Science doesn't advance by blind optimism. Science advances because intelligent people can reason what out is and what isn't possible, and how to make the possible things happen.
You're grasping at straws because you *want* these things to be true. A real scientist looks at things as objectively impossible and *finds* the truth, even if it is hard to accept.
I saw the article about superconductors in new york by 2010. I also noted that they work by sheathing the power line in liquid nitrogen. The whole point of superconductors is that you don't lose energy over distance. If it costs energy to cool the superconductor, then it defeats the whole point. It only makes sense in new york because it is over a small distance. A cross country superconducting line would cost *more* energy than a normal line because of the energy expended in cooling. In fact, it probably wouldn't even be possible to supply liquid nitrogen to a line over the distance, since liquid nitrogen evaporates relatively quickly.
RMS has become the Jesus of the open source movement, and everything he does is seen as worthy of adulation and beyond criticism.
Oh! You made a new version of GPL RMS? It must be *sooo* wonderful. I will rub it all over my body, and then force it on the unbelievers who still cling to your old license.
Seriously though, what's with all these people saying that Torvalds is some kind of shill for not adopting GPLv3? There would *be* no meaningful open source movement without Torvalds.
The guys on the "free software" side of the fence just can't seem to accept that some people have a different perspective and think in terms of "open source" software. It seems like a minor dispute to me (free software vs open source), but there's always some nut trying to start a holy war about it...
>At that speed you could download a high-definition copy of 'Batman Begins' in four minutes Just as long as you aren't downloading the torrent...
What's the point of a high bandwidth pipe if your provider is going to arbitrarily throttle your traffic to nil? My comcast link at my apartment is much faster than my verizon link at my parents house, but in practice because comcast fucks with the traffic, it's much slower for the only really bandwidth intensive operation I do, torrenting.
You can't say that I got my information from reading articles in the 1970's since I wasn't *alive* int he 1970's.
>however people writing today have seen what happened when the prototypes of those >technologies were built. Which people are you talking about? What is your evidence? Can you cite any facts, or just a general dislike for nuclear power?
There are indeed problems with nuclear power, but the reading I've done suggests that those problems are exaggerated (such as the problems with waste).
>The ridiculous 100% replacement with any single thing argument is that of >salesfolk or people fooled by them.
What's ridiculous about it if some countries have already use nuclear power for the majority of their power using existing technology? This is a working solution in practice right now. Furthermore a solution that can't really replace coal power isn't a solution at all, and is a waste of time and resources.
>Bonus points if you can name a nuclear plant and attach a cost per kW/h for the >electricity it produces.
A quick google shows a number of different numbers gathered by different sources between 1.7 cents to 10 cents per killowatt hour. Additionally, said sources indicate that nuclear accounts for 24% of the global energy supply at present, almost as high as coal.
Comparatively, solar accounts for 0.8% of global energy demand and wind accounts for 1.4%.
This says to me that nuclear works in practice and is a general solution. It is true that it is costly, but all of the other green solutions (aside from water and geothermal, which we've already tapped) cost much more and have never been demonstrated to work on a large scale, and there are technical reasons to think that they simply cannot that have never been refuted.
There's no way to deploy such a system on a large scale, so it is meaningless. The idea is science fiction.
> there is no ultimate solution to nuclear waste - you can't reprocess it indefinitely.
That's what yucca mountain is for. Saying that there is no solution to nuclear waste is like saying there is no solution to garbage and landfills. The amount of waste generated is manageable, and will decrease and become less radioactive as time goes on. Waste from early plants had a half life of tens of thousands of years, but it is possible to decrease the halflife to something reasonable with newer more efficient plants.
Of course France gets 70% of its electricity *today* from nuclear power. But lets ignore the proven viable solution to the carbon problem, and go with the pie in the sky approach that won't work for decades even by the most optimistic estimates...
When will people get it through their heads that solar is not a viable replacement for fossil fuel? Most of the country isn't even sunny enough to use it. The parts that are, aren't sunny *all the time*. When night hits, the entire country would brown out. We don't *have* the kind of battery technology to store the entire country's power supply overnight.
What do people expect to do about the northern parts of the country? Don't they realize you have to generate electricity relatively close to the point of use? Power lines aren't superconductors. They offer resistance, and the electricity dissipates the further you try to send it.
Solar power *clearly* does not scale up, yet people still keep trying to push these projects because solar gives them a warm fuzzy feeling.
Nuclear on the other hand is immediately usable, and the problems that it presents in terms of spent fuel are solvable by reprocessing. Additionally, advances in reactor like breeder reactors technology promise to increase future fuel efficiency and decrease the radioactivity of spent fuel. From a technical perspective it is clearly the correct solution to our short and long term energy needs, and is the only technology that can end our dependence on fossil fuels. However, when you point out arguments like this, people normally give you a science fiction story about "beaming" solar power from huge solar arrays in space. Here's a hint, if we could beam energy around efficiently, we wouldn't be using power lines.
are a dime a dozen, and rarely go anywhere. Projects that do go far, are often taken down with cease and desists.
From screenshots it looks like they've accomplished a lot though. I hope they don't run out of steam before the job is finished like 90% of the fan projects out there (remember freecraft?). A lot of developers become happy when a game is "playable" but still contains major bugs that insure that no one will actually bother playing it.
