By the way, if you need help seeing what this looks like: Ron Paul will show you the way.
The people who are really serious about "Live Free or Die" cover themselves in petrol and set fire to themselves to protest against injustice and oppression. Ron Paul? He's just another politician, full of words.
About the only significant natural resource Japan ever had was coal.... which is one of the reasons why it industrialized in the first place. Much of that coal has already been extracted though, so Japan generally does need to look elsewhere for their energy needs.
A fairly large proportion of that coal was in Korea, which was a Japanese colony for a large part of the first half of the 20th century (1910-1945).
Which is why we don't build very large dams much any more, unless absolutely forced to. Perhaps you can agree that the same logic should apply to nuclear power.
In a lot of the world, large dams aren't being built because the suitable sites either already have a dam or have a large number of NIMBYs in residence. The geology matters; build in a limestone area, and your reservoir will never hold water as the rock will always be too permeable. (Put the dam itself in a bad area and it will collapse. That's occasionally happened, until everyone learned not to do that, and far more died from that "learning" than have ever died due to nuclear accidents.)
Look, we don't claim that nuclear power is 100% safe (it clearly isn't) but we do claim that you're putting a falsely low estimate of risk on the alternatives. Remove those rose-tinted glasses!
Death is not the only consequence of a nuclear disaster. Look at the economic damage and the cost of fixing the problem. A large area of Japan is uninhabitable, a large number of people were displaced and are now jobless and living on benefits just outside the exclusion zone. You can argue all you like about whose fault it is and if the actions taken were justified, but none the less it happened.
But most of that is due to excessive caution and fear-mongering. If you can't measure the radiation or the chemical pollution, by what possible standard is it unsafe? Mystic karmic vibration disturbance?
If Fukushima had been a geothermal plant, if instead there had been large off-shore wind farms, even if there had been a coal plant on that very same spot this would not have happened.
That is true. It is also the case that the pollution produced by that plant's normal operation would have caused many cases of respiratory diseases and low-to-medium levels of chronic poisoning. Furthermore, the cost of importing all that coal (Japan has none to speak of domestically) would have resulted in the Japanese people having significantly less money to spend on other things (such as healthcare, but it's really a long list of missed opportunities). As I said before, take off those rose-tinted glasses; don't just see the downsides of one alternative, look the others fairly too and weigh them all in the balance.
Why on Earth would you want a web-facing page to be able to manipulate files?
So that web page developers can push hot fixes to production deployments without all that irritating business of security auditing or involving a competent system administrator. Not that this would make the site exploitable, oh no no no... There are not nearly enough facepalm meme images in the known universe to cover the retardedness of some people, and yes, there's still a great many people who "want" this.
(There are a few scenarios where it genuinely make sense, but only when thoroughly guarded and with exceptionally careful privilege dropping. Not something for a general web site.)
This goes double for Windows, where pcntl_*() is not implemented and escapeshellcmd and escapeshellarg have completely incorrect behavior.
Not to detract from the main point (PHP's ability to avoid Doing Things Right at nearly every opportunity) but it turns out that it is impossible to get proper consistent behavior on Windows when starting a subprocess. The core of the problem is that the parsing of command lines into words is done by each program for itself, and there are a number of programs and shell commands that do it inconsistently. (The one you're most likely to run into is START, which has a totally retarded way of handling its first argument.) Because the trouble is baked into the whole way things work, you can't fix things. Thankfully, almost everything using the MSVC runtime or the same algorithm it implements, which means you don't have to worry about how bad it is usually, but it's still a disaster.
And it's all DOS's fault, or perhaps CP/M's; I don't know if it was a MS innovation when they wrote PCDOS. I didn't start using MSDOS until about 3.3 (ugh, I feel old) and it was already an entrenched piece of obvious lunacy then. A bad decision can persist for decades.
I'd think that people in the UK could easily work with the English/US version (assuming they don't get bent out of shape about the spelling of colour or aluminium).
There's also a lot of other localization to do to make things work in the UK (stuff like date and time handling).
