Did you read the original article rather than just skim over it? One of the surprises is that there is a third component in European ancestry. Another surprise is that the blue eyes apparently came with dark skin and the lighter skin colour came with brown eyes.
The third interesting thing is that two of our lineages are very old, but a third contribution came in around 7000 years ago, just at the same time as agriculture. It makes sense, IMO - agriculture meant that this particular group became dominant and thus contributed disproportionately more to the gene pool in a relatively short time.
I did and it is interesting, especially the part where it says that Northern Europeans are more strongly related to the original European hunter gatherers who presumably were the population that absorbed the original eurasian Neandertahl and Densiovian populations. It's gotten me even more interested in getting my DNA analyzed for archaic human ancestry. It would be ever so cool to find out I'm in the high range with 4-5% or more Neanderthal DNA or perhaps even coolest of all, Neandertahl mtDNA.
Because scientists require more than a good story, they require evidence that a good story might be waiting in the wings, and then when they get enough of this evidence together, they start to reconstruct the story.
The reason the ideas above aren't taught has little to do with ego, scientists have huge egos in the sense of wanting to strike virgin ground in the realm of knowledge. If they had access to the evidence, they'd be climbing over each other to be the first to publish. The reason it hasn't happened isn't due to personality, it's due to lack of evidence.
Also, keep in mind that any evidence isn't good evidence. It has to be evidence that differentiates one theory from another, as outstanding claims require outstanding evidence. Likewise, lack of evidence doesn't imply it didn't happen, it's just not something to be considered as we have nothing to back up our statements. Without the proof to back up statements, there would be little difference between science and some forms of science fiction.
They're not 'ideas', there is now actual DNA evidence for the presence of a Native Americans in Europe before Columbus. The same goes for Polynesians visiting America there is enough evidence to warrant further investigation. Polynesians found tiny little islands but missed two ginormous continents? Really? I'm no scientist but I do know enough about navigation to know that this suggestion is just plain stupid. It's a bit of a catch 22, if you are unwilling to investigate anything without evidence than you never find any evidence because you never investigate anything. People like you is the reason we need nutty scientists who go out on a limb. Sometimes they actually discover something that runs contrary to everything their more conservative colleagues held to be unchallengeable truths and often these colleagues are people who dominate a field, i.e. the 'great egos'. My favorite example of this is probably the supposed impossibility of there being Neanderthal DNA in modern humans. There were a number of great scientific egos who dominated the field of paleontology who ended up with egg all over their faces over that one, especially Ian Tattersall. Tattersall never went looking because there was no evidence, Svante Pääbo went and did something that was supposed to be impossible and then he actually went looking for something despite having no evidence and lo and behold he found found it.
In general, there are 4 stages to Islamic conquest.
1) When they are a tiny minority they only want to live, and worship, in peace.
2) Once they are a bigger minority, they start demanding special laws to respect their religion and culture. This is happening in many European nations right now. These special laws may directly oppose fundamental rights in western countries.
3) Once they are a sizable minority: they drop the mask, and the gloves come off. Time to violently overthrow the existing religion and culture. This has been going on throughout Islamic history. This is going on in Thailand right now.
4) Once Muslims are in charge, it is no different than any other mid-east nation.
Even getting to stage 2 is too much for many Americans. Lots of Americans do not want to give up stuff like freedom of speech, or freedom of press, freedom of religion.
You just described the rise of Christianity in the Roman empire.
When has "fact" had anything to do with religious outrage?
Religious outrage, racist outrage, nationalist outrage. They are all equally stupid. I have had a long series of strange discussions with people of all these denominations about the building of a Mosque in my town. The argumentation goes that: "Do you know how many Churches there are in Saudi Arabia? Have you seen what they are doing to Christians in Iraq!?! We must ban mosques immediately to prevent this from happening here before the Moslems rise up and impose Sharia law on all of us!!!". Really? Says I, for one thing our moslems are a small and moderate minority; how are they supposed to impose Sharia law on us (Answer: Uhhhhhhhhmmmmm.... Uhhhh.... I just fear that they just will!). Secondly I find it interesting that you are implying that one can use the stupidity and cruelty of people in other countries to justify doing stupid and cruel things to innocent people in your own country? In that case did you notice what the Serbs did to Moslems in Bosnia? Did you notice what the white patriotic christian knights of the Ku Klux Klan did to African Americans, Latinos and other minorities in the USA? We must ban Christianity immediately!!! Remarkably enough they considered equating all moslems with ISIS and banning Islam to be a reasonable and natural thing to do (even though the local moslem community is just about the most peaceful and law abiding group of people in our country) but they went absolutely apeshit when I applied their own logic to Christianity. It got even funnier when I pointed out that both the Serbs and the Ku Klux Klan are white and perhaps we should ban white people since most of the people involved in this discussion including my self were white. I just find it endlessly fascinating how the minds of these people work. They keep citing the Constitution when it supports their point of view but then they want to ban Moslems from practicing their religion, ban immigration of non-whites or put gay people in jail for offending christian fanatics everywhere by existing the Constitution can apparently be ignored.
