Ultimately though the court was persuaded that even if the statement was true, it was made with "actual malice." The relevant Mass. law already has an exception built into defamation law that says a true statement can still be libelous if it is made with "actual malice," and they concluded in this case that the statement was made with such intent.
Not quite, unless I drastically misread. As I understand it, the original judge had dismissed the libel claim of the suit before the case even made it to trial, because "truth is an absolute defense to a defamation action". Presumably this happened as a result of a Motion for Summary Judgment filed by Staples. The Circuit Court did not decide whether or not there was actual malice. They merely decided that the original judge was wrong to dismiss the claim outright- the plaintiff may still have a valid claim if he can demonstrate "actual malice". The plaintiff still has to hock his case to a jury to make a decision.
The first time you sync one of the new iPod Shuffles with iTunes, Apple will install software on your Mac or PC that makes the voice feature possible.
I'd be curious to see how accurate that statement actually is. "Apple Mobile Device Support", which as far as I can tell is only needed for iPhone or iPod Touch, is installed automatically with iTunes. Sure enough, I just checked in Apple Software Update, and the new version "Supports syncing with iPod shuffle (3rd generation)." If Apple insists on installing half a dozen other unrelated or semi-related software packages with iTunes, it would be nice if they would provide an interface to only install (or update) the ones that you actually want. At the very least, I'd appreciate it if the iTunes installer would recognize when certain components aren't installed so I wouldn't have to uninstall Bonjour every single time I upgrade. (Why anyone ever thought it would be a good idea for system level network autoconfiguration and application level sharing to be handled by the same program in the first place is beyond me. The only thing I find more baffling is that anyone else in the world thought it would be a good idea to follow their example. avahi, I'm looking at you...)
I generally can't stand them either, but the term mashup hardly does justice to what this guy has done. The level of talent and work that went into this (at least in video and audio editing even if you're not impressed by the composition itself) is a far, far cry from somebody singing their own vocals over the top of an old song.
That said, the comparison to Elvis is completely ridiculous. Elvis at least performed his own songs and so his success was due in large part to his own ability to perform. While this guy may be a talented editor, the music can only ever be as good as his source material.
The whole bit you quoted about SQLite was about optimization, not correctness.
the KDE and Gnome developers would be OK using the current file structure to save data so long as they had bothered to call fsync().
What emacs (and very sophisticated, careful application writers) will do is this:
3.a) open and read file ~/.kde/foo/bar/baz 3.b) fd = open("~/.kde/foo/bar/baz.new", O_WRONLY|O_TRUNC|O_CREAT) 3.c) write(fd, buf-of-new-contents-of-file, size-of-new-contents-of-file) 3.d) fsync(fd) --- and check the error return from the fsync 3.e) close(fd) 3.f) rename("~/.kde/foo/bar/baz", "~/.kde/foo/bar/baz~") --- this is optional 3.g) rename("~/.kde/foo/bar/baz.new", "~/.kde/foo/bar/baz")
The fact that series (1) and (2) works at all is an accident. Ext3 in its default configuration happens to have the property that 5 seconds after (1) and (2) completes, the data is safely on disk. (3) is the ***only*** thing which is guaranteed not to lose data. For example, if you are using laptop mode, the 5 seconds is extended to 30 seconds.
The problem is that the KDE developers were skipping step "d", presumably because they felt it slowed down the application too much. Fortunately(?) for them, with ext3 in its default configuration, it happened to not matter too much that they were skipping an important step.
The part you quoted was merely discussing a potential way to store lots of isolated bits of data without the overhead of calling fsync() constantly.
It's not that it's too much effort to follow a show that requires you to watch every episode, it's too much time. Right now I my wife and I watch most of my TV either online or through NetFlix. Online we almost exclusively watch Late Night talk shows or cartoons like The Simpsons and Family Guy. We don't watch it on any particular schedule - we just pull something random up every couple of nights when we're sitting around for a bit after our little one has gone to sleep. When we do go to visit family with cable, and we have any time to watch TV, it's almost always TLC for my wife and Discovery for me.