However, the big difference is almost certainly to do with totally different sets of laws relating to liability for faults and other things like that. That sort of thing can have a really big influence on costs, and it's pretty substantially different on the two sides of the Atlantic.
The fact that these scandals can be exposed in Britain is a strength not a weakness as you imply. Now that they have been exposed action can be taken against them. I am not a Eurosceptic but these types of issues are known to exist in even greater amounts in France, Italy, Greece and other countries but are never exposed. We should be pushing for greater British-style transparency not more opaque bureaucracy in the EU.
That's one of the very few good things to come out of this, that it has become clear that there are still some honest (or at least mostly-honest) people about and they care about cleaning the cesspit that yawned under too much public life.
Shift fees from the University budget (i.e. library) of subscribing for journals unto the researchers and labs paying the open access publication fees from their own research budgets (we're talking thousands of dollars per publication here).
It has to be budgeted for. It has to be beaten into funding agencies heads that this is a shift of where costs are being borne with an aim to deliver better results to the general public overall. This "beating into heads" is what is happening now.
Alas, costs at research institutes rise in the transition period because of the need to keep access to paywalled stuff for the time being. There's really no way to avoid that while remaining competitive, but it should reduce general overheads eventually. (Yeah, "should"...)
The only true way out of this situation is for there to be established open access journals that are also high impact. Some journals allow the authors to elect to use an open access option for additional cost. Whether the charges are at the right level I really don't know, but it's definitely an option. However, if you're publishing in a traditional high-impact journal that has the open access option, please use it!
Strictly, in the EU it depends where you are. In most member states, the legal system is such that decisions are supposed to be just taken on the laws as written and the facts of the case, though they may find legal arguments made elsewhere persuasive (after all, a good piece of jurisprudence is exactly that everywhere). Some member states (the UK and Ireland) have the same common law system as you see in the US, so decisions of higher courts are totally binding. The net effect is pretty similar wherever you are though; interfaces and algorithms are not copyrightable anywhere in the EU (not unless some bunch of scumbag politicians creates an explicit statute to change that, but we'll worry about that problem if it happens).
Although I like all of those, I doubt a 3-year old will get much out of it.
You'd be surprised.
Yes, he won't get everything, but he'll get enough to really enjoy them, and it will encourage him to read more for himself so that he doesn't have to wait for story time. He'll probably start with words relating to punchups and swear symbols: that's what I and my brothers did...
Of course, anyone who actually needs decent graphics wouldn't be using the on-chip graphics anyway, so I question just how useful this really is.
There's a whole world of people who would quite like decent graphics, but who don't want to spring another hundred bucks or two to get something fancy. There's also the mobile market (laptops, tablets, etc.) where fitting an extra graphics card looks more like a liability than a good thing. Overall, it looks to me like a smart area for Intel to pitch their transistor budget at.
You do not have to do anything to own a copyright beyond the act of writing the piece. You own your copyright at the time you write it; you do not have to register it with anyone (unlike a patent) to assert ownership.
But registration increases the damages that you may claim should you bring a case to court. If you've got a fairly high likelihood of bringing such a case in the jurisdiction covered by the registration process, you've got an incentive to register; otherwise, it's just fuss and cost for no gain to speak of.
...tell the government where to spend our taxes. Me regarding the taxes I pay, your regarding the taxes you pay.
Only problem is what to do about things that nobody wants to think about paying for despite the fact that they have to be funded. Often these are things that don't require a lot of money (can you think of anyone who wants to fund the retirement plans of federal auditors?) but without them all sorts of things just fall apart over time.
Free market capitalism stopped child labour, not any amount of laws.
My god, you are so full of bullshit. In the 19th century, free market capitalists were all for child labour precisely because the children could get underneath the weaving and spinning machines to clean up without the machine having to be stopped or slowed down. It was wonderful for the capitalist, especially as they had to wash the cloth afterwards anyway, so the blood and mashed up body parts from when there were accidents wouldn't add significantly to the overall cost of production, and you didn't have to pay nearly as much to children either (though of course it helped a lot that you also owned the only store in town and all the accommodation too, so you could be sure to get all those irritating "wages" back anyway).