As a side note, one of the cooler fan projects I've seen is a rom hack for Chrono Trigger, that takes the original game engine makes it into a sequel (the chrono trigger rom format has been investigated pretty deeply, and it's possible to change pretty much everything in the game).
>>The Hindenburg disaster wasn't that bad. It only killed a few dozen people. >Was the second sentence meant to support the first? Because I don't really think it does.
I think he's saying that the Hindenburg disaster didn't lead to a scarcity in the supply of people. The person supply being as plentiful as it is, we shouldn't be so afraid of spending it once in a while.
>>some religious groups feel that their beliefs about supernatural matters are on par or >>superior to knowledge about the physical world >This is because so many members of these groups depend on these supernatural >matters for their livelihood;-)
Church provides a social service to members. They are the centers of the community, and they both provide a support network and help to establish social norms. In japan, where most of the country has abandoned literal belief in the gods, the Shinto temples are still well patronized because of these services. I doubt that churches really need the supernatural to succeed, they just need ritual and authority within the community.
I suspect that the conflict you see between religion and science is a symptom of the deeper problem that most of society just doesn't understand science, and largely see it as a rival religion. That some sects see science as a religion is evident in their basic strategy with regards to science, e.g. take on the trappings and rituals of science in order to gain some of its power (christian scientists, intelligent design, etc), and try to come up with competing miracles (faith healing, speaking in tongues, etc) to overshadow science's numerous "miracles" (television, cars, electric lights, etc).
I was being sloppy about "hundreds" of years having passed. There is more than 1 span of one hundred years having passed, but fewer than two, so it's ambiguous if that counts as a plural (to me).
As far as things being disproven, it is possible to falsify a premise of a valid argument if the conclusion can be shown to be false. Falsification works deductively, so in a specific sense you can disprove a theory, whereas you cannot prove a theory, since verification of theories works inductively.
However, this of course ignores that in the real world there is always more than one premise, and so what exactly has been shown to be false can be ambiguous. This leads to an underdetermination of science. There's always more than one way to explain the world, and we largely pick the explanation not on empirical grounds, but on which theory is simply, which one makes more predictions, which one is aesthetically nicer, and politics plays a part too.
>Essentially, I think we needn't care too much about whether people choose to see everything >as fitting into 'God's Plan' or being just 'Stuff that happens' or whatever, as long as >everybody is committed to uncovering the truth, whatever it turns out to be.
I think the problem is that some people aren't committed to finding out the truth, whatever it turns out to be. There are some religious organizations, such as those promoting creationism that are using intellectually dishonest arguments and some outright lies to spread a world view that has been thoroughly disproven for hundreds of years.
I think it is true that science and religion can easily coexist in general. However, science cannot coexist with people who are not committed to discovering the truth. A person cannot be a scientist or understand science without a commitment to the truth.
This creates great stress on our society, because on the one hand people need science both to survive and to provide a reasonable explanation of the objective truths of the world. On the other and people also need help understanding the things that science doesn't have very good explanations of, like morality, or their subjective experience of the world.
Modern science and philosophy don't give clear guidelines on what sort of things a person should do, and they don't provide any sort of explanation on what our experiences of the world are. For instance, modern science provides an explanation of how light works, and how the brain works (to some degree), but there is no explanation of our experience of the color red, since red is not quantitatively defined. Note by the color red, I am not referring to a particular frequency of light, but our experience *of* that frequency of light. These are important aspects of how we partake in the world that have yet to be tackled.
Since psychologically people have a strong desire for explanations and reasons for both the things that we have explanations to, and the things we have yet to find explanations to, there is a strong need for belief in addition to knowledge. Religion typically fulfills this role in society with supernatural explanations of aspects of reality that our knowledge of the natural world falls short of. Unfortunately, people offering supernatural explanations for the things that we don't understand will sometimes try to offer supernatural explanations for the things we *do* already understand and those two explanations will stand at odds with one another.
In my mind is is clearly the responsibility of any religious organization to mend their religious doctrine so that it does not conflict with facts that are known about the world. Indeed, most major modern sects do so to some degree. The catholic church for instance has changed many of its stances on various issues to correspond with scientific understanding. Ideas like the big band theory and evolution are accepted and taught at catholic institutions, and of course there is no mention of a geocentric model of the universe anymore. Many protestant denominations have made similar changes.
Unfortunately, some religious groups feel that their beliefs about supernatural matters are on par or superior to knowledge about the physical world. They ask, why should we have to change our beliefs just because we know otherwise? Instead, these groups ask their members to believe one thing and know another. This is not a healthy attitude, and causes psychological and social strife I feel pretty strongly that such religious organizations are doing their members a disservice and should be called to task for the harm they are doing.
for apple to kill linux on the desktop, there would have to be a linux on the desktop to kill. As this article points out, only something like 0.63% of people browsing on the internet are using linux.
I don't see this as really a big deal. Linux just isn't a desktop platform. It is used for servers, and for workstations used for developing software for linux servers. This is Linux's niche. There's nothing wrong with that... I'm just always surprised that so many linux users are convinced that Linux is going to take over the desktop market at some point... I can't even imagine what events would have to transpire for that to become the case.
I don't see how you can say that corporations are leeching off of OLPC, when it was the companies like Intel that were *paying* for it in the first place. Furthermore it was engineers from large companies that were doing the work. What made OLPC happen was an *industry alliance*.
