> There is an argument that global warming has > caused deserts to grow, but one also has to > consider the effect of desert reclamation (the > Soviets were big on this) through irrigation and > careful land management.
While I believe there are some desert area which are "natural deserts" where no human intervention is involved, a lot of them *are* human made. It is mostly not due to global warming. Instead it is done by deforestation, not in modern age, but in human early history/pre-history. Chinese think there are "Four Great Ancient Civilizations": ancient China, Babylon, India, and Egypt. All of the places starting them are now deserts. Yes it includes China: the origin is the Loess Plateau around the Yellow River, it is a desert now.
Do you think civilization will somehow only start in desert? I don't think so. They must be originally resource rich, and with the river around them it makes them perfect place to start civilization. But once people know how to build a house with wood, and once people learned to grow their crops and find that forest are in their way, and once population grows and the majority of them don't even have the slightest thought about preservation, forest disappears, with its ability to hold water and soil. After a certain threshold it takes huge restoration efforts to reverse the desertification, and without that effort the desert grows by itself.
As I said, I know there is svk, and other distributed VC systems. The problem is just that nobody "win" in that area yet, so nobody get all the market share. System admins (especially those working in CS department of universities) tends not to install the needed software in those cases, and tell users to do it themselves (even though that means they have have to deal with the dependency hell themselves).
Yes, but again, it's painful to do if it happens often. What I'd have to do is (1) go home with my working directory, (2) create a repo for it, (3) start working on it with the repo, (4) (once online again) find the revision number that has the version I *was* having when I start working offline, (5) create a branch, (6) start pains-takingly update to each of the version I've created and check in, and finally (7) merge the result to the mainline. And even after that pain it is hard to see my history in the mainline, it looks as if a big portion of code has been modified in a single revision, and my only way to know the actual small steps taken is to have a log message saying "merge from branch xxx" and look at the branch xxx for each step. Not ideal at all for me.
I've always been using Subversion, but always see that as a serious limitation that makes it very tempting to seek an alternative. (But then, nothing else is as commonly available as Subversion, detering that switch since I need to work on many machines that I have no administrative rights.)
The story line is something like this. I have a program (or whatever that need history kept) that I collaborate with others, I create a repository and put it into the Internet so that others can access. Now I work at both office and at home, and for cost reasons I don't have an Internet connection at home. But from time to time I need to work from home. Then I have a problem: how I keep history for the work I do at home, given that I have no Internet access?
I can, of course, keep different versions at different directories. But it is pain to merge them back once I'm online. I can, of course, forget about history keeping. But if something happen I have nothing good to fall-back onto and I have no choice but to debug (normally I can choose to throw away what I've done and start again); and of course I'll give the person reading my change a really hard time when I merge everything back. I can also keep it in a local repo, which is somewhat better but needs time to setup and still difficult to merge with the actual repo that others are using. Most of the time, I end up giving up and wait until I'm online before I work.
I think this is expressedly not a use-case that Subversion will look at. It is a centralized VC scheme, and if one want distributed VC one has to look elsewhere. Perhaps svk, or perhaps arch/git. The unlucky fact is that no other system is as popular as Subversion (and of course, CVS).
Good luck. I remember reading that UK has a "plan" to do such "reprocessing" (or actually, building a "fast-breeder") to deal with the waste, but they never get the fund to actually do the research to materialize it.
> 2. place it into sealed containers and drop it into a tectonic subduction zone so it eventually gets pulled down into the mantle or
Good luck finding the energy to dig the "subduction zone" and transport all the wastes there.
> 3. Launch it into space
I suppose you are kidding about finding energy to launch them.
The actual answer is to simply permanently building storage facilities around the reactors to store the waste. But that accumulates, and nobody want to have to guard the facility for a few centuries. I think it is rather unresponsible to continue using the energy generation method if no better way is already developed to actually deal with the waste.
