VMWare has no DirectX support as far as I know, and USB support is not _that_ stable
In an office context, what would you need Direct X or USB for? We use VMWare extensively in our shop. Let me go into just a few of the applications.
1. Development. Need to switch from VS.NET back to VS 6.0 to figure out an obscure DLL problem? Just boot the proper development image.
2. Development. The new registry code goes haywire and frags the registry on your devel system. No problem, just click "Revert" and you're all fixed.
3. Development. Some bozo comes in during lunch and fucks your build configuration. Again, just hit "Revert," then check the workspace back out of CVS.
4. Tech support. Customer calls up with problems running the plugin in Netscape 4.0 under Windows ME. The tech boots the appropriate image and immediately can reproduce the problem. Sends the bug report upstairs to an engineer, who boots the appropriate VM and figures out what's wrong. Result? We require no dedicated testing platforms.
5. Upper manager irrecoverably hoses his install by deleting a bunch of DLLs. He then takes a snapshot, so we can't simply revert the image. That's okay, copy a fresh image over gigabit, he's back up and running in under 10 minutes.
6. Tricking the "sneakware." Want to install a trial version of some product, but that product leaves all kinds of traces on the drive, in an effort to avoid simply re-installing to defeat the timeout? Just snapshot at the appropriate moment, then install the software. When the software expires, revert the snapshot, and re-install. Okay, it's not very honest, but it's a potential application, and I've used this to test-drive a few printer drivers without worrying about what weird things they install on the system.
7. Want to upgrade the XP installations for all 15 tech support reps? Just copy the images over in the middle of the night and reboot their VMs remotely. Bang, people walk in the next morning and they're running Service Pack 3 (or whatever the latest is).
I could go on and on with this. I know of people who run their home PCs in Linux, but have XP running in VMWare. Yes, these are not game-playing types of people, but it really helps, when your wife, or son, or dog decides to really screw something and all you have to do is restore the image. All personal files are saved on a network share, so you don't lose any personal data.
Really, I see no reason to ever again run Windows on a "real" computer. Direct X and USB? Who cares...
Get VMWare, install your system how you want it inside the VMWare, then burn the disk images to CD. Now, whenever your installation gets hosed, you can simply use VMWare's "revert" feature to go back to the last working snapshot, or, if things are really fucked beyond repair, just restore the disk images off the CD and bam, you're back to a brand-new install, 10 minutes later.
In addition, if you change workstations you can take your virtual system with you. You'll never notice the difference.
VMWare costs money, but compare the price to the hours you waste fucking with hosed Windows installations. It's a freaking deal.
I don't feel like I should have to pay a bunch of cash to some a-hole in Oregon or wherever just so I can use my own goddamn computer that I paid my own goddamn good money for.
I think that hits the nail on the head (it's Washington, by the way, not Oregon). Something as fundamental as an operating system shouldn't cost anything. It is a requisite for computing.
How would you react if you walked into a car dealership and the dealer told you you had to pay extra for the car battery, that it didn't just come with the car? It would be ridiculous. You can't use a car without a battery, and you can't use a computer without an OS. Charging for it as if it were a seperate product, a seperate application, is simple highway robbery.
Yes, what I'm advocating here is tighter integration of the OS into the hardware. When you buy computer components, they shouldn't just sit around useless until you pay out even more money for an OS. It should be built in. Upgradeable, interchangeable, yes, but built in.
Microsoft argues that the price of their operating system reflects its true value, that an OS is really very valuable because it is required to make the system work. Yet a car battery is also required to make a car work, and it is one of the cheapest components of the car! So clearly, whether something is a requirement or not does not reflect on its value in any direct way.
People are beginning to wake up to this deficient argument, so now Microsoft's strategy is to bundle as much extraneous software as possible with the OS, and then claim that the extra value lies in the bundled software. But this is like selling a car battery than comes with, say, a matching riding lawn mower. Nevermind the fact that you don't need a riding mower, it's simply a way to get you to agree to pay much much more than what the product is actually worth. And of course you don't have the option of refusing the lawn mower -- you're going to pay for it anyway.
