Its why there was so much consumer debt - people thought they were entitled to a lifestyle beyond their means, and were willing to take loans to get it.
Sure, the debt load has absolutely nothing to do with the dramatically reduced purchasing power of the average worker over the past 40 years, nor anything to do with wild deregulation and promotion of consumer lending in the same period.
Every generation thinks it is entitled to more than it is. Being asshats doesn't make my generation special or unique.
Does it bother anyone this is the same type of gadget analysis that got us into the current economic situation? Your most valuable employees aren't always the most communicative.
It certainly bothers me. Individuals of very moderate intelligence who fail to understand the complexity of the system they work with, and come up with some trivial mathematical model that takes into account everything they understand so they think it takes into account everything. Then they try and convince more reasonable people to act based on their model. Yargh.
And, best of all the most communicative people may well be classed as uncommunicative. Imagine the guy who checks in great documentation with all of his SVN checkins, and has fantastically self explanatory code. Nobody needs to go emailing him questions because he is a great communicator in a medium that HR will frankly have no idea exists. The other developer checks in horrible hacks that nobody understands. He's supposedly a great communicator because everybody is bothering him all day trying to figure out what the hell he did.
Or, the person who uses the phone. Or face to face meetings with tasteful powerpoint presentations. Or produces an internal TV show watched and loved by all employees. the assistant who spends all their time writing via their boss's email account because he can't be bothered to write his own emails. Try to spread any information in a way not monitored by HR's tool and suddenly you get classified as a worthless loner that doesn't do anything. Consequently, you have a negative selection pressure on anybody trying to use new, more effective tools to communicate in the most useful way. Net effect of HR's efforts to improve communication by favoring communicators: Bupkis.
I suppose the gadget developers would argue that would be accounted by how often his code fragments turn up in other projects but how do you really account for the source of a code fragment? Especially one that is later modified for other uses?
Ha, I can just imagine whoever was the first person to check "i++;" into the repository eventually being declared the ultimate hero programmer because so many other programmers just use his code.
So, 0.5. Does that mean they're half way done? It's probably fair to say that ffmpeg currently supports 50% of all multimedia formats that will ever be invented, so I suppose that's fair.
Well, I haven't heard that Gnu Privacy Guard has announced support for Programmable Graphics Processing Units, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.
Then there have been comets and supernova that have been visible during daylight. Yea, I think the ISS is cool to observe, but don't call it 2nd brightest after the moon.
I think you get into "event" vs. "object" here. It's a pretty fine line, admittedly, but I think the ISS does deserve some distinction for reaching this (vaguely defined) milestone. I mean, hell... I just used the term "milestone" which literally refers to a hunk of rock that tells you how far you walked. Our language is still that archaic, and we still have a giant thing in the sky that is shinier than Venus. And, the first example of something brighter in the sky that you suggested was a flash off another man made object. It kind of blows my mind.
Re:I'm not dead yet
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If you're talking about the delivery mechanism, then yeah, it may work out that broadcasting the same signal to everyone is going away. Although even that I question. I'm wondering if the Internet infrastructure really has the bandwidth to support everyone (not just a minority of people) all doing real time streaming. I'm thinking we're at least one generation of the Internet away from such capacity.
Rule of thumb: The Internet never has enough bandwidth for everybody to do what the power users are currently doing.
Correlary: It will by the time everybody bothers to try.
Infrastructure improves. When pace of growth of Infrastructure outpaces paces of growth in requirements, new requirements are created. When requirements outpace infrastructure, it simply spurs investment in infrastructure. The worst case scenario if everybody tries something currently considered bandwidth intensive is simply that they find it annoying slow and don't bother to do it again soon. Usage patterns are thus self correcting and make use of the available capacity.
There was a time when the idea that everybody with a Network connection would send a 320x240 GIF to somebody every single week would have implied an "Internet Meltdown." Things change. They stay the same.
Umm...Shouldn't the police force be paying craigslist? Craigslist didn't create the prostitution. They stuck it all in one spot. The only way they could have helped the cops more is if they placed a big red arrow that says "hooker" over the prostitute's heads.
No, he's upset because craigslist makes the problem obvious. They want it to stay in the shadows so that they can ignore it and not work all day. As long as citizens can complain and file reports, then they need to investigate. They may even be forced to arrest some of their best friends and favorite girls.
I'm not talking about models of how things are, but how things will be (1, 5, 10 years from now). All of them are wrong, and simpler models usually do much better at this stuff than the highly complex Nobel-winning ones.
