Because superheros never work well on reduced power? Or maybe there's a patch they'll sell later (as per Intel's "upgradeable processor") that will let you run all three.
First, there's no evidence that the blood-stirring interpretation of what the Russian said was the least-bit correct. I would understand the posting by "a country" to refer to material commissioned by and paid for by the government of that nation or by agencies under its direct authority. A person is not a country and "a country" (being a geological formation) cannot post, so that's about the only interpretation I can place on it.
I think that postings by a Government on the Internet for the express purpose of attempting to orchestrate a military coup or a civil war in another nation should be treated outside of the framework of free speech for individuals. I'm not saying that such things should be banned altogether (though I can find no value in them - as I've posted before, I believe violence begets only violence and I see no good coming from such a path).
For someone to equate government pressure to bring down a rival government with, say, a critical posting by an individual on a blog - that's suspect at best and a shame on any who would use that kind of illogic to put forward their arguments. If you have no case with reasoning, then you can have no case without reasoning. Hyperbole and politically-charged speech adds nothing but hot air and bluster.
If you honestly do believe that the Russian referred to ANY posting by ANY person, feel free to reply with the evidence for this. I've backed down before when shown I was wrong. When I don't back down, it's because nothing has been shown and I don't retreat from shadows.
Having got that out of the way, I do believe that government-orchestrated disinformation campaigns and government-orchestrated coup attempts SHOULD be restricted at the very least, in an effective way. It's that last bit that is important. If any government - including the permanent members of the security council - is caught breaking International Law, they should be subject to penalties accordingly. At present, International Law has no teeth, it is merely a way to window-dress acts against another nation that the guilty country could never have got away with otherwise. That is not acceptable.
Now, this isn't to say I think the Russians should be allowed to get away with such statements without putting their own house in order. For example, the Russian Federation is just that - a federation of nations. If the Kremlin interferes in the affairs of any nation within that federation (other than Russia itself), it should be subject to those self-same laws and should be penalized accordingly. The same with Russia trying to manipulate Poland over what Poland can and cannot have on its territory by exerting fear and doubt into the Polish citizenry. Under such a law, this would have to stop and the UN would have to be willing to take the necessary action. No matter what. (Were this line to actually be taken by the UN, Russia would be the first to veto the law. The US would be second. Nobody else really matters in this.)
Interference in a society that is not ready to progress is rarely helpful to either those interfering or those interfered with. It can set both back a long way. In the case of the Middle East, persistent interference over the last 2,500 years is the main reason most nations there are an unhealthy mix of the Bronze Age with the Information Age. They will never develop unless they're allowed to.
I strongly suspect that those who claim to want to impose such-and-such a political or religious system on another nation actually have no such intent at all. It has never worked, in all of recorded history, and it is unlikely to start doing so soon. In the days of the Roman Empire, they didn't pretend it was for the good of the other nation. They were honest enough it was to keep Rome top-dog, with all other societies too fractured to rebel. Again, feel free to provide hard-and-fast evidence if you think I'm wrong. Appeals to my humanity won't cut it.
Now, again, this is interference on a large-scale as can only be done by a huge organization. We're not tal
Oh yeah. And before anyone points out that people have suggested that the protein was contamination, there was enough to see things that looked suspiciously like blood vessels and the protein resembled what would be found in chicken bones - which the hollow T. Rex bone strongly resembled. Similar results were apparently found in other T. Rex bones, but owing to the extreme rarity of T. Rex fossils in the first place, never mind the extreme reluctance of museums to go sawing their prize pieces in half, it's unclear if this is ever going to be "reproducible" to the point of anyone's complete satisfaction. (Actually, MRI should be able to see through stone ok, so long as it's not iron-bearing.)
There were elephants with four tusks, where the extra tusks offered virtually no advantage as far as anyone can tell. The horns on a dinosaur were of dubious defensive or offensive value and may well have been to improve cooling (greater surface area to radiate from) or for display. It would have made dealing with thick vegetation a problem - more ways to get tangled up. Ok, so if we go with improving cooling, in order to provide any serious advantage there has to be a significant source of heat that the triceratops did not face. Perhaps this dinosaur moved faster, or was more active in general.
Ever since paleontologists discovered proteins inside dino bones and even found a fossil that partially preserved the colour of the skin, the understanding of dino lives has changed dramatically.
Ok, I'll give it a shot. Have you taken a look at FreeCiv, though? It has some very nice features for game rule tweaking, but doesn't have as nice a diplomacy system for AIs as Civ II.
Better diplomacy would be nice - one of the real strengths of all the Civilization games is the depth and complexity of the interaction with NPCs. I like what you're saying about an improved navy. To improve realism, it would be good if they added a raft-with-sail (likely how early humans reached Australia, now believed to have been 70,000 years ago - well beyond the timeframe of Civilization of any edition). There's a few other such touches I'd like added, but whatever they added there'd always be something else that they could add which could be neat.
I have Civ I and II, never bothered with III and IV (I was spending waaaay too much time with FreeCiv), but V sounds like it'll be worth buying.
The meteorite is unlikely to add mystic powers, but iron-nickel-carbon swords are apparently stronger than iron-carbon swords. (I've wondered what a Katana would be like if it used iron-nickel-carbon. It would be heavier, but it should hold an edge better and should be less likely to break.)
If the instrumentation could be used on other database engines, all database engines would take (proportionally) the same hit and therefore the ratios should remain unchanged.