Free market capitalists have demonstrated beyond all shadow of a doubt that they are the scum of the earth. We have laws and regulations that prevent the worst excesses, but you seem to think that according everyone some rights is a Bad Thing. That's so fucked up an attitude that I really have nothing polite to say about it at all.
Mind you, we are talking about the same voting population who 4 years after Wall Street caused the biggest global economic melt down in close to a century through pure greed and stupidity is objecting to the implementation of any kind of regulation of the baking and finance sector.
Now that takes the cake. Sometimes you've just got to roll with it, but I really don't want to see financiers loafing around on our dime. It's not all bun and games in the real economy.
You forgot climatology and cosmology. Or are the objects of these "sciences" not sufficiently complex?
They don't really alter their fundamental behavior as a consequence of you publishing your theory. The problem with the human sciences is that humans read the discoveries and change what they're doing because of them. By comparison, large scale physical systems (the climate, the cosmos) don't give a fig what we think about them; even those changes that we can effect will not fundamentally alter the science itself.
I've been kinda enamoured with Thorium salt fast breeder reactors lately, seems to me it's a much more attainable goal. Fusion would be cool and all, but isn't TSFR technology, like, already within our grasp?
You would only spend money on researching one technology at a time? Most of what is being researched in something like ITER falls into two categories: plasma physics (which couldn't be found out before; plasmas aren't scale-invariant and the mathematics of them is furiously difficult) and advanced materials (how to cope with the neutron flux and efficiently convey the heat away without everything being super-brittle). The latter will also benefit fission reactors (including those Thorium salt fast breeders you seem to be in favor of).
My point is that in rural areas where you can't get DTV, you are unlikely to receive broadband wireless on these frequencies because of terrain (e.g., mountains). Where there isn't enough market to put a TV station, is there enough market for a broadband station?
But hardly anyone lives there. Where there are mountains, people tend to live in the valleys between them, and those are largely practical to cover with smaller transmitters. Furthermore, the same transmitters could be tasked with offering both TV and "wireless internet" signals, allowing enough profit to be made off them to make much smaller installations viable.
Even the most rural parts of the UK are mostly not nearly as rural as the most rural parts of the US.
What if 10 years from now someone actually invent the technology that can transfer matter from one location to the next, remotely - just like "Star Trek" - but they need radio frequency to accomplish that task
With "free" frequency all exhausted, that new invention can be put to use, can it?
You mean they can't do things like stopping transmissions of analog TV signals to free up spectrum? Like they've just done?
If there's a good reason to change frequency allocations, they'll be changed. As long as Ofcom (the relevant UK regulator given that this is a UK story; substitute with correct regulator in your locality as needed) remember to put things in place so that they can get the white-space frequency users out of the way of a regulated use, there'll be no significant problem. I guess that the devices in question will probably have to periodically (maybe monthly?) acquire the list of permitted frequencies for their locality somehow.
You keep talking about "facts" as if they exist. In science, there are no facts - there are hypotheses - models of the way the world works.
You're totally wrong there. There's loads of facts, but they're little facts. "I saw *this* reading on *that* instrument at *this* time in *that* location." It's the assembly of these little facts into progressively bigger pictures that requires hypotheses, but the little facts are there, and they're a large part of the power of science to explain things. Many scientific explanations can also be used to make projections, predictions about the future under reasonable assumptions. (Those assumptions should be explicit for the best science, of course.) The assumptions can be wrong — heck, they probably will be in the detail, since it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future — and so the overall picture is naturally going to be subject to revision, but as much as possible of the reasoning behind the predictions is out in the open so it can be checked and updated as necessary. That's why science is not just argumentum ad verecundiam.
Slashdot Mirror
Live Free or Die motherfuckers.
By the way, if you need help seeing what this looks like:
Ron Paul will show you the way.
The people who are really serious about "Live Free or Die" cover themselves in petrol and set fire to themselves to protest against injustice and oppression. Ron Paul? He's just another politician, full of words.
