Incidentally, Wikipedia's liberalism I really don't care what Wikipedia thinks about its definition of liberalism. Really, unless its technical in nature, I tend not to trust any supposedly authoritative source.
Hmm... interestingly put. But it seems you're using doublespeak to redefine the opposition, while in your GP post claiming that your own personal ideology is somehow *different* and thus exempt from commonsense criticism we might levy against 'conservatives'
It's very simple and your argument is very simple. In one corner, you have freedom, and on the other corner, you have all of the liberal pet issues such as the environment, desegregation, ending the individual right to own guns, redistribution of wealth and so forth. Every single liberal pet cause requires government intervention, and is a reduction in freedom. It just is. When you say that you are in favor of bussing, gun control, progressive taxation, environmental legislation, you have to have more taxes and more police, and therefor, less freedom. Freedom is more than a buzzword. We conservatives choose our policies not because we particularly hate the planet, but because we simply value freedom more. None of your causes are worth the dent to our freedom, plain and simple, no matter how good they are or how much convince yourselves that you are saints.
today's conservatives are really corporatists, which is just an opaque way of saying fascist, and thus, they do not value freedom very much at all, no matter how much they claim they do
Again, no. First off, your redefinition of fascism is completely wrong. Yeah, there are reconstructionist liberal historians you can cite that are trying to paint the economics of the 1930s Italy and Germany into something that they weren't, but you would completely miss the point.
But even if your definition were valid, your application of it simply isn't true and it is very easy to empirically prove. Republicans merely say that if you form a company, you should be allowed to keep what you make, and in general, be able to operate without government interference. Whether you win or you lose in business, there is no government interference.
Democrats, on the other hand, routinely work in the context of government to lock in corporations, increase social stability, basically, to create a sort of the fascist regime you speak of. They want to pick economic winners and "harness" corporations for their own state goals.
The easiest way to see this is who is the first to bail out big corporations in the USA when they get into trouble, in exchange for some corporate concession. Generally speaking, its the Democrats.
It wasn't Ronald Reagan that bailed out Chrysler, that was Jimmy Carter.
When GM posted its enormous losses last year, George Bush said that they should build better cars, but Barrack Obama offered them a multibillion dollar aid package, if they would build the kind of cars he liked.
As most good conservative writers would note, today's conservatism is classicially liberalism, yes, that's absolutely right. But today's liberals are really socialists, and thus, they do not value freedom very much at all, even if they think they do.
I hear the post office is moving to your model though. Because people get a lot of junk mail and it takes a lot of time for the post office to sort that junk mail, they're going to start delivering all the mail COD, and you don't get a choice not to receive it.
No. The post office charges the sender of the message, not the recipient. The internet charges the recipient, via the ISP. If the likes of slashdot had to pay comcast to send you a web page, and we all received our broadband at no charge, that would be the model most comparable to the post office.
Dear God, I pride myself on being a right wing troll, and I am capitalist to the core, but when companies start a public campaign to deceive citizens into thinking they have no rights in order to make a buck, then a line in the sand must be drawn.
The fact is very simple - corporations have less of a right to exist than consumers have of a fair use in copyright, and, even more importantly, the desirability of corporate profits does not entitle them into twisting laws to create an oligarchy. Capitalism exists as an American system to benefit the American people, and not the other way around. Corporations are no more entitled to rent seeking and guaranteed profits than a lazy man is entitled to a government check. If corporations want to earn more money, then they should be compelled to invent new products and new services, not attempt to bend the will of the government and the soul of the people into being enslaved into old products, old services, and worst of all, old ideas.
My fellow Republicans need to be reminded that to be a genuine conservative is to value freedom first and foremost. From that freedom we do have a prosperous society, yes, but prosperity is not why we value freedom and we should not let our greed rule deceive us into believing that the point of freedom is profits for someone else. There will come a time, and it may be soon, when we have to choose between freedom versus wealth, and we can only hope that men of good conscience will have to see that the former is always priceless.
Yeah, it's a terrible thing, violation of civil rights, but, ya know.. what's the hourly rate and skillset for this thing! Is there a soda perk, or, do we all get our complimentary terror fighting machine gun!
The issue here is really whether the sender of a message to a consumer should have to pay more or less depending on how the message is sent. If the internet were structured so that, yeah, a person pushing out content might actually have to pay when they hit a certain threshold, then, automatically you would see some cruft cleaned out.
Spam would certainly diminish. If every email message cost two cents, you would certainly wind up with less of it. My web site, http://www.mightyware.com/ only gets about 1000 uniques a month, but sometimes I wind up with nearly that many spams per day. It's just out of control.
