Well you only need stimulus if there is enough money in private hands, but people are weary of investing it. So ideally the state should spend stimulus money so that it saves money in the long term. Now if that monitoring would lead to prevent economic damage due to some natural disaster - that could save money in the long term. Maybe it's not the most efficient way to spend the money (that's close to impossible to assess) but it seems reasonably sensible. I would guess there are plenty of other spending items which are more worthy of criticism.
Let's be reasonable in our expectation of politicians (even though complaining about them comes more natural) - it's not trivial to come up with large numbers of *sensible* projects to suddenly spend money on. It is a difficult job to make sure the money is not wasted, with all sorts of lobbyist and corrupt officials trying to get a cut somehow. So really - why attack this item out of all the other possibilities?
Maybe because it's so much easier to infect a machine by other means. There is no way to protect against physical access in any case, and once you have gained admin privileges why even bother with the BIOS? There are so many botnets out there already, so apparently it's quite easy to infect large numbers of machines in the first place. Putting in extra effort to make an infected machine withstand a re-install doesn't make economical sense. It would only become interesting for attackers if a significant percentage of infected machines would be cleaned quickly.
Some mainboards have a jumper to clear the Flash, IIRC.
Well the only long-term solution I've heard about is this: http://www.deekoo.net/peeves/spam/spammers/premiere/index2.htm
Mind you, that's not a legal solution. However if you ever get too much spam, I recommend looking at that site - it sure helps you to relax.
Parallel computing and parallel hardware have been around for decades - not on the desktop, but in the supercomputer area. It's a tough problem to solve efficiently - there are some things which are hard to get around. As an example think of the equation y = SQRT(a*b) - you need two mathematical operations there. It doesn't really help if you have two processors, since you need the result of one operation before you can perform the second. The example isn't very interesting, but essentially you always have this problem - if you rely on the result of the previous steps, then you need to do things in order. You can modify your algorithms so that happens less often, but this is hard work and interferes with your desire to write clean readable code.
That's a fair point. I recall having once read the legends of the bushmen, were the phrase "at a time when there was no difference between baboons and humans" was used. In addition they had the creation myth of the moon god making all animals from clay, too. Still, I was pretty amazed to find that phrase.
However looking at Genesis it seems clear that the focus is on claiming superiority over other religions - particularly sun and moon gods. People at the time were well aware that daylight was connected to the sun. If you already have light, why does god in the story create the sun? Just to emphasize: our god is way better than yours, we don't even need your god for anything, he is just a decoration our god made. That the creation order was nonsensical didn't matter - the important thing was to make this powerful point. I suspect even then people were not taking it literally, but that's speculating.
There will always be one ISP that does not monitor it's traffic.[...] Not to say this will be in the U.S., but there will always be that one country.
Well a non-monitoring ISP in Japan is not going to help US customers much. Even if they'd lay a cable from the ISP directly to the user's house - once the cable enters US territory it's under US jurisdiction. I grant you - encryption, proxies etc can help (provided it won't be outlawed again) but that works regardless whether the ISP monitors traffic. Also monitoring is already applied on a large scale - despite that https isn't used much outside of payment transactions, IPSEC is rarely used outside of company networks.
Ok, imagine you are a Israeli sheep herder back in the day before the Roman conquest. Someone reads you this psalm - how are you going to interpret it? How is anyone in the whole country going to interpret it? Would you say there'd be a single sane person who thought: "hmmm - maybe that day took thousand years"? I can't imagine so, and if you have written a text that any normal person in your culture reads in the same way, then you've succeeded in being unambiguous.
As for the light thing: likely the writers wanted to emphasize that their god was greater than the sun or moon gods which other cultures were worshiping.
I think I explained everything regarding difficulty at length.
As for creationism - it's not some new idea, we all know what it's about. There are no two sides of the aisle in this case, neither creationism research nor magical elf research nor flat earth research deserve to run a masters program. How ludicrous does a proposal have to be before you discard it?
Not really. "Some day" and "the day will come" express an uncertain duration, but unambiguously so - it's readily apparent to any reader that this refers to a not exactly defined period of time in the future. Nobody would interpret these expressions as: "it will take exactly one day". On the other hand the statement "And there was evening and there was morning, one day" refers to a clearly defined duration. How would the writers of Genesis go about making it even more clear what duration they refer to?