Shows that actually require you to catch every episode are the exclusive domain of NetFlix, because we can wait until a whole season comes out on DVD and then watch it in a night or two in place of a movie. I loved Firefly, but even if Fox hadn't screwed it up, I'm not sure I would have ever watched it on TV. The problem with this method is that I have to hope that there are enough people out there watching a new show when it does air that it even makes it to the DVD stage.
I enjoy entertainment that makes me think, but TV is not my sole (or even primary) source of entertainment. If it's going to require the patience and commitment to track down every episode when it airs and watch them all in order -or pay money for a machine to do it for me- forget it. I have more than enough other things in my life to spend my time on.
"Suburbanization" is probably more of a problem than urbanization. In a true urban setting, the average person will get more than enough exercise just walking from place to place because it's the most efficient way to get around. The suburban mindset that you can't go more than a half a block without getting in your car is a much bigger problem. In a big city you would probably never drive less than a half mile because you may end up parking farther away from where you're going than you started. When my wife and I lived in the city, we often laughed at the fact that we walked farther to get on the train (less than a half mile, so not even that far) than her mom drove to work every day. Since we've moved to a more suburban area we've found that our typical daily activity has dropped a fair amount from what it used to be even without any significant change of lifestyle.
I strongly disagree. JavaScript is a great language - in fact I think it is one of the best dynamic languages out there. The biggest problem is that 95% of the people who program JavaScript never bother to figure out the right way to use the language. I have heard people who had worked for years programming in JavaScript (actually JScript) claim that the language does not support inheritance, which could not be more untrue. As Douglas Crockford stated in a talk titled "JavaScript: The Good Parts":
I began programming JavaScript the same way everybody else began programming JavaScript: I didn't learn it. Just tried to figure it out by trial and error. It was like "There's not enough here to be worth having to learn it. I'll just fumble around with it." That's not true of any other language. Every other language that I've ever attempted, I would learn it - I would learn it deep and I would learn it good. JavaScript is the only language I've ever encountered where "I should be able to fake it."
I don't know why JavaScript has that aspect about it, but I find that's pretty much universal. Most of the people who start using JavaScript really don't bother to learn it. But they expect it to work anyway, and often they are disappointed when it doesn't work the way they thought it should, when they have no reason to expect that it should work the way they thought it should.
If people would actually bother to learn the language (and could be convinced to give up the notion that you can't do OO properly without classes) you'd probably hear a lot less hatred for it.
Also, adding other support for other languages wouldn't do anything to address the biggest difficulty in writing code that runs in a browser, which is the incompatibilities between the different browsers' DOM and CSS implementations.
It is interesting the while javascript is being more and more heavily used, it is in a way like development tools have been reset 10 years.
It depends what kind of development you are used to. If you come from a background in C++ / Java / C#, then I'm sure it seems like quite a step back. But if your primary experience has been in Perl / PHP / Ruby, then it's not really too much different. In fact, I think that JavaScript is actually quite a step up from debugging Perl or PHP. (I have very little experience with Python or Ruby, so I can't make any comparison there.) I've been working JavaScript and PHP (and to a lesser extent ASP and Perl) for 10 years now, and I've always been happy just using ViM. ViM's autocompletion isn't on the level of IntelliSense, but most of the time, it is sufficient just to look for similar strings in the file I am working, because typically I'm just trying to complete a variable that I have almost always declared or used previously. At one point I went in and configured "omnicompletion" to be aware of all the JavaScript libraries that I was using at the time, but I didn't find it to be all that much more helpful.