Furthermore, I don't see how Intel developing low priced laptops hurts the developing world, when these low priced laptops will likely to be *sold* in the developing world.
In any case, a non profit is not a long term solution to the problem. Having a company back cheap laptops in third world is the best possible result. Making the third world entirely dependent on something as ephemeral as generosity is a good recipe for screwing them in the long run.
>When people first read this rant they mistakenly assumed I was whining about not having a job >and blaming that on Rails. I'm not whining, I'm not sick, or crazy, just pissed off and I can >write about it so fuck you very much.
The entire article is a bunch of swearing, and irc logs about petty disputes he has had with other members of the rails community. They are pretty formulaic along these lines: guy: hey, zedas! you're a douche. zedas: nah, uh. You're a douch! etc.
This isn't to criticize the guy for writing the article, as it's his right to get steam off on his personal blog. However, I've got to wonder why this got posted on slashdot, as it really isn't tech news. Not every dispute that takes place on the internet is tech news.
I can't remember ever enjoying being at a fries. Being in Fry's is like shifting through every item available on the internet pilled into an enormous unorganized mound.
The basic concept of the store seems to be condense all of amazon.com (or in this case http://www.outpost.com/) into a single physical store. This basically means you get all of the items of output, with *no ability to search*.
Additionally, everything is overpriced. If they were smart, they'd be the costco of electronics stores, and instead of carrying a small quantity of every item you don't need at a high price, they'd carry a large quantity of stuff that everyone needs at a low price, and ignore specialty products.
I can't help but notice that there's nothing mentioned about unicode. I don't see how a major web development language, especially one made by Japanese designers, can go so long without adding comprehensive unicode support. After all, it's not like only English speaking people use rails websites...
>The actual use is, your army is invading some country far away, and is setting up a base >camp in the middle of nowhere and would like some power.
Armies typically just use petroleum or nuclear power, as it is portable and reliable, whereas solar energy is neither. Really, I've never heard of an army concerning itself with making its energy source "green." After all, that would imply moral concerns that don't exist when participating in organized violence...
>We all know the usual pro-copyright arguments. Most of them hinge on the fact that >the individual or company that has a copyright needs an incentive to make something >that is copyrightable
I thought that the basis of copyright comes from a recognition of "The inalienable rights of Life, Liberty and Property," as the original wording goes. Copyright naturally follows from the right to property.
There's a need for a reform of our patent system, and probably some limitations on the duration of intellectual property; however, I don't think any reasonable person can dispute the legitimacy of copyright in principle.
Of course, there are some people who object to personal property all together. Communism and socialism are not dead ideas, even if they don't take center stage anymore. However, I think that history has proven that any society that rejects the right to property, but holds all things as property of the state also inevitably rejects the right to life and liberty, and that no individual in such a society can call himself free.
After all, our property constitutes our physical selves, and the extensions to our physical selves necessary to our identity, thus without a right to property we cannot have any right to life. If this is unclear, let me make it clear with an example. If we have no personal property, we logically do not own our internal organs, but possess them in common with the rest of society. Thus, the state would have the right to extract our organs for the benefit of others without our consent if it was deemed in the interest of the state.
Additionally, if we have no right to property, our liberty has no domain to exercise itself over. After all, how can we exercise our liberty if everything in the world belongs to the state, and exists solely for the benefit of the state? The exercise of liberty implies that we act on the world in a way determined by ourselves and directed towards whatever end we so desire, even selfish ends. This is not compatible with a world where we have no legal right to act on anything in a way contrary to the desires of the majority or of the state.
I think that for these reasons social views that do not allow for some basic right to personal property cannot be called ideologically sound or proscriptive of a free society. I think that when taking on patent and copyright reform we need to keep in mind that while the copyright and personal property rights may need to be limited in some ways, the basic right to property and to control copies of our works should be considered unassailable.
>I've never once used ACLs or seen them used. Has anybody used them? I gave an example of where I've used ACL's in my post (a non root user try to give access to specific others to his files without giving everyone access). I also have run into a lot of other people who hit the same problem, but simply gave up because it couldn't be done without creating a whole new group, which they sometimes couldn't do... I suspect if you haven't noticed the limitations of user/group/everyone bits, you've been trying pretty hard to ignore them.
As you say, 90% of the cases may work without ACL's, but that isn't good enough. You're saying that you're ok with your security model just not working 10% of the time? Maybe you'd be fine with handing out your password to 10% of the people on the internet?
so their plan is to put a solar panel in space... because solar radiation is 8 times more powerful... umm... I'm pretty sure that putting the same surface area of solar panels in space is going to cost *way* more than 8 times as much as putting it on the ground.
Then of course there's the idea that we will somehow magically "beam" the energy to the ground. Here's an idea, we let the sunlight beam itself to the ground, instead of putting an enormous expensive satellite as an unnecessary intermediary in the process.
This is one of the sci fi ideas that sounds cool in a story because it involves big machines and lasers, but is totally nonsensical when you actually take ten seconds to think about it. File this in the same category as giant fighting robots and transporter beams.
>"Education" means telling people what to believe. That's a cynical belief that seems popular these days. To many people, teaching is just another word for propagandizing. What that ignores is that the primary purpose of any real education is to teach critical thinking above all else.
