Yep - as well as anything that can be used to create one of those things more efficiently (like farm implements), transport those things to people who want/need them, preserve/protect them for future use, etc.
You could also argue that derivative products created from the labor of people using these basic necessities also constitutes value from those basic resource used. I suppose in that case you could also then argue that Bitcoins have a value derived from the energy/resources used to generate them (even if that resource use is very arbitrarily defined in a way that tries to prevent any efficiencies in "production" from making generation faster.
I like how initially the post was modded insightful and funny, and then eventually troll - probably once mods browsing at 1+ stopped seeing the parent troll and thought mine was a serious reply to the OP. Oh well. At least a couple of people got it;)
It was an undergraduate lab experiment, so, *I* didn't get a chance. But it's not like this is anything new, the orgininal Urey-Miller experiment was done in 1952, and Joan Oro performed a similar experiment to create adenine in 1961. Later experiments have seen other nucleic acids form, as well.
Not over yet, actually. If Oracle had really learned their lesson they wouldn't have appealed. I doubt they will win, but as I said it's still not an encouraging move.
But yeah, OpenJDK is not going anywhere, and the support behind it dwarfs even Google's resources...
It's folk like you that Alexander Pope alluded to when he wrote, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing."
In brief, you're wrong. But I don't have the time to explain it to you, and you likely lack the intellect to comprehend that you are wrong due to the Dunning-Kruger effect
I look at it, and the chances for each event are just too high to say that it's been a run of good luck for life on Earth in my opinion
I created amino acids out of basic molecules in a lab in college by mixing a few gases, water, and some electricity for a week. Extrapolate that over a few billion years over a few billion (or more) planets and the current result is just NOT a very low probability event. It's like saying they chances of winning the lottery are so low that when someone does God must have been behind it.
And what isn't clear to me is - what defines the "judgement"? That Genesis is or isn't literal, or that there just isn't enough evidence to make that decision? ie. is this criminal or civil standards? IMO there is enough scientific evidence that either would have effectively been proven, but "beyond a reasonable doubt" and "preponderance of evidence" aren't the same thing, and I'm sure provide plenty or wiggle (or weasel) room...
Definitely, and that's a great thing. Though Oracle still has a lot of control over the language - and suing Google for Android wasn't an encouraging move...
Java has one feature that C# doesn't. This one feature makes up for all the nice-to-have little C# features. That one feature is "portability", not only of the language, but even more importantly, *all* the standard libraries.
Uh... yeah, I completely agree, and said so in my previous post in a lot fewer words;) C# language = great. Platform = sucks.
[Though of course my maintainer comment was complete sarcasm... Oracle seems to be very good at buying companies with popular, often open source products and fucking them up.]
Yeah, it's basically true... most of the major feature additions in the last couple releases really do seem to be to catch up to C# (and other, more dynamic scripting languages). C# as a language is great - it's major problem is being so tightly associated with.NET/Sliverlight/etc.
At least Java has one thing going for it - a highly responsive owner/maintainer that listens carefully to all complaints and patches security vulnerabilities almost instantly!
The POINT is it's a general purpose SoC-based platform that does a LOT more than just talk to a temperature sensor, etc. Why put a whole extra microcontroller in a design when you can just put in a UART (or possibly already have buffered support from the SoC).
If the only point of the design is to talk to a sensor, using a real OS like Linux would be stupid, of course.
Or just use a simple UART or other sort of buffered interface (in the case I was talking about that support is built into the SoC, where you are toggling register bits to do what you want, not writing to a GPIO wire directly). You could definitely disable interrupts and lock the kernel for 60us to get the right timing (if this is the only purpose, that's fine, otherwise that's a LOT of cycles to disable interrupts).
However there are some things that you can do with a micro-controller that can not be done with a full OS - e.g. bit-banging I/O to one-wire temperature sensors.
Why couldn't you do that with a full OS? I did something just like this under Linux almost a decade ago on a set-top with BRCM SoC. You can even do it in userspace if you mmap the BRCM GPIO registers. Same with a HID driver (BRCM's was implemented in software in a kernel module... kind of a CPU hog, but it worked fine). Even their V.34 modem was implemented in software (ugh).
Those are high level protocols requiring software and OS support, etc. GPIO basically gives you register-level access to pins that you can do whatever you want with, which is extremely useful for an educational/DIY board, of course.
No, what you are suggesting is having a driver's exam every time you buy a car, borrow, or rent.
Oh, I see... you don't register every car you buy? Though I do like where you are going with that - require someone to take a gun safety class/test before owning a firearm (renewable periodically). Good idea!