The "better idea" is that you associate specific types of underlying database-level task with some meaningful quantity or quantities (I propose maximum, minimum, mean and variance on the memory consumed and the time taken) and then associate the way in which tasks interact with similar quantities, and finally generate values for how the system scales (doing N tasks will not take the same time as N x one task, even on a strictly sequential system - and sequential systems haven't been used since the Dark Ages). You do this for each database engine you want to model. This isn't a perfect representation, but it's good enough to say database engine X will perform better/worse/about the same as database engine Y on doing the same set of tasks.
You then produce a cookbook, which maps database models and high-level database tasks onto the associated underlying database tasks. You can now feed this cookbook an OO database model + OO database code or an ER diagram and SQL code and get a good feel for what a specific database will do when fed that. Each cookbook would need to be specific to a given database, as the underlying engine will be different. This is where the first problem creeps in - to compare apples with apples, the tailoring can't unfairly optimize for a given underlying engine. However, to compare best with best, you've got to use what the engine provides and not unfairly bias by ignoring the engine's strengths.
(In short, this would be something analogous to ERwin or Dezign for Databases, but it would be independent not only of the underlying database but also of the database methodology used, and it would need to know about the tricks and tips for getting the best out of each system. It would actually be closer to GCC, where the language passed to the frontend is completely independent of the language delivered by the backend. The "cookbook" would then be analogous to the bit that converts the data generated by the gcc frontend into something some given backend can parse.)
You then take any number of real-world solutions that exist, "compile" them for each database in turn, then "run" them to get estimates for how each database would handle that specific solution. You could also "compile" them to actual code digestable by the database in question to see how the estimates compared against actual usage. With enough solutions within each type of problem-space, and enough problem-spaces, you can get a feel for how to adjust the estimates for real-world dynamics.
Finally, you provide a means for a user to feed in some approximation of what they imagine their solution will end up looking like. The thing about the software life-cycle is that the idea of what the solution is, or indeed what the problem is, changes - though if it's a good design it'll not change at the high-level by a huge amount. The compiler then shows how the databases it can compile to would stack up for that approximation. If the coding is good, it won't be optimized prematurely, so you can use the first-round recommendation for a test platform which should give a good feel for what you will end up with. Once you reach the point of wanting to do optimizations, if you've changed the model you re-compile it and see if it still recommends the same engine. Whether it does or it doesn't, it should be a drop-in replacement. You then optimize for this "ideal" system.
There you have it. And the odds of this ever being done? Pffft! You know how long it took developers to write GCC? Nobody has written a down-to-the-nuts-and-bolts compiler with pluggable frontends and pluggable backends for compilers. Nobody knows how to do it, which is the same state compiler writers were in when GCC first came out. What is suggested here, basically a Fifth Generation compiler ("Fifth Generation" because it has a high-level specification input and you've an expert system involved in compiling it), is possible but people have tried to write Fifth Generation compilers for regular programming for 20 years now and have got absolutely nowhere. It is a
I would have to agree. Sadly, certain three-letter organizations have also been known to fire hellcat missiles into busy streets to get one or two specific individuals and to hell with anyone else. Carnage as a method of controlling public opinion is given a very specific name. State-sponsorship of such carnage is a serious offense in the eyes of the World Court (now the ICJ).
Yes, I accept the argument that certain nations have... issues... that make certain technologies inadvisable. It does NOT help that two such nations were given nuclear technology by the US, and this has indeed been used as justification for equally hazardous nations possessing the know-how. That was a seriously bad mistake, as deliberate violations of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty by key members of the Security Council makes it much much harder for the UN to enforce said treaty. But that is just the point. This is a UN issue, the US by being a member of the UN is subordinate to the UN on all international matters - whether it likes it or not. I would point out that the reason that the League Of Nations collapsed was because of nations deciding their political agendas were more important than the good of all.
Perhaps the UN lacks teeth. Perhaps the members of the Security Council would like to explain why said teeth were pulled, knowingly and willingly, by each and every one of them. Perhaps they would also like to explain what "Security" they propose to offer when there's nothing to offer it with. No, of course they won't. And the bombs will continue to be planted/launched, people will suffer indiscriminately (in violation of many other laws - not to mention every manual ever written on how to wage war), nothing will change. Further, the purported objectives will never be met.
(I say "purported" precisely because manuals like "The Art of War" specifically prohibit senseless killing or destruction. Can something be a true objective if you pursue a path that you know MUST fail, that every text tells you WILL fail, that every attempt in history to succeed by that path HAS failed? If you really want to achieve a result, would you not follow a path that would really achieve it? Of course, you have to consider the possibility that those giving the orders really do believe in what they claim they want, but are too deluded, too far under the Napoleonic Complex, to comprehend that they are wrong. That is actually a bit more likely than the 1984 scenario of a permanent war, engineered to subvert the minds of others, but no less terrifying. Consider this - if the people in high office are all criminally insane, and the population is knowingly electing them, what does that tell you about the population?)
Small-enough wood chippings and a decent pair of bellows can make a brilliant Iron-Age blast furnace. Indeed, this is how early metalwork and baked ceramic work was done. It is highly plausible that Sir Pratchett has refined the basic approach or obtained information from the excellent living history and archaeological communities that showed how to make such refinements. I am much impressed. Now, whether the iron was truly meteoric - that's a tougher question. Mind you, one could argue that it hardly matters. A home-made sword is a home-made sword. That is no mean feat in itself and would take a lot out of a healthy blacksmith in the olden days, if done right. (Even for Viking-era swords, when the skill was better-understood, there is a major variation between them and some have suggested that particularly good sword-makers would use brand-names.)
My guess on the manure is that it follows the same logic as the wood chippings - the greater the surface area of the burning material, the faster you can burn it and therefore the hotter the immediate temperature. The total quantity of heat produced doesn't change, but you squish the timeframe down to make the heat produced per unit time much greater. You could potentially use almost anything flammable as fuel with this approach, provided the granularity is fine enough, the oxygen flow is sufficient, and you can replace the used fuel fast enough. (NB: Whilst some Slashdot posts are indeed flammable, they are not useful as fuel.)
