Fundamental philosophy in Linux: if you don't like the way somebody's doing it, then fork off.:) Make your own distro and do things the way you want. The end result is that yes, there isn't a whole lot of unity, and there are a whole lot of distros out there. This works to Linux's advantage, however, not towards its detriment. Most distros can be used for basic productivity, but there's a bunch of highly specialized distros out there that do one specific task extremely well. No matter what task you're looking to accomplish, there's a distro that's specialized for it, and there's several other distros that can perform the task with minimal tweaking.
I have to entirely disagree here. Lots of distributions is the greatest impediment to Linux. Or at least lack of a single standard for packaging product releases. Hypothetically suppose I want to do two specialized tasks with my computer: Photoshop and AutoCAD. Using your logic, there would be a specialized Photoshop distribution and specialized AutoCAD distribution. So what do I do? Dual boot? Do I want to reboot my computer everytime I need to use AutoCAD for something? No end user is going to accept that when just buying Windows XP will make all that switching go away.
I used these product examples because neither is available for Linux and a primary roadblock against the manufacturer porting them is:
* How many packages do we have to support to get it to run on Linux? * What happens if we release it as an RPM and a RPM-to-deb conversion results in a corrupt install? How can we tell the install is corrupt? Do we have to pay tech support people to figure it out? * We have dependencies on other packages, are we going to be flooded with support calls asking where to get these other packages? Will an RPM-to-deb converter correctly translate these dependencies? If it doesn't, do we have to pay support people to walk people through fixing it? * Will there be an update to glibc, which is out of our control, that breaks everything and forces us to rebuild our entire product and ship it out to our customers?
Lots of distributions (or at least a lack of a standard release system) make Linux worse both for those making software and those using software.
And for the record, all 3 of my laptops dual boot XP & some flavor of Linux (one Mandrake, one Gentoo and one FC2), I have 1 server running linux (Gentoo), 1 development-only machine running linux (Gentoo), and 2 mixed use entertainment/productivity systems, one running Win2K and another XP Pro. I'm all for going 100% Linux (because for me Linux is easier to manage) but it just isn't feasible.
Ummm, where do you store the size of your hash? You are hiding information and thinking that is getting you ahead. You must now add at least two bits to indicate hash size so your hash is *NEVER* smaller than the original message.
I have a system where all my files are exactly two bits:
00 01 10 11
Could you devise a hash that uniquely identifies each of those values in fewer bits? No? What if my files were 3 bits and I wanted a 2 bit hash? 4 bits in a 3 bit hash? n bits in an n-1 bit hash?
Ahh well. Guess unique hashes aren't possible in fewer bits than the message.
Okay, let's take a scenario from space flight and see how you transform non-linear equations into an LP problem:
An agency wants to send a scientist to mars to do some research and then come back to earth. To do so they will need to put S kilograms of scientific equipment in the space capsule, which needs to come back. To keep the scientists alive they need to put F kilograms of foodstuff and other life support equipment. Also there is a fuel unit factor, U, that represents the fuel cost to carry out the mission. And they spend T days in space. Now, construct a LP problem to maximize scientific return R given the constraints:
U = S^3 + F^2 (food is cheaper because it's shoved out the airlock when "eliminated") T = 0.5F - 300 (2kg food a day, 300 days travel time) R = S ln(T-300) (diminishing returns on time spent doing experiments) T >= 300 (travel time) U <= 25,000 (maximum fuel that can be used)
This problem is, however, much simplified from a real problem (contains no higher order derivatives on any of the other functions). So how are you going to transform that to an LP problem?
Someone facing the death penalty is not innocent and has gone through a considerable process before the sentence is carried out.
I am not saying better care couldn't be taken to make sure innocent people aren't executed by accident, I am saying I have no problem executing someone who is guilty.
How do you reconcile those two statements? People have been freed from death row after DNA evidence showed they could not have committed the crime. But the first sentence claims that they were categorically not innocent because they were facing the death penalty. What standard do we use to ensure an innocent person is never executed? There is only one: abolish capital punishment.