You'll notice that selling to criminals is a crime, and a felon having a firearm is also a crime.
Seriously? That's the POINT of background checks! What do you think, the seller should just ask the buyer, "hey, are you a felon?" I'm sure that will work...
As for airport security, well I don't like to be groped or have nude images of me or my wife taken, but I don't know about your tastes. I would rather not.
Current security mechanisms are another topic, but I sure as hell support airport security in general.
Strange, I could have sworn that criminals having firearms was already illegal.
No, it's not illegal for a "criminal" to have a firearm - that is, unless it's unregistered and that person lives in a place where registration is required! It may be illegal for a felon to have a firearm, but to be a felon they were already convicted so a lot of good that does...
"Our Flight Software Group currently has opportunities developing software for embedded flight hardware using Linux and VxWorks as well as ground simulation software using Linux. "
They are HIRING people with VxWorks experience and say they use it in their current job descriptions.
They use Linux, obviously. But they also use VxWorks for some mission critical RT applications. You said "they don't use it at all". You are wrong.
Second, background checks only affect people that are already within the law.
That is a horrible argument. With that same logic we shouldn't bother with driver's exams or licenses, either, we should allow 13 year olds to buy all of the alcohol and cigarettes they want, and forget any security checks at airports, they are terribly inconvenient for those who aren't trying to hijack a plane.
What's to stop criminals from continuing to do private sales of illegal firearms?
Law enforcement. That's their job. But only if you actually make it illegal first, duh.
Irrelevant. All they have to listen to is the subset of people in their own district who comprise more than 50% of voters who actually show up. They can and do totally ignore all other viewpoints. Districts have been carefully engineered to ensure that situation exists.
Not sure how listening to 400,000 people is significantly easier than listening to 700,000. You seem to be saying assuming the most vocal are by definition the majority, when that's rarely the case. Besides, your theory also seems to imply there is one single "majority" on all issues, when that's rarely true, either. I'm sure many congresspeople have been voted out of office because of those same assumptions... the Republicans vastly underestimated the value of connecting with the grass roots voters, as well, which is why they got hammered in the last election...
Just don't think I'll ever be convinced that prioritizing said DC games over home presence is the solution. In fact, if you look at it the length of congressional sessions is higher now than almost any time in the past 30 years, yet also the least productive...
Oh well, at least we seem to agree that Congress is currently almost completely ineffective and that political games have utterly swamped any productivity...
Why not? With the current gerrymandered districts, it's not hard to figure out exactly what the majority of constituents in each one think that they want. That's the easy part.
No, it's really the easy part, and hasn't been for a long time. Think about it - when this system was created one representative represented about 50,000 citizens. Now that number is about 700,000 (and for Senators, up to about 15 million). These citizens are not homogenous no matter how badly you think things are gerrymandered (which is not nearly as much as you seem to believe, and in fact is totally irrelevant to the Senate).
The hard part is for congress to come up with some kind of common national plan of action rather than deadlock. That would generally require each member of congress to spend *less* time holed up in their own echo chambers and *more* time thinking about the country as a whole.
Or to vote on an issue based on what their constituents want rather than what the party leadership tells them. These days DC and specifically the congressional floors are the ultimate echo chambers. Thinking about their constituents more and their party and special interests less would not only be a more effective way to get legislation passed, it would actually pass legislation that the majority of voters WANT (now, you may argue that is not always a good thing, but that's a democracy for you, take it or leave it...) Stop with the partisanism, the childish pseudo-filibusters using counterproductive and antiquated house rules, listen to your supporters, and just VOTE already.
And in many ways, lobbyists are the opposite of local constituents. If I had to choose whether my representative spent more time listening to the former in DC or the latter in my district, I'd choose the latter, hands down.
Wait, so you think the problem is that legislators spend too MUCH time in their home districts listening to the opinions of the people who they were elected to represent? There are many things wrong with the current federal government (for example, blind partisanism and special interest lobbying, as you said) but trying to understand the most important issues in your home district/state and listening to your constituents should never be considered one of them.
And actually, the reason the country was set up as a republic of united states instead of a single federal democracy is to hold the government more accountable to the individual states, not less. Not that it's always a good thing that way, but it was the reason...
Slashdot Mirror
Try paying for anything in Bitcoins without electricity.
Yep - as well as anything that can be used to create one of those things more efficiently (like farm implements), transport those things to people who want/need them, preserve/protect them for future use, etc.
You could also argue that derivative products created from the labor of people using these basic necessities also constitutes value from those basic resource used. I suppose in that case you could also then argue that Bitcoins have a value derived from the energy/resources used to generate them (even if that resource use is very arbitrarily defined in a way that tries to prevent any efficiencies in "production" from making generation faster.