To a degree, I agree. There will also be a number of things in database design that a DBA wizard could suggest that go beyond my knowledge. However, let's take a trivial example - basic SELECT, INSERT and UPDATE operations. What can you do with these? For any of the Open Source databases, you can compile with instrumentation and then measure the average length of each arc through the program that you can hit with just those three statements. With this, you can determine the maximum, minimum, mean and variance for the arc length for each of the three statements for some determined load level. You then do a series of load levels and obtain these four parameters for each statement at each load. This tells you something about the scalability on workload as well as the behaviour of the three functions.
(I pity the fool who actually tries to run a database with maximum instrumentation - you'll need hellish horsepower to get any kind of response even under light workloads. Under really heavy loads, the fountain of youth would be handy as well.)
I fully agree it would be Herculean, which is why it would be good if we could find a Hercules to assign the task to.:)
In practice, you're right, there are some thing that are too different to compare readily. How do you compare an OO database with a Relational Database? For that matter, how do you compare a Star Database with a Relational Database? Even if they used an identical command language, the beasts are very very different. To an extent, that is a good thing - it means you can pick a database that's good for the problem, rather than forcing the problem to suit the database. In practice, precisely because they are so different, there's very limited metrics to make such a choice.
This has generally led to some assumptions. It is assumed relational databases is the most flexible but the slowest of the designs. There's next to no real proof of this, for the very reason you've noted, which means people are left with what amounts to folklore. It might be right, it might even be right for the right reasons, but it's simply not possible to know if this is the case right now.
And that leads back to the frustration that I feel. I am a software engineer with a strong science background. To be told that I have to accept folklore as a source of database knowledge - that is just so very very wrong. I can't accept that that's the best that can be done, even if I lack the skills to do better.
A broken laptop and two dead drives on my desktop. I'm a decent coder and can work my way round old-style rats-nest electronics with a soldering iron and a multimeter, but I'm not so good on rebuilding crashed drives or a cracked motherboard. Meh. I'll get them replaced sometime. If nobody has done the comparison by then, maybe I'll do one. But frankly, you're better off with an expert DBA designing such a test system, not a coder. A DBA =knows= what to look for and what to stress. That is their job and their training. A coder merely has an API. I've done enough DB design to do a decent job on developing databases, but I don't pretend to have the skills necessary to work the kind of magic that really exposes what a DB can and cannot do. That kind of wizardry is expressly in the domain of the creme-a-la-creme of DBAs.
Whilst I appreciate you thinking I should be in said category, the fact is that there are very very few such people. We are talking serious Database Black Magic, not just on one engine but a whole set of them. There's probably more people living in the same block as you than there are DBAs who have that level of expertise. Sure, there'll be plenty who are good on ONE engine (though not necessarily in enough aspects and enough case uses to really understand the complete range of loads), but to be sufficiently skilled across multiple styles of database over all manners of system load? That's a bit rarer. You no more want a software engineer attempting that than you want a database engineer working on a FIPS-180 crypto library in assembly. Whole 'nother animal.
The new features are much admired by all (and deservedly so), but a heavier footprint typically means poorer performance overall even if there's accelerated performance in specific areas or improved programming. I'd like to see a performance plot, showing version versus performance versus different types of system load, in order to see how well new stuff is being added in. It might be merged in great and the underlying architecture may be superb, but I would like to see actual data on this.
Also, PostgreSQL and MySQL aren't the only Open Source SQL databases. Including variants and forks, you really need to also consider Ingres, Drizzle, MariaDB, SAP MaxDB, FireBird and SQLite. If you want to also compare against Closed Source DBs, then you'd obviously want to look at DB/2, Oracle, Cache and Sybase. I'd love to see a full comparison between all of these, feature-for-feature, with no bias for or against any specific development model or database model, but rather an honest appraisal of how each database performs at specific tasks.
I like PostgreSQL a lot. I rate it extremely highly. However, without an objective analysis, all I have is my subjective perception. And subjective perceptions are not something I could credibly use in a workplace to encourage a switch. For that matter, subjective perceptions are not something I would consider acceptable for even telling a friend what to use. Perceptions are simply not credible and have no value in the real world.
It =IS= a big problem and as much as I think that I'm working along the right lines, all of the reasoning is based on the idea that you can identify when forces are balanced and how to get them there when they are not. In Britain, there were two attempts at achieving some semblance of balance - Alfred the Great's educational and legal reforms, and (to a lesser extent) the Magna Carta. Plato also emphasized the need for education. Education would enable individuals (and communities) to determine if a degree of parity had been achieved, but alone would not either create that parity nor would it (alone) persuade either individuals or communities to respect that balance.
Proportional Representation would seem to be part - but only part - of the key on the government side. I've wondered what would happen if you had a system where the first and second placed candidates for any seat were elected but had voting power proportional to the votes cast for them, in addition to (or in place of) some form of "traditional" Proportional Representation scheme. It would be messy to run such a system, but it would make cooperation much more valuable than antagonism. It's not the answer you're looking for, but it forms a possible starting point. The UK's House of Lords is also a good place to look, as it shows the concept of having two houses with separation not just of powers but of formation as well, so that there's a level of fault-tolerance - if one system isn't working right, it won't affect the other. In theory.
You are correct, but as others have noted the infrastructure needed isn't cheap either. That is why any such switch IS a gamble. It is not a foregone conclusion that it will pay off, but neither is it a foregone conclusion that it would fail. It might prove too difficult, but equally it might pay off big.
