Understand the System, before you blindly perpetuate it. Please.
What makes you think that I don't Understand the System? Are you saying that if I Understood the System, I would no longer believe that jury trials are important? Even the site you linked to supports jury trials.
Thousands of acres would need to be set aside for a wind farm large enough to power a city.
Fortunately, in many cases we have already set aside those thousands of acres, for use in growing food for said city. Since those two uses are not mutually exclusive, we can now make those acres do double-duty.
What if it was hit by a hurricane or tornado?
Then it would probably break and have to be repaired or replaced, same as anything else. C'est la vie.
Failed wind turbines can be extremely dangerous, destroying buildings and killing people.
Wind turbines are not typically located in populated areas (or at least not in heavily populated areas), so failed wind turbines are not likely to kill many people.
Since the population currently handles the death toll from car accidents without complaining too much, I don't think a few deaths from the occasional windmill accident would cause a huge outcry either.
Once you get through that, though, the solid core doesn't care about a solution for baseload electrical generation. Their answer is some kind of neo-primitivism involving no energy or extremely limited energy consumption.
The other answer, at least in the long long term, would be to generate a large surplus of renewable energy and store it (somehow) for use as needed, in combination with: generating renewable energy in enough locations and through enough methods simultaneously that the chances of a significant portion of it being unavailable at once would be negligible.
Yes, we're a long way from there today. But that's the inevitable end game (at least until someone figures out nuclear fusion, or captures some unicorns).
coward. we're supposed to cower in fear of these people?
That's the beauty of the Internet, isn't? It allows you to sit in your parent's basement (or whatever safe location you are in) and demand that other peoples' lives should be put at risk so that you can feel good. Meanwhile, the people who actually have to make these decisions are required to factor in other concerns besides their egos -- details like the safety of Americans living abroad, who might well be lynched if there is a backlash in response to their actions. They have to act like adults, not like children playing superhero. Remember the ~20 innocent UN workers who got lynched in Afghanistan after Terry Jones made his oh-so-brave political statement by burning a Koran in Florida? What would you say to the next 20 innocents whose lives you could have spared but chose not to? "Sorry, your life is less important than my sense of justice"?
I think the assassination itself is what's going to do that, photos won't really make any difference.
You'd think that, but that isn't how human beings work.
Consider the effect of the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, versus the effect of the various textual reports of prisoner abuse that were released before the photos were.
It's one thing to hear about something unpleasant, but quite another to actually see it with your own eyes.
. And there may be as many as 100,000,000 of them (10% of all Muslims). That is not Nebulous
I don't know, "there may be as many as" sounds pretty nebulous to me. It includes any number between zero and 100 million (the latter a number that sounds awfully like it was made up by you, or by someone with an interest in controlling you through fear).
Programming is not art or something. It's like asking a car mechanic for his "portfolio" of repaired cars.
Until there is "one right way" to create any requested functionality, programming is partially an art.
Car repair isn't analogous at all. To repair a car, you have to first diagnose what is wrong, and then apply the manufacturer-approved fix. This might be analogous to debugging a program, but it's quite different from creating one.
Programming would be more like car design -- and car designers most definitely ARE asked about their portfolios.
I'd rather hire the kid who's code sample consists of fixing 5 memory leaks in 5 different open source libraries. He'll write solid code.
I'm not sure I buy this. Debugging code and designing code are two different skill sets. Granted, you usually pick them up together, but it certainly be possible to be quite skilled at running valgrind and parsing its output, while at the same time having little or no idea of how to put together maintainable non-spaghetti code yourself.
I bet it's less than 15 characters like 99% of people tend to use.
You underestimate Mr. bin Ladin. He actually left laptops with TrueCrypt partitions full of only random binary lying around, just to drive the NSA batty.
Ha, if the NSA needs the computing power they could go to IBM and say "How would you like the awesome PR opportunity of letting us borrow one of your blue gene clusters for a few months?
I think it's probably safe to assume that the NSA has all the computing power they feel they need (and probably much more than IBM does).
This makes encryption a very useful tool, as the password will literally die with you.
On the other hand, if there's anyone who can crack the encryption without the password, it's probably the US government. Perhaps the common encryption methods are mathematically strong enough to withstand money-is-no-object brute-force, and perhaps the implementations don't have any unpublicized weaknesses (or secret back doors)... but I wouldn't want to bet my evil terrorism network on that.