Except Wall Street is at least nominally speculating based on equity, whereas Bitcoins have less inherent value than a bag of tulip bulbs.
I like how initially the post was modded insightful and funny, and then eventually troll - probably once mods browsing at 1+ stopped seeing the parent troll and thought mine was a serious reply to the OP. Oh well. At least a couple of people got it ;)
Or as someone else put it: "one of Java's biggest strengths is that it limits how badly mediocre programmers can screw up the code" ;)
It was an undergraduate lab experiment, so, *I* didn't get a chance. But it's not like this is anything new, the orgininal Urey-Miller experiment was done in 1952, and Joan Oro performed a similar experiment to create adenine in 1961. Later experiments have seen other nucleic acids form, as well.
Not over yet, actually. If Oracle had really learned their lesson they wouldn't have appealed. I doubt they will win, but as I said it's still not an encouraging move.
But yeah, OpenJDK is not going anywhere, and the support behind it dwarfs even Google's resources...
It's folk like you that Alexander Pope alluded to when he wrote, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing."
In brief, you're wrong. But I don't have the time to explain it to you, and you likely lack the intellect to comprehend that you are wrong due to the Dunning-Kruger effect
I look at it, and the chances for each event are just too high to say that it's been a run of good luck for life on Earth in my opinion
I created amino acids out of basic molecules in a lab in college by mixing a few gases, water, and some electricity for a week. Extrapolate that over a few billion years over a few billion (or more) planets and the current result is just NOT a very low probability event. It's like saying they chances of winning the lottery are so low that when someone does God must have been behind it.
And what isn't clear to me is - what defines the "judgement"? That Genesis is or isn't literal, or that there just isn't enough evidence to make that decision? ie. is this criminal or civil standards? IMO there is enough scientific evidence that either would have effectively been proven, but "beyond a reasonable doubt" and "preponderance of evidence" aren't the same thing, and I'm sure provide plenty or wiggle (or weasel) room...
Definitely, and that's a great thing. Though Oracle still has a lot of control over the language - and suing Google for Android wasn't an encouraging move...
Java has one feature that C# doesn't. This one feature makes up for all the nice-to-have little C# features. That one feature is "portability", not only of the language, but even more importantly, *all* the standard libraries.
Uh... yeah, I completely agree, and said so in my previous post in a lot fewer words ;) C# language = great. Platform = sucks.
[Though of course my maintainer comment was complete sarcasm... Oracle seems to be very good at buying companies with popular, often open source products and fucking them up.]
Yeah, it's basically true... most of the major feature additions in the last couple releases really do seem to be to catch up to C# (and other, more dynamic scripting languages). C# as a language is great - it's major problem is being so tightly associated with .NET/Sliverlight/etc.
At least Java has one thing going for it - a highly responsive owner/maintainer that listens carefully to all complaints and patches security vulnerabilities almost instantly!
The POINT is it's a general purpose SoC-based platform that does a LOT more than just talk to a temperature sensor, etc. Why put a whole extra microcontroller in a design when you can just put in a UART (or possibly already have buffered support from the SoC).
If the only point of the design is to talk to a sensor, using a real OS like Linux would be stupid, of course.
Or just use a simple UART or other sort of buffered interface (in the case I was talking about that support is built into the SoC, where you are toggling register bits to do what you want, not writing to a GPIO wire directly). You could definitely disable interrupts and lock the kernel for 60us to get the right timing (if this is the only purpose, that's fine, otherwise that's a LOT of cycles to disable interrupts).
Actually, two of the three writers (John Cleese and Chris Sanders) are more than decent. Must have been the 3rd guy who screwed it up.
However there are some things that you can do with a micro-controller that can not be done with a full OS - e.g. bit-banging I/O to one-wire temperature sensors.
Why couldn't you do that with a full OS? I did something just like this under Linux almost a decade ago on a set-top with BRCM SoC. You can even do it in userspace if you mmap the BRCM GPIO registers. Same with a HID driver (BRCM's was implemented in software in a kernel module... kind of a CPU hog, but it worked fine). Even their V.34 modem was implemented in software (ugh).
Seriously? Come on...
Those are high level protocols requiring software and OS support, etc. GPIO basically gives you register-level access to pins that you can do whatever you want with, which is extremely useful for an educational/DIY board, of course.
No, what you are suggesting is having a driver's exam every time you buy a car, borrow, or rent.
