This is an extremely odd choice of words. I would have used 'cooperative', wouldn't you? I wonder if their intent was to conjure up another commun- word. We may never know.
Communitarian has a very specific meaning that describes a recently-popularized political philosophy. Both Bill Clinton in the US and Tony Blair in the UK have talked about their political philosophy as inspired by communitarian ideas. As the name implies it proposes that communities are a central political unit.
Replying to my own comment... MacOSRumors is reporting that:
"According to Apple sources, the company is hard at work on an update to both OS X 10.1 and 10.2 (10.0.x will not be supported by this update) to prevent possible damage to SuperDrives when burning to high-speed DVD-R disks, and expects to release it via Software Update around the end of the first week of October."
However MOSR is not the most reliable source so take this with however large a pinch of salt you feel is necessary.
The Pioneer firmware fix won't work on SuperDrives installed in a Mac. As quoted from Macintosh Digital Hub:
"So what's the resolution? For Mac users, that answer is a bit hazy. Pioneer is releasing updater software that tweaks the internal firmware in its drives so that they are able to use the high-speed media. This firmware updater will be available for download from Pioneer's Web site; you'll also be able to order it on a CD-ROM.
But this updater will not work with SuperDrives, since they contain Apple's firmware. According to Pioneer senior vice president Andy Parsons, "Apple is aware of the issue, and we expect they will have a solution soon." Those of us with SuperDrives will have to wait or Apple to deliver a firmware update"
The funny thing is, most people don't know any better and assume that buying a new computer will make the Internet faster.
Do you have any evidence to support this belief? How do you know that "most people" assume this? Have you conducted statistically significant surveys. Have you read about a statistically significant survey?
Its not even as if this belief is actually wrong, as you seem to think. Connection speed is only one component of the overall "speed" of the Internet. Page render time is also an important component and this will be affected by CPU speed. There are enough complex content and layout types out there (flash, audio, video, CSS, dynaic HTML, client-side Java...) that your CPU really will make a difference to how quickly you can surf the 'net.
Pi and Gattaca are good films, but the article specifically mentioned this should be a film about science, not a science fiction film. The two are not synonymous (c.f. anything with Ahnuld in it).
Also I rather suspect that Mr. DeNiro was looking for an original script, not a remake of an existing film.
Which is why deaf people don't snowboard or ski, right? You can't navigate by sound while riding. The tunes don't really matter.
The point is not just that you can't hear what is going on around you, but that you are concentrating on something else instead of on skiing/snowboarding. Listening to music requires a certain amount of concentration which isn't available for navigation - there is a finite amount of stuff you can attend to at one time.
The good news is that the brain is relatively good at not concentrating on music when other stimuli grab its attention. Music processing is a low priority task. This is different from, for example, taking part in a conversation, which the brain will treat as a less interuptable activity. This is why talking on a cell phone while driving is considerably more dangerous than listening to music while driving - your brain will continue to concentrate on the conversation even when something else (a red light, a driver cutting into your lane, a child crossing the street) should grab your immediate attention.
So, I tend to disagree that music is a huge danger when skiing, although it does impose some burden on the listener.
has just released a very, very nice snowboarding jacket called the Analog Clone
How can you tell its "very, very nice"? An important ingredient in any piece of clothing is what it looks like. The photos on Burton's website are so badly exposed that I can't see the jacket at all.
I would be much more likely to shell our a grand for a jacket if I knew what it looked like.
Though you may not be downloading anything, many might be downloading from you. (This is, of course, assuming you have your client configured to share.) KaZaA, by default, puts its installable executable in your shared directory making it available for anyone to grab.
You're missing the point - go back and read the article linked in the story. The point is that excluding uploads and downloads these P2P networks are producing a lot of nework traffic. The example quoted is up to 1.6GB a day just for running the client. Again, this is excluding the bandwidth required for uploads and downloads to/from your machine. This is just the overheads of communication, searches and ad pushes.
Not that there aren't inefficiencies, though.
The point being the inefficiencies are so large that just having a few hundred P2P machines running on your network can amount to a significant bandwidth drain, even before they share a single file.
