Trump is certainly does his best to spread ignorance, but many of his supporters see through at least some of it. I'm somewhat loathed to link to a slate.com article, but this one interviews Trump supporters about climate change. Many of his supporters see climate change as real and caused by humans, but they prioritize other things or thinks that Trump will come around on the issue. Many people support Trump because they think he is a successful business man, a man of action, and is not a dirty Washington politician. I take issue with the first two claims, but Trump hasn't really had to propagate those claims; the media was doing that long before he ran for president.
I think that it also helps that there's fertile ground for denial.
For example with climate change, there's a large number of Americans who see hard-core environmentalists as a bunch of hippies who are constantly yelling that the sky is falling and want government intervention in everything. (To be fair, there are vocal environmentalists that fit this mold, and they're very vocal.) So, it doesn't take much to cause a knee-jerk reaction against the claims of environmentalists because of negative perceptions of environmentalists in general. In fact, it might happen even without the prodding of people who want to peddle ignorance. Here's an interesting example of what I'm talking about: an otherwise thoughtful person who automatically rejected climate change ideas simply because of the source but has since reevaluated his beliefs.
Smoking also had fertile ground for ignorance. Since there was a push for government involvement, anti-nanny-staters were likely to automatically push back. Tobacco companies pedaling ignorance had fertile ground there too.
Guess what: Moore's law has been failing for several generations of fabs! The divergence from Moore's law has been gradual. No one is saying that progress will suddenly stop, but we've been slowly falling behind the "doubling every two years" schedule for a while now (arguably since at least 2012).
Now, you can argue about why that is. However, the problem is not a lack of effort or funding. I have a bunch of friends who work at Intel, and they're not taking it easy. They're working their asses off but making progress slower than they used to. Making transistors smaller and smaller is proving to be a very difficult task. Now, if you want to call that an engineering problem rather than a physics problem, go right ahead. But the fact remains: the difficulties stem from the physical size of the transistors, not from managerial issues.
Back in the day, moving from bipolar to MOSFET transistors was a fundamentally new technology, but we haven't done anything like that any time recently. Almost all of the examples on that list are old or speculative. All the chips in recent memory have been silicon MOSFETS made using ultraviolet photolithography. Moving from planar transistors to FinFETs is the closet thing to a new technology, but that really seems like a refinement. Moreover, banking on a fundamentally new technology won't save Moore's law because the technology needs to be ready now, and it's not.
We have reached the end of Moore's law. That isn't up for debate. Computer performance has been slipping from Moore's schedule for a while now. The question is why. I maintain that it's due to physical limitations. The OP says it's due to economics. I guess that you could argue that we'll get back on pace to follow Moore's law at some point in the future, but that's a much harder argument to make.
I'm not picking on you in particular, but I'm seeing a lot of posts implying that Moore's law could keep going but it's too expensive, there's not enough competition to warrant it, etc. The fact is that physics is the nail in the coffin for Moore's law. Making small fab processes is getting more and more difficult because these size scales are super tiny, and the difficulty means that Moore's law simply cannot keep going because we have to develop fundamentally new technology -- not just scaled down current technology.
There's a reason Intel is planning to stop using Silicon at 7 nm (not clear what they'll move to -- maybe indium gallium arsenide), and getting up to production quality with a new material is a huge task that is fundamentally incompatible with Moore's law. (InGaAs is not "new" per se, but InGaAs has never seen real commercial use; it has been confined to research labs.)
There's also a reason that research in classical (not only quantum) computing with superconducting circuits is again being seriously researched by commercial enterprises -- including companies like Northrup Grumman which are not traditionally associated with designing computer chips. (IBM poured a lot of money into superconducting computers in the 1980s but ultimately gave up because Si computing was marching along just fine. I think that IBM is back in the superconducting game too.) Again, getting superconducting circuits up and running is _hard_ and fundamentally incompatible with Moore's law.
Moore's law is intrinsically dead. End of story. Even if/when the non-Si chips get up and running, I don't expect that Moore's law will be revived. 7 nm equates to about 14 silicon atoms. The end of the road is in sight. It's trying to march through quicksand from here on out.