So the reason I don't use Windows is because I refuse to be forced to buy a riding lawn mower when all I really want is a car battery. Yeah, I'm forced to use a battery that most people are unfamiliar with, and which is somewhat persnickety, and doesn't work in as many types of cars as the Microsoft battery (in case you hadn't guessed, I'm talking about Linux here), but now I'm getting what I really want, instead of what some corporation in Redmond thinks I want.
Eric, you don't stand outside the spectrum, the spectrum is simply multi-dimensional, and you've stepped off the axis which runs through "liberal" and "conservative."
Just because it's not a stored-program machine doesn't mean it isn't a computer. The theoretical definition of a universal computing device is based on Turing machines, not the von Neumann architecture.
A Turing machine (as it is typically introduced to students) doesn't have a "program" anywhere, just a list of transition rules. These rules are not stored on the tape itself. Yet it would be ridiculous to claim that a Turing machine is not a computer, since it is the gold standard by which all other computers are judged!
A universal computer is, identically, any machine which is capable of performing any transformation which a Turing machine can perform. It has nothing to do with anything as concrete as execution architectures, memory characteristics, etc.
Floating point is merely the binary equivalent of scientific notation. Instead of writing 0.123*10^4, you write 0.600*2^11. The only difference is the base of the exponential part.
So claiming that Intel invented floating point is like claiming that Intel invented scientific notation, i.e., complete bull.
Now, Intel may have had some influence on the development of the IEEE floating point standard, but that's an entirely different issue. Floating point itself is a general concept, totally aside from any particular implementation (with whatever implementation-dependent idiosynchracies that entails).
For example, in some variations of floating point, there are two different values for zero: negative zero and positive zero. In other implementations there is a special representation for zero which does not include sign. Some implementations have special values for "infinity" and "not a number," some do not. Etc etc.
First, what he posted is the Chain Rule, written in Leibniz notation.
Second, you've committed the atrocious sin of mixing Leibniz notation with Newton prime notation. What a horrific mess you've created.
The proper way to write it would be:
h(x) = f(g(x))
h'(x) = f'(g(x))*g'(x)
I think this should help explain why the Leibniz notation is so popular, because in the Newtonian notation, a prime can only bind to a name, not an arbitrary algebraic expression. Hence you are required to introduce the additional function h(x) just to allow the notation to work.
Anyway, you're hardly qualified to school us in calculus.
Highlighting to select is convenient, but can be annoying sometimes (like when you are highlighting simply in order to delete something). I suggest the following: to copy a selection, highlight the selection, and when you release the mouse button after selecting the appropriate material, give it a final click. This is like a "double click" but at the end of the operation instead of the beginning. This would specify that you want the selection to be copied.
The copy buffer should operate like a fixed-length queue, or ring buffer. The newest copied selection goes at the front of the buffer, bumping the oldest entry off the end. I'd say 3 entries would be more than enough for most people.
When you hit ctrl-v, the most recent selection should be pasted. If this is not the selection you want, hitting ctrl-v again should cycle through the available selections.
By the way, this pasting behavior is exactly how Emacs operates. When you ctrl-w a selection, it goes into the kill buffer. Hitting ctrl-y recalls the selection. Hitting ctrl-u at that point will cycle through the kill buffer.
Tounge-in-cheek or not, this article is comparing a person's life to a dollar figure. Now, I'm as much a fan of cleaning out virii as anyone else, but that's just messed up. How much is a human life worth?
A certain fraction of humans getting cancer is unfortunate, but realistically, people get cancer for all kinds of reasons, and it's not going away anytime soon (unless the "cure for cancer" is around the corner).
"Cancer" is a powerful word, like "terrorism." It's a scary and painful way to die, but objectively, it's not really much different than dying of a heart attack, or a stroke, or a terrible flu infection. We should do what we can to reduce the incidence of cancer, but we also need to maintain perspective and realize that it isn't some Hell-sent killer causing unimaginable destruction.
To me, it seems far more important to preserve the climate of the Earth as a whole by reducing our net CO2 emissions, than to worry about the increase in cancer rates caused by particulate emissions. We're already using diesel anyway, so this isn't going to make the situation any worse than it already is.
