In my personal experience with sysadmins in big financial companies, maybe 1 out of 10 are true geeks. The remaining 9 are either MSCEs (true, some MSCEs are geeks) or clueless newbies just picked out of college or high-school which wouldn't recognize a kernel driver from a shell script even if it bit their asses.
Not surprising really, since being a sysadmin in a big financial company is often the same as sitting at the bottom of the shit-slide.
Did people forgot that plants are powered by sunlight?
Unless we're talking rainforest style vertical farming here (top floor - tree tops, middle floor - monkeys and assorted fruit eating birds, bottom floor - weeds, dead leafs and mushrooms) then the expected result is, as an insightful AC already pointed out - "The top layer is for growing plants, all the bottom layers are for growing mushrooms and cockroaches".
The only viable way of raising any kind of green plants below the top levels is by using artificial lighting, which is hardly efficient or ecological (since electricity for those lights has to come from somewhere).
Is this just another "stupid politician trying to look green 'cause it's fashionable while actually damaging the environment" kind of idea?
Actually, the implications are potentially a lot wider than what it might seem.
The thing is, most modern digital transmission devices also have RAM... and communications going through them are also temporarily stored in RAM. The same logic as the judge used - the contents of the RAM is a document, thus logging the IP addresses from the RAM is a form of transcription, not the producing of a new document - can also be used to order parties to implement measures to "copy the unprocessed digital signal from the RAM of a digital communication device"... in other words, wiretapping (potentially on a massive and arbitrary scale, if what we're talking about is a digital telephone exchange).
EULAs are not valid in most of Europe (possibly in all of Europe) because they're post-sale changes to the implicit contract entered at the moment of the sale.
If EULAs where shown to potential customers before the sale, then the situation would be different. If the potential customer had to sign the EULA contract as part of buying the product then it would definitely be a different situation (though some clausules in most EULAs are not valid in most European countries)
However, the customer is only presented with the EULA after the sale has been finalized. In most countries of the world, you cannot unilaterally change the terms of a sale after you finalized it, be it about software or not.
Actually "f@ck" translates to "f-at-ck" which in turn can be grouped as "fat ck". In the given context "ck" can be understood as the SMS abreviation for "cock" so "fat ck" turns into "fat cock".
Naturally we're talking about a big rooster here....
If i still remember correctly, from what i learned in my Philisophy classes:
In the original concept: - Communism is the final status where everybody is equal to everybody else and has the same amount of things - Socialism is one way to reach Communism. Socialism says that to reach Communism one must first have a revolution which establishes a "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" (The proletariat is basically the group name for all common workers). Under that Dictatorship, property will be redistributed until everybody has the same and Communism is achieved. - Social Democracy is another way to reach Communism. Social Democracy says that richer people must be taxed more heavilly than poorer people which will eventually lead to the situation where everybody has the same, eg Communism.
All so called Communist countries actually started with Socialist revolutions (more preciselly, variants of Socialism such as Maoism and Marxism/Leninism), only they all stopped at the stage of "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" (surprise, surprise)
Most Western European countries adopted a variant of Social Democracy in the sense that in most of Western Europe taxes are progressive (eg, the bigger the income the higher the percentage of tax), though the aim is to increase social equality, NOT achieving Communism.
There's a huge number of good practices which majorly decrease the chances of critical races and deadlocks. Actually, most of those are used in the standard Java classes.
Things like read-only objects (for example Strings); passing the state around as State objects which are inputs to methods of Objects which act based on the state; stateless Objects such as Algorithm objects; and more, much more.
It also helps a lot if you have a proper Object Oriented design were Containement of Information and Clear Separation of Responsabilities have been worked payed proper attention - if each data category is only contained in a specific type of container object and only changed via a small number of well define pathways, then the place(s) to put your synchronized blocks to control multi-threaded access to that data is(are) obvious.
Multi-threading must to be worked into the design of the software: considering the multithreading issues only at development time is a painfull and unrewarding task (as you seem to have discovered).
I never said it was easy - i only said it wasn't that hard;)
Java and Fortran really aren't very different, and neither is well suited to paralellizing programs.
Actually in Java it's extraordinarilly easy to do things like spawning new threads and fine grained synchronizing of multiple threads.
Here's a simple example multithreaded Java app: public class MultiHello {
public static void main(String args[]){
(new Thread(new Runnable(){public void run(){System.out.println("Hello world!");}})).start();
System.out.println("Goodbye world!");
} }
(it starts a new thread which just prints "Hello world!" to the console while the main thread prints "Goodbye world!")
Even more, if you work with Enterprise Applications or Web Based interfaces in Java your code will be working in a multi-threaded environment and can be executed simultaneously by multiple threads (unless you explicitly configure it otherwise).
The problem is not the suitability of the language for multithreading but the quality of the programmers: - There's a whole generation of Java developers out there which wouldn't recognize a mutator if it bit their asses (even though in Java when you use the keyword "synchronized" you're using a mutator). And let's not even start talking about semaphores...
Many of the latest crop of Java developers have never done C, never worked with multiple processes and never really understood the nitty gritty details of how multithreading works in Java. Most are in one of two groups: - Blissefully unaware that their code is working in a multithreaded environment - many of those doing Servlets and JSP pages (web-based UIs) are not even aware that their code can be called by multiple threads simultaneously. - Blindly using the "synchronized" keyword in all their functions (a syhcronized function on an Object can only be accessed by one thread at a time) - thus, often needlessly, removing any and all possibility of serialization in their programs (or worse, their libraries).
Proper multi-threaded programming in Java isn't easy but it isn't that hard either. I recommend the following: - Read a good book about it ("Concurrent Programming in Java: Design Principles and Patterns" from Sun is good) - Think before you act! A little bit of up-front design (even if only in your mind) makes a lot of difference on the results. - Exercise a bit of discipline and restraint. (do you really need to make a variable an object variable when it's only used as a temporary variable inside functions; do you really need to keep variables in an algorithm implementation Object when it's perfectly feasible to pass the input values as function parameters; why syncronized a method which does not write into object or class variables?)