Children will say that my pastor showed me a picture of the dinosaurs and the cavemen living together. The teacher will explain that there is a difference between a painting and a photograph, and that with a certain skill, one can paint a picture of anything that looks reasonably like a near-photo.
Oh yeah, teachers will be so happy to have to argue to kids that their pastor is a liar. Nothing better to appease a bunch of fruitcakes who want to push their religion into science class, but that.
Phrases such as "some day" and "the day will come" clearly do not mean a period of 24 hours.
Do you have an example for "it took a day" or a similar phrase actually referring to a period of thousands of years? (Apart from the bible, I mean.) I don't know Hebrew, maybe "yom" could stand for "turn" or "phase" or something like that? The King James Bible is a pretty important milestone though - it does appear that no-one considered translating "yom" as "turn" or "period" in 1611, and there had certainly been a lot of thought spend on bible interpretation in the hundreds of years before it was written. Also Genesis always mentions a morning and an evening - how clear can you possibly be about referring to an actual day?
There's also the issue that solar days couldn't exist before the sun,
Ok, but the duration of a day would have been readily understandable to the writers of Genesis. Also creation of light (in Genesis) precedes the creation of the sun. We can't argue with terms like "solar days" if we don't even accept that the light comes from the sun. Then there is the "firmament" and the claim that there is water above the sky, which we know to be wrong. There is also the claim that the moon provides light which is wrong. There is no way to reconcile all these incorrect claims with what we know now, unless we take it for nothing but an allegory. You could say: "well the people at the time just wouldn't have been able to understand the real process". However if you do that, then you can't take anything about this creation story literally.
Is difficulty the ultimate metric for advanced degrees?
Sheesh - does that really need explaining? A degree in apple counting is unnecessary, since anybody can do it without any training. Using the same title for people who have attended a three week course to count apples and people who've actually gained significant knowledge in a complicated field, is cheating.
Maybe you worked hard because you aren't particularly suited to the field you studied?
Phrasing insults as rhetorical questions is a rather cowardly tactic. That science degrees usually take hard work is common knowledge - it's silly and boring to pretend to be unaware of that.
How do you know that a degree in Creationism isn't as difficult as your field of study?
The same way I know that pencil sharpening isn't as difficult to study. It's creationism, it's not like nobody here has heard anything about it. Yes: it's ridiculously easy.
Even then, it's the defrauded buyers that should be pressing claims, not the purported manufacturer.
The buyer may not feel defrauded at all. Sure if you buy a high-quality item, and you get a cheap replica, then you feel cheated. However what if you buy e.g. a fashionable purse which costs $20 to make, and retails at $4000, for say $50? An item which has been made in the same factory, by the same people, to the same standards as the item which goes to the retailer? Who is loosing there? Not the manufacturer, not the buyer, just the brand owner who wants to charge for his logo.
Their business model is to invest in advertising, ridiculously inflating the prices and creating a demand for the "exclusivity" which relies on that high price. Then they push the costs for dealing with "fakes" to society, impacting legitimate sales on ebay, hassling merchants, tying-up courts with their law suits. I can't say I'm feeling particularly sorry for them.
Saying this as a frontend chip designer - unfortunately what's really important about Intel and AMD is not the processor architecture, but their fabs and their manufacturing technology. That's the major factor controlling on-chip caches, clock speed, power consumption etc. If x86 would die, it would only be replaced by SPARC or PPC if Intel were to decide to go that route.
No. For evolution to work, the animals having that trait must procreate in higher numbers than those without it. This chimp got his balls cut off - that means in the future chimps who are more docile or less capable of planning have a better chance. Historically, in the same way we haven't bred sheep which successfully evade shearing, pigs which figure out how to escape slaughter or dogs which realize they could kill and eat us.
The differences are indeed very small usually, I scanned the table - in most cases the difference is something like 0.02 s, 0.05 s etc. However for ebay and myspace IE seems to do very well with a lead of 1.01 s and 1.85 s respectively. Also from the table it seems IE has a slight performance problem with Chinese fonts.
Anyone running a site which takes 8 s or even 15 s just to render, should have a hard look at their site design, though. Particularly Adobe at 9 s for a simple static page, seems really wierd.
Good point. As the article states "The amount of time spent in front of the box was used as a proxy measure of sedentary behaviour, because personal computers and games consoles were not in widespread use at the time (mid 1990s)".
