Can someone tell me where I can sign-up for the upcoming Civil War?
That was it, last night. Every election is a bloodless civil war.
In all seriousness, continued attempts to start a bloddy one one are going to be met with overwhelming hostility. The solution to losing an election is not to start a war, and anybody who truly acts like it is shouldn't be moving to Canada, they should be moving to central Africa or something where that sort of barbaric behavior really is the expected result.
I'm not a "love it or leave it" person; I'm a "love it, leave it, work within the system to change it, or shut the hell up" person. But if you really think this is worth killing people because an election didn't go your way, then I offer you two other choices: Shut the hell up about "civil war" and grow up, or yes, get the hell out.
Good lord. You can demonize conservatives as much as you want, but when Clinton won, nobody talked about civil war.
Grow up, kiddies. You lose sometimes. Now is a chance to rebuild and refocus. Start a war and I'll be first in line to stop you with all necessary force.
That there are other factors in climate change does not mean we should not change those which we have control over.
It can, if our changes are expensive (which they are, and "expensive" automatically translates into human lives), and we can't have a significant effect anyhow, which is an open question.
Reflexive knee-jerking is not the right solution, no matter what emotional terms people like you wrap it in.
Companies shouldn't assume that everyone who's using dodgy/generated keys didn't legitimately purchase their software...
They don't have to assume. Given the legitimacy of EULAs, by cracking the software, you are in violation of the license. Therefore, you are obligated to destroy your copy. (No, they aren't obligated to return your money. Ha ha.) Therefore, if you continue to use it, you are doing so illegally without license, so they can pursue everybody using fake keys or patches without regard to whether the customer bought it.
It may have an impact on the resulting (theoretical) lawsuit, though. A non-paid-for copy of XP Home can plausibly be said to carry $100 in damages if you get charged with copyright infringement, but it is going to be hard to convince a judge of any damage for a paid-for copy. They might try to hit you with a contract-breach suit, but there's a reason no breach-of-EULA has ever actually gone to court, at least at the consumer level.
Practically speaking, there isn't much they can do legally. But given the legitimacy of EULAs, they can still safely act as though all cracked copies are illegitimate.
(Now, a lesson in logic for the Slashdotters who may not have gotten there yet: I use the term "given" to mean "If we assume X to be true". You see it a lot in real math classes. It does not make any claims about the actual truth of X. I personally do not accept EULAs in their current form. But Microsoft clearly does, and if you want to look from their point of view, as I did in this post, that's one of the things you have to take as a "given".)
(I really ought to put this somewhere permanent, I keep re-writing it.)
Civilization, the game, should be required parts of any school cirriculum, and should I ever have kids and homeschool them, they will play something like it.
Civilization is an extremely unusual game, even in its supposed genre of turn-based strategy, because it is not a wargame, it is a resource allocation game. You have a very, very limited amount of resources, how do you spend them? The answer to that is quite complicated because of the realistic number of ways you can spend them.
More conventional turn-based wargames typically have at most a handful of ways to spend resources (fairly generic infrastructure or troops), and are much more generous with the number of troops you can pump out, because that is what the game is about. You rarely end up with a choice between building a defensive unit, or finishing the Granary.
This is obviously a continuum and I can't say I've played all turn-based strategy games. But the Sid Meier Civ games (including Alpha Centauri, my favorite, and not including Call To Power, which as the name indicates is a military game from what I've heard) are far over on the "limited resources" side. The only other thing that comes close is SimCity.
Civ can teach several valuable lessons that many people never learn, and that probably includes many people reading this message:
No matter how rich you are, you can't do everything. Your expectations rise with your power.
Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure. (In a two-player Civ game, a "rush" is only viable if you do it right away; otherwise the other player may out-infrastructure you. This is particularly true in Alpha Centauri, where you can make a very tightly targeted defensive unit, which results in them being quite cheap.) What seperates a First World civilization from a Third World one is the infrastructure. (Also a culture that makes sure to maintain and expand it, and not destroy it for short-term gain, but that doesn't come up much in Civ.)
Military conflict isn't the answer to everything, but sometimes it is the only answer, especially when the troops are knocking on your door.
Related to that, there is a big difference between being prepared and not being prepared. One of the biggest mistakes I personally make almost every time I play is to overallocate to infrastructure, and neglect my military, until someone comes a-knocking, at which point it is often too late.
In this case, I would like to point out that I'm not necessarily emphasizing the "military" aspect; consider "invasion" as a stand-in for many other problems as well. A hurricane isn't all that different from an enemy attack in effects. The "preparedness" is important; if you have to interrupt yourself to deal with an emergency because you weren't ready it can be immensely disruptive.