Whether you go to an expensive school or are self educated, the real distinction between an educated and uneducated person is whether they can think logically and critically, i.e. whether they can listen to an argument, understand the structure of the argument, and find logical flaws in the argument if there are any. This is the single most valuable thing you can learn in school or anywhere else.
The primary problem with the public at present is that they are incapable of doing the basic logic to analyze political arguments, and so they are easily manipulated. Most people use emotional arguments to make a point, or use arguments by analogy, neither of which are valid forms of reasoning.
If you look at your average post on slashdot, it will look something like:
1. Albert made argument A, but everybody hates Albert, therefor the conclusion of argument A must be false.
Or
2. A is true of computer science or copyright law because B, which is somewhat similar to A, is true of car mechanics.
both arguments are absurd, but for some reason most people find them compelling in many situations.
>Well, the article is about capabilities, not ACLs, and Linux has had ACLs in the >filesystem for years too. Years yes... but they are still fairly new compared to the ACLs that are present in NTFS. Also, ACL's aren't really universal or standardized in linux. SELinux provides ACLs, as does AppArmor, which suze uses. It's kind of hard to adopt a permissions system that works differently between distros and not at all on some.
Which goes to your other point about people not using ACLs in Linux often. This is largely a cultural thing left over from unix, which discarded ACLs in order to save space on the file system, which is now a non issue.
>Administrators don't use ACLs on Linux because they make file permissions much harder >to understand, for what is in reality an unimportant increase in expressiveness. You're saying that probably because you've only used single user Linux systems... which kind of defeats the purpose of unix as a multiuser operating system btw. ACLs provide a very important level of expressiveness on a multiuser system.
If user A wants to share files with user B, but no one else (say user A has an SVN repository) without ACL's a special group has to be created and A and B are added as members. This means that something as simple as giving someone else access to your files requires elevation to root! On a large multiuser system, very few users have root access, so it is usually simply impossible. Being able to add an ACL to your file that says "allow user A" solves the problem elegantly.
Linux ACL's have taken a while to arrive and mature, but I've used them a number of times to solve the problem above and I'm glad they are finally here and hope for more consistent support in the future. When you don't need ACL's, they may seem like unnecessary complexity. In that case, feel free to ignore them and use the traditional user/group/other permissions. When you need them though, you will be very glad they are there. Generally, if you really need to do something with ACL's and you try to emulate it with groups, you are likely to open security holes, or make your system unusable for some class of users you didn't think of. ACL's are not the simple solution to the problem, but they are often the only correct solution, which matters a lot to some people.
>You can start from one of two viewpoints (and most will eventually end somewhere in between them): >* Most people are idiots who make bad decisions >* Most people are smart enough to make better decisions than their governments
Both sides miss the point. Those two problems are connected. We have a representative government, which means if the people are idiots, the government will be filled with idiots. Additionally, it means that corruption can go unchecked because most of the public is too dumb and uninvolved in politics to realize that the people they are voting for are scumbags.
Most of the problems with our country can be traced to the fact that the public is largely uneducated and have no real understanding of even the most basic political issues. Many people choose not to vote, and those that choose to vote largely just check every republican box or every democrat box.
The solution is better education. You should notice that although the public education system has pretty much totally collapsed in most of the country (with the exception of a few wealthy neighborhoods) no politicians are even talking about how to fix the problem. The libertarians try to sidestep the issue by dissolving public education altogether, and the republicans and democrats mostly just ignore the issue or pretend that things aren't as bad as they are.
The real problem with the country is that the way we fund education, where most money comes from *local* government, not state or federal, insure that most of the parts of the country where people live have almost no money for education. On the other hand, most of our tax dollars go to the federal government, which does almost nothing for education, or any of the social services we use aside from social security...
Additionally, since schools are paid for at the local level, gifted students in a poor neighborhood receive a poor education, whereas low performers in a rich neighborhood get the best education and end up in a better university by virtue of the high school they attended. In most industrialized nations, which public school you get into is based on merit instead of where your parents can afford to live. Simply allowing gifted students to study with other gifted students, while allowing vocational opportunities for students lacking the intelligence or motivation to make it into college is a proven model that is highly successful in the rest of the world. Most industrialized nations are *not* facing an education crisis and are not facing low turnouts on voting day, and we don't have to either if we accept a rational and proven education model.
In the US, if a precedent is set by the courts, this determines future cases as well. This is true only because of the independent judiciary and the rule of law. The judicial branch of the government has power completely independent of the congress or president, and the other branches can't countermand them or remove justices. In many ways the judicial branch is more powerful than any other.
In china, all power derives from various factions in the communist party and personal loyalties. Even basic things like succession of the head of state aren't really nailed down yet (the guy, Jiang, was the first one to willingly give up power and even he hung on in some ways afterwards). There is no such thing as the rule of law in a country like that. You can be sure that the verdict here is little more than a sign that someone in yahoo china lost a power struggle. Don't imagine that this is a precedent that indicates that china will actually start enforcing the copyright of western companies.
Slashdot Mirror
Science doesn't advance by blind optimism. Science advances because intelligent people can reason what out is and what isn't possible, and how to make the possible things happen.
You're grasping at straws because you *want* these things to be true. A real scientist looks at things as objectively impossible and *finds* the truth, even if it is hard to accept.
