I'm not sure what your point its. Unless we try very hard to do things in the most illogical way possible, covering 98% of the land mass would almost certainly mean that at any given time *more* than 98% of the population would have coverage. It would probably mean that *most* people would have 100% of the time.
What I'm concerned is what terms the coverage would come under. How expensive would it be? What about net neutrality? Would this be a subsidy for carriers who want to lock subscribers into their own content?
Well, bugs in a particular JRE aside, is your system *exclusively* implemented in Java? You don't, say, save the data to a database that isn't 100% Java, or anything like that? That said, it seems to me that buffer overflow is a relatively minor issue. In any case, if you read TFA, you'll see that contracts aren't about input checking, which should be done in UI code.
It sounds to me like DbC makes an interesting complement to unit testing. One of the hollow feelings I always feel in the pit of my stomach when I write a unit test is how dang *specific* unit tests are. It'd be nice to be able to say, "I haven't given any thought to values outside this range so make sure you're only using values in this range."
It also seems to me that this could be a nice safety net for when people try weird and wonderful things to eke out a little more performance, like caching or reusing objects, or having factory methods that return a singleton. Often these strategies are poorly implemented, or have side effects that aren't well thought out. So you might say that a method that returns a connection to some external software service ensures the connection TO be open and NOT TO BE in some kind of error state. You'd just toss that annotation in without much advance thought, because in *your* version of the routine it just won't happen. Later when some genius modifies the method to roll his own connection pooling scheme, the annotation will catch the problem of service connections returned in an inconsistent state to the previously non-existent and still not visible pool. Gosh, I've run across that kind of thing more than once.
I don't "need" my Android phone, but it sure is handy being able to put an appointment in and have it show up in the calendar I share with my wife. It's nice to be able to see whether an email I've been waiting for has arrived yet without having to dig out my laptop.
Can I live without my smartphone? Sure. Is my life better with my Android phone than it would be without? A little bit, but not radically so. Is my life worse without the cash I give up every month for the data plan? A little bit, but not radically so.
We make tons of decisions like this every day, and different people can arrive at different conclusions for very good reasons. Conversely, what is a good choice for one person might be bad for another. For example, I don't happen to watch TV, so I only have basic cable because it comes with my Internet service. The fact that I don't pay for a fancier plans doesn't make me a better consumer than my neighbor who does. The fact he doesn't have a data plan on his cell service doesn't make him a better consumer than me.
I think you overestimate the effectiveness of the Cultural Revolution. True, many priceless artifacts were lost, and worse many irreplaceable intellectuals.. But you simply can't wipe out a nation's cultural memory in ten years.
Look at it this way: Deng Xiao Peng was 62 when the Cultural Revolution started, and during it he was purged not once, but twice. After Mao died, the party turned to Deng because of his experience in dealing with the economic chaos from the Great Leap Forward. They turned to 72 year old Deng because of his experience *before* the Cultural Revolution. Deng was *hated* by the supporters of the Cultural Revolution.The Red Guards even threw his son off the roof of a four story building.
So that should be enough to show that the Cultural Revolution did not succeed in destroying everything that came before. It would be true to say that it transformed China, and not necessarily for the better, but it would be a mistake to depict it as successful on its own terms. One of its ironic effects it had was to inculcate a strong distaste for "Mao Zedong Thought".
Well, just because it doesn't work for *you* in every situation you might want it to, doesn't mean it is a bad implementation. It just mens it doesn't work for *you* in *that* situation.
That said, I think it'd be way cooler if they used a client side certificate.
I think you're kind of missing the point of education. Kids are supposed to go in ignorant little barbarians and come out worthy to be citizens of a great democracy. If you start from the fatalistic standpoint that kids are what they are and won't ever become more, why bother educating them at all? You could be investing all that money in razor wire and ammo.
Plenty of Republicans and other conservatives back things like construction of new nuclear power plants, a form of renewable energy that actually makes sense.
Well, let's not get too nitpicky here about the fact that breeding nuclear fuel doesn't make it a renewable resource. I'm suspicious of the claims boosters of this technology have made, particularly about how long the global fuel supply will last. On economic grounds alone, I do not find claims that breeder reactors can supply our energy needs for thousands of years plausible. Nor do we know whether any of the design concepts proposed will be as economical and practical to operate as we hope they'll be. Still I think breeder technology is promising in the short to mid term, and I'd like to see this technology pursued.
What I don't want to see is a crash program on which we pin too many of our plans for the future. Once too much money and too many hopes have been invested in a particular design, we won't be able to tolerate any bad news about it. It would be like Ibsen's play, "An Enemy of the People." We should allow ourselves a decade or so in which questions about the merits of a design or design concept don't brand a critic as unpatriotic or against human progress or economic survival.
