Re:Speaking of statistics
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah, how can a conspiracy of this scale stay unnoticed, without someone leaking? You would need at the very least ONE programmer to make the actual change. How on earth can they keep something of that scale quiet?
Okay, okay, in all fairness, you need about five. The two brothers that are CEOs at Diebold and ES&S, Karl Rove, and two unwitting programmers that quite possibly make a requested change from their CEO without being told what it is really for.
So you're saying that also all tenured climatologists are making up global warming so that they get funding to make up more things, this all to avoid teaching a bit more?
It's quite a stretch to extrapolate three Mars-years (about six earth years) of observations of the Mars polar ice cap behaviour to every other planet in the solar system. Is this normal? Is this weird? With three years, that's hard to tell. Then: is Venus heating up? Is Mercury? Is Jupiter? Where's the evidence?
Not really. The best indicator for global warming are the glaciers and snow caps on mountains. The snows on the Kilimanjaro are gone, glaciers in the US, the Alps, Africa, the Himalaya, are all decaying rapidly. Most of these have been there for 11,000 years or more.
Glaciers are ice, the ice is melting almost everywhere, must be the temperature. Ice was 11,000 years old. Must be the hottest we've encountered in 11,000 years. See, no models needed. It's not that difficult.
We've already got some pretty good solar energy powered devices that are capable of mining carbon out of the atmosphere and creating oil out of it. They're generally referred to as algae. Works fine, much better than that highly subsidized device called corn.
The treaty was surely flawed, but what the US and Australia should have recognized was that this was but a first step into a long march to get these emissions under control. China was exempt, not because it's not polluting, but simply because it's developing. You cannot demand from a developing nation whose people don't even have a tenth of the wealth of a developed nation to seriously cull their development on the vague promise that we will also do our bit. We are the major cause of it now, China will be the cause later.
What should have been done is the first world taking the major initial hit. That's what Kyoto was about. We're wealthy, we have a strong economy, we caused most of it, and we can take the hit. After taking the first step and thus achieving a global consensus about working towards the goal, the thumbscrews can be set to China to reduce emissions. Fail to cooperate? Emission tax on export. If we're setting the standards, we can start demanding nations to follow.
Unfortunately, the US and Australia decided that even that first step was too much, claiming it was unfair. The obese bully getting less chocolate than his starving sister, it's no fair!
Now we're up shit creek, simply because the most powerful nation refused to even take the first token step towards combatting a global problem. No global cooperation can be formed now, simply because of the inaction of the once benevolent giant. They're the biggest problem now.
Not all over the globe. Interestingly, in the Netherlands, a group of 70 captains of industry urged the new government currently being formed to make more and stronger regulations for industry in order to combat global warming. This was all on personal title, and included notorious polluters such as head-honchos from Shell. The problems they are facing is that without regulations, the industry itself cannot implement the necessary changes because they will be undercut by competition that couldn't care less.
Any explanation for this irrational behaviour from any lurking libertarian here?
0) If I bloody pay for this piece of shite that this so-called artist created, *I* decide when, where and how I use it. It's sold, it's mine, my copy is no longer owned by the creator and he'd better keep his hands from it. The only thing I am not allowed to do is copy it in order to give it to someone else, that's the only right the artist retains.
So I've put it in a database, now what? Run queries? You've got to be kidding. The data is already fully denormalized, and comes from a database! I merely need to apply some calculations, some summations, create a nice report on one sheet, make some charts on another, investigate some pivots and sub-pivots, and send all this to my boss. So what should I use? A database + a charting program + a reporting tool + an olap tool? That'll take me weeks instead of hours to get my work done.
Quite a coincidence. Today, I was reading the subversion license (acknowledged as BSD style) to see if we could incorporate it in some add-on of our products. We need version control, you see. I read the text, and what was immediately obvious was the provision that next to the copyright 'this list of conditions' needed to be included. My common sense told me that if we distributed that software, tightly integrated with out product, what would 'this list of conditions' apply to?
The subversion part of the code, the subversion + integration part, or our entire binary? How should we make clear that only the subversion part of the code is covered by the condition that the binary can be freely distributed? I am not a lawyer, but I saw an issue here.
After looking around a bit I found some web-pages that told me that Subversion has a BSD/Apache style license, and I was momentarily satisfied, thinking by myself: "I read so much about the BSD license, this should be ok. Just make sure that the corporate lawyers take a look before we go that route."
I also read the BSD license itself and noted that indeed, subversion is a BSD (not Apache) style license.