Is the article accurate? The settlement was just to "hide" the bundled software? There was no part indicating that the services offered to IE, Outlook, Media Player, etc by the OS have to be available to competitors, so that they can integrate and interoperate as seamlessly? No wonder 9 states dissented.
Many of the services you mention (perhaps all?) are available for third party developers. As an example, I am writing this using Crazy Browser a web browser that uses the IE engine but has a different UI (blocks pop-ups, browser panes etc.). I know there are APIs (e.g. this one) to the Media Player that allows third parties to integrate it into their applications. I'm not sure about Outlook.
So, I suppose that you're going to ignore the numerous studies that show that "people of faith" have a higher survival rate for cancer and other long term illnesses? Or, at the very least, suffer less depression? (Yes, unsurprisingly, different studies have had different results).
These studies do indeed exist and are indeed true. As you go on to say, its not terribly surprising that "people of faith" have a psychology that can help them in some situations. Sometimes its good to be fatalistic.
However that's not what Larry was talking about. He quite explicitly is talking about God. Singular and in his case Christian. If "good things" truly did happen to those who were looking for Larry's God, then they by definition wouldn't happen to people how believed in other, contradictory gods. This would be measurable. The fact that this effect happens to all "people of faith" tells us that it is faith, not what you have faith in that is the critical factor.
Wiccans, Muslims, Satanists, Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Scientologists. They all have this "faith factor". From this we can either conclude that all these religions are equally true and all approach the same God. Or we can conclude that it is not as Larry (and many others) claim the nearness to God that is the cause, but blind faith in anything at all.
So faith is useful in some circumstances. You can equally believe in a stick of wood or Joe Pescapo (with apologies to George Carlin) as in a God and it works just as well. And in many cases having faith is a huge impediment to you.
On balance I'd rather not believe in a lie on the off-chance it will help me out a little in some circumstances at a known and definate cost.
HP was legendary for how well it treated its staff, not how shittily. Perhaps you should poke around their history some more.
I was talking more about the early days when they did have a culture of long work hours. Also, where did I claim they treated people badly? Just because a company demands a lot of work and dedication from its employees does not mean they are treated badly. Sometimes it just means that to be the best you have to work hard.
You've not been reading the business section recently, I take it.
You mean Enron, WorldCom et al.? These aren't anything to do with executives ignorning the deadlines that their employees tell them about. These are totally different problems. Besides they represent only a small fraction of the companies in the US.
Of course there are bad employers. It sounds like you're working for one. Get out now while you can. Most companies are not run the way you describe.
Executives don't like reality. They are all about wish fulfillment. When your project(s) are not completed by their deadlines, you will be fired. You will be the one who has to pay, because you were the one repeatedly pointing out that you needed more resources, given the requirements and deadlines. You contradicted your executive's worldview
Right, because executives are never rewarded based on their company's performance. A CEO never cares about success, they in fact want their company to fail. Managers are so stupid they deliberately ignore what their employees tell them and enjoy seeing projects fail.
Look, if that's how it is where you work quit now because that's one messed up company. Most of the world is not like that.
Ask yourself, how many dotcom tales of people agreeing to work without pay for a while; work long hours; all the rest of it, you've heard. Now, how many of those companies actually survived by doing that? Next to none?
Of the dotcoms, practically none, but then none of the dotcoms that didn't work that waysurvived either. Conversely, look at the older Silicon Valley companies that did make it. How many of those were born from huge efforts by their staff? Apple. Cisco. Palm. Intel. HP. Sun. The list goes on; all companies that were and/or still are legendary for the long hours they expected of their employees.
This doesn't prove that long hours are a good thing, but there are at least counter-examples to the claim that this approach never works out.
My experience, after more than 6 years working in Silicon Valley, is that sustained periods of long hours can be damaging. But short bursts to hit a specific project goal can be a good thing. Programming - when done well - requires huge concentration. You have to focus hard on the code. Once you're in the swing of it, you don't want to be interupted. That's why the culture of long and eccentric hours has grown up - its the way good engineers usually work.