In the meantime we should work on improving our electric grid. That's a no-brainer that will serve us well when the time comes (if it ever does) for a nuclear crash program. If that time never comes, and improved grid will serve us in diversifying our energy sources. An improved grid will promote competition in energy technologies, allowing developers of new power plants (nuclear or otherwise) to recoup their investment over a greater geographical area.
Well... what do you mean by "significant"? There are supposedly 5.37 million "bitcoins" in circulation. By comparsion there are 829 billion in US *currency* in circulation according to the New York Fed. That's more than 153 thousand times as much, which sounds impressive for bitcoin until you realize that the 829 billion is only the actual paper money and coinage out there, which is only a tiny fraction of the US dollars in circulation, most of which have no more physical existence than as a figure in a Fed spreadsheet somewhere.
This kind of apples and oranges comparison bedevils public thinking about money and policy. How can the US Budget (2.38 trillion for FY 2011) be almost three times the amount of actual currency in circulation? The actual money supply turns out to be hard to specify, because the vast majority of money out there is credit. The Fed's M2 statistic sets a lower bound on the total number of dollars out there at 8.8 trillion, which happens to be less than the US annual GDP of 14.1 trillion.
In any case, in an apples to apples comparision, there are 5.37 x 10^6 BitCoins acknowledged to be in existence, and 8.8 x 10^13. Still pretty impressive for BitCoins to be within a factor of 1.7 million of the dollars in circulation, but as we can see this doesn't necessarily tell us anything about the volume of *transactions* conducting in each currency. Weird, huh?
The linking of tablets with comm functionality is just the continuation of what we saw from the dying days of the PDA era, when PDAs morphed into smartphones. What had been proven a useful category of devices was no longer profitable to sell and support, because of falling prices. Nobody wanted to be in the business of selling $50 PDAs, so PDAs became smartphones. Selling through cell carriers meant that nobody really knew the price of anything.
The general crumminess of what's available in the Android tablet market is a product of another thing we saw in the demise of the PDA era: risk aversion. That risk aversion leads to two inconsistent strategies: trying to be all things to all people, and excessive conservatism. This led to the suckage that was PocketPC (later rebranded Windows Mobile), the very name embodying the hopelessly inconsistent promise of doing everything a PC does, just like a PC does, but in a pocket form factor.
Everyone knew tablets were coming, and of course nobody builds anything themselves anymore, so it doesn't take much investment or imagination to put an open source platform like Android on commodity tablet hardware in an attempt to "catch the wave." That might have worked in the early PC era, but I don't think it works in the current era, simply because that commodity hardware and software make it so easy for a competitor to conjure itself out of nothing. There is no time to get entrenched; no grace period in which to enjoy higher than normal profits.
I would argue that there are no more such hardware waves to catch, although that doesn't stop people from trying. What you have to do is *define* the wave. That takes a willingness to make investments and to take risks.
Well, I don't know about the revelations being pointless (although in the end I think they'll be largely harmless), but that has little to do with the ethics of Wikileaks. Reportedly Assange was initially indifferent to the risks the Iraq War Logs posed to civilians who may have talked to US forces, dismissing them as "collaborators". I've certainly heard his supporters taking this blanket position. This is really just the mirror image of George W. Bush's "you're with us or against us" way of looking at things. There are way more than two sides to the Iraq question, and even if there were only two sides, condemning somebody to the risk of reprisal based on hearsay seems unreasonably callous to me.
It's the apparent narcissism of Assange and his Anonymous partisans that arouses my skepticism. That doesn't mean they're necessarily wrong in every case, or that they can't do good things. It means their ethical judgment is questionable. At least it appears so to me. They don't seem to be able to imagine anything they do as wronging anyone so long as they have good intentions. I distrust self-righteous crusaders or jihadists of every stripe, because their world views so often deteriorate into simplistic, one-sided narratives of their personal persecution or heroism. Such people often do much good in the world, getting out ahead of other people on important issues, but their genuinely heroic deeds shouldn't cause us to view them uncritically.
But isn't "homeland security" going down the same path those guys in brown shirts tried some 80 years ago?
No. That doesn't mean they aren't doing bad things.
There's nothing wrong with Nazi analogies, as long as they're specific and substantive. Calling anything detrimental to freedom Nazism just makes your defense of freedom sound silly.
You could get some exercise. There is simply no other thing you can do for brain health and performance that has anything close to the volume of research support that exercise has. Recently I was reading in Science News about how rats given a test requiring them to remember subtle differences performed significantly better when they had an exercise wheel in their cage.
Well, a firewall is a single point of control, so it pretty much can't avoid being a single point of failure.
There doesn't seem to be anything surprising about what this guy is saying. Stateful firewalls are likely to fail under a DDOS attack because they keep track of connection requests until the table is full. Then everything behind the firewall is cut off. It's been years since I've done this kind of planning, but it certainly makes sense to make other security provisions for services that might attract DDOS attacks other than putting them behind the same firewall as everything else. It's been years since I've done that kind of planning, but I'd guess only mom and pop businesses would do it that way these days.