And with no net CO2 emissions, we can burn that diesel in power plants, which not only scrub their emissions far better than an automobile could, but that power can also be used to power electric vehicles and remove those irritants from populated areas altogether.
...until they broke the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Gaaah! Why do people always say this?! The 2nd law has nothing to do with conservation of energy!
Conservation of energy was well understood before thermodynamics was discovered. The 2nd law merely states that the entropy, meaning the logarithm of the number of macroscopically indistinguishable microstates, monotonically increases. It has nothing to do with energy!
The 2nd law states the following: Heat always flows from a hotter body to a colder body. Or, equivalently: the entropy of a closed system may never decrease. It does not say that energy is conserved. That is a much older, more fundamental law.
Now, the first law of thermodynamics states that the total energy including heat of a closed system cannot change. However, the crux of the first law is not the conservation of energy (that was well understood at the time), but the fact that heat is a type of energy.
Even worse, some people are prone to claim that the 2nd law forbids perpetual motion devices. This is utter nonsense. A perpetual motion device is clearly possible. Behold the Earth, which orbits the Sun, and will continue to do so. "Perpetual motion" is often equated with "free energy," but again, this is incorrect.
Oh, and to address the main point of your post: the net energy increase comes from the Sun, which dumps approximately 1300 watts per square meter into the Earth's atmosphere. Take away some reflection, and absorption and subsequent re-radiation of some of that heat back into space, and you can count on somewhere around 800 watts per square meter reaching the surface of the Earth.
Please for fuck's sake will you stop using hemp and marijuana interchangably in conversation? They are *NOT* the same thing.
Just to clarify, the trigger for my rant wasn't really that he mentioned hemp, but that he mentioned NORML. I do believe the 'M' in NORML stands for marijuana.
Quit doing the job of the War on Drugs idiots by equating hemp and marijuana.
I didn't. The parent poster did that by mentioning NORML.
The more the pro-legalization community uses this stupid tactic of lying about your motivations (do you really think you're fooling anybody), the less seriously it will be taken by people in power.
I'm just as much for legalization of marijuana as the next NORML member, but at least I'm honest with myself and other people: I want it legalized because I want to smoke it. There are plenty of good, valid arguments for legalization without resorting to lying about your motives. What we want is real societal change toward acceptance of reasonable, recreational use of marijuana. This approach does not further than goal.
Yes, hemp oil is an effective fuel. The fact is, though, that other biofuels are just as good. The only reason a person would prefer hemp over any other kind of oil probably has to do with some other motivations...
This makes the entire pro-legalization movement look shady and dishonest. Please, knock it off already.
Even if we could make this idea a reality, we will still be contaminating our enviroment.
No we won't, because the algae grows by consuming CO2 from the atmosphere. The amount of CO2 removed is exactly equal to the amount released when the diesel is burned. Yes, biodiesel emits the same particulates as petro-diesel, but it has no sulfur emissions, and honestly, the kinds of emissions we're talking about here (the kind DEQ checks for, for instance) are not really that harmful to the environment -- they're simply irritating to humans.
This is very, very different than fossil fuels, where the carbon has been sequestered underground for millions of years, and we take it out and release it into the atmosphere.
In fact, algae might be a way to re-sequester some of that carbon, by growing large masses of algae then simply burying it deep, somewhere where it will not decay and release CO2 again.
Re:assembly language is for pansies
on
Hardcore Java
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· Score: 2, Insightful
assembly language is for pansies... Hardcore is finite state machines.
All physical computers are equivalent to finite state machines, due to the fact that their memory is not infinite.
A computer with 64 megs of RAM along with 8 32-bit registers has a total of 536871168 bits of memory. Hence, such a machine can take on a finite number of states, namely: 2^536871168 states.
It's a collossal number of states, but the fact is, all computers with finite memory are finite state machines.
Re:Things you can do with Java no one talks about.
on
Hardcore Java
·
· Score: 1
But I'm sure its much more fun and easier to slander Java than do something useful with it.
<looks around> I don't see any slander here.
Why are you so insecure about your language of choice? If it's really all you make it out to be, what does it matter if a few twirps on some message board disparage it? Not to mention you've gotten defensive even before the insults have started flying...