As a rule I figure you can sustain two or maybe three major bursts of 100 hours a week. Each burst shouldn't last more than 5 weeks. I once did a ten week burst and it nearly killed me. Once you go over 5 weeks, you'll get into serious counter-productivity.
Its also important to have a good reason to do so. If your company doesn't have the cash or revenue to hire more people and needs you to put in the hours to get a revolutionary new product out, that's one thing. If its poor planning or management that causes the crisis, it will be much harder to motivate people to put in long hours.
A good example of this is cancer. Cancer was uncommon in the 19th. century. By the end of the 20th. century it was the primary killer in Western countries.
Heart disease is the number one killer in the world, not cancer.
Sorry, I should have said a primary killer, not the primary killer.
There is also another reason people dind't die of cancer as often back then. During the 1800's there weren't as many carcenogenic (sp?) variables to cause people to develop cancer. There were no mass microwaves in the air, no radio, tv, callular phone, ect floating around in the air to give us cancer.
Nice theory except cancer rates in the US peaked about 20 years ago, and have been falling slowly but steadily ever since, at excatly the time when these kind of low-level radition sources have massively increased. The main reason for this is the drop in lung cancer rates due to anti-smoking efforts.
There is little or no evidence that electromagnetic radition of the kind you mention is a major source of cancer. It probably causes some, but not much.
If you think about it, this makes sense. After all more than 99% of the radiation you are exposed to comes not from artificial sources like TV but from the Sun...
Sigh. You have confused freedom with license. They are NOT the same.
Actually in this specific context I think they are the same. The sort of limitations being discussed, such as the use of military courts to try certain suspects in secret, are very much extensions to the power of license that the state holds. This is the sort of "freedom" we are talking about giving up. You are still free to undertake terrorist acts, but the government will act against you in a different way.
Or to use another example, the TIPS scheme where people are encouraged to spy on their neighbors and co-workers. This is an increase in government license.
I don't - as it happens - agree with either of these measures. But I do think that some such measures might be necessary to combat terrorism. I think there should be strictly applied expiration dates on any such measures. And I do think the effect is to limit some of the freedoms I can actually practice. If you want to describe that as a free system with strong license, then I think we are arguing semantics.
Stupid metaphors are an even weaker form of argument. Since when is murdering people considered a freedom?
It wasn't a metaphor. I mean this literally. There are a lot of things we are not free to do. Murdering people is one of them. There have been plenty of times in history when this was acceptable. I am not advocating that we should be free to murder - quite the opposite, I am very glad we aren't. We, as a society, have decided that we will infringe on an individual's freedoms in this matter for the greater general good.
There are also other restrictions that we accept. There are in fact limits on free speech (the infamous "yelling fire in a crowded theater" argument) it is not absolute. This is as it should be. Again the argument shouldn't (IMHO) be about whether to allow limitations on freedom, but on what limitations to permit, for how long and to what end.
As soon as a cure or effective treatment for one disease is created, somehow a bigger badder uglier disease pops up somewhere.
A good example of this is cancer. Cancer was uncommon in the 19th. century. By the end of the 20th. century it was the primary killer in Western countries.
Was there a sudden upsurge in cancer? Did more virulent "strains" suddenly appear? No. It simpler. Back in the 1800's few people died of cancer because most of the population died of other diseases. Cancer is (with some exceptions) a disease of old age. If you die of tuberculosis in your early twenties as millions did back then, you won't survive to die of the cancer that would have killed you when you hit 60.
Many of these "new" diseases are more prominent now because we have eliminated so many other diseases that used to cull the herd of mankind.
Of course there are exceptions. HIV/AIDS may be one - it appears to have evolved into a mass-transmitable and often fatal disease in recent memory.
Re:Franklin said:
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Trade freedom for security, and you'll get neither. If only people would understand.
Just because Franklin said it, doesn't make it true. Appeal to authority is a very weak form of argument.
Giving up some freedom can in fact give you some security, and we all do it all the time. I am not allowed to go around shooting people - if I do the cops come and arrest me. This is a compromise of my absolute freedom, but one that I (and the vast majority of other people) are very happy to make.