Why is it that when a thing like this happens (supposedly), we're directed to the misguided BBC, and to cowardous CNN?
Doesn't Iceland have some kind of geologic society or meteorlogic society that issues reports based on adequate, current, hot-off-the-volcano scientific data?
Why is it that when a thing like this happens (supposedly), we're directed to the misguided BBC, and to cowardous CNN?
Doesn't Iceland have some kind of geologic society or meteorlogic society that issues reports based on adequate, current, hot-off-the-volcano scientific data?
The icelandic met office has a site that tracks seismic activity (read: earthquakes), they have an english website:
http://en.vedur.is/#tab=skjalf...
Oh, you want to be pedantic? Let's be pedantic, then!
Scandinavian languages don't have "umlauts". "Umlaut" is a concept from German, where vowels are modified into different forms and marked with an umlaut mark. Other languages, however, just borrow these typographical forms to represent vowels with similar sounds. However, while German considers the vowels a and ä to be variations on the same letter, Scandinavian languages consider these to be separate letters entirely, and place them differently in alphabetical orderings.
Thus, there is no "umlaut" in Eyjafjallajökull, there is merely an "ö" rather than an "o".
In Icelandic 'o' and 'ö' are fairly subtle variations on the same sound, the difference betwee 'o' and 'ö' is only a matter of moving your tongue about 4-5mm forward. Icelandic is near near-isomorphic with with Ancient Norse to the point where some Icelanders can actually stumble their way through inscriptions transcribed into modern alphabet from rune stones over a thousand years old and many can read 12-13th century manuscripts similarly transcribed to modern alphabet pretty clearly, in fact teenagers in Iceland are sometimes required to read portions of sagas in the original medieval Icelandic in secondary school. You can consider Icelandic as something akin to a modern dialect of Ancient Norse whereas the modern Scandinavian languages on the other hand have evolved very far from the original Ancient Norse. The difference is about the same as between modern English and the language spoken in the UK in the 10-13 century. Come to think of it an Icelander would probably have much better luck reading early medieval English than a modern English person. Try getting a Norwegian, Swede or Dane to read a 13th century Icelandic saga manuscript and you'd not have much luck either.
Oracle's complexity and vendor lock-in is a minus to the extent that if there is *any* other way to solve the problem, including using MS-SQL, Sybase, or even DB2, use the alternative.
My employer has been using AIX for stability reasons for a long time (since the very early 90s). At the moment neither MySQL nor Postgres guarantee AIX ODBC driver support. Only DB2 (obviously), Oracle and Sybase (IIRC) do that so there you are, another reason on to keep dealing with these companies. Whether you use MS-SQL, Sybase, or even DB2 is really irrelevant, they all force a degree of vendor locking, they are expensive and come to think of it, if you want support, MySQL is merely somewhat less expensive than the rest. I will agree that Oracle's pricing is armed robbery but they are not alone. I had a one third party driver vendor ask more money for a MySQL ODBC driver license for AIX (that allowed us to connect to one MySQL instance) than it cost to get a MySQL enterprise license. It was cheaper to migrate to DB2.
Others speculate that he's only going to Moscow in transit to Iceland (which has offered him asylum) or some other place.
AFAIK Iceland has not offered him asylum. The Icelanders just changed to a fiercely right wing government which has already refused to consider asylum unless Snowden actually lands in Reykjavik and hands in an asylum request in person. That does not exactly indicate much enthusiasm for pissing off Obama and the US Republicans. I'd say Snowden is unlikely to receive much sympathy with the current Icelandic Govt. unless the Icelandic population gets together and to forces them to reconsider by protesting or gathering enough names on a petition. Given the size of the country and the close knit nature of Icelandic society it is actually surprisingly easy to get up to 25-30% of the electorate to sign such a petition if you can stir up enough support.
Eh, I'm the complete opposite. My Nexus 7 has almost completely replaced my laptop and phone (Galaxy Nexus) in my home for "general" usage (web browsing, emailing, e-reading, and watching videos). Hell, I only use a laptop at home for gaming and programming now.