When it comes to valuable data, nothing beats a local hard drive, and nothing will ever beat that.
You know what beats a local hard drive? Two local hard drives, so that if one of them dies, you can still retrieve your data on the other one. And you know what beats two local hard drives? N hard drives in different locations, so that even after Evil Otto nukes your office and your branch office, you can still retrieve a backup copy of your data from another zip code.
I wonder if/when any cloud services will offer the option of letting you automatically keep a copy of your cloud data on your home computer's local drive? That seems like it would be a good feature to have.
Obama is unconcerned with energy or the economy and instead focuses on overthrowing religious fundamentalists and nation building.
Now this is just silly. Obama has been actively promoting renewable energy for years, and has done more to actually move the industry forward than any other President since Carter. And he's as aware as anyone that the health of the economy is what will make or break his re-election bid next year.
You may think his energy/economy policies are wrong-headed/harmful/evil/whatever, but to label him "unconcerned" only shows that you haven't been paying attention.
Shame they didn't get him alive and give him a trial.
Perhaps, but it's no longer clear to me that the US feels itself capable of putting Al Quaeda leaders on trial. At least, most of Congress no longer has enough faith in our justice system to allow it.
Rowling made so much money off the Potter series that even if she had been sued successfully for patent infringement, she still would have come out stinking rich...
Either that, or the person who sued her would have come out stinking rich.... I don't think there is any cap on how much a person found guilty of patent infringement might be required to pay.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't need cars that get 2% more mileage - we need a Plan B. We haven't got one.
There's always the default Plan B -- stop driving.
Understand the System, before you blindly perpetuate it. Please.
What makes you think that I don't Understand the System? Are you saying that if I Understood the System, I would no longer believe that jury trials are important? Even the site you linked to supports jury trials.
Thousands of acres would need to be set aside for a wind farm large enough to power a city.
Fortunately, in many cases we have already set aside those thousands of acres, for use in growing food for said city. Since those two uses are not mutually exclusive, we can now make those acres do double-duty.
What if it was hit by a hurricane or tornado?
Then it would probably break and have to be repaired or replaced, same as anything else. C'est la vie.
Failed wind turbines can be extremely dangerous, destroying buildings and killing people.
Wind turbines are not typically located in populated areas (or at least not in heavily populated areas), so failed wind turbines are not likely to kill many people.
Since the population currently handles the death toll from car accidents without complaining too much, I don't think a few deaths from the occasional windmill accident would cause a huge outcry either.
Once you get through that, though, the solid core doesn't care about a solution for baseload electrical generation. Their answer is some kind of neo-primitivism involving no energy or extremely limited energy consumption.
The other answer, at least in the long long term, would be to generate a large surplus of renewable energy and store it (somehow) for use as needed, in combination with: generating renewable energy in enough locations and through enough methods simultaneously that the chances of a significant portion of it being unavailable at once would be negligible.
Yes, we're a long way from there today. But that's the inevitable end game (at least until someone figures out nuclear fusion, or captures some unicorns).
People don't seem to say this was a failure of management or engineering in these discussions. Why do you suppose that is?
Management and engineering will always fail from time to time, because managers and engineers are human and fallible.
The question is, how serious are the consequences when (not if!) those failures occur?
coward. we're supposed to cower in fear of these people?
That's the beauty of the Internet, isn't? It allows you to sit in your parent's basement (or whatever safe location you are in) and demand that other peoples' lives should be put at risk so that you can feel good. Meanwhile, the people who actually have to make these decisions are required to factor in other concerns besides their egos -- details like the safety of Americans living abroad, who might well be lynched if there is a backlash in response to their actions. They have to act like adults, not like children playing superhero. Remember the ~20 innocent UN workers who got lynched in Afghanistan after Terry Jones made his oh-so-brave political statement by burning a Koran in Florida? What would you say to the next 20 innocents whose lives you could have spared but chose not to? "Sorry, your life is less important than my sense of justice"?
I think the assassination itself is what's going to do that, photos won't really make any difference.
You'd think that, but that isn't how human beings work.
Consider the effect of the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, versus the effect of the various textual reports of prisoner abuse that were released before the photos were.
It's one thing to hear about something unpleasant, but quite another to actually see it with your own eyes.