Of course, most people aren't going to face the problems a Civ player faces literally in real life, but the lessons are still sound and the evidence suggests a lot of people still don't learn them. How many people run around thinking the US is infinitely powerful, and therefore think (we can provide infinite free healthcare for the world)/(we can engage in any military endeavor infinitely safely)/(the US could come over and fix my country but they are just to lazy and greedy to do so)/(nothing could ruin this country so who cares about fixing huge money sink X)? As you can see, the attitude is not a characteristic of one political side or another, there are weak thinkers on all sides who think and act on this premise.
I don't know how to teach these vital things. But video gaming, a.k.a. "simulating", in a controlled and otherwise-harmless enviroment, is the best guess I've got. Better to learn these things from Civ then the first time you get a credit card... statistics say a lot of people learn this lesson then, too.
Conventional teaching just won't work with this. You can say this as much as you want, but the vast majority of people learn from experience. At least give people a good opportunity to learn it safely.
Actually, a careful reading of my post shows that being able to do it in PHP is not logically necessary to my point:-) But it is good that PHP can do that, although passing the function by name is another smell.... hmm, let me see... oh, poor scoping ability, which limits the ability (no relevant hits on PHP closure) to use closures (link to a Perl FAQ because it's the best resource I found in 30 seconds; Python, Javascript, and a wide variety of other languages use them). Fortunately, that's not so killer now that PHP has at least some OO support. (You can usually use support for closures or classes to hack enough support for the other to get by.)
As for "bad variable names", note that in Perl, $a and $b in the sort function are actually mandated by the language... well, sort of, kind of, close enough; "man perlfunc" and look for "sort" for the details. Everything else is a free choice, and short examples call for short names. I guarantee you I haven't written "array" as a variable in many, many years, unless that was absolutely the best name. (And for things like sorting functions, it sometimes is.)
Indentation is via "ecode":
an ecode block
four spaces of indentation
eight spaces of indentation no more
although it still apparently is a bit kooky, as you can see.
If coding a customize sort is more difficult in PHP than in an other language, then that's bad. I can't really see how that would be though - implementing a custom sort algorithm doesn't depend hugely on the features of a language - its all basic loops and conditions.
That is almost certainly not what the OP meant. Staying language generic, suppose you have an array of two-element arrays:
[[1, 3], [2, 2], [3, 1]]
and you want to sort this array by the second element. In Perl, that's
use Data::Dumper; my @array = ([1, 3], [2, 2], [3, 1]); my @sorted = sort { $a->[1] <=> $b->[1] } @array; print Dumper(@sorted);
and viola, an array sorted with a custom compare function. In Python,
And I can do this in Javascript, C ("man qsort"), C++'s STL (in the verbose way the C++ does things, but still), and at a bare minimum pretty much any language where functions are first-class objects, which with the possible exception of C/C++ I now consider an absolute requirement for any language I will use.
A language that makes this hard isn't worth using; it's a "smell". Your not knowing this, no particular offense intended, rather re-inforces the original poster's point: The only people singing the praises of PHP are those who aren't terribly experienced with other languages, and it tends to show pretty clearly. (No, ASP.NET is not sufficiently different. Same domain, same basic approach, slight difference in evolution.) As penance, I order you to spend a month with OCaml, for your own good.
If you expect that, how do you reconcile it with the rapid changes in temperature due to sunlight variations from Earth's axial tilt? The oceans may take years to adjust fully but we'd feel the effects much more quickly on land.
Those are surface adjustments only. Go into a cave sometime, it holds the same temp all year long. To see the full effects of increased solar input, I would expect the big heat sinks, like the ground and the ocean which you mentioned, to take years to adjust. I would expect that to have some sort of averaging effect.
AC says: Except, if you had read the article, you'd see that it quite explicitly says that this study shows that solar activity does not account for the rise is global average temperature since the start of industrial revolution.
You mean this part?
Whether this effect could have provided a significant contribution to the global warming of the Earth during the last century is
an open question. The researchers around Sami K. Solanki stress the fact that solar activity has remained on a roughly constant (high) level since about 1980 - apart from the variations due to the 11-year cycle - while the global temperature has experienced a strong further increase during that time. On the other hand, the rather similar trends of solar activity and terrestrial temperature during the last centuries (with the notable exception of the last 20 years) indicates that the relation between the Sun and climate remains a challenge for further research.
