more disingenuous hand waving and armchair economic reasoning from you in these two posts than in that entire study. For example, they cite three different, independently organised large scale studies, and are then accused by you of cherry picking numbers without you giving any counterexample whatsoever (not even a pharma-sponsored "white paper").
Also, according to that report, free samples are promotion costs.
Well, duh. My father gets such samples all the time, along with glossy brochures extolling their fantastic effects and why he should prescribe them to his patients.
That quote comes from someone of the Home Office (the people responding for this senseless spending spree), so yes, that's not really an impartial source.
The UK has the most camera's per capita, I think. Are there any numbers available on how much crime has decreased in those areas where the camera's are? Also how much have they incread in surrounding areas where they are not.
but you can put a combination of windmills, geo-thermal, solar panels, and waste incinerators (with their heat used for both electricity generation and heating industrial or other buildings, rather than just for heating rivers) in or in the neighbourhood of places where the electricity is actually needed.
No you can't.
There is a cooperative in Belgium, called Ecopower, which was started as an experiment to figure out whether this is feasible. In the 17 years since it was founded, the people involved have gained a lot of expertise in this field.
Right now they own a variety of wind turbines, water turbines and co-own a number of photo-voltaic installations that shareholders put on their roofs. At the last general assembly, they presented a scheme of how, using mostly renewable localised production, all of Flanders (the northern region of Belgium, with about 6 million inhabitants) could be supplied with electricity (taking into account peak usages, production lows etc).
They indeed still need a number of conventional plants as backup (be it natural gas, coal, nuclear, whatever; although I doubt it will be coal, since we closed our last coal plant in Belgium many years ago), but surprisingly few.
But if you start putting them everywhere you can because you want to be green like Europe does, they can end up costing 2x-4x as much per kWh as coal and nuclear.
There is more to the cost than just the installation cost. Rolling blackouts because a centralised production area or transmission line was hit by a natural disaster (which with increasing global climate instability is probably only going to get worse), problems to due huge companies who own large swaths of the production chain getting in trouble (Enron, anyone?), constant monitoring and securing nuclear installations and cleaning up pollution when it occurs (and getting rid of the waste in a safe way), the ability to organically grow capacity and hence to constantly add newer and more efficient generators to the mix (or take out badly performing ones),...
Then there's also the fact that if you bring the power production closer to the people, they'll automatically become more conscious about their power usage and reduce their usage (not necessarily by losing comfort, but e.g. by using better isolation, switching off appliances that are normally on standby, buying appliances that are less power-hungry). Ecopower with its cooperative model takes this even further, by letting people profit directly from the power they do not use (it can be sold off to others, increasing profits for the shareholders).
And with the green electricity certificates model that Belgium uses, Ecopower can actually offer its electricity at quite competitive prices as long as you don't use more than the average family. I.e., their prices scale linearly and there is no fixed cost, rather than that you start with a fixed cost and that over a certain amount of energy the cost per kilowatt-hour decreases. For me personally, they're the cheapest of all electricity companies in Belgium.
Of course, this is due to the fact that the government created this market in green electricity certificates and consequently producers of non-green energy are basically subsidising this cooperative. However, given the amount of money that our government poured into nuclear power in the past to get it where it stands today, I don't think that's unreasonable (the yearly amount of direct subsidies to nuclear power today still dwarfs that for renewable power today). And thanks to experiments like Ecopower it is possible to find out in practice how realistic such models are, and at the same time to create a market for green power generators so money gets invested in improving them.
One of the advantages of most ways to produce clean energy is exactly that it is easier to distribute the power generation over different locations. You can't put a nuclear plant next to each village, but you can put a combination of windmills, geo-thermal, solar panels, and waste incinerators (with their heat used for both electricity generation and heating industrial or other buildings, rather than just for heating rivers) in or in the neighbourhood of places where the electricity is actually needed.
This both lowers the stress imposed on large scale heavy duty power distribution nets, and reduces single points of failure and associated cascade effects. Of course, when you build massive wind/solar/... farms in certain places, you're going to need massive distribution capacity there just like in case you'd build any other large scale power plant.