. And there may be as many as 100,000,000 of them (10% of all Muslims). That is not Nebulous
I don't know, "there may be as many as" sounds pretty nebulous to me. It includes any number between zero and 100 million (the latter a number that sounds awfully like it was made up by you, or by someone with an interest in controlling you through fear).
A jury is made up of 12 people too dumb or too lazy to get out of jury duty...
... is still smarter than the people who don't understand the importance of jury trials.
This human-powered contraption is just a big waste of time.
So is a StairMaster, but at least this version is fun.
Programming is not art or something. It's like asking a car mechanic for his "portfolio" of repaired cars.
Until there is "one right way" to create any requested functionality, programming is partially an art.
Car repair isn't analogous at all. To repair a car, you have to first diagnose what is wrong, and then apply the manufacturer-approved fix. This might be analogous to debugging a program, but it's quite different from creating one.
Programming would be more like car design -- and car designers most definitely ARE asked about their portfolios.
I'd rather hire the kid who's code sample consists of fixing 5 memory leaks in 5 different open source libraries. He'll write solid code.
I'm not sure I buy this. Debugging code and designing code are two different skill sets. Granted, you usually pick them up together, but it certainly be possible to be quite skilled at running valgrind and parsing its output, while at the same time having little or no idea of how to put together maintainable non-spaghetti code yourself.
I bet it's less than 15 characters like 99% of people tend to use.
You underestimate Mr. bin Ladin. He actually left laptops with TrueCrypt partitions full of only random binary lying around, just to drive the NSA batty.
Ha, if the NSA needs the computing power they could go to IBM and say "How would you like the awesome PR opportunity of letting us borrow one of your blue gene clusters for a few months?
I think it's probably safe to assume that the NSA has all the computing power they feel they need (and probably much more than IBM does).
You assume that a SEAL can actually use a computer sensibly?
Maybe, or maybe not. But I'm pretty sure he'd be able to deliver the computer to someone who can.
This makes encryption a very useful tool, as the password will literally die with you.
On the other hand, if there's anyone who can crack the encryption without the password, it's probably the US government. Perhaps the common encryption methods are mathematically strong enough to withstand money-is-no-object brute-force, and perhaps the implementations don't have any unpublicized weaknesses (or secret back doors) ... but I wouldn't want to bet my evil terrorism network on that.
I believe that is the alternate job title for the Chief Technical Officer at AOL.
When it comes to valuable data, nothing beats a local hard drive, and nothing will ever beat that.
You know what beats a local hard drive? Two local hard drives, so that if one of them dies, you can still retrieve your data on the other one. And you know what beats two local hard drives? N hard drives in different locations, so that even after Evil Otto nukes your office and your branch office, you can still retrieve a backup copy of your data from another zip code.
I wonder if/when any cloud services will offer the option of letting you automatically keep a copy of your cloud data on your home computer's local drive? That seems like it would be a good feature to have.
I would like more elaboration on what "touched the keyboard" means.
It was an extreme case of static discharge. The engineer is lucky to be alive -- when doing cloud computing, thunderstorms are a huge hazard.
If someone sends a user an attachment of lady gaga nude, they're going to set the damn execute bit to view it.
One would hope that anyone smart enough to know how to set the execute bit, would be smart enough to know not to set the execute bit.
(One would probably be disappointed, though ;^))
Obama is unconcerned with energy or the economy and instead focuses on overthrowing religious fundamentalists and nation building.
Now this is just silly. Obama has been actively promoting renewable energy for years, and has done more to actually move the industry forward than any other President since Carter. And he's as aware as anyone that the health of the economy is what will make or break his re-election bid next year.
You may think his energy/economy policies are wrong-headed/harmful/evil/whatever, but to label him "unconcerned" only shows that you haven't been paying attention.
If you consider bin Laden a friend and countryman, you need to die, too.
I think the parent poster was referring to the hundreds (thousands?) of Afghans killed by drone strikes over the last few years -- not to OBL.
Btw, when did thoughtcrime become worthy of capital punishment?
Shame they didn't get him alive and give him a trial.
Perhaps, but it's no longer clear to me that the US feels itself capable of putting Al Quaeda leaders on trial. At least, most of Congress no longer has enough faith in our justice system to allow it.
Rowling made so much money off the Potter series that even if she had been sued successfully for patent infringement, she still would have come out stinking rich...
Either that, or the person who sued her would have come out stinking rich.... I don't think there is any cap on how much a person found guilty of patent infringement might be required to pay.