We have The Danish Cancer Society, which is a highly-respected non-profit organization that fund cancer research and support to cancer patients. It is pretty well funded, probably because cancer also hit rich people.
I'm sure there must be similar organizations in other countries, so funding for a promising treatment should be possible even without a profit motive.
Heh, the first time they do that here, we will pay millions in damages. Not that we haven't licensed all the software we use, but most of it is ancient and I doubt we would be able to find the necessary papers any more.
The sad thing is that there is no way the leadership would draw the correct lesson from this (to mandate the use of free software, and hire more researcher for the money they save), instead they would fire more researchers in order to create a new administrative unit to handle software licenses, and forbid the use of "unlicensed" (including free) software.
I believe "socialized medicine" is a term invented by private health care companies to slander public health care systems (which tend to cost less than private system to run).
Public health care systems still relies on patents to finance private medical research, so no difference there.
I grant you anti-corporation, but I don't see how free software can be viewed as anti-globalization... Free software is to some degree a product of globalization, and certainly benefits from it. Most of it is developed by people who are only vaguely aware of where on the globe the other contributers live.
How much intelligence does it take to bite off the head of live chickens at marketplaces?
Both geek and nerd have been used as negative labels for socially awkward people, and both geek and nerd have been partly retaken by the "socially awkward people" as positive labels for people with a lot of knowledge outside mainstream (or what used to be mainstream) interest.
The countries that have expressed interest in the OLPC are very different from each other, and someone who was too close to the problems in one country might have a hard time designing something that properly addressed the problems in the other countries.
I'd suggest most people using GNU/Linux in a professional setting to buy one of the commercial distributions, including a support package at the level needed.
Remember him? He was interviewed in Danish television with regard to the IPCC findings. He demonstrated nothing but respect for the findings of facts by the IPCC.
He just draws different conclusions based on them, the changes are not larger than what we can adapt much cheaper than we can implement the Kyoto-protocol, which won't make much of a difference anyway.
I believe this is the way to be a "skeptical environmentalist", instead of denying what has become the scientific consensus (much more now than when Lomborg published his first articles on the subject), let us base the discussion on taking the scientific consensus as facts, and instead discuss what consequences we want to draw from these facts. That discussion is in higher degree based on values, and something where laypeople may contribute as much as the scientists.
The arguments against the existence of human made global warming have become increasingly similar to the arguments against evolution, they rely on conspiracy theories, general scientific illiteracy, and blowing the genuine scientific disagreements out of proportions. I'm very happy Lomborg has not chosen to follow that path.
Gates mentions Linux, without really any prompting from the interviewer, in his second answer. He doesn't really say anything, but just the fact that he mentions Linux without having to is going to make Linux seem more like a serious contender to many people.
> Yep, they also make sure that even the worst employee keeps their job,
Not where I live. Firing people is easy, with a few exceptions (like pregnant women). High unemployment benefit has meant that the unions have not demanded "job security" clauses. Since it is much easier to fire people than in most other EU countries, employers are much less reluctant to hire people, and companies can easily adjust to changing market conditions. This also gives us one of the lowest unemployment rates in the EU.
> and no matter how much you excel, you will still be paid the same amount the schlub only > giving 50% does
That is true, we have one of the lowest spread in pay for any non-socialist country. I have a master degree and earn only twice what someone with no education (apart from mandatory school) does. And the other people with a similar degree as me at my place of work, tend to earn within 15% of what I do.
Money becomes much less of a motivation factor, for good and for bad. Also because the education of my children and my retirement plan will be ensured no matter what mess I make of my live.
Society seems to function nonetheless. Compared with US (where I worked for two years), I see many more people who do a good or adequate job, and less people who do a fantastic job.
> It's also something that could easily fall under a university's PR budget
The PR budget actually being used on the researchers? What a wonderful place you live.
Where I live, the university budget is used to hire non-academics to find out new uncredited duties for the researchers to do, which they can then compensate for by spending even less time on the students (meaning they will get less students next year, and move closer to being fired), less time on research (meaning they will have a harder time getting new grants, and move closer to being fired), or less time on their family (which is no problem, as any spouse worth keeping at this point will already have filled for a divorce, and moved away with the kids).
It is, in fact, very hard to get academics to conclude anything beyond "this approach shows great promise, and should be investigated further". [ Please give me more money. ]
Of course, a journalist can't use such a non-conclusion to anything, so the few academics who like to use stronger statements (or like to be in the media) are used constantly. So those are the academics the laymen are going to see.
My guess is that the "tweaking" they have done actually just consist on demanding that the page contains the term being searched for. Which is bad, since sometimes the best page uses an alternative terminology for the subject you are looking for.
If I'm right, we can resume googlebombing simply by picking the words or phrases from the page we want to "bomb".