Actually, giving them a plane ticket home would be better than treating them all like convicted child molesters. If they don't have mens rea (a guilty mind/criminal intent), they aren't criminals. They're people with incorrect immigration papers. So you say, "Gee, it's too bad your papers are screwed up, but you have to go home until you can get them straightened out. We'll give you a reasonable period to wrap up your affairs first of course. The people of the United States wish you well in all your future endeavors."
Treating people with respect costs less than treating them disrespectfully. And we want to treat these people with respect, because it is in our national interest to do so. India is the world's largest democracy. They aren't exactly an ally, but if you look at that part of the world, a strong, stable and generally cooperative country looks a lot better than a basket case ally that can transform overnight into an implacable enemy.
This is not about what we owe *them*. It's about what we owe ourselves.
The "solution" we ended up is the worst of all possible worlds. We're being provocatively harsh, *and they're still here*. We'd be better off just turning a blind eye to these people. Even if some of them ended up staying here indefinitely, that's not the end of the world, and it is certainly not worth inflaming the sensibilities of an important strategic and economic partner. People here in the US are pissed at Indians for doing exactly what we asked them to do. They sold us services under our free trade policies. They came here at our invitation to fill up H1B positions. And we're angry at *them* for the laws and policies we have enacted?
If it were up to me, I'd give these people the benefit of the doubt. I'd bend over backward to give them a chance to adjust their status, apply under a different visa program, or go home voluntarily. Why? Primarily because it's the decent, stand-up thing to do. But if that's not enough, it's the right thing to do for our national interests.
All of which somebody somewhere no doubt still uses. Heck, you can still buy minidisc players.
I even read a story last year about a band that released a steampunk themed song on wax cylinder (dug it up for you:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10171206).
I dunno. It depends on your criteria for "still actually used". It seems to me that obsolete tools are obsoleted in different ways:
(1) The tool has been superseded by refined versions of itself. (Metal ax replaces stone ax)
(2) The tool has been superseded in its primary economic role by different tools. (Guns and bullets replace bows and arrows)
(3) The role itself has become obsolete. (Shoe fitting fluoroscopes).
The shoe fitting fluoroscope may be the closest thing there is to an extinct tool, because you would never build such a thing for such a purpose today. However, there *are* still fluoroscopes in use. Presumably you *could* use them to fit shoes, but they lack the refinements that would make the convenient for using in a retail environment.
For that matter, so far as I know people are not building new steam locomotives either. That doesn't mean that rail museums aren't refurbishing and using them. I'm sure that steam engines are being produced that *could* be adapted to pull loads over rails, but they wouldn't have the performance and form factor to make that practical.
Both these technologies (shoe fluoroscopes and steam locomotives) are good choices for extinction because they aren't things you would either build or use casually (unlike a primitive ax or bow). Even so, it seems to me that the truth of the statement "No tool ever dies" depends on what you mean. You can falsify it by being unreasonably narrow (e.g., many early airplanes of which there are no surviving examples or design documents are extinct, although *similar* aircraft are being built by homebrewers). You can make it true by being unreasonably permissive (fluoroscopes are still in use in medicine and *could* be used to fit shoes if you wanted to).
Two or three decades in the future you will be thinking about decommissioning plants you build today.
We will not run out of Uranium in a hundred years. We won't run out of petroleum either. What will happen is that we'll run out of reserves that are economical to extract and process on the scale needed to supply. We'll never run out of gold either, because there's gold dissolved in the oceans that will never be worth extracting except in tiny quantities.
As for current growth in uranium use continuing at its current rate, that's a highly dubious assumption. Worldwide nuclear accounts for less than 20% of electricity alone, and if we are to look at nuclear as the solution for *all* our energy problems, then we'd need to increase the total amount of electricity generated as well. After we'd done that, we'd have to increase the consumption of nuclear power at least with the word population, and probably faster if we wanted to provide for improved standards of living. That's all assuming that we put all our eggs in the nuclear basket.
As I said, I'm for an increase in the use of nuclear power, and even for looking at advanced fuel cycle technologies. What I'm against is wishful thinking.
OK, well first of all I meant "unustainability can't be sustained". It was a typo, and if you really wanted to understand what I wrote that would have been clear. The problem of *unsustainaility* isn't that it can't be sustained; it's what we do to make an unsustainable practice last a bit longer.
Second of all, oil has nothing to do with nuclear? They're both energy sources. That's the best way to look at them. My point is that the electric infrastructure is key to reducing our dependency on any single source of energy. Even if the immediate environmental effect of something like electric cars is nil or slightly negative, in the long term the fungibility of energy sources is a critical step toward sustainability.
And cheap fossil fuels killed nuclear power. Period. It was convenient all the way around to claim this as a victory for the "environmental lobby", but if it weren't for cheap coal, fuel oil and natural gas we'd have continued building nuclear power plants.