I mostly use my iPad for note taking at work, e-mail, games, movies and several hundred e-books and a pile of photos. A tablet won't replace my laptop any time soon. The virtual keyboards are no good for typing, there are no really good office suites, no proper image processing apps, and try coding on a tablet... yeah right...
The WWI Western front is the point of Europe?
That's what you said just then.
Yes, WWI and the Sequel WWII are some of the prime motivators behind the European Union. It has grown far beyond that but the people who originated the EU were partially motivated by the idea of preventing future wars by increasing economic integration to the point where war had become a sport that was to expensive to indulge in. and for what little it seems to be worth to conservative anti EU tossers these days, hundreds of thousands of those reasons that are buried in Flanders, and whom the GP spoke of, are British.
Where's Iceland fit into this?
Iceland exports in excess of 70% of it's manufactured goods to the EU. Iceland has enacted about 75-80% of the laws needed to join the EU and Icelandic politicians have proven them selves to be a bunch of incompetent nepotistic tosspots who cant keep the inflation graphs from looking like a set of sharks teeth. If you want to have a laugh compare the inflation graph for Iceland to that of Germany:
Notice how the German figure hovers between 0 and 5%, now compare it to the Icelandic graph. You would laugh even harder if you could see data from before 1989. Inflation in Iceland since 1944 fluctuated between ~3% to as high as 25-30% and occasionally topped 100%. In 1979, these wankers that make up the Icelandic political class, finally had to index-link loans to inflation to motivate capital owners to start loaning money. What that means is that if your loan carries 6% interest and there is 8% inflation you are effectively paying 14% interests. Now try to imagine what happens when inflation hits 20% and you will understand why Icelanders are so angry they are spitting acid. Joining the EU would force their brainless politicos to... well... behave. And additionally when you export 70% of your manufactured goods to the EU it's kind of dumb to want to have no say in how the EU's inner market evolves which makes me wonder why the British, who depend on the EU for 50% or so of their exports want to leave the EU. It's kind of like robbing yourself of the ability to influence how your country is begin governed by voluntarily relinquishing your right to vote.
You will not know if it will erase your disk until you try to boot it.
It's more like:
If the display on your Fedora19 box is in sleep mode and you know that the Fedora 19 kernel panics once a day because of a poorly written kernel module you cannot know whether it OS has panicked until you wake the display. Until then all you can do is calculate the probability that the kernel has panicked as the sleep time of the display approaches 24 hours. Thus your Fedora 19 box is both in a state of kernel panic and running normally at the same time until you wake the display and 'fix its state'. The interesting thing is what happens if you try to cheat by pinging your Fedora 19 box from your laptop. Assuming you have a perfect network connection you can only tell whether the system is up or not, you cannot tell whether it's lack of response is due to a kernel panic or a segfault in the network daemon. You can only calculate the probability of the lack of response being due to a panic since, on your badly broken Fedora 19 box, panics happen more frequently than segfaults in inetd do. So you get closer to inferring the state of your Fedora 19 box but you cannot be entirely sure by simply pinging it, you need more information but not so much that you fix the state.
AIX? Here's a nickle son, go get yourself a real operating system!
Young man, I'll have you know that I was using UNIX long before Linux was a 115 kB compressed tarball on the funet.fi FTP server.
If you're that old, a nickle should seem like a lot of money!
**Sigh** I'd explain the concept of inflation to you but I don't have the time. I'm busy loading shotgun shells with rock salt so I'll be prepared for the next time Larry Ellison makes the mistake of stepping onto my lawn.
What statement? It looks like an ordinary article to me.
As a fork of a leading open source software system, it is notable for being led by its original developers and triggered by concerns over [the] direction [taken] by an acquiring commercial company Oracle.
It may only be an article but it says all that needs to be said. Oracle bought up MySQL and immediately dropped support for a range of systems that had previously been supported, probably in the hope it would drive scores of customers into the open arms of the Oracle sales team and their extortionate license prices. I now have to migrate several MySQL databases that previously lived a happy life on AIX 5 to something else and MariaDB is a welcome alternative because I'm sure as [Expletive deleted] not going to shell out thousands of $ for overpriced Oracle DBs with a pile of features that I don't need.
Your kid, spending your money . . . . . . should not be the government's problem.
Ah, parents these days . . . and their children . . . most of the time they're somebody else's problem.
Why should predatory business practices be allowed behavior by default and the burden of guarding against them be placed on the consumer? Should real-estate fraud be allowed and should the onus of guarding against it be placed on the consumer? It's kind of convenient to have a police force who sees to it that the occurrence of real-estate fraud is minimized, even hard core free market fanatics admit that much. So if we can do something to crack down on people who have turned exploiting the economic naivete of children into a business model then we should do it. Suckering kids and teens into buying toys and other junk is one thing but some of these in-app game purchases are bordering on downright fraud.
