They amount to a trap door into an unknown amount of code for an insert or update. Sort of like the "COME FROM" construct in INTERCAL. In large database systems involving multiple development groups they can become an interaction nightmare; killing performance and having strange exceptions bubbling up from previously working code.
Maybe. Or maybe not. But the European (read French) obsession with this contains more than a wiff of "projection" onto the US "other". As in "that is what we would do if we were still able to be that powerful."
And "they believe that any such undertaking is intrinsically flawed" - these are the words of tired "old Europe" - the words of self-hate. The residue of the COMINTERN effort to destroy the West; preparing it for conquest by spreading defeatist memes. We're not buying it.
Don't look to the EU for salvation in anything - the current international crisis may well kill it, or make harmonization efforts vs. the US politically impossible on both sides of the Atlantic.
Uh, dude. This has nothing to do with the "cold fusion" fiasco, except in terms of the size of the equipment (table-top size). And the researchers have nothing to do with the P&F guys, as shown in the credits below the picture of the device:
Courtesy of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Russian Academy of Sciences--Rusi P. Taleyarkhan, J. S. Cho, C. D. West, R. T. Lahey, Jr., R. Nigmatulin and R. C. Block.
You might try reading the article link before posting (just a suggestion).
What content are you talking about, the kind that the big-label record companies produce? If that goes the way of the dodo, maybe the overall loss will be small. The superstar system of "pop" music creation is a very recent thing, an artifact of the invention of radio and recording technology. The traditional market of performers is paid live performances. So, the technology changes, and therefore the business model changes.
At least 2 of those three items are very bad examples of "free markets": RIAA an industry cartel set up to restrain trade and free expression (based on a legal loophole coming out of our f**k-ed up IP laws), and the FDA is a government gatekeeper organization that restrains the free development and trade of foods/drugs.
Beacuse consultants generally come out of a different budget, and don't affect the employee headcount.
Also, in some companies, the market rate for hiring a competent developer is above the salary range permitted for the position. So, a semi-permanent consultant is used instead - at 3 or 4 times the cost.
I experienced this myself when I did a stint of consulting - the customer (my site boss) wanted to hire me permanently, but backed off when it was realized my salary (from the consulting company, which was a good bit less than what the client was paying) translated into a position *above* his in the (rather rigid) salary structure of the client company. So nothing changed, and the next time a mass purge of consultants occurred (a regular happening at this company, where it was used as a substitute for real efforts at controlling costs) I, and the rest of the consultants working on our project (80% of the team) were forced out, taking our hard-earned knowledge with us.
Re:The first Slashdot troll post investigation
on
KaZaa Suspends Downloads
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
What gives is editors have unlimited points for moderation. It's censorship from the top. Of course what this entire thread deserves is to be re-parented to the top/front page (but the software probably doesn't allow that). Beacuse it is a matter of utmost importance to the/. community.
With this level of activity, in the face of such stiff moderator opposition, on an issue of vital importance to the/. community - something is seriously wrong (see my previous post above).
Moderators are self-selecting themselves as censors, to enforce some sort of groupthink PC. Trolls are posting more and more outreageous stuff, just to attack the system.
CT, it may be too late to save/., this is no longer such a fun site, a place for a community to form - it's just your JOB. Bleah.
Maybe you should just forget about the whole thing??? (Or maybe you have no choice - house and car, too many debts, wage slavery chaining you to a task you no longer love? I've been there.)
First of all, I find the troll/moderator wars totally tiresome. Secondly, every time CT adds another "feature" to the system, further limiting our freedom, in the name of improving the quality of the site, the S/N ratio gets worse, not better (after maybe a slight initial improvement).
(Reminds me of government regulation, but that's a different discussion.)
Finally, the system of doing moderation and allocating moderation points (assigning the task of moderation and meta-moderation) is totally broken from a UI point of view, which is why I opted out of the whole mess a long while ago. Why should there be 3 seperate activities, some gated or restricted, and some partially hidden from view? And use-it-or-lose-it moderator point assignment? And forcing a choice between moderation and posting? It is a kludge, a bad design. There should be only 1 activity, done in the open, that can contain a comment (to rebut or agree, and/or to justify moderation of it's parent), and logged-in users can also vote on the parent post - including other "moderation" posts. Voting totals cascade up the tree, with reversals for negative moderation (if the system includes it - I have seen posts that really justify it - see this recent post for a comment on such).
Maybe some of the other ideas of the current system should be kept - but the entire system is crying out for a redesign. It is choking on a chain of bad choices, each one which may have seemed justifiable at the time but whose culmative effect is to lower the quality of the site (which I find myself visiting less and less over time).