I'm more thinking in the line of intent. What is the intent that a typical citizen install a wireless router. My guess: "for himself to be able to access the broadband he has subscribed". If you see an open wifi signal, what is the most likely intent of the person enabling it? My guess is still, "for himself to be able to access the broadband he has subscribed". Does the average intent include "to allow arbitrary people to access it"? Well... I don't think so. Then it is a break-in for somebody just access it. Just like if somebody leave a key at a hidden corner around his gate at the openly accessible side of his house so that he can open the gate in case he has forgotten his key, if you find the key and open it, you are still breaking in. Of course he might not be able to catch you, but that is not the point. The point is, you are treapassing.
In a world where the norm of people installing wifi is to have a WPA key locking everything out, the rules will be very different. It is not a technical thing at all, it is a human thing. To resolve such issue, no spec document will tell you the answer. That answer has to be come from social norms.
Choosing a release time when the world is up and watching and waiting for the release of another piece of software with greatly overlapping audience is probably not the wisest act...
Perhaps there's a more complicated reason for the slashdotting? I've read that they are trying to use some cookie to track download to make sure duplicates are not counted, if some code has a performance problem it can kill the server rather badly... and those code does tend to be under-tested.
Now the site can load sometimes, but I didn't see a big Firefox 3 button for downloading a new version... perhaps we need to wait for the engineers there to fix code... =(
> The cost of Vista itself bars it from UMPC market.
No. The price of an additional license of Vista is 400USD, of course. But the cost of an additional license of Vista is essentially zero. If MS want to bar Linux from entry and Vista does the job, it can start offering 10USD sub-laptop only licenses to OEM. The problem is, Vista doesn't do the job. It would run too slow. It would eat battery too fast.
> So the only way this fungus could make the jump across the ocean to Latin America is either by
> A) someone bringing an infected plant and planting it in the middle of a plantation, or
> B) someone bringing a sack of infected earth and dumping it in a plantation. That's it, really.
I think it is much easier than that. The fungus spread by insects like aphid. All it takes is a single one left alone in a container to somehow land in anywhere close to plantation to begin the spread of the disease.
BMI is not a good predictor of individual health. There are too many reasons why an individual can have high BMI but healthy, or low BMI but not healthy. But since the probability of those, though many, reasons are not high, the average of it over a population is a good predictor of collective health. You might be yourselves an athletics that makes good reason for your own high BMI. If 70% of your whole population has that, it is not very likely that all of them have the same good excuse. Much more likely they are high BMI because they eat too much energy and expend too little.
I think the problem is not the removal of the use of uninitialized memory as source of randomness. Instead it is the wrong way it is done, removing nearly all sources of randomness as a result. By the way, the fixed package still don't use the uninitialized memory as source of randomness.
> Post-collision debris from Lunar creation might have persisted a little bit longer than originally thought in these crazy gravitational slots, but no evidence is available to back up this theory, and it sure would be neat-o."
Reading the abstract of the article actually led me to think the opposite: "The L4 and L5 positions are a little less stable than previously thought, so the non-existence of objects in those locations nowadays cannot be used to demostrate the lack of such objects in the past." IANAP either, so perhaps I'm completely wrong.
> In general I feel that whenever 'weapons' (DoS > attacks, censorship, physical force) are used to > end a discussion, it means that party has run > out of reasonable arguments (and in a way, > admits moral defeat).
If you ever have access to the discussion of those Chinese youths, you will understand the problem better. There are no longer two "parties" trying to make an "argument". They see the biased report as an intentional attacks to their country. As a person born and lived in HK for a long time, I can understand that news in Western standards normally tries to please their audience, so they are eager to report and exaggerate anything negative about China while tend to neglect or downplay positive things since they don't sell papers. Not for them. What they feel is that their voice goes nowhere except among the Chinese. Even if a large group of Chinese go to demonstrate in London and Paris, they get minimal media coverage. A small group of pro-Tibet people will get a huge noise, in contrast.
They are not just worried, but are angry, literally. If you see it, you will not be surprised by such attacks at all. It is just a matter of when. No, I don't think government intervention is required. Indeed I believe the Beijing government very much want this not to happen at all, given the upcoming Olympiads, but they probably have no way to prevent this.
