The general "non theological" topic of a "creator" is ended with a request of definition of "creator". Even if such being exists, you can not define it without going into theology. And when "creator" is completely undefined, you cannot really have a logical discussion about it. Instead you could just as well note that "big bang" is the "creator" (which will result in science asking who created it, but that's a different discussion entirely).
That's because we separated church and state. Go back a bit over a hundred years and try not paying your 10% to catholic church then. Enjoy the slavery you'll be sold into. Most males were usually sent into coal mines for not being able to pay church their share back then, with life expectancy of a few years.
That accounts for essentially all religions on the planet where clergy isn't working another job for a living. For example, none of the major religion's practising clergy is unpaid - they're all paid by the church or its worshippers "for religious services rendered".
The author most likely refers to "lawsuits against church", and in this context, he's mostly correct. Law of the land was usually interpreted by a local lord, and unless it was about something obvious, like a priest taking a loan from a well connected local jew and trying to pass on repaying it (no one but jews had the right to practice usury back then) they would not even think of pissing church off by ruling against it. Pissing off the church during pre-reformation Catholicism meant you or someone close to you was going to get branded heretic and burned at the stake, casting a massive shadow on your entire family even if you were nobility.
You tried to learn latin and learn what bible says? Nine out of ten times local priest would feel threatened and have you branded a heretic resulting in a nice fleshy bonfire. After all, why would a person who's not a member of clergy try to learn the language of the bible if not to pervert the word of God translated to you by his divine messenger the Pope and his ordained faithful followers.
Total death count of ALL of those terror organisations over age after WW2 is still but a tiny fraction of WW2 losses.
World now has several times the population it had during WW2.
Are you sure you want to argue mathematics and victims numbers on slashdot? People here tend to know math better then average. If WW3 happens then nukes or not, we're looking at nine digits victim count.
While this was originally true, it's not any more. The Assisted Global Positioning System in the modern cellular network is so accurate, it can fairly reliably replace baseline GPS inside buildings in urban areas and it has been doing so for devices that support it long ago (for example, my ancient nokia 5230 which I use for navigation has this ability).
It would be pretty interesting if this could ever be used to slam unstoppable force (anti-piracy movement) and unmovable object (protect the children movement) against one another.
It would be like watching two evil empires duke it out. Except that it wouldn't be "like", but exactly like that.
Most likely the languages of the most active/important developers, with more to follow later. You obviously want to prioritise the languages you're fluent in when doing a project like this, to make sure that non-language related bugs get ironed out of the system.
EU is currently the biggest and most profitable market for MS by a decent margin. Any CEO suggesting this would hold his office for approximately as long as it takes for big stock holders to make the necessary calls to have him committed to nearest asylum and decision cancelled on count of "nervous breakdown under heavy stress".
It was specifically set to less then 1:1 to USD as a "magical standard", so that when inevitable value increase would come as currency got adopted more widely, it would function as a great balancer of two biggest economic zones. It would also promote tourism and cross-continental payments as it would be easier to evaluate how much you would be paying when buying across the Atlantic.
Unfortunately US economy tanked and currency devalued more then expected by economists setting up the euro.
So Neelie Kroes' local reputation of being utterly brutal on local monopolies and totally unjustified?
What exactly are you smoking? She's been known as someone brutal enough to take on any monopoly that tries to play against competitiveness, and done so long before microsoft. They're not even on her "first ten" list of big companies to get hit hard.
Only a few orders of magnitude off there champ. Hint: here on slashdot people typically understand math beyond "what's a million and how is different from bazillion?"
No worries, these people will be labeled something among the lines of "terrorists, pedophiles, liberals, wing nuts" or whatever other term will be deemed valid and hostile enough by spin doctors writing speeches for modern leaders.
Then most of the sheep will happily nuke the "enemies of the state" into the oblivion.