The most efficient raw material for producing ethanol is sugar cane. Sugar cane can be produced in very large quantities on countries with a high average temperature and lots of sun (like Brasil).
The US imposes heavy tariffs on imported ethanol, which in practice means pretty much only ethanol produced from sugar cane since that is by far the cheapest way of making ethanol.
Removed the tariffs on imported ethanol and corn ethanol is not viable anymore (even with subsidies) thus ending the food problem.
As the parent poster pointed out, the problem is not with biofuels or ethanol, it's with politicians.
I live in London and i can definitely say you are full of it: 1) There are many, many cameras in private buildings which are covering the outside of the buiding. I can almost guarantee that any building where cameras are installed on the inside alsohas outside cameras covering the outside the building, at least one per-side, probably more in order to cover dead angles.
2) Anybody commuting to London will definitely get filmed hundreds of times. For example, the Oxford Circus tube station has at least 5 cameras per-platform, at least one camera per-corridor-and-direction (more if it has bends or is longer than 20m), at least one camera per set of stairs and 2 per hallway. I usually use this station to change lines and i pass under more than 20 cameras just to change metro (and i'm not even getting anywhere near an exit). Another example is the City of London - pretty every building has a camera covering each of the outside walls, there are traffic cameras covering crossroads and streets, all stores and all building entryways have cameras which often viewing into the street. I am 100% sure that just getting from home to work i've been filmed by 50+ cameras (this is a conservative number) and this is even before i go out for lunch.
The thing is to such an extreme that all you have to do anywhere in the center of London is to look around and you will find at least one camera pointing at you. If you're in the subway, at any point you're probably being filmed by at least 3 cameras.
Please, feel free to point me wrong and let me know any place whatsoever in the City of London which is not inside a building and which is not covered by any camera.
Those with the right connections and/or in a position of power get special treatment.
Being wealthy is probably highly correlated with having the right connections and being in a position of power: - Connections are needed to get rich or are inherited along with the money ("daddy's friends", "my rich guys fratternity pals") - Money enables power - in most societies money enables power simply because some of those which are in positions of power but are not wealthy are willing to be payed to exercise their power in specific ways.
However, money is not a pre-requisite for having connections or power: for example, many politicians are not rich.
In the end, the fact remains, that those which receive special treatment (let's call them, the elites) want to keep receiving special treatment and will do what it takes to make it be so (eg, remain an elite). This is pure human nature.
A common misconception (especially within a certain old-fashioned left) is that those which are not rich are inheritely better people and if they found themselfs in a positions of power/influence they would somehow behave differently from the current elites. Countless cases of ex-revolutionaries holding on to power (and the special treatment that comes with it) or previously "opressed" common workers which by luck or skill became bosses and turned into "oppressors" should have disavowed people of those notions.
With the onset of the ubiquitous camera, you may or may not be under observation, but probably best to act as though you are, all the time, too. With the cameras, the balance of power has shifted completely - you may be watched by no-one or you may be being watched by dozens, and being recorded to boot - you simply don't know.
Actually i would like to go suggest a way of leveling the playing field: a) All feeds from all cameras in public venues or pointing at public venues should be viewable by everybody in realtime via the Internet. b) Cameras should be allowed in any public venue and anybody can put up a camera in any public venue or in their private property as long as it obeys rule A. c) To access the camera feeds you need to register in such a way that your real name is associated with your session. The names of all the people observing any feed should be displayed along with the feed. Also a history should be kept.
In other words, everybody can watch everybody else, no public venues are out of bounds for surveilance and it's possible to know who is watching who.
Of course, i'm sure some police officers and politicians would oppose the sugestions above - after all, some people are superior to other people and THEIR privacy should be protected (for security reasons, of course).......
Actually all online FPSs are are vary much reliant on "user created content" of a sort: the other player avatars running around the place.
It's not an "objects" kind of content it is however an "intelligent entity" kind of content.
My point here is that there are alreayd plenty of games out there relying on users to provide entertainment and replayability for other users. If you can get some users to also contribute with new or improved game objects, that's just icing on the cake.
"Right now I work in a very large bank and some days I think the admins could not find their rear end with both hands and a man page - I've never met them persoanlly so no idea what they are actually like. From otehr friends I have working in banking I know how much red tape they have to work under and I suspect half of the problems the user end sees (bear in mind I'm an ex admin myself and now developer) are caused by the red tape, not by the admin.
I work in a banking environment with less than the usual red tape (for a banking environment) and most sysadmins are still less than impressive.
As i see it, it's a problem with banks (who see IT as a cost center rather than an essencial part of empowering their business) and not red tape.
The truth is, as companies grow, checks and controls are added for a reason. Consider the scenario where Group A responsible for system 1 (say, Accounting) asks the sysadmins for a seemingly small change to the configuration on a server machine which in turn breaks the systems of Groups C and D (say, responsible for the Sales and the Dispatching systems) resulting in a down time of several hours and a month's worth man-hours wasted.
Checks and controls (say, a change approval system) are added preciselly to avoid this kind of scenario: beyond a certain level of complexity, some level of check and controls is required to avoid that everybody is constantly tripping in everybody else's toes.
Red tape (read, unnecessary bureaucracy) is born when bureaucracies gain a live of their own and rules are created for purposes such as "showing work done" or "creating and fencing a new area of responsability". Another way how red tape is born is when the reason for a rule ceases to exist but the rule is not remove.
In my experience, banks are not especially more prone to red tape than other big companies - mostly it boils down to: - The quality of high-level and mid-level management. Good managers (like good programmers) aim for lean and mean and low clutter. - How old the company is. Old companies, if they don't go through periodic process reinvention phases, tend to accumulate old rules which have long since become worthless. - The level of competitiviness and the size of the profit margins on the business area/location where a company operates. Companies in highly competitive markets and/or having tight margins have a lot more incentive to "trim fat" than companies in stable markets with high barriers to entry.