It is sad that this whole thing fueled a whole generation of Chinese youth who continue to think that their country is being belittled, and think that it all comes because they are not powerful enough. Your dream just goes the reverse direction, unfortunately. But instead of being "against the Tibetans", they are "against the Western world". They more and more are thinking in the lines of "over-power the West", rather than to live in harmony with them. The main result of the current episode is a strong mutual distrust. Europeans mistrust news reported by PRC (never mind they can now report criticism as long as it is not persuading any movement threatening their rule over China), and Chinese in general mistrust any European or American reporting.
> On the other hand the Chinese regime's genocidal > brutality against the occupied people in Tibet > would invalidate even (imagined) de facto rule > according to international laws of which even > the PRC is nominally a signatory.
I find it completely inappropriate to say the current ruling of Chinese in Tibet to be a "genocidal brutality" when the place is still dominated by Tibetans and when they still learn Tibetan not just at home but at school as well.
> If you're going to use the Yuan claims over > Tibet as an argument that modern-day China > should rule there,...
No. I'm saying that it is nonsense to say the situation is the same as that of India under the British hands.
> the Dalai Lama at the time paid deference to > the Qing emperor (but hey, so did Korea and > Japan), and in return was granted spiritual > authority over all of China, in return for > acknowledging the emperor's (limited) political > authority
The rulers of a country rule their country differently at different times. That at the current moment you don't accept such relation as the ownership doesn't mean that in the past they don't. On the other hand, Qing never have a map containing Japan or Korean, while Qing's map always contain Tibet.
And on the other hand, I don't think historic reasons alone should decide whether a country should possess a piece of land. It is decided by a combination of the military power of the country, the economic power of the country, the happiness of the people living there as ruled by the country, and other factors.
> I told them all "fine, i will agree to that, > Tibet is as much a part of China as India is a > part of Britian."
The earliest times when Tibet becomes part of China is the Yuan dynasty (1279 - 1368), the ones getting them is Mongols, not Hans. After that, in the Ming dynasty (1368 - 1644), Tibet is part of China in the strong times and invaded by others in the weak times of China. During much of the Qing dynasty (1644 - 1911) Tibet is part of China. Tibet is then said to be part of Republic of China (1911 - now), but they never actually quite control the place due to British interest and a very weak China. PRC resumed the possession of Tibet in its history in 1951, and Tibet is part of China ever since. I think a comparison with the past British rule over India is very inappropriate.
It might be the case for much of the 2000 years, but this cannot be the case now. Very few han Chinese want to reside in Tibet or Xinjiang. The high altitude, harsh weather and low income there is not what they typically prefers. And this theory is also incompatible with the way that the "one-child policy" is being executed. That policy dictates that every family can only have a single child. There are heavy fine for those caught giving birth to more children. And there are staff who repeatedly try to "ensure" people for neutering after the birth of the first child. The catch: only Han people are restricted, all other races can give birth to as many as they want. If the aim is "extermination and assimilation", why the hell they have such stupid rule to get every member of the main race angry?
Wikipedia is actually much better than newspaper in this regard. When reading newspaper, you have no way to see the opinions of anybody other than the members of the editorial board of the newspaper. In Wikipedia, at least you can view the history of the article and the discussion page if the Wiki-page is heavy-handed by a group of people with a particular political, commercial or whatever stand. The only thing good about newspaper is that it is so obviously biased that nobody will trust it.
I only oppose to the idea that anybody should expect that nobody should be looking at your premise by taking a photograph, say once a few months, because their intention is to take a photo of the scenery around. Of course if it come down to tracking a particular person or a particular belonging of him, that is a surveillance system and in general will not be accepted by public. I can hardly think that what Google map do now can be seen as such.
I don't welcome a world where merely opening my eye or taking a photo in public places can lead me in court if that results in being able to see your "secrets".
My understanding is that those the Chinese government really afraid of are those "naive" users. So if you display that you are not in this (major, at least that's what they'd think) set of users, say by using encryption, they no longer bother.
Slashdot Mirror
> There is an argument that global warming has
> caused deserts to grow, but one also has to
> consider the effect of desert reclamation (the
> Soviets were big on this) through irrigation and
> careful land management.