Greenspan said he'd been in the business of predicting the economic future for 30 years, and had never seen the slightest evidence that people could do it.
Of course efforts to predict the future are wrong. That doesn't make them useless. Tide predictions are wrong. The ocean is an extremely complex fluid system, and most predictions don't even attempt to take into account the relativistic aspect of the effects of gravity That doesn't make tide predictions useless. It just constrains their accuracy. The problem with the models is that sometimes the people using them sometimes get convinced that the models are accurate, instead of simply useful. For those people, the models are useless.
The business types all decided that they didn't need an understanding of statistics, or an understanding of interval arithmetic, or a grain of salt. They trusted their models, instead of trying to learn the weaknesses of the models. If somebody had really investigated the models, and tried to understand the nature of the inputs and assumptions, they could have seen that the models were flawed, seen how they were flawed, and taken that into account when trying to figure out what to do.
Not in economics, they're not. The book Black Swan, which should be read by anyone interested in this topic, says that the hideous lie is that people claim that "they're better than nothing", when, in fact, they're worse than not having any model at all.
Explain to me what Economics looks like without some sort of a model at some level. You can't. Humans make models. They have to. It's just the way things work. They can be intuitive, subconscious models wich drive our "gut" intuition. Or they can be mathematical models dressed up with computers. Once you say "No Models," then all you have is a pile of some raw data. What do you do with that. Data doesn't tell you anything useful on its own. And, what's more, you have to accept that you never have all the data. So, you don't have all the data, and you don't have a model to guess at what else is going on. So, what do you do then? You go the heck home and do something besides play at being a model-less economist.
nobody has a "shovel-ready" blueprint for a practical, cost effective fusion reactor yet nobody has a blueprint for a practical, cost effective fusion reactor yet nobody has a blueprint for a cost effective fusion reactor yet nobody has a blueprint for a effective fusion reactor yet nobody has a blueprint for a fusion reactor yet
People have built fusion reactors, and they have output more power than they consumed. It was slight, but they got there. And, like I said, I want to see money thrown at fusion R+D to get us to the point where we can build something sensible. That was the point of my comment. The basic science of fusion has been demonstrated in a lab, so it is largely a matter of engineering to make it practical now.
How does this compare? My gut reaction is that, government subsidies aside, per kilowatt-hour, I'm sure just about ANYTHING is cheaper than solar at this point.
When will we finally start building cheap, efficient, and above all clean nuclear plants again instead of wasting our time with this solar and wind crap?
Well, in the US, at least, there are very significant subsidies on fossil fuel based power as well, so on a completely level playing field, Solar would still be in the ballpark. It's certainly not a discount power source, though. And, there is a firm limit on Earth's solar capacity -- the total amount of sunlight falling on the planet.
Unfortunately, nuclear isn't a cure-all. Clean is certainly a relative term. Sure, CO2 emissions would basically be zero, and the probability of a Chernobyl type event in a modern reactor would be extremely small. Still, you have a bunch of radioactive crap to deal with. Some of which must be dealt with on a very very long timescale.
IMO, throwing money at fusion R+D is the way to go, but obviously nobody has a "shovel-ready" blueprint for a practical, cost effective fusion reactor yet. Power output is significant in existing reactors, but most of that goes back to driving the fusion reaction, and the net output is barely enough to make a cup of slightly warm tea.
So, with the cost of Solar falling constantly with R+D, and the fact that it currently makes economic sense in some places, and the fact that the cost effectiveness of solar increases as cost of the competition's fuel rises, and the fact the solar cost will be very stable for an installation, and the fact that it is quite environmentally friendly, I expect to see a heck of a lot of solar deployed in the next 20 years. Wind has similar advantages as solar, but probably less significant gains from R+D because the technology is better understood. (Spinny things go in circle when I blow on them.) I don't think these technologies should be dismissed as folly just because they aren't as sexy as the nuclear options.
Also, and this is not an attack on you personally, but 'the government' in the article and in your post assumes the US government. Good luck asserting these laws in my country, where me and my server reside.
All this will achieve is less people renting servers in the US. Many organisations around the world already have a ban due to the Patriot Act, this is just going to seal the deal. Oh well, more money for other countries, with more freedom.
Well, in the context, I was really talking about US State governments, rather than the US Federal government, but I think my point is generally applicable. Whether it's Maryland, Washington DC, or Tehran, governments shouldn't always assume themselves to be a solution to these sorts of issues. Ignoring them is a much better, more effective, cheaper solution with fewer negative side effects of action.