Very, very odd behavior, I think.
Re:Listen, young one...
on
Hardcore Java
·
· Score: 4, Informative
A pointer is a reference is a pointer.
No. A pointer is a memory address. A reference is an abstract object referring to another object. It might be implemented as a memory address, or it might not.
I could very well implement references by making them indexes into a table of structs which contain type information as well as pointers to the objects themselves. Thus, the pointer would be extracted from the reference like this:
ptr = ref_table[reference].pointer;
In fact, this would be superior to merely using pointers as references, because it makes it explicit that the reference is not a pointer and doesn't behave like one.
Re:No Pointers?
on
Hardcore Java
·
· Score: 4, Informative
If Java has no pointers what's going on here:
Call it a handle, or a reference. It is superficially like a pointer, as your example demonstrates.
However, it clearly is not a pointer, because you cannot do this:
array2 = array + 1;
You also cannot do this:
array2[1] = 12;
Because it would cause a bounds exception. In C, you can get away with writing outside an array, and you get all the wonderful side effects of that, including random crashes, data corruption, or in the worst possible scenario, no visible bug whatsoever.
And don't even think of trying this in Java:
double[] foo = new double[100];
int[] bar;
bar = (int[])foo;
The above is an example of a pointer typecast as it would be expressed in Java (if it was allowed), but thankfully, the above code is utter nonsense.
Anyway, the entities you manipulate in Java are quite assuredly not pointers. They are handles to objects.
I'd like to see the greenines push a more reliable, inexpensive and realistic solution to the problem.
The solution isn't to switch everybody from one type of personal vehicle (car) to another (motorcycle). The solution is to eliminate personal vehicles with effective mass transit.
Sadly, this isn't going to happen anytime soon, because Americans commonly assume that only the poor ride the bus, and they prefer the feeling of independence that comes with owning a personal vehicle (however illusory that feeling might be). In addition, many American cities sprawl, and thus the population density is not in the "sweet spot" where municipal development of mass transit becomes economical.
I think the real wave of the future isn't these super-efficient personal vehicles, but actually, a move away from the concept of a personal vehicle, toward mass transit. But we have to stop this ridiculous practice of sprawling our cities across 40 miles of wretched suburbia, first.
Correct, The group that this would effect most directly is telecommuters. The ones that use authenticaion with their company's smtp server.
Telecommuting should be done over VPN anyway. If you're directly connecting to work servers from home, "authenticated" or not, you have much bigger issues than Comcast blocking your packets.
Does the cost of my time fixing my friends' computer problem equate to a net personal benefit to me
The fundamental problem with this analysis is the assumption that the worth of your time is a constant. For nearly everyone, it certainly is not.
I've seen plenty of people on Slashdot evaluate their time in terms of their hourly wage. This is completely bogus. If you work a 9-5, then the value of your time between the hours of 7 and 8 PM has absolutely nothing to do with your work wage. You aren't at work between the hours of 7 to 8 PM anyway, so it makes no sense to value your time based on that standard.
For some, their off-work time is worth less than on-work. For example, people who are paid double-time to work weekends might jump at the chance to give up a few hours lounging around on Sunday in return for a few hundred bucks.
On the other hand, you have people like me, whose off-work time is so valuable that I doubt there is a quantity you could pay me (ok, within reason) to get me to come to work on Saturday. I don't think I'd do it even for $1000 a day. Okay, maybe as a one-time deal, but not consistently.
Personally, I think I'm better off with friends that actually like me enough to not try taking advantage of me.
That's why I have very few "friends." People sometimes ask me if I'm lonely. I respond that I have just as many friends as they do, it's just that I don't refer to my casual acquaintances as "friends." The three or four close friends I do have, would probably give up limbs for me, and I'd do the same.
I realized long ago that the effort of maintaining the less serious casual acquaintances just wasn't worth it. Pick your real friends and then direct all your energy toward those people. Nobody else matters.
Oh and the pretty girls tend to be dumb, so it all works out.
Nah, the reality is, most girls are pretty. It's just that the ones with intelligence don't work as hard to accentuate it as the "hotties," who simply have nothing better to do.
