Most of the international community thinks that Russia is either over reacting or taking advantage of Goergia's internal conflict with a Goergian province that declared independence.
A better way to put it: people think that Russia is supporting Georgian separatists (from two regions, not one) as a means of interfering in Georgian internal affairs, with an eye to resuming their historical domination of Georgia, one that lasted from 1812 to the break up of the Soveit Union in 1990 (with minor interruptions). In the past, this has been limited to giving the separatists military backing and granting residents of breakaway regions Russian Federation passports. Now this has escalated into an actual war (provoked by Georgian actions that can be characterized as an unprovoked attack on Russian-protect regions or as a legitimate attempt to secure Georgian borders, depending on who you talk to), complete with a full scale military incursion, in which the Georgian forces are totally outclassed by the Russian invaders. There are also accusations that Russian-backed separatist militias are attempting to force ethnic Georgians out of the breakaway regions. There have also been reports of massacres.
Last, but certainly not least, Russia is demanding that Georgia pick a new President. Since the current guy is democratically elected (and a strong advocate of closer ties to the west), this amounts to a demand that Georgia become a client state.
The effect on the ISS is miniscule compared with the other ramifications. NATO has agreed to allow Georgia to join, once they've met "technical requirements". If this had already happened, the U.S. would have a treaty obligation to help defend Georgia against the Russian invasion. We're talking world war here, not unlike the way a dispute between Serbia and Austria escalated into the first world war. It seems likely that one of the purposes of the Russian invasion is to make the U.S. think twice about its policy of expanding NATO eastward.
Barring a world war, there's not a lot anybody can do about this. The party line in Russia is that the west is determined to keep down all the Slavic countries. (In this narrative, the NATO attack against Serbia was about that, not about preventing genocide in Kosovo.) Putin's defiance of the west only makes him more popular, all the more so if we impose sanctions.
But of course the sanctions will happen: western leaders have to take action, no matter how symbolic, or look ineffectual. (Yes, they are ineffectual, but they can't afford to look it.) That pretty much brings to an end any Russian-western cooperation in space exploration.
So "Mathematics" must be plural too. So everybody who says "Mathematics is" instead of "Mathematics are" is "wrong". Whatever.
Grammatical rules like "s means plural" are not written by God. They're written by academics struggling to understand the structure of language. And every rule they make up has a ton of demonstrable exceptions.
Mind you, I don't think it's unnecessary to worry about language rules. I write for a living, and coming up with the right usage that won't make my prose look illiterate. But I refuse to get all religious about it, and I find people who do very irritating. As do most people on Slashdot (which is why so many of them almost make a fetish of bad spelling). Not only is it obnoxious (when you nitpicked "maths is" you basically called everybody in the UK illiterate), it almost always has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
Dude,.NET is a VM. Microsoft doesn't like to call it that, but that's what it is. Anders Hejlsberg dreamed up.NET when he realized he was never going to get the changes he wanted in Java.
VMs don't have to be slow to start up. They have that reputation mainly because of all those gawdawful Java VMs Sun produced when they were overselling Java.
No, "maths" is Brit shorthand for "mathematics", like the American "math". Would you say, "Mathematics are hard"?
Also, Britain is not a utopia, unless you really, really like overcooked vegetables.
Finally, on Slashdot, it's OK to criticize somebody's grasp of science, math, or logic. But under no circumstances may you quibble about spelling or grammar!
It's easy enough to buy a fake social security card with a valid number, and that's all the proof employers are required to ask for. Illegals in my neck of the woods (Silicon Valley) often hold down fairly responsible jobs. There was an incident a few months ago in which a child was killed in a traffic accident. The driver's biggest headache was not her liability (not clear that it was her fault) but that she was undocumented. Now, this was not some Spanish-only immigrant driving from a communal flophouse to her house cleaning job. This was a fluently bilingual suburban housewife driving to her office job in her SUV.
That said, I'd hardly recommend this route for somebody who just wants to do a 3-month internship in a professional capacity. The safety and legal risks are huge. For somebody fleeing poverty or violence in Latin America, the risks might be worth it (and the necessary connections easier to make). But for a software person? Forget it. Not too much chance of doing jail time (though perhaps they'd want to make an example of somebody who came here to do professional work), but you could end up barred from entering the U.S. again, ever.
My first thought on seeing this was, "If they're going to incorporate a Wacom digitizer, why not incorporate it in the display, and make the whole thing a tablet?" But I was forgetting that the display is 17 inches, and a digitzer that size would add another K or two to the price.
It's all too common in China, where people often resort to machine translation, and don't have a fluent English speaker nearby to check copy. See here and here.
What you're talking about is emulating one OS on top of another. That's a different (and a lot more complicated) than anything Java does.