Sure, you can argue that the government pays for a lot of the internet, but the government certainly isn't paying for that much anymore. The bulk of it is coming out of comcast and other ISP's pockets, and, to their eyes, seeing the lions share of their bandwidth being consumed by google or microsoft surely seems somehow unfair. It's like, comcast is laying out a ton of money, so google and microsoft and cnn can all get rich really on the hardware that other people have bought.
So, yeah, if ISPs could soak the likes of Ballmer and the Google guys, then, why not...
Nerds are raised world wide. In the USA, Nerds are the "outcasts" from the mainstream body during H.S., as they aren't sports heros. Then, in college, they wind up in classes with a bunch of people from around the world, looking to get a good engineering education. If you go onto get a Phd, it becomes even more so.
During the whole time, Nerds are playing with computers, engaging in science at least as a hobby, and are reading about contributions from people all over the planet, and in many different cultures. So, you really, wind up with, a body of people that are really raised to be in and then engage in a course of study and profession that requires you to set aside prejudices to not only succeed, but to make friends as well.
The question really is, not, how are nerds libertarians, but really, how could any nerd not be a libertarian, except as a reactionary thing.
That's the whole point. If I invent a product, chances are, in order to really get it out, I will probably wind up infringing on someone else's patent in order to get a complete solution.
For example, let's say I have a revolutionary new programming language. Great stuff, but, ultimately, it will need a bunch of existing technologies to make it work. I'll need parse trees, string manipulations, code generation, and hey, why not an IDE, all of which are covered by a bazillion patents already.
So, if I bring my product to market, the best I can possibly hope for is a cross licensing agreement with a major player, and that in turn, means they can crush me. Or, they can work around my patent in some way, still get the feature, and crush me. Patents don't protect ideas, unless you have a lot of very good patent attorneys and those cost big bucks.
In the world of machines, this doesn't happen. If I invent a new kind of a screw, its pretty obvious that the screw is a patentable thing. But software doesn't exist at that level of componentry and most likely never will. It simply can't. Software wants to integrate and to some extent, that makes it unique from the physical world. You don't need to integrate a particular kind of screw into every single socket and with every single tool, but ultimately, with software, you do wind up having to talk to every kind of protocol, database, and GUI, and in doing so, you wind up flying into a hailstorm of patents.
Seriously, when's the last time anyone has actually checked to see if they infringe before they write something? Only a big company can really afford to do it. Face it, the idea of a little guy with a software patent is a myth, 95% of the time, and its simply not worth the cost to the rest of us - even if we work in a big corporation.
How does the patent in this case "promote the useful arts and sciences." Patents don't do anything to benefit the public. Patents were fine in an era before the need for capital became its own barrier to entry in a given market, but, any more, they are not only a relic, but a dangerous, anti-competitive one. Would it be a troll to say anyone who is in favor of patents is really in favor of oligarchy?
1) When a farm is converted to housing, a lot of trees go up, and as a result, we are sort of reforesting ourselves.
2) I left an open bag of top soil and an open bag of grass seed sitting on top of each other, next to a leaky hose. Sure enough, the water dripped down, and, when I was cleaning out my garage, I discovered I had a small lawn inside.
3) Also, if you take a look at some industrial areas in PA, you'll find that a lot of old buildings are being overrun by nature.
The moral of the story, point by point, is this. 1) a lot of what was farmland was trees to begin with, and is going back to trees. 2) nature always finds away to prosper, even if you turn your back on it for a month, and 3) large parts of American cities that were manufacturing centers will be reforested within our lifetimes, and you can see that happening now, if you ride the R2 rail line from Chester PA to Philadelphia, and I imagine in other cities as well.
Finally, fuel prices are rising and will continue to rise, and this will over time put a break in the suburban sprawl that so many are against.
The obvious flipside to this is, is the USA spying on Chinese computers? I would bet that we are!
With that said, to some degree, spying is something that Great Powers have historically done. But, now, in an era where public intentions are something different than the real ones, by any national actor, allowing a rival some degree of a looksee can be a useful tool.
For one, you can feed the rival disinformation, and in the USA, that's pretty easy to do. We let the Chinese have a look at some "secret" Pentagon systems, then, turn around and leak that such an assault was made to the popular media. This surely gets some airplay, helping to validate the "true" nature of the Pentagon secrets. China then absorbs some made up junk as its canon, and the USA pulls a fast one. OR, the data might actually be legitimate, if we want to make sure that, for example, that our putting an extra carrier in the Persian gulf is not an act to form up a "bomb China" invasion force.