Las Vegas has no natural resources, but is hardly impoverished. You can't get much further away from Europe or America than Australia or New Zealand, but both have thriving tourist industries. On the other hand, Europe and America are littered with wannabe tourist attractions that are complete disasters, despite being convenient and having plenty of excellent qualities. Tourists are strange animals and do not follow anything that would be considered "logic". The first to find out why tourists go where they go (eg: paying sizable amounts to dig on archaeological sites in Israel for zero credit and zero keepsakes, paying to climb Mount Everest in the full knowledge that guides can and do abandon tourists to their deaths if it'll improve their profit margins, paying to go on luxury cruise liners knowing that disease is a constant threat and "mysterious un-investigated accidents" happen) will make a lot of money. And quite possibly a killing. In fact, if there is a common denominator on all the high-pricetag holidays, it's the fact that there is an element of danger - usually some other poor unfortunate sod, or nobody would go. "Risk-averse" only applies to the individual.
I suggest you look up the Sherman Tank sketch from Kenny Everett's television show. It does indeed use a cheap car to demonstrate the need to drive a tank down to the grocery store.
In principle, it should be impossible to tell the difference between encrypted data and a random oracle. In practice, many encryption algorithms leave tell-tale signs. (Suggest taking a look at the 2DEM encryption mode paper on the NIST website for an example.) One-Time Pads, if the encryption key is truly random, are guaranteed to yield data that is indistinguishable from random, but that is the only time you have a guarantee of that.
Modern cryptography is divided over the issue, but my understanding is that if you heavily compress data first and then encrypt it, you will get something much closer to the "ideal" of appearing random.
In steganography, the problem is slightly different. Image data isn't truly random. You can analyze the level of randomness and see if that level is within the bounds you would expect to find in an image. Your problem, then, is not to produce something that looks like a random oracle, but rather to produce something that looks like a natural oracle. I would imagine you could space the encrypted data out a bit and inject garbage that artificially kept the level of randomness within the bounds you would expect to find in an image. Do a bit of interpolation, come up with something that would make some sort of sense if it were all natural image data. Remember, the analysis will be done by computers and computers won't look at the aesthetics or the plausibility of the image, they'll only be looking for whether some algorithmically-defined metric falls inside or outside some given bounds. Algorithms are great for "what" questions, not so good for "why" questions.
Neighbors? Let's see. I'm from England. That makes my neighbors Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall (it has it's own parliament, so yes it counts), Norway, Denmark and France. Now, children, can anyone tell me which of these has NEVER invaded one or more of the others?
Would I be peaceful if I saw a Russian tank rolling down my street? For starters, I probably wouldn't care. NO country has ever successfully invaded England except when requested to do so by the majority in England. (Strange but true.) Thus, if there was a successful invasion by Russia, it could only be by the democratic will of the nation. As a believer in democracy, I will NOT dictate to my countrymen what I believe to be the right choice for the nation. If the majority wish a foreign takeover, then it is their right to make that choice and I would be utterly in the wrong to oppose it.
Would it be helpful for me to not be peaceful? Well, the Russians defeated the German invasion by throwing themselves at tanks and lobbing petrol bombs down the hatches. The death toll on the Russian side alone ran into the tens of millions as a result. You will also notice that Russia (a country riddled with violence at the best of times) also took a steep turn downwards at that time, becoming infinitely more rabid than it had been before. Those tens of millions who died "saved" Russia from what? They stopped a Fascist dictatorship but only at the cost of creating a Communist dictatorship every bit as large and unpleasant as the one they stopped.
This achieved what?
C'mon, you seem to have an answer, so what is it? What did these (unquestionably brave and heroic) Stalingraders die for, in the end, that they could not have created by living? And had the Russian Revolution been one of peace, rather than bloody conflict and nihilism, would Russia not have been the better-able to stop Germany long before it ever got to Stalingrad? If the autocrats and the populace had worked together, rather than in endless cycle of destruction, modern Communism would never have happened.
Even World War II was merely a byproduct of the senseless destruction of World War I and the mindless destruction wrecked by the Treaty of Versailles. If the nations had been less bent on revenge and more bent on preventing future conflict, Hitler would never have happened at all. In more modern times, the Rwandan massacre was the product of the French colonialists creating divisions and antagonism. That massacre has resulted in subsequent revenge massacres. This is unlikely to stop any time soon.
Now look at a different conflict, that in Northern Ireland. The cycle of violence was largely broken by both sides, resulting in peace that would not have been imagined possible in our lifetimes a mere 20 years ago. Sure, there's some groups still stirring up trouble. You can't stop a flywheel instantly. But so long as nobody works to put energy into that flywheel, the energy coming out will die out. The epiphany by both sides that they could actually work together AND achieve their goals has resulted in something that no amount of wars has ever achieved.
Did the US invasions of Grenada or Haiti produce anything comparable to Stormont? What about those of Iraq or Afghanistan? No?
Ok, what about other conflicts? ETA declared a ceasefire. Not sure if it was entirely sincere, but they did it and the Spanish government ignored it. Result, the violence did not end. One side fighting rather than two didn't change a damn thing. What would have happened if the Spanish government had opted instead for a Stormont-like deal and decriminalized the Basquist politicians? I don't know. I don't pretend to know. What I do know is that they didn't and their decision didn't work - and that like decisions throughout history have never worked. Insanity is doing the same thing, expecting different results.
Maybe Spain wasn't capable of cohesive peace that time round, that had the government done something different it wouldn't have altered the outcome that much. I don't have the in
Slashdot Mirror
Because superheros never work well on reduced power? Or maybe there's a patch they'll sell later (as per Intel's "upgradeable processor") that will let you run all three.