While I believe there are some desert area which are "natural deserts" where no human intervention is involved, a lot of them *are* human made. It is mostly not due to global warming. Instead it is done by deforestation, not in modern age, but in human early history/pre-history. Chinese think there are "Four Great Ancient Civilizations": ancient China, Babylon, India, and Egypt. All of the places starting them are now deserts. Yes it includes China: the origin is the Loess Plateau around the Yellow River, it is a desert now.
Do you think civilization will somehow only start in desert? I don't think so. They must be originally resource rich, and with the river around them it makes them perfect place to start civilization. But once people know how to build a house with wood, and once people learned to grow their crops and find that forest are in their way, and once population grows and the majority of them don't even have the slightest thought about preservation, forest disappears, with its ability to hold water and soil. After a certain threshold it takes huge restoration efforts to reverse the desertification, and without that effort the desert grows by itself.
As I said, I know there is svk, and other distributed VC systems. The problem is just that nobody "win" in that area yet, so nobody get all the market share. System admins (especially those working in CS department of universities) tends not to install the needed software in those cases, and tell users to do it themselves (even though that means they have have to deal with the dependency hell themselves).
Yes, but again, it's painful to do if it happens often. What I'd have to do is (1) go home with my working directory, (2) create a repo for it, (3) start working on it with the repo, (4) (once online again) find the revision number that has the version I *was* having when I start working offline, (5) create a branch, (6) start pains-takingly update to each of the version I've created and check in, and finally (7) merge the result to the mainline. And even after that pain it is hard to see my history in the mainline, it looks as if a big portion of code has been modified in a single revision, and my only way to know the actual small steps taken is to have a log message saying "merge from branch xxx" and look at the branch xxx for each step. Not ideal at all for me.
I've always been using Subversion, but always see that as a serious limitation that makes it very tempting to seek an alternative. (But then, nothing else is as commonly available as Subversion, detering that switch since I need to work on many machines that I have no administrative rights.)
The story line is something like this. I have a program (or whatever that need history kept) that I collaborate with others, I create a repository and put it into the Internet so that others can access. Now I work at both office and at home, and for cost reasons I don't have an Internet connection at home. But from time to time I need to work from home. Then I have a problem: how I keep history for the work I do at home, given that I have no Internet access?
I can, of course, keep different versions at different directories. But it is pain to merge them back once I'm online. I can, of course, forget about history keeping. But if something happen I have nothing good to fall-back onto and I have no choice but to debug (normally I can choose to throw away what I've done and start again); and of course I'll give the person reading my change a really hard time when I merge everything back. I can also keep it in a local repo, which is somewhat better but needs time to setup and still difficult to merge with the actual repo that others are using. Most of the time, I end up giving up and wait until I'm online before I work.
I think this is expressedly not a use-case that Subversion will look at. It is a centralized VC scheme, and if one want distributed VC one has to look elsewhere. Perhaps svk, or perhaps arch/git. The unlucky fact is that no other system is as popular as Subversion (and of course, CVS).
> 1. reprocess it or
Good luck. I remember reading that UK has a "plan" to do such "reprocessing" (or actually, building a "fast-breeder") to deal with the waste, but they never get the fund to actually do the research to materialize it.
> 2. place it into sealed containers and drop it into a tectonic subduction zone so it eventually gets pulled down into the mantle or
Good luck finding the energy to dig the "subduction zone" and transport all the wastes there.
> 3. Launch it into space
I suppose you are kidding about finding energy to launch them.
The actual answer is to simply permanently building storage facilities around the reactors to store the waste. But that accumulates, and nobody want to have to guard the facility for a few centuries. I think it is rather unresponsible to continue using the energy generation method if no better way is already developed to actually deal with the waste.
I'm more thinking in the line of intent. What is the intent that a typical citizen install a wireless router. My guess: "for himself to be able to access the broadband he has subscribed". If you see an open wifi signal, what is the most likely intent of the person enabling it? My guess is still, "for himself to be able to access the broadband he has subscribed". Does the average intent include "to allow arbitrary people to access it"? Well... I don't think so. Then it is a break-in for somebody just access it. Just like if somebody leave a key at a hidden corner around his gate at the openly accessible side of his house so that he can open the gate in case he has forgotten his key, if you find the key and open it, you are still breaking in. Of course he might not be able to catch you, but that is not the point. The point is, you are treapassing.