However, the future has been much better. I believe the future topped around 1900, where it seemed like science could explain everything. Instead we used most of the next century to discovering the limitations of science.
Of course, the future has been worse as well. When I grew up, it seemed like the most likely future consisted of cockroaches ruling over a radioactive Earth.
Stories like this makes me happy to live in a country where unions are the norm. The union would handle this case, and I wouldn't have to worry about it.
[ Most of the employers are actually happy with the unions as well, the unions tend to prevent strikes and make the salaries fluctuate less, which makes long time planning easier. ]
Some Americans have very broad definitions of socialist and communist. Ronald Reagan has been called a communist because the federal government under him continued to "send out armed men in peoples home to rob them of their possessions", which is their code-speak for tax collectors backed by the police.
The big difference is whether you are contributing or leeching on the distribution system.
The original Canter & Siegel spam was in no way "legitimate", it was leeching (and ultimately destroying) on the infrastructure it was using.
Legitimate marketing, on the other hand, contribute to the infrastructure it is using. A banner add on/. contributes to the running cost of the site, and is legitimate marketing. Putting a add in a signature may or may not be, it depend on the policy of the site. The site owners may believe that th contribution in form of the message is "worth" the price of the add, and they may not believe so. Anyone involved in legitimate marketing will respect that. A leech will not.
A quick test to see if you are a leech or a legitimate marketeer: Have you found an advertising channel that is free or much cheaper than the conventional channel? If so, you are almost certainly a leech.
The oceans contain 96.5% of the water on the Earth. The soil moisture, which is what we would like to increase, contains 0.001% of the water. Even if you doubled the soil moisture with this technique, the the oceans would still contain 96.5% of the water. The change is simply too small to register on the same scale. So don't worry about the salt balance of the oceans.
Almost all the moisture taken from the atmosphere would btw end right back in the atmosphere again, as evapotranspiration. But in the process, it would allow plants to grow.
The announcement claims that the driver will be "automatically included in all Linux distributions". There is no way that is going to happen if the driver is binary, or even if it is obfuscated.
Slashdot Mirror
We have The Danish Cancer Society, which is a highly-respected non-profit organization that fund cancer research and support to cancer patients. It is pretty well funded, probably because cancer also hit rich people.
I'm sure there must be similar organizations in other countries, so funding for a promising treatment should be possible even without a profit motive.
Heh, the first time they do that here, we will pay millions in damages. Not that we haven't licensed all the software we use, but most of it is ancient and I doubt we would be able to find the necessary papers any more.
The sad thing is that there is no way the leadership would draw the correct lesson from this (to mandate the use of free software, and hire more researcher for the money they save), instead they would fire more researchers in order to create a new administrative unit to handle software licenses, and forbid the use of "unlicensed" (including free) software.
I believe "socialized medicine" is a term invented by private health care companies to slander public health care systems (which tend to cost less than private system to run).
Public health care systems still relies on patents to finance private medical research, so no difference there.
Smart crooks sell Vista
I grant you anti-corporation, but I don't see how free software can be viewed as anti-globalization... Free software is to some degree a product of globalization, and certainly benefits from it. Most of it is developed by people who are only vaguely aware of where on the globe the other contributers live.
How much intelligence does it take to bite off the head of live chickens at marketplaces?
Both geek and nerd have been used as negative labels for socially awkward people, and both geek and nerd have been partly retaken by the "socially awkward people" as positive labels for people with a lot of knowledge outside mainstream (or what used to be mainstream) interest.
The countries that have expressed interest in the OLPC are very different from each other, and someone who was too close to the problems in one country might have a hard time designing something that properly addressed the problems in the other countries.
There are companies where nobody dares question the official policy. Not successful companies, mind you.
Clearly Microsoft is not populated by yes-men.
I'd suggest most people using GNU/Linux in a professional setting to buy one of the commercial distributions, including a support package at the level needed.
I'd much prefer an answer like this, than the usual bullshit you'd expect from a customer service manager that would amount to the same thing.
Remember him? He was interviewed in Danish television with regard to the IPCC findings. He demonstrated nothing but respect for the findings of facts by the IPCC.
He just draws different conclusions based on them, the changes are not larger than what we can adapt much cheaper than we can implement the Kyoto-protocol, which won't make much of a difference anyway.
I believe this is the way to be a "skeptical environmentalist", instead of denying what has become the scientific consensus (much more now than when Lomborg published his first articles on the subject), let us base the discussion on taking the scientific consensus as facts, and instead discuss what consequences we want to draw from these facts. That discussion is in higher degree based on values, and something where laypeople may contribute as much as the scientists.
The arguments against the existence of human made global warming have become increasingly similar to the arguments against evolution, they rely on conspiracy theories, general scientific illiteracy, and blowing the genuine scientific disagreements out of proportions. I'm very happy Lomborg has not chosen to follow that path.