Emphasis mine. It does not say anything about whether the activity can account for the temperature. In fact, it quite explicitly disclaims any such claims in either direction. It is too soon. You need to brush up on your science skills, and your ability to read what things say instead of reading what you want them to say. If more climate fearmongers demonstrated these skills, I might actually be willing to join them in their panic. But dogma, dogma, dogma, and carefully selected evidence seems to rule the day.
So... we'll schedule the Global Cooling panic for what, 2030-ish? That good for everyone?
Save your Global Cooling books from the 70s, they'll be invaluable in showing how long it has been a problem even as the Global Warming hysteria is quietly, but thoroughly, whitewashed out of existance (just as the Global Cooling panic has been, as of today).
See you then!
(This is about 1/3 humorous, 1/3 a troll, and 1/3 an attempt to get people to be a little less dogmatic and a little more thoughful about climate issues in general. Moderate accordingly, I guess.)
(PS: I would expect the Earth's temp, if it is affected significantly by the Sun, to lag behind it by several years, because it has one hell of a lot of "thermal inertia".)
No shit, Sherlock. It's called a "metaphor". I'm pretty sure most people using the phrase are quite aware that information is an inanimate object, to the extent that it is an object. Grandparent poster understands the phrase better than you do.
Anglo-saxon countries have those terrible hangups about State-issued ID (amongst other things), mostly for neurotic reasons that can be traced back to the magna-carta.
I recommend you investigate the provenance of the phrase "Show me your papers." (Google is not your friend on this one, I tried.)
Neurotic, or another one of those "those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it" sort of things?
And what about the misuse and abuse of social-security numbers? Video-clubs will ask for it to rent a goddammed DVD!!! It is not likely that a video-club will keep it's database as securely as a bank does.
You falsely assume that people against state IDs are otherwise OK with the situation as-is and implicitly accuse them of hypocrisy. Speaking at least for myself, I am not happy with the situation as is, so no hypocrisy here. (Although perhaps not for the exact reason you think; some reasoning here, but also, even though Social Security really isn't a national ID card, it is, as you point out, wildly unethical for entities unwilling to safeguard it to require it. Whether or not it is a "national ID" is irrelevant; the point is that it is a highly privacy sensitive information (a term I define quite carefully), and for corporations in general to require it, but not respect and safeguard it, is very unethical. Going along with the writeup I link, the problem with a National ID card is it concentrates the privacy-sensitivity so much that no real entity can ever be responsible enough by my standards to handle that kind of power over me... therefore, it will simply be taken, against my will and with no compensation to me of significance. (And remember, ethically I set my price; this precludes the obvious comeback to that phrase.) Not a good thing.)
Read them more closely; there is no contradiction. "I'm not a one-issue voter on the war, but on all the other issues I care about there is no difference, so it is the only one I have to consider." There is no contradiction there, just more nuance than you are probably used to seeing on Slashdot.
BTW, Troll? Moderation is officially broken on Slashdot. You can be a lunatic in favor of Kerry, but post a reasoned opinion that with reluctance semi-endorses Bush and you're whacked with "Troll".
In fact, looking at the breakdown of the mods, I'm officially wondering where the "Insightful" went, as it is no longer listed. J'accuse; are people running Slashdot that biased, is the software buggy, or is that broken as designed?
This is largely why I will be voting for Bush. I disagree with the rhetoric on the war, I think it is going as well as can be expected. (Please, this is not a request to "correct" me on this; I've heard it all before. I mean, sure, feel free to whack that reply button, it's your right, but don't expect me to suddenly see the error of my ways or anything. Caveat over.)
But I don't love everything Bush has done. His administration is disturbingly secretive, and while I freely concede the need to keep some things secret, it is clear to me a lot of people are using "security" as an excuse to cover things up. I understand the "You are with us or against us" line in the context of countries (where IMHO it does make sense in context), but they apply it to individuals too often where it doesn't make sense. The deficit bothers me. Some other things bother me.
OK, I understand the war is a big deal, and a lot of people disagree with me. For me it is a big issue, but not big enough to call myself a one-issue voter. Kerry could have definately picked me up on other issues.
But any issue I care about, he has voted against (which sometimes manifests as a "vote for", like the Patriot act). Civil liberties? Copyright issues? Smaller government? Nope, nope, nope. At best, silence.
You take away the war issue, and there isn't much reason for a Slashdot type to vote for either one of them. That leaves me mostly deciding on the war issue and I personally think that it is going as well as can be expected. (For reasoning on that, see a lot of the arguments here, and no, I don't expect you to swallow that uncritically, and no, there likely isn't much you can say to change my mind on the issue at this point.) So, Bush it is. But I'm probably voting libertarian on all the other races that I can.