You can only support capital punishment if you're willing to let the occasionally innocent person be executed in order to make sure that the majority guilty ones are too.
I reject your reality, and substitute it with my own.
Your reality is surreal.
Spam is a fact of life. It won't go away, it won't decrease.
And this makes it right how? If we are a victim of crime, the criminal should not be punished because crime is a fact of life and the fact we were victimized shows that we inadequately prepared ourselves... is this what you're saying?
To say that it's stolen implies that somebody has been deprived of something. Sure, they may have less free space, but the capacity is still there - so nothing has been stolen.
So they have less space... but they haven't been deprived of that space?
Actually the stat probably is accurate to 0.01% because it's a descriptive statistic. They are, of course, trying to get you to make the mistake of non-statisticians and interpret the number as an inferential statistic (i.e. "Since 65.64% of reports were against Linux, then Linux accounts for 65.64% of all events reported or not.").
Mathematics is a completely human-created abstract system of reasoning. Mathematics is built upon axioms which cannot be proven and must be accepted as true. This is why mathematics is not a science.
One must ask, then, how the scientific community manages so well using only verifiable sources? No scientific journal editor would even consider allowing a reference to an anonymous source.
Okay, that is just seriously bad straw man arguing there.
If we subject politicians to the same scrutiny as scientific experiment, then yes we should do away with anonymous sources. After all, we would be able to conduct an experiment to determine what the source intimated anyway.
Furthermore the article is ignoring the fact that anonymous sources are used all the time in scientific research. It's called a poll. Just try and get a list of all the women who answered "yes" to some embarassing sexual question for a poll reported in some psychology or medical journal.
They are two different things and both use anonymous sources in some fashion. That was some seriously ill-informed reporting.
If you pass any classified information to someone not authorized to view it, you've committed a crime. Doesn't matter if it's spoken, written, peed into the snow or acted out in charades.
The only question should be was classified material passed to the media. Whether or not the person was actively covert or not is immaterial. If the information was classified, a crime was committed. Even if the information was publicly known, on the headlines of every major newspaper in the country, if a document with a classification stamp was passed, a crime was committed.
I don't think you can say absolutely that a trait that exists must confer a selective advantage. Well, we're in luck because nobody said that!
So if nurturing was somehow genetically programmed into these dinosaurs, there may have been other traits such as feathered limbs that simply came along for a ride. That's a really bad example. Feathers are very expensive to make. Unless there is an advantage to having them, they won't get made. I'm not sure I follow this notion of "tag along traits" that have no selective pressure but are in some way attached to other traits.
Mutations on the microscale are hardly what you could call advantageous to any specific creature. Some help, most hurt, some neither help nor hurt. Whether it is helpful or hurtful depends on reproductive advantage.
It isn't until these mutations progress through lineage that they begin to take on aspect of being advantageous. I don't think most researchers would agree with that notion. If what you say is true we would expect to see things like people walking around with third and fourth proto-arms that still have 100 generations until they're fully formed and functional, but in the meantime they're just hanging around useless - requiring energy to maintain but conferring no benefit.
Generally any time we see a useless appendage in an animal it's vestigal and will probably disappear over time if animals with smaller useless appendages are more reproductively successful.
Any particular reason you felt the need to close with the ad hominem there? What notion got into your head that the average American teen is headed for grad school? And for what it's worth, I'm currently an undergraduate technical scholar at a national laboratory. 5 days a week I'm doing science and research in computation. I spent much of a day this week in the lab's library pouring over journal articles. I've contributed to open source projects including Linux, but mostly in computational biology and bioinformatics. I think my credentials are adequate, I didn't realize there were so many morons like me around. The lab would have me believe it is actually difficult for them to find qualified candidates for their internships.
Okay, how about this gem from page 1 of the prologue:
The cost in New York State for building a well-schooled child in the year 2000 is $200,000 per body when lost interest is calculated. That capital sum invested in the child's name over the past twelve years would have delivered a million dollars to each kid as a nest egg to compensate for having no school.
