All 5 are irrelevant. What is relevant is that if you are the only(*) car manufacturer around, then you are prohibited to use that monopoly to gain another one in car radios. It's that simple.
(*) In economic theory, they usually use 25% market share as sufficient to define a 'near'-monopoly.
Paranoid much? The XP-N fiasco was of course stupid, they just should have fined Microsoft more! An empathic 'no' to the assertion that's it's the poor US companies that get fined by the EU. EU used to be trust-central: all large EU companies were colluding to screw the customers. If the EU did one thing right, this is it: they dismantled the trusts. Many European companies have been fined heavily, to the tune of 100 of millions of euros (that's billions of dollars:). That the EU doesn't make an exception for corporations from a country that has all but dismantled anti-trust law... well boohoo.
The US needs to learn that free competition should trump capitalism.
Furthermore, I seem to recall that the spelling issue with Quale surfaced when he was trying to correct a high-school kid. Incorrectly. If you can't spell, intelligence requires you to know this and not attempt to start to teach spelling.
I think his point was: if you believe that the bible is the word of God and literally true, you assume that the men writing it had no free will. As the bible states that man has free will, we have a contradiction, and therefore the bible is not the word of God. Christianity is simply inconsistent. Many smart Christians accept these inconsistencies as being part of the mystery of religion, it's just the creationist fundies that try to forge a consistent whole out of inconsistent parts.
Hey, you do realize that these days there's never an excuse to waste precious developer time on something as mundane as performance improvements, don't you? The TCO of the $250 worth of RAM is just a fraction of the gazzilion dollars it must have cost to have you automate the copying of the file to tmpfs. This is simply unacceptable: your boss should have to learn to live with dog-slow software just like everyone else!
The braindeadness comes from the fact that memcpy and memcpy_s have completely different contracts. So now people will port code that reads:
int mem_copy(void* dst, int dstlen, void* src, int srclen, int tocopy) { if (dstlen < tocopy || srclen < tocopy) return ERR_NOSPACE; memcpy(dst, src, tocopy); }
To (incorrectly)
int safe_copy(void* dst, int dstlen, void* src, int srclen, int tocopy) { if (dstlen < tocopy || srclen < tocopy) return ERR_NOSPACE; memcpy_s(dst, dstlen, src, srclen);/* BUG: we quite likely copy more than we should */ }
Or (correctly to)
int safe_copy(void* dst, int dstlen, void* src, int srclen, int tocopy) { if (dstlen < tocopy || srclen < tocopy) return ERR_NOSPACE; memcpy_s(dst, tocopy, src, tocopy);/* misuse buflen to specify what to copy */ }
So, to port this code, we have to break the implicit contract with memcpy_s that asks us to provide the length of the buffers instead of the number of bytes that we would like to copy. Your static analysis tools would incorrectly flag the correct version as incorrect, and you might even change the second version to the first to 'fix' it.
If MS would have provided 'safe_copy' as 'memcpy_s' this would be fine. memcpy_s is not a memcpy, it is a bufcpy. If MS is serious about security, it should ban memcpy_s, not memcpy.
In the last 4 yrs. Oracle has gone back to core competencies...
WTF? In the last 4 years, Oracle has bought PeopleSoft, Siebel and a plethora of other companies to take over the CRM world. That's not core competence, that's expansion (and in true Oracle form, extremely poorly executed). Ellison probably still thinks he's in a dick-matching context with Gates, yet Gates has moved on.
If it's harmful to us and it is caused by us, then there's a pretty good chance we can do something about it. If it's not caused by us, we're probably screwed (when using our entire industry to pump CO2 in the atmosphere has no effect, there's probably nothing we can do which affects climate in any way).
Would the explosion that is near enough to cause serious damage (as in, killing most people) be visible by observers BEFORE gamma and x rays do any visible damage?
No, gamma and x rays are a form of electro-magnetic radiation and travel at the speed of light. This is not something Bruce Willis can solve for us, it would be more like: huh? And we're gone.
Did Greenspan miss the fact that raking in a couple of 100 million of dollars in a year will cushion anything that will economically happen afterwards to the individual actor? Or did he figure that actors burning a company in the pursuit of personal wealth are behaving irrationally? And that moron ran the Fed?
It's even worse than that for the role of AIG. The credit default swaps are essentialy insurance against people defaulting on their loans/mortgages.
AIG effectively insured the entire financial industry against bad loans. There was no oversight on this, and nobody really questioned whether AIG could in fact insure the entire world for bad debt. Guess what, they couldn't, and now the taxpayers are picking up the bill, and the money is used to pay off the guys that took the insurance (read: the rest of the financial world).
Tricky thing is, if AIG would go bust, the worldwide financial industry would be so much exposed to bad debt that they would crumble as well. In my view, it's still an open question if it wouldn't have just been better to let it happen, and pour the money into the consumer sector to safeguard savings and cushion against predatory debt collecting. Goldman & Sachs, Bank of America, Citi, and the rest of the gang have taken a huge bet and lost. They forgot to do their due diligence on the solvability of the amazing trick of the dissapearing risk. Furthermore, the rating agencies that gave this scheme the triple A's should be disbanded, their executives tarred and feathered.
