Australia recently banned guns, and had their firearm homocide rate TRIPLE!!!
That's not actually true. It's something a gun supporter made up and has been repeated by gun nuts ever since. Check the stats - it's just not true.
There are a few things wrong with this story. Firstly, Australia didn't recently ban guns. They've always been strictly licensed but legal here. On the other hand they did outlaw private ownership of semi-automatic weapons a few years ago - but there was no noticable change in firearm deaths, either up or down.
I was at the eGames expo on Friday and tried out the 3d display. My thought was "Oh, someone's still doing the LCD shutter glasses?". It was just the same old technology from years ago as far as I could see. The only new thing was that they'd made a clever driver which hooked into DirectX so existing games could be used in 3d.
Sorry guys, there was no 2d->3d conversion at all.
Michael Robertson isn't very "linspiring" as a CEO of a software company. He hasn't really thought this through, has he?
Let's think about the kinds of data that might exist on a computer:
The data you already have
The OS, application programs and configuration
Other peoples data
Data you may create in the future
Running a vulnerable program as a user exposes the data you already have to damage, so only one of the four categories is at risk. But running it as root means that all your system setup and any other programs also cop it. And even better trojans and rootkits can be installed on your system so all your future data is also vulnerable.
If I'm going to have a disaster I'd prefer it to just screw me over once rather than make my entire life a misery.
In Australia and many European countries holding this kind of reverse auction for pay rates is illegal. The reason is quite simple - in occupations like nursing where there's an oversupply of willing workers the employers are able to use a reverse auction to bid wages right down to the breadline. Employees will be desperate enough to bid themselves into poverty just to get their next meal. This makes employers happy but results in a lot of employees suffering greatly.
The alternative is a "minimum wage" system which we've traditionally used here in Australia. This more egalitarian approach reduces the incidence of poverty in the country but also reduces the chance for employers to get incredibly rich.
We used to have an oversupply of doctors and nurses here and (cutting a long story short) we now have shortages of doctors and nurses due to many leaving the profession. This in turn is starting to drive their wages back up again. Most importantly due to our minimum wage policies, unemployment benefits and the unions they didn't all starve during this adjustment.
Having said all that stuff about minimum wage, Australia is gradually trending towards an individual employment contract model more like the US - and as a result the social divide here is increasing. Thirty years ago true poverty and homelessness were rather rare here - a very different situation to the US. Trailer parks were almost unknown here compared to the US. Homelessness was also comparatively rare back then. The visible rate of homelessness here is now maybe ten times what it was back then. It's still a small fraction of the US rate though - I was shocked to see the number of homeless people when I visited San Francisco. This change in Australia is partially due to changes in employment policies and partially due to reduction of benefits. Government policies have reduced unemployment benefits and tossed people out of mental institutions as well as allowing individual pay negotiation in some cases.
So I guess whether you allow employment policies like reverse auctions is a matter of "What kind of society do I want?" If you want a comfortable country where no-one suffers too much then you need more left-wing policies like minimum wages and strong welfare. If you want to encourage the profit making possibilities of a free market economy then you should allow policies like reverse actions and reduced welfare.
As a point of comparison the US spends about half its tax on the military. Australia spends about half its tax on welfare instead. The US allows employers to get people to bid themselves into poverty. Australia doesn't. As a result it should surprise no-one that Australia has a vastly lower rate of poverty than the US and much fewer incredibly rich people. The cost of some of these policies is pretty high taxes compared to the US. People here seem to be willing to pay that price to have a relatively egalitarian society.
Nanobacteria have been known about for quite a few years, though as the above article points out their existence is still contraversial.
All this is particularly interesting to me since my doctor has tested me for nanobacteria using an ELIZA test (an antibody-based test). I came up positive and have been under treatment with antibiotics (doxycycline) for some months. Subsequent tests have shown decreasing levels of the critters, and I'm hoping to be clear of them in a few months. So I'm hoping that they really exist or I've wasted a lot of effort and money!
You might wonder why I'd subject myself to treatment for a thing that might not even exist. The answer is simple - I have chronic fatigue syndrome and anything which might cure it is worth trying. The latest research into chronic fatigue indicates that systemic infections of various bacteria (mycoplasma fermentans being one) and nanobacteria are implicated in many cases. But it's certainly not a conclusively proven remedy at this stage.
No matter how many years you spent doing ballroom dancing you'd never become a professional until you got paid. And even if you were terrible at it but got paid you'd still be a professional.
But let's say you're a good dancer who isn't paid. People might say you were "very professional" in your attitude or presentation but in that case they're using an analogy - saying you're as good as a professional, not saying you're actually a professional.
I think a lot of people are confused about this word. We use the term "amateurish" to talk about things which are crappy and I really think this helps to add to the confusion. For instance I write free software which by definition is an "amateur" activity since I don't get paid for it but I'd really like to think it's not "amateurish" and crappy!
There are some other distinctions used these days too. I play in a band which you'd definitely describe as "amateur". But maybe someday we'll get booked at a venue and become "semi-pro", meaning we get paid to play - but not enough to give up our day jobs. Not quite "professional" but not "amateur" either.