And remember, wherever you are, eventually somebody there will use America as an example of what to do. If they have any sense, most people in the country will laugh at him for citing our actions as those of a role model. But, for better or worse, America does still have a lot of influence in the world. More than I wish it did. Just look at the influence America apparently had in the Pirate Bay raid.
So, while this is fundamentally an American issue, I just think that it's best America stays a front-line in the war against stupidity. If we become a lost cause, then your country becomes the front line. And believe me, you don't want to follow in our foot steps when that happens.
If people know that "bad" comments are taken off the Internet, and the Government is there to protect us, then the Government is giving weight to everything that's out there. Unfortunately, the Government can't take down every bad thing out there. Net result is that the effort to protect people just makes things worse. As long as the Government keeps its hands off, and people understand that there is no Thought Police on the Internet, then they will be dismissive of most unsubstantiated anonymous claims, and they can cause no harm. Legislators, please take the day off on this one. Everybody will be better off.
I did test Win2003server for a year and I completely fail to grok the logic behind needing a special OS just to run a bunch of servers. Oh, I understand full well the need of MS to sell you a more expensive OS. But for me a server is an application. Win*server contains several, some more or less well written but that's not the point. The point is that this test convinced me to run Linux, where if I want a web server I just do "aptitude install apache" or "yum install apache", if I want an ssh server, I do "aptitude install openssh-server, likewise for vnc, sql, ftp, etc... And the rest of the OS continues to work the same.
Yeah, I know what you mean. IME, Linux is much more valuable to me because it offers more flexibility over the life of a system. If the organisation grows and I need more concurrent users, I don't need to worry about the license. If I need to add a service on an existing server, I don't need to worry about whether Moderately Enterprisey Edition has what I need, or if I can only do it on one of the Really Quite Enterprisey Edition boxes. I can install a zillion times in different VM's, and not have to read the EULA with a fine toothed comb to know if it was legal. In many ways, I'd consider an expensive Linux preferable to a free Windows.
That said, the Windows Server thing isn't that hard to grok. It's just market segmentation, plus a decision to only bundle the server and administrative application bundle with particular variations of the OS. If you prefer, think of it as buying the application bundle, and getting a free, tuned and tweaked version of Windows that is just there to run the expensive application bundle. Net result is that you don't need to worry about compatibility between the applications and your existing OS. MS comes to the table from a proprietary mindset. That's not inherently 100% terrible. And, more important than anything else, they bring some quite good tools. You can decide those tools aren't worth the headaches that come with MS for your situation. But, if you've ever set up NIS and NFS home directories on a bunch of Linux boxes, and you've joined Windows machines to a domain... You know that joining a Windows box to a domain is a heck of a lot more convenient than deploying NIS.
I'm a UNIX admin who has worked with Windows servers, but even coming from my "UNIX 4 eva" side of the fence, I have to admit that the MS solutions make some things very convenient compared to the most analagous UNIX options. Just make sure you know which edition you need, so you install the Windows Server OS that will actually use all of your RAM.:)
There's plenty free. Air is free, and it's a lot cleaner air than when I was growing up (although cleaning up the mess industry made cost us taxpayers a bundle, and few corporations pay any US Federal Income Tax).
Cleaning it up cost you, and keeping it clean requires paying for regulatory and monitoring infrastructure. EPA is not free, and not staffed by volunteers. Air = Not Free.
Rainwater waters your gardens for free.
True, but for the clean water, see also, EPA from above. And, that garden isn't on land that you can get for free. Had to pay for that. And, most land deals require legal documentation, so while the previous owner might accept a smile as payment for the land, the real estate agent won't. Want seeds for the garden? Go buy some. Fertiliser? Can't just use animal dung as fertiliser because you can't legally keep large animals in most cities. Need to actually be out in farmland for that. Rainwater on your garden = Not Free.
Sunrises and sunsets are free.
But in some jurisdictions, the electric company can charge you for the electricity you aren't using if you install solar panels to take advantage of those sunrises. Not Free.
This feature is quite nice for beginners. I think for me it would be just annoying. They really need to clean up the wording though, because now it's just very confusing.
It's one of those things that is almost cool. I mean, a unified UI for a multifunction physical device is not an inherently bad idea. For example, when I plug in my camera on Windows, I usually just go to "My Computer" and get the pictures manually. (It mounts the memory card as a USB mass storage device. I dunno what was on the CD that was supposedly required...) But, I can imagine the camera itself showing up as a device, going to that, and having an option to get the files, and also an option for USB automatic control to take a picture while the camera is plugged into my computer. The mass storage device, and the fact that there is a CCD available for taking pictures aren't related to each other in Windows XP.