PS. I don't get the "lack of competition" hypothesis for why Intel is slowing down; there are a number of manufacturers matching or closing in on Intel's fab process. E.g. Samsung and Globalfoundries are already at 14 nm. TSMC is at 16 nm. These aren't in direct competition with Intel at the moment, but they will be if Intel ever gets serious about putting their chips in things other than desktops/laptops/servers. Intel isn't stupid; they see these other companies as competitors, and Intel really wants a leg up on them. If Intel could keep up with Moore's law, they would.
Automatics get better fuel economy than manuals in all new cars now.
Sounds good. The only problem: it's not true. Granted, the efficiency of non-manual transmissions (traditional automatics, CVTs, automated manual transmission , etc.) has improved greatly, and in some cases it's better than manual transmissions, but from what I've seen from shopping for small cars, manual transmissions are still a bit more fuel efficient on average.
I won't post a ton of links, but your statement only requires a single counterexample to disprove, so here's one: the Hyundai Accent.
The chances of successfully completing the goals in your grant are usually quite high because you generally apply for money to work on things that have already been _partially_ completed! This sounds disingenuous, but it's a practical response to funding levels. Money is scarce, so if you don't meet the goals in your grant proposal, you're less likely to get future grants funded. For that reason, projects with a low chance for success are just too risky.
So what do you do? You write a proposal for something that you're confident will work because you're already made headway into the problem. Then if you get the grant money, you use some of the funding to complete the project that you already started, and you use the rest of the money to work on a different project. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.
I'm not thrilled with this type of funding cycle. However, it does ensure that the research aims are completed, and it gives scientists some freedom to try different things. In short, it's still moving science forward, so I've made peace with the process.
The NSF is usually very careful about who it gives money to; only something like 10% of funding request are granted. For those who are curious, the basic grant information on this grant is available from the NSF:
The grant was done through the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (specifically the division of Social and Economic Sciences) -- as opposed to the Geosciences Directorate, which I believe normally handles the climate change work. (The NSF is divided into different parts for funding different areas.)
FWIW, the house science committee has long been working to cut the budget for the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. I'm sure that good work gets funded by that directorate, but it sure does make me pissed that a BS grant like this gets funded, while more useful grants in applied physics (my area) don't get funded.
I wouldn't pin this bad grant on the NSF as a whole. Hopefully it's the exception for that directorate rather than the rule.
Talk about a stretch of the imagination. Brandenburg v Ohio said that a KKK member had the right to express abstract advocacy of force or law violation. I.e. the KKK member could say "All Jews should be killed," since he wasn't advocating or planning a specific act of violence ("lets go to Synagogue X this evening and burn it down!").
What any of that has to do with Snowden is beyond me. Snowden didn't advocate leaking documents in an abstract sense. He actually leaked the documents. Moreover, who says that the court will treat government secrets in the same way they treat the speech of a KKK member? There is a first amendment right to say stupid stuff. There's no first amendment right to leak government secrets.
You're allowed to defend your actions. Plenty of those accused have.
No, you're not always allowed to defend your actions. Consider Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked top-secret documents in 1971. Here's part of wikipedia's description of the trial:
Ellsberg tried to claim that the documents were illegally classified to keep them not from an enemy but from the American public. However, that argument was ruled "irrelevant". Ellsberg was silenced before he could begin. According to Ellsberg, his "lawyer, exasperated, said he 'had never heard of a case where a defendant was not permitted to tell the jury why he did what he did.' The judge responded: well, you're hearing one now. And so it has been with every subsequent whistleblower under indictment".
That said, the judge eventually dismissed the case because the government broke a number of rules, including wiretapping Ellsberg without a warrant. However, if the government had bothered to follow the rules, you can bet that Ellsberg would be in the slammer because Ellsberg unequivocally violated the Espionage Act of 1917. Although releasing the information was the right thing to do, that simply isn't a legally valid defense. Period.
Likewise, Snowden has no inherent right to defend his actions, and unless the government did something dumb like illegally wiretap him, Snowden would be found guilty because he unequivocally broke the law (albeit for a good purpose, which is not a legally valid defense). Since the government can get rubber stamp warrants whenever it wants, government investigators may well have complied with the letter of the law. If you define a "fair trial" as a "a trial where the judge enforces the laws as they are written", then short of the government doing something stupid, Snowden be found guilty. I'm not saying that's a good thing (it's not), but thinking otherwise is delusional.