As I was satisfied by the 'common wisdom' around the BSD-license I didn't really pursue this, but my first instinct was to be very wary of the license. Thus, to quote you:
No one, ever, anywhere, has ever had any question as to what the BSD license means. So clearly there is a valid and correct reading that means what everyone knows it to mean. So clearly any reading that completely reverses that meaning must be making a mistake somewhere.
I had questions, today, before I read this article, right after reading a BSD-style license, before I knew it was BSD-style. I was stupid enough to be satisfied when I saw the label 'BSD' applied to the license, assuming that that should be okay. Okay not because the text was okay, but because everybody said it was okay. And then this article. They see the same thing, and brutally kill the point by drowning it in legalese. The point is there though.
Now my question for you is: consider a situation where you create closed-source software, you want to incorporate some BSD code, and you read the BSD-license. How would you formulate the license of your code in such a way that (a) contains the BSD-license and (b) it only applies to the BSD part of the code and not to the code you wrote yourself, which EULA style. To make it interesting: you're distributing it as a single binary.
For reference, here are the three clauses of a current BSD (source wikipedia). Read carefully:
* Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without * modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: * * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. * * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the * documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. * * Neither the name of the <organization> nor the * names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products * derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
Re:Performance, anyone?
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 1
Actually, Greenspun was only partly right, the true gospel should read:
Any sufficiently complicated C, Fortran or Lisp program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
RTFA. She is already convicted by the jury, all that we're waiting for now is the sentence itself. She is now officially a felon and a sexual offender, her life is over.
I'm pretty sure that the 'pint' is there to stay in the UK. It will however degenerate from a description of volume to a name for a type of glass to drink beer from. The pint of milk will disappear, if it hasn't already.
Incidentally, while 12 pt. is exactly 12/72 of an inch, it is also 12/182.88 of a centimeter. What is even more astounding is that this defines a PPC resolution which will not enlarge your selection boxes at all. Your point is saved!
Brilliant. Unfortunately, your firefighters have been shot by you neighbour in retaliation that they didn't do anything to his house in which her husband just died trying to save their children. There goes your home, up in flames. (fuck these kids, they were always walking on your lawn anyway).
The 10 billion spend to fix Iraq equates to 1/6-th of the annual military expense for the US in Iraq (using these numbers). So, if the 10 billion would mean that you can pull out your troops 60 days earlier than now, it means break even, and would be a wise investment.
P>
The real problem is obviously that Bush wants to spend 10 billion now, instead of spending it when there was still hope that a nation could be built. But no, the money needed to go to Haliburton.
Not to bash you or anything, but isn't this nonsense about spelling 'liter' as 'litre' and 'meter' as 'metre' not really meant to make it look like the words are French and therefore inherently evil? Come on Anglo-Saxons, you can do better than this!
For one thing, the board might consider that the investment arm should be cautious in the way it gathers money. It's no use to have a foundation where one arm destroys the work the other arm does. Making profitable investments in durable, fair, companies is not that difficult, and will in the long run probably do more good than the charitable arm will ever accomplish. They will rake in less money in the short term that way, but given that they do less harm, this will balance out.
From your description I can only conclude that the foundation is set up wrongly: aggressive investment for maximum profit combined with charitable endevours do not necessarily lead to a net positive for the world. Both arms need to strive for the same thing. As it seems from your description, the foundation is flawed.
If your options are to either work for the oil company in horrible circumstances, or to farm the land that has just been taken away by that same company, how much choice do you think there actually is? And about salaries, what do you think a company, unchecked by labor laws and backed by the government, will actually pay workers that have no choice? Yes, just enough so that they don't starve. At least not starve quickly.
You're reasoning from the socialist haven that is the US or Europe (yes, you read that right, compared with Nigeria, US = socialist). You need to read up on how we got where we are. In the first century of the Industrial revolution there was also no choice for the workers, and there was quite a bit of despair. Much like Nigeria (and China) now. At a certain point, people did figure out there was a choice: follow Marx and fight. The social unrest that followed for the next 50/60 years forced the capitalists to increase the level of pay for their workers, made irresponsible danger on the workplace illegal, brought general voting rights and lots of things that you take for granted in a 1st world nation. We didn't get there because companies had paying jobs, we got here because we forced those companies to make the jobs less dangerous, the working conditions better, and increase the pay at the expense of company profits. Companies are by nature immoral beasts and needs to be constrained in order to let them function in a civilized environment.
Hmm, so what's actually happening is that the spammers are coercing the spam-filter writers to create good enough OCR so that the spammers can turn around and use that to circumvent the captcha's on the www. Talking about a devious ploy! We're fucked.
