As a percentage of GDP, the U.S. debt situation is about the same as Germany, France, and Canada, and is considerably better than Japan and Italy's. It's a common misconception that the U.S. is badly in debt.
I've heard this argument many times and I think there are some serious problems with it. You are basically saying, it's OK for debt to grow as long as the GDP is growing faster.
But you have to ask yourself, now much of that GDP growth is due to real long term sustainable industries and how much of it is just because of the regular cash injections from borrowing more money.
It's like someone who's not worried about credit card debt because he knows he can get a new card to pay off the previous one next month. This works great until no-one wants to lend you more money.
There are also longer term problems that are slowly sneaking up and for which there are no contingency plans - like the trillions of dollars the social security fund is going to be short by in ten year's time.
The political parties don't want to touch it because every possible solution will be unpopular which is bad if you want to get re-elected
Overall, it's pretty predictable: The democrat wants more government regulation, the Republican wants less government involvement. Shockers all around. (Though the wiretapping issue is the one thing that's not so obvious.) Very predictable - wire-tapping included. The GOP candidate wants to look after the interests of big business and the Democrat wants to protect the little guy.
His "belief system also states that he needs to feed the hungry, house the homeless, clothe the poor Are you telling me he's a friggin pinko commie?? That is surely not acceptable in the USA
Unfortunately none of those dozens of varieties have the attributes that make the Cavendish banana by far the most successful and important fruit crop in the world:
1. Long shelf life 2. Very uniform and predictable ripening times
That is why you can get bananas cheaply, even though they might be grown thousands of miles from where they are eventually sold.
Most, if not all the other varieties are only viable crops when they are sold very close to where they were grown.
I prefer tools that work well in their own space, tools that manipulate source in ways that are useful, without hiding any details of how things are done (I prefer making my own build files, I prefer using source directly rather than configuring everything in XML - debugging code is a billion times easier and faster than debugging huge configuration details and when something breaks that was automated you want to be able to find the problem by hand.) I'm 100% with you on this. I have recently been working with various incarnations of Visual Studio, including the abomination called SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio and it's a nightmare.
Instead of source files where you can just do a text search to find something, almost everything is hidden away in some property dialog.
Certain properties are SQL queries. If you're lucky there is a button you can press that opens a new dialog with a text area (with variable width font and no syntax highlighting) where you can edit the sql. In other places there is no option but a single line textbox for you to work with.
That's just one gripe - I can name many other problems. But they all boil down to the same thing: The flashy UI makes development harder and more laborious than it would be if you could just edit the source files directly.
A good IDE (like Eclipse) can really make you more productive, but I would rather go back to vi and gcc and no integrated debugger than this crap.
Rorschach's rampant homophobia, for example... For me what Moore accomplished with Rorschach is the single most brilliant aspect of the story. He is an unpleasant, right wing, sadistic, conspiracy theorist believing, murdering psychopath - the kind of person you would want to see behind bars in real life, and yet, he is the person that the reader tends to have the most sympathy for and identifies with the most.
If they can get that right the movie will be brilliant, but I doubt they will.
Another thing: The story is in a large part driven by the Cold War and the threat of nuclear holocaust. What are they going to do about that? I would love it if they kept it as an 80's period piece.
One big fear that I have is that they will make it more "relevant" and "contemporary" by changing the threat to be some kind of War on Terror driven bull.
umm.. wouldn't that be one zettabyte? If I am not off then one yottabyte would be a billion terabyte
FAIL all around
A billion gigabytes would be an exabyte. A billion terrabytes would be zettabyte. A trillion terabytes or a quadrillion gigabytes would be a yottabyte.
I never really understood atheism anyway. They mock theists for their faith, but there's certainly no way to prove that there's not a god, so aren't they also believing in something independent of scientific proof? IMO agnosticism is the only tenable position for the non-theist. Here's my explanation of why it doesn't take faith to be an atheist
How hard is it to map the galaxy? If we don't know where the stars are, we can't know the size. If we know, we don't need it; we can describe the actual, real, shape.
It's pretty hard to measure the size and shape of the Milky Way simply because we are stuck in the middle of it. Measuring the size and shape of far away galaxies is a lot easier because we have a better view. Our galaxy is a flat disk with spiral arms where we are in one of those arms - the overall structure is very hard to measure from that perspective. To complicate things further there is quite a lot if interstellar dust that messes up our view in certain directions.
As an analogy - imagine being stuck in a traffic jam. Figuring out the extent of it is very hard from the view you get from your car. A helicopter in the sky has no problems though.