Why don't you academics stop jerking off over week-early predictions and do something productive like research a cure for cancer,
You know, I think I'm OK with Political Scientists not treating cancer.
(Sloppy Thinking Sign #4: Lumping all members of a group together and discarding relevant distinctions. In this case, the point is that all academics are not created equal. Accurate poll research is one of the more useful things a political scientist can be doing, considering the general uselessness of that branch of "science".)
I'm thinking that medical researchers should also, in general, avoid research into alternative fuels.
It also shares at least one of the developers, Brian Fargo, in a lead role, so it is not completely hopeless that at least some of the spirit will shine through.
If Microsoft had released similar search feature, it would be one more nail in the coffin of poor security, no matter what user advisories they had given.
Microsoft has released a similar feature. You've been able to find files by a string in the contents for a long time now. Not only is it not "a nail in the coffin of poor security", it is completely unnoticed in this entire fracas. Yes, the implementation sucks (and it seems like I've never gotten it to work right in XP), but it is there and I am yet to hear a Google Search privacy problem that is not equally a problem for the built-in OS search.
I guess you can only bitch about what you know about. Most people, even on Slashdot, are ultimately pretty ignorant about what is in the seething miasma that is Windows. (I'm only slightly better than ignorant.) Speaking as a certified privacy wonk, this is all too silly to worry about.
I assumed the original poster was concerned about the pollution in general, not as compared to fuel cells.
Another interesting question is to compare construction pollution costs of a turbine vs. a fuel cell, but it's probably too soon to tell yet, since neither tech is mature.
There are a couple of nagging issues in Python which give me this idea:
Here's how I think people should evaluate Python vs. Ruby:
Run Python, downloading it if necessary.
Run a Python shell (OS-dependent).
Type "import this", and read it.
If everything speaks to you, as it does me, than try Python first. Otherwise, try Ruby. I'll leave a Ruby-ist to explain the exact differences.
I can give a couple of the differences, though; mostly, the differences between the languages and capabilities are philosophical. Ruby has more "purity", Python says "Although practicality beats purity." (although with a strong cultural understanding that purity isn't worth tossing away as Perl seems to). Python also thinks "Readability counts.", Ruby seems more interested in making the syntax always concise. I'd much rather read a Ruby program than a C++ program, but the Python one will look more like pseudo-code with real English words, and Ruby will have a bit more syntax. Python has no culture of saving keystrokes and such things are usually considered a joke when the topic comes up, as are various language comparision benchmarks that incorporate that as a measure. (Typing speed is very, very rarely the constraint on programming speed.)
Which is right? Well, it mostly depends on what you want.
The best relativity resource I've found is an in-depth online book called "Reflections on Relativity". Be warned, it's the real deal; read it slowly and carefully. Intro calculus should suffice to get you through chapter one (which took me about two weeks spare time in the evening to read and digest), after that it gets tougher, although I'm finding the subjects don't build on each other so much after that so you can skip something you can't follow and keep going. (On the other hand, I only just finished Chapter 2, of 9.)
About the only thing I can tell you, short of linking the book as I did or quoting it more extensively than Slashdot will allow, is that nearly everything physics fanboys think they know is wrong. Don't rely on Star Trek for your physics, get the real deal; it'll only take as much time as a few episodes of Star Trek and you'll feel much better about your expanding horizons:-)
Sorry, but this one is much more on topic. (Think about how one would create such a ball if you don't quite get why.)
Fry: I just saw something incredibly cool. A big floating ball that lit up with every colour of the rainbow, plus some new ones that were so beautiful I fell to my knees and cried.
Amy: Was it out in front of Discount Shoe Outlet?
Fry: Yeah.
Amy: They have a college kid wear that to attract customers.
Fry: Well I don't care if it was some dork in a costume. For one brief moment I felt the heartbeat of creation. And it was one with my own.
Amy: Big deal.
Bender: We all feel like that all the time. You don't hear us gassin' on about it.
Would somebody care to geek out for me, and estimate how much power is contained in a standard fart's methane content, if you conventionally combust it? (Remember, even the worst farts aren't 100% methane, although if you do the math based on that assumption it'd be trivial to scale, if you tell us.)
This invention could be the best thing that ever happened to the baked beans market, no?
I think the key will be how high they can get the efficiency. Some other commenters have said that turbines can be really efficient, but I don't know how well that will scale, and the article IMHO didn't really give us much to go on.