About the only significant natural resource Japan ever had was coal.... which is one of the reasons why it industrialized in the first place. Much of that coal has already been extracted though, so Japan generally does need to look elsewhere for their energy needs.
A fairly large proportion of that coal was in Korea, which was a Japanese colony for a large part of the first half of the 20th century (1910-1945).
Which is why we don't build very large dams much any more, unless absolutely forced to. Perhaps you can agree that the same logic should apply to nuclear power.
In a lot of the world, large dams aren't being built because the suitable sites either already have a dam or have a large number of NIMBYs in residence. The geology matters; build in a limestone area, and your reservoir will never hold water as the rock will always be too permeable. (Put the dam itself in a bad area and it will collapse. That's occasionally happened, until everyone learned not to do that, and far more died from that "learning" than have ever died due to nuclear accidents.)
Look, we don't claim that nuclear power is 100% safe (it clearly isn't) but we do claim that you're putting a falsely low estimate of risk on the alternatives. Remove those rose-tinted glasses!
Death is not the only consequence of a nuclear disaster. Look at the economic damage and the cost of fixing the problem. A large area of Japan is uninhabitable, a large number of people were displaced and are now jobless and living on benefits just outside the exclusion zone. You can argue all you like about whose fault it is and if the actions taken were justified, but none the less it happened.
But most of that is due to excessive caution and fear-mongering. If you can't measure the radiation or the chemical pollution, by what possible standard is it unsafe? Mystic karmic vibration disturbance?
If Fukushima had been a geothermal plant, if instead there had been large off-shore wind farms, even if there had been a coal plant on that very same spot this would not have happened.
That is true. It is also the case that the pollution produced by that plant's normal operation would have caused many cases of respiratory diseases and low-to-medium levels of chronic poisoning. Furthermore, the cost of importing all that coal (Japan has none to speak of domestically) would have resulted in the Japanese people having significantly less money to spend on other things (such as healthcare, but it's really a long list of missed opportunities). As I said before, take off those rose-tinted glasses; don't just see the downsides of one alternative, look the others fairly too and weigh them all in the balance.
Why on Earth would you want a web-facing page to be able to manipulate files?
So that web page developers can push hot fixes to production deployments without all that irritating business of security auditing or involving a competent system administrator. Not that this would make the site exploitable, oh no no no... There are not nearly enough facepalm meme images in the known universe to cover the retardedness of some people, and yes, there's still a great many people who "want" this.
(There are a few scenarios where it genuinely make sense, but only when thoroughly guarded and with exceptionally careful privilege dropping. Not something for a general web site.)
This goes double for Windows, where pcntl_*() is not implemented and escapeshellcmd and escapeshellarg have completely incorrect behavior.
Not to detract from the main point (PHP's ability to avoid Doing Things Right at nearly every opportunity) but it turns out that it is impossible to get proper consistent behavior on Windows when starting a subprocess. The core of the problem is that the parsing of command lines into words is done by each program for itself, and there are a number of programs and shell commands that do it inconsistently. (The one you're most likely to run into is START, which has a totally retarded way of handling its first argument.) Because the trouble is baked into the whole way things work, you can't fix things. Thankfully, almost everything using the MSVC runtime or the same algorithm it implements, which means you don't have to worry about how bad it is usually, but it's still a disaster.
And it's all DOS's fault, or perhaps CP/M's; I don't know if it was a MS innovation when they wrote PCDOS. I didn't start using MSDOS until about 3.3 (ugh, I feel old) and it was already an entrenched piece of obvious lunacy then. A bad decision can persist for decades.
Does /dev/null support sharding?
Wonderful!
I'd think that people in the UK could easily work with the English/US version (assuming they don't get bent out of shape about the spelling of colour or aluminium).
There's also a lot of other localization to do to make things work in the UK (stuff like date and time handling).
However, the big difference is almost certainly to do with totally different sets of laws relating to liability for faults and other things like that. That sort of thing can have a really big influence on costs, and it's pretty substantially different on the two sides of the Atlantic.
