We'd be a third rate economy if we'd stayed with the gold or silver base.
The essence of money is far more complex than "pay the bearer on demand x dollars in gold or silver". That's a thoroughly obsolete definition in the modern world economy and quite frankly seems to appeal to nationalistic isolationists.
I'd say it's obvious that crime rates can be brought down by installing surveillance cameras, increasing the visible police presence on the streets and granting the law enforcement agencies more rights to carry out surveillance of suspects.
Yeah, maybe the opponents of surveillance cameras are right in saying that the crime only moves to some other part of the city, but so what. I feel safer in knowing that my neighbourhood is well covered by the police cameras and if the crime moves somewhere else then install cameras there as well.
So what's the problem?
Getting captured on a surveillance tape close to a crime scene and being falsely accused? Ok, that might happen but still that's why we have courts where you can clear your name.
Meeting someone who's involved in criminal activities and already under surveillance which might get you, in turn, on the suspect list? Well, meeting a criminal is not a crime so you should be alright. They watch you for a while and stop it after a while after realizing that you're not a criminal.
HotSpot can actually use the real data used to run the program
Sounds a lot like what FX!32 did on Alpha.
It translated Intel code to native Alpha code and ran it. The first translation was improved every time the Intel program was run and eventually it was running like a native Alpha application. Very nice.
stuff like scsi controllers are ridiculous expensive
I've been wondering about this. AFAIK the only difference between a Sun compatible SCSI card and an off-the-shelf SCSI card is the latter lack the Forth firmware with which to boot the card.
Like a we-do-not-tolerate-clearly-dangerous-cults-
precedent?
For Christs sake, you've got prisons crammed full of minor drug offenders and some states execute children and you say that banning something as abhorrent as $cientology sets a dangerous precedent!
its not uncommon to wait 3 to 6 months for what that surgery
Yes, but as far as I know socialised health care does not mean that you can't buy health services if you want. So what you've got is two options: an inexpensive alternative for which you might have to wait and more expensive, private health care
Best of both worlds.
how nice it is to shop here, how we have so much stuff
Somehow I find that hard to believe.
Don't make Europe out to be some bastion of freedom
I wasn't. In fact, I was pointing out that exactly such approach would be one-dimensional thinking.
like being forced to pay a tax that goes to churches in Germany
Yeah, there is a State Church in many European countries, but as far as I know, you can revoke your membership and avoid the tax.
the exercise more control over their people than the US government, but its easy to forget that eh?
As if that is some kind of a catch-all for happy society. The less control a government exerts on the people, the better society you get? You mention China as an example of a controlling state and then use it as an example how the European states who control (as you claim without proof) their citizens more must also be worse off. What about a country like Ivory Coast where there is no government at all. The people are completely free - or are they?
That's too one dimensional, black and white thinking: us vs. them, capitalism vs. communism, good vs. evil and so on. The world is full of shades of gray and so are the benefits and disadvantages of government control (or the lack of it).
Yeah, perhaps the corporations in European countries are more controlled and people pay more income tax than in the US, but is that so bad for Joe Sixpack. And then again in most European countries they still have living standards that are more than comparable to that in the U.S.A. They have excellent, government subsidized health care and public transportation. You probably know the list.
Hey, I'm just a lone open source refugee who has been thrust
in the middle of Solaris sysadming without any prior experience.
That white boot screen console is so fucking slow that I think
even an X console would beat it.
Even in democratic countries we're living under centralised government, so your argument doesn't really hold.
Furthermore, the market may be smarter than centralised planning, but it doesn't make it more moral in terms of how it affects the society as a shole.
In fact, privatised broadcasting tends to be much more prone to shallow and politically biased analysis (=news broadcasting and opinions that will please the sponsors most) and fastfood news with 30 second world headlines followed by half an hour of sports.
Just compare the depth of news broadcasts by BBC and CNN or, God forbid, FOX.
Re:Tito - selfish bastard
on
Tito In Space
·
· Score: 1
Prepare to write more than one letter, then.
Looks like James Cameron (of the Aliens and Terminator 2 fame) might be going up next...
First of all, there already is such a product: OpenGL. Why don't we see OpenGL games on Linux, then?
It doesn't make economic sense to the game manufacturers to write games for many different platforms. Most of the games nowadays use Direct3D, so if the goal is to get more games for Linux, the only right way is to adopt and not to compete with Direct3D.
An academic reviewer would return such articles with "Do not publish" written all over them.