The fundamental problem here is that the laws are shitty. However, pointing out that the laws are shitty is not a valid defense unless you can prove they're unconstitutional, and for better or worse, the supreme court has blessed the Espionage Act of 1917.
Wind maximum capacity is pretty meaningless, I believe the average production is around 1/3 of rated.
How does average nuclear production compare to its maximum capacity? Its almost certainly higher than for wind, but it's not like every nuclear plant is constantly running at 100% capacity.
If a maximum wind capacity to maximum nuclear capacity comparison is a bad comparison, then an average wind production to average nuclear production comparison is needed instead.
Regardless, if wind power production keeps growing this quickly (it likely will because windows power is so cheap--nuclear isn't), then its average production will probably overtake nuclear sooner rather than later. I'm not saying that's good or bad; it's just how it is.
It's not quite abandonware, but the central impetus for it's creation and advancement is gone.
I wasn't planning to comment on this thread, but this is too big a lie to let stand -- unless by "not quite abaondonware" you mean "has absolutely nothing in common with abandonware besides being a type of software". Oracle was never the sole developer, and now that Oracle has lost interest, the developers just moved to other companies and kept doing the same thing. Its raison d'etre remains to provide an advanced filesystem that's easily integrated with linux, which for better or worse means being licensed under the GPL or something compatible.
As for encryption, yeah that would be nice to have, but it's not like zfs has all the features btrfs has. I'll take btrfs's online balancing (ability to add and remove drives at will) over built in encryption, but I realize that's a personal choice.
Finally, let's actually quote the FAQ correct only stability:
Short answer: Maybe.
Long answer: Nobody is going to magically stick a label on the btrfs code and say "yes, this is now stable and bug-free". Different people have different concepts of stability: a home user who wants to keep their ripped CDs on it will have a different requirement for stability than a large financial institution running their trading system on it. If you are concerned about stability in commercial production use, you should test btrfs on a testbed system under production workloads to see if it will do what you want of it. In any case, you should join the mailing list (and hang out in IRC) and read through problem reports and follow them to their conclusion to give yourself a good idea of the types of issues that come up, and the degree to which they can be dealt with. Whatever you do, we recommend keeping good, tested, off-system (and off-site) backups.
Pragmatic answer: (2012-12-19) Many of the developers and testers run btrfs as their primary filesystem for day-to-day usage, or with various forms of real data. With reliable hardware and up-to-date kernels, we see very few unrecoverable problems showing up. As always, keep backups, test them, and be prepared to use them.
For all practical purposes, btrfs is stable. Everything they say in the long answer basically applies to linux in general (unless you have a support contract with Red Hat or the likes).
I'm not quite sure why you're brining up the soviet union's problems, but I (perhaps incorrectly) get the sense that you're brining it up to suggest that external factors--rather than internal economic policy--were the major causes (or even the root cause) of economic problems in the soviet union. I'm only responding to that point.
the Soviet Union suffered near its start from a paranoid dictator (Stalin) who didn't give a crap about communism or any other kind of -ism other than his own power, it was devastated in a war in which it sustained vastly more casualties than we did and which in the US did not touch our industrial infrastructure, plus after that war it had to endure literally decades of economic warfare from the west. If there's one thing western countries, governments, and companies know how to do it's wage economic warfare.
These things sure hurt, but it doesn't fully explain the soviet union's economic problems or why the soviet union was unable to overcome them.
Stalin did a huge amount of damage, but can that really explain why his successors were so unsuccessful? They had nearly four decades to turn things around and failed miserably.
Germany was destroyed too and had a large fraction of its population killed, but Germany rebounded very quickly. Yes, foreign aid helped, but I think that foreign aid sped up a process that would have happened anyway (albeit more gradually).
The soviet union had all the resources it needed (oil, farm land, coal, iron ore, a good education system, etc.). Economic warfare only works when you can deny a country something that it needs. Moreover, most of the world didn't take part in an all-out economic embargo on the soviet union. E.g. Ladas were exported to pretty much every western country except the US. However, even US companies got in on the action. Read the whole wikipedia article including the part about how Coca-Cola used Ladas as currency.