The fact that these scandals can be exposed in Britain is a strength not a weakness as you imply. Now that they have been exposed action can be taken against them. I am not a Eurosceptic but these types of issues are known to exist in even greater amounts in France, Italy, Greece and other countries but are never exposed. We should be pushing for greater British-style transparency not more opaque bureaucracy in the EU.
That's one of the very few good things to come out of this, that it has become clear that there are still some honest (or at least mostly-honest) people about and they care about cleaning the cesspit that yawned under too much public life.
Shift fees from the University budget (i.e. library) of subscribing for journals unto the researchers and labs paying the open access publication fees from their own research budgets (we're talking thousands of dollars per publication here).
It has to be budgeted for. It has to be beaten into funding agencies heads that this is a shift of where costs are being borne with an aim to deliver better results to the general public overall. This "beating into heads" is what is happening now.
Alas, costs at research institutes rise in the transition period because of the need to keep access to paywalled stuff for the time being. There's really no way to avoid that while remaining competitive, but it should reduce general overheads eventually. (Yeah, "should"...)
This.
The only true way out of this situation is for there to be established open access journals that are also high impact. Some journals allow the authors to elect to use an open access option for additional cost. Whether the charges are at the right level I really don't know, but it's definitely an option. However, if you're publishing in a traditional high-impact journal that has the open access option, please use it!
for the US, and Canada, the EU, ...
Strictly, in the EU it depends where you are. In most member states, the legal system is such that decisions are supposed to be just taken on the laws as written and the facts of the case, though they may find legal arguments made elsewhere persuasive (after all, a good piece of jurisprudence is exactly that everywhere). Some member states (the UK and Ireland) have the same common law system as you see in the US, so decisions of higher courts are totally binding. The net effect is pretty similar wherever you are though; interfaces and algorithms are not copyrightable anywhere in the EU (not unless some bunch of scumbag politicians creates an explicit statute to change that, but we'll worry about that problem if it happens).
Although I like all of those, I doubt a 3-year old will get much out of it.
You'd be surprised.
Yes, he won't get everything, but he'll get enough to really enjoy them, and it will encourage him to read more for himself so that he doesn't have to wait for story time. He'll probably start with words relating to punchups and swear symbols: that's what I and my brothers did...
Of course, anyone who actually needs decent graphics wouldn't be using the on-chip graphics anyway, so I question just how useful this really is.
There's a whole world of people who would quite like decent graphics, but who don't want to spring another hundred bucks or two to get something fancy. There's also the mobile market (laptops, tablets, etc.) where fitting an extra graphics card looks more like a liability than a good thing. Overall, it looks to me like a smart area for Intel to pitch their transistor budget at.
You do not have to do anything to own a copyright beyond the act of writing the piece. You own your copyright at the time you write it; you do not have to register it with anyone (unlike a patent) to assert ownership.
But registration increases the damages that you may claim should you bring a case to court. If you've got a fairly high likelihood of bringing such a case in the jurisdiction covered by the registration process, you've got an incentive to register; otherwise, it's just fuss and cost for no gain to speak of.
...tell the government where to spend our taxes. Me regarding the taxes I pay, your regarding the taxes you pay.
Only problem is what to do about things that nobody wants to think about paying for despite the fact that they have to be funded. Often these are things that don't require a lot of money (can you think of anyone who wants to fund the retirement plans of federal auditors?) but without them all sorts of things just fall apart over time.
Unless their exclusion zone is measured in a circle at least 100km wide (are we going to shut down Heathrow, then?) [...]
We don't need an exclusion zone to shut down Heathrow for the duration of the Olympics. We've got immigration officials to do that for us!
Free market capitalism stopped child labour, not any amount of laws.
My god, you are so full of bullshit. In the 19th century, free market capitalists were all for child labour precisely because the children could get underneath the weaving and spinning machines to clean up without the machine having to be stopped or slowed down. It was wonderful for the capitalist, especially as they had to wash the cloth afterwards anyway, so the blood and mashed up body parts from when there were accidents wouldn't add significantly to the overall cost of production, and you didn't have to pay nearly as much to children either (though of course it helped a lot that you also owned the only store in town and all the accommodation too, so you could be sure to get all those irritating "wages" back anyway).