Used properly, spying can be used to win diplomatic initiatives, and to prevent wars among great powers, which, these days, would be a humanity damaging affair.
There's a number of excellent Hubble images of just about everything in our solar system to the most distant galaxies.
I would put my money on Hubble, for two reasons.
First, the averaging algorithm is not without its flaws. They make the assumption that by averaging out a bunch of images, you eliminate distortion. For this to work, you have to assume that the probability of a particular pixel being in the right spot is higher as the distortion would essentially be random, and that could theoretically not be the case. If the distortion is completely random, then, averaging a set of images would essentially lose the pixel that is being pushed around its "real" spot by the atmosphere, and you can actually see that, as the corrected images still look muddy compared to their HST or even adaptive optic counterparts.
Secondly, the atmosphere doesn't just distort light, it also filters it. You can use averaging to remove distortion "noise", but, there's really no way to ascertain what information was removed by the atmosphere.
The bottom line is, yes, you can get some pretty good results with averaging software, but, if you have money to spend, the best images are going to be space based, and its still going to cost a billion dollars. Given the promise the heavens hold for the advance of human understanding, let alone essentially infinite resources, one only hopes that policy makers will not be mislead by the outrageous claim that one can get the best images from the ground. You can't. HST should not be thought of as an aberration made obsolete by adaptative optics or the low budget averaging. Low budget averaging and adaptive optics really need to be thought of as getting by until we can put larger, and better visible wavelength telescopes into space.
Imagine what a space based Mt. Palomar sized mirror could do, if in space!
Everyone is caught up in this notion of "your body is your temple", and that, you have an inviolate right to your body, and, I'd argue that you don't. There's nothing that you do with your body that is without social consequence, from the food you eat, water you drink, the air you breath, and the waste you make. Really, the whole "it's my body" argument that women have when defining abortion rights or even the notion of "reproductive rights" is utterly laughable. The tribe ultimately has every right to boot you off the island and it certainly may control its breedings. It is only our comperitive wealth that allows us to ignore this, and, so, arguing absolutes about freedom in an ephemeral context will only doom us overall. At some point, we may need to legislate birth rates or even those who should be born, and organize humanity optimally for an even distribution of sexual activity.
Just screw over a bunch of shareholders so that a few lawyers can get rich. Really, there's no "consumer" benefit to this at all. Class action lawsuits have become a tax that rich people collect at the expense of the common man, and anyone who sees otherwise needs to take off their anti-corporation tinfoil hats...
Here's the thing. Visual Studio 2005 for C# is probably the most "cushy" environment out there. But, if you are writing in C++, then, I've found KDevelop to be pretty damn nice. For 64 bit C++, KDevelop and Linux are a long way ahead of Windows. For assembly language, KDevelop does remarkably well. OTH, Visual Studio is a huge pain in the rear and getting more so.
Autocomplete in C++ sucks, and a lot of that has to do with the language itself, but, in terms of the compiler telling you exactly what is wrong, I think GCC is better than Visual C++. I really think, for a number of reasons, even though I do like Windows, that Linux is the place to be for C/C++ 64 bit development, or for that matter, SSEn development, and I think most developers would prefer it to.
Visual Studio sucks for C++, what more do you need!
The Beatles were a band, but the bulk of the songs were written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and all of the greatest songs were written by individually by any one of them. Teams are good for collaborating on ways to go where one person has already decided that you will go, but are not good at coming up with solutions to problems.
"Damn it, Bones, you're a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can't be taken away with a wave of a magic wand. They're the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don't want my pain taken away! I need my pain!"
Yes, I have watched ST-V, and I have to admit, that the above line might well be my favorite Kirk line in all of Star Trek. That, and "why does God need a starship."
I think ST-V was an ambitious movie, and had it better effects and a bit better editing, then, it might well have been a classic.
A lot of people writing on this board want Star Trek to become more dark, the characters less gung ho and somehow, that will make them "more realistic". That's patently absurd.
Let's understand this, guys that get to command state of the art "ships-of-the-line" are better than the rest of us average joes, just as much as guys that make it through Annapolis, then, work their way through years of active duty, to command an aircraft carrier or a ballistic missile submarine, are better than the rest of us. The whole point of the existence of military culture is to vett through thousands of young men to ultimately produce a handful of people that know how to take a state of the art system costing billions of dollars into battle. We expect these people to be gung-ho, idealistic, and confident, and our expectations of the bridge staff of one of 13 ships of the line in the Federation should be more, not less. After all, if you figure that the likes of NCC-1701 had only 400 or so crewman, out of a Federation population of tens of billions, you would expect that every man or woman on that ship would be of first rate education, character, and quality.