Opec anyone? You know, the gas station you buy at doesn't make anything off the gas, right?
I do agree on the gov't monopolies suck though. It's really just the gov't paying for the infrastructure and then handing it over to a private citizen for free. If we're gonna have socialism just keep is social. Internet is so useful and essential to better living it should be a public utility. Hell, there was just a story on cnn about how the worst crop yields of the last 10 years are better than the best of the last 50; and it was partially attributed to sharing better farming techniques. Communication is good.
Whether or not govt. 'monopolies' suck depends on what you mean by government monopoly. Is it the role of government to run an ISP? I'd say no unless it is to provide coverage to areas where private companies can't be bothered. Infrastructure is a different topic. Where I live we used to have a what you Yanks would call a 'socialist' ISP run by the govt. and this same ISP also owned and ran the infrastructure. They ended up getting caught using the pricing for access to their network infrastructure to make life hard for competitors. Eventually this company was split up into an ISP part that was privatised and the infrastructure part that is still owned by the government and municipalities and it is now relatively easy for small time ISPs to set up shop and compete with the bigger boys. The lesson is that the owner of infrastructure should have no economic ties to those that use it or you'll quickly start to see anti-competitive behaviour unless multiple competing infrastructure companies build their own duplicateinfrastructure which is wasteful and does not entirely solve the problem of anti-competitive activity. I'm fine with the current system we have here where governmnent builds infrastructure and ensures that everybody has truly equal access to it.
Pffft... Stripes? Flames? I covered my PC box with that newfangled paper thin screen material. Now I have ANIMATED flames, or anything else I want (including topless dancers). I even installed cameras in the PC box and now, when I leave the apartment, the computer goes into adaptive camouflage mode and melds into the furniture rendering it invisible to burglars. If they still find it, my fallback is a weapons grade laser. Mind you... that thing still has a few bugs, it fried the neighbours cat as it walked past the living-room window the other day.
Lol, pfft. I was shopping recently in Akihabara. Just to pick a random example, in one shop the biggest available SSD was 256MB. The biggest real disk was 3TB.
256 *megabytes*? Are you kidding me?
SSD isn't going to take over from real disks unless and until they can make it bigger AND cheaper, and since real disks keep getting bigger, that doesn't look likely to happen any time soon.
Really? I've had SSDs in my machines for the last 3 years and I've never cast a nostalgic backward glance. My current laptop drive is a 480Gb SSD and I'm not going back to mechanical any time soon. If you really think mechanical disks are going to trump SSDs you should get together with the people that told me 15-20 years ago that digital photography would never push film cameras off the stage. I dunno about what pros have done in terms of digital vs film cameras but It's been a loooooooooooooooooooong time since I last saw a person with a film camera.
(not shedding any tears)
Whilst you're welcome to your own opinions, I personally won't be storing anything of any importance on an SSD until not only are they a viable option cost-wise cf. real disks, but also there's some hope of recovering data off them when they fail. Real disks are well-understood in terms of data-recovery, whereas all SSDs store data in extremely-proprietary ways.
Ditto:-) If data recovery after a catastrophic hard drive failure is your preferred backup strategy they you have a point. Myself I do regular backups to external storage so It's not an issue for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you read the original article rather than just skim over it? One of the surprises is that there is a third component in European ancestry. Another surprise is that the blue eyes apparently came with dark skin and the lighter skin colour came with brown eyes.
The third interesting thing is that two of our lineages are very old, but a third contribution came in around 7000 years ago, just at the same time as agriculture. It makes sense, IMO - agriculture meant that this particular group became dominant and thus contributed disproportionately more to the gene pool in a relatively short time.
I did and it is interesting, especially the part where it says that Northern Europeans are more strongly related to the original European hunter gatherers who presumably were the population that absorbed the original eurasian Neandertahl and Densiovian populations. It's gotten me even more interested in getting my DNA analyzed for archaic human ancestry. It would be ever so cool to find out I'm in the high range with 4-5% or more Neanderthal DNA or perhaps even coolest of all, Neandertahl mtDNA.
Because scientists require more than a good story, they require evidence that a good story might be waiting in the wings, and then when they get enough of this evidence together, they start to reconstruct the story.
The reason the ideas above aren't taught has little to do with ego, scientists have huge egos in the sense of wanting to strike virgin ground in the realm of knowledge. If they had access to the evidence, they'd be climbing over each other to be the first to publish. The reason it hasn't happened isn't due to personality, it's due to lack of evidence.