I came in here to say almost exactly what the parent post said - If you had taken all the Hubble money and rather spent it on some social program it would come down to basically $1 per US citizen per year over the last 20 years.
Money spent on pure science is usually a good investment because the returns are cumulative. The new knowledge that we gain can potentially benefit the human race in all perpetuity.
E.g. Of the immense amount of technology that gives you the ability to post here in Slashdot large portions was funded by public money. Yes, you could rather have used that money to feed a few hungry people, but I would argue that the human race as a whole would be worse off for it.
Apparently there's a long-term strategy to move to FLOSS
OSS has a big following in SA for many reasons. One of the obvious benefits is that OpenOffice and many other open source programs are available in all 11 official languages - something that the likes of MS can't offer.
The celebrity of Mark Shuttleworth in SA and the success of Ubuntu no doubt played its part as well.
Your point is well made. Why the hell would anyone care about the state of OSS in South Africa? The next thing you know Slashdot will probably start covering that other South African loser and his rediculous project.
I have a huge stack of old Byte magazines at home - I've been lugging them around since high school. Those were the best - they covered hobby computing, hardware, software, programming, you name it. The ads were also great.
Hmm... I came in here to brag, but now I suddenly just feel very old.
They are the defenders of copyright! If it wasn't for their lobbying efforts the copyright of Mickey Mouse would already have expired. Imagine the chaos! Anyone would be able to create Mickey Mouse material, effectively stealing money from Disney's pockets and removing all incentive for them to create anything new - it would give people free reign to steal their work.
If copyrights expire then everyone could just profit from other people's work instead of having to come up with original material the way Disney has over the years. Imagine if Disney could just use works with expired copyright instead of creating originals like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Alice in Wonderland, Beauty and the Beast, Treasure Island (Planet), the Little Mermaid and hundreds more...Oh, wait...
Today's pirating student is tomorrow's paying customer. When I was a student I didn't have money, so I never paid for music, computer games or any other software - I copied it.
Once I started working I had money and I started buying all these things that I learned to appreciate through copying.
Let's see... I'm 41, have loved metal since I was 14 (Motorhead is the greatest band EVAR) and am the smartest guy on slashdot... The evidence is overwhelming.
I'm 31, I've listened to metal since I was 14 (Iron Maiden is the greatest band EVAR) and I am the smartest guy in this thread.
Re:Results of experiment published in the past
on
Speed of Light Exceeded?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
So the dupe will be posted 6 years ago? Awesome! I'm looking forward to it.
"According to this NY Times piece, Lijun Wang of the NEC Research Institute in Princeton has reported an experiment where "a pulse of light that enters a transparent chamber filled with specially prepared cesium gas is pushed to speeds of 300 times the normal speed of light". A second experiment by three scientists for the Italian National Research Council is reporting also superluminal speeds. And yet, this seems to be consistent with Einstein's theories. "
Wow... we finally have proof that dupes travel faster than the speed of light!
Slashdot Mirror
As a percentage of GDP, the U.S. debt situation is about the same as Germany, France, and Canada, and is considerably better than Japan and Italy's. It's a common misconception that the U.S. is badly in debt.
I've heard this argument many times and I think there are some serious problems with it. You are basically saying, it's OK for debt to grow as long as the GDP is growing faster.
But you have to ask yourself, now much of that GDP growth is due to real long term sustainable industries and how much of it is just because of the regular cash injections from borrowing more money.
It's like someone who's not worried about credit card debt because he knows he can get a new card to pay off the previous one next month. This works great until no-one wants to lend you more money.
There are also longer term problems that are slowly sneaking up and for which there are no contingency plans - like the trillions of dollars the social security fund is going to be short by in ten year's time.
The political parties don't want to touch it because every possible solution will be unpopular which is bad if you want to get re-elected
Actually they only get second place on this list (Cubatao, Brazil).
From the lyrics of their 1993 song Biotech is Godzilla:
Like Cubatao"World's most polluted town"
Air-melts your face
Deformed children all around
Unfortunately none of those dozens of varieties have the attributes that make the Cavendish banana by far the most successful and important fruit crop in the world:
1. Long shelf life
2. Very uniform and predictable ripening times
That is why you can get bananas cheaply, even though they might be grown thousands of miles from where they are eventually sold.
Most, if not all the other varieties are only viable crops when they are sold very close to where they were grown.
They missed the most influential and groundbreaking site of the whole dot-com era: Zombocom!
Instead of source files where you can just do a text search to find something, almost everything is hidden away in some property dialog.