First, there's no evidence that the blood-stirring interpretation of what the Russian said was the least-bit correct. I would understand the posting by "a country" to refer to material commissioned by and paid for by the government of that nation or by agencies under its direct authority. A person is not a country and "a country" (being a geological formation) cannot post, so that's about the only interpretation I can place on it.
I think that postings by a Government on the Internet for the express purpose of attempting to orchestrate a military coup or a civil war in another nation should be treated outside of the framework of free speech for individuals. I'm not saying that such things should be banned altogether (though I can find no value in them - as I've posted before, I believe violence begets only violence and I see no good coming from such a path).
For someone to equate government pressure to bring down a rival government with, say, a critical posting by an individual on a blog - that's suspect at best and a shame on any who would use that kind of illogic to put forward their arguments. If you have no case with reasoning, then you can have no case without reasoning. Hyperbole and politically-charged speech adds nothing but hot air and bluster.
If you honestly do believe that the Russian referred to ANY posting by ANY person, feel free to reply with the evidence for this. I've backed down before when shown I was wrong. When I don't back down, it's because nothing has been shown and I don't retreat from shadows.
Having got that out of the way, I do believe that government-orchestrated disinformation campaigns and government-orchestrated coup attempts SHOULD be restricted at the very least, in an effective way. It's that last bit that is important. If any government - including the permanent members of the security council - is caught breaking International Law, they should be subject to penalties accordingly. At present, International Law has no teeth, it is merely a way to window-dress acts against another nation that the guilty country could never have got away with otherwise. That is not acceptable.
Now, this isn't to say I think the Russians should be allowed to get away with such statements without putting their own house in order. For example, the Russian Federation is just that - a federation of nations. If the Kremlin interferes in the affairs of any nation within that federation (other than Russia itself), it should be subject to those self-same laws and should be penalized accordingly. The same with Russia trying to manipulate Poland over what Poland can and cannot have on its territory by exerting fear and doubt into the Polish citizenry. Under such a law, this would have to stop and the UN would have to be willing to take the necessary action. No matter what. (Were this line to actually be taken by the UN, Russia would be the first to veto the law. The US would be second. Nobody else really matters in this.)
Interference in a society that is not ready to progress is rarely helpful to either those interfering or those interfered with. It can set both back a long way. In the case of the Middle East, persistent interference over the last 2,500 years is the main reason most nations there are an unhealthy mix of the Bronze Age with the Information Age. They will never develop unless they're allowed to.
I strongly suspect that those who claim to want to impose such-and-such a political or religious system on another nation actually have no such intent at all. It has never worked, in all of recorded history, and it is unlikely to start doing so soon. In the days of the Roman Empire, they didn't pretend it was for the good of the other nation. They were honest enough it was to keep Rome top-dog, with all other societies too fractured to rebel. Again, feel free to provide hard-and-fast evidence if you think I'm wrong. Appeals to my humanity won't cut it.
Now, again, this is interference on a large-scale as can only be done by a huge organization. We're not tal
Oh yeah. And before anyone points out that people have suggested that the protein was contamination, there was enough to see things that looked suspiciously like blood vessels and the protein resembled what would be found in chicken bones - which the hollow T. Rex bone strongly resembled. Similar results were apparently found in other T. Rex bones, but owing to the extreme rarity of T. Rex fossils in the first place, never mind the extreme reluctance of museums to go sawing their prize pieces in half, it's unclear if this is ever going to be "reproducible" to the point of anyone's complete satisfaction. (Actually, MRI should be able to see through stone ok, so long as it's not iron-bearing.)
There were elephants with four tusks, where the extra tusks offered virtually no advantage as far as anyone can tell. The horns on a dinosaur were of dubious defensive or offensive value and may well have been to improve cooling (greater surface area to radiate from) or for display. It would have made dealing with thick vegetation a problem - more ways to get tangled up. Ok, so if we go with improving cooling, in order to provide any serious advantage there has to be a significant source of heat that the triceratops did not face. Perhaps this dinosaur moved faster, or was more active in general.
Ever since paleontologists discovered proteins inside dino bones and even found a fossil that partially preserved the colour of the skin, the understanding of dino lives has changed dramatically.
Ok, I'll give it a shot. Have you taken a look at FreeCiv, though? It has some very nice features for game rule tweaking, but doesn't have as nice a diplomacy system for AIs as Civ II.
Time is relative and relatives exist to embarrass you.
So long as the Universe is replaced with something identical, I won't care.
Better diplomacy would be nice - one of the real strengths of all the Civilization games is the depth and complexity of the interaction with NPCs. I like what you're saying about an improved navy. To improve realism, it would be good if they added a raft-with-sail (likely how early humans reached Australia, now believed to have been 70,000 years ago - well beyond the timeframe of Civilization of any edition). There's a few other such touches I'd like added, but whatever they added there'd always be something else that they could add which could be neat.
I have Civ I and II, never bothered with III and IV (I was spending waaaay too much time with FreeCiv), but V sounds like it'll be worth buying.
The meteorite is unlikely to add mystic powers, but iron-nickel-carbon swords are apparently stronger than iron-carbon swords. (I've wondered what a Katana would be like if it used iron-nickel-carbon. It would be heavier, but it should hold an edge better and should be less likely to break.)
If the instrumentation could be used on other database engines, all database engines would take (proportionally) the same hit and therefore the ratios should remain unchanged.
The "better idea" is that you associate specific types of underlying database-level task with some meaningful quantity or quantities (I propose maximum, minimum, mean and variance on the memory consumed and the time taken) and then associate the way in which tasks interact with similar quantities, and finally generate values for how the system scales (doing N tasks will not take the same time as N x one task, even on a strictly sequential system - and sequential systems haven't been used since the Dark Ages). You do this for each database engine you want to model. This isn't a perfect representation, but it's good enough to say database engine X will perform better/worse/about the same as database engine Y on doing the same set of tasks.