So what's the hidden agenda of the so-called 'Royal Society'? Funding such controversial ideas as 'gravity', 'celestial body movement algebra', 'optics' and more of this clearly politically biased 'science', they must have a hidden agenda!
Sorry, I'm getting a bit fed up with the truthiness of some of the commentators here.
Okay, let's play. Global warming is not real, it is manufactured by scientists to achieve political goals. Please list the political goals that are achieved when the population is convinced that global warming is real and it's our fault. They'd better be good, given the vastness of the conspiracy.
I've seen this myth, companies being sued if they don't defend their bottom line, countless times, but never seen an actual court case mentioned where a company was successfully sued because the shareholders could prove that the company wasn't doing this. I can imagine this happening when the CEO decides to sell the company's main assets for $1 to his nephew, but can you actually point to a courtcase where a company was going into a particular strategic direction, and they were sued because of it?
Given that the company's bottom line lies where the company decides where it lies, both in time and in market space, this must be a difficult case to prove in court.
Oh, I'm pretty sure that the gigantic military/windmill complex is behind this grand global warming conspiracy. I indeed call you a cynic (if not a moron), not because you take everything with a grain of salt, but simply because you cannot discriminate between levels of truth. So please, enlighten us, which are the companies that have a vested interest in the population believing that global warming is going on. These companies should have existed in the seventees, as this is where the conspiracy started.
Just as an exercise, try to figure out where the funding came from for the development of the theory of plate tectonics? Who was so desperate in confronting the church to fund Darwin to spread his lies? Who wanted gravity to exist and bribed Newton to prove this in such an intractible way that we still believe it?
And brainiacs like you were in the seventees probably using these cold winters to laugh at the crackpots that were claiming global warming to occur. Global cooling at that time was a popular opinion, not a broadly supported scientific theory. The media jumped on it, but in contrast with the current situation, this was not because climatologists had come to some definite conclusion, but (duh) because winters were pretty cold. At that same time global warming was proposed, and laughed at by the media (yet not by the scientific community).
And of course, increased solar output has been included in the models. What do you think scientists do? Come together in their secret cabal and make up the next big story to tell the unwashed masses? That's what theologists do. Scientists work in a brutally competitive arena of thought, measurement and models. Everything is scrutinized. Errors are made, but likewise scientific careers are made out of pointing out flaws in the work of others. So long that is that case, the process is sound.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, okay, in all fairness, you need about five. The two brothers that are CEOs at Diebold and ES&S, Karl Rove, and two unwitting programmers that quite possibly make a requested change from their CEO without being told what it is really for.
So you're saying that also all tenured climatologists are making up global warming so that they get funding to make up more things, this all to avoid teaching a bit more?
It's quite a stretch to extrapolate three Mars-years (about six earth years) of observations of the Mars polar ice cap behaviour to every other planet in the solar system. Is this normal? Is this weird? With three years, that's hard to tell. Then: is Venus heating up? Is Mercury? Is Jupiter? Where's the evidence?
Glaciers are ice, the ice is melting almost everywhere, must be the temperature. Ice was 11,000 years old. Must be the hottest we've encountered in 11,000 years. See, no models needed. It's not that difficult.
We've already got some pretty good solar energy powered devices that are capable of mining carbon out of the atmosphere and creating oil out of it. They're generally referred to as algae. Works fine, much better than that highly subsidized device called corn.
What should have been done is the first world taking the major initial hit. That's what Kyoto was about. We're wealthy, we have a strong economy, we caused most of it, and we can take the hit. After taking the first step and thus achieving a global consensus about working towards the goal, the thumbscrews can be set to China to reduce emissions. Fail to cooperate? Emission tax on export. If we're setting the standards, we can start demanding nations to follow.
Unfortunately, the US and Australia decided that even that first step was too much, claiming it was unfair. The obese bully getting less chocolate than his starving sister, it's no fair!
Now we're up shit creek, simply because the most powerful nation refused to even take the first token step towards combatting a global problem. No global cooperation can be formed now, simply because of the inaction of the once benevolent giant. They're the biggest problem now.
Any explanation for this irrational behaviour from any lurking libertarian here?
0) If I bloody pay for this piece of shite that this so-called artist created, *I* decide when, where and how I use it. It's sold, it's mine, my copy is no longer owned by the creator and he'd better keep his hands from it. The only thing I am not allowed to do is copy it in order to give it to someone else, that's the only right the artist retains.
So I've put it in a database, now what? Run queries? You've got to be kidding. The data is already fully denormalized, and comes from a database! I merely need to apply some calculations, some summations, create a nice report on one sheet, make some charts on another, investigate some pivots and sub-pivots, and send all this to my boss. So what should I use? A database + a charting program + a reporting tool + an olap tool? That'll take me weeks instead of hours to get my work done.