Solutions using this approach do exist. But none of them are the simple one-size-fits-all solution you're asking for, nor are they likely to be. Wine emulates the Windows APIs well enough to run most major applications, but only after major tweaking for each application. The effort required to make it a simple turnkey emulator that supports all Windows applications without tweaking would be huge.
I don't know how well BSD emulates Linux APIs. But it wouldn't be hard to do it well, since BSD and Linux are almost the same OS. But emulating Linux APIs on Windows? Again, a huge effort. Not impossible: Cygwin implements most Linux/Unix APIs under Windows, though it doesn't support Linux binaries (you have to recompile). I use it a lot. But I regularly run into weird errors caused by the collision between the two universes. If it's that difficult to provide simple API compatibility, imagine the difficulty in supporting Linux binaries.
Emulating one OS on top of another isn't easy. In fact, I think it's somewhat harder than implementing the OS from scratch on top of bare metal. So it's not a simple fix for all our platform compatibility woes.
"Like Java, but with native code"? What does that mean? Java achieves platform independence by running on a virtual machine. No virtual machine, no platform independence.
I can't quote figures, but I suspect that a burning oil field is nothing, CO2wise, compared to hundreds of millions of cars and trucks going back and forth. All that soot might easily have helped to make the planet a little cooler. Though once again, probably not enough to notice.
Speaking of soot, there are multiple proposals to control global warming by dispersing particulates in the upper atmosphere. Sounds like an easy fix, right? But it's actually just a little scary. If you start controlling the planetary temperature that way, you've effectively created a planetary thermostat. And whatever the global temperature is, there will be winners and losers. You could easily see a major war fought over who gets to control that thermostat.
Even with a cross-platform graphics layer, we're not seeing a lot high-performance games that run on all of Windows, Linux, and Mac. The problems of developing and debugging this kind of software are big enough to discourage people doing it for multiple platforms in any case.
Well, that answers my earlier question... you have not seen any of the recent episodes.
Dude, I haven't even seen the first episode, beyond the first 10 minutes. Cawley's performance is that nauseating. (I tried to watch the damn thing 3 or 4 times, never got past the 10-minute mark without wanting to claw my eyes out.) Unless you can tell me he's spent the last year in Juliard boot camp, I have no inclination to give his later performances a check.
If the requirements of his day job include having a really stupid looking haircut, he should have given the role to somebody else. I'm guessing that, since he's both the star and the "executive producer" most of the production costs are coming out of his pocket. Well, it's his money, he can do what he wants with it. But this is a vanity project, pure and simple, and that's not a formula for good entertainment.
OK, so the Federation must be a totalitarian state, to make sure the "wrong people" don't get their hands on warp cores. The mental health thing is obviously a cover for the secret police who keep everybody in line.
It was "Gold-pressed latinum". And one reason they created DS9 was that they found the social perfection of the Federation hard to write stories about. So they came up with a premise involving a space station outside the Federation, where market forces (and other "primitive" social mechanisms) are very much at work.
TOS was not quite as utopian or "evolved" as the later series.
OK, the WWW III thing is a good point. But I find the idea that the "antisocial" can be "fixed" just a little scary — and not conducive to a free and open society.
I missed that — and it's obvious nonsense. If the in-game engine created all those fancy deep-space animations, then very few people will be able to afford the hardware to run it.
It's easier to believe that the in-game engine did those few (very few, and very brief) scenes where characters are interacting. And there the graphic details looks pretty darn sparse.
Don't believe everything you read. And learn the difference between healthy skepticism and trolling.
Hah! But in fact, Steve Jobs is very much a child of th 60s (remember the "Think Different" campaign?), and that's where Trek-style idealism comes from.
The decline of blatant racism has less to do with any kind of evolution than a simple awareness of hypocrisy. The idea of that "all men are created equal" and have an "inalienable right" to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" was a basic part of the national dogma since day one. But there's always been a heavy element of doublethink — the famous document I just quoted was written by slave owner.
People didn't get really serious about racial equality until mass media made it impossible for racists to abuse non-whites openly. And from what I've seen, there's as much racial prejudice as ever, it's just hidden behind code words and euphemisms. Doesn't look like "cultural evolution" to me.
Which is not a reason to abandon hope. Things do get better, simply because a lot of brave people work to awaken people's moral consciousness. "Evolution" is very much the wrong word for that process. It smacks of the Social Darwinism that so much racism is built on.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the international community thinks that Russia is either over reacting or taking advantage of Goergia's internal conflict with a Goergian province that declared independence.