The question is not should we give up freedom for security, but how much and for how long, and what are we getting in return. These are the right questions to be asking. We should be very careful not to compromise any more freedom than is necessary and we should make sure that we get it all back once the threat has subsided. Freedom is a precious and important thing that we should not give up lightly.
Any system that is taken to its absolute conclusion is dangerous. Have we learnt nothing of the danger when any view is taken to its extreme? I would have thought the example of Islamic fundamentalism was only too painfully clear.
If your code requires massive documentation within the code to make it understandable, then your code likely needs to be rewritten.
I think you're missing the point. All code can be described at several different levels. At the highest level, you might describe a program as (for example) "an online banking application", which is a complete description of the app. However there are obviously a lot of details below this level of description:-)
Different people need to understand a program at different levels of description. The CEO may only need to know the highest level description. At the other end of the spectrum, someone working on the optimal algorithm for maintining user session should be isolated from the implementation details of other parts of the program. The architect should be concentrating on the interconnection of modules within the code, not the implementation itself.
The code itself is good at describing some levels of description and very poor at describing others. The example you give doesn't need any documentation to understand what those two lines do, but it will need documentation to understand their relevance to the higher levels of the system.
Programmers tend to see the details and often miss the larger context. This can lead to unstated and often false assumptions about what role the code fulfills and how it interacts with the rest of the system These are the hardest bugs to find and fix.
There are many ways to solve this "levels of description" problem. Inline documentation is one very valuable tool. Of course it shouldn't be:
// Adds two numbers together a = b + c;
It should describe the functional role of the code in relation to the higher-level components of the system.
As you point out, abstraction and encapsulation are good mechanisms for constructing higher-level descriptions of functionality. Why stop there? Why not try to build up beyond these levels as well? Perhaps we will evolve to high-level languages that can express these high-level designs. Until then inline docuemntation and literate programming are excellent tools to help you achieve these goals.
Roedy Green has written an excellent, humorous online article on writing unmaintainable code. This relates directly to Literate Programming, especially Roedy's points about maintaining existing code. He writes (here): "[the maintainence programmer] views your code through a toilet paper tube. He can only see a tiny piece of your program at a time. You want to make sure he can never get at the big picture from doing that. You want to make it as hard as possible for him to find the code he is looking for. But even more important, you want to make it as awkward as possible for him to safely ignore anything. "
Literate programming in general, and Leo in particular, would be the ultimate cure for this. It allows you to easily navigate between multiple levels of description of a program. This is critically important if you are coming fresh to an existing piece of code. You need to constantly cross-reference the high-level design and low-level implementations (and the various levels of description between these extremes).
CRTs do contain lead to block the low-level radiation that they produce. See the Electronic Industries Alliance's information page on lead use in CRTs [eiae.org], along with a handy PDF [eiae.org]. Examples range from 1.7 lbs in a 14" CRT to 2.3 in a 21" one. Add that to whatever amounts may be present in other system peripherals, and 3 lbs probably isn't too far a stretch. Remember, most people in this world consider a "computer" to be not only that box with the retractable coffee-cup holder, but the entire system (including monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.).
Thank you. I was indeed assuming that they meant "computer" not "computer, monitor and keyboard". That makes more sense.
Okay, moving story. Poor third world people. Clearly evil Western powers at work.
But... can we trust the source. The quoted Basel Action Network says that a pile of 500 computers contains 717Kg of lead. That just doesn't sound plausible. Does every computer really have 3.15 pounds of lead in it? Where? Not in the case (all plastic and steel usually). Lead is used in PCB manufacturing, but has anyone heard of a 3lb. PCB?Lead is not a major component of ICs. Perhaps if it was an old portable computer is might have Lead-Acid batteries, but I very much doubt there's more than 3 pounds of the stuff in any portable.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I am sceptical of this figure. If their basic stats are wrong, how much can we trust the rest of the reporting? It seems emotive and biased. I'm sure there is a story here and a legitimate concern, but I'd like to see the real facts.
Slashdot Mirror
communitarian spirit"?