I've not typically had too much trouble hunting down syntax errors. Running the code is just a quick as compiling in another language, and as long as you aren't trying to debug in Internet Explorer, the errors aren't all that cryptic. The only syntax error that I remember ever having to spend a lot of time hunting down, or helping other coworkers hunt down (At my last company, we had about 30 developers whose primary job was JavaScript programming - we used it as a server side language as well) is having a trailing comma in an inline array.
var blah = [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ];
It may look obvious when it's on one line like that, but if you split it up over multiple lines it can be really hard to spot - especially when you start rearranging the items in the array or commenting some of them out. The only reason that this is so hard to track down compared to any other syntax error is that Internet Explorer seems to be the only browser that cares. The rest will happily ignore the trailing comma and do what you mean. And since Internet Explorer gives you completely useless information in its Script Error dialogs, and won't even tell you what JavaScript file the error is in, it can take a lot of time figuring out where the error is. (Supposedly, Microsoft fixed the useless error messages in IE 7. It's been a little while now since I've had to do serious JavaScript debugging, but I seem to remember that they were only a slight improvement.) It got a little bit easier to track down once we realized that if you are getting a syntax error that only appears in IE, this is almost certainly the cause.
My bigger beef with JavaScript is that they used the same operator for concatenation and addition. Maybe you can get away with this in a static language that will throw a compiler error when you try to add a sting to an integer, but in a dynamic language it is a real source of confusion. It's way too easy to end up with 10 + 1 == 101. This is a much harder error to spot than a syntax error because you never get a warning. If they had just added a separate operator for concatenation, like virtually every other dynamic language (and some static languages) the whole problem could have been avoided.
Not really, because these people are still fixing a closed source software.
It's more an example of "Big Software Companies don't care (as much as they should) about security." Adobe could have a fix out just as quickly, but they won't accept a fix that works by disabling the (mis)feature entirely. If they really cared about security, they wouldn't have added a scripting language in the first place - you'd think maybe they would have paid attention and learned their lesson from the whole Word Macro Virus mess. Apparently the only thing they learned was that poorly thought out features sell better then security.
I think the best argument that you could use this to justify is that "Companies care more about money than about their customers," which is still a useful in favor of Open Source when talking about public institutions, but not necessarily for the same reasons.
Because self-signed certificates are bad for a number of reasons
Self signed certs (or rather, something that is basically identical in practice) work well enough for SSH, so they must have some value. I don't hear any clamoring for a certification agency for SSH keys.
You would have to read the certificate itself, but you wouldn't really have to know that much about the certificate that you are expecting... If you think you are going to secure.paypal.com, and the name on the cert says secure.paypal.com/any-random-collection-of-characters-regardless-of-whether-it-looks-like-a-legit-url.evil.com, you should probably be a little suspicious.
Really, the solution to this is same same to every other "attack" on SSL - Type the URL into the address bar yourself, or click on a bookmark. You just have to pay a little bit more attention when you do it than you used to. The real problem is the people who don't understand why they should care. When the attack on Google was announced a while back, I made my wife change her account settings to only use secure pages, and she made the snide remark, "Oh, No! somebody could have gotten into my email! Oh dear!" I tried to explain to her why she should care, but eventually just gave up and told her it didn't matter whether or not she cared, I was still going to do my best to make sure it didn't happen.
And if you really want to increase enforcement, then stick a cop, not a camera, on every corner.
You've apparently never had any meaningful interaction with the Chicago Police Department. I fail to see how this would help things. You heard about the large group of CPD / Cook County Sheriffs that were recently arrested in an FBI corruption probe? The ones that aren't power crazed or blatantly corrupt seem to just not care.
I'm sure there are some good cops in the city (although in the 8 years I lived there I don't remember ever encountering any, or meeting anyone who had) but if there are, they aren't in the right neighborhoods to make a difference.
Apparently he read the links better than you. They are cooling the incoming air, but they aren't liquefying it. According one of the links, systems like you describe do exist, but typically require too much fuel to be practical. In "air breathing" mode it does appear to be a glorified scramjet.
Either way, he is correct; it is a significantly more complex engine than the scramjets that have been uder development for some time now, and it's cost us a heck of a lot more than a million dollars to get to where we are now on that front.
When it comes down to it, "experience" is really utter bullshit that we tolerate only because there are no objective ways to measure actual ability, which is what we really care about. And using subjective measurements of ability are problematic for two reasons: First, too many people can BS their way past them, and second, they open you up to liability for discrimination in hiring (or firing).