It is, however, encouraging that they are seriously discussing putting these into laptops. Since waste energy almost always comes out as heat, and while a lot of that will presumably come out the exhaust, a lot will also go into the laptop itself. If they aren't going to toast the laptop they much be expecting some pretty decent efficiency.
If they can get the efficiency to a point comparable to the efficiencies attained at large, centralized power plants... and that is quite a challenge because due to the ecomomies of scale power plants can do a lot of things to improve efficiency (or decrease pollution) that last little.05% that make no sense on smaller scales... then it'll basically be a wash in pollution terms for household power generation vs. what we have now.
Only large scale use like millions of people using it as their primary power generation matter. Even if I used it to power my laptop, and I am a heavy laptop user, do you have any idea how long it would take me to go through even a gallon of fuel? Compare that to a single truck. Small scale, I'd guess these will be several times more friendly than conventional really-quite-nasty batteries, just looking at it from a thermo-dynamic-limit point of view. Many fewer conversion inefficiencies.
Slashdot Mirror
Can someone tell me where I can sign-up for the upcoming Civil War?
That was it, last night. Every election is a bloodless civil war.
In all seriousness, continued attempts to start a bloddy one one are going to be met with overwhelming hostility. The solution to losing an election is not to start a war, and anybody who truly acts like it is shouldn't be moving to Canada, they should be moving to central Africa or something where that sort of barbaric behavior really is the expected result.
I'm not a "love it or leave it" person; I'm a "love it, leave it, work within the system to change it, or shut the hell up" person. But if you really think this is worth killing people because an election didn't go your way, then I offer you two other choices: Shut the hell up about "civil war" and grow up, or yes, get the hell out.
Good lord. You can demonize conservatives as much as you want, but when Clinton won, nobody talked about civil war.
Grow up, kiddies. You lose sometimes. Now is a chance to rebuild and refocus. Start a war and I'll be first in line to stop you with all necessary force.
That there are other factors in climate change does not mean we should not change those which we have control over.
It can, if our changes are expensive (which they are, and "expensive" automatically translates into human lives), and we can't have a significant effect anyhow, which is an open question.
Reflexive knee-jerking is not the right solution, no matter what emotional terms people like you wrap it in.
Companies shouldn't assume that everyone who's using dodgy/generated keys didn't legitimately purchase their software...
They don't have to assume. Given the legitimacy of EULAs, by cracking the software, you are in violation of the license. Therefore, you are obligated to destroy your copy. (No, they aren't obligated to return your money. Ha ha.) Therefore, if you continue to use it, you are doing so illegally without license, so they can pursue everybody using fake keys or patches without regard to whether the customer bought it.
It may have an impact on the resulting (theoretical) lawsuit, though. A non-paid-for copy of XP Home can plausibly be said to carry $100 in damages if you get charged with copyright infringement, but it is going to be hard to convince a judge of any damage for a paid-for copy. They might try to hit you with a contract-breach suit, but there's a reason no breach-of-EULA has ever actually gone to court, at least at the consumer level.
Practically speaking, there isn't much they can do legally. But given the legitimacy of EULAs, they can still safely act as though all cracked copies are illegitimate.
(Now, a lesson in logic for the Slashdotters who may not have gotten there yet: I use the term "given" to mean "If we assume X to be true". You see it a lot in real math classes. It does not make any claims about the actual truth of X. I personally do not accept EULAs in their current form. But Microsoft clearly does, and if you want to look from their point of view, as I did in this post, that's one of the things you have to take as a "given".)
Read it again, more carefully. In your zeal to have your beliefs validated, you misread it 180 degrees.
Civilization, the game, should be required parts of any school cirriculum, and should I ever have kids and homeschool them, they will play something like it.
Civilization is an extremely unusual game, even in its supposed genre of turn-based strategy, because it is not a wargame, it is a resource allocation game. You have a very, very limited amount of resources, how do you spend them? The answer to that is quite complicated because of the realistic number of ways you can spend them.
More conventional turn-based wargames typically have at most a handful of ways to spend resources (fairly generic infrastructure or troops), and are much more generous with the number of troops you can pump out, because that is what the game is about. You rarely end up with a choice between building a defensive unit, or finishing the Granary.
This is obviously a continuum and I can't say I've played all turn-based strategy games. But the Sid Meier Civ games (including Alpha Centauri, my favorite, and not including Call To Power, which as the name indicates is a military game from what I've heard) are far over on the "limited resources" side. The only other thing that comes close is SimCity.
Civ can teach several valuable lessons that many people never learn, and that probably includes many people reading this message:
- No matter how rich you are, you can't do everything. Your expectations rise with your power.
- Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure. (In a two-player Civ game, a "rush" is only viable if you do it right away; otherwise the other player may out-infrastructure you. This is particularly true in Alpha Centauri, where you can make a very tightly targeted defensive unit, which results in them being quite cheap.) What seperates a First World civilization from a Third World one is the infrastructure. (Also a culture that makes sure to maintain and expand it, and not destroy it for short-term gain, but that doesn't come up much in Civ.)
- Military conflict isn't the answer to everything, but sometimes it is the only answer, especially when the troops are knocking on your door.
- Related to that, there is a big difference between being prepared and not being prepared. One of the biggest mistakes I personally make almost every time I play is to overallocate to infrastructure, and neglect my military, until someone comes a-knocking, at which point it is often too late.
Of course, most people aren't going to face the problems a Civ player faces literally in real life, but the lessons are still sound and the evidence suggests a lot of people still don't learn them. How many people run around thinking the US is infinitely powerful, and therefore think (we can provide infinite free healthcare for the world)/(we can engage in any military endeavor infinitely safely)/(the US could come over and fix my country but they are just to lazy and greedy to do so)/(nothing could ruin this country so who cares about fixing huge money sink X)? As you can see, the attitude is not a characteristic of one political side or another, there are weak thinkers on all sides who think and act on this premise.In this case, I would like to point out that I'm not necessarily emphasizing the "military" aspect; consider "invasion" as a stand-in for many other problems as well. A hurricane isn't all that different from an enemy attack in effects. The "preparedness" is important; if you have to interrupt yourself to deal with an emergency because you weren't ready it can be immensely disruptive.
I don't know how to teach these vital things. But video gaming, a.k.a. "simulating", in a controlled and otherwise-harmless enviroment, is the best guess I've got. Better to learn these things from Civ then the first time you get a credit card... statistics say a lot of people learn this lesson then, too.
Conventional teaching just won't work with this. You can say this as much as you want, but the vast majority of people learn from experience. At least give people a good opportunity to learn it safely.
As for "bad variable names", note that in Perl, $a and $b in the sort function are actually mandated by the language... well, sort of, kind of, close enough; "man perlfunc" and look for "sort" for the details. Everything else is a free choice, and short examples call for short names. I guarantee you I haven't written "array" as a variable in many, many years, unless that was absolutely the best name. (And for things like sorting functions, it sometimes is.)
Indentation is via "ecode":although it still apparently is a bit kooky, as you can see.
That is almost certainly not what the OP meant. Staying language generic, suppose you have an array of two-element arrays:
[[1, 3], [2, 2], [3, 1]]
and you want to sort this array by the second element. In Perl, that'sand viola, an array sorted with a custom compare function. In Python,And I can do this in Javascript, C ("man qsort"), C++'s STL (in the verbose way the C++ does things, but still), and at a bare minimum pretty much any language where functions are first-class objects, which with the possible exception of C/C++ I now consider an absolute requirement for any language I will use.
A language that makes this hard isn't worth using; it's a "smell". Your not knowing this, no particular offense intended, rather re-inforces the original poster's point: The only people singing the praises of PHP are those who aren't terribly experienced with other languages, and it tends to show pretty clearly. (No, ASP.NET is not sufficiently different. Same domain, same basic approach, slight difference in evolution.) As penance, I order you to spend a month with OCaml, for your own good.
If you expect that, how do you reconcile it with the rapid changes in temperature due to sunlight variations from Earth's axial tilt? The oceans may take years to adjust fully but we'd feel the effects much more quickly on land.
Those are surface adjustments only. Go into a cave sometime, it holds the same temp all year long. To see the full effects of increased solar input, I would expect the big heat sinks, like the ground and the ocean which you mentioned, to take years to adjust. I would expect that to have some sort of averaging effect.
I might be wrong, of course.
You mean this part?Emphasis mine. It does not say anything about whether the activity can account for the temperature. In fact, it quite explicitly disclaims any such claims in either direction. It is too soon. You need to brush up on your science skills, and your ability to read what things say instead of reading what you want them to say. If more climate fearmongers demonstrated these skills, I might actually be willing to join them in their panic. But dogma, dogma, dogma, and carefully selected evidence seems to rule the day.
Less dogma, more science, please.
So... we'll schedule the Global Cooling panic for what, 2030-ish? That good for everyone?
Save your Global Cooling books from the 70s, they'll be invaluable in showing how long it has been a problem even as the Global Warming hysteria is quietly, but thoroughly, whitewashed out of existance (just as the Global Cooling panic has been, as of today).
See you then!