I saw the article about superconductors in new york by 2010. I also noted that they work by sheathing the power line in liquid nitrogen. The whole point of superconductors is that you don't lose energy over distance. If it costs energy to cool the superconductor, then it defeats the whole point. It only makes sense in new york because it is over a small distance. A cross country superconducting line would cost *more* energy than a normal line because of the energy expended in cooling. In fact, it probably wouldn't even be possible to supply liquid nitrogen to a line over the distance, since liquid nitrogen evaporates relatively quickly.
RMS has become the Jesus of the open source movement, and everything he does is seen as worthy of adulation and beyond criticism.
Oh! You made a new version of GPL RMS? It must be *sooo* wonderful. I will rub it all over my body, and then force it on the unbelievers who still cling to your old license.
Seriously though, what's with all these people saying that Torvalds is some kind of shill for not adopting GPLv3? There would *be* no meaningful open source movement without Torvalds.
The guys on the "free software" side of the fence just can't seem to accept that some people have a different perspective and think in terms of "open source" software. It seems like a minor dispute to me (free software vs open source), but there's always some nut trying to start a holy war about it...
Can't we all just get along?
>At that speed you could download a high-definition copy of 'Batman Begins' in four minutes
Just as long as you aren't downloading the torrent...
What's the point of a high bandwidth pipe if your provider is going to arbitrarily throttle your traffic to nil? My comcast link at my apartment is much faster than my verizon link at my parents house, but in practice because comcast fucks with the traffic, it's much slower for the only really bandwidth intensive operation I do, torrenting.
You can't say that I got my information from reading articles in the 1970's since I wasn't *alive* int he 1970's.
>however people writing today have seen what happened when the prototypes of those
>technologies were built.
Which people are you talking about? What is your evidence? Can you cite any facts, or just a general dislike for nuclear power?
There are indeed problems with nuclear power, but the reading I've done suggests that those problems are exaggerated (such as the problems with waste).
>The ridiculous 100% replacement with any single thing argument is that of
>salesfolk or people fooled by them.
What's ridiculous about it if some countries have already use nuclear power for the majority of their power using existing technology? This is a working solution in practice right now. Furthermore a solution that can't really replace coal power isn't a solution at all, and is a waste of time and resources.
>Bonus points if you can name a nuclear plant and attach a cost per kW/h for the
>electricity it produces.
A quick google shows a number of different numbers gathered by different sources between 1.7 cents to 10 cents per killowatt hour. Additionally, said sources indicate that nuclear accounts for 24% of the global energy supply at present, almost as high as coal.
Comparatively, solar accounts for 0.8% of global energy demand and wind accounts for 1.4%.
This says to me that nuclear works in practice and is a general solution. It is true that it is costly, but all of the other green solutions (aside from water and geothermal, which we've already tapped) cost much more and have never been demonstrated to work on a large scale, and there are technical reasons to think that they simply cannot that have never been refuted.
>>Power lines aren't superconductors
>Superconducting powerlines are.
There's no way to deploy such a system on a large scale, so it is meaningless. The idea is science fiction.
> there is no ultimate solution to nuclear waste - you can't reprocess it indefinitely.
That's what yucca mountain is for. Saying that there is no solution to nuclear waste is like saying there is no solution to garbage and landfills. The amount of waste generated is manageable, and will decrease and become less radioactive as time goes on. Waste from early plants had a half life of tens of thousands of years, but it is possible to decrease the halflife to something reasonable with newer more efficient plants.
by 2050?
Of course France gets 70% of its electricity *today* from nuclear power. But lets ignore the proven viable solution to the carbon problem, and go with the pie in the sky approach that won't work for decades even by the most optimistic estimates...
When will people get it through their heads that solar is not a viable replacement for fossil fuel? Most of the country isn't even sunny enough to use it. The parts that are, aren't sunny *all the time*. When night hits, the entire country would brown out. We don't *have* the kind of battery technology to store the entire country's power supply overnight.
What do people expect to do about the northern parts of the country? Don't they realize you have to generate electricity relatively close to the point of use? Power lines aren't superconductors. They offer resistance, and the electricity dissipates the further you try to send it.
Solar power *clearly* does not scale up, yet people still keep trying to push these projects because solar gives them a warm fuzzy feeling.
Nuclear on the other hand is immediately usable, and the problems that it presents in terms of spent fuel are solvable by reprocessing. Additionally, advances in reactor like breeder reactors technology promise to increase future fuel efficiency and decrease the radioactivity of spent fuel. From a technical perspective it is clearly the correct solution to our short and long term energy needs, and is the only technology that can end our dependence on fossil fuels. However, when you point out arguments like this, people normally give you a science fiction story about "beaming" solar power from huge solar arrays in space. Here's a hint, if we could beam energy around efficiently, we wouldn't be using power lines.
are a dime a dozen, and rarely go anywhere. Projects that do go far, are often taken down with cease and desists.
From screenshots it looks like they've accomplished a lot though. I hope they don't run out of steam before the job is finished like 90% of the fan projects out there (remember freecraft?). A lot of developers become happy when a game is "playable" but still contains major bugs that insure that no one will actually bother playing it.