A couple of years ago I developed the LookSmart (search engine) CGI system. This was one of the earliest category-based search systems and at the time was unusual in that every page was customisable in a number of ways - so every page had to be CGI generated.
The equipment we had at our disposal was a couple of fairly big Sun servers, so we had to be able to serve a high volume of CGI-generated traffic off only two machines (rather than using the usual farm arrangement which seems common for high volume sites these days). Last I heard the site was serving some millions of CGI pages a day - upward of a hundred pages a second at peak load. The architecture has stood the test of time - today it's essentially unmodified from the one I designed in 1997.
How was this level of performance achieved? Given the hardware constraints I took an approach which squeezed the maximum possible hits per second out of what we had. I chose Apache as the web server and FastCGI as the interface to a rather large CGI written in C/C++. Using this setup I was able to produce CGI pages not much more slowly than Apache can produce static pages, even when producing fairly complex pages with database content. C/C++ might seem like a strange choice for a CGI language but in terms of sheer speed it was miles better than Perl - the other obvious option at the time. I've done a lot of CGI programming in different systems since then and despite the hype about other CGI systems I'd say they're still not that much easier than C to write CGIs in.
One other trick I used to make the LookSmart site so fast was to avoid the use of conventional databases altogether - at least at the CGI side of things. Our database was regularly exported as a specially-formatted flat file which I mmap()ed into each CGI's memory space. This allowed all the CGI processes to share the same flat file image, while taking advantage of the demand paging system to minimise the memory impact of the database. Other tricks were used to maximise the locality properties of the database. This all resulted in a system which was many, many times faster than SQL database access would have been. (In fact we later tried an ASP/SQL server architecture for comparison and it was several orders of magnitude slower)
One downside of this relatively low-level approach to CGI was reduced flexibility. Initially it wasn't easy for non-programmers to modify the behaviour of the site. Over time I gradually added more and more configurability to the system so more of the system could be tinkered with by naive users. Which in itself led to plenty of problems, but that's another story:) In the end I'd developed a farily rudimentary but fast templating system which adequately served most requirements for flexibility.
Would I do it the same way again? Given the same hardware and load constraints, yes I think I would. In a situation where you must extract the maximum possible performance out of the available hardware this kind of approach really worked extremely well. The cost was in increased development effort and more reliance on programmers (ie. usually me) when changes had to be made to the system.
Slashdot Mirror
Australia recently banned guns, and had their firearm homocide rate TRIPLE!!!
That's not actually true. It's something a gun supporter made up and has been repeated by gun nuts ever since. Check the stats - it's just not true.
There are a few things wrong with this story. Firstly, Australia didn't recently ban guns. They've always been strictly licensed but legal here. On the other hand they did outlaw private ownership of semi-automatic weapons a few years ago - but there was no noticable change in firearm deaths, either up or down.
I was at the eGames expo on Friday and tried out the 3d display. My thought was "Oh, someone's still doing the LCD shutter glasses?". It was just the same old technology from years ago as far as I could see. The only new thing was that they'd made a clever driver which hooked into DirectX so existing games could be used in 3d.
Sorry guys, there was no 2d->3d conversion at all.
Michael Robertson isn't very "linspiring" as a CEO of a software company. He hasn't really thought this through, has he?
Let's think about the kinds of data that might exist on a computer:
The data you already have
The OS, application programs and configuration
Other peoples data
Data you may create in the future
Running a vulnerable program as a user exposes the data you already have to damage, so only one of the four categories is at risk. But running it as root means that all your system setup and any other programs also cop it. And even better trojans and rootkits can be installed on your system so all your future data is also vulnerable.
If I'm going to have a disaster I'd prefer it to just screw me over once rather than make my entire life a misery.
Here's a view from the other side of the world.
In Australia and many European countries holding this kind of reverse auction for pay rates is illegal. The reason is quite simple - in occupations like nursing where there's an oversupply of willing workers the employers are able to use a reverse auction to bid wages right down to the breadline. Employees will be desperate enough to bid themselves into poverty just to get their next meal. This makes employers happy but results in a lot of employees suffering greatly.
The alternative is a "minimum wage" system which we've traditionally used here in Australia. This more egalitarian approach reduces the incidence of poverty in the country but also reduces the chance for employers to get incredibly rich.
We used to have an oversupply of doctors and nurses here and (cutting a long story short) we now have shortages of doctors and nurses due to many leaving the profession. This in turn is starting to drive their wages back up again. Most importantly due to our minimum wage policies, unemployment benefits and the unions they didn't all starve during this adjustment.
Having said all that stuff about minimum wage, Australia is gradually trending towards an individual employment contract model more like the US - and as a result the social divide here is increasing. Thirty years ago true poverty and homelessness were rather rare here - a very different situation to the US. Trailer parks were almost unknown here compared to the US. Homelessness was also comparatively rare back then. The visible rate of homelessness here is now maybe ten times what it was back then. It's still a small fraction of the US rate though - I was shocked to see the number of homeless people when I visited San Francisco. This change in Australia is partially due to changes in employment policies and partially due to reduction of benefits. Government policies have reduced unemployment benefits and tossed people out of mental institutions as well as allowing individual pay negotiation in some cases.