Compared with most of Europe, Holland is much more tolerant:
Consider the support that a right-wing, populist and anti-emigrant party had (Lijst Pim Furtuyn) even though their leader was openly gay (which in most of Europe would be a big no-no for the kind of constituency they were targetting).
I have lived in 3 countries in Europe by now (Holland, Portugal and England) and Holland is by far the most equalitarian and socially stable of the three.
The truth is, a number of enlightned measures taken in the past made Holland the country it is today. For example, of these three countries, Holland is by far the one with the lowest amount of drug related problems - i'm thinking junkies begging on the streets and commiting crimes - and at the same time it's the only one which doesn't criminalize consumption, and tolerates selling of soft drugs (which seem to be mostly consumed by forgeign turists visiting Amsterdam;)).
As i see it societies go through cycles between "more freedom" and "more safety". My impression of Holland (and i lived there for 8 years until the end of last year) is that when i arrived the country was climbing to the top of the "more freedom" part of the cycle. Then came the economic recession and the side effects of the latest wave of uneducated emigrants from closed, intolerant cultural backgrounds started to be felt - so the cycle turned in the direction of "more safety". The discovery of the malign cancer which was developing within some closed communities of the latest-wave emigrants (eg islamic extremism) just increased people's yearning for "more safety". I expect that at some point, the side effects of a "control society" will start to be felt as the increasingly restrictive rules and laws passed by the "power hungry" and "i know best" members of society increases the frequency of the exposure of the common people to "unfair", "agressive" and "abusive" actions by the enforcers of the law. At that point, the cycle should start to turn. Unfortunatly, it usually takes a whole generation (since today's teenagers, being natural rebels agains the "old rules" and "authority", are disproportionally the ones that suffer the side effects of "too much law") for this kind of cycle to turn.
I reckon this idea neatly dovetails with your point that it's the police that's "abusing" the rules - the police tends to attract people with a judgemental temperament who believe people must follow a strict set of rules and are the first group people turn to for "more safety". In that sence, the police's "sterner" (from their point of view, other people might call it "excessive") enforcing of their interpretation of the law is the natural consequence of laxer oversight (which in turn is the natural consequence of populist politicians giving people what appears to be "more safety" in order to get re-elected).
"...Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it..."
... the responsible politicians just stand idly by while overzealous police officers...
Judging by the highly publicized raids on "hemp farms" and closures of "rose buurts" (red light districts) i would say that the politicians are activelly supporting the police on this kind of measures. Couple this with active support of Bush's invasion of Iraq and a pattern of right-wing, neocon-style moralism starts to emerge.
As a liberal on moral issues (eg, liberal european style) i'm deeply disapointed with the turn Holland took. More so 'cause i was living there at the time.
I can understand the level of shock for most dutch people (hey, i was shocked and i'm not dutch) when it turns out that dutch tolerance was being used and abuse by intolerants bound on violently forcing the world to follow their beliefs (i'm thinking the murderers of Theo Van Gogh and their ilk here). Still, I don't exactly see how the "War on Drugs" and the "War on Sex" have anything to do with fighting intolerance.
It saddens me that one of the few western nations with a culture of "If it doesn't hurt anybody and i don't have to see it, you can do whatever you want" is responding to religious intolerance by becoming intolerant themselfs (doing it by proxy - such as through extraditing locals to places with stricter rules - is in practice the same).
Just makes me think that Freedom (the real one, not the "you're free to do what if it doesn't break our rules" sold but power-hungry politicians the world over) is a hard to get and easy to loose thing.
As someone which has lived in Holland for many years and just recently left the country due to it's high taxes, ever decreasing public services and progressive leaning to the conservative right (Note: as a foreigner i couldn't vote) allow me to point you that the Dutch did it to themselfs (and just recentely did it again by re-electing the same moralist, religious right-wing conservatives).
In a sense, the scenario in Holland is very similar to the one in Australia - a conservative, right-wing party got to power just when the economy was bouncing back from recession, proceeded to pass moralistic laws, rules and regulations and has hold on to power by claiming the results of the economic recovery as their doing (when in fact that would have happenned anyway, even if the government was made up of semi-trained monkeys).
I'm happy i'm an experienced migrant with highly portable skills, though concerned for my friends in Holland and their families.
Let's hope that the next recession won't end up being harder on both countries than it should've otherwise.
The objective of Libertarianism is to "Maximize Liberty".
What Libertarians diverge in is i how to do it and in the answer to questions such as "Should we sacrifice some Liberty now so that later on we can have the-same/more Liberty?"
As i pointed out above, you can easilly spot Libertarians from those with different agendas by the fact that Libertarians look at most typical choices of modern politics (big government, small government, more social protections, more economic freedom) as means to an end, not the end itself. As such their opinions tend not to be always pointing in the direction of one of the extremes ("smaller state"; "smaller state"; "smaller state") but instead point at some point in the middle ("more than this, less than that").
There's Libertarianism and there's US Libertarianism.
True Libertarianism is not about no government or not paying any taxes - that kind of idea is Anarchism or extreme Small Government Conservatism.
Libertarianism (as undertood in places other than the US) is based on the idea of Liberty and, as anybody that has thought about it seriously for more than 5 minutes can tell you, one person's liberty ends where another person's liberty begins.
Now, since no 2 people will ever agree to "where does my liberty stop and your begin" you need rules so that someone's "liberty" doesn't overstep somebody else's liberty (like somebody deciding that "I should be free to take your stuff"). Rules don't work if they're not enforced to you have a State. To maintain a State that enforces the rules you need to pay for it. To pay for it you need Taxes. Human behaviour is complex and very few rules are obvious and straightforward to determine and interpret, so you need Legislators and Judges, and so forth and so forth...