You then produce a cookbook, which maps database models and high-level database tasks onto the associated underlying database tasks. You can now feed this cookbook an OO database model + OO database code or an ER diagram and SQL code and get a good feel for what a specific database will do when fed that. Each cookbook would need to be specific to a given database, as the underlying engine will be different. This is where the first problem creeps in - to compare apples with apples, the tailoring can't unfairly optimize for a given underlying engine. However, to compare best with best, you've got to use what the engine provides and not unfairly bias by ignoring the engine's strengths.
(In short, this would be something analogous to ERwin or Dezign for Databases, but it would be independent not only of the underlying database but also of the database methodology used, and it would need to know about the tricks and tips for getting the best out of each system. It would actually be closer to GCC, where the language passed to the frontend is completely independent of the language delivered by the backend. The "cookbook" would then be analogous to the bit that converts the data generated by the gcc frontend into something some given backend can parse.)
You then take any number of real-world solutions that exist, "compile" them for each database in turn, then "run" them to get estimates for how each database would handle that specific solution. You could also "compile" them to actual code digestable by the database in question to see how the estimates compared against actual usage. With enough solutions within each type of problem-space, and enough problem-spaces, you can get a feel for how to adjust the estimates for real-world dynamics.
Finally, you provide a means for a user to feed in some approximation of what they imagine their solution will end up looking like. The thing about the software life-cycle is that the idea of what the solution is, or indeed what the problem is, changes - though if it's a good design it'll not change at the high-level by a huge amount. The compiler then shows how the databases it can compile to would stack up for that approximation. If the coding is good, it won't be optimized prematurely, so you can use the first-round recommendation for a test platform which should give a good feel for what you will end up with. Once you reach the point of wanting to do optimizations, if you've changed the model you re-compile it and see if it still recommends the same engine. Whether it does or it doesn't, it should be a drop-in replacement. You then optimize for this "ideal" system.
There you have it. And the odds of this ever being done? Pffft! You know how long it took developers to write GCC? Nobody has written a down-to-the-nuts-and-bolts compiler with pluggable frontends and pluggable backends for compilers. Nobody knows how to do it, which is the same state compiler writers were in when GCC first came out. What is suggested here, basically a Fifth Generation compiler ("Fifth Generation" because it has a high-level specification input and you've an expert system involved in compiling it), is possible but people have tried to write Fifth Generation compilers for regular programming for 20 years now and have got absolutely nowhere. It is a
I would have to agree. Sadly, certain three-letter organizations have also been known to fire hellcat missiles into busy streets to get one or two specific individuals and to hell with anyone else. Carnage as a method of controlling public opinion is given a very specific name. State-sponsorship of such carnage is a serious offense in the eyes of the World Court (now the ICJ).
Yes, I accept the argument that certain nations have... issues... that make certain technologies inadvisable. It does NOT help that two such nations were given nuclear technology by the US, and this has indeed been used as justification for equally hazardous nations possessing the know-how. That was a seriously bad mistake, as deliberate violations of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty by key members of the Security Council makes it much much harder for the UN to enforce said treaty. But that is just the point. This is a UN issue, the US by being a member of the UN is subordinate to the UN on all international matters - whether it likes it or not. I would point out that the reason that the League Of Nations collapsed was because of nations deciding their political agendas were more important than the good of all.
Perhaps the UN lacks teeth. Perhaps the members of the Security Council would like to explain why said teeth were pulled, knowingly and willingly, by each and every one of them. Perhaps they would also like to explain what "Security" they propose to offer when there's nothing to offer it with. No, of course they won't. And the bombs will continue to be planted/launched, people will suffer indiscriminately (in violation of many other laws - not to mention every manual ever written on how to wage war), nothing will change. Further, the purported objectives will never be met.
(I say "purported" precisely because manuals like "The Art of War" specifically prohibit senseless killing or destruction. Can something be a true objective if you pursue a path that you know MUST fail, that every text tells you WILL fail, that every attempt in history to succeed by that path HAS failed? If you really want to achieve a result, would you not follow a path that would really achieve it? Of course, you have to consider the possibility that those giving the orders really do believe in what they claim they want, but are too deluded, too far under the Napoleonic Complex, to comprehend that they are wrong. That is actually a bit more likely than the 1984 scenario of a permanent war, engineered to subvert the minds of others, but no less terrifying. Consider this - if the people in high office are all criminally insane, and the population is knowingly electing them, what does that tell you about the population?)
Small-enough wood chippings and a decent pair of bellows can make a brilliant Iron-Age blast furnace. Indeed, this is how early metalwork and baked ceramic work was done. It is highly plausible that Sir Pratchett has refined the basic approach or obtained information from the excellent living history and archaeological communities that showed how to make such refinements. I am much impressed. Now, whether the iron was truly meteoric - that's a tougher question. Mind you, one could argue that it hardly matters. A home-made sword is a home-made sword. That is no mean feat in itself and would take a lot out of a healthy blacksmith in the olden days, if done right. (Even for Viking-era swords, when the skill was better-understood, there is a major variation between them and some have suggested that particularly good sword-makers would use brand-names.)
My guess on the manure is that it follows the same logic as the wood chippings - the greater the surface area of the burning material, the faster you can burn it and therefore the hotter the immediate temperature. The total quantity of heat produced doesn't change, but you squish the timeframe down to make the heat produced per unit time much greater. You could potentially use almost anything flammable as fuel with this approach, provided the granularity is fine enough, the oxygen flow is sufficient, and you can replace the used fuel fast enough. (NB: Whilst some Slashdot posts are indeed flammable, they are not useful as fuel.)