Not that I am trying to get into the defence any of the above alleged events/interventions (there is not the time nor the space for all these tired items that are trotted out by leftists when they want to dis the US), but you know, nationalization (i.e. stealing the investments of foreign companies) and the threat of proxy attacks originating from the Soviet Bloc (i.e. communist takeovers via any means during the Cold War) is not the same as changing vendors (a business/public policy decision).
I agreee. The computer software industry (except for the OSS corner) is nearly dead compared to 10, 15 years ago. The M$ monopoly (and monotony) has completely stifled the lively innovation of those times.
This will ultimately stifle competition and create an inefficient economy.
It already has. This is one of the reasons for the rise of OSS software. Mind that the people that complain the OSS is no good because it is cheap or free ($) confuse market value (price) with use value. OSS has high use value.
"Evolution" as an English word, means more than what is actually occurring in nature. The process in nature that we label "evolution" has no "direction". Random chance and a generic selection function (offspring <=> no offspring) does not a defined direction make. You get what you get.
Actually, you are wrong. While fish and tomatoes do not directly breed (nor are animal-plant species transfers the usual subject of genetic engineering - normally it would be plant-plant or animal-animal), it is concieveable that genes could (and probably have, at more than one point in Earth's long history) be transfered through the mediation of retro-viruses, even between animals and plants. As with most genetic experiments (natural or artifical) probably most resulting hybrids died or were suboptimal. But there is nothing special about genes from one source or another (mutation, combination, transfer) - to think different is to be essentially subscribing to the discredited theory of vitalism: that there is something "special" about living material that makes it different than any other - and that there are therefore special dangers in combining genes in "unnatural" ways. It's religion in disguise.
But it is too important to bother studying before taking drastic action. It is important to drasticaly diminish the size of the global economy *right now* on the off chance that the natural phenomenon we know has been happening for millenia is happening *this time* because of human activity.
This must be sarcasm, right?? Especially after the first paragraph. After all, this is politically-motivated junk science.
"drasticaly diminish the size of the global economy" == "commit economic sucide" == "spend the rest of your short life meanly scrabbling after food".
Cutting down on CO2 the way GreenPeace wants to do it (i.e. by limiting emmissions and thereby limiting economic activity) will kill our already weak economy. It's a typical socialist non-solution by people who hate our modern world anyway. Besides, it is still very arguable that CO2 levels (or changes thereof) have nothing with human activity (or are drowned out by natural carbon-cycle processes, which is saying the same thing).
Besides, there are ways to deal with excess carbon dioxide that don't involve economic sucide, including the excellent idea of putting iron into the ocean.
Sounds like an "undo" to me. If we ever need it. (Actually we may do it anyway for fish-farming reasons - in which case the chicken-little's of the world will start screaming about the coming ice age, like they used to before they got on the "global warming" band wagon. Always gotta have a crisis...)
But! It doesen't matter how much you toe the line and think that the powers-that-be would have no interest in you or your life - in only matters that you escape their notice in the bland flock of everyone else like you that they supposedly approve of. Should you be selected out for any reason, even the most trivial or random one - then the wolves will cut you from the flock and eat you. And the sheep still in the flock will bless the fact that they were not chosen (this time) and claim that you must have deserved it: "How dreadful!" they will say, "and he seemed to be just like us - I never knew he was so bad. I am glad they caught him. He deserves everything they do to him."
It's the pink monkey syndrome. Anyone who is "different" is a outcast to be destroyed, for the safety of the flock. This is the dark part of our biological heritige, along with hopeful part of our individual yearning for freedom, liberty and diginity (i.e. our rights are inalienable beacuse they are part of our biology, not because the state can't take them away in the name of collective safety).
Somehow, I am not getting a warm and cozy from the government on this one.
is a ritual designed to bless the resulting government as legitimate. Every government needs (or survives better with) some source of legitimacy, in addition to the excercise of naked power (of course, that helps too).
Royalty have their bloodlines - control of the state depends on the control of the body of the King or his hiers (or other relatives) - and usually the bloodline is considered anointed/blessed by God: "divine right of Kings".
Dictators have a harder time of it, and must scrabble for what legitimacy they can find.
Usually, various pretences of "national emergency" or "the current crisis" is invoked (this worked for the Roman Emperors, plus many
3rd-world tinpot types).
The Communists derived thier legitimacy directly from their ideology: "dictatorship of the proletariat" - it's for the workers (heh).
Western nations generally use voting: "the will of the people". Never mind that not all people can vote, or that the choices provided are very limited, or the popular methods of combining votes (winner take all instead of weighted voting, etc.) tend to reduce choices; because people voted, the results must be "the will of the people".
This is sort of like when you were young and Mom took you out to buy clothes: she chooses the store and pulls a couple of items from the rack that she considers to be acceptable, then you get to pick between the two shades in the same style - not much of a real choice.