I think a stimulus bill should be an investment bill. Initially there is extra spending which causes economic activity of some kind, and that helps in the short-term. However the spending needs to be directed, so that long-term public costs are reduced. If that doesn't happen your debt may get out of control. One way of investing in that way, could be to pay for software to be written so you own it, rather than owning a license to use it.
If you buy e.g. an installation of MS Office, then you own merely the right to use it on one computer. Maybe you want to buy it at many sites because it has feature X which OpenOffice doesn't have. Rather than spending the money to buy many installations you could spend it to have it added to OpenOffice. This could have similar short-term cost, but in the long-term you could access this new feature wherever you needed it, without extra cost.
Similar for medical software - you could direct the spending so that you'll get extra features in the short-term and keep paying for them in the long-term. Alternatively you could pay to have it created under GPL license, and in the future you could always get competing bids when it comes to add features to the software, and you could add additional installations without further licensing costs.
...why the poster feels the need to bash the Vatican for saying it
While the statement is not without merit, there were political reasons for making it. The Vatican newspaper didn't just decide to play a party game: Let's try and rank the most liberating inventions for women - it will be so fun. They chose to publish this article on women's day, with the obvious intent to denigrate achievements like women's right to work and their ability to enjoy sex and control the size of their families due to the pill. The Vatican's stance on birth control and the role of women, is one which leads to population growth and poverty. While they may genuinely think of their position as moral - it is seen as amoral and detrimental to humanity by many others.
Also - while birth control is still a political matter in many nations, there is no such debate about outlawing washing machines. Raising this point as part of a discussion about birth control and other women's rights matters, is very much a red herring.
I think this perspective is a little absurd. Sure Britain as a geographical entity was invaded many times. Certainly by the Danes, the Normans, the Saxons the Celts, the Romans. Of course modern Brits are descended not just from the people who were being invaded, but also from the people who did the invading. The complaint about what "they" did is a bit strange, considering. Even if that wasn't the case, it took some invading in order to build the British empire, didn't it? Looking at some of these places which were under British control at some time, like Bombay, Sidney, New York... it's not like these are villages in Cornwall, are they?
In most types of negotiation, announcing that you'll take anything the other side offers is usually a bad strategy. It would remove their incentive to find common ground with you. Sure it would be silly to make demands which they can't possibly fulfill either - that would just terminate the negotiations.
I don't think the negotiating position of the US is all that bad - the US is a lot more powerful militarily, and while the Chinese economy has been growing fast - it's still only about a third of the US'. If the US maintains good relations and coordinates with their allies - like the Europeans and e.g. Japan, South-Korea, Taiwan in Asia - China is completely outclassed, and will be at least for many decades. Most of the powerful and productive nations in the world are democracies and - despite the rivalries - we share a lot of our values. That should be a good basis to deal with a developing nation like China with an outdated system of government.
So really - caving-in to the Chinese is counter-productive, the US can and should negotiate from a position of strength. Bush should have gotten something in return for visiting during the Olympics. Maybe he did - not all diplomatic activities are out in the open, but it was certainly worth something for the Chinese. If we don't make any demands we are are not going to get anything.
Asus is one of the companies, offering this as "Express Gate". There is some promotional stuff here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w41vS3UcZdk Xandros has a business relationship with Asus already (via EeePC), so they might try to offer their product to them as a replacement. As for the hibernate/suspend - this isn't used so much in Europe, where people are more concerned about standby power, so it might be an interesting feature for some other markets, even if it's not seen as attractive in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's be reasonable in our expectation of politicians (even though complaining about them comes more natural) - it's not trivial to come up with large numbers of *sensible* projects to suddenly spend money on. It is a difficult job to make sure the money is not wasted, with all sorts of lobbyist and corrupt officials trying to get a cut somehow. So really - why attack this item out of all the other possibilities?
Some mainboards have a jumper to clear the Flash, IIRC.
Well the only long-term solution I've heard about is this: http://www.deekoo.net/peeves/spam/spammers/premiere/index2.htm Mind you, that's not a legal solution. However if you ever get too much spam, I recommend looking at that site - it sure helps you to relax.