So, yes, experience will only get you so far. At some point, you have to actually be good (or good enough) at what you do. More importantly, you have to work for somebody who needs the ability you have, and that actually cares about ability rather than treating employees like identical cogs in a machine.
This reasoning is suspect because, aside from global warming effects, green house gas emissions aren't very harmful.
Well, there is the fact that most greenhouse gases come from burning things that we have ample motivation to phase out anyway, such as petroleum (limited supply, politically unstable suppliers) or coal (dangerous to mine, dirty to burn). Most of the sensible solutions to global warming - renewable energy, energy conservation, cleaner industry, reduction of dependence on fossil fuels, etc. - have myriad reasons to adopt them regardless of your beliefs about global warming. And the more extreme solutions, in my opinion, should be avoided because our tendency to take actions that have a dramatic effect on the environment without understanding all of the consequences is what got us into this mess to begin with.
The implicit assumption behind radio and carbon dating is that the mixture of the things being sampled is constant and that time itself moves in some continuous fashion.
That was the original assumption behind Carbon dating, however, we now know that the first assumption, at least, is not completely accurate. We know that the amount of atmospheric carbon has fluctuated throughout history. That is why scientists now use "Calibrated Carbon dates", which take these fluctuations into account. Dates up to about 6000 years ago have been calibrated using tree rings, and there are other techniques that have been used to calibrate dates back as far as 13,000 years. If anything the typical result has been that we have learned things were older than previously thought. It is now believed that an old (uncalibrated) radio carbon date of 9000BC actually corresponds to a "real" (calibrated) date of 11000BC.
As far as your other assumption, well, if that turns out to be false, we have much bigger problems than radio dating.
Of course, there have been other problems with radio carbon dating in the past as well. One big problem historically was that a fairly large sample was needed to get an accurate date, so scientists would measure ages of small things like seeds indirectly by measuring the carbon in e.g. a large piece of charcoal that was found at the same site. Obviously this was prone to problems, because that charcoal could have come from a forest fire thousands of years earlier. However, with "modern" techniques (i.e. as of the 1980's), indirect measurement is no longer really an issue, because scientists can accurately measure the carbon ratios even in very small samples using mass spectrometry.
no attorney I've ever met will spend billable time making changes to any agreement unless the client asks for a change
That depends on the arrangement between the attorney and the "client". In a typical situation, you are correct. But if the lawyer is actually a salaried employee, then sometimes they have to sit around and find things to do to make their employer feel like their getting their money's worth by keeping them on salary. And although I haven't run into it personally, I believe there are some companies out their that employ lawyers by way of retainer agreements that would give the lawyers an incentive to use up a certain number of billable hours every month.
OK, I know I haven't followed baseball in a long time, but I used to live right down the street from them. When did they stop being the "California Angels"? And how does any team end up with two cities in their name. That's just plain dumb.
If you read the article, the accused judges shut down the original county run detention center, and argued that their only remaining option was to use the newly built private prison. It sounds as though it's doubtful that the commercial center would exist at all if it wasn't for the actions of these men. So while I agree with you that paying them in a way that benefits the operator for in increased number of convictions is not a good thing, I don't think that was the only problem here.
If I put diesel fuel in my unleaded engine, what gives my car the right to stop the engine functioning? Just because the two may appear compatible doesn't mean they are...
it appears they've gone out of their way to make sure you can only run a particular version of a DLL and seems to lock you out of your own settings directories if they catch you running a different one
...or perhaps the "hacked DLL" that the user tried to use included a "bonus prize".
Kinda reminds me of the Mac users back when OSX was new that got burned by somebody slapping a Microsoft Word icon on a Trojan and throwing it up on Kazaa (or whatever). Except back then the refrain around here was "Ha Ha, stupid users!" and not "OMG, Apple is teh suck!" (OK, so there were a few...)