Roddenberry, for all of his other faults, nailed this exactly right on the head. Writers that want to have officers dragged down by "personal issues", filling people with all manner of dark character conflicts, really, are just catering to the masses. Yes Virginia, not everyone has mommy issues, and those that don't, get picked for the big jobs that you don't.
It's not bundling software, it's not embrace and extend, that gets Microsoft into hot water. That's all authoring of software, and rivals all bundle, and all would embrace and extend if they could.
It's when Microsoft calls up hardware vendors such as Dell and tells them that they will have their Windows license revoked if they sell another OS, that's where you need the Feds to step in. At that point, Microsoft is not investing to add features, but is really working to the detrminent of consumers.
That Microsoft engages in such behavior is already proven. During the OS/2 vs Windows days, Microsoft threatened IBM with license termination if they continued to promote and develop OS/2. IBM withdrew. During the Netscape wars, Microsoft strong armed vendors to bundle the inferior IE2.0 with Windows 95, which confused the market long enough to deny Netscape needed funding for a future release, AND, bought Microsoft time to make an IE 4.0 which really was a better product. In the former case, Microsoft was engaging in restraint of trade, and in the second case, they were tying, both of which are illegal under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
The only thing that saved them in the USA is that what constitutes tying in the software business is entirely up in the air. In general, the government under any modern administration wants to give businesses as free as a hand as possible to arrange their product offerings. In Europe, however, this is not nearly so much the case, and geopolitical concerns play as well. The EU is something of an economic rival to the USA, and thus they have absolutely no problem slamming Microsoft in any number of ways, and they have.
Troll me down again, but while I may disagree with many slash dotters about when something should be publicly funded, this 2nd amendment purist, capitalist, right wingnut is honored to stand with the most radical left wing, nationalize everything liberal when something is publicly funded. All federal research, federally funded research, should be in the public domain and for any use by US citizens, and by extension, the world. Most of us who are interested in this data would just as soon be able to get loads of open data anyway. That includes all NASA research, images, all government data, census, geographical, geological, or any other sort of non-classified data that the government might collect or generate as part of its ongoing operation.
Zoraster is all well and good, but, Jews have given us the theory of relativity, numerous advances in quantum physics, chemistry and the arts. Where's the Iranian Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen or Steven Spielberg or Albert Einstein? Intel's Core architecture was done by a design lab located in Israel. What chip architecture is Iran working on?
The fact of the matter is, Iran exists today because it is sitting a mountain of oil and doling it out, while Israel is sitting in a wasteland and is churning out numerous intellectual advances.
From a foreign policy perspective, Iran IS waging a war of aggression. Iran funds many Islamic terror groups, and wages her "wars" via proxy suicide bombers. Israel has absolutely nothing to do with Iran, but, Iran has repeatedly said that it will continue to support those people who work to destroy Israel, simply because of religious differences.
People on this board yelp about George Bush and the Christian Right in the USA, but the activities of the Christian Right are limited to verbal criticisms of gay people and abortion, and a refusal to agree that gays can be married. In Iran, people are WHIPPED and STONED for committing all manner of religious differences. Daily Iranian propaganda rails on about jews, about christians, and yes, even about the original Persian zoroastrainism. Newspapers are closed down, the internet is restricted.
If you think Iran is so great, go ahead go to DC and shout that George Bush and the Supreme Court has sex with donkeys and make a picture of Jesus as some sort of a monkey. Then, go to Tel Aviv and say the same about Israel's leaders and Moses. Then, go back to Tehran, and try the same but about Mohammed. I guarantee you, you will be ignored in DC, ignored in Tel Aviv, but then, you will probably be arrested and might even be executed in Iran.
Pining for the good old days of what Islam did or Persia did hundreds of years ago will not change the situation in Iran now. The government is so repressive that the Iranian people will not be able to accomplish anything of any significance forever. Iran's government is determined to keep her people in the dark ages, and until you accept that, then, Iran is forever lost.
Slashdot Mirror
I create artificial life with a 12 pack of Genny Cream Ales and a Dominos Pizza!
Incidentally, Wikipedia's liberalism I really don't care what Wikipedia thinks about its definition of liberalism. Really, unless its technical in nature, I tend not to trust any supposedly authoritative source.