Are you sure you've understood the reviewer's role right?
I've reviewed scientifically brilliant but grammatically hideous papers from the far east and eastern Europe. If I think the article is scientifically worth my and others' time, I usually correct the worst spelling and grammatical mistakes myself and include these as "suggestions" with my other comments to the authors. If they can't handle it, then so be it - fix your text or don't publish it.
It has a moral outloook, and if your morals are different you are screwed.
You are assuming that there are no moral problems with corporations' single-minded drive to make money. Corporations do have a moral agenda: to make us consume more, which with our finite natural resources is in itself a very questionable agenda.
If policing were private, that would not have happened.
You mean things would be better like in the private prisons? Horrific abuses of power and inhuman treatment of the inmates to reduce the operating costs.
You're forgetting that you also get something like good universal health care and public transportation for your tax money -- even to those who otherwise couldn't afford it (and unlike you Ayn Rand fanatics would like to believe not all of them are simply "lazy").
I had a tumour surgically removed from my stomach at a university hospital. I was admitted four days after I was diagnosed, had a smooth operation and got excellent care for two weeks at the ward. The immediate cost? $200. At a private clinic this would have cost me at least $5000, which I could not have afforded at this stage of my life (I've spent all my personal budget surplus on computers and stocks).
"Get an insurance. It's unfair that I have to pay for someone else's operation", you say? The problem with the health insurance is that it can severely restrict the way the doctors can treat you. It also promotes social inequality as only the rich can get proper treatment.
In the finaly analysis, yes I feel the 28% income tax is worth it. That way we get good services for everybody, which in itself makes me feel good.
I remember chatting with Moscow university students during the hard-liners' attempted coup in the 1990s.
It was rather strange to be on IRC and to read someone writing that he could hear automatic gunfire in the distance and see tank columns in the city streets.
I also remember wondering that if the hard-line communists won, how long it would take before they remembered to cut the internet connections. Phone lines and radios would have been gone at once, but the net was such a novelty back then that the universities might have been able to keep a life-line abroad for a while longer.
And, to be honest, when I see how some people live their lives... I don't see the interest in lengthning it.
With immortality would, of course, come responsibility. It would probably mean that the idea of a free society where wastefulness and pollution is tolerated would have to be abandoned.
The nearest example I can think of is the China model. If you live in a city and have more than one child, you'll get economically punished by the state.
Well, consider this. Raw materials like iron, copper and gold are produced by mining ore from the ground. The pure materials are then extracted from the ore in post processing. Once you process a pound of ore, it's all done with: there's no more gold, iron or copper in it and you need to do some more mining instead.
Similarly, in physical sciences the experiments produce the raw material. Experimentalists also pre-proecss the stuff and often come up with reasonably accurate models that are then incorporated and refined by the theorists and modelers using computers. They use the computers to distill the information that's still in the "raw material", but after that you need to go "mining", that is experimenting, again.
an increasingly common use of computer simulations is for a theorist to quickly run a model and then fix his theory as required
As an experimentalist I've never quite understood what's the point in using a model as a point of reference to another model. To me it sounds like an elaborate circular argument or "scientific inbreeding".
Anyway, I've always been interested in computational physics (I originally came to study CS) and as a part of my postgraduate studies I did an essay on the use of density functional theory in materials science. I was appalled to read in a review article by very established computational physicists (M.C. Payne, M.P. Teter, D.C. Allan, T.A. Arias and J.D. Joannopoulos, Rev. Mod. Phys. 64 4 (1992) 1045) a following paragraph:
Comparing the decreasing cost of computers with the cost of a large number of different pieces of experimental apparatus needed to carry out the same functions, one sees that the cost effectiveness of quantum-mechanical modeling methods over physical experimentation will continue to increase with time.
I can't understand how any self-respecting scientist could ever even propose that experimental observation could be replaced by simulations. On the other hand, English is not my mother tongue so I might have misunderstood the tone of that paragraph.
Don't take me wrong. I think computational physics and ab initio calculations in particular are invaluable tools, but one should always compare theories and simulation with the Nature herself.
Well, that misunderstanding is somewhat understandable since the public image of a physical scientist is that of someone sitting in front of a computer and all getting the right answers from a simulation.