The point is, Microsoft still got the money for those sales. So even if a Windows 7 "boycott" is successful, and Windows 7 turns out to be as unpopular as Vista, Microsoft is still making boatloads of money off it.
I'll try to avoid taking one side or the other in the GPL2 vs GPL3 debate today. That said, FTA...
Linus' discomfort [with GPL3] stems from a personal issue, so I tend to discount him in this case.
How is that different from somebody claiming that "RMS' preference of copyleft over non-copyleft licenses stems from a personal issue, so I tend to discount him in this case"?
As I understand it, Linus has objections to GPL3 because he believes that one of the "shortcomings" of GPL2 that GPL3 is intended to address is actually a feature, and it seems he is not alone in that belief. While I know you don't agree with that position, it doesn't seem very fair to brush it under a rug with a brief sentence discounting it as a "personal issue".
Other than that, good article, although I was a little surprised to see the Apache License recommendation. I seem to remember there being a big firestorm of complaints when it was first announced. I wonder if the license was revised or if, like GPL3, most of the initial outrage was merely due to misunderstandings of the early drafts?
This is possibly the best idea that I've ever heard. You're just all looking at it wrong. The new gated community isn't for everybody, it's just for certain users. You are all picturing rich Southern California hillside type of gated communities. What we really need to build is more of a Supermax-style gated community.
Of course, participation would be completely voluntary. We just need to advertise it to the right people. It would be the B Ark of the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite, unless I drastically misread. As I understand it, the original judge had dismissed the libel claim of the suit before the case even made it to trial, because "truth is an absolute defense to a defamation action". Presumably this happened as a result of a Motion for Summary Judgment filed by Staples. The Circuit Court did not decide whether or not there was actual malice. They merely decided that the original judge was wrong to dismiss the claim outright- the plaintiff may still have a valid claim if he can demonstrate "actual malice". The plaintiff still has to hock his case to a jury to make a decision.
As if iTunes wasn't already bloated enough...
I'd be curious to see how accurate that statement actually is. "Apple Mobile Device Support", which as far as I can tell is only needed for iPhone or iPod Touch, is installed automatically with iTunes. Sure enough, I just checked in Apple Software Update, and the new version "Supports syncing with iPod shuffle (3rd generation)." If Apple insists on installing half a dozen other unrelated or semi-related software packages with iTunes, it would be nice if they would provide an interface to only install (or update) the ones that you actually want. At the very least, I'd appreciate it if the iTunes installer would recognize when certain components aren't installed so I wouldn't have to uninstall Bonjour every single time I upgrade. (Why anyone ever thought it would be a good idea for system level network autoconfiguration and application level sharing to be handled by the same program in the first place is beyond me. The only thing I find more baffling is that anyone else in the world thought it would be a good idea to follow their example. avahi, I'm looking at you...)
I generally can't stand them either, but the term mashup hardly does justice to what this guy has done. The level of talent and work that went into this (at least in video and audio editing even if you're not impressed by the composition itself) is a far, far cry from somebody singing their own vocals over the top of an old song.
That said, the comparison to Elvis is completely ridiculous. Elvis at least performed his own songs and so his success was due in large part to his own ability to perform. While this guy may be a talented editor, the music can only ever be as good as his source material.
The whole bit you quoted about SQLite was about optimization, not correctness.
the KDE and Gnome developers would be OK using the current file structure to save data so long as they had bothered to call fsync().
The problem is that the KDE developers were skipping step "d", presumably because they felt it slowed down the application too much. Fortunately(?) for them, with ext3 in its default configuration, it happened to not matter too much that they were skipping an important step.
The part you quoted was merely discussing a potential way to store lots of isolated bits of data without the overhead of calling fsync() constantly.
It's not that it's too much effort to follow a show that requires you to watch every episode, it's too much time. Right now I my wife and I watch most of my TV either online or through NetFlix. Online we almost exclusively watch Late Night talk shows or cartoons like The Simpsons and Family Guy. We don't watch it on any particular schedule - we just pull something random up every couple of nights when we're sitting around for a bit after our little one has gone to sleep. When we do go to visit family with cable, and we have any time to watch TV, it's almost always TLC for my wife and Discovery for me.