The fundamental problem with the soviet union is that the state owned enterprises and collective farms were incredibly inefficient both in terms of their production and what they produced. I'm not from the former soviet union, but I have many friends who are, and I hear lots of stories about how the collective farms would harvest crops so inefficiently that people in a town could basically subsist off everything they left on the ground. Many got most of their food from personal garden plots, which produced much better quality food. Of course, since production quotas were set by some central office, they didn't respond to which (inefficiently produced) goods were in demand.
None of this proves that "pure capitalism" (whatever that means) is better, but don't misrepresent the causes of the soviet union's economic woes in terms of these "uncomfortable facts".
Yeah, the summary is a total slashvertisement, but it actually looks like a cool machine. If you customize the build, you can choose Ubuntu as the OS and save $100 over the Windows price. It also can take up to 32 GiB of Ram, whereas many small laptops now top out at 8 or 16 GiB GiB (that are soldered to the motherboard, of course).
That said, the machine does cost an arm and a leg and has super shitty battery life.
Why do/did they think they can just outsource their ads for their online product?
Because directly courting advertisers and vetting every ad adds overhead to a process which already isn't that profitable. Additionally, outsourcing the product makes the process more flexible; ads can be quickly tested and swapped out for better performing adds. I'm sure there are other benefits to outsourcing ads too.
I'm not defending online advertising practices. I'm just saying that there's a good reason that things evolved into the current state of affairs. It's hard to find a solution without really understanding the problem. Understanding the problem means being able to answer the question you posed without simply dismissing Wired and the likes as idiots.
Advertisers go for the Superbowl because they have a pretty good idea how many eyeballs their ads will reach, and there's no doubt that the ad was shown at the Superbowl. In contrast, without some sort of script, it would be very hard for advertisers to independently verify the statistics provided by Wired (or any other website).
(This is a self reply instead of making the same comment for several posts.)
I see a lot of suggestions for self-hosting ads, which is certainly worth trying. However, I asked about that in my post: "What if non-abusive ads aren't enough to break even?"
Self-hosting ads adds overhead in courting advertisers and vetting the ads. Self-hosting ads that don't track you also makes the ads less valuable to advertisers, so Wired will likely get less money for each ad.
It is not at all clear to me that self-hosting ads will produce enough revenue. Like I said, it's worth a shot, but I'm not convinced it's the silver bullet than many are suggesting.
To add to your point, I'm guessing that the print version has less content than the website. (Not all of the online content makes it to the magazine.) So the print version has advertising and less content than the web version while costing half as much. If $25 for the magazine is worthwhile, then $52 for the website is probably worthwhile too.
According to Wired, only 20% of the visitors to the site block ads. Hardly a reason for a site to go bankrupt.
Part of the issue is that the number of people that block ads is increasing. Regardless, how do you know that your statement is true? There's not a ton of money in web ads, so maybe losing 20% of their revenue steam is too much. Unless you know Wired's financials, you aren't in a position to make the statement you made.
That said, the rest of your comment is very constructive. Thank you for participating in the dialog.
after years of abusing ads for profit, sites are now trying to act like innocent victims just trying to keep the lights on.
I see this type of comment fairly frequently, and I understand the sentiment, but what exactly do you propose that they do instead? Just go bankrupt? Can they somehow regain your trust by running non-abusive ads? (Whatever that means. How do you know which ads aren't abusive? Do you check every site or just run your ad blocker everywhere?) What if non-abusive ads aren't enough to break even? Micropayments?
Wired produces good content, so I'd hate for them to go under. I see other comments saying that you'll just get your content elsewhere, but that's just kicking the can down the road instead of solving the problem. The same problems apply to your new news source, which is probably going to ban ad blockers sooner or later too unless a long-term solution is found.
(Moreover, what exactly does "abusing ads for profit" mean? Are you faulting them for trying to make a profit using advertising? Is the complaint not the ads per se, but the ads that track your every move? If so, that's not at all clear from your writing.)
How could PacMan realistically affect real world functioning?
Unfortunately, the summary is missing an important fact: the study _did_ control for the type of games played; the study (at least attempted) to only measure the effect of violent video games, although they relied on self-reporting of game type by the children who played them (a method which, while much better than nothing, still has issues). So yeah, the study authors are well aware that PacMan isn't going to cause violence.