Seriously... The "hot" chick in sixth period is only hot because of the giant quantities of mascara and cover-up she puts on. Oh, she may be hot now... But in the morning, after six hours of "playtime," she might appear... different.
Don't discount the more "ordinary" looking girls so easily.
Free trade is only free trade if the government gets its cut
What a bizarre statement. Consider its analog: Free speech is only free speech if the government puts its stamp on it.
How about we base government taxation on the actual services it provides to the public instead of simply taking a chunk out of each transaction between private parties, no matter how irrelevant that transaction is to society as a whole?
Seriously, if I mow my uncle's yard and he gives me a cord of wood for my trouble, what the hell business does the government have involving itself in that? What services, relating to either lawn-mowing or wood, will the government provide me in return for my barter tax?
Most likely, that money will be dumped down the war shithole, which makes it (for me, at least) a moral duty to refuse to pay such tax.
Slashdot Mirror
"5$"? Is that some kind of RPN currency notation?
In an office context, what would you need Direct X or USB for? We use VMWare extensively in our shop. Let me go into just a few of the applications.
1. Development. Need to switch from VS.NET back to VS 6.0 to figure out an obscure DLL problem? Just boot the proper development image.
2. Development. The new registry code goes haywire and frags the registry on your devel system. No problem, just click "Revert" and you're all fixed.
3. Development. Some bozo comes in during lunch and fucks your build configuration. Again, just hit "Revert," then check the workspace back out of CVS.
4. Tech support. Customer calls up with problems running the plugin in Netscape 4.0 under Windows ME. The tech boots the appropriate image and immediately can reproduce the problem. Sends the bug report upstairs to an engineer, who boots the appropriate VM and figures out what's wrong. Result? We require no dedicated testing platforms.
5. Upper manager irrecoverably hoses his install by deleting a bunch of DLLs. He then takes a snapshot, so we can't simply revert the image. That's okay, copy a fresh image over gigabit, he's back up and running in under 10 minutes.
6. Tricking the "sneakware." Want to install a trial version of some product, but that product leaves all kinds of traces on the drive, in an effort to avoid simply re-installing to defeat the timeout? Just snapshot at the appropriate moment, then install the software. When the software expires, revert the snapshot, and re-install. Okay, it's not very honest, but it's a potential application, and I've used this to test-drive a few printer drivers without worrying about what weird things they install on the system.
7. Want to upgrade the XP installations for all 15 tech support reps? Just copy the images over in the middle of the night and reboot their VMs remotely. Bang, people walk in the next morning and they're running Service Pack 3 (or whatever the latest is).
I could go on and on with this. I know of people who run their home PCs in Linux, but have XP running in VMWare. Yes, these are not game-playing types of people, but it really helps, when your wife, or son, or dog decides to really screw something and all you have to do is restore the image. All personal files are saved on a network share, so you don't lose any personal data.
Really, I see no reason to ever again run Windows on a "real" computer. Direct X and USB? Who cares...
In addition, if you change workstations you can take your virtual system with you. You'll never notice the difference.
VMWare costs money, but compare the price to the hours you waste fucking with hosed Windows installations. It's a freaking deal.
I think that hits the nail on the head (it's Washington, by the way, not Oregon). Something as fundamental as an operating system shouldn't cost anything. It is a requisite for computing.
How would you react if you walked into a car dealership and the dealer told you you had to pay extra for the car battery, that it didn't just come with the car? It would be ridiculous. You can't use a car without a battery, and you can't use a computer without an OS. Charging for it as if it were a seperate product, a seperate application, is simple highway robbery.
Yes, what I'm advocating here is tighter integration of the OS into the hardware. When you buy computer components, they shouldn't just sit around useless until you pay out even more money for an OS. It should be built in. Upgradeable, interchangeable, yes, but built in.
Microsoft argues that the price of their operating system reflects its true value, that an OS is really very valuable because it is required to make the system work. Yet a car battery is also required to make a car work, and it is one of the cheapest components of the car! So clearly, whether something is a requirement or not does not reflect on its value in any direct way.