Shows that actually require you to catch every episode are the exclusive domain of NetFlix, because we can wait until a whole season comes out on DVD and then watch it in a night or two in place of a movie. I loved Firefly, but even if Fox hadn't screwed it up, I'm not sure I would have ever watched it on TV. The problem with this method is that I have to hope that there are enough people out there watching a new show when it does air that it even makes it to the DVD stage.
I enjoy entertainment that makes me think, but TV is not my sole (or even primary) source of entertainment. If it's going to require the patience and commitment to track down every episode when it airs and watch them all in order -or pay money for a machine to do it for me- forget it. I have more than enough other things in my life to spend my time on.
"Suburbanization" is probably more of a problem than urbanization. In a true urban setting, the average person will get more than enough exercise just walking from place to place because it's the most efficient way to get around. The suburban mindset that you can't go more than a half a block without getting in your car is a much bigger problem. In a big city you would probably never drive less than a half mile because you may end up parking farther away from where you're going than you started. When my wife and I lived in the city, we often laughed at the fact that we walked farther to get on the train (less than a half mile, so not even that far) than her mom drove to work every day. Since we've moved to a more suburban area we've found that our typical daily activity has dropped a fair amount from what it used to be even without any significant change of lifestyle.
I strongly disagree. JavaScript is a great language - in fact I think it is one of the best dynamic languages out there. The biggest problem is that 95% of the people who program JavaScript never bother to figure out the right way to use the language. I have heard people who had worked for years programming in JavaScript (actually JScript) claim that the language does not support inheritance, which could not be more untrue. As Douglas Crockford stated in a talk titled "JavaScript: The Good Parts":
If people would actually bother to learn the language (and could be convinced to give up the notion that you can't do OO properly without classes) you'd probably hear a lot less hatred for it.
Also, adding other support for other languages wouldn't do anything to address the biggest difficulty in writing code that runs in a browser, which is the incompatibilities between the different browsers' DOM and CSS implementations.
It depends what kind of development you are used to. If you come from a background in C++ / Java / C#, then I'm sure it seems like quite a step back. But if your primary experience has been in Perl / PHP / Ruby, then it's not really too much different. In fact, I think that JavaScript is actually quite a step up from debugging Perl or PHP. (I have very little experience with Python or Ruby, so I can't make any comparison there.) I've been working JavaScript and PHP (and to a lesser extent ASP and Perl) for 10 years now, and I've always been happy just using ViM. ViM's autocompletion isn't on the level of IntelliSense, but most of the time, it is sufficient just to look for similar strings in the file I am working, because typically I'm just trying to complete a variable that I have almost always declared or used previously. At one point I went in and configured "omnicompletion" to be aware of all the JavaScript libraries that I was using at the time, but I didn't find it to be all that much more helpful.
I've not typically had too much trouble hunting down syntax errors. Running the code is just a quick as compiling in another language, and as long as you aren't trying to debug in Internet Explorer, the errors aren't all that cryptic. The only syntax error that I remember ever having to spend a lot of time hunting down, or helping other coworkers hunt down (At my last company, we had about 30 developers whose primary job was JavaScript programming - we used it as a server side language as well) is having a trailing comma in an inline array.
It may look obvious when it's on one line like that, but if you split it up over multiple lines it can be really hard to spot - especially when you start rearranging the items in the array or commenting some of them out. The only reason that this is so hard to track down compared to any other syntax error is that Internet Explorer seems to be the only browser that cares. The rest will happily ignore the trailing comma and do what you mean. And since Internet Explorer gives you completely useless information in its Script Error dialogs, and won't even tell you what JavaScript file the error is in, it can take a lot of time figuring out where the error is. (Supposedly, Microsoft fixed the useless error messages in IE 7. It's been a little while now since I've had to do serious JavaScript debugging, but I seem to remember that they were only a slight improvement.) It got a little bit easier to track down once we realized that if you are getting a syntax error that only appears in IE, this is almost certainly the cause.