Slashdot Mirror
Trump is certainly does his best to spread ignorance, but many of his supporters see through at least some of it. I'm somewhat loathed to link to a slate.com article, but this one interviews Trump supporters about climate change. Many of his supporters see climate change as real and caused by humans, but they prioritize other things or thinks that Trump will come around on the issue. Many people support Trump because they think he is a successful business man, a man of action, and is not a dirty Washington politician. I take issue with the first two claims, but Trump hasn't really had to propagate those claims; the media was doing that long before he ran for president.
I think that it also helps that there's fertile ground for denial.
For example with climate change, there's a large number of Americans who see hard-core environmentalists as a bunch of hippies who are constantly yelling that the sky is falling and want government intervention in everything. (To be fair, there are vocal environmentalists that fit this mold, and they're very vocal.) So, it doesn't take much to cause a knee-jerk reaction against the claims of environmentalists because of negative perceptions of environmentalists in general. In fact, it might happen even without the prodding of people who want to peddle ignorance. Here's an interesting example of what I'm talking about: an otherwise thoughtful person who automatically rejected climate change ideas simply because of the source but has since reevaluated his beliefs.
Smoking also had fertile ground for ignorance. Since there was a push for government involvement, anti-nanny-staters were likely to automatically push back. Tobacco companies pedaling ignorance had fertile ground there too.
Did you not read the summary? That's exactly what it says.
Guess what: Moore's law has been failing for several generations of fabs! The divergence from Moore's law has been gradual. No one is saying that progress will suddenly stop, but we've been slowly falling behind the "doubling every two years" schedule for a while now (arguably since at least 2012).
Now, you can argue about why that is. However, the problem is not a lack of effort or funding. I have a bunch of friends who work at Intel, and they're not taking it easy. They're working their asses off but making progress slower than they used to. Making transistors smaller and smaller is proving to be a very difficult task. Now, if you want to call that an engineering problem rather than a physics problem, go right ahead. But the fact remains: the difficulties stem from the physical size of the transistors, not from managerial issues.
Back in the day, moving from bipolar to MOSFET transistors was a fundamentally new technology, but we haven't done anything like that any time recently. Almost all of the examples on that list are old or speculative. All the chips in recent memory have been silicon MOSFETS made using ultraviolet photolithography. Moving from planar transistors to FinFETs is the closet thing to a new technology, but that really seems like a refinement. Moreover, banking on a fundamentally new technology won't save Moore's law because the technology needs to be ready now, and it's not.
We have reached the end of Moore's law. That isn't up for debate. Computer performance has been slipping from Moore's schedule for a while now. The question is why. I maintain that it's due to physical limitations. The OP says it's due to economics. I guess that you could argue that we'll get back on pace to follow Moore's law at some point in the future, but that's a much harder argument to make.
I'm not picking on you in particular, but I'm seeing a lot of posts implying that Moore's law could keep going but it's too expensive, there's not enough competition to warrant it, etc. The fact is that physics is the nail in the coffin for Moore's law. Making small fab processes is getting more and more difficult because these size scales are super tiny, and the difficulty means that Moore's law simply cannot keep going because we have to develop fundamentally new technology -- not just scaled down current technology.
There's a reason Intel is planning to stop using Silicon at 7 nm (not clear what they'll move to -- maybe indium gallium arsenide), and getting up to production quality with a new material is a huge task that is fundamentally incompatible with Moore's law. (InGaAs is not "new" per se, but InGaAs has never seen real commercial use; it has been confined to research labs.)
There's also a reason that research in classical (not only quantum) computing with superconducting circuits is again being seriously researched by commercial enterprises -- including companies like Northrup Grumman which are not traditionally associated with designing computer chips. (IBM poured a lot of money into superconducting computers in the 1980s but ultimately gave up because Si computing was marching along just fine. I think that IBM is back in the superconducting game too.) Again, getting superconducting circuits up and running is _hard_ and fundamentally incompatible with Moore's law.
Moore's law is intrinsically dead. End of story. Even if/when the non-Si chips get up and running, I don't expect that Moore's law will be revived. 7 nm equates to about 14 silicon atoms. The end of the road is in sight. It's trying to march through quicksand from here on out.