Hmm... interestingly put. But it seems you're using doublespeak to redefine the opposition, while in your GP post claiming that your own personal ideology is somehow *different* and thus exempt from commonsense criticism we might levy against 'conservatives'
It's very simple and your argument is very simple. In one corner, you have freedom, and on the other corner, you have all of the liberal pet issues such as the environment, desegregation, ending the individual right to own guns, redistribution of wealth and so forth. Every single liberal pet cause requires government intervention, and is a reduction in freedom. It just is. When you say that you are in favor of bussing, gun control, progressive taxation, environmental legislation, you have to have more taxes and more police, and therefor, less freedom. Freedom is more than a buzzword. We conservatives choose our policies not because we particularly hate the planet, but because we simply value freedom more. None of your causes are worth the dent to our freedom, plain and simple, no matter how good they are or how much convince yourselves that you are saints.
today's conservatives are really corporatists, which is just an opaque way of saying fascist, and thus, they do not value freedom very much at all, no matter how much they claim they do
Again, no. First off, your redefinition of fascism is completely wrong. Yeah, there are reconstructionist liberal historians you can cite that are trying to paint the economics of the 1930s Italy and Germany into something that they weren't, but you would completely miss the point.
But even if your definition were valid, your application of it simply isn't true and it is very easy to empirically prove. Republicans merely say that if you form a company, you should be allowed to keep what you make, and in general, be able to operate without government interference. Whether you win or you lose in business, there is no government interference.
Democrats, on the other hand, routinely work in the context of government to lock in corporations, increase social stability, basically, to create a sort of the fascist regime you speak of. They want to pick economic winners and "harness" corporations for their own state goals.
The easiest way to see this is who is the first to bail out big corporations in the USA when they get into trouble, in exchange for some corporate concession. Generally speaking, its the Democrats.
It wasn't Ronald Reagan that bailed out Chrysler, that was Jimmy Carter.
When GM posted its enormous losses last year, George Bush said that they should build better cars, but Barrack Obama offered them a multibillion dollar aid package, if they would build the kind of cars he liked.
And so on.
That would be liberalism[1]... Not conservatism.
As most good conservative writers would note, today's conservatism is classicially liberalism, yes, that's absolutely right. But today's liberals are really socialists, and thus, they do not value freedom very much at all, even if they think they do.
I hear the post office is moving to your model though. Because people get a lot of junk mail and it takes a lot of time for the post office to sort that junk mail, they're going to start delivering all the mail COD, and you don't get a choice not to receive it.
No. The post office charges the sender of the message, not the recipient. The internet charges the recipient, via the ISP. If the likes of slashdot had to pay comcast to send you a web page, and we all received our broadband at no charge, that would be the model most comparable to the post office.
Dear God, I pride myself on being a right wing troll, and I am capitalist to the core, but when companies start a public campaign to deceive citizens into thinking they have no rights in order to make a buck, then a line in the sand must be drawn.
The fact is very simple - corporations have less of a right to exist than consumers have of a fair use in copyright, and, even more importantly, the desirability of corporate profits does not entitle them into twisting laws to create an oligarchy. Capitalism exists as an American system to benefit the American people, and not the other way around. Corporations are no more entitled to rent seeking and guaranteed profits than a lazy man is entitled to a government check. If corporations want to earn more money, then they should be compelled to invent new products and new services, not attempt to bend the will of the government and the soul of the people into being enslaved into old products, old services, and worst of all, old ideas.
My fellow Republicans need to be reminded that to be a genuine conservative is to value freedom first and foremost. From that freedom we do have a prosperous society, yes, but prosperity is not why we value freedom and we should not let our greed rule deceive us into believing that the point of freedom is profits for someone else. There will come a time, and it may be soon, when we have to choose between freedom versus wealth, and we can only hope that men of good conscience will have to see that the former is always priceless.
Yeah, it's a terrible thing, violation of civil rights, but, ya know.. what's the hourly rate and skillset for this thing! Is there a soda perk, or, do we all get our complimentary terror fighting machine gun!
The issue here is really whether the sender of a message to a consumer should have to pay more or less depending on how the message is sent. If the internet were structured so that, yeah, a person pushing out content might actually have to pay when they hit a certain threshold, then, automatically you would see some cruft cleaned out.
Spam would certainly diminish. If every email message cost two cents, you would certainly wind up with less of it. My web site, http://www.mightyware.com/ only gets about 1000 uniques a month, but sometimes I wind up with nearly that many spams per day. It's just out of control.