No. Oceans are huge masses of water, far from uniform. The current issue is likely linked to salinity levels of the ocean, specifically the osmotic engine powering the Golf stream. In addition to saline levels and osmotic movement you have various other causes for streams, such as rotation of the planet Earth, gravitational forces of objects other then Moon, such as Sun, other planets with large mass in Solar system and various passing asteroids. There are several other factors as well.
In this specific case, Golf Stream pulls water from North America's East coast in direction of continental Europe. As it weakens due to melting ice diluting saline levels and weakening osmotic engine driving it, less water is pulled causing the rise of sea levels in location water is pulled from as status quo changes.
The problem is that the construction they have uses massive amounts of ground effect (note how propellers are lowered to the ground level on the machine, causing it to look massive).
At 3m ground effect will be much weaker. So while this is indeed an interesting advancement, it's not very practical in terms of looking for something that can meet the criteria of Sikorsky's prize. It's too specialized to be dependent on maximum amount of ground effect to scale as altitude increases. The construction that would hover at that altitude would likely want to minimize weight and friction over maximizing ground effect.
Your bird comparison is quite a bit off. Birds are ornitorpters or mixed combination of both ornitopter and fixed wing (ornitopter on take off, fixed wing on travel for most hawks for example).
Difference between those and rotating wing based helicopter is the massive difference in used energy to stay afloat. There's a reason why US Marines really, REALLY wanted a mixed format of rotor and fixed wing for their troop transport - fixed wing is far more energy efficient then rotating one.
That is also why we have had fixed wing gliders for ages. As long as you get one of those in the air, it will stay there almost indefinitely provided there are enough pillars of hot rising air for it to maintain altitude. They are just that energy efficient.
He also knows that this is not going to happen, and is looking for a middle ground. Fanatical "open source or GTFO" movement isn't look pretty in this either.
Because generation of hydro-carbons is several (tens/hundreds?) of orders of magnitude more difficult then generation of electric charge in the battery.
I'd like to pitch in on this one. I live in Finland, city of Tamepere. we have ~200k living in the city. This is the site of our public transportation: http://aikataulut.tampere.fi/?lang=en (fully functional english version, we have a lot of exchange students and foreign workers due to being an industrial town). There is also a mobile version of the site and most stops have a printed upcode barcode that you can scan with your phone into an app to help with seeing timetables on the fly.
Full site has the following: 1. Per bus line and per stop timetable (which tends to be accurate within ~2 minutes). 2. Journey planner, where you simply input your start point and end point and set your desired departure or arrival time, and software will provide you with several routes that fit your criteria. You can also set details, like to ignore certain bus lines when doing route calculation or how much margin of error you want to switching lanes. 3. Traffic monitor of GPS-fitted busses (actually most if not all busses have trackers, but it seems only a few are enabled to broadcast to public at any given time).
Public transit itself here is excellent. The only times I ever need to use a car is when I leave the city or am in a big hurry. This in spite of the city being so big that it was classified as a "village" by early EU rules due to having extremely low population density, often considered a bane of public transportation. Night traffic also exists, timed with shift changes in bigger working places (for example shift changes for central hospitals or major factories).
Every bus has been equipped with GPS for a while now. Bus essentially has a notification board inside set to be visible from everywhere in the bus that displays the next stop's name and projected time of arrival as well as current time. Busses are modern Volvo and Scania models, fully air conditioned and equipped with heaters so they're comfortable through hot summers and cold winters. There are many other little allowances for comfort of people, like NFC tickets (you just wave your card through a NFC reader and it shows you the balance on the ticket in front of the driver where you enter, while people exiting the bus do so through middle and rear doors).
Pricing is reasonable by local standard: you can enter any bus for an hour after purchasing the ticket which costs 2.50EUR. By using preloaded tickets, you shave almost a euro off the price. You can also get a monthly card for something around 50EUR, and there are significant discounts for students children and elderly. They also have "workplace" tickets specially tailored for workplaces to buy for their workers.
We have bus lanes throughout city centre, which means that you will avoid most of the congestion especially during rush hour by taking a bus.