In a world where the norm of people installing wifi is to have a WPA key locking everything out, the rules will be very different. It is not a technical thing at all, it is a human thing. To resolve such issue, no spec document will tell you the answer. That answer has to be come from social norms.
Choosing a release time when the world is up and watching and waiting for the release of another piece of software with greatly overlapping audience is probably not the wisest act...
Perhaps there's a more complicated reason for the slashdotting? I've read that they are trying to use some cookie to track download to make sure duplicates are not counted, if some code has a performance problem it can kill the server rather badly... and those code does tend to be under-tested.
Now the site can load sometimes, but I didn't see a big Firefox 3 button for downloading a new version... perhaps we need to wait for the engineers there to fix code... =(
This is what AdBlock plus reports about browser version compatibility at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4364:
> Works with:
> * Firefox: 1.5 - 3.0.*
Looks like you have what you asked for...
> The cost of Vista itself bars it from UMPC market.
No. The price of an additional license of Vista is 400USD, of course. But the cost of an additional license of Vista is essentially zero. If MS want to bar Linux from entry and Vista does the job, it can start offering 10USD sub-laptop only licenses to OEM. The problem is, Vista doesn't do the job. It would run too slow. It would eat battery too fast.
> So the only way this fungus could make the jump across the ocean to Latin America is either by
> A) someone bringing an infected plant and planting it in the middle of a plantation, or
> B) someone bringing a sack of infected earth and dumping it in a plantation. That's it, really.
I think it is much easier than that. The fungus spread by insects like aphid. All it takes is a single one left alone in a container to somehow land in anywhere close to plantation to begin the spread of the disease.
BMI is not a good predictor of individual health. There are too many reasons why an individual can have high BMI but healthy, or low BMI but not healthy. But since the probability of those, though many, reasons are not high, the average of it over a population is a good predictor of collective health. You might be yourselves an athletics that makes good reason for your own high BMI. If 70% of your whole population has that, it is not very likely that all of them have the same good excuse. Much more likely they are high BMI because they eat too much energy and expend too little.
It is a problem of OpenSSL, not OpenSSH. The former has a much larger set of applications, including, e.g., telnet-ssl and Apache SSL module.
I think the problem is not the removal of the use of uninitialized memory as source of randomness. Instead it is the wrong way it is done, removing nearly all sources of randomness as a result. By the way, the fixed package still don't use the uninitialized memory as source of randomness.
> Post-collision debris from Lunar creation might have persisted a little bit longer than originally thought in these crazy gravitational slots, but no evidence is available to back up this theory, and it sure would be neat-o."
Reading the abstract of the article actually led me to think the opposite: "The L4 and L5 positions are a little less stable than previously thought, so the non-existence of objects in those locations nowadays cannot be used to demostrate the lack of such objects in the past." IANAP either, so perhaps I'm completely wrong.
> In general I feel that whenever 'weapons' (DoS
> attacks, censorship, physical force) are used to
> end a discussion, it means that party has run
> out of reasonable arguments (and in a way,
> admits moral defeat).
If you ever have access to the discussion of those Chinese youths, you will understand the problem better. There are no longer two "parties" trying to make an "argument". They see the biased report as an intentional attacks to their country. As a person born and lived in HK for a long time, I can understand that news in Western standards normally tries to please their audience, so they are eager to report and exaggerate anything negative about China while tend to neglect or downplay positive things since they don't sell papers. Not for them. What they feel is that their voice goes nowhere except among the Chinese. Even if a large group of Chinese go to demonstrate in London and Paris, they get minimal media coverage. A small group of pro-Tibet people will get a huge noise, in contrast.
They are not just worried, but are angry, literally. If you see it, you will not be surprised by such attacks at all. It is just a matter of when. No, I don't think government intervention is required. Indeed I believe the Beijing government very much want this not to happen at all, given the upcoming Olympiads, but they probably have no way to prevent this.