The most basic idea of Libertarianism is that the State should refrain as much as possible of restricting personal behaviour. This can split into two parts: - Personal behaviour which does not affect others: For example anything that does not cause damage to others should never be forbiden (think moralistic laws such as those that forbid private sexual acts between consenting adults or the consumption of any substance in the privacy of one's home or the right to terminate one's own life). - The balance of the rules that define the borders of one's liberties versus the borders of everybody else's liberties: where the point is which are the right rules so that everybody has the same level of liberties; which rules maximize everybody's liberties; how to punish those that overstep the rules; what are the correct rules to make sure that people's liberties are not lost over time.
The first part of Libertarianism is completly orthogonal to the Left-Right political axis which goes from "It's the responsibility of Society to make sure everybody has the same as everybody else" (pure Communism) to "Everybody stands on their own and must fend for themselfs, there will be winners and loosers and Society must not intervene in any way whatsoever to help anybody." (pure Capitalism). Moral laws aftect nothing in the equality-vs-competitiveness axis - forbidding homosexual sex will neither increase equality nor increase competitiveness - so in the Libertarian point of view they are always bad.
The second part of Libertarianism is however very much entwined with the left-right axis. The problem here is that the State is the main agent of Society and calling uppon Society to make sure of anything (such as, for example, promoting equality) just boils down to having the State make more rules, which per definition reduces Liberty. Hence, to the untrained eye, it might look like pure Capitalism = maximum Liberty. However, there are 2 ways in which pure Capitalism negativelly afects one's Liberty: - To preserve one's liberties societies must be stable. The question is still open on whether a society with no support whatsoever for a (potentially majority) of "loosers" will not crumble into revolution. - Inequality brings poverty. Poverty brings crime. Crime reduces everybody's liberties, either because of fear of being a victim of crime or because draconian measures are put in place to fight said crime.
Hence maximum Liberty is NOT to be found in a Society with no support for anybody.
So how to distinguish Libertarians from Small Government Conservatives and Anarchists when discussing politics ins the left-right wing axis?
Simple - look at their final objectives: - The objective of Small Government Conservatives is "The smallest possible Government" - The objective of Anarchists is "No Government" - The objective of Libertarians is "Maximize liberty"
So the first two groups will always ask for smaller governments, fewer laws, less taxes. Always! Government ca
I've been faced with the "pot is bad" people before.
They absorve all that crap on the media about how smoking pot is dangerous and pot-smoking people flood the hospitals and waste taxpayers money, and drive dangerously and are all junkies (picture: wasted crackhead types).
Now, i've lived in Holland, i know people that smoke pot and i can openly admit it.
When i ask any "pot-haters" if they know somebody that smokes pot, it turns out none of them does (surprise, surprise). At that point i point out that i know people that smoke pot and they're all absolutly normal people with jobs, families and you wouldn't be able to spot them on the street from everybody else. At that point they go silent.
As i see it, the reason why some Governments are winning the disinformation war about soft drugs is because most of those that actually smoke pot or have/had contact with people that smoke pot can't admit to it (they might be prosecuted because of it). In other words, they're being censored. This leaves us with an ignorant majority being fed the pre-packaged "pot is evil" message and a knowledgeable minority that cannot (or has to be very carefull when they) educate people to the fact that the official message is mostly lies (pot is highly addictive), wild exagerations (if we liberalize pot, thousands will flood the health services) and subtle omissions (like conveniently forgetting the small detail that tobacco is both more addictive and way much more dangerous to you health than pot).
If not, how do we know that it doesn't have a back-door?
And if it does indeed have a back-door, how can people ever be sure that the "wrong" people (definition of "wrong" depending on the user) will not intercept and decode the communications using said back-door?
In this world of powerfull Intelligence Agencies, any kind of communications security software/hardware which is not at the very least peer-reviewed is bound to have some sort of backdoor.
You see, there's this funny idea called 'Capitalism'. Capitalism pretty much means "if you want to sell a product at whatever price you want to sell it, go for it. If you make money, congratulations. If you lose money, tough." The corollary to that is "if you want something and are willing to pay the asked-for price, you can buy it. If you are unwilling to pay that price, you can try to negotiate a new lower price, shop elsewhere, or go without."
Actually people going around telling their friends and aquaintances that a certain vendor is too expensive and they can buy the same product cheaper somewhere else is also a part of Capitalism.
Given that the theoretical baseline for old fashioned Free Market theories (100% information awareness for all participants) doesn't really exist, the real world way of compensating for the information gap (between single consumers and multimilion dollar companies with big consumer research and marketing departments) is doing exactly what the GP is doing: "Dessiminating the information that he has".
Actually, the only reason why we don't have DRM free music at $0.25 a pop is because Government has created and granted artificial monopoly rights (aka copyright) to some of the players.
These kind of patents are filled before it becames economically feasible to do so.
It's a bit like officially staking ownership to a piece of land on Mars and then waiting until people get there.
The thing is, in IT related areas, given the speed of technological evolution and the way too long duration of a patent, wild land grabs before the necessary technology exists are a viable business model since technology will often catch up before the patent expires.
Reduce the length of a patent on IT to 2 years and all these parasites will go away.
Beter yet, eliminate patents for business methods altogether.
At the moment, in the US, the concept of "doing something" is patentable. Instead, patents should only be awarded to "the mechanics of a solution that allows the doing of something". If somebody else comes up with a beter solution the patent doesn't cover them, but if they tune or tweak your solution they have to pay you to sell their version of the solution.
This is how you get innovation instead of stagnation.
That means that "One-click shopping" would not be patentable but "An implementation of one-click shopping" would be patentable. If your implementation is sofware then it's already covered by copyright, the only reason you would need a patent for this is if hardware was involved.
For whatever is left, the "obvious to a specialist in that field" test would provide a good test of "inovativeness". If i try and patent "A mechanism for asysnchnously sending and receiving text messages over a TCP/IP network" and you go and ask a couple of specialists in the field "How would you do a mechanism to asysnchnously sending and receiving text messages over a TCP/IP network" and one or more come up with the same mechanism as me (by the way, that would be e-mail), then that mechanism is an "obvious solution" and thus not patentable.
I search for something in Google and your site is one of the links.
I click on the link and i get an "IE only message".
5 seconds later (literally), i have pressed Back on my brower and clicked on another link.