Oh really? Let's see, 200,000 * (1+r)^12 = 1,000,000 => r ~= 0.1435. Yes that's right, a "safe" investment for our children yields a reliable 14.4% annual return for 12 years. He's clueless about economics - you just don't see that kind of return reliably for that length of time. And what about lost interest from that $200,000 spent all at once? Guess he's clueless about math as well.
It found its "scientific" presentation in the bell curve, along which talent supposedly apportions itself by some Iron Law of Biology.
That's from page 2. Actually the bell curve comes from statistics. It's just a representative distribution for a great many things. He clearly isn't real clued into statistics. A phenomena like talent, which is under the control of many genes and environmental factors, should distribute itself normally. I don't think he's much clued into biology either.
These are glaring errors. He didn't even try to reality check that $200,000 thing. So yeah, the guy is whack. Teacher of the year or not, accolades do not excuse a poorly formed argument. If he can't even get his introductory facts right, any sensible person should find his claims dubious.
Ugh... I can't believe people are still using that John Gatto book to support any argument except that a seriously non-intellectual individual could receive many teaching accolades. I tried to read the book, but there were so many seriously flawed arguments in the first couple pages I couldn't figure out which scared me more... That this guy won teacher of the year, or that he was a teacher at all.
At the very least he needs to go back to college and learn when, where and how to make a citation.
But if you look at the graduate students in science, my experience has been that 50-75% are of eastern descent directly, specifically chinese or indian.
I have a near-relative who is a full professor and used to work as an assistant professor at one of those "better known" universities which has a plethora of Asian and Indian descendants. She gave me some unique insight into why the situation is as it is...
Universities, focused on "empire building," are under pressure for getting ever more research dollars. Research dollars are generally directly proportional to publications, and publications are generally the result of lots and lots of really boring data analysis. They aren't looking for graduate students who are stellar innovators, looking to set out on their own and blaze a new trail on their own... They're looking for graduate students who will sit for weeks in front of a spreadsheet working data until something interesting pops out.
American born students don't generally tolerate that sort of uninspiring data entry job. Even American born students of Asian or Indian descent don't tolerate it. However, foreign nationals can't just pick up and leave. They're cheap. Their mobility is limited. They're perfect for the job. The universities grab 'em up.
Given that government-operated schools are the norm and not the exception among industrialized nations
I'm sure from when you studied rhetoric or logic in college you recognize that as a logical fallacy.
there are significant pedagogical and bureaucratic problems with the current system that we should address.
In the private sector such inefficiencies are usually addressed by competitive pressure. Organizations are forced to change from within or die. The pressure on public schools is entirely political. Maybe if they are forced to deal with competitive pressure, we will all win.
But the baby needs to stay even if the bathwater goes.
The baby is our children's education. Yes, it does have to stay. Even if the current system of education needs to go.
Virtually noone used HAM, no games (maybe for the odd splash screen), it was very slow, no good for interfaces (you couldn't put a white pixel directly next to a black pixel without a few pixels of smearing in between) It worked by recording each pixel as a value relative to the adjacent pixel, meaning that providing you didn't need abrupt colour changes, it could encode way more colours with less data, it's only when you want to say put black and white together it all broke
While it is true that practically nobody used HAM (I think NewTek's DigiPaint was the only paint program I'd ever heard of anybody using for it's HAM support), it isn't necessarily true that you couldn't put a black and white pixel immediately adjacent to one another.
HAM allowed you to specify a 16 color palette and then for each pixel specify either use a palette entry, or use the palette entry of the previous pixel, but change either the R,G or B bits.
Eventually some clever person figured out that with some clever programming (that may have involved the copper, I forget now) you could reload the color palette every scanline. Thus you could optimize your palette for the 16 colors most needed for a particular scanline (including potentially black and white). They called this "Sliced HAM" or "SHAM". It was only good for still images, but considering the Amiga at this point was taking a beating in the image quality arena from the new VESA super VGA cards for the PC, it was nice to know that there was a way to view JPG files with reasonably good quality on the Amiga.