A better way to put it: people think that Russia is supporting Georgian separatists (from two regions, not one) as a means of interfering in Georgian internal affairs, with an eye to resuming their historical domination of Georgia, one that lasted from 1812 to the break up of the Soveit Union in 1990 (with minor interruptions). In the past, this has been limited to giving the separatists military backing and granting residents of breakaway regions Russian Federation passports. Now this has escalated into an actual war (provoked by Georgian actions that can be characterized as an unprovoked attack on Russian-protect regions or as a legitimate attempt to secure Georgian borders, depending on who you talk to), complete with a full scale military incursion, in which the Georgian forces are totally outclassed by the Russian invaders. There are also accusations that Russian-backed separatist militias are attempting to force ethnic Georgians out of the breakaway regions. There have also been reports of massacres.
Last, but certainly not least, Russia is demanding that Georgia pick a new President. Since the current guy is democratically elected (and a strong advocate of closer ties to the west), this amounts to a demand that Georgia become a client state.
The effect on the ISS is miniscule compared with the other ramifications. NATO has agreed to allow Georgia to join, once they've met "technical requirements". If this had already happened, the U.S. would have a treaty obligation to help defend Georgia against the Russian invasion. We're talking world war here, not unlike the way a dispute between Serbia and Austria escalated into the first world war. It seems likely that one of the purposes of the Russian invasion is to make the U.S. think twice about its policy of expanding NATO eastward.
Barring a world war, there's not a lot anybody can do about this. The party line in Russia is that the west is determined to keep down all the Slavic countries. (In this narrative, the NATO attack against Serbia was about that, not about preventing genocide in Kosovo.) Putin's defiance of the west only makes him more popular, all the more so if we impose sanctions.
But of course the sanctions will happen: western leaders have to take action, no matter how symbolic, or look ineffectual. (Yes, they are ineffectual, but they can't afford to look it.) That pretty much brings to an end any Russian-western cooperation in space exploration.
Good song, bad physics.
So "Mathematics" must be plural too. So everybody who says "Mathematics is" instead of "Mathematics are" is "wrong". Whatever.
Grammatical rules like "s means plural" are not written by God. They're written by academics struggling to understand the structure of language. And every rule they make up has a ton of demonstrable exceptions.
Mind you, I don't think it's unnecessary to worry about language rules. I write for a living, and coming up with the right usage that won't make my prose look illiterate. But I refuse to get all religious about it, and I find people who do very irritating. As do most people on Slashdot (which is why so many of them almost make a fetish of bad spelling). Not only is it obnoxious (when you nitpicked "maths is" you basically called everybody in the UK illiterate), it almost always has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
Dude, .NET is a VM. Microsoft doesn't like to call it that, but that's what it is. Anders Hejlsberg dreamed up .NET when he realized he was never going to get the changes he wanted in Java.
VMs don't have to be slow to start up. They have that reputation mainly because of all those gawdawful Java VMs Sun produced when they were overselling Java.
No, "maths" is Brit shorthand for "mathematics", like the American "math". Would you say, "Mathematics are hard"?
Also, Britain is not a utopia, unless you really, really like overcooked vegetables.
Finally, on Slashdot, it's OK to criticize somebody's grasp of science, math, or logic. But under no circumstances may you quibble about spelling or grammar!
It's easy enough to buy a fake social security card with a valid number, and that's all the proof employers are required to ask for. Illegals in my neck of the woods (Silicon Valley) often hold down fairly responsible jobs. There was an incident a few months ago in which a child was killed in a traffic accident. The driver's biggest headache was not her liability (not clear that it was her fault) but that she was undocumented. Now, this was not some Spanish-only immigrant driving from a communal flophouse to her house cleaning job. This was a fluently bilingual suburban housewife driving to her office job in her SUV.
That said, I'd hardly recommend this route for somebody who just wants to do a 3-month internship in a professional capacity. The safety and legal risks are huge. For somebody fleeing poverty or violence in Latin America, the risks might be worth it (and the necessary connections easier to make). But for a software person? Forget it. Not too much chance of doing jail time (though perhaps they'd want to make an example of somebody who came here to do professional work), but you could end up barred from entering the U.S. again, ever.
My first thought on seeing this was, "If they're going to incorporate a Wacom digitizer, why not incorporate it in the display, and make the whole thing a tablet?" But I was forgetting that the display is 17 inches, and a digitzer that size would add another K or two to the price.
It's all too common in China, where people often resort to machine translation, and don't have a fluent English speaker nearby to check copy. See here and here.
What you're talking about is emulating one OS on top of another. That's a different (and a lot more complicated) than anything Java does.
Solutions using this approach do exist. But none of them are the simple one-size-fits-all solution you're asking for, nor are they likely to be. Wine emulates the Windows APIs well enough to run most major applications, but only after major tweaking for each application. The effort required to make it a simple turnkey emulator that supports all Windows applications without tweaking would be huge.