Of course, there raises the question as to how much real choice and freedom Americans (or anybody else) can handle - generally anything resembling it is labeled "anarchy" or "chaos" and is "fixed" as soon as possible (like the Net right now, hmmm?).
Not totally true. First of all, it was Swartzkof (sp?) not Powell in operational command; secondly, he did the obvious strategy: flank the enemy's fixed position by going deep into the desert - the same strategy used by both Axis and Allies in North Africa.
And the skill he did show is knowing when to shut up when his commander in chief had made an extreme blunder. I am referring to the infamous Bush I "stop order" that ended the war before we had finished off our defeated enemy for diplomatic/political reasons that, at the time and even more in hindsight, were totally lame. (And now we will have to do it again, do it right; and do it from a harder starting position. Sigh..)
Slashdot Mirror
They amount to a trap door into an unknown amount of code for an insert or update. Sort of like the "COME FROM" construct in INTERCAL. In large database systems involving multiple development groups they can become an interaction nightmare; killing performance and having strange exceptions bubbling up from previously working code.
You are so lost. Such a loser. You will make a good drone in the European collective. Have a nice life.
Maybe. Or maybe not. But the European (read French) obsession with this contains more than a wiff of "projection" onto the US "other". As in "that is what we would do if we were still able to be that powerful."
And "they believe that any such undertaking is intrinsically flawed" - these are the words of tired "old Europe" - the words of self-hate. The residue of the COMINTERN effort to destroy the West; preparing it for conquest by spreading defeatist memes. We're not buying it.
Don't look to the EU for salvation in anything - the current international crisis may well kill it, or make harmonization efforts vs. the US politically impossible on both sides of the Atlantic.
You might try reading the article link before posting (just a suggestion).
What content are you talking about, the kind that the big-label record companies produce? If that goes the way of the dodo, maybe the overall loss will be small. The superstar system of "pop" music creation is a very recent thing, an artifact of the invention of radio and recording technology. The traditional market of performers is paid live performances. So, the technology changes, and therefore the business model changes.
At least 2 of those three items are very bad examples of "free markets": RIAA an industry cartel set up to restrain trade and free expression (based on a legal loophole coming out of our f**k-ed up IP laws), and the FDA is a government gatekeeper organization that restrains the free development and trade of foods/drugs.
Also, in some companies, the market rate for hiring a competent developer is above the salary range permitted for the position. So, a semi-permanent consultant is used instead - at 3 or 4 times the cost.
I experienced this myself when I did a stint of consulting - the customer (my site boss) wanted to hire me permanently, but backed off when it was realized my salary (from the consulting company, which was a good bit less than what the client was paying) translated into a position *above* his in the (rather rigid) salary structure of the client company. So nothing changed, and the next time a mass purge of consultants occurred (a regular happening at this company, where it was used as a substitute for real efforts at controlling costs) I, and the rest of the consultants working on our project (80% of the team) were forced out, taking our hard-earned knowledge with us.
What gives is editors have unlimited points for moderation. It's censorship from the top. Of course what this entire thread deserves is to be re-parented to the top/front page (but the software probably doesn't allow that). Beacuse it is a matter of utmost importance to the /. community.
Moderators are self-selecting themselves as censors, to enforce some sort of groupthink PC. Trolls are posting more and more outreageous stuff, just to attack the system.
CT, it may be too late to save /., this is no longer such a fun site, a place for a community to form - it's just your JOB. Bleah.
Maybe you should just forget about the whole thing??? (Or maybe you have no choice - house and car, too many debts, wage slavery chaining you to a task you no longer love? I've been there.)
Finally, the system of doing moderation and allocating moderation points (assigning the task of moderation and meta-moderation) is totally broken from a UI point of view, which is why I opted out of the whole mess a long while ago. Why should there be 3 seperate activities, some gated or restricted, and some partially hidden from view? And use-it-or-lose-it moderator point assignment? And forcing a choice between moderation and posting? It is a kludge, a bad design. There should be only 1 activity, done in the open, that can contain a comment (to rebut or agree, and/or to justify moderation of it's parent), and logged-in users can also vote on the parent post - including other "moderation" posts. Voting totals cascade up the tree, with reversals for negative moderation (if the system includes it - I have seen posts that really justify it - see this recent post for a comment on such).
Maybe some of the other ideas of the current system should be kept - but the entire system is crying out for a redesign. It is choking on a chain of bad choices, each one which may have seemed justifiable at the time but whose culmative effect is to lower the quality of the site (which I find myself visiting less and less over time).
Not that I am trying to get into the defence any of the above alleged events/interventions (there is not the time nor the space for all these tired items that are trotted out by leftists when they want to dis the US), but you know, nationalization (i.e. stealing the investments of foreign companies) and the threat of proxy attacks originating from the Soviet Bloc (i.e. communist takeovers via any means during the Cold War) is not the same as changing vendors (a business/public policy decision).