In general, if you want to make it work, it can be made to work and work well to the point where even a low density 200k city can have public transit good enough to allow to not even have a car if you don't want to own one. It's one of the major infrastructural advantages here, of you move with your spouse, one car for the family is more then enough, and a single person can go without a car alltogether in many cases. There have actually been calculations done that it's cheaper for an average single student/worker to have a bus card and grab a (very expensive high quality service legally mandated local monopoly) taxi for those few times that bus tables do not suit him/her.
Time when microsoft had to bail apple out of bankruptcy with a multi-billion USD injection into the company in exchange for stock for reasons of not getting raped by anti-trust enforcement if apple was to die. Time when apple got several of its bets wrong or simply not right enough.
The more I listen to various mozilla reps, the more I am convinced that they are extremely distanced from reality, and firefox's reduction in market share is direct consequence of this ignorance.
The problems he's talking about has been long solved by "there is an add-on for that" in firefox. Use ghostery. It has a good list of pretty much all meaningful tracking services and offers to block them for you on per-site basis or globally, along with a nice list of all trackers currently tracking you and if they're blocked or not.
And now, mozilla is essentially sponsoring a more gimp version of ghostery? Colour me unimpressed.
The tourists are actually one of the least targeted groups in kidnappings, because there is a collective interest of very powerful tourist industry that no such kidnappings occur.
Consider the Kenya example, where disabled woman got kidnapped for ransom by somali (no local kenyan would dare to touch a tourist). Kenya went full military on the kidnappers down to chasing them into Somalia across borders later executing a very difficult and expensive excursion into south Somalia to destroy bases where kidnappers might be trained. Al-Shahab is still recovering from that strike since. And now when my parents visited Kenya as tourists about a year after the incident, they spoke of heavy army presence on the beaches guarding the tourist sites now.
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None of these are even close to being considered "major".
The general "non theological" topic of a "creator" is ended with a request of definition of "creator". Even if such being exists, you can not define it without going into theology. And when "creator" is completely undefined, you cannot really have a logical discussion about it. Instead you could just as well note that "big bang" is the "creator" (which will result in science asking who created it, but that's a different discussion entirely).
That's because we separated church and state. Go back a bit over a hundred years and try not paying your 10% to catholic church then. Enjoy the slavery you'll be sold into. Most males were usually sent into coal mines for not being able to pay church their share back then, with life expectancy of a few years.
That accounts for essentially all religions on the planet where clergy isn't working another job for a living. For example, none of the major religion's practising clergy is unpaid - they're all paid by the church or its worshippers "for religious services rendered".
The author most likely refers to "lawsuits against church", and in this context, he's mostly correct. Law of the land was usually interpreted by a local lord, and unless it was about something obvious, like a priest taking a loan from a well connected local jew and trying to pass on repaying it (no one but jews had the right to practice usury back then) they would not even think of pissing church off by ruling against it. Pissing off the church during pre-reformation Catholicism meant you or someone close to you was going to get branded heretic and burned at the stake, casting a massive shadow on your entire family even if you were nobility.
You tried to learn latin and learn what bible says? Nine out of ten times local priest would feel threatened and have you branded a heretic resulting in a nice fleshy bonfire. After all, why would a person who's not a member of clergy try to learn the language of the bible if not to pervert the word of God translated to you by his divine messenger the Pope and his ordained faithful followers.
Total death count of ALL of those terror organisations over age after WW2 is still but a tiny fraction of WW2 losses.
World now has several times the population it had during WW2.
Are you sure you want to argue mathematics and victims numbers on slashdot? People here tend to know math better then average. If WW3 happens then nukes or not, we're looking at nine digits victim count.
When it enabled talks that allowed you to be born into a world without nuclear fallout and a functional ozone layer for example?
While this was originally true, it's not any more. The Assisted Global Positioning System in the modern cellular network is so accurate, it can fairly reliably replace baseline GPS inside buildings in urban areas and it has been doing so for devices that support it long ago (for example, my ancient nokia 5230 which I use for navigation has this ability).