Ahhh, glad someone mentioned this. This article was really pissing me off. Here's one my favorites from the article:
"Many of [the students] were now interested in designing games, going into graphics for industries such as the movies, designing automobiles, doing architectural design work... they just didn't know there were so many interesting careers in computer science," said Eleanor Babco, executive director of the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology and one of the report's co-authors.
WHAT?? Designing automobiles is computer science now? Architectural design work? I remember a computer architecture class I took, maybe students are clamoring to create their own chip designs?!
I think they have seriously confused "computer science" with just plain "computer technology."
Experts such as Malcom and Babco think some colleges should "take a page" off the for-profit, client-based institutions such as Strayer and DeVry, and make computer science more accessible, practical and less intimidating,
I suggest experts such as Malcom and Babco "take a page" from colleges and get an education about a subject before professing expertise in it. If you want to design automobiles, do yourself a favor... drop your CS classes and start taking ME classes. Vehicle design will make much more sense.
The non-compete clause was narrowed to only include direct competitors to the type of work he was doing at MS. In this case he went from Microsoft's Search Engine team over to Google.
By the same token though, this person's most valuable work asset was his knowledge with search engines. If he couldn't work in that field, he may not have had the qualifications to work at anything close to the same payscale in another field.
Really? Nobody comes out and tells you the difference between illegal and unenforceable? If you sign a contract with unenforceable (void) provisions, nobody has broken the law (unless it's a hit contract or something).
No significant nuclear power plant has ever been attempted to be decomissioned.
Define "significant". Is 913MWe significant (That's more than either of the Three Mile Island reactors produced)? If so, you're completely wrong.
Further problems with nuclear include the unsolved problem of waste disposal,
The problem is only unsolved because the anti-nuclear lobby won't let us solve it. Bury it for a very long time, problem solved. There's a group of people who seem hell-bent on stopping projects like Yucca mountain because it would effectively remove this, their best argument.
the high cost of producing nuclear power (it's actually much more expensive than many renewables)
Renewables, such as? I know you're not going to be so fallacious as to suggest wind or hydroelectric. (How many of these environmentally friendly groups support hydroelectric, completely ignoring the environmental damage damming a major river does) These sources of power pale in comparison to what you'll get out of a U238 breeder reactor.
nuclear weapons proliferation
The proliferation of nuclear weapons is going to proceed regardless of the state of nuclear power generation. They are separate issues.
there have been plenty of other nuclear accidents
Take that list and subtract from it any event not related to using nuclear energy for generating electricity. Many of those accidents are directly related to weapons activity or people experimenting with radioactivity and are thus in a category completely dissimilar to power generation. Suddenly the list isn't so very long, and compared to human toll caused from mining fossil fuels, is a much better bargain.
High grade uranium will run out in 20 to 50 years (pick your estimate).
Ummm... I pick neither. Even 50 years seems rather low. Australia all by itself has 1.5 million tons of known economically minable uranium ore using todays mining methods. Uranium is a ubiquitous ore in the earth's crust. Occurs with about the same frequency as tin or zinc. Research is underway to find economic ways to extract Uranium from sea water as there is an estimated 4.5 billion tons of it dissolved. Uranium is the 11th most common dissolved metal in seawater. And this isn't even addressing the fact that we could extract much more energy if we used the "waste" U238 in breeder reactors.
You've really trumped up just about everything you mentioned.
I hear what you're saying about water being plentiful, but there are any number of reasons why a large, relatively pure liquid body of fresh water is imensely preferable to what you'd find in asteroids etc... For one, it's one stop shopping. They don't have to spend precious time which they have none of to locate and mine H2O from a myriad of astral bodies. They don't have to mine squat actualy, just drop a hose and suck.
There is a big reason why mining water from an astral body is immensely preferable: Most stars with heavy elements that have coalesced into planets swirling around them almost certainly have a halo of comets circling them in an oort cloud. The comets are composed primarily of CO2 and H2O. Simply capture a small one of these (or shoot a big one, and capture a fragment) and warm it up. The CO2 will sublime away, the water and some contaminants will be left behind.