This is an extremely odd choice of words. I would have used 'cooperative', wouldn't you? I wonder if their intent was to conjure up another commun- word. We may never know.
Communitarian has a very specific meaning that describes a recently-popularized political philosophy. Both Bill Clinton in the US and Tony Blair in the UK have talked about their political philosophy as inspired by communitarian ideas. As the name implies it proposes that communities are a central political unit.
You can find out more at places like: RadicalMiddle
I believe that calling the Open Source movement communitarian has some useful connotations.
Replying to my own comment... MacOSRumors is reporting that:
"According to Apple sources, the company is hard at work on an update to both OS X 10.1 and 10.2 (10.0.x will not be supported by this update) to prevent possible damage to SuperDrives when burning to high-speed DVD-R disks, and expects to release it via Software Update around the end of the first week of October."
However MOSR is not the most reliable source so take this with however large a pinch of salt you feel is necessary.
The Pioneer firmware fix won't work on SuperDrives installed in a Mac. As quoted from Macintosh Digital Hub:
"So what's the resolution? For Mac users, that answer is a bit hazy. Pioneer is releasing updater software that tweaks the internal firmware in its drives so that they are able to use the high-speed media. This firmware updater will be available for download from Pioneer's Web site; you'll also be able to order it on a CD-ROM.
But this updater will not work with SuperDrives, since they contain Apple's firmware. According to Pioneer senior vice president Andy Parsons, "Apple is aware of the issue, and we expect they will have a solution soon." Those of us with SuperDrives will have to wait or Apple to deliver a firmware update"
The funny thing is, most people don't know any better and assume that buying a new computer will make the Internet faster.
Do you have any evidence to support this belief? How do you know that "most people" assume this? Have you conducted statistically significant surveys. Have you read about a statistically significant survey?
Its not even as if this belief is actually wrong, as you seem to think. Connection speed is only one component of the overall "speed" of the Internet. Page render time is also an important component and this will be affected by CPU speed. There are enough complex content and layout types out there (flash, audio, video, CSS, dynaic HTML, client-side Java...) that your CPU really will make a difference to how quickly you can surf the 'net.
Pi and Gattaca are good films, but the article specifically mentioned this should be a film about science, not a science fiction film. The two are not synonymous (c.f. anything with Ahnuld in it).
Also I rather suspect that Mr. DeNiro was looking for an original script, not a remake of an existing film.
Which is why deaf people don't snowboard or ski, right?
You can't navigate by sound while riding. The tunes don't really matter.
The point is not just that you can't hear what is going on around you, but that you are concentrating on something else instead of on skiing/snowboarding. Listening to music requires a certain amount of concentration which isn't available for navigation - there is a finite amount of stuff you can attend to at one time.
The good news is that the brain is relatively good at not concentrating on music when other stimuli grab its attention. Music processing is a low priority task. This is different from, for example, taking part in a conversation, which the brain will treat as a less interuptable activity. This is why talking on a cell phone while driving is considerably more dangerous than listening to music while driving - your brain will continue to concentrate on the conversation even when something else (a red light, a driver cutting into your lane, a child crossing the street) should grab your immediate attention.
So, I tend to disagree that music is a huge danger when skiing, although it does impose some burden on the listener.
has just released a very, very nice snowboarding jacket called the Analog Clone
How can you tell its "very, very nice"? An important ingredient in any piece of clothing is what it looks like. The photos on Burton's website are so badly exposed that I can't see the jacket at all.
I would be much more likely to shell our a grand for a jacket if I knew what it looked like.
Though you may not be downloading anything, many might be downloading from you. (This is, of course, assuming you have your client configured to share.) KaZaA, by default, puts its installable executable in your shared directory making it available for anyone to grab.
You're missing the point - go back and read the article linked in the story. The point is that excluding uploads and downloads these P2P networks are producing a lot of nework traffic. The example quoted is up to 1.6GB a day just for running the client. Again, this is excluding the bandwidth required for uploads and downloads to/from your machine. This is just the overheads of communication, searches and ad pushes.
Not that there aren't inefficiencies, though.