As a side note, one of the cooler fan projects I've seen is a rom hack for Chrono Trigger, that takes the original game engine makes it into a sequel (the chrono trigger rom format has been investigated pretty deeply, and it's possible to change pretty much everything in the game).
http://www.chronocompendium.com/Term/Fan_Projects.html#Chrono_Trigger:_Crimson_Echoes
that project also seems to have halted, but there's already a lot of playable game.
>>The Hindenburg disaster wasn't that bad. It only killed a few dozen people.
>Was the second sentence meant to support the first? Because I don't really think it does.
I think he's saying that the Hindenburg disaster didn't lead to a scarcity in the supply of people. The person supply being as plentiful as it is, we shouldn't be so afraid of spending it once in a while.
>>some religious groups feel that their beliefs about supernatural matters are on par or ;-)
>>superior to knowledge about the physical world
>This is because so many members of these groups depend on these supernatural
>matters for their livelihood
Church provides a social service to members. They are the centers of the community, and they both provide a support network and help to establish social norms. In japan, where most of the country has abandoned literal belief in the gods, the Shinto temples are still well patronized because of these services. I doubt that churches really need the supernatural to succeed, they just need ritual and authority within the community.
I suspect that the conflict you see between religion and science is a symptom of the deeper problem that most of society just doesn't understand science, and largely see it as a rival religion. That some sects see science as a religion is evident in their basic strategy with regards to science, e.g. take on the trappings and rituals of science in order to gain some of its power (christian scientists, intelligent design, etc), and try to come up with competing miracles (faith healing, speaking in tongues, etc) to overshadow science's numerous "miracles" (television, cars, electric lights, etc).
I was being sloppy about "hundreds" of years having passed. There is more than 1 span of one hundred years having passed, but fewer than two, so it's ambiguous if that counts as a plural (to me).
As far as things being disproven, it is possible to falsify a premise of a valid argument if the conclusion can be shown to be false. Falsification works deductively, so in a specific sense you can disprove a theory, whereas you cannot prove a theory, since verification of theories works inductively.
However, this of course ignores that in the real world there is always more than one premise, and so what exactly has been shown to be false can be ambiguous. This leads to an underdetermination of science. There's always more than one way to explain the world, and we largely pick the explanation not on empirical grounds, but on which theory is simply, which one makes more predictions, which one is aesthetically nicer, and politics plays a part too.
>Essentially, I think we needn't care too much about whether people choose to see everything
>as fitting into 'God's Plan' or being just 'Stuff that happens' or whatever, as long as
>everybody is committed to uncovering the truth, whatever it turns out to be.
I think the problem is that some people aren't committed to finding out the truth, whatever it turns out to be. There are some religious organizations, such as those promoting creationism that are using intellectually dishonest arguments and some outright lies to spread a world view that has been thoroughly disproven for hundreds of years.
I think it is true that science and religion can easily coexist in general. However, science cannot coexist with people who are not committed to discovering the truth. A person cannot be a scientist or understand science without a commitment to the truth.
This creates great stress on our society, because on the one hand people need science both to survive and to provide a reasonable explanation of the objective truths of the world. On the other and people also need help understanding the things that science doesn't have very good explanations of, like morality, or their subjective experience of the world.
Modern science and philosophy don't give clear guidelines on what sort of things a person should do, and they don't provide any sort of explanation on what our experiences of the world are. For instance, modern science provides an explanation of how light works, and how the brain works (to some degree), but there is no explanation of our experience of the color red, since red is not quantitatively defined. Note by the color red, I am not referring to a particular frequency of light, but our experience *of* that frequency of light. These are important aspects of how we partake in the world that have yet to be tackled.
Since psychologically people have a strong desire for explanations and reasons for both the things that we have explanations to, and the things we have yet to find explanations to, there is a strong need for belief in addition to knowledge. Religion typically fulfills this role in society with supernatural explanations of aspects of reality that our knowledge of the natural world falls short of. Unfortunately, people offering supernatural explanations for the things that we don't understand will sometimes try to offer supernatural explanations for the things we *do* already understand and those two explanations will stand at odds with one another.
In my mind is is clearly the responsibility of any religious organization to mend their religious doctrine so that it does not conflict with facts that are known about the world. Indeed, most major modern sects do so to some degree. The catholic church for instance has changed many of its stances on various issues to correspond with scientific understanding. Ideas like the big band theory and evolution are accepted and taught at catholic institutions, and of course there is no mention of a geocentric model of the universe anymore. Many protestant denominations have made similar changes.
Unfortunately, some religious groups feel that their beliefs about supernatural matters are on par or superior to knowledge about the physical world. They ask, why should we have to change our beliefs just because we know otherwise? Instead, these groups ask their members to believe one thing and know another. This is not a healthy attitude, and causes psychological and social strife I feel pretty strongly that such religious organizations are doing their members a disservice and should be called to task for the harm they are doing.
for apple to kill linux on the desktop, there would have to be a linux on the desktop to kill. As this article points out, only something like 0.63% of people browsing on the internet are using linux.
I don't see this as really a big deal. Linux just isn't a desktop platform. It is used for servers, and for workstations used for developing software for linux servers. This is Linux's niche. There's nothing wrong with that... I'm just always surprised that so many linux users are convinced that Linux is going to take over the desktop market at some point... I can't even imagine what events would have to transpire for that to become the case.