(This is about 1/3 humorous, 1/3 a troll, and 1/3 an attempt to get people to be a little less dogmatic and a little more thoughful about climate issues in general. Moderate accordingly, I guess.)
(PS: I would expect the Earth's temp, if it is affected significantly by the Sun, to lag behind it by several years, because it has one hell of a lot of "thermal inertia".)
Information doesn't "want" anything.
No shit, Sherlock. It's called a "metaphor". I'm pretty sure most people using the phrase are quite aware that information is an inanimate object, to the extent that it is an object. Grandparent poster understands the phrase better than you do.
Anglo-saxon countries have those terrible hangups about State-issued ID (amongst other things), mostly for neurotic reasons that can be traced back to the magna-carta.
I recommend you investigate the provenance of the phrase "Show me your papers." (Google is not your friend on this one, I tried.)
Neurotic, or another one of those "those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it" sort of things?
And what about the misuse and abuse of social-security numbers? Video-clubs will ask for it to rent a goddammed DVD!!! It is not likely that a video-club will keep it's database as securely as a bank does.
You falsely assume that people against state IDs are otherwise OK with the situation as-is and implicitly accuse them of hypocrisy. Speaking at least for myself, I am not happy with the situation as is, so no hypocrisy here. (Although perhaps not for the exact reason you think; some reasoning here, but also, even though Social Security really isn't a national ID card, it is, as you point out, wildly unethical for entities unwilling to safeguard it to require it. Whether or not it is a "national ID" is irrelevant; the point is that it is a highly privacy sensitive information (a term I define quite carefully), and for corporations in general to require it, but not respect and safeguard it, is very unethical. Going along with the writeup I link, the problem with a National ID card is it concentrates the privacy-sensitivity so much that no real entity can ever be responsible enough by my standards to handle that kind of power over me... therefore, it will simply be taken, against my will and with no compensation to me of significance. (And remember, ethically I set my price; this precludes the obvious comeback to that phrase.) Not a good thing.)
How do you reconcile those two statements?
Read them more closely; there is no contradiction. "I'm not a one-issue voter on the war, but on all the other issues I care about there is no difference, so it is the only one I have to consider." There is no contradiction there, just more nuance than you are probably used to seeing on Slashdot.
BTW, Troll? Moderation is officially broken on Slashdot. You can be a lunatic in favor of Kerry, but post a reasoned opinion that with reluctance semi-endorses Bush and you're whacked with "Troll".
In fact, looking at the breakdown of the mods, I'm officially wondering where the "Insightful" went, as it is no longer listed. J'accuse; are people running Slashdot that biased, is the software buggy, or is that broken as designed?
Good point. Not enough to sway my vote on my personal value scale, but good point. Thank you.
This is largely why I will be voting for Bush. I disagree with the rhetoric on the war, I think it is going as well as can be expected. (Please, this is not a request to "correct" me on this; I've heard it all before. I mean, sure, feel free to whack that reply button, it's your right, but don't expect me to suddenly see the error of my ways or anything. Caveat over.)
But I don't love everything Bush has done. His administration is disturbingly secretive, and while I freely concede the need to keep some things secret, it is clear to me a lot of people are using "security" as an excuse to cover things up. I understand the "You are with us or against us" line in the context of countries (where IMHO it does make sense in context), but they apply it to individuals too often where it doesn't make sense. The deficit bothers me. Some other things bother me.
OK, I understand the war is a big deal, and a lot of people disagree with me. For me it is a big issue, but not big enough to call myself a one-issue voter. Kerry could have definately picked me up on other issues.
But any issue I care about, he has voted against (which sometimes manifests as a "vote for", like the Patriot act). Civil liberties? Copyright issues? Smaller government? Nope, nope, nope. At best, silence.
You take away the war issue, and there isn't much reason for a Slashdot type to vote for either one of them. That leaves me mostly deciding on the war issue and I personally think that it is going as well as can be expected. (For reasoning on that, see a lot of the arguments here, and no, I don't expect you to swallow that uncritically, and no, there likely isn't much you can say to change my mind on the issue at this point.) So, Bush it is. But I'm probably voting libertarian on all the other races that I can.
Why don't you academics stop jerking off over week-early predictions and do something productive like research a cure for cancer,
You know, I think I'm OK with Political Scientists not treating cancer.
(Sloppy Thinking Sign #4: Lumping all members of a group together and discarding relevant distinctions. In this case, the point is that all academics are not created equal. Accurate poll research is one of the more useful things a political scientist can be doing, considering the general uselessness of that branch of "science".)