South is anything past the Watford Gap.
To a degree, I agree. There will also be a number of things in database design that a DBA wizard could suggest that go beyond my knowledge. However, let's take a trivial example - basic SELECT, INSERT and UPDATE operations. What can you do with these? For any of the Open Source databases, you can compile with instrumentation and then measure the average length of each arc through the program that you can hit with just those three statements. With this, you can determine the maximum, minimum, mean and variance for the arc length for each of the three statements for some determined load level. You then do a series of load levels and obtain these four parameters for each statement at each load. This tells you something about the scalability on workload as well as the behaviour of the three functions.
(I pity the fool who actually tries to run a database with maximum instrumentation - you'll need hellish horsepower to get any kind of response even under light workloads. Under really heavy loads, the fountain of youth would be handy as well.)
I fully agree it would be Herculean, which is why it would be good if we could find a Hercules to assign the task to. :)
In practice, you're right, there are some thing that are too different to compare readily. How do you compare an OO database with a Relational Database? For that matter, how do you compare a Star Database with a Relational Database? Even if they used an identical command language, the beasts are very very different. To an extent, that is a good thing - it means you can pick a database that's good for the problem, rather than forcing the problem to suit the database. In practice, precisely because they are so different, there's very limited metrics to make such a choice.
This has generally led to some assumptions. It is assumed relational databases is the most flexible but the slowest of the designs. There's next to no real proof of this, for the very reason you've noted, which means people are left with what amounts to folklore. It might be right, it might even be right for the right reasons, but it's simply not possible to know if this is the case right now.
And that leads back to the frustration that I feel. I am a software engineer with a strong science background. To be told that I have to accept folklore as a source of database knowledge - that is just so very very wrong. I can't accept that that's the best that can be done, even if I lack the skills to do better.
A broken laptop and two dead drives on my desktop. I'm a decent coder and can work my way round old-style rats-nest electronics with a soldering iron and a multimeter, but I'm not so good on rebuilding crashed drives or a cracked motherboard. Meh. I'll get them replaced sometime. If nobody has done the comparison by then, maybe I'll do one. But frankly, you're better off with an expert DBA designing such a test system, not a coder. A DBA =knows= what to look for and what to stress. That is their job and their training. A coder merely has an API. I've done enough DB design to do a decent job on developing databases, but I don't pretend to have the skills necessary to work the kind of magic that really exposes what a DB can and cannot do. That kind of wizardry is expressly in the domain of the creme-a-la-creme of DBAs.
Whilst I appreciate you thinking I should be in said category, the fact is that there are very very few such people. We are talking serious Database Black Magic, not just on one engine but a whole set of them. There's probably more people living in the same block as you than there are DBAs who have that level of expertise. Sure, there'll be plenty who are good on ONE engine (though not necessarily in enough aspects and enough case uses to really understand the complete range of loads), but to be sufficiently skilled across multiple styles of database over all manners of system load? That's a bit rarer. You no more want a software engineer attempting that than you want a database engineer working on a FIPS-180 crypto library in assembly. Whole 'nother animal.
The new features are much admired by all (and deservedly so), but a heavier footprint typically means poorer performance overall even if there's accelerated performance in specific areas or improved programming. I'd like to see a performance plot, showing version versus performance versus different types of system load, in order to see how well new stuff is being added in. It might be merged in great and the underlying architecture may be superb, but I would like to see actual data on this.
Also, PostgreSQL and MySQL aren't the only Open Source SQL databases. Including variants and forks, you really need to also consider Ingres, Drizzle, MariaDB, SAP MaxDB, FireBird and SQLite. If you want to also compare against Closed Source DBs, then you'd obviously want to look at DB/2, Oracle, Cache and Sybase. I'd love to see a full comparison between all of these, feature-for-feature, with no bias for or against any specific development model or database model, but rather an honest appraisal of how each database performs at specific tasks.
I like PostgreSQL a lot. I rate it extremely highly. However, without an objective analysis, all I have is my subjective perception. And subjective perceptions are not something I could credibly use in a workplace to encourage a switch. For that matter, subjective perceptions are not something I would consider acceptable for even telling a friend what to use. Perceptions are simply not credible and have no value in the real world.
It =IS= a big problem and as much as I think that I'm working along the right lines, all of the reasoning is based on the idea that you can identify when forces are balanced and how to get them there when they are not. In Britain, there were two attempts at achieving some semblance of balance - Alfred the Great's educational and legal reforms, and (to a lesser extent) the Magna Carta. Plato also emphasized the need for education. Education would enable individuals (and communities) to determine if a degree of parity had been achieved, but alone would not either create that parity nor would it (alone) persuade either individuals or communities to respect that balance.
Proportional Representation would seem to be part - but only part - of the key on the government side. I've wondered what would happen if you had a system where the first and second placed candidates for any seat were elected but had voting power proportional to the votes cast for them, in addition to (or in place of) some form of "traditional" Proportional Representation scheme. It would be messy to run such a system, but it would make cooperation much more valuable than antagonism. It's not the answer you're looking for, but it forms a possible starting point. The UK's House of Lords is also a good place to look, as it shows the concept of having two houses with separation not just of powers but of formation as well, so that there's a level of fault-tolerance - if one system isn't working right, it won't affect the other. In theory.
You are correct, but as others have noted the infrastructure needed isn't cheap either. That is why any such switch IS a gamble. It is not a foregone conclusion that it will pay off, but neither is it a foregone conclusion that it would fail. It might prove too difficult, but equally it might pay off big.