Also, keep in mind that any evidence isn't good evidence. It has to be evidence that differentiates one theory from another, as outstanding claims require outstanding evidence. Likewise, lack of evidence doesn't imply it didn't happen, it's just not something to be considered as we have nothing to back up our statements. Without the proof to back up statements, there would be little difference between science and some forms of science fiction.
They're not 'ideas', there is now actual DNA evidence for the presence of a Native Americans in Europe before Columbus. The same goes for Polynesians visiting America there is enough evidence to warrant further investigation. Polynesians found tiny little islands but missed two ginormous continents? Really? I'm no scientist but I do know enough about navigation to know that this suggestion is just plain stupid. It's a bit of a catch 22, if you are unwilling to investigate anything without evidence than you never find any evidence because you never investigate anything. People like you is the reason we need nutty scientists who go out on a limb. Sometimes they actually discover something that runs contrary to everything their more conservative colleagues held to be unchallengeable truths and often these colleagues are people who dominate a field, i.e. the 'great egos'. My favorite example of this is probably the supposed impossibility of there being Neanderthal DNA in modern humans. There were a number of great scientific egos who dominated the field of paleontology who ended up with egg all over their faces over that one, especially Ian Tattersall. Tattersall never went looking because there was no evidence, Svante Pääbo went and did something that was supposed to be impossible and then he actually went looking for something despite having no evidence and lo and behold he found found it.
In general, there are 4 stages to Islamic conquest.
1) When they are a tiny minority they only want to live, and worship, in peace.
2) Once they are a bigger minority, they start demanding special laws to respect their religion and culture. This is happening in many European nations right now. These special laws may directly oppose fundamental rights in western countries.
3) Once they are a sizable minority: they drop the mask, and the gloves come off. Time to violently overthrow the existing religion and culture. This has been going on throughout Islamic history. This is going on in Thailand right now.
4) Once Muslims are in charge, it is no different than any other mid-east nation.
Even getting to stage 2 is too much for many Americans. Lots of Americans do not want to give up stuff like freedom of speech, or freedom of press, freedom of religion.
You just described the rise of Christianity in the Roman empire.
When has "fact" had anything to do with religious outrage?
Religious outrage, racist outrage, nationalist outrage. They are all equally stupid. I have had a long series of strange discussions with people of all these denominations about the building of a Mosque in my town. The argumentation goes that: "Do you know how many Churches there are in Saudi Arabia? Have you seen what they are doing to Christians in Iraq!?! We must ban mosques immediately to prevent this from happening here before the Moslems rise up and impose Sharia law on all of us!!!". Really? Says I, for one thing our moslems are a small and moderate minority; how are they supposed to impose Sharia law on us (Answer: Uhhhhhhhhmmmmm.... Uhhhh.... I just fear that they just will!). Secondly I find it interesting that you are implying that one can use the stupidity and cruelty of people in other countries to justify doing stupid and cruel things to innocent people in your own country? In that case did you notice what the Serbs did to Moslems in Bosnia? Did you notice what the white patriotic christian knights of the Ku Klux Klan did to African Americans, Latinos and other minorities in the USA? We must ban Christianity immediately!!! Remarkably enough they considered equating all moslems with ISIS and banning Islam to be a reasonable and natural thing to do (even though the local moslem community is just about the most peaceful and law abiding group of people in our country) but they went absolutely apeshit when I applied their own logic to Christianity. It got even funnier when I pointed out that both the Serbs and the Ku Klux Klan are white and perhaps we should ban white people since most of the people involved in this discussion including my self were white. I just find it endlessly fascinating how the minds of these people work. They keep citing the Constitution when it supports their point of view but then they want to ban Moslems from practicing their religion, ban immigration of non-whites or put gay people in jail for offending christian fanatics everywhere by existing the Constitution can apparently be ignored.
Why is it that when a thing like this happens (supposedly), we're directed to the misguided BBC, and to cowardous CNN? Doesn't Iceland have some kind of geologic society or meteorlogic society that issues reports based on adequate, current, hot-off-the-volcano scientific data?
The icelandic met office has a site that tracks seismic activity (read: earthquakes), they have an english website: http://en.vedur.is/#tab=skjalf... The University of Iceland's institute of earth sciences has a news page in english: http://earthice.hi.is/bardarbu... They have also set up a number of webcams: http://www.livefromiceland.is/... (Vaðalda, north of Vatnajökull, towards Bárðabunga) http://vedur2.mogt.is/grimsfja... (Grímsfjall) http://vedur2.mogt.is/kverkfjo... (Kverkfjöll) Not very spectacular sites but the content is a bit better than most of the bullshit you are likely to get from the corporate media.