I don't see how you can say that corporations are leeching off of OLPC, when it was the companies like Intel that were *paying* for it in the first place. Furthermore it was engineers from large companies that were doing the work. What made OLPC happen was an *industry alliance*.
Furthermore, I don't see how Intel developing low priced laptops hurts the developing world, when these low priced laptops will likely to be *sold* in the developing world.
In any case, a non profit is not a long term solution to the problem. Having a company back cheap laptops in third world is the best possible result. Making the third world entirely dependent on something as ephemeral as generosity is a good recipe for screwing them in the long run.
>When people first read this rant they mistakenly assumed I was whining about not having a job
>and blaming that on Rails. I'm not whining, I'm not sick, or crazy, just pissed off and I can
>write about it so fuck you very much.
The entire article is a bunch of swearing, and irc logs about petty disputes he has had with other members of the rails community. They are pretty formulaic along these lines:
guy: hey, zedas! you're a douche.
zedas: nah, uh. You're a douch!
etc.
This isn't to criticize the guy for writing the article, as it's his right to get steam off on his personal blog. However, I've got to wonder why this got posted on slashdot, as it really isn't tech news. Not every dispute that takes place on the internet is tech news.
I can't remember ever enjoying being at a fries. Being in Fry's is like shifting through every item available on the internet pilled into an enormous unorganized mound.
The basic concept of the store seems to be condense all of amazon.com (or in this case http://www.outpost.com/) into a single physical store. This basically means you get all of the items of output, with *no ability to search*.
Additionally, everything is overpriced. If they were smart, they'd be the costco of electronics stores, and instead of carrying a small quantity of every item you don't need at a high price, they'd carry a large quantity of stuff that everyone needs at a low price, and ignore specialty products.
I can't help but notice that there's nothing mentioned about unicode. I don't see how a major web development language, especially one made by Japanese designers, can go so long without adding comprehensive unicode support. After all, it's not like only English speaking people use rails websites...
>The actual use is, your army is invading some country far away, and is setting up a base
>camp in the middle of nowhere and would like some power.
Armies typically just use petroleum or nuclear power, as it is portable and reliable, whereas solar energy is neither. Really, I've never heard of an army concerning itself with making its energy source "green." After all, that would imply moral concerns that don't exist when participating in organized violence...
>We all know the usual pro-copyright arguments. Most of them hinge on the fact that
>the individual or company that has a copyright needs an incentive to make something
>that is copyrightable
I thought that the basis of copyright comes from a recognition of "The inalienable rights of Life, Liberty and Property," as the original wording goes. Copyright naturally follows from the right to property.
There's a need for a reform of our patent system, and probably some limitations on the duration of intellectual property; however, I don't think any reasonable person can dispute the legitimacy of copyright in principle.
Of course, there are some people who object to personal property all together. Communism and socialism are not dead ideas, even if they don't take center stage anymore. However, I think that history has proven that any society that rejects the right to property, but holds all things as property of the state also inevitably rejects the right to life and liberty, and that no individual in such a society can call himself free.
After all, our property constitutes our physical selves, and the extensions to our physical selves necessary to our identity, thus without a right to property we cannot have any right to life. If this is unclear, let me make it clear with an example. If we have no personal property, we logically do not own our internal organs, but possess them in common with the rest of society. Thus, the state would have the right to extract our organs for the benefit of others without our consent if it was deemed in the interest of the state.
Additionally, if we have no right to property, our liberty has no domain to exercise itself over. After all, how can we exercise our liberty if everything in the world belongs to the state, and exists solely for the benefit of the state? The exercise of liberty implies that we act on the world in a way determined by ourselves and directed towards whatever end we so desire, even selfish ends. This is not compatible with a world where we have no legal right to act on anything in a way contrary to the desires of the majority or of the state.
I think that for these reasons social views that do not allow for some basic right to personal property cannot be called ideologically sound or proscriptive of a free society. I think that when taking on patent and copyright reform we need to keep in mind that while the copyright and personal property rights may need to be limited in some ways, the basic right to property and to control copies of our works should be considered unassailable.
>I've never once used ACLs or seen them used. Has anybody used them?
I gave an example of where I've used ACL's in my post (a non root user try to give access to specific others to his files without giving everyone access). I also have run into a lot of other people who hit the same problem, but simply gave up because it couldn't be done without creating a whole new group, which they sometimes couldn't do... I suspect if you haven't noticed the limitations of user/group/everyone bits, you've been trying pretty hard to ignore them.
As you say, 90% of the cases may work without ACL's, but that isn't good enough. You're saying that you're ok with your security model just not working 10% of the time? Maybe you'd be fine with handing out your password to 10% of the people on the internet?
so their plan is to put a solar panel in space... because solar radiation is 8 times more powerful... umm... I'm pretty sure that putting the same surface area of solar panels in space is going to cost *way* more than 8 times as much as putting it on the ground.
Then of course there's the idea that we will somehow magically "beam" the energy to the ground. Here's an idea, we let the sunlight beam itself to the ground, instead of putting an enormous expensive satellite as an unnecessary intermediary in the process.
This is one of the sci fi ideas that sounds cool in a story because it involves big machines and lasers, but is totally nonsensical when you actually take ten seconds to think about it. File this in the same category as giant fighting robots and transporter beams.