Oh, I see... you don't register every car you buy? Though I do like where you are going with that - require someone to take a gun safety class/test before owning a firearm (renewable periodically). Good idea!
You'll notice that selling to criminals is a crime, and a felon having a firearm is also a crime.
Seriously? That's the POINT of background checks! What do you think, the seller should just ask the buyer, "hey, are you a felon?" I'm sure that will work...
As for airport security, well I don't like to be groped or have nude images of me or my wife taken, but I don't know about your tastes. I would rather not.
Current security mechanisms are another topic, but I sure as hell support airport security in general.
Strange, I could have sworn that criminals having firearms was already illegal.
No, it's not illegal for a "criminal" to have a firearm - that is, unless it's unregistered and that person lives in a place where registration is required! It may be illegal for a felon to have a firearm, but to be a felon they were already convicted so a lot of good that does...
No, it's not. Ok, here's more evidence.
http://www.spacex.com/careers.php?jvi=oe2HWfwD,Job
"Our Flight Software Group currently has opportunities developing software for embedded flight hardware using Linux and VxWorks as well as ground simulation software using Linux. "
They are HIRING people with VxWorks experience and say they use it in their current job descriptions.
They use Linux, obviously. But they also use VxWorks for some mission critical RT applications. You said "they don't use it at all". You are wrong.
Second, background checks only affect people that are already within the law.
That is a horrible argument. With that same logic we shouldn't bother with driver's exams or licenses, either, we should allow 13 year olds to buy all of the alcohol and cigarettes they want, and forget any security checks at airports, they are terribly inconvenient for those who aren't trying to hijack a plane.
What's to stop criminals from continuing to do private sales of illegal firearms?
Law enforcement. That's their job. But only if you actually make it illegal first, duh.
Or don't RTFA, and instead actually do some research first.
http://www.spacex.com/downloads/dragonlab-datasheet.pdf
Search for "Flight Software" (the most mission critical RT bit, of course).
Irrelevant. All they have to listen to is the subset of people in their own district who comprise more than 50% of voters who actually show up. They can and do totally ignore all other viewpoints. Districts have been carefully engineered to ensure that situation exists.
Not sure how listening to 400,000 people is significantly easier than listening to 700,000. You seem to be saying assuming the most vocal are by definition the majority, when that's rarely the case. Besides, your theory also seems to imply there is one single "majority" on all issues, when that's rarely true, either. I'm sure many congresspeople have been voted out of office because of those same assumptions... the Republicans vastly underestimated the value of connecting with the grass roots voters, as well, which is why they got hammered in the last election...
Just don't think I'll ever be convinced that prioritizing said DC games over home presence is the solution. In fact, if you look at it the length of congressional sessions is higher now than almost any time in the past 30 years, yet also the least productive...
Oh well, at least we seem to agree that Congress is currently almost completely ineffective and that political games have utterly swamped any productivity...
Why not? With the current gerrymandered districts, it's not hard to figure out exactly what the majority of constituents in each one think that they want. That's the easy part.
No, it's really the easy part, and hasn't been for a long time. Think about it - when this system was created one representative represented about 50,000 citizens. Now that number is about 700,000 (and for Senators, up to about 15 million). These citizens are not homogenous no matter how badly you think things are gerrymandered (which is not nearly as much as you seem to believe, and in fact is totally irrelevant to the Senate).
The hard part is for congress to come up with some kind of common national plan of action rather than deadlock. That would generally require each member of congress to spend *less* time holed up in their own echo chambers and *more* time thinking about the country as a whole.
Or to vote on an issue based on what their constituents want rather than what the party leadership tells them. These days DC and specifically the congressional floors are the ultimate echo chambers. Thinking about their constituents more and their party and special interests less would not only be a more effective way to get legislation passed, it would actually pass legislation that the majority of voters WANT (now, you may argue that is not always a good thing, but that's a democracy for you, take it or leave it...) Stop with the partisanism, the childish pseudo-filibusters using counterproductive and antiquated house rules, listen to your supporters, and just VOTE already.
And in many ways, lobbyists are the opposite of local constituents. If I had to choose whether my representative spent more time listening to the former in DC or the latter in my district, I'd choose the latter, hands down.
Wait, so you think the problem is that legislators spend too MUCH time in their home districts listening to the opinions of the people who they were elected to represent? There are many things wrong with the current federal government (for example, blind partisanism and special interest lobbying, as you said) but trying to understand the most important issues in your home district/state and listening to your constituents should never be considered one of them.
And actually, the reason the country was set up as a republic of united states instead of a single federal democracy is to hold the government more accountable to the individual states, not less. Not that it's always a good thing that way, but it was the reason...