PS. I don't get the "lack of competition" hypothesis for why Intel is slowing down; there are a number of manufacturers matching or closing in on Intel's fab process. E.g. Samsung and Globalfoundries are already at 14 nm. TSMC is at 16 nm. These aren't in direct competition with Intel at the moment, but they will be if Intel ever gets serious about putting their chips in things other than desktops/laptops/servers. Intel isn't stupid; they see these other companies as competitors, and Intel really wants a leg up on them. If Intel could keep up with Moore's law, they would.
Automatics get better fuel economy than manuals in all new cars now.
Sounds good. The only problem: it's not true. Granted, the efficiency of non-manual transmissions (traditional automatics, CVTs, automated manual transmission , etc.) has improved greatly, and in some cases it's better than manual transmissions, but from what I've seen from shopping for small cars, manual transmissions are still a bit more fuel efficient on average.
I won't post a ton of links, but your statement only requires a single counterexample to disprove, so here's one: the Hyundai Accent.
I think PhD comics nicely sums up the grant cycle (although it exaggerates parts):
http://www.phdcomics.com/comic...
The chances of successfully completing the goals in your grant are usually quite high because you generally apply for money to work on things that have already been _partially_ completed! This sounds disingenuous, but it's a practical response to funding levels. Money is scarce, so if you don't meet the goals in your grant proposal, you're less likely to get future grants funded. For that reason, projects with a low chance for success are just too risky.
So what do you do? You write a proposal for something that you're confident will work because you're already made headway into the problem. Then if you get the grant money, you use some of the funding to complete the project that you already started, and you use the rest of the money to work on a different project. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.
I'm not thrilled with this type of funding cycle. However, it does ensure that the research aims are completed, and it gives scientists some freedom to try different things. In short, it's still moving science forward, so I've made peace with the process.
The NSF is usually very careful about who it gives money to; only something like 10% of funding request are granted. For those who are curious, the basic grant information on this grant is available from the NSF:
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch...
The grant was done through the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (specifically the division of Social and Economic Sciences) -- as opposed to the Geosciences Directorate, which I believe normally handles the climate change work. (The NSF is divided into different parts for funding different areas.)
FWIW, the house science committee has long been working to cut the budget for the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. I'm sure that good work gets funded by that directorate, but it sure does make me pissed that a BS grant like this gets funded, while more useful grants in applied physics (my area) don't get funded.
I wouldn't pin this bad grant on the NSF as a whole. Hopefully it's the exception for that directorate rather than the rule.
Talk about a stretch of the imagination. Brandenburg v Ohio said that a KKK member had the right to express abstract advocacy of force or law violation. I.e. the KKK member could say "All Jews should be killed," since he wasn't advocating or planning a specific act of violence ("lets go to Synagogue X this evening and burn it down!").
What any of that has to do with Snowden is beyond me. Snowden didn't advocate leaking documents in an abstract sense. He actually leaked the documents. Moreover, who says that the court will treat government secrets in the same way they treat the speech of a KKK member? There is a first amendment right to say stupid stuff. There's no first amendment right to leak government secrets.
You're allowed to defend your actions. Plenty of those accused have.
No, you're not always allowed to defend your actions. Consider Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked top-secret documents in 1971. Here's part of wikipedia's description of the trial:
Ellsberg tried to claim that the documents were illegally classified to keep them not from an enemy but from the American public. However, that argument was ruled "irrelevant". Ellsberg was silenced before he could begin. According to Ellsberg, his "lawyer, exasperated, said he 'had never heard of a case where a defendant was not permitted to tell the jury why he did what he did.' The judge responded: well, you're hearing one now. And so it has been with every subsequent whistleblower under indictment".
That said, the judge eventually dismissed the case because the government broke a number of rules, including wiretapping Ellsberg without a warrant. However, if the government had bothered to follow the rules, you can bet that Ellsberg would be in the slammer because Ellsberg unequivocally violated the Espionage Act of 1917. Although releasing the information was the right thing to do, that simply isn't a legally valid defense. Period.