Well, having low prices for petroleum, coal and natural gas after the 1970s *might* have had something to do with the collapse of the US nuclear industry.
Seriously, just how paranoid do you have to be to believe in an environmental lobby that can prevail against any industry that sees big, quick bucks to be made? How out of touch with what environmentalists actually think do you have to be to believe they *don't* know coal is involved in generating electricity?
Environmentalists who are concerned with energy generally want two things: (1) greater efficiency and (2) sustainably renewable energy sources. These also happen to be good things if you are interested in national economic security.
Renewable energy sources are where we'll be in the long run anyhow, because sustainability is, well, *unsustainable*. Unsustainability per se is not a long term problem, because it is a self-correcting problem. The problems with non-sustainable practices are all the things we end up doing to keep the status quo running just a little bit longer; the external costs we dump on the society and the planet because we are facing problems we don't know how to fix in a decade, much less overnight. Deepwater Horizon was an example of that. We pushed our capability to the limit, and because the margins at the limit aren't as generous as we'd like we cut corners.
This problem is exacerbated by the unwillingness of people to think ahead. People equate thinking ahead with doom and gloom. When they fix a problem, they want it to be fixed forever, even if that's unreasonable. If we planned ahead, we could use nuclear power to help us transition from petroleum.The first bite of a non-sustainable practice is the least environmentally costly. But we have trouble not taking the next bite, and the bite after that, until we've used it all up.
What would happen if we decided to pursue nuclear as bridge to future sustainable energy production? I think very quickly people would view this as a new status quo that will last forever. They won't think about decommissioning, waste disposal an fuel supply problems that are two or three decades in the future. Oh, they'll pay lip service to these things, but then go ahead and build plants on a scale that ignores these coming problems. The urge build our way out of our short term problems will be almost irresistible. If we succeed in building our way out of our short term problems, energy efficiency will go out the window because we'll consider our problems solved forever.
Nonetheless, I think we *should* increase our use of nuclear power. We'll probably need to increase our use of natural gas and (ugh) coal. There will be millions spent lobbying to choose one of these technologies and treat it as a silver bullet (which none of them will be). We just have to accept that's a fight we'll have to have, because having failed to convince people to look ahead forty years ago, we can't just wag our finger at them and say, "See? This is what we said was going to happen, even if in the short term oil prices went down." You don't win people over by rubbing their nose in their being wrong.
The important thing is to move to a diversified portfolio of energy sources, and electricity generation is key to this. As any single energy source becomes economically or environmentally non-viable, we won't be faced with the end of civilization as we know it. This will also be a bridge to a sustainable energy future. As each non-sustainable energy source drops out, consumers will economize and economically marginal energy sources (e.g. photovoltaics) will attract more private investment.
Well, would you feel better if people talked in terms of "virtual universes"?
Suppose people used the multiverse idea to describe observable phenomena in this universe without taking any position on whether those other universes actually exist. If the descriptions arrived at are neat and elegant enough, they will surely result in some predictions testable in this universe, even though the physical existence of those "other universes" will almost by definition be a meaningless question.
There's a pesky thing that the US and a few other countries have ratified named the "Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies", or simply "Space Treaty". One of the major points of it is the agreement that no one will militarize space.
Ah, but we put a giant loophole in that treaty. Nowhere does the treaty say we can't put an Indian reservation in space. Go Manifest Destiny!
It doesn't necessarily follow that the system is not producing net energy. An internal combustion engine generates more mechanical energy than is put into it, but it stores some of that energy in a flywheel so it can compress the fuel air mixture, a phase that *consumes* energy. If your engine design had no means for capturing some of the energy from the power stroke, you'd have to feed your engine a constant stream of external power, say from an electrical motor or actuator.
This thing might well produce net energy as heat, but require something like electrical input to operate. Until you could scale the thing to a size that could generate electricity, you can't do the definitive demonstration of feeding a load while sustaining the reaction.
That said, I'm dubious. But if experimenters can reproduce a reaction into which they put nickel and hydrogen, and extract copper where there was none before, I'll buy that there is fusion going on.
That's the point. If you restricted your activities to things *nobody* considered evil you couldn't get anything done. They are doing things that require people to trust them.
I've studied the issue of privacy, and its not a simple one; but I've come to the conclusion that behind what we call "privacy" is personal autonomy. Forbidding Google to collect and use data on customers would *also* be an interference in their customers' autonomy, provided that Google discloses the uses to which it puts data and follows a reasonable and explicit privacy policy.
The privacy link at the bottom of Google's home leads to an explanation of what data they collect and how they use it, along with tools which allow you to manage the data which Google tracks on you. Who else does that?
If you've got a privacy ax to grind with Google, fine, but you ought to be more explicit other than "I don't like Google collecting data on me." If you don't like that don't use Google servcies.