It already has. This is one of the reasons for the rise of OSS software. Mind that the people that complain the OSS is no good because it is cheap or free ($) confuse market value (price) with use value. OSS has high use value.
"Evolution" as an English word, means more than what is actually occurring in nature. The process in nature that we label "evolution" has no "direction". Random chance and a generic selection function (offspring <=> no offspring) does not a defined direction make. You get what you get.
Actually, you are wrong. While fish and tomatoes do not directly breed (nor are animal-plant species transfers the usual subject of genetic engineering - normally it would be plant-plant or animal-animal), it is concieveable that genes could (and probably have, at more than one point in Earth's long history) be transfered through the mediation of retro-viruses, even between animals and plants. As with most genetic experiments (natural or artifical) probably most resulting hybrids died or were suboptimal. But there is nothing special about genes from one source or another (mutation, combination, transfer) - to think different is to be essentially subscribing to the discredited theory of vitalism: that there is something "special" about living material that makes it different than any other - and that there are therefore special dangers in combining genes in "unnatural" ways. It's religion in disguise.
And it's just at 0. Where are you, moderators?
This must be sarcasm, right?? Especially after the first paragraph. After all, this is politically-motivated junk science.
"drasticaly diminish the size of the global economy" == "commit economic sucide" == "spend the rest of your short life meanly scrabbling after food".
Cutting down on CO2 the way GreenPeace wants to do it (i.e. by limiting emmissions and thereby limiting economic activity) will kill our already weak economy. It's a typical socialist non-solution by people who hate our modern world anyway. Besides, it is still very arguable that CO2 levels (or changes thereof) have nothing with human activity (or are drowned out by natural carbon-cycle processes, which is saying the same thing).
Besides, there are ways to deal with excess carbon dioxide that don't involve economic sucide, including the excellent idea of putting iron into the ocean. Sounds like an "undo" to me. If we ever need it. (Actually we may do it anyway for fish-farming reasons - in which case the chicken-little's of the world will start screaming about the coming ice age, like they used to before they got on the "global warming" band wagon. Always gotta have a crisis...)
(Note: I would have a good reason anyway, since my own kids are attending grade school now.)
But! It doesen't matter how much you toe the line and think that the powers-that-be would have no interest in you or your life - in only matters that you escape their notice in the bland flock of everyone else like you that they supposedly approve of. Should you be selected out for any reason, even the most trivial or random one - then the wolves will cut you from the flock and eat you. And the sheep still in the flock will bless the fact that they were not chosen (this time) and claim that you must have deserved it: "How dreadful!" they will say, "and he seemed to be just like us - I never knew he was so bad. I am glad they caught him. He deserves everything they do to him."
It's the pink monkey syndrome. Anyone who is "different" is a outcast to be destroyed, for the safety of the flock. This is the dark part of our biological heritige, along with hopeful part of our individual yearning for freedom, liberty and diginity (i.e. our rights are inalienable beacuse they are part of our biology, not because the state can't take them away in the name of collective safety).
Somehow, I am not getting a warm and cozy from the government on this one.
Royalty have their bloodlines - control of the state depends on the control of the body of the King or his hiers (or other relatives) - and usually the bloodline is considered anointed/blessed by God: "divine right of Kings".
Dictators have a harder time of it, and must scrabble for what legitimacy they can find. Usually, various pretences of "national emergency" or "the current crisis" is invoked (this worked for the Roman Emperors, plus many 3rd-world tinpot types).
The Communists derived thier legitimacy directly from their ideology: "dictatorship of the proletariat" - it's for the workers (heh).
Western nations generally use voting: "the will of the people". Never mind that not all people can vote, or that the choices provided are very limited, or the popular methods of combining votes (winner take all instead of weighted voting, etc.) tend to reduce choices; because people voted, the results must be "the will of the people".
This is sort of like when you were young and Mom took you out to buy clothes: she chooses the store and pulls a couple of items from the rack that she considers to be acceptable, then you get to pick between the two shades in the same style - not much of a real choice.
Of course, there raises the question as to how much real choice and freedom Americans (or anybody else) can handle - generally anything resembling it is labeled "anarchy" or "chaos" and is "fixed" as soon as possible (like the Net right now, hmmm?).
Sounds good to me. Where can I get the RPM?
Actually, that sounds like the mercenary armies of the contending Italian states during the Rennisance.
And the skill he did show is knowing when to shut up when his commander in chief had made an extreme blunder. I am referring to the infamous Bush I "stop order" that ended the war before we had finished off our defeated enemy for diplomatic/political reasons that, at the time and even more in hindsight, were totally lame. (And now we will have to do it again, do it right; and do it from a harder starting position. Sigh..)
And benchmark results are the only criterion for selecting a tecknology??? Hruumph.