It is sad that this whole thing fueled a whole generation of Chinese youth who continue to think that their country is being belittled, and think that it all comes because they are not powerful enough. Your dream just goes the reverse direction, unfortunately. But instead of being "against the Tibetans", they are "against the Western world". They more and more are thinking in the lines of "over-power the West", rather than to live in harmony with them. The main result of the current episode is a strong mutual distrust. Europeans mistrust news reported by PRC (never mind they can now report criticism as long as it is not persuading any movement threatening their rule over China), and Chinese in general mistrust any European or American reporting.
> Tibet is as much a part of China is Ireland is a
> part of England
I suppose you mean United Kingdom or Great Britain, not "England", which is itself just a part of it.
> On the other hand the Chinese regime's genocidal
> brutality against the occupied people in Tibet
> would invalidate even (imagined) de facto rule
> according to international laws of which even
> the PRC is nominally a signatory.
I find it completely inappropriate to say the current ruling of Chinese in Tibet to be a "genocidal brutality" when the place is still dominated by Tibetans and when they still learn Tibetan not just at home but at school as well.
> If you're going to use the Yuan claims over ...
> Tibet as an argument that modern-day China
> should rule there,
No. I'm saying that it is nonsense to say the situation is the same as that of India under the British hands.
> the Dalai Lama at the time paid deference to
> the Qing emperor (but hey, so did Korea and
> Japan), and in return was granted spiritual
> authority over all of China, in return for
> acknowledging the emperor's (limited) political
> authority
The rulers of a country rule their country differently at different times. That at the current moment you don't accept such relation as the ownership doesn't mean that in the past they don't. On the other hand, Qing never have a map containing Japan or Korean, while Qing's map always contain Tibet.
And on the other hand, I don't think historic reasons alone should decide whether a country should possess a piece of land. It is decided by a combination of the military power of the country, the economic power of the country, the happiness of the people living there as ruled by the country, and other factors.
> I told them all "fine, i will agree to that,
> Tibet is as much a part of China as India is a
> part of Britian."
The earliest times when Tibet becomes part of China is the Yuan dynasty (1279 - 1368), the ones getting them is Mongols, not Hans. After that, in the Ming dynasty (1368 - 1644), Tibet is part of China in the strong times and invaded by others in the weak times of China. During much of the Qing dynasty (1644 - 1911) Tibet is part of China. Tibet is then said to be part of Republic of China (1911 - now), but they never actually quite control the place due to British interest and a very weak China. PRC resumed the possession of Tibet in its history in 1951, and Tibet is part of China ever since. I think a comparison with the past British rule over India is very inappropriate.
It might be the case for much of the 2000 years, but this cannot be the case now. Very few han Chinese want to reside in Tibet or Xinjiang. The high altitude, harsh weather and low income there is not what they typically prefers. And this theory is also incompatible with the way that the "one-child policy" is being executed. That policy dictates that every family can only have a single child. There are heavy fine for those caught giving birth to more children. And there are staff who repeatedly try to "ensure" people for neutering after the birth of the first child. The catch: only Han people are restricted, all other races can give birth to as many as they want. If the aim is "extermination and assimilation", why the hell they have such stupid rule to get every member of the main race angry?
Wikipedia is actually much better than newspaper in this regard. When reading newspaper, you have no way to see the opinions of anybody other than the members of the editorial board of the newspaper. In Wikipedia, at least you can view the history of the article and the discussion page if the Wiki-page is heavy-handed by a group of people with a particular political, commercial or whatever stand. The only thing good about newspaper is that it is so obviously biased that nobody will trust it.
I only oppose to the idea that anybody should expect that nobody should be looking at your premise by taking a photograph, say once a few months, because their intention is to take a photo of the scenery around. Of course if it come down to tracking a particular person or a particular belonging of him, that is a surveillance system and in general will not be accepted by public. I can hardly think that what Google map do now can be seen as such.
I don't welcome a world where merely opening my eye or taking a photo in public places can lead me in court if that results in being able to see your "secrets".
My understanding is that those the Chinese government really afraid of are those "naive" users. So if you display that you are not in this (major, at least that's what they'd think) set of users, say by using encryption, they no longer bother.