Certain properties are SQL queries. If you're lucky there is a button you can press that opens a new dialog with a text area (with variable width font and no syntax highlighting) where you can edit the sql. In other places there is no option but a single line textbox for you to work with.
That's just one gripe - I can name many other problems. But they all boil down to the same thing: The flashy UI makes development harder and more laborious than it would be if you could just edit the source files directly.
A good IDE (like Eclipse) can really make you more productive, but I would rather go back to vi and gcc and no integrated debugger than this crap.
If they can get that right the movie will be brilliant, but I doubt they will.
Another thing: The story is in a large part driven by the Cold War and the threat of nuclear holocaust. What are they going to do about that? I would love it if they kept it as an 80's period piece.
One big fear that I have is that they will make it more "relevant" and "contemporary" by changing the threat to be some kind of War on Terror driven bull.
FAIL all around
A billion gigabytes would be an exabyte. A billion terrabytes would be zettabyte. A trillion terabytes or a quadrillion gigabytes would be a yottabyte.
Wikipedia to the rescue
What makes it even more amazing is that one of the most successful FOSS projects out there originated in his own back yard.
It's pretty hard to measure the size and shape of the Milky Way simply because we are stuck in the middle of it. Measuring the size and shape of far away galaxies is a lot easier because we have a better view. Our galaxy is a flat disk with spiral arms where we are in one of those arms - the overall structure is very hard to measure from that perspective. To complicate things further there is quite a lot if interstellar dust that messes up our view in certain directions.
As an analogy - imagine being stuck in a traffic jam. Figuring out the extent of it is very hard from the view you get from your car. A helicopter in the sky has no problems though.
Exactly
I came in here to say almost exactly what the parent post said - If you had taken all the Hubble money and rather spent it on some social program it would come down to basically $1 per US citizen per year over the last 20 years.
Money spent on pure science is usually a good investment because the returns are cumulative. The new knowledge that we gain can potentially benefit the human race in all perpetuity.
E.g. Of the immense amount of technology that gives you the ability to post here in Slashdot large portions was funded by public money. Yes, you could rather have used that money to feed a few hungry people, but I would argue that the human race as a whole would be worse off for it.
*golf clap*
Your comment sums up the situation perfectly. Oh if only I had mod points...
OSS has a big following in SA for many reasons. One of the obvious benefits is that OpenOffice and many other open source programs are available in all 11 official languages - something that the likes of MS can't offer.
The celebrity of Mark Shuttleworth in SA and the success of Ubuntu no doubt played its part as well.
Your point is well made. Why the hell would anyone care about the state of OSS in South Africa? The next thing you know Slashdot will probably start covering that other South African loser and his rediculous project.
I have a huge stack of old Byte magazines at home - I've been lugging them around since high school. Those were the best - they covered hobby computing, hardware, software, programming, you name it. The ads were also great.
Hmm... I came in here to brag, but now I suddenly just feel very old.
O RLY?
Everything on fark is 50% in-jokes, 50% lol and 50% win - yup, that's 150%, motherfarker
They are the defenders of copyright! If it wasn't for their lobbying efforts the copyright of Mickey Mouse would already have expired. Imagine the chaos! Anyone would be able to create Mickey Mouse material, effectively stealing money from Disney's pockets and removing all incentive for them to create anything new - it would give people free reign to steal their work.
...Oh, wait...
If copyrights expire then everyone could just profit from other people's work instead of having to come up with original material the way Disney has over the years. Imagine if Disney could just use works with expired copyright instead of creating originals like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Alice in Wonderland, Beauty and the Beast, Treasure Island (Planet), the Little Mermaid and hundreds more
Today's pirating student is tomorrow's paying customer. When I was a student I didn't have money, so
I never paid for music, computer games or any other software - I copied it.
Once I started working I had money and I started buying all these things that I learned to appreciate through copying.
I'm 31, I've listened to metal since I was 14 (Iron Maiden is the greatest band EVAR) and I am the smartest guy in this thread.
Found it!
"According to this NY Times piece, Lijun Wang of the NEC Research Institute in Princeton has reported an experiment where "a pulse of light that enters a transparent chamber filled with specially prepared cesium gas is pushed to speeds of 300 times the normal speed of light". A second experiment by three scientists for the Italian National Research Council is reporting also superluminal speeds. And yet, this seems to be consistent with Einstein's theories. "
Wow
I thought it was: In God we trust
Not everyone. Some of us are perfectly OK with the idea that this is the only life we have and therefore we have to make the most of it.