That said, The Windows Seven implementation is clearly fucked in the head, and is apparently going to be used by printer manufacturers to show you ads for ink.
Sadly, Mac OS X 10.8 and KDE 5 or whatever will probably be inspired by the Windows 7 UI, and do something annoyingly similar for the sake of user familiarity.::sigh::
Why don't they improve GCC to have a 8-9 to 40% performance gain? it's not like intel has some kind of secret magical piece of code that lets them have a better compiler.
To a large extent, they have. ICC really no longer has the performance lead that it once did over gcc. There was absolutely a time when the difference was consistent, and significant. But, a lot has changed since gcc 2.95, when egcs existed. The 4.x branch in particular has been about improving the optimisation capabilities of the compiler. These days, I generally reccomend just going with gcc to anybody who asks me.
Compilers shouldn't need to be compatible with each other; code should be written to standards (C99 or so) and Makefiles and configure scripts should weed out the options automatically.
Unfortunately, writing an OS inherently requires making use of functionality not addressed in the C standards. If you stick only to behavior well defined by the ISO C standards you *can* *not* write a full kernel. Doing stuff that low level requires occasional ASM, and certainly some stuff dependent on a particular hardware platform. I think that being as compiler-portable as it is hardware-portable should certainly be a goal. The ability to build on as many platforms as possible certainly helps shake out bugs and bad assumptions. But, just saying "clean it up to full C99 compliancy, and don't do anything that causes undefined behavior" would be ignoring the actual reality of the situation, and makes as much sense as porting the whole kernel to Java or Bash scrips.
No. If you show the border agents the encrypted kiddie porn on the hard drive, you cannot later claim that being forced to give them a copy of that same kiddie porn would be a violation of your 5th amendment right.
I damn well can. The government wants to convict me of having kiddie porn, so they ask me to give them kiddie porn. There are two possible outcomes: 1 - I give them kiddie porn, now they can prove that I had it. Bad. 2 - I give them files which are all perfectly appropriate. 100 copies of the constitution, or whatever. But, the government "knows" that I was supposed to give them kiddie porn. Now, I'm facing charges for tampering with and falsifying evidence.
The only sensible thing is to give the government nothing. There's no possible way that giving them anything would not be potentially incriminating, regardless of what is in the files. The government will take what it feels it is legally entitled to, because the men with guns feel justified about taking it. I have no intention of giving them anything else once they have decided I'm a bad person.
This reminds me of the gold plated cables "to ensure the digital signal has the highest fidelity".
This looks like snake oil marketed to the "I'm a pretend audiophile who loves buying more expensive things with questionable benefits" crowd.
that was my second impression. My first impression, however, was that Sony came up with a new format spec so that they couldn't get in trouble for violating the proper audio CD spec by including DRM nonsense and anything else they can come up with to make copying it inconvenient. If you recall, there was a kerfuffle over the rootkit fiasco when the trademark holder (Phillips?) realised that Sony was labelling the defective discs as actual audio CD's, in violation with the terms of trademark compliance.
Re:Paying for Internet by the hour?
on
Jurassic Web
·
· Score: 1
June 1995 AOL 3.0 (Win16) for Windows 3.x/Windows 95/Windows NT released
Think he meant AOL messenger. Since if I recall, back in 3.0 you could message and punt (I was young and it was new to me at least:P). AIM got released later for the non-AOLers.
I noticed the comment on SILC, but looking over their page I see it touting security, but nothing about IP security. Encrypt all the messages you like but if others can still get your IP (or their servers freely hand them over) then its pointless...but this is a question - not a statement.
You could send AOL Instant messages prior to version 3. 2.x just didn't yet feature the invention of a "buddy list," so almost nobody knew that the feature existed. And, you weren't certain if somebody was online until you tried to send them a message. (Where you typed in the username to start the conversation thanks to the no buddy list. So, if you got an error, you weren't sure if they were offline, or if you made a typo.)
I deeply confused some people by sending them an IM back in the day.
The code was so obfuscated, the people running the competition were actually driven completely mad and committed suicide. Now you need to be *extra* clever to have them receive your submission, and you have to be willing to kill yourself to see the results.
If the text says, for example, 'Virgin Killers is an album by [X band]...' you can guess the page is going to be legit. If it says 'cum see the hottest ch1ld pr0n0 & k1ddi3 pix...' well... you can guess what's going to be in there.