People are beginning to wake up to this deficient argument, so now Microsoft's strategy is to bundle as much extraneous software as possible with the OS, and then claim that the extra value lies in the bundled software. But this is like selling a car battery than comes with, say, a matching riding lawn mower. Nevermind the fact that you don't need a riding mower, it's simply a way to get you to agree to pay much much more than what the product is actually worth. And of course you don't have the option of refusing the lawn mower -- you're going to pay for it anyway.
So the reason I don't use Windows is because I refuse to be forced to buy a riding lawn mower when all I really want is a car battery. Yeah, I'm forced to use a battery that most people are unfamiliar with, and which is somewhat persnickety, and doesn't work in as many types of cars as the Microsoft battery (in case you hadn't guessed, I'm talking about Linux here), but now I'm getting what I really want, instead of what some corporation in Redmond thinks I want.
Eric, you don't stand outside the spectrum, the spectrum is simply multi-dimensional, and you've stepped off the axis which runs through "liberal" and "conservative."
A Turing machine (as it is typically introduced to students) doesn't have a "program" anywhere, just a list of transition rules. These rules are not stored on the tape itself. Yet it would be ridiculous to claim that a Turing machine is not a computer, since it is the gold standard by which all other computers are judged!
A universal computer is, identically, any machine which is capable of performing any transformation which a Turing machine can perform. It has nothing to do with anything as concrete as execution architectures, memory characteristics, etc.
Floating point is merely the binary equivalent of scientific notation. Instead of writing 0.123*10^4, you write 0.600*2^11. The only difference is the base of the exponential part.
So claiming that Intel invented floating point is like claiming that Intel invented scientific notation, i.e., complete bull.
Now, Intel may have had some influence on the development of the IEEE floating point standard, but that's an entirely different issue. Floating point itself is a general concept, totally aside from any particular implementation (with whatever implementation-dependent idiosynchracies that entails).
For example, in some variations of floating point, there are two different values for zero: negative zero and positive zero. In other implementations there is a special representation for zero which does not include sign. Some implementations have special values for "infinity" and "not a number," some do not. Etc etc.
Second, you've committed the atrocious sin of mixing Leibniz notation with Newton prime notation. What a horrific mess you've created.
The proper way to write it would be:
h(x) = f(g(x))
h'(x) = f'(g(x))*g'(x)
I think this should help explain why the Leibniz notation is so popular, because in the Newtonian notation, a prime can only bind to a name, not an arbitrary algebraic expression. Hence you are required to introduce the additional function h(x) just to allow the notation to work.
Anyway, you're hardly qualified to school us in calculus.
The copy buffer should operate like a fixed-length queue, or ring buffer. The newest copied selection goes at the front of the buffer, bumping the oldest entry off the end. I'd say 3 entries would be more than enough for most people.
When you hit ctrl-v, the most recent selection should be pasted. If this is not the selection you want, hitting ctrl-v again should cycle through the available selections.
By the way, this pasting behavior is exactly how Emacs operates. When you ctrl-w a selection, it goes into the kill buffer. Hitting ctrl-y recalls the selection. Hitting ctrl-u at that point will cycle through the kill buffer.
According to the U.S. government, anywhere between $1 million and $6.3 million.
I seem to remember hearing that the U.S. military uses the value of $2 million per soldier. I can't verify that at the moment.
We need to prioritize.
A certain fraction of humans getting cancer is unfortunate, but realistically, people get cancer for all kinds of reasons, and it's not going away anytime soon (unless the "cure for cancer" is around the corner).
"Cancer" is a powerful word, like "terrorism." It's a scary and painful way to die, but objectively, it's not really much different than dying of a heart attack, or a stroke, or a terrible flu infection. We should do what we can to reduce the incidence of cancer, but we also need to maintain perspective and realize that it isn't some Hell-sent killer causing unimaginable destruction.
To me, it seems far more important to preserve the climate of the Earth as a whole by reducing our net CO2 emissions, than to worry about the increase in cancer rates caused by particulate emissions. We're already using diesel anyway, so this isn't going to make the situation any worse than it already is.
And with no net CO2 emissions, we can burn that diesel in power plants, which not only scrub their emissions far better than an automobile could, but that power can also be used to power electric vehicles and remove those irritants from populated areas altogether.