Likewise, Snowden has no inherent right to defend his actions, and unless the government did something dumb like illegally wiretap him, Snowden would be found guilty because he unequivocally broke the law (albeit for a good purpose, which is not a legally valid defense). Since the government can get rubber stamp warrants whenever it wants, government investigators may well have complied with the letter of the law. If you define a "fair trial" as a "a trial where the judge enforces the laws as they are written", then short of the government doing something stupid, Snowden be found guilty. I'm not saying that's a good thing (it's not), but thinking otherwise is delusional.
The fundamental problem here is that the laws are shitty. However, pointing out that the laws are shitty is not a valid defense unless you can prove they're unconstitutional, and for better or worse, the supreme court has blessed the Espionage Act of 1917.
Wind maximum capacity is pretty meaningless, I believe the average production is around 1/3 of rated.
How does average nuclear production compare to its maximum capacity? Its almost certainly higher than for wind, but it's not like every nuclear plant is constantly running at 100% capacity.
If a maximum wind capacity to maximum nuclear capacity comparison is a bad comparison, then an average wind production to average nuclear production comparison is needed instead.
Regardless, if wind power production keeps growing this quickly (it likely will because windows power is so cheap--nuclear isn't), then its average production will probably overtake nuclear sooner rather than later. I'm not saying that's good or bad; it's just how it is.
It's not quite abandonware, but the central impetus for it's creation and advancement is gone.
I wasn't planning to comment on this thread, but this is too big a lie to let stand -- unless by "not quite abaondonware" you mean "has absolutely nothing in common with abandonware besides being a type of software". Oracle was never the sole developer, and now that Oracle has lost interest, the developers just moved to other companies and kept doing the same thing. Its raison d'etre remains to provide an advanced filesystem that's easily integrated with linux, which for better or worse means being licensed under the GPL or something compatible.
As for encryption, yeah that would be nice to have, but it's not like zfs has all the features btrfs has. I'll take btrfs's online balancing (ability to add and remove drives at will) over built in encryption, but I realize that's a personal choice.
Finally, let's actually quote the FAQ correct only stability:
Short answer: Maybe.
Long answer: Nobody is going to magically stick a label on the btrfs code and say "yes, this is now stable and bug-free". Different people have different concepts of stability: a home user who wants to keep their ripped CDs on it will have a different requirement for stability than a large financial institution running their trading system on it. If you are concerned about stability in commercial production use, you should test btrfs on a testbed system under production workloads to see if it will do what you want of it. In any case, you should join the mailing list (and hang out in IRC) and read through problem reports and follow them to their conclusion to give yourself a good idea of the types of issues that come up, and the degree to which they can be dealt with. Whatever you do, we recommend keeping good, tested, off-system (and off-site) backups.
Pragmatic answer: (2012-12-19) Many of the developers and testers run btrfs as their primary filesystem for day-to-day usage, or with various forms of real data. With reliable hardware and up-to-date kernels, we see very few unrecoverable problems showing up. As always, keep backups, test them, and be prepared to use them.
For all practical purposes, btrfs is stable. Everything they say in the long answer basically applies to linux in general (unless you have a support contract with Red Hat or the likes).
I'm not quite sure why you're brining up the soviet union's problems, but I (perhaps incorrectly) get the sense that you're brining it up to suggest that external factors--rather than internal economic policy--were the major causes (or even the root cause) of economic problems in the soviet union. I'm only responding to that point.
the Soviet Union suffered near its start from a paranoid dictator (Stalin) who didn't give a crap about communism or any other kind of -ism other than his own power, it was devastated in a war in which it sustained vastly more casualties than we did and which in the US did not touch our industrial infrastructure, plus after that war it had to endure literally decades of economic warfare from the west. If there's one thing western countries, governments, and companies know how to do it's wage economic warfare.
These things sure hurt, but it doesn't fully explain the soviet union's economic problems or why the soviet union was unable to overcome them.
The fundamental problem with the soviet union is that the state owned enterprises and collective farms were incredibly inefficient both in terms of their production and what they produced. I'm not from the former soviet union, but I have many friends who are, and I hear lots of stories about how the collective farms would harvest crops so inefficiently that people in a town could basically subsist off everything they left on the ground. Many got most of their food from personal garden plots, which produced much better quality food. Of course, since production quotas were set by some central office, they didn't respond to which (inefficiently produced) goods were in demand.