The point being the inefficiencies are so large that just having a few hundred P2P machines running on your network can amount to a significant bandwidth drain, even before they share a single file.
Is the article accurate? The settlement was just to "hide" the bundled software? There was no part indicating that the services offered to IE, Outlook, Media Player, etc by the OS have to be available to competitors, so that they can integrate and interoperate as seamlessly? No wonder 9 states dissented.
Many of the services you mention (perhaps all?) are available for third party developers. As an example, I am writing this using Crazy Browser a web browser that uses the IE engine but has a different UI (blocks pop-ups, browser panes etc.). I know there are APIs (e.g. this one) to the Media Player that allows third parties to integrate it into their applications. I'm not sure about Outlook.
So, I suppose that you're going to ignore the numerous studies that show that "people of faith" have a higher survival rate for cancer and other long term illnesses? Or, at the very least, suffer less depression? (Yes, unsurprisingly, different studies have had different results).
These studies do indeed exist and are indeed true. As you go on to say, its not terribly surprising that "people of faith" have a psychology that can help them in some situations. Sometimes its good to be fatalistic.
However that's not what Larry was talking about. He quite explicitly is talking about God. Singular and in his case Christian. If "good things" truly did happen to those who were looking for Larry's God, then they by definition wouldn't happen to people how believed in other, contradictory gods. This would be measurable. The fact that this effect happens to all "people of faith" tells us that it is faith, not what you have faith in that is the critical factor.
Wiccans, Muslims, Satanists, Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Scientologists. They all have this "faith factor". From this we can either conclude that all these religions are equally true and all approach the same God. Or we can conclude that it is not as Larry (and many others) claim the nearness to God that is the cause, but blind faith in anything at all.
So faith is useful in some circumstances. You can equally believe in a stick of wood or Joe Pescapo (with apologies to George Carlin) as in a God and it works just as well. And in many cases having faith is a huge impediment to you.
On balance I'd rather not believe in a lie on the off-chance it will help me out a little in some circumstances at a known and definate cost.
HP was legendary for how well it treated its staff, not how shittily. Perhaps you should poke around their history some more.
I was talking more about the early days when they did have a culture of long work hours. Also, where did I claim they treated people badly? Just because a company demands a lot of work and dedication from its employees does not mean they are treated badly. Sometimes it just means that to be the best you have to work hard.
You've not been reading the business section recently, I take it.
You mean Enron, WorldCom et al.? These aren't anything to do with executives ignorning the deadlines that their employees tell them about. These are totally different problems. Besides they represent only a small fraction of the companies in the US.
Of course there are bad employers. It sounds like you're working for one. Get out now while you can. Most companies are not run the way you describe.
Executives don't like reality. They are all about wish fulfillment. When your project(s) are not completed by their deadlines, you will be fired. You will be the one who has to pay, because you were the one repeatedly pointing out that you needed more resources, given the requirements and deadlines. You contradicted your executive's worldview
Right, because executives are never rewarded based on their company's performance. A CEO never cares about success, they in fact want their company to fail. Managers are so stupid they deliberately ignore what their employees tell them and enjoy seeing projects fail.
Look, if that's how it is where you work quit now because that's one messed up company. Most of the world is not like that.
Ask yourself, how many dotcom tales of people agreeing to work without pay for a while; work long hours; all the rest of it, you've heard. Now, how many of those companies actually survived by doing that? Next to none?
Of the dotcoms, practically none, but then none of the dotcoms that didn't work that waysurvived either. Conversely, look at the older Silicon Valley companies that did make it. How many of those were born from huge efforts by their staff? Apple. Cisco. Palm. Intel. HP. Sun. The list goes on; all companies that were and/or still are legendary for the long hours they expected of their employees.
This doesn't prove that long hours are a good thing, but there are at least counter-examples to the claim that this approach never works out.
My experience, after more than 6 years working in Silicon Valley, is that sustained periods of long hours can be damaging. But short bursts to hit a specific project goal can be a good thing. Programming - when done well - requires huge concentration. You have to focus hard on the code. Once you're in the swing of it, you don't want to be interupted. That's why the culture of long and eccentric hours has grown up - its the way good engineers usually work.