Gaaah! Why do people always say this?! The 2nd law has nothing to do with conservation of energy!
Conservation of energy was well understood before thermodynamics was discovered. The 2nd law merely states that the entropy, meaning the logarithm of the number of macroscopically indistinguishable microstates, monotonically increases. It has nothing to do with energy!
The 2nd law states the following: Heat always flows from a hotter body to a colder body. Or, equivalently: the entropy of a closed system may never decrease. It does not say that energy is conserved. That is a much older, more fundamental law.
Now, the first law of thermodynamics states that the total energy including heat of a closed system cannot change. However, the crux of the first law is not the conservation of energy (that was well understood at the time), but the fact that heat is a type of energy.
Even worse, some people are prone to claim that the 2nd law forbids perpetual motion devices. This is utter nonsense. A perpetual motion device is clearly possible. Behold the Earth, which orbits the Sun, and will continue to do so. "Perpetual motion" is often equated with "free energy," but again, this is incorrect.
Oh, and to address the main point of your post: the net energy increase comes from the Sun, which dumps approximately 1300 watts per square meter into the Earth's atmosphere. Take away some reflection, and absorption and subsequent re-radiation of some of that heat back into space, and you can count on somewhere around 800 watts per square meter reaching the surface of the Earth.
Just to clarify, the trigger for my rant wasn't really that he mentioned hemp, but that he mentioned NORML. I do believe the 'M' in NORML stands for marijuana.
Quit doing the job of the War on Drugs idiots by equating hemp and marijuana.
I didn't. The parent poster did that by mentioning NORML.
The more the pro-legalization community uses this stupid tactic of lying about your motivations (do you really think you're fooling anybody), the less seriously it will be taken by people in power.
I'm just as much for legalization of marijuana as the next NORML member, but at least I'm honest with myself and other people: I want it legalized because I want to smoke it. There are plenty of good, valid arguments for legalization without resorting to lying about your motives. What we want is real societal change toward acceptance of reasonable, recreational use of marijuana. This approach does not further than goal.
Yes, hemp oil is an effective fuel. The fact is, though, that other biofuels are just as good. The only reason a person would prefer hemp over any other kind of oil probably has to do with some other motivations...
This makes the entire pro-legalization movement look shady and dishonest. Please, knock it off already.
No we won't, because the algae grows by consuming CO2 from the atmosphere. The amount of CO2 removed is exactly equal to the amount released when the diesel is burned. Yes, biodiesel emits the same particulates as petro-diesel, but it has no sulfur emissions, and honestly, the kinds of emissions we're talking about here (the kind DEQ checks for, for instance) are not really that harmful to the environment -- they're simply irritating to humans.
This is very, very different than fossil fuels, where the carbon has been sequestered underground for millions of years, and we take it out and release it into the atmosphere.
In fact, algae might be a way to re-sequester some of that carbon, by growing large masses of algae then simply burying it deep, somewhere where it will not decay and release CO2 again.
All physical computers are equivalent to finite state machines, due to the fact that their memory is not infinite.
A computer with 64 megs of RAM along with 8 32-bit registers has a total of 536871168 bits of memory. Hence, such a machine can take on a finite number of states, namely: 2^536871168 states.
It's a collossal number of states, but the fact is, all computers with finite memory are finite state machines.
<looks around> I don't see any slander here.
Why are you so insecure about your language of choice? If it's really all you make it out to be, what does it matter if a few twirps on some message board disparage it? Not to mention you've gotten defensive even before the insults have started flying...
Very, very odd behavior, I think.
No. A pointer is a memory address. A reference is an abstract object referring to another object. It might be implemented as a memory address, or it might not.
I could very well implement references by making them indexes into a table of structs which contain type information as well as pointers to the objects themselves. Thus, the pointer would be extracted from the reference like this:
ptr = ref_table[reference].pointer;
In fact, this would be superior to merely using pointers as references, because it makes it explicit that the reference is not a pointer and doesn't behave like one.
Call it a handle, or a reference. It is superficially like a pointer, as your example demonstrates.