Your post includes the text "cum see the hottest ch1ld pr0n0 & k1ddi3 pix..." My post includes the phrase twice, because I quoted you and also pointed out that you said it. Therefore, our posts are 300% proof that we are child pornographers. And, if you can just get some text onto somebody's web page talking about this stuff, then that should be enough to open a formal police investigation, and get them tried and possibly convicted of abusing children. (A *lot* of people get convicted with negligible evidence in child porn cases, because the jury is so biased against the nature of the supposed crime.)
And, the actual child porn producers with messed up kids in their basement being photographed... Well, they just don't put up any text discussing the content. They either have no text, or they copy and paste the text of a web page about the changing role of baseball in American literature and film from 1920-1960.
Then, because you can surely guess what's actually on a web page if you just look at the text, you and I rot in jail, while an actual perv walks away, and the jury that would have convicted him takes on a new appreciation for "Casey At the Bat."
Or, maybe these things should actually be considered in context.
I hate to respond to myself but: Yeah the market share of Linux is not huge, Nvidia is probably not terrified of losing sales to Larrabee on some desktop Linux boxes (high end supercomputing apps could be an interesting niche they might care about though). However, it is afraid that OEMs will be interested in Larrabee as a discrete card where Intel never had a solution before. Given the problems that Nvidia has had with execution over the last year, and the fact that Intel knows how to keep suppliers happy, THAT is where Nvidia is really afraid.
Don't be too dismissive out of hand of the importance of Linux for nVidia. There are two distinct markets that involve linux. One is ordinary folks with GeForce cards. Linux gamers are pretty rare, but Linux users tend to be computer enthusiasts, so they tend to like having decent cards regardless. They run free software, so they aren't necessarily going to be spending tons of money, and they are smart enough to not buy the latest thing just to impress their friends. Then, you get group two. Call it the Hollywood Linux market. These guys have special nVidia CUDA boxes for their color grading systems, and they have crazy $5000 video cards with HDSDI outputs in their Flame boxes, and they get high end Quadros for running Maya. And add in a couple of CS researchers at universities building compute clusters from GPU's and whatnot. Group one involves a hell of a lot more people than group two and they probably can be ignored relatively safely. Group two, is tiny by comparison, most people will never see the hardware they use in person, but it's still pretty farking significant to the bottom line. It's all the people who used to use SGI hardware, and thus think a $5000 video card is cheap.
But yeah, if Larrabee lives up to the hype, and OEM's start to use it to displace GeForces, nVidia shits itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, the debt load has absolutely nothing to do with the dramatically reduced purchasing power of the average worker over the past 40 years, nor anything to do with wild deregulation and promotion of consumer lending in the same period.
Every generation thinks it is entitled to more than it is. Being asshats doesn't make my generation special or unique.
It certainly bothers me. Individuals of very moderate intelligence who fail to understand the complexity of the system they work with, and come up with some trivial mathematical model that takes into account everything they understand so they think it takes into account everything. Then they try and convince more reasonable people to act based on their model. Yargh.
And, best of all the most communicative people may well be classed as uncommunicative. Imagine the guy who checks in great documentation with all of his SVN checkins, and has fantastically self explanatory code. Nobody needs to go emailing him questions because he is a great communicator in a medium that HR will frankly have no idea exists. The other developer checks in horrible hacks that nobody understands. He's supposedly a great communicator because everybody is bothering him all day trying to figure out what the hell he did.
Or, the person who uses the phone. Or face to face meetings with tasteful powerpoint presentations. Or produces an internal TV show watched and loved by all employees. the assistant who spends all their time writing via their boss's email account because he can't be bothered to write his own emails. Try to spread any information in a way not monitored by HR's tool and suddenly you get classified as a worthless loner that doesn't do anything. Consequently, you have a negative selection pressure on anybody trying to use new, more effective tools to communicate in the most useful way. Net effect of HR's efforts to improve communication by favoring communicators: Bupkis.
Ha, I can just imagine whoever was the first person to check "i++;" into the repository eventually being declared the ultimate hero programmer because so many other programmers just use his code.
So, 0.5. Does that mean they're half way done?
It's probably fair to say that ffmpeg currently supports 50% of all multimedia formats that will ever be invented, so I suppose that's fair.
Well, I haven't heard that Gnu Privacy Guard has announced support for Programmable Graphics Processing Units, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.