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I'm not sure what your point its. Unless we try very hard to do things in the most illogical way possible, covering 98% of the land mass would almost certainly mean that at any given time *more* than 98% of the population would have coverage. It would probably mean that *most* people would have 100% of the time.
What I'm concerned is what terms the coverage would come under. How expensive would it be? What about net neutrality? Would this be a subsidy for carriers who want to lock subscribers into their own content?
Well, bugs in a particular JRE aside, is your system *exclusively* implemented in Java? You don't, say, save the data to a database that isn't 100% Java, or anything like that? That said, it seems to me that buffer overflow is a relatively minor issue. In any case, if you read TFA, you'll see that contracts aren't about input checking, which should be done in UI code.
It sounds to me like DbC makes an interesting complement to unit testing. One of the hollow feelings I always feel in the pit of my stomach when I write a unit test is how dang *specific* unit tests are. It'd be nice to be able to say, "I haven't given any thought to values outside this range so make sure you're only using values in this range."
It also seems to me that this could be a nice safety net for when people try weird and wonderful things to eke out a little more performance, like caching or reusing objects, or having factory methods that return a singleton. Often these strategies are poorly implemented, or have side effects that aren't well thought out. So you might say that a method that returns a connection to some external software service ensures the connection TO be open and NOT TO BE in some kind of error state. You'd just toss that annotation in without much advance thought, because in *your* version of the routine it just won't happen. Later when some genius modifies the method to roll his own connection pooling scheme, the annotation will catch the problem of service connections returned in an inconsistent state to the previously non-existent and still not visible pool. Gosh, I've run across that kind of thing more than once.
I don't "need" my Android phone, but it sure is handy being able to put an appointment in and have it show up in the calendar I share with my wife. It's nice to be able to see whether an email I've been waiting for has arrived yet without having to dig out my laptop.
Can I live without my smartphone? Sure. Is my life better with my Android phone than it would be without? A little bit, but not radically so. Is my life worse without the cash I give up every month for the data plan? A little bit, but not radically so.
We make tons of decisions like this every day, and different people can arrive at different conclusions for very good reasons. Conversely, what is a good choice for one person might be bad for another. For example, I don't happen to watch TV, so I only have basic cable because it comes with my Internet service. The fact that I don't pay for a fancier plans doesn't make me a better consumer than my neighbor who does. The fact he doesn't have a data plan on his cell service doesn't make him a better consumer than me.
I think you overestimate the effectiveness of the Cultural Revolution. True, many priceless artifacts were lost, and worse many irreplaceable intellectuals.. But you simply can't wipe out a nation's cultural memory in ten years.
Look at it this way: Deng Xiao Peng was 62 when the Cultural Revolution started, and during it he was purged not once, but twice. After Mao died, the party turned to Deng because of his experience in dealing with the economic chaos from the Great Leap Forward. They turned to 72 year old Deng because of his experience *before* the Cultural Revolution. Deng was *hated* by the supporters of the Cultural Revolution.The Red Guards even threw his son off the roof of a four story building.
So that should be enough to show that the Cultural Revolution did not succeed in destroying everything that came before. It would be true to say that it transformed China, and not necessarily for the better, but it would be a mistake to depict it as successful on its own terms. One of its ironic effects it had was to inculcate a strong distaste for "Mao Zedong Thought".
Well, just because it doesn't work for *you* in every situation you might want it to, doesn't mean it is a bad implementation. It just mens it doesn't work for *you* in *that* situation.
That said, I think it'd be way cooler if they used a client side certificate.
I think you're kind of missing the point of education. Kids are supposed to go in ignorant little barbarians and come out worthy to be citizens of a great democracy. If you start from the fatalistic standpoint that kids are what they are and won't ever become more, why bother educating them at all? You could be investing all that money in razor wire and ammo.
Plenty of Republicans and other conservatives back things like construction of new nuclear power plants, a form of renewable energy that actually makes sense.
Well, let's not get too nitpicky here about the fact that breeding nuclear fuel doesn't make it a renewable resource. I'm suspicious of the claims boosters of this technology have made, particularly about how long the global fuel supply will last. On economic grounds alone, I do not find claims that breeder reactors can supply our energy needs for thousands of years plausible. Nor do we know whether any of the design concepts proposed will be as economical and practical to operate as we hope they'll be. Still I think breeder technology is promising in the short to mid term, and I'd like to see this technology pursued.
What I don't want to see is a crash program on which we pin too many of our plans for the future. Once too much money and too many hopes have been invested in a particular design, we won't be able to tolerate any bad news about it. It would be like Ibsen's play, "An Enemy of the People." We should allow ourselves a decade or so in which questions about the merits of a design or design concept don't brand a critic as unpatriotic or against human progress or economic survival.
In the meantime we should work on improving our electric grid. That's a no-brainer that will serve us well when the time comes (if it ever does) for a nuclear crash program. If that time never comes, and improved grid will serve us in diversifying our energy sources. An improved grid will promote competition in energy technologies, allowing developers of new power plants (nuclear or otherwise) to recoup their investment over a greater geographical area.