There is now also a YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Why is it that when a thing like this happens (supposedly), we're directed to the misguided BBC, and to cowardous CNN? Doesn't Iceland have some kind of geologic society or meteorlogic society that issues reports based on adequate, current, hot-off-the-volcano scientific data?
The icelandic met office has a site that tracks seismic activity (read: earthquakes), they have an english website: http://en.vedur.is/#tab=skjalf...
The University of Iceland's institute of earth sciences has a news page in english: http://earthice.hi.is/bardarbu...
They have also set up a number of webcams:
http://www.livefromiceland.is/... (Vaðalda, north of Vatnajökull, towards Bárðabunga)
http://vedur2.mogt.is/grimsfja... (Grímsfjall)
http://vedur2.mogt.is/kverkfjo... (Kverkfjöll)
Not very spectacular sites but the content is a bit better than most of the bullshit you are likely to get from the corporate media.
At least you can pronounce Bardarbunga.
It is a composite word: Bárður - A man's name. Bunga - In this context it means mountain or peak. So in English: "Bárður's Peak"
No shit....
Oh, you want to be pedantic? Let's be pedantic, then!
Scandinavian languages don't have "umlauts". "Umlaut" is a concept from German, where vowels are modified into different forms and marked with an umlaut mark. Other languages, however, just borrow these typographical forms to represent vowels with similar sounds. However, while German considers the vowels a and ä to be variations on the same letter, Scandinavian languages consider these to be separate letters entirely, and place them differently in alphabetical orderings.
Thus, there is no "umlaut" in Eyjafjallajökull, there is merely an "ö" rather than an "o".
In Icelandic 'o' and 'ö' are fairly subtle variations on the same sound, the difference betwee 'o' and 'ö' is only a matter of moving your tongue about 4-5mm forward. Icelandic is near near-isomorphic with with Ancient Norse to the point where some Icelanders can actually stumble their way through inscriptions transcribed into modern alphabet from rune stones over a thousand years old and many can read 12-13th century manuscripts similarly transcribed to modern alphabet pretty clearly, in fact teenagers in Iceland are sometimes required to read portions of sagas in the original medieval Icelandic in secondary school. You can consider Icelandic as something akin to a modern dialect of Ancient Norse whereas the modern Scandinavian languages on the other hand have evolved very far from the original Ancient Norse. The difference is about the same as between modern English and the language spoken in the UK in the 10-13 century. Come to think of it an Icelander would probably have much better luck reading early medieval English than a modern English person. Try getting a Norwegian, Swede or Dane to read a 13th century Icelandic saga manuscript and you'd not have much luck either.
I'm leaving for Tokyo later this month. At least is easier to pronounce than Eyjafjallajokull.
Eyjafjallajökull let's not forget the umlaut...
Oracle's complexity and vendor lock-in is a minus to the extent that if there is *any* other way to solve the problem, including using MS-SQL, Sybase, or even DB2, use the alternative.
My employer has been using AIX for stability reasons for a long time (since the very early 90s). At the moment neither MySQL nor Postgres guarantee AIX ODBC driver support. Only DB2 (obviously), Oracle and Sybase (IIRC) do that so there you are, another reason on to keep dealing with these companies. Whether you use MS-SQL, Sybase, or even DB2 is really irrelevant, they all force a degree of vendor locking, they are expensive and come to think of it, if you want support, MySQL is merely somewhat less expensive than the rest. I will agree that Oracle's pricing is armed robbery but they are not alone. I had a one third party driver vendor ask more money for a MySQL ODBC driver license for AIX (that allowed us to connect to one MySQL instance) than it cost to get a MySQL enterprise license. It was cheaper to migrate to DB2.
Others speculate that he's only going to Moscow in transit to Iceland (which has offered him asylum) or some other place.
AFAIK Iceland has not offered him asylum. The Icelanders just changed to a fiercely right wing government which has already refused to consider asylum unless Snowden actually lands in Reykjavik and hands in an asylum request in person. That does not exactly indicate much enthusiasm for pissing off Obama and the US Republicans. I'd say Snowden is unlikely to receive much sympathy with the current Icelandic Govt. unless the Icelandic population gets together and to forces them to reconsider by protesting or gathering enough names on a petition. Given the size of the country and the close knit nature of Icelandic society it is actually surprisingly easy to get up to 25-30% of the electorate to sign such a petition if you can stir up enough support.