I don't know how well BSD emulates Linux APIs. But it wouldn't be hard to do it well, since BSD and Linux are almost the same OS. But emulating Linux APIs on Windows? Again, a huge effort. Not impossible: Cygwin implements most Linux/Unix APIs under Windows, though it doesn't support Linux binaries (you have to recompile). I use it a lot. But I regularly run into weird errors caused by the collision between the two universes. If it's that difficult to provide simple API compatibility, imagine the difficulty in supporting Linux binaries.
Emulating one OS on top of another isn't easy. In fact, I think it's somewhat harder than implementing the OS from scratch on top of bare metal. So it's not a simple fix for all our platform compatibility woes.
I said upper atmosphere. The idea is to spread particles with rockets, not turn off the filters on power plants.
"Like Java, but with native code"? What does that mean? Java achieves platform independence by running on a virtual machine. No virtual machine, no platform independence.
I can't quote figures, but I suspect that a burning oil field is nothing, CO2wise, compared to hundreds of millions of cars and trucks going back and forth. All that soot might easily have helped to make the planet a little cooler. Though once again, probably not enough to notice.
Speaking of soot, there are multiple proposals to control global warming by dispersing particulates in the upper atmosphere. Sounds like an easy fix, right? But it's actually just a little scary. If you start controlling the planetary temperature that way, you've effectively created a planetary thermostat. And whatever the global temperature is, there will be winners and losers. You could easily see a major war fought over who gets to control that thermostat.
Even with a cross-platform graphics layer, we're not seeing a lot high-performance games that run on all of Windows, Linux, and Mac. The problems of developing and debugging this kind of software are big enough to discourage people doing it for multiple platforms in any case.
Well, Slashdot has an RSS feed too. But I never use it, because I value Slashdot more as a discussion site. As a news site, it sucks pretty totally.
Well, that answers my earlier question... you have not seen any of the recent episodes.
Dude, I haven't even seen the first episode, beyond the first 10 minutes. Cawley's performance is that nauseating. (I tried to watch the damn thing 3 or 4 times, never got past the 10-minute mark without wanting to claw my eyes out.) Unless you can tell me he's spent the last year in Juliard boot camp, I have no inclination to give his later performances a check.
If the requirements of his day job include having a really stupid looking haircut, he should have given the role to somebody else. I'm guessing that, since he's both the star and the "executive producer" most of the production costs are coming out of his pocket. Well, it's his money, he can do what he wants with it. But this is a vanity project, pure and simple, and that's not a formula for good entertainment.
OK, so the Federation must be a totalitarian state, to make sure the "wrong people" don't get their hands on warp cores. The mental health thing is obviously a cover for the secret police who keep everybody in line.
And I thought Troi was such a nice person!
I thought the point of posting was to share your opinions, not get mod points. Are mod points redeemable for valuable gifts or something?
It was "Gold-pressed latinum". And one reason they created DS9 was that they found the social perfection of the Federation hard to write stories about. So they came up with a premise involving a space station outside the Federation, where market forces (and other "primitive" social mechanisms) are very much at work.
TOS was not quite as utopian or "evolved" as the later series.
OK then, the Federation is like a car that has warp engines.
OK, the WWW III thing is a good point. But I find the idea that the "antisocial" can be "fixed" just a little scary — and not conducive to a free and open society.
I missed that — and it's obvious nonsense. If the in-game engine created all those fancy deep-space animations, then very few people will be able to afford the hardware to run it.
It's easier to believe that the in-game engine did those few (very few, and very brief) scenes where characters are interacting. And there the graphic details looks pretty darn sparse.
Don't believe everything you read. And learn the difference between healthy skepticism and trolling.
Hah! But in fact, Steve Jobs is very much a child of th 60s (remember the "Think Different" campaign?), and that's where Trek-style idealism comes from.
The decline of blatant racism has less to do with any kind of evolution than a simple awareness of hypocrisy. The idea of that "all men are created equal" and have an "inalienable right" to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" was a basic part of the national dogma since day one. But there's always been a heavy element of doublethink — the famous document I just quoted was written by slave owner.
People didn't get really serious about racial equality until mass media made it impossible for racists to abuse non-whites openly. And from what I've seen, there's as much racial prejudice as ever, it's just hidden behind code words and euphemisms. Doesn't look like "cultural evolution" to me.
Which is not a reason to abandon hope. Things do get better, simply because a lot of brave people work to awaken people's moral consciousness. "Evolution" is very much the wrong word for that process. It smacks of the Social Darwinism that so much racism is built on.
Not even Elvis wore his hair that big.
Does this dude know the difference between imitating a stage performance and actual acting? Obviously not.
A computer to do your math for you is yet another half.