Well... what do you mean by "significant"? There are supposedly 5.37 million "bitcoins" in circulation. By comparsion there are 829 billion in US *currency* in circulation according to the New York Fed. That's more than 153 thousand times as much, which sounds impressive for bitcoin until you realize that the 829 billion is only the actual paper money and coinage out there, which is only a tiny fraction of the US dollars in circulation, most of which have no more physical existence than as a figure in a Fed spreadsheet somewhere.
This kind of apples and oranges comparison bedevils public thinking about money and policy. How can the US Budget (2.38 trillion for FY 2011) be almost three times the amount of actual currency in circulation? The actual money supply turns out to be hard to specify, because the vast majority of money out there is credit. The Fed's M2 statistic sets a lower bound on the total number of dollars out there at 8.8 trillion, which happens to be less than the US annual GDP of 14.1 trillion.
In any case, in an apples to apples comparision, there are 5.37 x 10^6 BitCoins acknowledged to be in existence, and 8.8 x 10^13. Still pretty impressive for BitCoins to be within a factor of 1.7 million of the dollars in circulation, but as we can see this doesn't necessarily tell us anything about the volume of *transactions* conducting in each currency. Weird, huh?
The linking of tablets with comm functionality is just the continuation of what we saw from the dying days of the PDA era, when PDAs morphed into smartphones. What had been proven a useful category of devices was no longer profitable to sell and support, because of falling prices. Nobody wanted to be in the business of selling $50 PDAs, so PDAs became smartphones. Selling through cell carriers meant that nobody really knew the price of anything.
The general crumminess of what's available in the Android tablet market is a product of another thing we saw in the demise of the PDA era: risk aversion. That risk aversion leads to two inconsistent strategies: trying to be all things to all people, and excessive conservatism. This led to the suckage that was PocketPC (later rebranded Windows Mobile), the very name embodying the hopelessly inconsistent promise of doing everything a PC does, just like a PC does, but in a pocket form factor.
Everyone knew tablets were coming, and of course nobody builds anything themselves anymore, so it doesn't take much investment or imagination to put an open source platform like Android on commodity tablet hardware in an attempt to "catch the wave." That might have worked in the early PC era, but I don't think it works in the current era, simply because that commodity hardware and software make it so easy for a competitor to conjure itself out of nothing. There is no time to get entrenched; no grace period in which to enjoy higher than normal profits.
I would argue that there are no more such hardware waves to catch, although that doesn't stop people from trying. What you have to do is *define* the wave. That takes a willingness to make investments and to take risks.
Well, I don't know about the revelations being pointless (although in the end I think they'll be largely harmless), but that has little to do with the ethics of Wikileaks. Reportedly Assange was initially indifferent to the risks the Iraq War Logs posed to civilians who may have talked to US forces, dismissing them as "collaborators". I've certainly heard his supporters taking this blanket position. This is really just the mirror image of George W. Bush's "you're with us or against us" way of looking at things. There are way more than two sides to the Iraq question, and even if there were only two sides, condemning somebody to the risk of reprisal based on hearsay seems unreasonably callous to me.
It's the apparent narcissism of Assange and his Anonymous partisans that arouses my skepticism. That doesn't mean they're necessarily wrong in every case, or that they can't do good things. It means their ethical judgment is questionable. At least it appears so to me. They don't seem to be able to imagine anything they do as wronging anyone so long as they have good intentions. I distrust self-righteous crusaders or jihadists of every stripe, because their world views so often deteriorate into simplistic, one-sided narratives of their personal persecution or heroism. Such people often do much good in the world, getting out ahead of other people on important issues, but their genuinely heroic deeds shouldn't cause us to view them uncritically.
But isn't "homeland security" going down the same path those guys in brown shirts tried some 80 years ago?
No. That doesn't mean they aren't doing bad things.
There's nothing wrong with Nazi analogies, as long as they're specific and substantive. Calling anything detrimental to freedom Nazism just makes your defense of freedom sound silly.
You could get some exercise. There is simply no other thing you can do for brain health and performance that has anything close to the volume of research support that exercise has. Recently I was reading in Science News about how rats given a test requiring them to remember subtle differences performed significantly better when they had an exercise wheel in their cage.
Well, a firewall is a single point of control, so it pretty much can't avoid being a single point of failure.
There doesn't seem to be anything surprising about what this guy is saying. Stateful firewalls are likely to fail under a DDOS attack because they keep track of connection requests until the table is full. Then everything behind the firewall is cut off. It's been years since I've done this kind of planning, but it certainly makes sense to make other security provisions for services that might attract DDOS attacks other than putting them behind the same firewall as everything else. It's been years since I've done that kind of planning, but I'd guess only mom and pop businesses would do it that way these days.