It would be pretty interesting if this could ever be used to slam unstoppable force (anti-piracy movement) and unmovable object (protect the children movement) against one another.
It would be like watching two evil empires duke it out. Except that it wouldn't be "like", but exactly like that.
Most likely the languages of the most active/important developers, with more to follow later. You obviously want to prioritise the languages you're fluent in when doing a project like this, to make sure that non-language related bugs get ironed out of the system.
EU is currently the biggest and most profitable market for MS by a decent margin. Any CEO suggesting this would hold his office for approximately as long as it takes for big stock holders to make the necessary calls to have him committed to nearest asylum and decision cancelled on count of "nervous breakdown under heavy stress".
It was specifically set to less then 1:1 to USD as a "magical standard", so that when inevitable value increase would come as currency got adopted more widely, it would function as a great balancer of two biggest economic zones. It would also promote tourism and cross-continental payments as it would be easier to evaluate how much you would be paying when buying across the Atlantic.
Unfortunately US economy tanked and currency devalued more then expected by economists setting up the euro.
So Neelie Kroes' local reputation of being utterly brutal on local monopolies and totally unjustified?
What exactly are you smoking? She's been known as someone brutal enough to take on any monopoly that tries to play against competitiveness, and done so long before microsoft. They're not even on her "first ten" list of big companies to get hit hard.
Only a few orders of magnitude off there champ. Hint: here on slashdot people typically understand math beyond "what's a million and how is different from bazillion?"
No worries, these people will be labeled something among the lines of "terrorists, pedophiles, liberals, wing nuts" or whatever other term will be deemed valid and hostile enough by spin doctors writing speeches for modern leaders.
Then most of the sheep will happily nuke the "enemies of the state" into the oblivion.
No. Oceans are huge masses of water, far from uniform. The current issue is likely linked to salinity levels of the ocean, specifically the osmotic engine powering the Golf stream. In addition to saline levels and osmotic movement you have various other causes for streams, such as rotation of the planet Earth, gravitational forces of objects other then Moon, such as Sun, other planets with large mass in Solar system and various passing asteroids. There are several other factors as well.
In this specific case, Golf Stream pulls water from North America's East coast in direction of continental Europe. As it weakens due to melting ice diluting saline levels and weakening osmotic engine driving it, less water is pulled causing the rise of sea levels in location water is pulled from as status quo changes.
Here is a map of Golf Stream's flow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Golfstream.jpg
The problem is that the construction they have uses massive amounts of ground effect (note how propellers are lowered to the ground level on the machine, causing it to look massive).
At 3m ground effect will be much weaker. So while this is indeed an interesting advancement, it's not very practical in terms of looking for something that can meet the criteria of Sikorsky's prize. It's too specialized to be dependent on maximum amount of ground effect to scale as altitude increases. The construction that would hover at that altitude would likely want to minimize weight and friction over maximizing ground effect.
Your bird comparison is quite a bit off. Birds are ornitorpters or mixed combination of both ornitopter and fixed wing (ornitopter on take off, fixed wing on travel for most hawks for example).
Difference between those and rotating wing based helicopter is the massive difference in used energy to stay afloat. There's a reason why US Marines really, REALLY wanted a mixed format of rotor and fixed wing for their troop transport - fixed wing is far more energy efficient then rotating one.
That is also why we have had fixed wing gliders for ages. As long as you get one of those in the air, it will stay there almost indefinitely provided there are enough pillars of hot rising air for it to maintain altitude. They are just that energy efficient.
He also knows that this is not going to happen, and is looking for a middle ground. Fanatical "open source or GTFO" movement isn't look pretty in this either.
Because generation of hydro-carbons is several (tens/hundreds?) of orders of magnitude more difficult then generation of electric charge in the battery.