I think you get into "event" vs. "object" here. It's a pretty fine line, admittedly, but I think the ISS does deserve some distinction for reaching this (vaguely defined) milestone. I mean, hell... I just used the term "milestone" which literally refers to a hunk of rock that tells you how far you walked. Our language is still that archaic, and we still have a giant thing in the sky that is shinier than Venus. And, the first example of something brighter in the sky that you suggested was a flash off another man made object. It kind of blows my mind.
Rule of thumb: The Internet never has enough bandwidth for everybody to do what the power users are currently doing.
Correlary: It will by the time everybody bothers to try.
Infrastructure improves. When pace of growth of Infrastructure outpaces paces of growth in requirements, new requirements are created. When requirements outpace infrastructure, it simply spurs investment in infrastructure. The worst case scenario if everybody tries something currently considered bandwidth intensive is simply that they find it annoying slow and don't bother to do it again soon. Usage patterns are thus self correcting and make use of the available capacity.
There was a time when the idea that everybody with a Network connection would send a 320x240 GIF to somebody every single week would have implied an "Internet Meltdown." Things change. They stay the same.
No, he's upset because craigslist makes the problem obvious. They want it to stay in the shadows so that they can ignore it and not work all day. As long as citizens can complain and file reports, then they need to investigate. They may even be forced to arrest some of their best friends and favorite girls.
Of course efforts to predict the future are wrong. That doesn't make them useless. Tide predictions are wrong. The ocean is an extremely complex fluid system, and most predictions don't even attempt to take into account the relativistic aspect of the effects of gravity That doesn't make tide predictions useless. It just constrains their accuracy. The problem with the models is that sometimes the people using them sometimes get convinced that the models are accurate, instead of simply useful. For those people, the models are useless.
The business types all decided that they didn't need an understanding of statistics, or an understanding of interval arithmetic, or a grain of salt. They trusted their models, instead of trying to learn the weaknesses of the models. If somebody had really investigated the models, and tried to understand the nature of the inputs and assumptions, they could have seen that the models were flawed, seen how they were flawed, and taken that into account when trying to figure out what to do.
Explain to me what Economics looks like without some sort of a model at some level. You can't. Humans make models. They have to. It's just the way things work. They can be intuitive, subconscious models wich drive our "gut" intuition. Or they can be mathematical models dressed up with computers. Once you say "No Models," then all you have is a pile of some raw data. What do you do with that. Data doesn't tell you anything useful on its own. And, what's more, you have to accept that you never have all the data. So, you don't have all the data, and you don't have a model to guess at what else is going on. So, what do you do then? You go the heck home and do something besides play at being a model-less economist.
People have built fusion reactors, and they have output more power than they consumed. It was slight, but they got there. And, like I said, I want to see money thrown at fusion R+D to get us to the point where we can build something sensible. That was the point of my comment. The basic science of fusion has been demonstrated in a lab, so it is largely a matter of engineering to make it practical now.
Well, in the US, at least, there are very significant subsidies on fossil fuel based power as well, so on a completely level playing field, Solar would still be in the ballpark. It's certainly not a discount power source, though. And, there is a firm limit on Earth's solar capacity -- the total amount of sunlight falling on the planet.
Unfortunately, nuclear isn't a cure-all. Clean is certainly a relative term. Sure, CO2 emissions would basically be zero, and the probability of a Chernobyl type event in a modern reactor would be extremely small. Still, you have a bunch of radioactive crap to deal with. Some of which must be dealt with on a very very long timescale.
IMO, throwing money at fusion R+D is the way to go, but obviously nobody has a "shovel-ready" blueprint for a practical, cost effective fusion reactor yet. Power output is significant in existing reactors, but most of that goes back to driving the fusion reaction, and the net output is barely enough to make a cup of slightly warm tea.
So, with the cost of Solar falling constantly with R+D, and the fact that it currently makes economic sense in some places, and the fact that the cost effectiveness of solar increases as cost of the competition's fuel rises, and the fact the solar cost will be very stable for an installation, and the fact that it is quite environmentally friendly, I expect to see a heck of a lot of solar deployed in the next 20 years. Wind has similar advantages as solar, but probably less significant gains from R+D because the technology is better understood. (Spinny things go in circle when I blow on them.) I don't think these technologies should be dismissed as folly just because they aren't as sexy as the nuclear options.
Well, in the context, I was really talking about US State governments, rather than the US Federal government, but I think my point is generally applicable. Whether it's Maryland, Washington DC, or Tehran, governments shouldn't always assume themselves to be a solution to these sorts of issues. Ignoring them is a much better, more effective, cheaper solution with fewer negative side effects of action.