Actually, giving them a plane ticket home would be better than treating them all like convicted child molesters. If they don't have mens rea (a guilty mind/criminal intent), they aren't criminals. They're people with incorrect immigration papers. So you say, "Gee, it's too bad your papers are screwed up, but you have to go home until you can get them straightened out. We'll give you a reasonable period to wrap up your affairs first of course. The people of the United States wish you well in all your future endeavors."
Treating people with respect costs less than treating them disrespectfully. And we want to treat these people with respect, because it is in our national interest to do so. India is the world's largest democracy. They aren't exactly an ally, but if you look at that part of the world, a strong, stable and generally cooperative country looks a lot better than a basket case ally that can transform overnight into an implacable enemy.
This is not about what we owe *them*. It's about what we owe ourselves.
The "solution" we ended up is the worst of all possible worlds. We're being provocatively harsh, *and they're still here*. We'd be better off just turning a blind eye to these people. Even if some of them ended up staying here indefinitely, that's not the end of the world, and it is certainly not worth inflaming the sensibilities of an important strategic and economic partner. People here in the US are pissed at Indians for doing exactly what we asked them to do. They sold us services under our free trade policies. They came here at our invitation to fill up H1B positions. And we're angry at *them* for the laws and policies we have enacted?
If it were up to me, I'd give these people the benefit of the doubt. I'd bend over backward to give them a chance to adjust their status, apply under a different visa program, or go home voluntarily. Why? Primarily because it's the decent, stand-up thing to do. But if that's not enough, it's the right thing to do for our national interests.
All of which somebody somewhere no doubt still uses. Heck, you can still buy minidisc players.
I even read a story last year about a band that released a steampunk themed song on wax cylinder (dug it up for you:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10171206).
I dunno. It depends on your criteria for "still actually used". It seems to me that obsolete tools are obsoleted in different ways:
(1) The tool has been superseded by refined versions of itself. (Metal ax replaces stone ax)
(2) The tool has been superseded in its primary economic role by different tools. (Guns and bullets replace bows and arrows)
(3) The role itself has become obsolete. (Shoe fitting fluoroscopes).
The shoe fitting fluoroscope may be the closest thing there is to an extinct tool, because you would never build such a thing for such a purpose today. However, there *are* still fluoroscopes in use. Presumably you *could* use them to fit shoes, but they lack the refinements that would make the convenient for using in a retail environment.
For that matter, so far as I know people are not building new steam locomotives either. That doesn't mean that rail museums aren't refurbishing and using them. I'm sure that steam engines are being produced that *could* be adapted to pull loads over rails, but they wouldn't have the performance and form factor to make that practical.
Both these technologies (shoe fluoroscopes and steam locomotives) are good choices for extinction because they aren't things you would either build or use casually (unlike a primitive ax or bow). Even so, it seems to me that the truth of the statement "No tool ever dies" depends on what you mean. You can falsify it by being unreasonably narrow (e.g., many early airplanes of which there are no surviving examples or design documents are extinct, although *similar* aircraft are being built by homebrewers). You can make it true by being unreasonably permissive (fluoroscopes are still in use in medicine and *could* be used to fit shoes if you wanted to).
Two or three decades in the future you will be thinking about decommissioning plants you build today.
We will not run out of Uranium in a hundred years. We won't run out of petroleum either. What will happen is that we'll run out of reserves that are economical to extract and process on the scale needed to supply. We'll never run out of gold either, because there's gold dissolved in the oceans that will never be worth extracting except in tiny quantities.
As for current growth in uranium use continuing at its current rate, that's a highly dubious assumption. Worldwide nuclear accounts for less than 20% of electricity alone, and if we are to look at nuclear as the solution for *all* our energy problems, then we'd need to increase the total amount of electricity generated as well. After we'd done that, we'd have to increase the consumption of nuclear power at least with the word population, and probably faster if we wanted to provide for improved standards of living. That's all assuming that we put all our eggs in the nuclear basket.
As I said, I'm for an increase in the use of nuclear power, and even for looking at advanced fuel cycle technologies. What I'm against is wishful thinking.
OK, well first of all I meant "unustainability can't be sustained". It was a typo, and if you really wanted to understand what I wrote that would have been clear. The problem of *unsustainaility* isn't that it can't be sustained; it's what we do to make an unsustainable practice last a bit longer.
Second of all, oil has nothing to do with nuclear? They're both energy sources. That's the best way to look at them. My point is that the electric infrastructure is key to reducing our dependency on any single source of energy. Even if the immediate environmental effect of something like electric cars is nil or slightly negative, in the long term the fungibility of energy sources is a critical step toward sustainability.
And cheap fossil fuels killed nuclear power. Period. It was convenient all the way around to claim this as a victory for the "environmental lobby", but if it weren't for cheap coal, fuel oil and natural gas we'd have continued building nuclear power plants.
Well, having low prices for petroleum, coal and natural gas after the 1970s *might* have had something to do with the collapse of the US nuclear industry.