Eh, I'm the complete opposite. My Nexus 7 has almost completely replaced my laptop and phone (Galaxy Nexus) in my home for "general" usage (web browsing, emailing, e-reading, and watching videos). Hell, I only use a laptop at home for gaming and programming now.
I mostly use my iPad for note taking at work, e-mail, games, movies and several hundred e-books and a pile of photos. A tablet won't replace my laptop any time soon. The virtual keyboards are no good for typing, there are no really good office suites, no proper image processing apps, and try coding on a tablet... yeah right...
The WWI Western front is the point of Europe? That's what you said just then.
Yes, WWI and the Sequel WWII are some of the prime motivators behind the European Union. It has grown far beyond that but the people who originated the EU were partially motivated by the idea of preventing future wars by increasing economic integration to the point where war had become a sport that was to expensive to indulge in. and for what little it seems to be worth to conservative anti EU tossers these days, hundreds of thousands of those reasons that are buried in Flanders, and whom the GP spoke of, are British.
Where's Iceland fit into this?
Iceland exports in excess of 70% of it's manufactured goods to the EU. Iceland has enacted about 75-80% of the laws needed to join the EU and Icelandic politicians have proven them selves to be a bunch of incompetent nepotistic tosspots who cant keep the inflation graphs from looking like a set of sharks teeth. If you want to have a laugh compare the inflation graph for Iceland to that of Germany:
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/iceland/inflation-cpi
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/germany/inflation-cpi
Notice how the German figure hovers between 0 and 5%, now compare it to the Icelandic graph. You would laugh even harder if you could see data from before 1989. Inflation in Iceland since 1944 fluctuated between ~3% to as high as 25-30% and occasionally topped 100%. In 1979, these wankers that make up the Icelandic political class, finally had to index-link loans to inflation to motivate capital owners to start loaning money. What that means is that if your loan carries 6% interest and there is 8% inflation you are effectively paying 14% interests. Now try to imagine what happens when inflation hits 20% and you will understand why Icelanders are so angry they are spitting acid. Joining the EU would force their brainless politicos to... well... behave. And additionally when you export 70% of your manufactured goods to the EU it's kind of dumb to want to have no say in how the EU's inner market evolves which makes me wonder why the British, who depend on the EU for 50% or so of their exports want to leave the EU. It's kind of like robbing yourself of the ability to influence how your country is begin governed by voluntarily relinquishing your right to vote.
Citation needed. What other counties demand access to tourists' e-mail?
North Korea?
That was awesome. But not until I read it.
Right, until then it sucked and was awesome simultaneously.
You will not know if it will erase your disk until you try to boot it.
It's more like:
If the display on your Fedora19 box is in sleep mode and you know that the Fedora 19 kernel panics once a day because of a poorly written kernel module you cannot know whether it OS has panicked until you wake the display. Until then all you can do is calculate the probability that the kernel has panicked as the sleep time of the display approaches 24 hours. Thus your Fedora 19 box is both in a state of kernel panic and running normally at the same time until you wake the display and 'fix its state'. The interesting thing is what happens if you try to cheat by pinging your Fedora 19 box from your laptop. Assuming you have a perfect network connection you can only tell whether the system is up or not, you cannot tell whether it's lack of response is due to a kernel panic or a segfault in the network daemon. You can only calculate the probability of the lack of response being due to a panic since, on your badly broken Fedora 19 box, panics happen more frequently than segfaults in inetd do. So you get closer to inferring the state of your Fedora 19 box but you cannot be entirely sure by simply pinging it, you need more information but not so much that you fix the state.
AIX? Here's a nickle son, go get yourself a real operating system!
Young man, I'll have you know that I was using UNIX long before Linux was a 115 kB compressed tarball on the funet.fi FTP server.
If you're that old, a nickle should seem like a lot of money!
**Sigh** I'd explain the concept of inflation to you but I don't have the time. I'm busy loading shotgun shells with rock salt so I'll be prepared for the next time Larry Ellison makes the mistake of stepping onto my lawn.
AIX? Here's a nickle son, go get yourself a real operating system!
Young man, I'll have you know that I was using UNIX long before Linux was a 115 kB compressed tarball on the funet.fi FTP server.
"Oracle may screw MySQL".
Is there a reason for this other than ifs, buts and maybes?
One definition of madness is to try the same thing again and again and keep expecting different results. It's Oracle. You will get screwed.
Amen!
What statement? It looks like an ordinary article to me.
As a fork of a leading open source software system, it is notable for being led by its original developers and triggered by concerns over [the] direction [taken] by an acquiring commercial company Oracle.