And remember, wherever you are, eventually somebody there will use America as an example of what to do. If they have any sense, most people in the country will laugh at him for citing our actions as those of a role model. But, for better or worse, America does still have a lot of influence in the world. More than I wish it did. Just look at the influence America apparently had in the Pirate Bay raid.
So, while this is fundamentally an American issue, I just think that it's best America stays a front-line in the war against stupidity. If we become a lost cause, then your country becomes the front line. And believe me, you don't want to follow in our foot steps when that happens.
If people know that "bad" comments are taken off the Internet, and the Government is there to protect us, then the Government is giving weight to everything that's out there. Unfortunately, the Government can't take down every bad thing out there. Net result is that the effort to protect people just makes things worse. As long as the Government keeps its hands off, and people understand that there is no Thought Police on the Internet, then they will be dismissive of most unsubstantiated anonymous claims, and they can cause no harm. Legislators, please take the day off on this one. Everybody will be better off.
Yeah, I know what you mean. IME, Linux is much more valuable to me because it offers more flexibility over the life of a system. If the organisation grows and I need more concurrent users, I don't need to worry about the license. If I need to add a service on an existing server, I don't need to worry about whether Moderately Enterprisey Edition has what I need, or if I can only do it on one of the Really Quite Enterprisey Edition boxes. I can install a zillion times in different VM's, and not have to read the EULA with a fine toothed comb to know if it was legal. In many ways, I'd consider an expensive Linux preferable to a free Windows.
That said, the Windows Server thing isn't that hard to grok. It's just market segmentation, plus a decision to only bundle the server and administrative application bundle with particular variations of the OS. If you prefer, think of it as buying the application bundle, and getting a free, tuned and tweaked version of Windows that is just there to run the expensive application bundle. Net result is that you don't need to worry about compatibility between the applications and your existing OS. MS comes to the table from a proprietary mindset. That's not inherently 100% terrible. And, more important than anything else, they bring some quite good tools. You can decide those tools aren't worth the headaches that come with MS for your situation. But, if you've ever set up NIS and NFS home directories on a bunch of Linux boxes, and you've joined Windows machines to a domain... You know that joining a Windows box to a domain is a heck of a lot more convenient than deploying NIS.
I'm a UNIX admin who has worked with Windows servers, but even coming from my "UNIX 4 eva" side of the fence, I have to admit that the MS solutions make some things very convenient compared to the most analagous UNIX options. Just make sure you know which edition you need, so you install the Windows Server OS that will actually use all of your RAM. :)
Cleaning it up cost you, and keeping it clean requires paying for regulatory and monitoring infrastructure. EPA is not free, and not staffed by volunteers. Air = Not Free.
True, but for the clean water, see also, EPA from above. And, that garden isn't on land that you can get for free. Had to pay for that. And, most land deals require legal documentation, so while the previous owner might accept a smile as payment for the land, the real estate agent won't. Want seeds for the garden? Go buy some. Fertiliser? Can't just use animal dung as fertiliser because you can't legally keep large animals in most cities. Need to actually be out in farmland for that. Rainwater on your garden = Not Free.
But in some jurisdictions, the electric company can charge you for the electricity you aren't using if you install solar panels to take advantage of those sunrises. Not Free.
Youknow, I'm just sayin...
It's one of those things that is almost cool. I mean, a unified UI for a multifunction physical device is not an inherently bad idea. For example, when I plug in my camera on Windows, I usually just go to "My Computer" and get the pictures manually. (It mounts the memory card as a USB mass storage device. I dunno what was on the CD that was supposedly required...) But, I can imagine the camera itself showing up as a device, going to that, and having an option to get the files, and also an option for USB automatic control to take a picture while the camera is plugged into my computer. The mass storage device, and the fact that there is a CCD available for taking pictures aren't related to each other in Windows XP.
That said, The Windows Seven implementation is clearly fucked in the head, and is apparently going to be used by printer manufacturers to show you ads for ink.
Sadly, Mac OS X 10.8 and KDE 5 or whatever will probably be inspired by the Windows 7 UI, and do something annoyingly similar for the sake of user familiarity. ::sigh::
To a large extent, they have. ICC really no longer has the performance lead that it once did over gcc. There was absolutely a time when the difference was consistent, and significant. But, a lot has changed since gcc 2.95, when egcs existed. The 4.x branch in particular has been about improving the optimisation capabilities of the compiler. These days, I generally reccomend just going with gcc to anybody who asks me.