As a rule I figure you can sustain two or maybe three major bursts of 100 hours a week. Each burst shouldn't last more than 5 weeks. I once did a ten week burst and it nearly killed me. Once you go over 5 weeks, you'll get into serious counter-productivity.
Its also important to have a good reason to do so. If your company doesn't have the cash or revenue to hire more people and needs you to put in the hours to get a revolutionary new product out, that's one thing. If its poor planning or management that causes the crisis, it will be much harder to motivate people to put in long hours.
A good example of this is cancer. Cancer was uncommon in the 19th. century. By the end of the 20th. century it was the primary killer in Western countries.
Heart disease is the number one killer in the world, not cancer.
Sorry, I should have said a primary killer, not the primary killer.
There is also another reason people dind't die of cancer as often back then. During the 1800's there weren't as many carcenogenic (sp?) variables to cause people to develop cancer. There were no mass microwaves in the air, no radio, tv, callular phone, ect floating around in the air to give us cancer.
Nice theory except cancer rates in the US peaked about 20 years ago, and have been falling slowly but steadily ever since, at excatly the time when these kind of low-level radition sources have massively increased. The main reason for this is the drop in lung cancer rates due to anti-smoking efforts.
There is little or no evidence that electromagnetic radition of the kind you mention is a major source of cancer. It probably causes some, but not much.
If you think about it, this makes sense. After all more than 99% of the radiation you are exposed to comes not from artificial sources like TV but from the Sun...
Sigh. You have confused freedom with license. They are NOT the same.
Actually in this specific context I think they are the same. The sort of limitations being discussed, such as the use of military courts to try certain suspects in secret, are very much extensions to the power of license that the state holds. This is the sort of "freedom" we are talking about giving up. You are still free to undertake terrorist acts, but the government will act against you in a different way.
Or to use another example, the TIPS scheme where people are encouraged to spy on their neighbors and co-workers. This is an increase in government license.
I don't - as it happens - agree with either of these measures. But I do think that some such measures might be necessary to combat terrorism. I think there should be strictly applied expiration dates on any such measures. And I do think the effect is to limit some of the freedoms I can actually practice. If you want to describe that as a free system with strong license, then I think we are arguing semantics.
Stupid metaphors are an even weaker form of argument. Since when is murdering people considered a freedom?
It wasn't a metaphor. I mean this literally. There are a lot of things we are not free to do. Murdering people is one of them. There have been plenty of times in history when this was acceptable. I am not advocating that we should be free to murder - quite the opposite, I am very glad we aren't. We, as a society, have decided that we will infringe on an individual's freedoms in this matter for the greater general good.
There are also other restrictions that we accept. There are in fact limits on free speech (the infamous "yelling fire in a crowded theater" argument) it is not absolute. This is as it should be. Again the argument shouldn't (IMHO) be about whether to allow limitations on freedom, but on what limitations to permit, for how long and to what end.
As soon as a cure or effective treatment for one disease is created, somehow a bigger badder uglier disease pops up somewhere.
A good example of this is cancer. Cancer was uncommon in the 19th. century. By the end of the 20th. century it was the primary killer in Western countries.
Was there a sudden upsurge in cancer? Did more virulent "strains" suddenly appear? No. It simpler. Back in the 1800's few people died of cancer because most of the population died of other diseases. Cancer is (with some exceptions) a disease of old age. If you die of tuberculosis in your early twenties as millions did back then, you won't survive to die of the cancer that would have killed you when you hit 60.
Many of these "new" diseases are more prominent now because we have eliminated so many other diseases that used to cull the herd of mankind.
Of course there are exceptions. HIV/AIDS may be one - it appears to have evolved into a mass-transmitable and often fatal disease in recent memory.
Trade freedom for security, and you'll get neither. If only people would understand.
Just because Franklin said it, doesn't make it true. Appeal to authority is a very weak form of argument.
Giving up some freedom can in fact give you some security, and we all do it all the time. I am not allowed to go around shooting people - if I do the cops come and arrest me. This is a compromise of my absolute freedom, but one that I (and the vast majority of other people) are very happy to make.