I'm thinking that medical researchers should also, in general, avoid research into alternative fuels.
It also shares at least one of the developers, Brian Fargo, in a lead role, so it is not completely hopeless that at least some of the spirit will shine through.
If Microsoft had released similar search feature, it would be one more nail in the coffin of poor security, no matter what user advisories they had given.
Microsoft has released a similar feature. You've been able to find files by a string in the contents for a long time now. Not only is it not "a nail in the coffin of poor security", it is completely unnoticed in this entire fracas. Yes, the implementation sucks (and it seems like I've never gotten it to work right in XP), but it is there and I am yet to hear a Google Search privacy problem that is not equally a problem for the built-in OS search.
I guess you can only bitch about what you know about. Most people, even on Slashdot, are ultimately pretty ignorant about what is in the seething miasma that is Windows. (I'm only slightly better than ignorant.) Speaking as a certified privacy wonk, this is all too silly to worry about.
I pay taxes to build prisons. Therefore, if I want to, I can go into the prison and set all the murderers and rapists free.
Actually, you do have that right, just one shared by the community. You can set criminals free by voting for people or policies that have that result.
You can't do it unilaterally, but you can do it.
I assumed the original poster was concerned about the pollution in general, not as compared to fuel cells.
Another interesting question is to compare construction pollution costs of a turbine vs. a fuel cell, but it's probably too soon to tell yet, since neither tech is mature.
Here's how I think people should evaluate Python vs. Ruby:
- Run Python, downloading it if necessary.
- Run a Python shell (OS-dependent).
- Type "import this", and read it.
If everything speaks to you, as it does me, than try Python first. Otherwise, try Ruby. I'll leave a Ruby-ist to explain the exact differences.I can give a couple of the differences, though; mostly, the differences between the languages and capabilities are philosophical. Ruby has more "purity", Python says "Although practicality beats purity." (although with a strong cultural understanding that purity isn't worth tossing away as Perl seems to). Python also thinks "Readability counts.", Ruby seems more interested in making the syntax always concise. I'd much rather read a Ruby program than a C++ program, but the Python one will look more like pseudo-code with real English words, and Ruby will have a bit more syntax. Python has no culture of saving keystrokes and such things are usually considered a joke when the topic comes up, as are various language comparision benchmarks that incorporate that as a measure. (Typing speed is very, very rarely the constraint on programming speed.)
Which is right? Well, it mostly depends on what you want.
The best relativity resource I've found is an in-depth online book called "Reflections on Relativity". Be warned, it's the real deal; read it slowly and carefully. Intro calculus should suffice to get you through chapter one (which took me about two weeks spare time in the evening to read and digest), after that it gets tougher, although I'm finding the subjects don't build on each other so much after that so you can skip something you can't follow and keep going. (On the other hand, I only just finished Chapter 2, of 9.)
:-)
About the only thing I can tell you, short of linking the book as I did or quoting it more extensively than Slashdot will allow, is that nearly everything physics fanboys think they know is wrong. Don't rely on Star Trek for your physics, get the real deal; it'll only take as much time as a few episodes of Star Trek and you'll feel much better about your expanding horizons
Would somebody care to geek out for me, and estimate how much power is contained in a standard fart's methane content, if you conventionally combust it? (Remember, even the worst farts aren't 100% methane, although if you do the math based on that assumption it'd be trivial to scale, if you tell us.)
This invention could be the best thing that ever happened to the baked beans market, no?
I think the key will be how high they can get the efficiency. Some other commenters have said that turbines can be really efficient, but I don't know how well that will scale, and the article IMHO didn't really give us much to go on.
.05% that make no sense on smaller scales... then it'll basically be a wash in pollution terms for household power generation vs. what we have now.
It is, however, encouraging that they are seriously discussing putting these into laptops. Since waste energy almost always comes out as heat, and while a lot of that will presumably come out the exhaust, a lot will also go into the laptop itself. If they aren't going to toast the laptop they much be expecting some pretty decent efficiency.
If they can get the efficiency to a point comparable to the efficiencies attained at large, centralized power plants... and that is quite a challenge because due to the ecomomies of scale power plants can do a lot of things to improve efficiency (or decrease pollution) that last little
Only large scale use like millions of people using it as their primary power generation matter. Even if I used it to power my laptop, and I am a heavy laptop user, do you have any idea how long it would take me to go through even a gallon of fuel? Compare that to a single truck. Small scale, I'd guess these will be several times more friendly than conventional really-quite-nasty batteries, just looking at it from a thermo-dynamic-limit point of view. Many fewer conversion inefficiencies.