So I guess whether you allow employment policies like reverse auctions is a matter of "What kind of society do I want?" If you want a comfortable country where no-one suffers too much then you need more left-wing policies like minimum wages and strong welfare. If you want to encourage the profit making possibilities of a free market economy then you should allow policies like reverse actions and reduced welfare.
As a point of comparison the US spends about half its tax on the military. Australia spends about half its tax on welfare instead. The US allows employers to get people to bid themselves into poverty. Australia doesn't. As a result it should surprise no-one that Australia has a vastly lower rate of poverty than the US and much fewer incredibly rich people. The cost of some of these policies is pretty high taxes compared to the US. People here seem to be willing to pay that price to have a relatively egalitarian society.
> They haven't been able to extract nucleic acids from the structures.
Not true. The Mayo Clinic team paper (which this slashdot article was based on) claims that they've identified RNA and DNA from them.
This New Scientist article has more detail.
Nanobacteria have been known about for quite a few years, though as the above article points out their existence is still contraversial.
All this is particularly interesting to me since my doctor has tested me for nanobacteria using an ELIZA test (an antibody-based test). I came up positive and have been under treatment with antibiotics (doxycycline) for some months. Subsequent tests have shown decreasing levels of the critters, and I'm hoping to be clear of them in a few months. So I'm hoping that they really exist or I've wasted a lot of effort and money!
You might wonder why I'd subject myself to treatment for a thing that might not even exist. The answer is simple - I have chronic fatigue syndrome and anything which might cure it is worth trying. The latest research into chronic fatigue indicates that systemic infections of various bacteria (mycoplasma fermentans being one) and nanobacteria are implicated in many cases. But it's certainly not a conclusively proven remedy at this stage.
No matter how many years you spent doing ballroom dancing you'd never become a professional until you got paid. And even if you were terrible at it but got paid you'd still be a professional.
But let's say you're a good dancer who isn't paid. People might say you were "very professional" in your attitude or presentation but in that case they're using an analogy - saying you're as good as a professional, not saying you're actually a professional.
I think a lot of people are confused about this word. We use the term "amateurish" to talk about things which are crappy and I really think this helps to add to the confusion. For instance I write free software which by definition is an "amateur" activity since I don't get paid for it but I'd really like to think it's not "amateurish" and crappy!
There are some other distinctions used these days too. I play in a band which you'd definitely describe as "amateur". But maybe someday we'll get booked at a venue and become "semi-pro", meaning we get paid to play - but not enough to give up our day jobs. Not quite "professional" but not "amateur" either.
A couple of years ago I developed the LookSmart (search engine) CGI system. This was one of the earliest category-based search systems and at the time was unusual in that every page was customisable in a number of ways - so every page had to be CGI generated.
The equipment we had at our disposal was a couple of fairly big Sun servers, so we had to be able to serve a high volume of CGI-generated traffic off only two machines (rather than using the usual farm arrangement which seems common for high volume sites these days). Last I heard the site was serving some millions of CGI pages a day - upward of a hundred pages a second at peak load. The architecture has stood the test of time - today it's essentially unmodified from the one I designed in 1997.
How was this level of performance achieved? Given the hardware constraints I took an approach which squeezed the maximum possible hits per second out of what we had. I chose Apache as the web server and FastCGI as the interface to a rather large CGI written in C/C++. Using this setup I was able to produce CGI pages not much more slowly than Apache can produce static pages, even when producing fairly complex pages with database content. C/C++ might seem like a strange choice for a CGI language but in terms of sheer speed it was miles better than Perl - the other obvious option at the time. I've done a lot of CGI programming in different systems since then and despite the hype about other CGI systems I'd say they're still not that much easier than C to write CGIs in.
One other trick I used to make the LookSmart site so fast was to avoid the use of conventional databases altogether - at least at the CGI side of things. Our database was regularly exported as a specially-formatted flat file which I mmap()ed into each CGI's memory space. This allowed all the CGI processes to share the same flat file image, while taking advantage of the demand paging system to minimise the memory impact of the database. Other tricks were used to maximise the locality properties of the database. This all resulted in a system which was many, many times faster than SQL database access would have been. (In fact we later tried an ASP/SQL server architecture for comparison and it was several orders of magnitude slower)
One downside of this relatively low-level approach to CGI was reduced flexibility. Initially it wasn't easy for non-programmers to modify the behaviour of the site. Over time I gradually added more and more configurability to the system so more of the system could be tinkered with by naive users. Which in itself led to plenty of problems, but that's another story :) In the end I'd developed a farily rudimentary but fast templating system which adequately served most requirements for flexibility.
Would I do it the same way again? Given the same hardware and load constraints, yes I think I would. In a situation where you must extract the maximum possible performance out of the available hardware this kind of approach really worked extremely well. The cost was in increased development effort and more reliance on programmers (ie. usually me) when changes had to be made to the system.