>"Education" means telling people what to believe.
That's a cynical belief that seems popular these days. To many people, teaching is just another word for propagandizing. What that ignores is that the primary purpose of any real education is to teach critical thinking above all else.
Whether you go to an expensive school or are self educated, the real distinction between an educated and uneducated person is whether they can think logically and critically, i.e. whether they can listen to an argument, understand the structure of the argument, and find logical flaws in the argument if there are any. This is the single most valuable thing you can learn in school or anywhere else.
The primary problem with the public at present is that they are incapable of doing the basic logic to analyze political arguments, and so they are easily manipulated. Most people use emotional arguments to make a point, or use arguments by analogy, neither of which are valid forms of reasoning.
If you look at your average post on slashdot, it will look something like:
1. Albert made argument A, but everybody hates Albert, therefor the conclusion of argument A must be false.
Or
2. A is true of computer science or copyright law because B, which is somewhat similar to A, is true of car mechanics.
both arguments are absurd, but for some reason most people find them compelling in many situations.
>Well, the article is about capabilities, not ACLs, and Linux has had ACLs in the
>filesystem for years too.
Years yes... but they are still fairly new compared to the ACLs that are present in NTFS. Also, ACL's aren't really universal or standardized in linux. SELinux provides ACLs, as does AppArmor, which suze uses. It's kind of hard to adopt a permissions system that works differently between distros and not at all on some.
Which goes to your other point about people not using ACLs in Linux often. This is largely a cultural thing left over from unix, which discarded ACLs in order to save space on the file system, which is now a non issue.
>Administrators don't use ACLs on Linux because they make file permissions much harder
>to understand, for what is in reality an unimportant increase in expressiveness.
You're saying that probably because you've only used single user Linux systems... which kind of defeats the purpose of unix as a multiuser operating system btw. ACLs provide a very important level of expressiveness on a multiuser system.
If user A wants to share files with user B, but no one else (say user A has an SVN repository) without ACL's a special group has to be created and A and B are added as members. This means that something as simple as giving someone else access to your files requires elevation to root! On a large multiuser system, very few users have root access, so it is usually simply impossible. Being able to add an ACL to your file that says "allow user A" solves the problem elegantly.
Linux ACL's have taken a while to arrive and mature, but I've used them a number of times to solve the problem above and I'm glad they are finally here and hope for more consistent support in the future. When you don't need ACL's, they may seem like unnecessary complexity. In that case, feel free to ignore them and use the traditional user/group/other permissions. When you need them though, you will be very glad they are there. Generally, if you really need to do something with ACL's and you try to emulate it with groups, you are likely to open security holes, or make your system unusable for some class of users you didn't think of. ACL's are not the simple solution to the problem, but they are often the only correct solution, which matters a lot to some people.
can someone verify if this is just part of the ARG for cloverfield? That would be pretty annoying.
>You can start from one of two viewpoints (and most will eventually end somewhere in between them):
>* Most people are idiots who make bad decisions
>* Most people are smart enough to make better decisions than their governments
Both sides miss the point. Those two problems are connected. We have a representative government, which means if the people are idiots, the government will be filled with idiots. Additionally, it means that corruption can go unchecked because most of the public is too dumb and uninvolved in politics to realize that the people they are voting for are scumbags.
Most of the problems with our country can be traced to the fact that the public is largely uneducated and have no real understanding of even the most basic political issues. Many people choose not to vote, and those that choose to vote largely just check every republican box or every democrat box.
The solution is better education. You should notice that although the public education system has pretty much totally collapsed in most of the country (with the exception of a few wealthy neighborhoods) no politicians are even talking about how to fix the problem. The libertarians try to sidestep the issue by dissolving public education altogether, and the republicans and democrats mostly just ignore the issue or pretend that things aren't as bad as they are.
The real problem with the country is that the way we fund education, where most money comes from *local* government, not state or federal, insure that most of the parts of the country where people live have almost no money for education. On the other hand, most of our tax dollars go to the federal government, which does almost nothing for education, or any of the social services we use aside from social security...
Additionally, since schools are paid for at the local level, gifted students in a poor neighborhood receive a poor education, whereas low performers in a rich neighborhood get the best education and end up in a better university by virtue of the high school they attended. In most industrialized nations, which public school you get into is based on merit instead of where your parents can afford to live. Simply allowing gifted students to study with other gifted students, while allowing vocational opportunities for students lacking the intelligence or motivation to make it into college is a proven model that is highly successful in the rest of the world. Most industrialized nations are *not* facing an education crisis and are not facing low turnouts on voting day, and we don't have to either if we accept a rational and proven education model.
In the US, if a precedent is set by the courts, this determines future cases as well. This is true only because of the independent judiciary and the rule of law. The judicial branch of the government has power completely independent of the congress or president, and the other branches can't countermand them or remove justices. In many ways the judicial branch is more powerful than any other.
In china, all power derives from various factions in the communist party and personal loyalties. Even basic things like succession of the head of state aren't really nailed down yet (the guy, Jiang, was the first one to willingly give up power and even he hung on in some ways afterwards). There is no such thing as the rule of law in a country like that. You can be sure that the verdict here is little more than a sign that someone in yahoo china lost a power struggle. Don't imagine that this is a precedent that indicates that china will actually start enforcing the copyright of western companies.