Slashdot Mirror
The (small and simple) bootstrap VM is written in C++.
JikesRVM has a small "bootstrap" VM that is used to get the main VM going, but after startup everything is run in the main VM (including the main VM itself).
There's nothing inherently bad about the concept. It's in fact quite interesting to have the JVM optimise itself along with the programs running inside it. And while the JikesRVM, being a research VM, does not run as fast as Sun's VM or IBM's commercial VMs, it's not that slow either (definitely not as slow as you'd first think of a JVM implemented in Java).
http://jikesrvm.org/
The main people negotiating about the ACTA are not the Commission, but the EU Council of Minister (which consists of ministers from the member states). And it is these ministers that refuse to inform their national parliaments of what the hell they are actually negotiating about.
So while it is easy to blame everything on the EU, in this case it's actually the national governments that are to blame. And a single national parliament should be able to derail this whole farce by requiring its government to disclose those documents before they get a mandate from said parliament to sign any agreement.
it is democratic as long as the people doing the negociations are democraticly elected. That is called representative democracy. "We the people" can punish the leaders if they f- up by not re-electing them.
No, that's not how the Dutch or other European democracies work. We have a system whereby you have a government and a parliament (with one or two chambers). While both the people in parliament and in the government are democratically elected, the job of the parliament is to scrutinise the government. It's all part of the checks and balances.
The problem with the ACTA is that the national parliaments have no access whatsoever to the texts under negotiation, and hence are unable to perform their jobs as representatives of the other citizens.
It is this leaking that shifts the balance away from the electoral result, So actually i believe that leaking does more harm to the democratic process than the fact that they do it behind closed doors.
That's only true if you believe that a representative democracy means that you "cast your vote and then forget about everything". That's a very naive and unrealistic view. Voting is only a part (but an important one) of what is necessary to make a representative democracy work.
Constant scrutiny and input from the general public is desirable and I dare say required to keep things functioning properly. After all, the people in government and parliament are not supposed to and cannot rule from an ivory tower, just decreeing what is "best for the populace", without any external input.
They are elected to represent us, but that does not mean that from that point on they will automatically always possess all necessary knowledge to decide about anything that matters. They regularly have to inform themselves about topics they don't know everything about.
So how should they inform themselves? By looking at studies and talking to experts. Studies are written by people and experts are also people. Inevitably, you are going to get some bias. Therefore, it is of paramount importance that they get input from an as broad as possible group of people so that they get an as complete as possible picture (rather than just the picture that one or other special interest group wants them to see).
Hence, public scrutiny and awareness about what is going on is of paramount importance to avoid lock-ins by special interest groups. That doesn't mean it is easy to avoid this, but it is a necessary precondition.
The European Court of Justice recently still stressed the importance of openness in law making in its ruling in the Turco case:
Openness in that respect contributes to strengthening democracy by allowing citizens to scrutinize all the information which has formed the basis of a legislative act. The possibility for citizens to find out the considerations underpinning legislative action is a precondition for the effective exercise of their democratic rights.
And when they've achieved their goals how will they feel when the next superpower does them the same way?
It's not like the current superpower doesn't use "cyber warfare" to obtain technology transfer and market dominance (search for "Published cases".
There's nothing really new here, except for possibly some alternate methodologies.
If you add up all subsidies from the past for fossil/nuclear, sure.
At least in Europe that's not true (Dutch, and also in French).
That table shows, from left to right, European subsidies to energy production based on resp. fossil fuels, nuclear power and renewable energy. Vertically, the rows read "money transfers and fiscal support", "non-internalised external costs", "transfer of past subsidies", "preferential treatment", and "total".
It's based on numbers from 2001 and I guess in the mean time the fiscal support for alternative energy has increased significantly, but then again it's got quite a bit to make up for...
No, they are not. The Atom is an in-order processor. That means it will suck heavily at most regular desktop app code which has not been specifically scheduled for executing on it, because while stalling on memory accesses or waiting for expensive operations to finish it won't be able to do anything useful.