If you cannot clean that water, it is extremely unlikely that you'll be able to clean the water you sucked up from the liquid source either.
Why are we suddenly supporting ICANN? Because it's an opportunity to attack the U.S.? Come on, wasn't this the same organization that held meetings on critical issues in Ghana so that critics wouldn't come? (i.e. Let's hold an important meeting on how much we'll let the public participate in ICANN in a country with less than impressive internal stability so the critics will be scared away.)
Sorry, given the choice of ICANN control of root servers and US control of root servers... I'll stick with the current well functioning system. One of the two is subject to political pressure from SOMEBODY.
Slashdot Mirror
How could the FP to mention the bad editorial work on Slashdot be redundant?
You must be new here...
Fundamental philosophy in Linux: if you don't like the way somebody's doing it, then fork off. :) Make your own distro and do things the way you want. The end result is that yes, there isn't a whole lot of unity, and there are a whole lot of distros out there. This works to Linux's advantage, however, not towards its detriment. Most distros can be used for basic productivity, but there's a bunch of highly specialized distros out there that do one specific task extremely well. No matter what task you're looking to accomplish, there's a distro that's specialized for it, and there's several other distros that can perform the task with minimal tweaking.
I have to entirely disagree here. Lots of distributions is the greatest impediment to Linux. Or at least lack of a single standard for packaging product releases. Hypothetically suppose I want to do two specialized tasks with my computer: Photoshop and AutoCAD. Using your logic, there would be a specialized Photoshop distribution and specialized AutoCAD distribution. So what do I do? Dual boot? Do I want to reboot my computer everytime I need to use AutoCAD for something? No end user is going to accept that when just buying Windows XP will make all that switching go away.
I used these product examples because neither is available for Linux and a primary roadblock against the manufacturer porting them is:
* How many packages do we have to support to get it to run on Linux?
* What happens if we release it as an RPM and a RPM-to-deb conversion results in a corrupt install? How can we tell the install is corrupt? Do we have to pay tech support people to figure it out?
* We have dependencies on other packages, are we going to be flooded with support calls asking where to get these other packages? Will an RPM-to-deb converter correctly translate these dependencies? If it doesn't, do we have to pay support people to walk people through fixing it?
* Will there be an update to glibc, which is out of our control, that breaks everything and forces us to rebuild our entire product and ship it out to our customers?
Lots of distributions (or at least a lack of a standard release system) make Linux worse both for those making software and those using software.
And for the record, all 3 of my laptops dual boot XP & some flavor of Linux (one Mandrake, one Gentoo and one FC2), I have 1 server running linux (Gentoo), 1 development-only machine running linux (Gentoo), and 2 mixed use entertainment/productivity systems, one running Win2K and another XP Pro. I'm all for going 100% Linux (because for me Linux is easier to manage) but it just isn't feasible.
Ummm, where do you store the size of your hash? You are hiding information and thinking that is getting you ahead. You must now add at least two bits to indicate hash size so your hash is *NEVER* smaller than the original message.
I have a system where all my files are exactly two bits:
00
01
10
11
Could you devise a hash that uniquely identifies each of those values in fewer bits? No? What if my files were 3 bits and I wanted a 2 bit hash? 4 bits in a 3 bit hash? n bits in an n-1 bit hash?
Ahh well. Guess unique hashes aren't possible in fewer bits than the message.
Okay, let's take a scenario from space flight and see how you transform non-linear equations into an LP problem:
An agency wants to send a scientist to mars to do some research and then come back to earth. To do so they will need to put S kilograms of scientific equipment in the space capsule, which needs to come back. To keep the scientists alive they need to put F kilograms of foodstuff and other life support equipment. Also there is a fuel unit factor, U, that represents the fuel cost to carry out the mission. And they spend T days in space. Now, construct a LP problem to maximize scientific return R given the constraints:
U = S^3 + F^2 (food is cheaper because it's shoved out the airlock when "eliminated")
T = 0.5F - 300 (2kg food a day, 300 days travel time)
R = S ln(T-300) (diminishing returns on time spent doing experiments)
T >= 300 (travel time)
U <= 25,000 (maximum fuel that can be used)
This problem is, however, much simplified from a real problem (contains no higher order derivatives on any of the other functions). So how are you going to transform that to an LP problem?