At our university the Physics department is swamped every spring by senior Physics students who would like to come to work at the department. About 70% head straight for the computational physics lab. I've interviewed a few of those (after they got rejected by the comp. phys. lab) and asked why they named computational physics as their #1 option. My observation was that -- aside from them knowing nothing about the scientific process -- they believed that computational physics is Physics nowadays and that experimental work is mostly unnecessary. Very worrying when the future physicists might end up trusting more the results they get from models than those obtained from the real world...
In traditional physical sciences like Physics, the grunt-work is still being done by the experimentalists. Granted, they use computers for data gathering and analysis, but as such computers do not provide any raw information.
Slashdot Mirror
The essence of money is far more complex than "pay the bearer on demand x dollars in gold or silver". That's a thoroughly obsolete definition in the modern world economy and quite frankly seems to appeal to nationalistic isolationists.
I'd say it's obvious that crime rates can be brought down by installing surveillance cameras, increasing the visible police presence on the streets and granting the law enforcement agencies more rights to carry out surveillance of suspects.
Yeah, maybe the opponents of surveillance cameras are right in saying that the crime only moves to some other part of the city, but so what. I feel safer in knowing that my neighbourhood is well covered by the police cameras and if the crime moves somewhere else then install cameras there as well.
So what's the problem?
Getting captured on a surveillance tape close to a crime scene and being falsely accused? Ok, that might happen but still that's why we have courts where you can clear your name.
Meeting someone who's involved in criminal activities and already under surveillance which might get you, in turn, on the suspect list? Well, meeting a criminal is not a crime so you should be alright. They watch you for a while and stop it after a while after realizing that you're not a criminal.
Sounds a lot like what FX!32 did on Alpha.
It translated Intel code to native Alpha code and ran it. The first translation was improved every time the Intel program was run and eventually it was running like a native Alpha application. Very nice.
I've been wondering about this. AFAIK the only difference between a Sun compatible SCSI card and an off-the-shelf SCSI card is the latter lack the Forth firmware with which to boot the card.
Like a we-do-not-tolerate-clearly-dangerous-cults- precedent?
For Christs sake, you've got prisons crammed full of minor drug offenders and some states execute children and you say that banning something as abhorrent as $cientology sets a dangerous precedent!
Sounds a lot like: "Give me money and free slave labour and I'll get it done"...
Yes, but as far as I know socialised health care does not mean that you can't buy health services if you want. So what you've got is two options: an inexpensive alternative for which you might have to wait and more expensive, private health care
Best of both worlds.
how nice it is to shop here, how we have so much stuff
Somehow I find that hard to believe.
Don't make Europe out to be some bastion of freedom
I wasn't. In fact, I was pointing out that exactly such approach would be one-dimensional thinking.
like being forced to pay a tax that goes to churches in Germany
Yeah, there is a State Church in many European countries, but as far as I know, you can revoke your membership and avoid the tax.
As if that is some kind of a catch-all for happy society. The less control a government exerts on the people, the better society you get? You mention China as an example of a controlling state and then use it as an example how the European states who control (as you claim without proof) their citizens more must also be worse off. What about a country like Ivory Coast where there is no government at all. The people are completely free - or are they?
That's too one dimensional, black and white thinking: us vs. them, capitalism vs. communism, good vs. evil and so on. The world is full of shades of gray and so are the benefits and disadvantages of government control (or the lack of it).
Yeah, perhaps the corporations in European countries are more controlled and people pay more income tax than in the US, but is that so bad for Joe Sixpack. And then again in most European countries they still have living standards that are more than comparable to that in the U.S.A. They have excellent, government subsidized health care and public transportation. You probably know the list.
Hey, I'm just a lone open source refugee who has been thrust in the middle of Solaris sysadming without any prior experience. That white boot screen console is so fucking slow that I think even an X console would beat it.
Furthermore, the market may be smarter than centralised planning, but it doesn't make it more moral in terms of how it affects the society as a shole.
In fact, privatised broadcasting tends to be much more prone to shallow and politically biased analysis (=news broadcasting and opinions that will please the sponsors most) and fastfood news with 30 second world headlines followed by half an hour of sports.
Just compare the depth of news broadcasts by BBC and CNN or, God forbid, FOX.
Looks like James Cameron (of the Aliens and Terminator 2 fame) might be going up next...
It doesn't make economic sense to the game manufacturers to write games for many different platforms. Most of the games nowadays use Direct3D, so if the goal is to get more games for Linux, the only right way is to adopt and not to compete with Direct3D.
This is most disappointing and, unless countered, signals the death of free science.
Are you sure you've understood the reviewer's role right?