That does not mean that no code exists which may be just as fast on an Atom as on an out-of-order cpu (in case that code is heavily optimised, chances at that will probably increase), but it's far from "about even".
Given that so many people argue that they need patents because otherwise their competitors would immediate "steal their inventions", the above very much sounds like a false dichotimy.
Not if he can't look beyond patents, no. Concrete example of an alternative: we have a Ford factory in Genk, Belgium. Every year, it gives a prize to any employee of the factory who came u with the idea that saved the most money without having an impact on the quality of the production. It gives them great PR, people are happily and actively helping to improve the production processes, used materials etc, and they immediately get concrete results rather than that they are paying to obtain a bunch of "rights" that hopefully, at one time in the future, will pay for themselves.
Yes, just like banks that did not invest so much in junk bonds, or indeed, the entire world economy at large, are completely unaffected by the current credit crisis. Also, the purpose for which you get patents is irrelevant, it's the nature of the patents and number of the patents you get that counts.
Do you really think that those companies that actually need patents to recoup their investments won't care that the general valuation of patents suddenly implodes due to the overvaluation of the massive amounts of junk patents that have been granted over the years?
Because more patents are not necessarily better.
Additionally, certain patent acquirement strategies significantly increasethe risk of being the target of patent lawsuits, because they paint a bullseye on your company's strategic development, enabling patent trolls to predict it, patent "alongside" your development and sue you based on that.
And then there's still this whole patent bubble that's still forming, fairly similar to how the whole credit crisis came to be. In time, the value of patents is going to come crashing down just as spectacularly, regardless of how many times you repeat the holy yet hollow mantra "but our intellectual property must be protected!"
And before that there was time when there wasn't tv to corrupt the kids. And before that there was a time when weren't any "bad" magazines. Every generation has its own new "evils" which didn't exist when they were young and from which they think they need to protect their kids.
That's exactly how I ftp'd during my first steps on the Internet, when all I had was a dial-up account with email access. FTP Mail, aka everything that's old will be new again...
And if the patient has no money, he gives them several free samples.
If the patient has no money then they get virtually all costs back from our (Belgian) national healthcare system. Promotional samples don't even register as a blip on the radar when tackling healthcare challenges faced by "patients with no money". Trying to dress this up as some form of socially responsible charity is, as you like to say, disingenuous.
Since free samples make drugs cheaper (in aggregate)
Oh, please. Companies don't give stuff away to make things cheaper. That's all calculated into the price of the products they sell.
Obviously, medicins that are more successful (as in: more people buy them, not necessarily "more effective") may be sold cheaper than the rest since they can make the same profits in aggregate anyway. That's a general business principle, and marketing (including handing out free samples) may be one way to get there.
That does not mean that the best marketed product is also the best product though, nor that overall prices will be lower than if less money were spent on marketing by all parties involved and some other product got very popular for whatever reason.
The basic complaint is that drug companies spend too much on promotion and not enough on R&D.
No, the basic complaint is that drug companies always justify their needs for continuation patents, shaky lawsuits against generic medicin companies, high prices, patents on research largely performed by/in cooperation with public institutions, etc., by their huge R&D budgets. When it then turns out that they spend more on marketing than on R&D, I think it's logical that people are a bit miffed.
After all, they appear to need all that money more for marketing than for R&D. And if that's the case, overall healthcare quality may actually be better served with less exclusivity.
I think that it is at the least disingenuous to count them as overspending in promotion
Yes, it's clear you like the pharma industry a lot and want to discredit that study as much as possible, but I've seen more disingenuous hand waving and armchair economic reasoning from you in these two posts than in that entire study. For example, they cite three different, independently organised large scale studies, and are then accused by you of cherry picking numbers without you giving any counterexample whatsoever (not even a pharma-sponsored "white paper").
Also, according to that report, free samples are promotion costs.
Well, duh. My father gets such samples all the time, along with glossy brochures extolling their fantastic effects and why he should prescribe them to his patients.