Seriously, just how paranoid do you have to be to believe in an environmental lobby that can prevail against any industry that sees big, quick bucks to be made? How out of touch with what environmentalists actually think do you have to be to believe they *don't* know coal is involved in generating electricity?
Environmentalists who are concerned with energy generally want two things: (1) greater efficiency and (2) sustainably renewable energy sources. These also happen to be good things if you are interested in national economic security.
Renewable energy sources are where we'll be in the long run anyhow, because sustainability is, well, *unsustainable*. Unsustainability per se is not a long term problem, because it is a self-correcting problem. The problems with non-sustainable practices are all the things we end up doing to keep the status quo running just a little bit longer; the external costs we dump on the society and the planet because we are facing problems we don't know how to fix in a decade, much less overnight. Deepwater Horizon was an example of that. We pushed our capability to the limit, and because the margins at the limit aren't as generous as we'd like we cut corners.
This problem is exacerbated by the unwillingness of people to think ahead. People equate thinking ahead with doom and gloom. When they fix a problem, they want it to be fixed forever, even if that's unreasonable. If we planned ahead, we could use nuclear power to help us transition from petroleum.The first bite of a non-sustainable practice is the least environmentally costly. But we have trouble not taking the next bite, and the bite after that, until we've used it all up.
What would happen if we decided to pursue nuclear as bridge to future sustainable energy production? I think very quickly people would view this as a new status quo that will last forever. They won't think about decommissioning, waste disposal an fuel supply problems that are two or three decades in the future. Oh, they'll pay lip service to these things, but then go ahead and build plants on a scale that ignores these coming problems. The urge build our way out of our short term problems will be almost irresistible. If we succeed in building our way out of our short term problems, energy efficiency will go out the window because we'll consider our problems solved forever.
Nonetheless, I think we *should* increase our use of nuclear power. We'll probably need to increase our use of natural gas and (ugh) coal. There will be millions spent lobbying to choose one of these technologies and treat it as a silver bullet (which none of them will be). We just have to accept that's a fight we'll have to have, because having failed to convince people to look ahead forty years ago, we can't just wag our finger at them and say, "See? This is what we said was going to happen, even if in the short term oil prices went down." You don't win people over by rubbing their nose in their being wrong.
The important thing is to move to a diversified portfolio of energy sources, and electricity generation is key to this. As any single energy source becomes economically or environmentally non-viable, we won't be faced with the end of civilization as we know it. This will also be a bridge to a sustainable energy future. As each non-sustainable energy source drops out, consumers will economize and economically marginal energy sources (e.g. photovoltaics) will attract more private investment.
Well, would you feel better if people talked in terms of "virtual universes"?
Suppose people used the multiverse idea to describe observable phenomena in this universe without taking any position on whether those other universes actually exist. If the descriptions arrived at are neat and elegant enough, they will surely result in some predictions testable in this universe, even though the physical existence of those "other universes" will almost by definition be a meaningless question.
I hate it.
This reporter, Mark Whittington, is a Republican/Conservative reporter ...
Sure, he's a Dick, but that just means he'll be thrice Lord Mayor of London.
There's a pesky thing that the US and a few other countries have ratified named the "Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies", or simply "Space Treaty". One of the major points of it is the agreement that no one will militarize space.
Ah, but we put a giant loophole in that treaty. Nowhere does the treaty say we can't put an Indian reservation in space. Go Manifest Destiny!
It doesn't necessarily follow that the system is not producing net energy. An internal combustion engine generates more mechanical energy than is put into it, but it stores some of that energy in a flywheel so it can compress the fuel air mixture, a phase that *consumes* energy. If your engine design had no means for capturing some of the energy from the power stroke, you'd have to feed your engine a constant stream of external power, say from an electrical motor or actuator.
This thing might well produce net energy as heat, but require something like electrical input to operate. Until you could scale the thing to a size that could generate electricity, you can't do the definitive demonstration of feeding a load while sustaining the reaction.
That said, I'm dubious. But if experimenters can reproduce a reaction into which they put nickel and hydrogen, and extract copper where there was none before, I'll buy that there is fusion going on.
That's the point. If you restricted your activities to things *nobody* considered evil you couldn't get anything done. They are doing things that require people to trust them.
I've studied the issue of privacy, and its not a simple one; but I've come to the conclusion that behind what we call "privacy" is personal autonomy. Forbidding Google to collect and use data on customers would *also* be an interference in their customers' autonomy, provided that Google discloses the uses to which it puts data and follows a reasonable and explicit privacy policy.
The privacy link at the bottom of Google's home leads to an explanation of what data they collect and how they use it, along with tools which allow you to manage the data which Google tracks on you. Who else does that?
If you've got a privacy ax to grind with Google, fine, but you ought to be more explicit other than "I don't like Google collecting data on me." If you don't like that don't use Google servcies.