(Faster than openning IE)
Oh yeah, if the site was a on Google add, you've just payed them money for my click.
And by the way, i might just have searched for "secure online trading" or "mortgage advisor" or "exotic cruises". Guess you've just lost a customer....
The guy in the post you mentioned caved in to using IE because he was directed to use that site - it was not his choice, it had been imposed to him. However, most of the time when looking for services via the Internet people are not constrained in such a way.
Slashdot Mirror
In my personal experience with sysadmins in big financial companies, maybe 1 out of 10 are true geeks. The remaining 9 are either MSCEs (true, some MSCEs are geeks) or clueless newbies just picked out of college or high-school which wouldn't recognize a kernel driver from a shell script even if it bit their asses.
Not surprising really, since being a sysadmin in a big financial company is often the same as sitting at the bottom of the shit-slide.
Did people forgot that plants are powered by sunlight?
Unless we're talking rainforest style vertical farming here (top floor - tree tops, middle floor - monkeys and assorted fruit eating birds, bottom floor - weeds, dead leafs and mushrooms) then the expected result is, as an insightful AC already pointed out - "The top layer is for growing plants, all the bottom layers are for growing mushrooms and cockroaches".
The only viable way of raising any kind of green plants below the top levels is by using artificial lighting, which is hardly efficient or ecological (since electricity for those lights has to come from somewhere).
Is this just another "stupid politician trying to look green 'cause it's fashionable while actually damaging the environment" kind of idea?
Actually, the implications are potentially a lot wider than what it might seem.
... and communications going through them are also temporarily stored in RAM. The same logic as the judge used - the contents of the RAM is a document, thus logging the IP addresses from the RAM is a form of transcription, not the producing of a new document - can also be used to order parties to implement measures to "copy the unprocessed digital signal from the RAM of a digital communication device" ... in other words, wiretapping (potentially on a massive and arbitrary scale, if what we're talking about is a digital telephone exchange).
The thing is, most modern digital transmission devices also have RAM
EULAs are not valid in most of Europe (possibly in all of Europe) because they're post-sale changes to the implicit contract entered at the moment of the sale.
If EULAs where shown to potential customers before the sale, then the situation would be different. If the potential customer had to sign the EULA contract as part of buying the product then it would definitely be a different situation (though some clausules in most EULAs are not valid in most European countries)
However, the customer is only presented with the EULA after the sale has been finalized. In most countries of the world, you cannot unilaterally change the terms of a sale after you finalized it, be it about software or not.
Actually "f@ck" translates to "f-at-ck" which in turn can be grouped as "fat ck". In the given context "ck" can be understood as the SMS abreviation for "cock" so "fat ck" turns into "fat cock".
....
Naturally we're talking about a big rooster here
Naturally
If i still remember correctly, from what i learned in my Philisophy classes:
In the original concept:
- Communism is the final status where everybody is equal to everybody else and has the same amount of things
- Socialism is one way to reach Communism. Socialism says that to reach Communism one must first have a revolution which establishes a "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" (The proletariat is basically the group name for all common workers). Under that Dictatorship, property will be redistributed until everybody has the same and Communism is achieved.
- Social Democracy is another way to reach Communism. Social Democracy says that richer people must be taxed more heavilly than poorer people which will eventually lead to the situation where everybody has the same, eg Communism.
All so called Communist countries actually started with Socialist revolutions (more preciselly, variants of Socialism such as Maoism and Marxism/Leninism), only they all stopped at the stage of "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" (surprise, surprise)
Most Western European countries adopted a variant of Social Democracy in the sense that in most of Western Europe taxes are progressive (eg, the bigger the income the higher the percentage of tax), though the aim is to increase social equality, NOT achieving Communism.
Read the book i recommended.
;)
There's a huge number of good practices which majorly decrease the chances of critical races and deadlocks. Actually, most of those are used in the standard Java classes.
Things like read-only objects (for example Strings); passing the state around as State objects which are inputs to methods of Objects which act based on the state; stateless Objects such as Algorithm objects; and more, much more.
It also helps a lot if you have a proper Object Oriented design were Containement of Information and Clear Separation of Responsabilities have been worked payed proper attention - if each data category is only contained in a specific type of container object and only changed via a small number of well define pathways, then the place(s) to put your synchronized blocks to control multi-threaded access to that data is(are) obvious.
Multi-threading must to be worked into the design of the software: considering the multithreading issues only at development time is a painfull and unrewarding task (as you seem to have discovered).
I never said it was easy - i only said it wasn't that hard
Actually in Java it's extraordinarilly easy to do things like spawning new threads and fine grained synchronizing of multiple threads.
Here's a simple example multithreaded Java app:
public class MultiHello {
public static void main(String args[]){
(new Thread(new Runnable(){public void run(){System.out.println("Hello world!");}})).start();
System.out.println("Goodbye world!");
}
}
(it starts a new thread which just prints "Hello world!" to the console while the main thread prints "Goodbye world!")
Even more, if you work with Enterprise Applications or Web Based interfaces in Java your code will be working in a multi-threaded environment and can be executed simultaneously by multiple threads (unless you explicitly configure it otherwise).
The problem is not the suitability of the language for multithreading but the quality of the programmers:
- There's a whole generation of Java developers out there which wouldn't recognize a mutator if it bit their asses (even though in Java when you use the keyword "synchronized" you're using a mutator). And let's not even start talking about semaphores
Many of the latest crop of Java developers have never done C, never worked with multiple processes and never really understood the nitty gritty details of how multithreading works in Java. Most are in one of two groups:
- Blissefully unaware that their code is working in a multithreaded environment - many of those doing Servlets and JSP pages (web-based UIs) are not even aware that their code can be called by multiple threads simultaneously.
- Blindly using the "synchronized" keyword in all their functions (a syhcronized function on an Object can only be accessed by one thread at a time) - thus, often needlessly, removing any and all possibility of serialization in their programs (or worse, their libraries).