After looking around a bit I found some web-pages that told me that Subversion has a BSD/Apache style license, and I was momentarily satisfied, thinking by myself: "I read so much about the BSD license, this should be ok. Just make sure that the corporate lawyers take a look before we go that route." I also read the BSD license itself and noted that indeed, subversion is a BSD (not Apache) style license.
As I was satisfied by the 'common wisdom' around the BSD-license I didn't really pursue this, but my first instinct was to be very wary of the license. Thus, to quote you:
I had questions, today, before I read this article, right after reading a BSD-style license, before I knew it was BSD-style. I was stupid enough to be satisfied when I saw the label 'BSD' applied to the license, assuming that that should be okay. Okay not because the text was okay, but because everybody said it was okay. And then this article. They see the same thing, and brutally kill the point by drowning it in legalese. The point is there though.
Now my question for you is: consider a situation where you create closed-source software, you want to incorporate some BSD code, and you read the BSD-license. How would you formulate the license of your code in such a way that (a) contains the BSD-license and (b) it only applies to the BSD part of the code and not to the code you wrote yourself, which EULA style. To make it interesting: you're distributing it as a single binary.
For reference, here are the three clauses of a current BSD (source wikipedia). Read carefully:
Any sufficiently complicated C, Fortran or Lisp program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
RTFA. She is already convicted by the jury, all that we're waiting for now is the sentence itself. She is now officially a felon and a sexual offender, her life is over.
I'm pretty sure that the 'pint' is there to stay in the UK. It will however degenerate from a description of volume to a name for a type of glass to drink beer from. The pint of milk will disappear, if it hasn't already.
Incidentally, while 12 pt. is exactly 12/72 of an inch, it is also 12/182.88 of a centimeter. What is even more astounding is that this defines a PPC resolution which will not enlarge your selection boxes at all. Your point is saved!
Brilliant. Unfortunately, your firefighters have been shot by you neighbour in retaliation that they didn't do anything to his house in which her husband just died trying to save their children. There goes your home, up in flames. (fuck these kids, they were always walking on your lawn anyway).
The real problem is obviously that Bush wants to spend 10 billion now, instead of spending it when there was still hope that a nation could be built. But no, the money needed to go to Haliburton.
-Saxon-
From your description I can only conclude that the foundation is set up wrongly: aggressive investment for maximum profit combined with charitable endevours do not necessarily lead to a net positive for the world. Both arms need to strive for the same thing. As it seems from your description, the foundation is flawed.
You're reasoning from the socialist haven that is the US or Europe (yes, you read that right, compared with Nigeria, US = socialist). You need to read up on how we got where we are. In the first century of the Industrial revolution there was also no choice for the workers, and there was quite a bit of despair. Much like Nigeria (and China) now. At a certain point, people did figure out there was a choice: follow Marx and fight. The social unrest that followed for the next 50/60 years forced the capitalists to increase the level of pay for their workers, made irresponsible danger on the workplace illegal, brought general voting rights and lots of things that you take for granted in a 1st world nation. We didn't get there because companies had paying jobs, we got here because we forced those companies to make the jobs less dangerous, the working conditions better, and increase the pay at the expense of company profits. Companies are by nature immoral beasts and needs to be constrained in order to let them function in a civilized environment.
Hmm, so what's actually happening is that the spammers are coercing the spam-filter writers to create good enough OCR so that the spammers can turn around and use that to circumvent the captcha's on the www. Talking about a devious ploy! We're fucked.
Sorry, I'm getting a bit fed up with the truthiness of some of the commentators here.
Okay, let's play. Global warming is not real, it is manufactured by scientists to achieve political goals. Please list the political goals that are achieved when the population is convinced that global warming is real and it's our fault. They'd better be good, given the vastness of the conspiracy.
Given that the company's bottom line lies where the company decides where it lies, both in time and in market space, this must be a difficult case to prove in court.
Just as an exercise, try to figure out where the funding came from for the development of the theory of plate tectonics? Who was so desperate in confronting the church to fund Darwin to spread his lies? Who wanted gravity to exist and bribed Newton to prove this in such an intractible way that we still believe it?
And of course, increased solar output has been included in the models. What do you think scientists do? Come together in their secret cabal and make up the next big story to tell the unwashed masses? That's what theologists do. Scientists work in a brutally competitive arena of thought, measurement and models. Everything is scrutinized. Errors are made, but likewise scientific careers are made out of pointing out flaws in the work of others. So long that is that case, the process is sound.