I've reviewed scientifically brilliant but grammatically hideous papers from the far east and eastern Europe. If I think the article is scientifically worth my and others' time, I usually correct the worst spelling and grammatical mistakes myself and include these as "suggestions" with my other comments to the authors. If they can't handle it, then so be it - fix your text or don't publish it.
You are assuming that there are no moral problems with corporations' single-minded drive to make money. Corporations do have a moral agenda: to make us consume more, which with our finite natural resources is in itself a very questionable agenda.
If policing were private, that would not have happened.
You mean things would be better like in the private prisons? Horrific abuses of power and inhuman treatment of the inmates to reduce the operating costs.
I've never understood your problem with taxation.
You're forgetting that you also get something like good universal health care and public transportation for your tax money -- even to those who otherwise couldn't afford it (and unlike you Ayn Rand fanatics would like to believe not all of them are simply "lazy").
I had a tumour surgically removed from my stomach at a university hospital. I was admitted four days after I was diagnosed, had a smooth operation and got excellent care for two weeks at the ward. The immediate cost? $200. At a private clinic this would have cost me at least $5000, which I could not have afforded at this stage of my life (I've spent all my personal budget surplus on computers and stocks).
"Get an insurance. It's unfair that I have to pay for someone else's operation", you say? The problem with the health insurance is that it can severely restrict the way the doctors can treat you. It also promotes social inequality as only the rich can get proper treatment.
In the finaly analysis, yes I feel the 28% income tax is worth it. That way we get good services for everybody, which in itself makes me feel good.
It was rather strange to be on IRC and to read someone writing that he could hear automatic gunfire in the distance and see tank columns in the city streets.
I also remember wondering that if the hard-line communists won, how long it would take before they remembered to cut the internet connections. Phone lines and radios would have been gone at once, but the net was such a novelty back then that the universities might have been able to keep a life-line abroad for a while longer.
I'll get worried the day I get a letter from Monsanto or some other genetech company saying: "All your DNA and derivative products are belong to us!"
Meanwhile I'll keep investing in biotech companies.
With immortality would, of course, come responsibility. It would probably mean that the idea of a free society where wastefulness and pollution is tolerated would have to be abandoned.
The nearest example I can think of is the China model. If you live in a city and have more than one child, you'll get economically punished by the state.
Similarly, in physical sciences the experiments produce the raw material. Experimentalists also pre-proecss the stuff and often come up with reasonably accurate models that are then incorporated and refined by the theorists and modelers using computers. They use the computers to distill the information that's still in the "raw material", but after that you need to go "mining", that is experimenting, again.
As an experimentalist I've never quite understood what's the point in using a model as a point of reference to another model. To me it sounds like an elaborate circular argument or "scientific inbreeding".
Anyway, I've always been interested in computational physics (I originally came to study CS) and as a part of my postgraduate studies I did an essay on the use of density functional theory in materials science. I was appalled to read in a review article by very established computational physicists (M.C. Payne, M.P. Teter, D.C. Allan, T.A. Arias and J.D. Joannopoulos, Rev. Mod. Phys. 64 4 (1992) 1045) a following paragraph:
I can't understand how any self-respecting scientist could ever even propose that experimental observation could be replaced by simulations. On the other hand, English is not my mother tongue so I might have misunderstood the tone of that paragraph.
Don't take me wrong. I think computational physics and ab initio calculations in particular are invaluable tools, but one should always compare theories and simulation with the Nature herself.
At our university the Physics department is swamped every spring by senior Physics students who would like to come to work at the department. About 70% head straight for the computational physics lab. I've interviewed a few of those (after they got rejected by the comp. phys. lab) and asked why they named computational physics as their #1 option. My observation was that -- aside from them knowing nothing about the scientific process -- they believed that computational physics is Physics nowadays and that experimental work is mostly unnecessary. Very worrying when the future physicists might end up trusting more the results they get from models than those obtained from the real world...
Indeed.
I stopped investing in IT businesses last year when I got the feeling that the bubble was about to burst. And how right I was.
Most of my money is now in biotechnology and genetics.
Surely you mean: "This is precisely why we cannot defined the boundaries of what can and cannot be displayed on the internet."
Some people find Teletubbies offensive on moral grounds. If you want to legislate the net that way, you end up with total ban on everything.
In traditional physical sciences like Physics, the grunt-work is still being done by the experimentalists. Granted, they use computers for data gathering and analysis, but as such computers do not provide any raw information.