None of this proves that "pure capitalism" (whatever that means) is better, but don't misrepresent the causes of the soviet union's economic woes in terms of these "uncomfortable facts".
I should add, that $170 is the premium over 16 GiB, not over the base 8 GiB (I think).
Yeah, the summary is a total slashvertisement, but it actually looks like a cool machine. If you customize the build, you can choose Ubuntu as the OS and save $100 over the Windows price. It also can take up to 32 GiB of Ram, whereas many small laptops now top out at 8 or 16 GiB GiB (that are soldered to the motherboard, of course).
That said, the machine does cost an arm and a leg and has super shitty battery life.
I don't see that option.
The 32 GiB option is there. I'm looking at it right now: "32GB, DDR4-2133MHz SDRAM, 2 DIMMS, Non-ECC [add $170.00]"
Why do/did they think they can just outsource their ads for their online product?
Because directly courting advertisers and vetting every ad adds overhead to a process which already isn't that profitable. Additionally, outsourcing the product makes the process more flexible; ads can be quickly tested and swapped out for better performing adds. I'm sure there are other benefits to outsourcing ads too.
I'm not defending online advertising practices. I'm just saying that there's a good reason that things evolved into the current state of affairs. It's hard to find a solution without really understanding the problem. Understanding the problem means being able to answer the question you posed without simply dismissing Wired and the likes as idiots.
Advertisers go for the Superbowl because they have a pretty good idea how many eyeballs their ads will reach, and there's no doubt that the ad was shown at the Superbowl. In contrast, without some sort of script, it would be very hard for advertisers to independently verify the statistics provided by Wired (or any other website).
(This is a self reply instead of making the same comment for several posts.)
I see a lot of suggestions for self-hosting ads, which is certainly worth trying. However, I asked about that in my post: "What if non-abusive ads aren't enough to break even?"
Self-hosting ads adds overhead in courting advertisers and vetting the ads. Self-hosting ads that don't track you also makes the ads less valuable to advertisers, so Wired will likely get less money for each ad.
It is not at all clear to me that self-hosting ads will produce enough revenue. Like I said, it's worth a shot, but I'm not convinced it's the silver bullet than many are suggesting.
To add to your point, I'm guessing that the print version has less content than the website. (Not all of the online content makes it to the magazine.) So the print version has advertising and less content than the web version while costing half as much. If $25 for the magazine is worthwhile, then $52 for the website is probably worthwhile too.
According to Wired, only 20% of the visitors to the site block ads. Hardly a reason for a site to go bankrupt.
Part of the issue is that the number of people that block ads is increasing. Regardless, how do you know that your statement is true? There's not a ton of money in web ads, so maybe losing 20% of their revenue steam is too much. Unless you know Wired's financials, you aren't in a position to make the statement you made.
That said, the rest of your comment is very constructive. Thank you for participating in the dialog.
after years of abusing ads for profit, sites are now trying to act like innocent victims just trying to keep the lights on.
I see this type of comment fairly frequently, and I understand the sentiment, but what exactly do you propose that they do instead? Just go bankrupt? Can they somehow regain your trust by running non-abusive ads? (Whatever that means. How do you know which ads aren't abusive? Do you check every site or just run your ad blocker everywhere?) What if non-abusive ads aren't enough to break even? Micropayments?
Wired produces good content, so I'd hate for them to go under. I see other comments saying that you'll just get your content elsewhere, but that's just kicking the can down the road instead of solving the problem. The same problems apply to your new news source, which is probably going to ban ad blockers sooner or later too unless a long-term solution is found.
(Moreover, what exactly does "abusing ads for profit" mean? Are you faulting them for trying to make a profit using advertising? Is the complaint not the ads per se, but the ads that track your every move? If so, that's not at all clear from your writing.)
How could PacMan realistically affect real world functioning?
Unfortunately, the summary is missing an important fact: the study _did_ control for the type of games played; the study (at least attempted) to only measure the effect of violent video games, although they relied on self-reporting of game type by the children who played them (a method which, while much better than nothing, still has issues). So yeah, the study authors are well aware that PacMan isn't going to cause violence.
Right, /. doesn't like Unicode. The missing character in quotes looks like an 'o' and 'e' smashed together.