Proper multi-threaded programming in Java isn't easy but it isn't that hard either. I recommend the following:
- Read a good book about it ("Concurrent Programming in Java: Design Principles and Patterns" from Sun is good)
- Think before you act! A little bit of up-front design (even if only in your mind) makes a lot of difference on the results.
- Exercise a bit of discipline and restraint. (do you really need to make a variable an object variable when it's only used as a temporary variable inside functions; do you really need to keep variables in an algorithm implementation Object when it's perfectly feasible to pass the input values as function parameters; why syncronized a method which does not write into object or class variables?)
The most efficient raw material for producing ethanol is sugar cane. Sugar cane can be produced in very large quantities on countries with a high average temperature and lots of sun (like Brasil).
The US imposes heavy tariffs on imported ethanol, which in practice means pretty much only ethanol produced from sugar cane since that is by far the cheapest way of making ethanol.
Removed the tariffs on imported ethanol and corn ethanol is not viable anymore (even with subsidies) thus ending the food problem.
As the parent poster pointed out, the problem is not with biofuels or ethanol, it's with politicians.
I live in London and i can definitely say you are full of it:
1) There are many, many cameras in private buildings which are covering the outside of the buiding. I can almost guarantee that any building where cameras are installed on the inside alsohas outside cameras covering the outside the building, at least one per-side, probably more in order to cover dead angles.
2) Anybody commuting to London will definitely get filmed hundreds of times. For example, the Oxford Circus tube station has at least 5 cameras per-platform, at least one camera per-corridor-and-direction (more if it has bends or is longer than 20m), at least one camera per set of stairs and 2 per hallway. I usually use this station to change lines and i pass under more than 20 cameras just to change metro (and i'm not even getting anywhere near an exit).
Another example is the City of London - pretty every building has a camera covering each of the outside walls, there are traffic cameras covering crossroads and streets, all stores and all building entryways have cameras which often viewing into the street. I am 100% sure that just getting from home to work i've been filmed by 50+ cameras (this is a conservative number) and this is even before i go out for lunch.
The thing is to such an extreme that all you have to do anywhere in the center of London is to look around and you will find at least one camera pointing at you. If you're in the subway, at any point you're probably being filmed by at least 3 cameras.
Please, feel free to point me wrong and let me know any place whatsoever in the City of London which is not inside a building and which is not covered by any camera.
Those with the right connections and/or in a position of power get special treatment.
Being wealthy is probably highly correlated with having the right connections and being in a position of power:
- Connections are needed to get rich or are inherited along with the money ("daddy's friends", "my rich guys fratternity pals")
- Money enables power - in most societies money enables power simply because some of those which are in positions of power but are not wealthy are willing to be payed to exercise their power in specific ways.
However, money is not a pre-requisite for having connections or power: for example, many politicians are not rich.
In the end, the fact remains, that those which receive special treatment (let's call them, the elites) want to keep receiving special treatment and will do what it takes to make it be so (eg, remain an elite). This is pure human nature.
A common misconception (especially within a certain old-fashioned left) is that those which are not rich are inheritely better people and if they found themselfs in a positions of power/influence they would somehow behave differently from the current elites. Countless cases of ex-revolutionaries holding on to power (and the special treatment that comes with it) or previously "opressed" common workers which by luck or skill became bosses and turned into "oppressors" should have disavowed people of those notions.
Actually i would like to go suggest a way of leveling the playing field:
a) All feeds from all cameras in public venues or pointing at public venues should be viewable by everybody in realtime via the Internet.
b) Cameras should be allowed in any public venue and anybody can put up a camera in any public venue or in their private property as long as it obeys rule A.
c) To access the camera feeds you need to register in such a way that your real name is associated with your session. The names of all the people observing any feed should be displayed along with the feed. Also a history should be kept.
In other words, everybody can watch everybody else, no public venues are out of bounds for surveilance and it's possible to know who is watching who.
Of course, i'm sure some police officers and politicians would oppose the sugestions above - after all, some people are superior to other people and THEIR privacy should be protected (for security reasons, of course)
Actually all online FPSs are are vary much reliant on "user created content" of a sort: the other player avatars running around the place.
It's not an "objects" kind of content it is however an "intelligent entity" kind of content.
My point here is that there are alreayd plenty of games out there relying on users to provide entertainment and replayability for other users. If you can get some users to also contribute with new or improved game objects, that's just icing on the cake.
I work in a banking environment with less than the usual red tape (for a banking environment) and most sysadmins are still less than impressive.
As i see it, it's a problem with banks (who see IT as a cost center rather than an essencial part of empowering their business) and not red tape.
The truth is, as companies grow, checks and controls are added for a reason. Consider the scenario where Group A responsible for system 1 (say, Accounting) asks the sysadmins for a seemingly small change to the configuration on a server machine which in turn breaks the systems of Groups C and D (say, responsible for the Sales and the Dispatching systems) resulting in a down time of several hours and a month's worth man-hours wasted.
Checks and controls (say, a change approval system) are added preciselly to avoid this kind of scenario: beyond a certain level of complexity, some level of check and controls is required to avoid that everybody is constantly tripping in everybody else's toes.
Red tape (read, unnecessary bureaucracy) is born when bureaucracies gain a live of their own and rules are created for purposes such as "showing work done" or "creating and fencing a new area of responsability". Another way how red tape is born is when the reason for a rule ceases to exist but the rule is not remove.
In my experience, banks are not especially more prone to red tape than other big companies - mostly it boils down to:
- The quality of high-level and mid-level management. Good managers (like good programmers) aim for lean and mean and low clutter.
- How old the company is. Old companies, if they don't go through periodic process reinvention phases, tend to accumulate old rules which have long since become worthless.
- The level of competitiviness and the size of the profit margins on the business area/location where a company operates. Companies in highly competitive markets and/or having tight margins have a lot more incentive to "trim fat" than companies in stable markets with high barriers to entry.
Compared with most of Europe, Holland is much more tolerant:
;)).