The last trailer reminded me a lot of Munchkin. A computerised Munchkin could be really cool :)
That quote comes from someone of the Home Office (the people responding for this senseless spending spree), so yes, that's not really an impartial source.
The study that you linked does not indicate whether the cameras help prevent crime - only whether they were used to help in convictions.
The first one I mentioned in this post does. It's far from conclusive though.
The UK has the most camera's per capita, I think. Are there any numbers available on how much crime has decreased in those areas where the camera's are? Also how much have they incread in surrounding areas where they are not.
Crime doesn't move away when cctv's are installed. They simply have pretty much no consistent effects on crime rates at all. And they generally don't help with solving crimes either.
They've had this in london for a while, and it's been a severe invasion of privacy.
And it cost billions of pounds yet doesn't help in actually fighting crime.
No you can't.
There is a cooperative in Belgium, called Ecopower, which was started as an experiment to figure out whether this is feasible. In the 17 years since it was founded, the people involved have gained a lot of expertise in this field.
Right now they own a variety of wind turbines, water turbines and co-own a number of photo-voltaic installations that shareholders put on their roofs. At the last general assembly, they presented a scheme of how, using mostly renewable localised production, all of Flanders (the northern region of Belgium, with about 6 million inhabitants) could be supplied with electricity (taking into account peak usages, production lows etc).
They indeed still need a number of conventional plants as backup (be it natural gas, coal, nuclear, whatever; although I doubt it will be coal, since we closed our last coal plant in Belgium many years ago), but surprisingly few.
But if you start putting them everywhere you can because you want to be green like Europe does, they can end up costing 2x-4x as much per kWh as coal and nuclear.
There is more to the cost than just the installation cost. Rolling blackouts because a centralised production area or transmission line was hit by a natural disaster (which with increasing global climate instability is probably only going to get worse), problems to due huge companies who own large swaths of the production chain getting in trouble (Enron, anyone?), constant monitoring and securing nuclear installations and cleaning up pollution when it occurs (and getting rid of the waste in a safe way), the ability to organically grow capacity and hence to constantly add newer and more efficient generators to the mix (or take out badly performing ones), ...
Then there's also the fact that if you bring the power production closer to the people, they'll automatically become more conscious about their power usage and reduce their usage (not necessarily by losing comfort, but e.g. by using better isolation, switching off appliances that are normally on standby, buying appliances that are less power-hungry). Ecopower with its cooperative model takes this even further, by letting people profit directly from the power they do not use (it can be sold off to others, increasing profits for the shareholders).
And with the green electricity certificates model that Belgium uses, Ecopower can actually offer its electricity at quite competitive prices as long as you don't use more than the average family. I.e., their prices scale linearly and there is no fixed cost, rather than that you start with a fixed cost and that over a certain amount of energy the cost per kilowatt-hour decreases. For me personally, they're the cheapest of all electricity companies in Belgium.
Of course, this is due to the fact that the government created this market in green electricity certificates and consequently producers of non-green energy are basically subsidising this cooperative. However, given the amount of money that our government poured into nuclear power in the past to get it where it stands today, I don't think that's unreasonable (the yearly amount of direct subsidies to nuclear power today still dwarfs that for renewable power today). And thanks to experiments like Ecopower it is possible to find out in practice how realistic such models are, and at the same time to create a market for green power generators so money gets invested in improving them.
One of the advantages of most ways to produce clean energy is exactly that it is easier to distribute the power generation over different locations. You can't put a nuclear plant next to each village, but you can put a combination of windmills, geo-thermal, solar panels, and waste incinerators (with their heat used for both electricity generation and heating industrial or other buildings, rather than just for heating rivers) in or in the neighbourhood of places where the electricity is actually needed.
This both lowers the stress imposed on large scale heavy duty power distribution nets, and reduces single points of failure and associated cascade effects. Of course, when you build massive wind/solar/... farms in certain places, you're going to need massive distribution capacity there just like in case you'd build any other large scale power plant.