The question is not should we give up freedom for security, but how much and for how long, and what are we getting in return. These are the right questions to be asking. We should be very careful not to compromise any more freedom than is necessary and we should make sure that we get it all back once the threat has subsided. Freedom is a precious and important thing that we should not give up lightly.
Any system that is taken to its absolute conclusion is dangerous. Have we learnt nothing of the danger when any view is taken to its extreme? I would have thought the example of Islamic fundamentalism was only too painfully clear.
If your code requires massive documentation within the code to make it understandable, then your code likely needs to be rewritten.
:-)
// Adds two numbers together
I think you're missing the point. All code can be described at several different levels. At the highest level, you might describe a program as (for example) "an online banking application", which is a complete description of the app. However there are obviously a lot of details below this level of description
Different people need to understand a program at different levels of description. The CEO may only need to know the highest level description. At the other end of the spectrum, someone working on the optimal algorithm for maintining user session should be isolated from the implementation details of other parts of the program. The architect should be concentrating on the interconnection of modules within the code, not the implementation itself.
The code itself is good at describing some levels of description and very poor at describing others. The example you give doesn't need any documentation to understand what those two lines do, but it will need documentation to understand their relevance to the higher levels of the system.
Programmers tend to see the details and often miss the larger context. This can lead to unstated and often false assumptions about what role the code fulfills and how it interacts with the rest of the system These are the hardest bugs to find and fix.
There are many ways to solve this "levels of description" problem. Inline documentation is one very valuable tool. Of course it shouldn't be:
a = b + c;
It should describe the functional role of the code in relation to the higher-level components of the system.
As you point out, abstraction and encapsulation are good mechanisms for constructing higher-level descriptions of functionality. Why stop there? Why not try to build up beyond these levels as well? Perhaps we will evolve to high-level languages that can express these high-level designs. Until then inline docuemntation and literate programming are excellent tools to help you achieve these goals.
Roedy Green has written an excellent, humorous online article on writing unmaintainable code. This relates directly to Literate Programming, especially Roedy's points about maintaining existing code. He writes (here): "[the maintainence programmer] views your code through a toilet paper tube. He can only see a tiny piece of your program at a time. You want to make sure he can never get at the big picture from doing that. You want to make it as hard as possible for him to find the code he is looking for. But even more important, you want to make it as awkward as possible for him to safely ignore anything. "
Literate programming in general, and Leo in particular, would be the ultimate cure for this. It allows you to easily navigate between multiple levels of description of a program. This is critically important if you are coming fresh to an existing piece of code. You need to constantly cross-reference the high-level design and low-level implementations (and the various levels of description between these extremes).
CRTs do contain lead to block the low-level radiation that they produce. See the Electronic Industries Alliance's information page on lead use in CRTs [eiae.org], along with a handy PDF [eiae.org]. Examples range from 1.7 lbs in a 14" CRT to 2.3 in a 21" one. Add that to whatever amounts may be present in other system peripherals, and 3 lbs probably isn't too far a stretch. Remember, most people in this world consider a "computer" to be not only that box with the retractable coffee-cup holder, but the entire system (including monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.).
Thank you. I was indeed assuming that they meant "computer" not "computer, monitor and keyboard". That makes more sense.
Okay, moving story. Poor third world people. Clearly evil Western powers at work.
But... can we trust the source. The quoted Basel Action Network says that a pile of 500 computers contains 717Kg of lead. That just doesn't sound plausible. Does every computer really have 3.15 pounds of lead in it? Where? Not in the case (all plastic and steel usually). Lead is used in PCB manufacturing, but has anyone heard of a 3lb. PCB?Lead is not a major component of ICs. Perhaps if it was an old portable computer is might have Lead-Acid batteries, but I very much doubt there's more than 3 pounds of the stuff in any portable.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I am sceptical of this figure. If their basic stats are wrong, how much can we trust the rest of the reporting? It seems emotive and biased. I'm sure there is a story here and a legitimate concern, but I'd like to see the real facts.