Gates mentions Linux, without really any prompting from the interviewer, in his second answer. He doesn't really say anything, but just the fact that he mentions Linux without having to is going to make Linux seem more like a serious contender to many people.
> Yep, they also make sure that even the worst employee keeps their job,
Not where I live. Firing people is easy, with a few exceptions (like pregnant women). High unemployment benefit has meant that the unions have not demanded "job security" clauses. Since it is much easier to fire people than in most other EU countries, employers are much less reluctant to hire people, and companies can easily adjust to changing market conditions. This also gives us one of the lowest unemployment rates in the EU.
> and no matter how much you excel, you will still be paid the same amount the schlub only
> giving 50% does
That is true, we have one of the lowest spread in pay for any non-socialist country. I have a master degree and earn only twice what someone with no education (apart from mandatory school) does. And the other people with a similar degree as me at my place of work, tend to earn within 15% of what I do.
Money becomes much less of a motivation factor, for good and for bad. Also because the education of my children and my retirement plan will be ensured no matter what mess I make of my live.
Society seems to function nonetheless. Compared with US (where I worked for two years), I see many more people who do a good or adequate job, and less people who do a fantastic job.
> It's also something that could easily fall under a university's PR budget
The PR budget actually being used on the researchers? What a wonderful place you live.
Where I live, the university budget is used to hire non-academics to find out new uncredited duties for the researchers to do, which they can then compensate for by spending even less time on the students (meaning they will get less students next year, and move closer to being fired), less time on research (meaning they will have a harder time getting new grants, and move closer to being fired), or less time on their family (which is no problem, as any spouse worth keeping at this point will already have filled for a divorce, and moved away with the kids).
It is, in fact, very hard to get academics to conclude anything beyond "this approach shows great promise, and should be investigated further". [ Please give me more money. ]
Of course, a journalist can't use such a non-conclusion to anything, so the few academics who like to use stronger statements (or like to be in the media) are used constantly. So those are the academics the laymen are going to see.
My guess is that the "tweaking" they have done actually just consist on demanding that the page contains the term being searched for. Which is bad, since sometimes the best page uses an alternative terminology for the subject you are looking for.
If I'm right, we can resume googlebombing simply by picking the words or phrases from the page we want to "bomb".
However, the future has been much better. I believe the future topped around 1900, where it seemed like science could explain everything. Instead we used most of the next century to discovering the limitations of science.
Of course, the future has been worse as well. When I grew up, it seemed like the most likely future consisted of cockroaches ruling over a radioactive Earth.
If programmer hubris is ruining a company, the executives are at fault for not firing them.
Stories like this makes me happy to live in a country where unions are the norm. The union would handle this case, and I wouldn't have to worry about it.
[ Most of the employers are actually happy with the unions as well, the unions tend to prevent strikes and make the salaries fluctuate less, which makes long time planning easier. ]
Some Americans have very broad definitions of socialist and communist. Ronald Reagan has been called a communist because the federal government under him continued to "send out armed men in peoples home to rob them of their possessions", which is their code-speak for tax collectors backed by the police.
The big difference is whether you are contributing or leeching on the distribution system.
/. contributes to the running cost of the site, and is legitimate marketing. Putting a add in a signature may or may not be, it depend on the policy of the site. The site owners may believe that th contribution in form of the message is "worth" the price of the add, and they may not believe so. Anyone involved in legitimate marketing will respect that. A leech will not.
The original Canter & Siegel spam was in no way "legitimate", it was leeching (and ultimately destroying) on the infrastructure it was using.
Legitimate marketing, on the other hand, contribute to the infrastructure it is using. A banner add on
A quick test to see if you are a leech or a legitimate marketeer: Have you found an advertising channel that is free or much cheaper than the conventional channel? If so, you are almost certainly a leech.
1 mm of rain is 1 liter per square meter. Or 10 cubic meters per hectare.
I hope the parent comment was a joke, but if not, please take a look at this site:
m l
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/waterdistribution.ht
The oceans contain 96.5% of the water on the Earth. The soil moisture, which is what we would like to increase, contains 0.001% of the water. Even if you doubled the soil moisture with this technique, the the oceans would still contain 96.5% of the water. The change is simply too small to register on the same scale. So don't worry about the salt balance of the oceans.
Almost all the moisture taken from the atmosphere would btw end right back in the atmosphere again, as evapotranspiration. But in the process, it would allow plants to grow.
> That's called extortion, and it's illegal.
Like that ever stopped Microsoft before.
> I would hope the DoJ steps in at that point.
Like that ever stopped Microsoft before.
The announcement claims that the driver will be "automatically included in all Linux distributions". There is no way that is going to happen if the driver is binary, or even if it is obfuscated.
So I can't see how they can support NDA.