My bigger beef with JavaScript is that they used the same operator for concatenation and addition. Maybe you can get away with this in a static language that will throw a compiler error when you try to add a sting to an integer, but in a dynamic language it is a real source of confusion. It's way too easy to end up with 10 + 1 == 101. This is a much harder error to spot than a syntax error because you never get a warning. If they had just added a separate operator for concatenation, like virtually every other dynamic language (and some static languages) the whole problem could have been avoided.
Not really, because these people are still fixing a closed source software.
It's more an example of "Big Software Companies don't care (as much as they should) about security." Adobe could have a fix out just as quickly, but they won't accept a fix that works by disabling the (mis)feature entirely. If they really cared about security, they wouldn't have added a scripting language in the first place - you'd think maybe they would have paid attention and learned their lesson from the whole Word Macro Virus mess. Apparently the only thing they learned was that poorly thought out features sell better then security.
I think the best argument that you could use this to justify is that "Companies care more about money than about their customers," which is still a useful in favor of Open Source when talking about public institutions, but not necessarily for the same reasons.
Self signed certs (or rather, something that is basically identical in practice) work well enough for SSH, so they must have some value. I don't hear any clamoring for a certification agency for SSH keys.
You would have to read the certificate itself, but you wouldn't really have to know that much about the certificate that you are expecting... If you think you are going to secure.paypal.com, and the name on the cert says secure.paypal.com/any-random-collection-of-characters-regardless-of-whether-it-looks-like-a-legit-url.evil.com, you should probably be a little suspicious.
Really, the solution to this is same same to every other "attack" on SSL - Type the URL into the address bar yourself, or click on a bookmark. You just have to pay a little bit more attention when you do it than you used to. The real problem is the people who don't understand why they should care. When the attack on Google was announced a while back, I made my wife change her account settings to only use secure pages, and she made the snide remark, "Oh, No! somebody could have gotten into my email! Oh dear!" I tried to explain to her why she should care, but eventually just gave up and told her it didn't matter whether or not she cared, I was still going to do my best to make sure it didn't happen.
You've apparently never had any meaningful interaction with the Chicago Police Department. I fail to see how this would help things. You heard about the large group of CPD / Cook County Sheriffs that were recently arrested in an FBI corruption probe? The ones that aren't power crazed or blatantly corrupt seem to just not care.
I'm sure there are some good cops in the city (although in the 8 years I lived there I don't remember ever encountering any, or meeting anyone who had) but if there are, they aren't in the right neighborhoods to make a difference.
Apparently he read the links better than you. They are cooling the incoming air, but they aren't liquefying it. According one of the links, systems like you describe do exist, but typically require too much fuel to be practical. In "air breathing" mode it does appear to be a glorified scramjet.
Either way, he is correct; it is a significantly more complex engine than the scramjets that have been uder development for some time now, and it's cost us a heck of a lot more than a million dollars to get to where we are now on that front.
Experience only gets you so far in any industry.
When it comes down to it, "experience" is really utter bullshit that we tolerate only because there are no objective ways to measure actual ability, which is what we really care about. And using subjective measurements of ability are problematic for two reasons: First, too many people can BS their way past them, and second, they open you up to liability for discrimination in hiring (or firing).
So, yes, experience will only get you so far. At some point, you have to actually be good (or good enough) at what you do. More importantly, you have to work for somebody who needs the ability you have, and that actually cares about ability rather than treating employees like identical cogs in a machine.
Well, there is the fact that most greenhouse gases come from burning things that we have ample motivation to phase out anyway, such as petroleum (limited supply, politically unstable suppliers) or coal (dangerous to mine, dirty to burn). Most of the sensible solutions to global warming - renewable energy, energy conservation, cleaner industry, reduction of dependence on fossil fuels, etc. - have myriad reasons to adopt them regardless of your beliefs about global warming. And the more extreme solutions, in my opinion, should be avoided because our tendency to take actions that have a dramatic effect on the environment without understanding all of the consequences is what got us into this mess to begin with.