Sure, you can argue that the government pays for a lot of the internet, but the government certainly isn't paying for that much anymore. The bulk of it is coming out of comcast and other ISP's pockets, and, to their eyes, seeing the lions share of their bandwidth being consumed by google or microsoft surely seems somehow unfair. It's like, comcast is laying out a ton of money, so google and microsoft and cnn can all get rich really on the hardware that other people have bought.
So, yeah, if ISPs could soak the likes of Ballmer and the Google guys, then, why not...
Nerds are raised world wide. In the USA, Nerds are the "outcasts" from the mainstream body during H.S., as they aren't sports heros. Then, in college, they wind up in classes with a bunch of people from around the world, looking to get a good engineering education. If you go onto get a Phd, it becomes even more so.
During the whole time, Nerds are playing with computers, engaging in science at least as a hobby, and are reading about contributions from people all over the planet, and in many different cultures. So, you really, wind up with, a body of people that are really raised to be in and then engage in a course of study and profession that requires you to set aside prejudices to not only succeed, but to make friends as well.
The question really is, not, how are nerds libertarians, but really, how could any nerd not be a libertarian, except as a reactionary thing.
That's the whole point. If I invent a product, chances are, in order to really get it out, I will probably wind up infringing on someone else's patent in order to get a complete solution.
For example, let's say I have a revolutionary new programming language. Great stuff, but, ultimately, it will need a bunch of existing technologies to make it work. I'll need parse trees, string manipulations, code generation, and hey, why not an IDE, all of which are covered by a bazillion patents already.
So, if I bring my product to market, the best I can possibly hope for is a cross licensing agreement with a major player, and that in turn, means they can crush me. Or, they can work around my patent in some way, still get the feature, and crush me. Patents don't protect ideas, unless you have a lot of very good patent attorneys and those cost big bucks.
In the world of machines, this doesn't happen. If I invent a new kind of a screw, its pretty obvious that the screw is a patentable thing. But software doesn't exist at that level of componentry and most likely never will. It simply can't. Software wants to integrate and to some extent, that makes it unique from the physical world. You don't need to integrate a particular kind of screw into every single socket and with every single tool, but ultimately, with software, you do wind up having to talk to every kind of protocol, database, and GUI, and in doing so, you wind up flying into a hailstorm of patents.
Seriously, when's the last time anyone has actually checked to see if they infringe before they write something? Only a big company can really afford to do it. Face it, the idea of a little guy with a software patent is a myth, 95% of the time, and its simply not worth the cost to the rest of us - even if we work in a big corporation.
How does the patent in this case "promote the useful arts and sciences." Patents don't do anything to benefit the public. Patents were fine in an era before the need for capital became its own barrier to entry in a given market, but, any more, they are not only a relic, but a dangerous, anti-competitive one. Would it be a troll to say anyone who is in favor of patents is really in favor of oligarchy?
Random thoughts:
1) When a farm is converted to housing, a lot of trees go up, and as a result, we are sort of reforesting ourselves.
2) I left an open bag of top soil and an open bag of grass seed sitting on top of each other, next to a leaky hose. Sure enough, the water dripped down, and, when I was cleaning out my garage, I discovered I had a small lawn inside.
3) Also, if you take a look at some industrial areas in PA, you'll find that a lot of old buildings are being overrun by nature.
The moral of the story, point by point, is this. 1) a lot of what was farmland was trees to begin with, and is going back to trees. 2) nature always finds away to prosper, even if you turn your back on it for a month, and 3) large parts of American cities that were manufacturing centers will be reforested within our lifetimes, and you can see that happening now, if you ride the R2 rail line from Chester PA to Philadelphia, and I imagine in other cities as well.
Finally, fuel prices are rising and will continue to rise, and this will over time put a break in the suburban sprawl that so many are against.
I am not a physicist, but I thought Feynman invented Monte Carlo for this sort of thing.
The obvious flipside to this is, is the USA spying on Chinese computers? I would bet that we are!
With that said, to some degree, spying is something that Great Powers have historically done. But, now, in an era where public intentions are something different than the real ones, by any national actor, allowing a rival some degree of a looksee can be a useful tool.
For one, you can feed the rival disinformation, and in the USA, that's pretty easy to do. We let the Chinese have a look at some "secret" Pentagon systems, then, turn around and leak that such an assault was made to the popular media. This surely gets some airplay, helping to validate the "true" nature of the Pentagon secrets. China then absorbs some made up junk as its canon, and the USA pulls a fast one. OR, the data might actually be legitimate, if we want to make sure that, for example, that our putting an extra carrier in the Persian gulf is not an act to form up a "bomb China" invasion force.