I'd like to pitch in on this one. I live in Finland, city of Tamepere. we have ~200k living in the city. This is the site of our public transportation: http://aikataulut.tampere.fi/?lang=en (fully functional english version, we have a lot of exchange students and foreign workers due to being an industrial town). There is also a mobile version of the site and most stops have a printed upcode barcode that you can scan with your phone into an app to help with seeing timetables on the fly.
Full site has the following:
1. Per bus line and per stop timetable (which tends to be accurate within ~2 minutes).
2. Journey planner, where you simply input your start point and end point and set your desired departure or arrival time, and software will provide you with several routes that fit your criteria. You can also set details, like to ignore certain bus lines when doing route calculation or how much margin of error you want to switching lanes.
3. Traffic monitor of GPS-fitted busses (actually most if not all busses have trackers, but it seems only a few are enabled to broadcast to public at any given time).
Public transit itself here is excellent. The only times I ever need to use a car is when I leave the city or am in a big hurry. This in spite of the city being so big that it was classified as a "village" by early EU rules due to having extremely low population density, often considered a bane of public transportation. Night traffic also exists, timed with shift changes in bigger working places (for example shift changes for central hospitals or major factories).
Every bus has been equipped with GPS for a while now. Bus essentially has a notification board inside set to be visible from everywhere in the bus that displays the next stop's name and projected time of arrival as well as current time. Busses are modern Volvo and Scania models, fully air conditioned and equipped with heaters so they're comfortable through hot summers and cold winters. There are many other little allowances for comfort of people, like NFC tickets (you just wave your card through a NFC reader and it shows you the balance on the ticket in front of the driver where you enter, while people exiting the bus do so through middle and rear doors).
Pricing is reasonable by local standard: you can enter any bus for an hour after purchasing the ticket which costs 2.50EUR. By using preloaded tickets, you shave almost a euro off the price. You can also get a monthly card for something around 50EUR, and there are significant discounts for students children and elderly. They also have "workplace" tickets specially tailored for workplaces to buy for their workers.
We have bus lanes throughout city centre, which means that you will avoid most of the congestion especially during rush hour by taking a bus.
In general, if you want to make it work, it can be made to work and work well to the point where even a low density 200k city can have public transit good enough to allow to not even have a car if you don't want to own one. It's one of the major infrastructural advantages here, of you move with your spouse, one car for the family is more then enough, and a single person can go without a car alltogether in many cases. There have actually been calculations done that it's cheaper for an average single student/worker to have a bus card and grab a (very expensive high quality service legally mandated local monopoly) taxi for those few times that bus tables do not suit him/her.
Time when microsoft had to bail apple out of bankruptcy with a multi-billion USD injection into the company in exchange for stock for reasons of not getting raped by anti-trust enforcement if apple was to die. Time when apple got several of its bets wrong or simply not right enough.
The more I listen to various mozilla reps, the more I am convinced that they are extremely distanced from reality, and firefox's reduction in market share is direct consequence of this ignorance.
The problems he's talking about has been long solved by "there is an add-on for that" in firefox. Use ghostery. It has a good list of pretty much all meaningful tracking services and offers to block them for you on per-site basis or globally, along with a nice list of all trackers currently tracking you and if they're blocked or not.
And now, mozilla is essentially sponsoring a more gimp version of ghostery? Colour me unimpressed.
As apple's history shows, getting the big idea wrong results in bankruptcy.
The tourists are actually one of the least targeted groups in kidnappings, because there is a collective interest of very powerful tourist industry that no such kidnappings occur.
Consider the Kenya example, where disabled woman got kidnapped for ransom by somali (no local kenyan would dare to touch a tourist). Kenya went full military on the kidnappers down to chasing them into Somalia across borders later executing a very difficult and expensive excursion into south Somalia to destroy bases where kidnappers might be trained. Al-Shahab is still recovering from that strike since. And now when my parents visited Kenya as tourists about a year after the incident, they spoke of heavy army presence on the beaches guarding the tourist sites now.