Unfortunately, writing an OS inherently requires making use of functionality not addressed in the C standards. If you stick only to behavior well defined by the ISO C standards you *can* *not* write a full kernel. Doing stuff that low level requires occasional ASM, and certainly some stuff dependent on a particular hardware platform. I think that being as compiler-portable as it is hardware-portable should certainly be a goal. The ability to build on as many platforms as possible certainly helps shake out bugs and bad assumptions. But, just saying "clean it up to full C99 compliancy, and don't do anything that causes undefined behavior" would be ignoring the actual reality of the situation, and makes as much sense as porting the whole kernel to Java or Bash scrips.
I damn well can. The government wants to convict me of having kiddie porn, so they ask me to give them kiddie porn. There are two possible outcomes:
1 - I give them kiddie porn, now they can prove that I had it. Bad.
2 - I give them files which are all perfectly appropriate. 100 copies of the constitution, or whatever. But, the government "knows" that I was supposed to give them kiddie porn. Now, I'm facing charges for tampering with and falsifying evidence.
The only sensible thing is to give the government nothing. There's no possible way that giving them anything would not be potentially incriminating, regardless of what is in the files. The government will take what it feels it is legally entitled to, because the men with guns feel justified about taking it. I have no intention of giving them anything else once they have decided I'm a bad person.
that was my second impression. My first impression, however, was that Sony came up with a new format spec so that they couldn't get in trouble for violating the proper audio CD spec by including DRM nonsense and anything else they can come up with to make copying it inconvenient. If you recall, there was a kerfuffle over the rootkit fiasco when the trademark holder (Phillips?) realised that Sony was labelling the defective discs as actual audio CD's, in violation with the terms of trademark compliance.
You could send AOL Instant messages prior to version 3. 2.x just didn't yet feature the invention of a "buddy list," so almost nobody knew that the feature existed. And, you weren't certain if somebody was online until you tried to send them a message. (Where you typed in the username to start the conversation thanks to the no buddy list. So, if you got an error, you weren't sure if they were offline, or if you made a typo.)
I deeply confused some people by sending them an IM back in the day.
The code was so obfuscated, the people running the competition were actually driven completely mad and committed suicide. Now you need to be *extra* clever to have them receive your submission, and you have to be willing to kill yourself to see the results.
The cop / camera combination doesn't bother me too much, so long as the camera is watching the cop, and not being run by the people who hired the cop.
Your post includes the text "cum see the hottest ch1ld pr0n0 & k1ddi3 pix..." My post includes the phrase twice, because I quoted you and also pointed out that you said it. Therefore, our posts are 300% proof that we are child pornographers. And, if you can just get some text onto somebody's web page talking about this stuff, then that should be enough to open a formal police investigation, and get them tried and possibly convicted of abusing children. (A *lot* of people get convicted with negligible evidence in child porn cases, because the jury is so biased against the nature of the supposed crime.)
And, the actual child porn producers with messed up kids in their basement being photographed... Well, they just don't put up any text discussing the content. They either have no text, or they copy and paste the text of a web page about the changing role of baseball in American literature and film from 1920-1960.
Then, because you can surely guess what's actually on a web page if you just look at the text, you and I rot in jail, while an actual perv walks away, and the jury that would have convicted him takes on a new appreciation for "Casey At the Bat."
Or, maybe these things should actually be considered in context.
Don't be too dismissive out of hand of the importance of Linux for nVidia. There are two distinct markets that involve linux. One is ordinary folks with GeForce cards. Linux gamers are pretty rare, but Linux users tend to be computer enthusiasts, so they tend to like having decent cards regardless. They run free software, so they aren't necessarily going to be spending tons of money, and they are smart enough to not buy the latest thing just to impress their friends. Then, you get group two. Call it the Hollywood Linux market. These guys have special nVidia CUDA boxes for their color grading systems, and they have crazy $5000 video cards with HDSDI outputs in their Flame boxes, and they get high end Quadros for running Maya. And add in a couple of CS researchers at universities building compute clusters from GPU's and whatnot. Group one involves a hell of a lot more people than group two and they probably can be ignored relatively safely. Group two, is tiny by comparison, most people will never see the hardware they use in person, but it's still pretty farking significant to the bottom line. It's all the people who used to use SGI hardware, and thus think a $5000 video card is cheap.
But yeah, if Larrabee lives up to the hype, and OEM's start to use it to displace GeForces, nVidia shits itself.