Well, iirc, there are two stories in the book: one in which the animals were created and then Adam, and one in which they were created at the same time. Kind of a big hint not to take the thing too literally I always thought.
What's the dilemma? There's heredity, variation and selection. Repeat millions of time, and you will witness heredity and variation balance themselves in response to selection. Your "dilemma" misses the part about heredity in relation to variation. You do not need massive variation for evolution to work. On the contrary, too much variation counters heredity and therefore kills evolution.
There are no assumptions in biology about forces that trigger massive mutations. There's also no random pool. There are randomized changes, but it's drawn from a pool of proven technology (i.e., everything that has survived for 3.7 billion years in an uninterrupted line. Yes, your line is 3.7 billion years old, and there has never been a hiccup of someone in your line not procreating. Isn't that amazing!). Nothing is fully randomized. You should read up a bit on the actual thinking around evolution before you dismiss it on ill-conceived grounds.
No need to go through the scientific method for this. This is the dogma of materialism. It is founded in logic, not science. There could in principle be lots going on outside of the observable universe, no doubt about it. For something outside of the universe to have an effect on the universe, it should have a manifestation inside the universe. In other words, for it to matter (pardon the pun), it should produce a material effect. A miracle if you wish. If something produces a material effect, it is by definition possible to study it through science, although it does not necessarily need to be reproducible. In the latter case it's a one time event (miracle). The quantity and quality of miracles can be studied, but as so far there's no empirical basis for them. All in all, logic dictates that a divine being is either powerless by virtue of being disconnected from the material world, or it can be subject of empirical study. If the latter is the case, scientific observation shows a profound lack of any form of divine presence, making the whole hypothesis cumbersome.
What this line of reasoning attempts to show is not that the scientific method is the only way to know anything, but that anything that is knowable can be studied through the scientific method. Subtle difference.
I'm particularly interested in their method of falsifying big bang theories. These are post-hoc speculations based on empirical observation, and as such not experimentally falsifiable (hint: they're a best guess, not a true scientific theory).
For me the outlook of people living forever is so bleak that I'm happy that I'll be dead by then. There'll be no room for children anymore (how can you have children if you don't free up the resources by dying), just massive amounts of dinosaurs that hoard all the cash. Of course a revolution will follow soon, with the happiest outcome involuntary euthanasia at age 100.
But that would mean telling people that their favorite holy book is quite literally inaccurate in its depiction of the creation stories in Genesis.
I think the writers left some pretty strong hints in the holy book that Genesis shouldn't be taken literally. First man is created before all animals, and a few verses later he is created after all animals. You need to be extremely obtuse to miss that one and try to explain it away.
If you were to fall into a time machine and get stuck back in the 1400's and try to explain bacterias to people as manipulative, stiff-necked, and unreasonable as today's philosophers and armchair scientists, they would laugh you out! 'Unseen animals that are everywhere, making us sick, processing our foods in our bellies, aging our cheese, and everything else... yes, sure, magical animals -- too small to see, of course, except in the future where we have instruments that let us see them. Keep talking Futureman!'
Thing is, that if you don't produce any evidence for this, these 1400s scientists (term as such didn't exist back then, it was theology all-around, and if it couldn't be found in Aristotle it didn't exist), would be ab-so-lu-tely right. From a scientific perspective, it's the evidence that counts, not whether some idea just happens to be correct.
You seem to think it's a bad thing that scientists don't jump onto every crackpot idea (including the bacteria hypothesis not backed by evidence). It's not, it's the way it is supposed to work.
Still, the fact that there is some uncertainty around scientific evidence does not mean that all alternatives are equally likely. So, to put it scientifically, the hypothesis that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time is so exceedingly unlikely given the evidence, that anyone seriously holding this 'opinion' is in dire need of education (if not medical attention).
Yes, that apparently includes a large part of the American populace. So be it, you cannot just pick and choose in science as you can with the Bible. You either go with logical conjecture based on evidence, or you make things up as you go. Mixing the two makes you fall in the latter camp.
I think the sentence is brilliant. Only those that haven't got a clue about the proportion of water on the planet would take the wrong interpretation as the intended one. It's a test for scientific literacy in its own right. And for slashdot pedants of course.
Slashdot Mirror
(*) In economic theory, they usually use 25% market share as sufficient to define a 'near'-monopoly.
The US needs to learn that free competition should trump capitalism.
Furthermore, I seem to recall that the spelling issue with Quale surfaced when he was trying to correct a high-school kid. Incorrectly. If you can't spell, intelligence requires you to know this and not attempt to start to teach spelling.
Actually, being reproductive leads to excessive sleep deprivation.