Someone facing the death penalty is not innocent and has gone through a considerable process before the sentence is carried out.
I am not saying better care couldn't be taken to make sure innocent people aren't executed by accident, I am saying I have no problem executing someone who is guilty.
How do you reconcile those two statements? People have been freed from death row after DNA evidence showed they could not have committed the crime. But the first sentence claims that they were categorically not innocent because they were facing the death penalty. What standard do we use to ensure an innocent person is never executed? There is only one: abolish capital punishment.
You can only support capital punishment if you're willing to let the occasionally innocent person be executed in order to make sure that the majority guilty ones are too.
I reject your reality, and substitute it with my own.
Your reality is surreal.
Spam is a fact of life. It won't go away, it won't decrease.
And this makes it right how? If we are a victim of crime, the criminal should not be punished because crime is a fact of life and the fact we were victimized shows that we inadequately prepared ourselves... is this what you're saying?
To say that it's stolen implies that somebody has been deprived of something. Sure, they may have less free space, but the capacity is still there - so nothing has been stolen.
So they have less space... but they haven't been deprived of that space?
Actually the stat probably is accurate to 0.01% because it's a descriptive statistic. They are, of course, trying to get you to make the mistake of non-statisticians and interpret the number as an inferential statistic (i.e. "Since 65.64% of reports were against Linux, then Linux accounts for 65.64% of all events reported or not.").
Wow, did you read the first four words of that amendment?
In all criminal prosecutions
It doesn't say anything about civil proceedings, character assassinations or town criers.
Mathematics is a completely human-created abstract system of reasoning. Mathematics is built upon axioms which cannot be proven and must be accepted as true. This is why mathematics is not a science.
One must ask, then, how the scientific community manages so well using only verifiable sources? No scientific journal editor would even consider allowing a reference to an anonymous source.
Okay, that is just seriously bad straw man arguing there.
If we subject politicians to the same scrutiny as scientific experiment, then yes we should do away with anonymous sources. After all, we would be able to conduct an experiment to determine what the source intimated anyway.
Furthermore the article is ignoring the fact that anonymous sources are used all the time in scientific research. It's called a poll. Just try and get a list of all the women who answered "yes" to some embarassing sexual question for a poll reported in some psychology or medical journal.
They are two different things and both use anonymous sources in some fashion. That was some seriously ill-informed reporting.
Therefore, no crime was committed
If you pass any classified information to someone not authorized to view it, you've committed a crime. Doesn't matter if it's spoken, written, peed into the snow or acted out in charades.
The only question should be was classified material passed to the media. Whether or not the person was actively covert or not is immaterial. If the information was classified, a crime was committed. Even if the information was publicly known, on the headlines of every major newspaper in the country, if a document with a classification stamp was passed, a crime was committed.
I don't think you can say absolutely that a trait that exists must confer a selective advantage.
Well, we're in luck because nobody said that!
So if nurturing was somehow genetically programmed into these dinosaurs, there may have been other traits such as feathered limbs that simply came along for a ride.
That's a really bad example. Feathers are very expensive to make. Unless there is an advantage to having them, they won't get made. I'm not sure I follow this notion of "tag along traits" that have no selective pressure but are in some way attached to other traits.
Mutations on the microscale are hardly what you could call advantageous to any specific creature.
Some help, most hurt, some neither help nor hurt. Whether it is helpful or hurtful depends on reproductive advantage.
It isn't until these mutations progress through lineage that they begin to take on aspect of being advantageous.
I don't think most researchers would agree with that notion. If what you say is true we would expect to see things like people walking around with third and fourth proto-arms that still have 100 generations until they're fully formed and functional, but in the meantime they're just hanging around useless - requiring energy to maintain but conferring no benefit.