However, it clearly is not a pointer, because you cannot do this:
array2 = array + 1;
You also cannot do this:
array2[1] = 12;
Because it would cause a bounds exception. In C, you can get away with writing outside an array, and you get all the wonderful side effects of that, including random crashes, data corruption, or in the worst possible scenario, no visible bug whatsoever.
And don't even think of trying this in Java:
double[] foo = new double[100];
int[] bar;
bar = (int[])foo;
The above is an example of a pointer typecast as it would be expressed in Java (if it was allowed), but thankfully, the above code is utter nonsense. Anyway, the entities you manipulate in Java are quite assuredly not pointers. They are handles to objects.
The solution isn't to switch everybody from one type of personal vehicle (car) to another (motorcycle). The solution is to eliminate personal vehicles with effective mass transit.
Sadly, this isn't going to happen anytime soon, because Americans commonly assume that only the poor ride the bus, and they prefer the feeling of independence that comes with owning a personal vehicle (however illusory that feeling might be). In addition, many American cities sprawl, and thus the population density is not in the "sweet spot" where municipal development of mass transit becomes economical.
I think the real wave of the future isn't these super-efficient personal vehicles, but actually, a move away from the concept of a personal vehicle, toward mass transit. But we have to stop this ridiculous practice of sprawling our cities across 40 miles of wretched suburbia, first.
Telecommuting should be done over VPN anyway. If you're directly connecting to work servers from home, "authenticated" or not, you have much bigger issues than Comcast blocking your packets.
The fundamental problem with this analysis is the assumption that the worth of your time is a constant. For nearly everyone, it certainly is not.
I've seen plenty of people on Slashdot evaluate their time in terms of their hourly wage. This is completely bogus. If you work a 9-5, then the value of your time between the hours of 7 and 8 PM has absolutely nothing to do with your work wage. You aren't at work between the hours of 7 to 8 PM anyway, so it makes no sense to value your time based on that standard.
For some, their off-work time is worth less than on-work. For example, people who are paid double-time to work weekends might jump at the chance to give up a few hours lounging around on Sunday in return for a few hundred bucks.
On the other hand, you have people like me, whose off-work time is so valuable that I doubt there is a quantity you could pay me (ok, within reason) to get me to come to work on Saturday. I don't think I'd do it even for $1000 a day. Okay, maybe as a one-time deal, but not consistently.
Personally, I think I'm better off with friends that actually like me enough to not try taking advantage of me.
That's why I have very few "friends." People sometimes ask me if I'm lonely. I respond that I have just as many friends as they do, it's just that I don't refer to my casual acquaintances as "friends." The three or four close friends I do have, would probably give up limbs for me, and I'd do the same.
I realized long ago that the effort of maintaining the less serious casual acquaintances just wasn't worth it. Pick your real friends and then direct all your energy toward those people. Nobody else matters.
Nah, the reality is, most girls are pretty. It's just that the ones with intelligence don't work as hard to accentuate it as the "hotties," who simply have nothing better to do.
Seriously... The "hot" chick in sixth period is only hot because of the giant quantities of mascara and cover-up she puts on. Oh, she may be hot now... But in the morning, after six hours of "playtime," she might appear... different.
Don't discount the more "ordinary" looking girls so easily.
What a bizarre statement. Consider its analog: Free speech is only free speech if the government puts its stamp on it.
How about we base government taxation on the actual services it provides to the public instead of simply taking a chunk out of each transaction between private parties, no matter how irrelevant that transaction is to society as a whole?
Seriously, if I mow my uncle's yard and he gives me a cord of wood for my trouble, what the hell business does the government have involving itself in that? What services, relating to either lawn-mowing or wood, will the government provide me in return for my barter tax?
Most likely, that money will be dumped down the war shithole, which makes it (for me, at least) a moral duty to refuse to pay such tax.
Way to miss the point. The point is, you use "I" when you use a compound subject, and you use "me" when you use a compound object.
I went down to the store. --> He and I went down to the store.
He gave me a funny look. --> He gave my friend and me a funny look. (or alternatively) He gave me and my friend a funny look.
Would you say, "The cashier gave I a funny look!" No. People would rightly call you an idiot for saying that.
Now that we've all had our grammatical pedantry fix, can we get back on fucking topic?