That was the original assumption behind Carbon dating, however, we now know that the first assumption, at least, is not completely accurate. We know that the amount of atmospheric carbon has fluctuated throughout history. That is why scientists now use "Calibrated Carbon dates", which take these fluctuations into account. Dates up to about 6000 years ago have been calibrated using tree rings, and there are other techniques that have been used to calibrate dates back as far as 13,000 years. If anything the typical result has been that we have learned things were older than previously thought. It is now believed that an old (uncalibrated) radio carbon date of 9000BC actually corresponds to a "real" (calibrated) date of 11000BC.
As far as your other assumption, well, if that turns out to be false, we have much bigger problems than radio dating.
Of course, there have been other problems with radio carbon dating in the past as well. One big problem historically was that a fairly large sample was needed to get an accurate date, so scientists would measure ages of small things like seeds indirectly by measuring the carbon in e.g. a large piece of charcoal that was found at the same site. Obviously this was prone to problems, because that charcoal could have come from a forest fire thousands of years earlier. However, with "modern" techniques (i.e. as of the 1980's), indirect measurement is no longer really an issue, because scientists can accurately measure the carbon ratios even in very small samples using mass spectrometry.
That depends on the arrangement between the attorney and the "client". In a typical situation, you are correct. But if the lawyer is actually a salaried employee, then sometimes they have to sit around and find things to do to make their employer feel like their getting their money's worth by keeping them on salary. And although I haven't run into it personally, I believe there are some companies out their that employ lawyers by way of retainer agreements that would give the lawyers an incentive to use up a certain number of billable hours every month.
OK, I know I haven't followed baseball in a long time, but I used to live right down the street from them. When did they stop being the "California Angels"? And how does any team end up with two cities in their name. That's just plain dumb.
Only a dock, and a $50 A/V cable that only they sell...
If you read the article, the accused judges shut down the original county run detention center, and argued that their only remaining option was to use the newly built private prison. It sounds as though it's doubtful that the commercial center would exist at all if it wasn't for the actions of these men. So while I agree with you that paying them in a way that benefits the operator for in increased number of convictions is not a good thing, I don't think that was the only problem here.
Obviously, the system has no right.
If I put diesel fuel in my unleaded engine, what gives my car the right to stop the engine functioning? Just because the two may appear compatible doesn't mean they are...
Kinda reminds me of the Mac users back when OSX was new that got burned by somebody slapping a Microsoft Word icon on a Trojan and throwing it up on Kazaa (or whatever). Except back then the refrain around here was "Ha Ha, stupid users!" and not "OMG, Apple is teh suck!" (OK, so there were a few...)
The point is, Microsoft still got the money for those sales. So even if a Windows 7 "boycott" is successful, and Windows 7 turns out to be as unpopular as Vista, Microsoft is still making boatloads of money off it.
I'll try to avoid taking one side or the other in the GPL2 vs GPL3 debate today. That said, FTA...
How is that different from somebody claiming that "RMS' preference of copyleft over non-copyleft licenses stems from a personal issue, so I tend to discount him in this case"?
As I understand it, Linus has objections to GPL3 because he believes that one of the "shortcomings" of GPL2 that GPL3 is intended to address is actually a feature, and it seems he is not alone in that belief. While I know you don't agree with that position, it doesn't seem very fair to brush it under a rug with a brief sentence discounting it as a "personal issue".
Other than that, good article, although I was a little surprised to see the Apache License recommendation. I seem to remember there being a big firestorm of complaints when it was first announced. I wonder if the license was revised or if, like GPL3, most of the initial outrage was merely due to misunderstandings of the early drafts?
This is possibly the best idea that I've ever heard. You're just all looking at it wrong. The new gated community isn't for everybody, it's just for certain users. You are all picturing rich Southern California hillside type of gated communities. What we really need to build is more of a Supermax-style gated community.
Of course, participation would be completely voluntary. We just need to advertise it to the right people. It would be the B Ark of the Internet.