Parallel computing and parallel hardware have been around for decades - not on the desktop, but in the supercomputer area. It's a tough problem to solve efficiently - there are some things which are hard to get around. As an example think of the equation y = SQRT(a*b) - you need two mathematical operations there. It doesn't really help if you have two processors, since you need the result of one operation before you can perform the second. The example isn't very interesting, but essentially you always have this problem - if you rely on the result of the previous steps, then you need to do things in order. You can modify your algorithms so that happens less often, but this is hard work and interferes with your desire to write clean readable code.
However looking at Genesis it seems clear that the focus is on claiming superiority over other religions - particularly sun and moon gods. People at the time were well aware that daylight was connected to the sun. If you already have light, why does god in the story create the sun? Just to emphasize: our god is way better than yours, we don't even need your god for anything, he is just a decoration our god made. That the creation order was nonsensical didn't matter - the important thing was to make this powerful point. I suspect even then people were not taking it literally, but that's speculating.
Well a non-monitoring ISP in Japan is not going to help US customers much. Even if they'd lay a cable from the ISP directly to the user's house - once the cable enters US territory it's under US jurisdiction. I grant you - encryption, proxies etc can help (provided it won't be outlawed again) but that works regardless whether the ISP monitors traffic. Also monitoring is already applied on a large scale - despite that https isn't used much outside of payment transactions, IPSEC is rarely used outside of company networks.
As for the light thing: likely the writers wanted to emphasize that their god was greater than the sun or moon gods which other cultures were worshiping.
As for creationism - it's not some new idea, we all know what it's about. There are no two sides of the aisle in this case, neither creationism research nor magical elf research nor flat earth research deserve to run a masters program. How ludicrous does a proposal have to be before you discard it?
Not really. "Some day" and "the day will come" express an uncertain duration, but unambiguously so - it's readily apparent to any reader that this refers to a not exactly defined period of time in the future. Nobody would interpret these expressions as: "it will take exactly one day". On the other hand the statement "And there was evening and there was morning, one day" refers to a clearly defined duration. How would the writers of Genesis go about making it even more clear what duration they refer to?
Oh yeah, teachers will be so happy to have to argue to kids that their pastor is a liar. Nothing better to appease a bunch of fruitcakes who want to push their religion into science class, but that.
Do you have an example for "it took a day" or a similar phrase actually referring to a period of thousands of years? (Apart from the bible, I mean.) I don't know Hebrew, maybe "yom" could stand for "turn" or "phase" or something like that? The King James Bible is a pretty important milestone though - it does appear that no-one considered translating "yom" as "turn" or "period" in 1611, and there had certainly been a lot of thought spend on bible interpretation in the hundreds of years before it was written. Also Genesis always mentions a morning and an evening - how clear can you possibly be about referring to an actual day?
There's also the issue that solar days couldn't exist before the sun,
Ok, but the duration of a day would have been readily understandable to the writers of Genesis. Also creation of light (in Genesis) precedes the creation of the sun. We can't argue with terms like "solar days" if we don't even accept that the light comes from the sun. Then there is the "firmament" and the claim that there is water above the sky, which we know to be wrong. There is also the claim that the moon provides light which is wrong. There is no way to reconcile all these incorrect claims with what we know now, unless we take it for nothing but an allegory. You could say: "well the people at the time just wouldn't have been able to understand the real process". However if you do that, then you can't take anything about this creation story literally.
Sheesh - does that really need explaining? A degree in apple counting is unnecessary, since anybody can do it without any training. Using the same title for people who have attended a three week course to count apples and people who've actually gained significant knowledge in a complicated field, is cheating.
Maybe you worked hard because you aren't particularly suited to the field you studied?
Phrasing insults as rhetorical questions is a rather cowardly tactic. That science degrees usually take hard work is common knowledge - it's silly and boring to pretend to be unaware of that.
How do you know that a degree in Creationism isn't as difficult as your field of study?
The same way I know that pencil sharpening isn't as difficult to study. It's creationism, it's not like nobody here has heard anything about it. Yes: it's ridiculously easy.
He could sell it on ebay.
The buyer may not feel defrauded at all. Sure if you buy a high-quality item, and you get a cheap replica, then you feel cheated. However what if you buy e.g. a fashionable purse which costs $20 to make, and retails at $4000, for say $50? An item which has been made in the same factory, by the same people, to the same standards as the item which goes to the retailer? Who is loosing there? Not the manufacturer, not the buyer, just the brand owner who wants to charge for his logo.