Consider the support that a right-wing, populist and anti-emigrant party had (Lijst Pim Furtuyn) even though their leader was openly gay (which in most of Europe would be a big no-no for the kind of constituency they were targetting).
I have lived in 3 countries in Europe by now (Holland, Portugal and England) and Holland is by far the most equalitarian and socially stable of the three.
The truth is, a number of enlightned measures taken in the past made Holland the country it is today. For example, of these three countries, Holland is by far the one with the lowest amount of drug related problems - i'm thinking junkies begging on the streets and commiting crimes - and at the same time it's the only one which doesn't criminalize consumption, and tolerates selling of soft drugs (which seem to be mostly consumed by forgeign turists visiting Amsterdam
As i see it societies go through cycles between "more freedom" and "more safety". My impression of Holland (and i lived there for 8 years until the end of last year) is that when i arrived the country was climbing to the top of the "more freedom" part of the cycle. Then came the economic recession and the side effects of the latest wave of uneducated emigrants from closed, intolerant cultural backgrounds started to be felt - so the cycle turned in the direction of "more safety". The discovery of the malign cancer which was developing within some closed communities of the latest-wave emigrants (eg islamic extremism) just increased people's yearning for "more safety".
I expect that at some point, the side effects of a "control society" will start to be felt as the increasingly restrictive rules and laws passed by the "power hungry" and "i know best" members of society increases the frequency of the exposure of the common people to "unfair", "agressive" and "abusive" actions by the enforcers of the law. At that point, the cycle should start to turn.
Unfortunatly, it usually takes a whole generation (since today's teenagers, being natural rebels agains the "old rules" and "authority", are disproportionally the ones that suffer the side effects of "too much law") for this kind of cycle to turn.
I reckon this idea neatly dovetails with your point that it's the police that's "abusing" the rules - the police tends to attract people with a judgemental temperament who believe people must follow a strict set of rules and are the first group people turn to for "more safety". In that sence, the police's "sterner" (from their point of view, other people might call it "excessive") enforcing of their interpretation of the law is the natural consequence of laxer oversight (which in turn is the natural consequence of populist politicians giving people what appears to be "more safety" in order to get re-elected).
"Talk is cheap."
"Anything can happen in theory"
Judging by the highly publicized raids on "hemp farms" and closures of "rose buurts" (red light districts) i would say that the politicians are activelly supporting the police on this kind of measures. Couple this with active support of Bush's invasion of Iraq and a pattern of right-wing, neocon-style moralism starts to emerge.
As a liberal on moral issues (eg, liberal european style) i'm deeply disapointed with the turn Holland took. More so 'cause i was living there at the time.
I can understand the level of shock for most dutch people (hey, i was shocked and i'm not dutch) when it turns out that dutch tolerance was being used and abuse by intolerants bound on violently forcing the world to follow their beliefs (i'm thinking the murderers of Theo Van Gogh and their ilk here). Still, I don't exactly see how the "War on Drugs" and the "War on Sex" have anything to do with fighting intolerance.
It saddens me that one of the few western nations with a culture of "If it doesn't hurt anybody and i don't have to see it, you can do whatever you want" is responding to religious intolerance by becoming intolerant themselfs (doing it by proxy - such as through extraditing locals to places with stricter rules - is in practice the same).
Just makes me think that Freedom (the real one, not the "you're free to do what if it doesn't break our rules" sold but power-hungry politicians the world over) is a hard to get and easy to loose thing.
As someone which has lived in Holland for many years and just recently left the country due to it's high taxes, ever decreasing public services and progressive leaning to the conservative right (Note: as a foreigner i couldn't vote) allow me to point you that the Dutch did it to themselfs (and just recentely did it again by re-electing the same moralist, religious right-wing conservatives).
In a sense, the scenario in Holland is very similar to the one in Australia - a conservative, right-wing party got to power just when the economy was bouncing back from recession, proceeded to pass moralistic laws, rules and regulations and has hold on to power by claiming the results of the economic recovery as their doing (when in fact that would have happenned anyway, even if the government was made up of semi-trained monkeys).
I'm happy i'm an experienced migrant with highly portable skills, though concerned for my friends in Holland and their families.
Let's hope that the next recession won't end up being harder on both countries than it should've otherwise.
The objective of Libertarianism is to "Maximize Liberty".
What Libertarians diverge in is i how to do it and in the answer to questions such as "Should we sacrifice some Liberty now so that later on we can have the-same/more Liberty?"
As i pointed out above, you can easilly spot Libertarians from those with different agendas by the fact that Libertarians look at most typical choices of modern politics (big government, small government, more social protections, more economic freedom) as means to an end, not the end itself. As such their opinions tend not to be always pointing in the direction of one of the extremes ("smaller state"; "smaller state"; "smaller state") but instead point at some point in the middle ("more than this, less than that").
There's Libertarianism and there's US Libertarianism.
True Libertarianism is not about no government or not paying any taxes - that kind of idea is Anarchism or extreme Small Government Conservatism.
Libertarianism (as undertood in places other than the US) is based on the idea of Liberty and, as anybody that has thought about it seriously for more than 5 minutes can tell you, one person's liberty ends where another person's liberty begins.
Now, since no 2 people will ever agree to "where does my liberty stop and your begin" you need rules so that someone's "liberty" doesn't overstep somebody else's liberty (like somebody deciding that "I should be free to take your stuff"). Rules don't work if they're not enforced to you have a State. To maintain a State that enforces the rules you need to pay for it. To pay for it you need Taxes. Human behaviour is complex and very few rules are obvious and straightforward to determine and interpret, so you need Legislators and Judges, and so forth and so forth...
The most basic idea of Libertarianism is that the State should refrain as much as possible of restricting personal behaviour. This can split into two parts:
- Personal behaviour which does not affect others: For example anything that does not cause damage to others should never be forbiden (think moralistic laws such as those that forbid private sexual acts between consenting adults or the consumption of any substance in the privacy of one's home or the right to terminate one's own life).