It may only be an article but it says all that needs to be said. Oracle bought up MySQL and immediately dropped support for a range of systems that had previously been supported, probably in the hope it would drive scores of customers into the open arms of the Oracle sales team and their extortionate license prices. I now have to migrate several MySQL databases that previously lived a happy life on AIX 5 to something else and MariaDB is a welcome alternative because I'm sure as [Expletive deleted] not going to shell out thousands of $ for overpriced Oracle DBs with a pile of features that I don't need.
Your kid, spending your money . . . . . . should not be the government's problem.
Ah, parents these days . . . and their children . . . most of the time they're somebody else's problem.
Why should predatory business practices be allowed behavior by default and the burden of guarding against them be placed on the consumer? Should real-estate fraud be allowed and should the onus of guarding against it be placed on the consumer? It's kind of convenient to have a police force who sees to it that the occurrence of real-estate fraud is minimized, even hard core free market fanatics admit that much. So if we can do something to crack down on people who have turned exploiting the economic naivete of children into a business model then we should do it. Suckering kids and teens into buying toys and other junk is one thing but some of these in-app game purchases are bordering on downright fraud.
Opec anyone? You know, the gas station you buy at doesn't make anything off the gas, right? I do agree on the gov't monopolies suck though. It's really just the gov't paying for the infrastructure and then handing it over to a private citizen for free. If we're gonna have socialism just keep is social. Internet is so useful and essential to better living it should be a public utility. Hell, there was just a story on cnn about how the worst crop yields of the last 10 years are better than the best of the last 50; and it was partially attributed to sharing better farming techniques. Communication is good.
Whether or not govt. 'monopolies' suck depends on what you mean by government monopoly. Is it the role of government to run an ISP? I'd say no unless it is to provide coverage to areas where private companies can't be bothered. Infrastructure is a different topic. Where I live we used to have a what you Yanks would call a 'socialist' ISP run by the govt. and this same ISP also owned and ran the infrastructure. They ended up getting caught using the pricing for access to their network infrastructure to make life hard for competitors. Eventually this company was split up into an ISP part that was privatised and the infrastructure part that is still owned by the government and municipalities and it is now relatively easy for small time ISPs to set up shop and compete with the bigger boys. The lesson is that the owner of infrastructure should have no economic ties to those that use it or you'll quickly start to see anti-competitive behaviour unless multiple competing infrastructure companies build their own duplicateinfrastructure which is wasteful and does not entirely solve the problem of anti-competitive activity. I'm fine with the current system we have here where governmnent builds infrastructure and ensures that everybody has truly equal access to it.
Stripes? Stripes!!! We don't need no stinking stripes. We need FLAMES!!!! http://blog.cardomain.com/2008/10/17/pro-street-pi-1/ ...and a blower...
Pffft... Stripes? Flames? I covered my PC box with that newfangled paper thin screen material. Now I have ANIMATED flames, or anything else I want (including topless dancers). I even installed cameras in the PC box and now, when I leave the apartment, the computer goes into adaptive camouflage mode and melds into the furniture rendering it invisible to burglars. If they still find it, my fallback is a weapons grade laser. Mind you... that thing still has a few bugs, it fried the neighbours cat as it walked past the living-room window the other day.
mechanical disks go the way of the dodo
Lol, pfft. I was shopping recently in Akihabara. Just to pick a random example, in one shop the biggest available SSD was 256MB. The biggest real disk was 3TB.
256 *megabytes*? Are you kidding me?
SSD isn't going to take over from real disks unless and until they can make it bigger AND cheaper, and since real disks keep getting bigger, that doesn't look likely to happen any time soon.
Really? I've had SSDs in my machines for the last 3 years and I've never cast a nostalgic backward glance. My current laptop drive is a 480Gb SSD and I'm not going back to mechanical any time soon. If you really think mechanical disks are going to trump SSDs you should get together with the people that told me 15-20 years ago that digital photography would never push film cameras off the stage. I dunno about what pros have done in terms of digital vs film cameras but It's been a loooooooooooooooooooong time since I last saw a person with a film camera.
(not shedding any tears)
Whilst you're welcome to your own opinions, I personally won't be storing anything of any importance on an SSD until not only are they a viable option cost-wise cf. real disks, but also there's some hope of recovering data off them when they fail. Real disks are well-understood in terms of data-recovery, whereas all SSDs store data in extremely-proprietary ways.
Ditto :-) If data recovery after a catastrophic hard drive failure is your preferred backup strategy they you have a point. Myself I do regular backups to external storage so It's not an issue for me.