Las Vegas has no natural resources, but is hardly impoverished. You can't get much further away from Europe or America than Australia or New Zealand, but both have thriving tourist industries. On the other hand, Europe and America are littered with wannabe tourist attractions that are complete disasters, despite being convenient and having plenty of excellent qualities. Tourists are strange animals and do not follow anything that would be considered "logic". The first to find out why tourists go where they go (eg: paying sizable amounts to dig on archaeological sites in Israel for zero credit and zero keepsakes, paying to climb Mount Everest in the full knowledge that guides can and do abandon tourists to their deaths if it'll improve their profit margins, paying to go on luxury cruise liners knowing that disease is a constant threat and "mysterious un-investigated accidents" happen) will make a lot of money. And quite possibly a killing. In fact, if there is a common denominator on all the high-pricetag holidays, it's the fact that there is an element of danger - usually some other poor unfortunate sod, or nobody would go. "Risk-averse" only applies to the individual.
I suggest you look up the Sherman Tank sketch from Kenny Everett's television show. It does indeed use a cheap car to demonstrate the need to drive a tank down to the grocery store.
Next Up: Root vulnerability found in Abacus. Caveman laughs.
In principle, it should be impossible to tell the difference between encrypted data and a random oracle. In practice, many encryption algorithms leave tell-tale signs. (Suggest taking a look at the 2DEM encryption mode paper on the NIST website for an example.) One-Time Pads, if the encryption key is truly random, are guaranteed to yield data that is indistinguishable from random, but that is the only time you have a guarantee of that.
Modern cryptography is divided over the issue, but my understanding is that if you heavily compress data first and then encrypt it, you will get something much closer to the "ideal" of appearing random.
In steganography, the problem is slightly different. Image data isn't truly random. You can analyze the level of randomness and see if that level is within the bounds you would expect to find in an image. Your problem, then, is not to produce something that looks like a random oracle, but rather to produce something that looks like a natural oracle. I would imagine you could space the encrypted data out a bit and inject garbage that artificially kept the level of randomness within the bounds you would expect to find in an image. Do a bit of interpolation, come up with something that would make some sort of sense if it were all natural image data. Remember, the analysis will be done by computers and computers won't look at the aesthetics or the plausibility of the image, they'll only be looking for whether some algorithmically-defined metric falls inside or outside some given bounds. Algorithms are great for "what" questions, not so good for "why" questions.
Neighbors? Let's see. I'm from England. That makes my neighbors Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall (it has it's own parliament, so yes it counts), Norway, Denmark and France. Now, children, can anyone tell me which of these has NEVER invaded one or more of the others?
Would I be peaceful if I saw a Russian tank rolling down my street? For starters, I probably wouldn't care. NO country has ever successfully invaded England except when requested to do so by the majority in England. (Strange but true.) Thus, if there was a successful invasion by Russia, it could only be by the democratic will of the nation. As a believer in democracy, I will NOT dictate to my countrymen what I believe to be the right choice for the nation. If the majority wish a foreign takeover, then it is their right to make that choice and I would be utterly in the wrong to oppose it.
Would it be helpful for me to not be peaceful? Well, the Russians defeated the German invasion by throwing themselves at tanks and lobbing petrol bombs down the hatches. The death toll on the Russian side alone ran into the tens of millions as a result. You will also notice that Russia (a country riddled with violence at the best of times) also took a steep turn downwards at that time, becoming infinitely more rabid than it had been before. Those tens of millions who died "saved" Russia from what? They stopped a Fascist dictatorship but only at the cost of creating a Communist dictatorship every bit as large and unpleasant as the one they stopped.
This achieved what?
C'mon, you seem to have an answer, so what is it? What did these (unquestionably brave and heroic) Stalingraders die for, in the end, that they could not have created by living? And had the Russian Revolution been one of peace, rather than bloody conflict and nihilism, would Russia not have been the better-able to stop Germany long before it ever got to Stalingrad? If the autocrats and the populace had worked together, rather than in endless cycle of destruction, modern Communism would never have happened.
Even World War II was merely a byproduct of the senseless destruction of World War I and the mindless destruction wrecked by the Treaty of Versailles. If the nations had been less bent on revenge and more bent on preventing future conflict, Hitler would never have happened at all. In more modern times, the Rwandan massacre was the product of the French colonialists creating divisions and antagonism. That massacre has resulted in subsequent revenge massacres. This is unlikely to stop any time soon.
Now look at a different conflict, that in Northern Ireland. The cycle of violence was largely broken by both sides, resulting in peace that would not have been imagined possible in our lifetimes a mere 20 years ago. Sure, there's some groups still stirring up trouble. You can't stop a flywheel instantly. But so long as nobody works to put energy into that flywheel, the energy coming out will die out. The epiphany by both sides that they could actually work together AND achieve their goals has resulted in something that no amount of wars has ever achieved.
Did the US invasions of Grenada or Haiti produce anything comparable to Stormont? What about those of Iraq or Afghanistan? No?
Ok, what about other conflicts? ETA declared a ceasefire. Not sure if it was entirely sincere, but they did it and the Spanish government ignored it. Result, the violence did not end. One side fighting rather than two didn't change a damn thing. What would have happened if the Spanish government had opted instead for a Stormont-like deal and decriminalized the Basquist politicians? I don't know. I don't pretend to know. What I do know is that they didn't and their decision didn't work - and that like decisions throughout history have never worked. Insanity is doing the same thing, expecting different results.
Maybe Spain wasn't capable of cohesive peace that time round, that had the government done something different it wouldn't have altered the outcome that much. I don't have the in
I'm open to different viewpoints - it's a great way to learn - and I have to say that your posting is an excellent one to learn from. Thank you.