- The balance of the rules that define the borders of one's liberties versus the borders of everybody else's liberties: where the point is which are the right rules so that everybody has the same level of liberties; which rules maximize everybody's liberties; how to punish those that overstep the rules; what are the correct rules to make sure that people's liberties are not lost over time.
The first part of Libertarianism is completly orthogonal to the Left-Right political axis which goes from "It's the responsibility of Society to make sure everybody has the same as everybody else" (pure Communism) to "Everybody stands on their own and must fend for themselfs, there will be winners and loosers and Society must not intervene in any way whatsoever to help anybody." (pure Capitalism). Moral laws aftect nothing in the equality-vs-competitiveness axis - forbidding homosexual sex will neither increase equality nor increase competitiveness - so in the Libertarian point of view they are always bad.
The second part of Libertarianism is however very much entwined with the left-right axis. The problem here is that the State is the main agent of Society and calling uppon Society to make sure of anything (such as, for example, promoting equality) just boils down to having the State make more rules, which per definition reduces Liberty. Hence, to the untrained eye, it might look like pure Capitalism = maximum Liberty.
However, there are 2 ways in which pure Capitalism negativelly afects one's Liberty:
- To preserve one's liberties societies must be stable. The question is still open on whether a society with no support whatsoever for a (potentially majority) of "loosers" will not crumble into revolution.
- Inequality brings poverty. Poverty brings crime. Crime reduces everybody's liberties, either because of fear of being a victim of crime or because draconian measures are put in place to fight said crime.
Hence maximum Liberty is NOT to be found in a Society with no support for anybody.
So how to distinguish Libertarians from Small Government Conservatives and Anarchists when discussing politics ins the left-right wing axis?
Simple - look at their final objectives:
- The objective of Small Government Conservatives is "The smallest possible Government"
- The objective of Anarchists is "No Government"
- The objective of Libertarians is "Maximize liberty"
So the first two groups will always ask for smaller governments, fewer laws, less taxes. Always! Government ca
I've been faced with the "pot is bad" people before.
They absorve all that crap on the media about how smoking pot is dangerous and pot-smoking people flood the hospitals and waste taxpayers money, and drive dangerously and are all junkies (picture: wasted crackhead types).
Now, i've lived in Holland, i know people that smoke pot and i can openly admit it.
When i ask any "pot-haters" if they know somebody that smokes pot, it turns out none of them does (surprise, surprise). At that point i point out that i know people that smoke pot and they're all absolutly normal people with jobs, families and you wouldn't be able to spot them on the street from everybody else. At that point they go silent.
As i see it, the reason why some Governments are winning the disinformation war about soft drugs is because most of those that actually smoke pot or have/had contact with people that smoke pot can't admit to it (they might be prosecuted because of it). In other words, they're being censored. This leaves us with an ignorant majority being fed the pre-packaged "pot is evil" message and a knowledgeable minority that cannot (or has to be very carefull when they) educate people to the fact that the official message is mostly lies (pot is highly addictive), wild exagerations (if we liberalize pot, thousands will flood the health services) and subtle omissions (like conveniently forgetting the small detail that tobacco is both more addictive and way much more dangerous to you health than pot).
Is the encryption software open-source?
If not, how do we know that it doesn't have a back-door?
And if it does indeed have a back-door, how can people ever be sure that the "wrong" people (definition of "wrong" depending on the user) will not intercept and decode the communications using said back-door?
In this world of powerfull Intelligence Agencies, any kind of communications security software/hardware which is not at the very least peer-reviewed is bound to have some sort of backdoor.
Actually people going around telling their friends and aquaintances that a certain vendor is too expensive and they can buy the same product cheaper somewhere else is also a part of Capitalism.
Given that the theoretical baseline for old fashioned Free Market theories (100% information awareness for all participants) doesn't really exist, the real world way of compensating for the information gap (between single consumers and multimilion dollar companies with big consumer research and marketing departments) is doing exactly what the GP is doing: "Dessiminating the information that he has".
Actually, the only reason why we don't have DRM free music at $0.25 a pop is because Government has created and granted artificial monopoly rights (aka copyright) to some of the players.
These kind of patents are filled before it becames economically feasible to do so.
It's a bit like officially staking ownership to a piece of land on Mars and then waiting until people get there.
The thing is, in IT related areas, given the speed of technological evolution and the way too long duration of a patent, wild land grabs before the necessary technology exists are a viable business model since technology will often catch up before the patent expires.
Reduce the length of a patent on IT to 2 years and all these parasites will go away.
Beter yet, eliminate patents for business methods altogether.
At the moment, in the US, the concept of "doing something" is patentable. Instead, patents should only be awarded to "the mechanics of a solution that allows the doing of something". If somebody else comes up with a beter solution the patent doesn't cover them, but if they tune or tweak your solution they have to pay you to sell their version of the solution.
This is how you get innovation instead of stagnation.
That means that "One-click shopping" would not be patentable but "An implementation of one-click shopping" would be patentable. If your implementation is sofware then it's already covered by copyright, the only reason you would need a patent for this is if hardware was involved.
For whatever is left, the "obvious to a specialist in that field" test would provide a good test of "inovativeness". If i try and patent "A mechanism for asysnchnously sending and receiving text messages over a TCP/IP network" and you go and ask a couple of specialists in the field "How would you do a mechanism to asysnchnously sending and receiving text messages over a TCP/IP network" and one or more come up with the same mechanism as me (by the way, that would be e-mail), then that mechanism is an "obvious solution" and thus not patentable.
I search for something in Google and your site is one of the links.
I click on the link and i get an "IE only message".
5 seconds later (literally), i have pressed Back on my brower and clicked on another link.
(Faster than openning IE)
Oh yeah, if the site was a on Google add, you've just payed them money for my click.
And by the way, i might just have searched for "secure online trading" or "mortgage advisor" or "exotic cruises". Guess you've just lost a customer....
The guy in the post you mentioned caved in to using IE because he was directed to use that site - it was not his choice, it had been imposed to him. However, most of the time when looking for services via the Internet people are not constrained in such a way.