Generally any time we see a useless appendage in an animal it's vestigal and will probably disappear over time if animals with smaller useless appendages are more reproductively successful.
Any particular reason you felt the need to close with the ad hominem there? What notion got into your head that the average American teen is headed for grad school? And for what it's worth, I'm currently an undergraduate technical scholar at a national laboratory. 5 days a week I'm doing science and research in computation. I spent much of a day this week in the lab's library pouring over journal articles. I've contributed to open source projects including Linux, but mostly in computational biology and bioinformatics. I think my credentials are adequate, I didn't realize there were so many morons like me around. The lab would have me believe it is actually difficult for them to find qualified candidates for their internships.
These are glaring errors. He didn't even try to reality check that $200,000 thing. So yeah, the guy is whack. Teacher of the year or not, accolades do not excuse a poorly formed argument. If he can't even get his introductory facts right, any sensible person should find his claims dubious.
Ugh... I can't believe people are still using that John Gatto book to support any argument except that a seriously non-intellectual individual could receive many teaching accolades. I tried to read the book, but there were so many seriously flawed arguments in the first couple pages I couldn't figure out which scared me more... That this guy won teacher of the year, or that he was a teacher at all.
At the very least he needs to go back to college and learn when, where and how to make a citation.
But if you look at the graduate students in science, my experience has been that 50-75% are of eastern descent directly, specifically chinese or indian.
I have a near-relative who is a full professor and used to work as an assistant professor at one of those "better known" universities which has a plethora of Asian and Indian descendants. She gave me some unique insight into why the situation is as it is...
Universities, focused on "empire building," are under pressure for getting ever more research dollars. Research dollars are generally directly proportional to publications, and publications are generally the result of lots and lots of really boring data analysis. They aren't looking for graduate students who are stellar innovators, looking to set out on their own and blaze a new trail on their own... They're looking for graduate students who will sit for weeks in front of a spreadsheet working data until something interesting pops out.
American born students don't generally tolerate that sort of uninspiring data entry job. Even American born students of Asian or Indian descent don't tolerate it. However, foreign nationals can't just pick up and leave. They're cheap. Their mobility is limited. They're perfect for the job. The universities grab 'em up.
Given that government-operated schools are the norm and not the exception among industrialized nations
I'm sure from when you studied rhetoric or logic in college you recognize that as a logical fallacy.
there are significant pedagogical and bureaucratic problems with the current system that we should address.
In the private sector such inefficiencies are usually addressed by competitive pressure. Organizations are forced to change from within or die. The pressure on public schools is entirely political. Maybe if they are forced to deal with competitive pressure, we will all win.
But the baby needs to stay even if the bathwater goes.
The baby is our children's education. Yes, it does have to stay. Even if the current system of education needs to go.
Virtually noone used HAM, no games (maybe for the odd splash screen), it was very slow, no good for interfaces (you couldn't put a white pixel directly next to a black pixel without a few pixels of smearing in between) It worked by recording each pixel as a value relative to the adjacent pixel, meaning that providing you didn't need abrupt colour changes, it could encode way more colours with less data, it's only when you want to say put black and white together it all broke
While it is true that practically nobody used HAM (I think NewTek's DigiPaint was the only paint program I'd ever heard of anybody using for it's HAM support), it isn't necessarily true that you couldn't put a black and white pixel immediately adjacent to one another.
HAM allowed you to specify a 16 color palette and then for each pixel specify either use a palette entry, or use the palette entry of the previous pixel, but change either the R,G or B bits.
Eventually some clever person figured out that with some clever programming (that may have involved the copper, I forget now) you could reload the color palette every scanline. Thus you could optimize your palette for the 16 colors most needed for a particular scanline (including potentially black and white). They called this "Sliced HAM" or "SHAM". It was only good for still images, but considering the Amiga at this point was taking a beating in the image quality arena from the new VESA super VGA cards for the PC, it was nice to know that there was a way to view JPG files with reasonably good quality on the Amiga.
I think they have seriously confused "computer science" with just plain "computer technology."