Used properly, spying can be used to win diplomatic initiatives, and to prevent wars among great powers, which, these days, would be a humanity damaging affair.
I would think that before the scientists claim victory over Hubble, let's see their camera best some of Hubble's best work:
http://hubblesite.org/
There's a number of excellent Hubble images of just about everything in our solar system to the most distant galaxies.
I would put my money on Hubble, for two reasons.
First, the averaging algorithm is not without its flaws. They make the assumption that by averaging out a bunch of images, you eliminate distortion. For this to work, you have to assume that the probability of a particular pixel being in the right spot is higher as the distortion would essentially be random, and that could theoretically not be the case. If the distortion is completely random, then, averaging a set of images would essentially lose the pixel that is being pushed around its "real" spot by the atmosphere, and you can actually see that, as the corrected images still look muddy compared to their HST or even adaptive optic counterparts.
Secondly, the atmosphere doesn't just distort light, it also filters it. You can use averaging to remove distortion "noise", but, there's really no way to ascertain what information was removed by the atmosphere.
The bottom line is, yes, you can get some pretty good results with averaging software, but, if you have money to spend, the best images are going to be space based, and its still going to cost a billion dollars. Given the promise the heavens hold for the advance of human understanding, let alone essentially infinite resources, one only hopes that policy makers will not be mislead by the outrageous claim that one can get the best images from the ground. You can't. HST should not be thought of as an aberration made obsolete by adaptative optics or the low budget averaging. Low budget averaging and adaptive optics really need to be thought of as getting by until we can put larger, and better visible wavelength telescopes into space.
Imagine what a space based Mt. Palomar sized mirror could do, if in space!
Everyone is caught up in this notion of "your body is your temple", and that, you have an inviolate right to your body, and, I'd argue that you don't. There's nothing that you do with your body that is without social consequence, from the food you eat, water you drink, the air you breath, and the waste you make. Really, the whole "it's my body" argument that women have when defining abortion rights or even the notion of "reproductive rights" is utterly laughable. The tribe ultimately has every right to boot you off the island and it certainly may control its breedings. It is only our comperitive wealth that allows us to ignore this, and, so, arguing absolutes about freedom in an ephemeral context will only doom us overall. At some point, we may need to legislate birth rates or even those who should be born, and organize humanity optimally for an even distribution of sexual activity.
Just screw over a bunch of shareholders so that a few lawyers can get rich. Really, there's no "consumer" benefit to this at all. Class action lawsuits have become a tax that rich people collect at the expense of the common man, and anyone who sees otherwise needs to take off their anti-corporation tinfoil hats...
Here's the thing. Visual Studio 2005 for C# is probably the most "cushy" environment out there. But, if you are writing in C++, then, I've found KDevelop to be pretty damn nice. For 64 bit C++, KDevelop and Linux are a long way ahead of Windows. For assembly language, KDevelop does remarkably well. OTH, Visual Studio is a huge pain in the rear and getting more so.
Autocomplete in C++ sucks, and a lot of that has to do with the language itself, but, in terms of the compiler telling you exactly what is wrong, I think GCC is better than Visual C++. I really think, for a number of reasons, even though I do like Windows, that Linux is the place to be for C/C++ 64 bit development, or for that matter, SSEn development, and I think most developers would prefer it to.
Visual Studio sucks for C++, what more do you need!
The Beatles were a band, but the bulk of the songs were written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and all of the greatest songs were written by individually by any one of them. Teams are good for collaborating on ways to go where one person has already decided that you will go, but are not good at coming up with solutions to problems.
"Damn it, Bones, you're a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can't be taken away with a wave of a magic wand. They're the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don't want my pain taken away! I need my pain!"
Yes, I have watched ST-V, and I have to admit, that the above line might well be my favorite Kirk line in all of Star Trek. That, and "why does God need a starship."
I think ST-V was an ambitious movie, and had it better effects and a bit better editing, then, it might well have been a classic.
A lot of people writing on this board want Star Trek to become more dark, the characters less gung ho and somehow, that will make them "more realistic". That's patently absurd.
Let's understand this, guys that get to command state of the art "ships-of-the-line" are better than the rest of us average joes, just as much as guys that make it through Annapolis, then, work their way through years of active duty, to command an aircraft carrier or a ballistic missile submarine, are better than the rest of us. The whole point of the existence of military culture is to vett through thousands of young men to ultimately produce a handful of people that know how to take a state of the art system costing billions of dollars into battle. We expect these people to be gung-ho, idealistic, and confident, and our expectations of the bridge staff of one of 13 ships of the line in the Federation should be more, not less. After all, if you figure that the likes of NCC-1701 had only 400 or so crewman, out of a Federation population of tens of billions, you would expect that every man or woman on that ship would be of first rate education, character, and quality.