You are wrong. I believe that 'belief' means something different, in particular after examining some of the evidence given by Merriam-Webster:
I think his point was: if you believe that the bible is the word of God and literally true, you assume that the men writing it had no free will. As the bible states that man has free will, we have a contradiction, and therefore the bible is not the word of God. Christianity is simply inconsistent. Many smart Christians accept these inconsistencies as being part of the mystery of religion, it's just the creationist fundies that try to forge a consistent whole out of inconsistent parts.
Hey, you do realize that these days there's never an excuse to waste precious developer time on something as mundane as performance improvements, don't you? The TCO of the $250 worth of RAM is just a fraction of the gazzilion dollars it must have cost to have you automate the copying of the file to tmpfs. This is simply unacceptable: your boss should have to learn to live with dog-slow software just like everyone else!
To (incorrectly)
Or (correctly to)
So, to port this code, we have to break the implicit contract with memcpy_s that asks us to provide the length of the buffers instead of the number of bytes that we would like to copy. Your static analysis tools would incorrectly flag the correct version as incorrect, and you might even change the second version to the first to 'fix' it.
If MS would have provided 'safe_copy' as 'memcpy_s' this would be fine. memcpy_s is not a memcpy, it is a bufcpy. If MS is serious about security, it should ban memcpy_s, not memcpy.
"Racist". You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means...
WTF? In the last 4 years, Oracle has bought PeopleSoft, Siebel and a plethora of other companies to take over the CRM world. That's not core competence, that's expansion (and in true Oracle form, extremely poorly executed). Ellison probably still thinks he's in a dick-matching context with Gates, yet Gates has moved on.
If it's harmful to us and it is caused by us, then there's a pretty good chance we can do something about it. If it's not caused by us, we're probably screwed (when using our entire industry to pump CO2 in the atmosphere has no effect, there's probably nothing we can do which affects climate in any way).
No, gamma and x rays are a form of electro-magnetic radiation and travel at the speed of light. This is not something Bruce Willis can solve for us, it would be more like: huh? And we're gone.
Did Greenspan miss the fact that raking in a couple of 100 million of dollars in a year will cushion anything that will economically happen afterwards to the individual actor? Or did he figure that actors burning a company in the pursuit of personal wealth are behaving irrationally? And that moron ran the Fed?
Tricky thing is, if AIG would go bust, the worldwide financial industry would be so much exposed to bad debt that they would crumble as well. In my view, it's still an open question if it wouldn't have just been better to let it happen, and pour the money into the consumer sector to safeguard savings and cushion against predatory debt collecting. Goldman & Sachs, Bank of America, Citi, and the rest of the gang have taken a huge bet and lost. They forgot to do their due diligence on the solvability of the amazing trick of the dissapearing risk. Furthermore, the rating agencies that gave this scheme the triple A's should be disbanded, their executives tarred and feathered.
You're a scientist with scientific values. This is politics. You're naive to think this is about science.
Well, iirc, there are two stories in the book: one in which the animals were created and then Adam, and one in which they were created at the same time. Kind of a big hint not to take the thing too literally I always thought.
There are no assumptions in biology about forces that trigger massive mutations. There's also no random pool. There are randomized changes, but it's drawn from a pool of proven technology (i.e., everything that has survived for 3.7 billion years in an uninterrupted line. Yes, your line is 3.7 billion years old, and there has never been a hiccup of someone in your line not procreating. Isn't that amazing!). Nothing is fully randomized. You should read up a bit on the actual thinking around evolution before you dismiss it on ill-conceived grounds.
What this line of reasoning attempts to show is not that the scientific method is the only way to know anything, but that anything that is knowable can be studied through the scientific method. Subtle difference.
I'm particularly interested in their method of falsifying big bang theories. These are post-hoc speculations based on empirical observation, and as such not experimentally falsifiable (hint: they're a best guess, not a true scientific theory).
Yes, completely offtopic.
I think the writers left some pretty strong hints in the holy book that Genesis shouldn't be taken literally. First man is created before all animals, and a few verses later he is created after all animals. You need to be extremely obtuse to miss that one and try to explain it away.
Thing is, that if you don't produce any evidence for this, these 1400s scientists (term as such didn't exist back then, it was theology all-around, and if it couldn't be found in Aristotle it didn't exist), would be ab-so-lu-tely right. From a scientific perspective, it's the evidence that counts, not whether some idea just happens to be correct.
You seem to think it's a bad thing that scientists don't jump onto every crackpot idea (including the bacteria hypothesis not backed by evidence). It's not, it's the way it is supposed to work.
Yes, that apparently includes a large part of the American populace. So be it, you cannot just pick and choose in science as you can with the Bible. You either go with logical conjecture based on evidence, or you make things up as you go. Mixing the two makes you fall in the latter camp.
The traditional method of avoiding teen pregnancies was chaperoning the girls. It wouldn't surprise me if the Orthodox practice this still.
I think the sentence is brilliant. Only those that haven't got a clue about the proportion of water on the planet would take the wrong interpretation as the intended one. It's a test for scientific literacy in its own right. And for slashdot pedants of course.