Their business model is to invest in advertising, ridiculously inflating the prices and creating a demand for the "exclusivity" which relies on that high price. Then they push the costs for dealing with "fakes" to society, impacting legitimate sales on ebay, hassling merchants, tying-up courts with their law suits. I can't say I'm feeling particularly sorry for them.
That is not the point. I have a MSc and I worked hard for it.
Easy to answer: no he won't. What do you expect: miracles?
Saying this as a frontend chip designer - unfortunately what's really important about Intel and AMD is not the processor architecture, but their fabs and their manufacturing technology. That's the major factor controlling on-chip caches, clock speed, power consumption etc. If x86 would die, it would only be replaced by SPARC or PPC if Intel were to decide to go that route.
No. For evolution to work, the animals having that trait must procreate in higher numbers than those without it. This chimp got his balls cut off - that means in the future chimps who are more docile or less capable of planning have a better chance. Historically, in the same way we haven't bred sheep which successfully evade shearing, pigs which figure out how to escape slaughter or dogs which realize they could kill and eat us.
Anyone running a site which takes 8 s or even 15 s just to render, should have a hard look at their site design, though. Particularly Adobe at 9 s for a simple static page, seems really wierd.
Good point. As the article states "The amount of time spent in front of the box was used as a proxy measure of sedentary behaviour, because personal computers and games consoles were not in widespread use at the time (mid 1990s)".
If you buy e.g. an installation of MS Office, then you own merely the right to use it on one computer. Maybe you want to buy it at many sites because it has feature X which OpenOffice doesn't have. Rather than spending the money to buy many installations you could spend it to have it added to OpenOffice. This could have similar short-term cost, but in the long-term you could access this new feature wherever you needed it, without extra cost.
Similar for medical software - you could direct the spending so that you'll get extra features in the short-term and keep paying for them in the long-term. Alternatively you could pay to have it created under GPL license, and in the future you could always get competing bids when it comes to add features to the software, and you could add additional installations without further licensing costs.
While the statement is not without merit, there were political reasons for making it. The Vatican newspaper didn't just decide to play a party game: Let's try and rank the most liberating inventions for women - it will be so fun. They chose to publish this article on women's day, with the obvious intent to denigrate achievements like women's right to work and their ability to enjoy sex and control the size of their families due to the pill. The Vatican's stance on birth control and the role of women, is one which leads to population growth and poverty. While they may genuinely think of their position as moral - it is seen as amoral and detrimental to humanity by many others.
Also - while birth control is still a political matter in many nations, there is no such debate about outlawing washing machines. Raising this point as part of a discussion about birth control and other women's rights matters, is very much a red herring.
I think this perspective is a little absurd. Sure Britain as a geographical entity was invaded many times. Certainly by the Danes, the Normans, the Saxons the Celts, the Romans. Of course modern Brits are descended not just from the people who were being invaded, but also from the people who did the invading. The complaint about what "they" did is a bit strange, considering. Even if that wasn't the case, it took some invading in order to build the British empire, didn't it? Looking at some of these places which were under British control at some time, like Bombay, Sidney, New York ... it's not like these are villages in Cornwall, are they?
I don't think the negotiating position of the US is all that bad - the US is a lot more powerful militarily, and while the Chinese economy has been growing fast - it's still only about a third of the US'. If the US maintains good relations and coordinates with their allies - like the Europeans and e.g. Japan, South-Korea, Taiwan in Asia - China is completely outclassed, and will be at least for many decades. Most of the powerful and productive nations in the world are democracies and - despite the rivalries - we share a lot of our values. That should be a good basis to deal with a developing nation like China with an outdated system of government.
So really - caving-in to the Chinese is counter-productive, the US can and should negotiate from a position of strength. Bush should have gotten something in return for visiting during the Olympics. Maybe he did - not all diplomatic activities are out in the open, but it was certainly worth something for the Chinese. If we don't make any demands we are are not going to get anything.
Asus is one of the companies, offering this as "Express Gate". There is some promotional stuff here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w41vS3UcZdk Xandros has a business relationship with Asus already (via EeePC), so they might try to offer their product to them as a replacement. As for the hibernate/suspend - this isn't used so much in Europe, where people are more concerned about standby power, so it might be an interesting feature for some other markets, even if it's not seen as attractive in the US.