Roddenberry, for all of his other faults, nailed this exactly right on the head. Writers that want to have officers dragged down by "personal issues", filling people with all manner of dark character conflicts, really, are just catering to the masses. Yes Virginia, not everyone has mommy issues, and those that don't, get picked for the big jobs that you don't.
It's not bundling software, it's not embrace and extend, that gets Microsoft into hot water. That's all authoring of software, and rivals all bundle, and all would embrace and extend if they could.
It's when Microsoft calls up hardware vendors such as Dell and tells them that they will have their Windows license revoked if they sell another OS, that's where you need the Feds to step in. At that point, Microsoft is not investing to add features, but is really working to the detrminent of consumers.
That Microsoft engages in such behavior is already proven. During the OS/2 vs Windows days, Microsoft threatened IBM with license termination if they continued to promote and develop OS/2. IBM withdrew. During the Netscape wars, Microsoft strong armed vendors to bundle the inferior IE2.0 with Windows 95, which confused the market long enough to deny Netscape needed funding for a future release, AND, bought Microsoft time to make an IE 4.0 which really was a better product. In the former case, Microsoft was engaging in restraint of trade, and in the second case, they were tying, both of which are illegal under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
The only thing that saved them in the USA is that what constitutes tying in the software business is entirely up in the air. In general, the government under any modern administration wants to give businesses as free as a hand as possible to arrange their product offerings. In Europe, however, this is not nearly so much the case, and geopolitical concerns play as well. The EU is something of an economic rival to the USA, and thus they have absolutely no problem slamming Microsoft in any number of ways, and they have.
Troll me down again, but while I may disagree with many slash dotters about when something should be publicly funded, this 2nd amendment purist, capitalist, right wingnut is honored to stand with the most radical left wing, nationalize everything liberal when something is publicly funded. All federal research, federally funded research, should be in the public domain and for any use by US citizens, and by extension, the world. Most of us who are interested in this data would just as soon be able to get loads of open data anyway. That includes all NASA research, images, all government data, census, geographical, geological, or any other sort of non-classified data that the government might collect or generate as part of its ongoing operation.
It's our data.
Zoraster is all well and good, but, Jews have given us the theory of relativity, numerous advances in quantum physics, chemistry and the arts. Where's the Iranian Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen or Steven Spielberg or Albert Einstein? Intel's Core architecture was done by a design lab located in Israel. What chip architecture is Iran working on?
The fact of the matter is, Iran exists today because it is sitting a mountain of oil and doling it out, while Israel is sitting in a wasteland and is churning out numerous intellectual advances.
From a foreign policy perspective, Iran IS waging a war of aggression. Iran funds many Islamic terror groups, and wages her "wars" via proxy suicide bombers. Israel has absolutely nothing to do with Iran, but, Iran has repeatedly said that it will continue to support those people who work to destroy Israel, simply because of religious differences.
People on this board yelp about George Bush and the Christian Right in the USA, but the activities of the Christian Right are limited to verbal criticisms of gay people and abortion, and a refusal to agree that gays can be married. In Iran, people are WHIPPED and STONED for committing all manner of religious differences. Daily Iranian propaganda rails on about jews, about christians, and yes, even about the original Persian zoroastrainism. Newspapers are closed down, the internet is restricted.
If you think Iran is so great, go ahead go to DC and shout that George Bush and the Supreme Court has sex with donkeys and make a picture of Jesus as some sort of a monkey. Then, go to Tel Aviv and say the same about Israel's leaders and Moses. Then, go back to Tehran, and try the same but about Mohammed. I guarantee you, you will be ignored in DC, ignored in Tel Aviv, but then, you will probably be arrested and might even be executed in Iran.
Pining for the good old days of what Islam did or Persia did hundreds of years ago will not change the situation in Iran now. The government is so repressive that the Iranian people will not be able to accomplish anything of any significance forever. Iran's government is determined to keep her people in the dark ages, and until you accept that, then, Iran is forever lost.
Well now, irony of ironies.. in order to protect the GPL, the GPL needs to have Digital Rights Management... fancy that.
So, does this mean that the next release of the GPL will be, "well, we have to subject everyone to our DRM so that everyone can be free..."
I see this pig suddenly standing up and carrying a whip, in the name of all the other animals on the farm being equal.
I would think that AMD would be providing Barcelona benchmarks hand over fist, at this point, if they had something...