I suggest experts such as Malcom and Babco "take a page" from colleges and get an education about a subject before professing expertise in it. If you want to design automobiles, do yourself a favor... drop your CS classes and start taking ME classes. Vehicle design will make much more sense.
The non-compete clause was narrowed to only include direct competitors to the type of work he was doing at MS. In this case he went from Microsoft's Search Engine team over to Google.
By the same token though, this person's most valuable work asset was his knowledge with search engines. If he couldn't work in that field, he may not have had the qualifications to work at anything close to the same payscale in another field.
Really? Nobody comes out and tells you the difference between illegal and unenforceable? If you sign a contract with unenforceable (void) provisions, nobody has broken the law (unless it's a hit contract or something).
Wow, you've really bought into the scare...
No significant nuclear power plant has ever been attempted to be decomissioned.
Define "significant". Is 913MWe significant (That's more than either of the Three Mile Island reactors produced)? If so, you're completely wrong.
Further problems with nuclear include the unsolved problem of waste disposal,
The problem is only unsolved because the anti-nuclear lobby won't let us solve it. Bury it for a very long time, problem solved. There's a group of people who seem hell-bent on stopping projects like Yucca mountain because it would effectively remove this, their best argument.
the high cost of producing nuclear power (it's actually much more expensive than many renewables)
Renewables, such as? I know you're not going to be so fallacious as to suggest wind or hydroelectric. (How many of these environmentally friendly groups support hydroelectric, completely ignoring the environmental damage damming a major river does) These sources of power pale in comparison to what you'll get out of a U238 breeder reactor.
nuclear weapons proliferation
The proliferation of nuclear weapons is going to proceed regardless of the state of nuclear power generation. They are separate issues.
there have been plenty of other nuclear accidents
Take that list and subtract from it any event not related to using nuclear energy for generating electricity. Many of those accidents are directly related to weapons activity or people experimenting with radioactivity and are thus in a category completely dissimilar to power generation. Suddenly the list isn't so very long, and compared to human toll caused from mining fossil fuels, is a much better bargain.
High grade uranium will run out in 20 to 50 years (pick your estimate).
Ummm... I pick neither. Even 50 years seems rather low. Australia all by itself has 1.5 million tons of known economically minable uranium ore using todays mining methods. Uranium is a ubiquitous ore in the earth's crust. Occurs with about the same frequency as tin or zinc. Research is underway to find economic ways to extract Uranium from sea water as there is an estimated 4.5 billion tons of it dissolved. Uranium is the 11th most common dissolved metal in seawater. And this isn't even addressing the fact that we could extract much more energy if we used the "waste" U238 in breeder reactors.
You've really trumped up just about everything you mentioned.
I hear what you're saying about water being plentiful, but there are any number of reasons why a large, relatively pure liquid body of fresh water is imensely preferable to what you'd find in asteroids etc... For one, it's one stop shopping. They don't have to spend precious time which they have none of to locate and mine H2O from a myriad of astral bodies. They don't have to mine squat actualy, just drop a hose and suck.
There is a big reason why mining water from an astral body is immensely preferable: Most stars with heavy elements that have coalesced into planets swirling around them almost certainly have a halo of comets circling them in an oort cloud. The comets are composed primarily of CO2 and H2O. Simply capture a small one of these (or shoot a big one, and capture a fragment) and warm it up. The CO2 will sublime away, the water and some contaminants will be left behind.
If you cannot clean that water, it is extremely unlikely that you'll be able to clean the water you sucked up from the liquid source either.
And while we're on the subject...
Why are we suddenly supporting ICANN? Because it's an opportunity to attack the U.S.? Come on, wasn't this the same organization that held meetings on critical issues in Ghana so that critics wouldn't come? (i.e. Let's hold an important meeting on how much we'll let the public participate in ICANN in a country with less than impressive internal stability so the critics will be scared away.)
Sorry, given the choice of ICANN control of root servers and US control of root servers... I'll stick with the current well functioning system. One of the two is subject to political pressure from SOMEBODY.