Free market capitalists have demonstrated beyond all shadow of a doubt that they are the scum of the earth. We have laws and regulations that prevent the worst excesses, but you seem to think that according everyone some rights is a Bad Thing. That's so fucked up an attitude that I really have nothing polite to say about it at all.
And why is it they still use Pitot tubes when GPS has fairly high resolution in three dimensions?
GPS tells you ground speed, not air speed. That's a significant difference, given that high-altitude winds can be very fast moving indeed.
Mind you, we are talking about the same voting population who 4 years after Wall Street caused the biggest global economic melt down in close to a century through pure greed and stupidity is objecting to the implementation of any kind of regulation of the baking and finance sector.
Now that takes the cake. Sometimes you've just got to roll with it, but I really don't want to see financiers loafing around on our dime. It's not all bun and games in the real economy.
You forgot climatology and cosmology. Or are the objects of these "sciences" not sufficiently complex?
They don't really alter their fundamental behavior as a consequence of you publishing your theory. The problem with the human sciences is that humans read the discoveries and change what they're doing because of them. By comparison, large scale physical systems (the climate, the cosmos) don't give a fig what we think about them; even those changes that we can effect will not fundamentally alter the science itself.
I've been kinda enamoured with Thorium salt fast breeder reactors lately, seems to me it's a much more attainable goal. Fusion would be cool and all, but isn't TSFR technology, like, already within our grasp?
You would only spend money on researching one technology at a time? Most of what is being researched in something like ITER falls into two categories: plasma physics (which couldn't be found out before; plasmas aren't scale-invariant and the mathematics of them is furiously difficult) and advanced materials (how to cope with the neutron flux and efficiently convey the heat away without everything being super-brittle). The latter will also benefit fission reactors (including those Thorium salt fast breeders you seem to be in favor of).
My point is that in rural areas where you can't get DTV, you are unlikely to receive broadband wireless on these frequencies because of terrain (e.g., mountains). Where there isn't enough market to put a TV station, is there enough market for a broadband station?
But hardly anyone lives there. Where there are mountains, people tend to live in the valleys between them, and those are largely practical to cover with smaller transmitters. Furthermore, the same transmitters could be tasked with offering both TV and "wireless internet" signals, allowing enough profit to be made off them to make much smaller installations viable.
Even the most rural parts of the UK are mostly not nearly as rural as the most rural parts of the US.
Unfortunately there's not a constant conversion, since the number of watery tarts lobbing scimitars per mile varies with geographical location.
You mean it's a relativistic metric? Wow...
What if 10 years from now someone actually invent the technology that can transfer matter from one location to the next, remotely - just like "Star Trek" - but they need radio frequency to accomplish that task
With "free" frequency all exhausted, that new invention can be put to use, can it?
You mean they can't do things like stopping transmissions of analog TV signals to free up spectrum? Like they've just done?
If there's a good reason to change frequency allocations, they'll be changed. As long as Ofcom (the relevant UK regulator given that this is a UK story; substitute with correct regulator in your locality as needed) remember to put things in place so that they can get the white-space frequency users out of the way of a regulated use, there'll be no significant problem. I guess that the devices in question will probably have to periodically (maybe monthly?) acquire the list of permitted frequencies for their locality somehow.
You keep talking about "facts" as if they exist. In science, there are no facts - there are hypotheses - models of the way the world works.
You're totally wrong there. There's loads of facts, but they're little facts. "I saw *this* reading on *that* instrument at *this* time in *that* location." It's the assembly of these little facts into progressively bigger pictures that requires hypotheses, but the little facts are there, and they're a large part of the power of science to explain things. Many scientific explanations can also be used to make projections, predictions about the future under reasonable assumptions. (Those assumptions should be explicit for the best science, of course.) The assumptions can be wrong — heck, they probably will be in the detail, since it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future — and so the overall picture is naturally going to be subject to revision, but as much as possible of the reasoning behind the predictions is out in the open so it can be checked and updated as necessary. That's why science is not just argumentum ad verecundiam.