If I were picking a codename for my next product, I'm not sure I'd pick the name of a language famous for being useless for real work without vendor extensions.
I'm normally one to scoff at privatization of things like space exploration, but frankly finding the best ways to lower costs is precisely the kind of thing the private sector does best. Let 30 little companies work on the problem. There's plenty of a market in satellite launches to finance this. The ones with ideas that don't pan out will go belly-up, and the one or two that hit on good solutions will survive. There's no possible way a single organization (eg: NASA) can do that job properly.
NASA needs to be working on things that we just flat out don't know how to do, or it would be totally impractical for more than one group to attempt.
There's no such thing as almost having Rule of Law. If the laws don't apply to the powerful, then you don't really have laws. Constraining the powerful is what laws are for. The powerful don't need protection.
It sounds like they went through a lot of effort to make this agreement with Russia. Why on earth someone would do that, when the country doesn't operate under Rule of Law anyway? The current regime has shown time after time that it considers itself bound neither by its own laws, nor its signed treaties. When a company starts to do well, they nationalize it and throw the former owners in jail. When they want some territory, they take it.
If you agree to any of their laws or treaties, they only bind you, not them. So why bother agreeing to anything with them?
It isn't a matter of "proper funding". The current ideology is that large corporations are just plain better at everything that identically-sized groups that happen to be part of the government. Thus increasing funding to a non-military government agency for any reason is heresy.
There probably will eventually be future missions to Titan, but they will be for harvesting all that methane and natural gas so it can be hauled back to Earth and burned up in our atmosphere.
I know this is always a popular theme. Life may not be as we know it. However proper analisis makes it less likely than water based carbon life for a number of reasons.
Its popular for a reason. How do we know what exactly is required for life? Every time we've thought of a "requirement" before, we've looked somewhere on earth that doesn't meet those requirements and found life. Our knowledge of what is needed is limited, and frankly horribly blinded by our own experience. We know the mechanisms that we can see that life on earth uses, but that doesn't mean that's the only mechanism (or even the best possible mechanism). Humans can collectively be quite creative, but we are nothing compared to the universe at large.
Actually, not a horrible or unusual policy on/. , but you probably should read it before making assumptions about the contents. It keeps you from saying stupidly wrong thing like this.
Yes, those MEN had the GALL to WATCH two women hula hooping. Which made her feel unsafe. In other words, she's a lunatic and you can safely ignore anything she says.
This incident was a very small aside after a long history of (unrelated except in a common culture) horrific events that happened to her. It was only brought up as the straw that broke the camel's back, not as THE reason she left. If that same series of events had happened to me, I would have left far before the hula-hooping thing happened. If it had happened to one of my daughters, I'd be lucky to not be in jail right now.
Anyone who sizes upon this as a reason to "ignore anything she says", pretty clearly came into this story looking really hard to find a reason to do just that. It says way more about you than about her.
I know Slashdot takes a lot of heat for reposting old stories, but this one is truly impressive. Its 45 years old! Most Slashdot readers weren't even born yet. The Beatles were still together. I was 2.
Its like the editors went, oh old stories huh? You think these are old stories? I'll show you old stories, mofo!
Tomorrow: Jules Verne in 1877 suggested it might be possible to bootstrap space navigation by hitching a ride on a passing comet (tagged: screwyouwhiners)
For one thing, a bog standard Tesla already has pretty good protection. The NTSA actually had to make up new tests to find any kind of limits to the thing. For example, when they tried doing standard crashes into poles, it kept breaking their poles. They flat out could not get the thing to roll over. You'd think with that as a standard to start from, they could achieve some pretty great things if given the extra custom design latitude and budget a POTUS limo vendor is typically given.
For another, with the extra space under a stretch limo, as the article points out they ought to be able to pack enough extra battery to make up for the extra weight.
For another, electric cars already have much more power at lower revs than gasoline cars. I'd think that would be a pretty attractive feature for people worried about someone trying to block off their vehicle in an ambush.
Back when I worked for one of the top defense contractors, they really didn't pay us very competitively. I was looking around, and encouraged a good friend of mine to do so as well. He was a really good engineer, and deserved better. Unfortunately, he told me he couldn't.
You see, a few months after hiring on right out of college, he discovered he had diabetes. Our employer's insurance continued covering him (because they had to), but if he tried to go anywhere else nothing diabetes-related would be covered, as it would be considered a "preexisting condition". He was trim, and healthy and kept good care of himself, but every 2 years or so something would go wrong and he'd end up in the hospital for a couple of weeks. Without coverage for this, he'd be a financial disaster. He was stuck working there.
This is the point where a person starts to wonder how many other folks like him were out there. How many people had developed conditions that made them essentially indentured servants? And how much had this situation screwed over the natural economy that our country should have?
I know "pre-existing condition" exceptions are outlawed now. But our current Congress tried to reinstate them more than 50 times, last session. We're just one good Republican election away from getting them back.
A very good analysis. My only complaint with it is that a lot of it is conjecture based on the theory that the money supply is currently being increased, which is not actually the case. The Fed is not printing money, and in fact is not capable of doing so. It might be a very good idea right now, for reasons you are quite eloquent about, but the agency that would have to do it would be the Treasury, not the Fed.
The basic situation is that we went through very nasty credit-induced recession. We don't know what's typical for such things really, but the last one is now called "The Great Depression", and took more than a decade (and some say a major war) to recover from. So we should be thankful things aren't far worse, but they still suck compared to a typical "recovery". There's a good chance it will recover on its own eventually, but for us humans "eventually" doesn't buy us groceries, so it would be a really good idea to do what we reasonably can to help it.
The problem there is that we are currently the proud holders of a congress that couldn't pass gas in a chili house. The political cynic in me would say that the Republican Congress doesn't want the economy to recover before the 2018 election, and is doing everything they can to stop recovery efforts. But even if you don't buy that, its undeniable that there's no way they are going to allow any further stimulus (that isn't war-related).
So this means that the Treasury department will simply not be allowed to print money to help us out of this, no matter how good of an idea it may seem. The only government agencies that are capable of acting are independent agencies, and of those the only one with a mission of looking after the economy is The Fed. They can't print money of course, but what they can do is effectively give free loans to banks (which they are doing), and take treasury securities out of circulation by increasing reserve requirements (which they are also doing). Both of these in theory ought to make it easier and more attractive for banks to give out loans and people to buy stocks.
Of course this means that those who don't want the economy stimulated now hate the Fed, and are spewing all kinds of vitrol against it. It doesn't matter much if there's any truth in their complaints, because what the Fed actually does is so arcane that nobody can refute lies without making the typical American's eyes glaze over.
Anyone who thinks the fed "creates [money] out of thin air" and as a consequence is able to "raise revenue without increasing taxes or borrowing it" has undoubtedly received their economic education from a single source, namely youtube.com
Great point. Sadly, the rest devolved into another goofy anti-fed diatribe, from a different angle.
You may have noticed that inflation is actually at a historic low right now. So based on this external data, it doesn't really look like the money supply is being artificially increased right now, does it?
Well, that's because it isn't. What the Fed is doing to stimulate things right now is twofold: It is allowing banks to borrow money from it at almost no interest, and it is "buying" its own treasury securities to get them out of the market. There is no extra new cash flowing around the USA right now, and if the government wanted to do that, it would have to be the Treasury Department doing it, not the Fed.
So why the "printing money" meme? The cynic in my says its because the phrase tests well for Right-Wingers when they use it, and the truth is so complicated there's little danger of the fib going corrected.
By this logic, you could make the same claim about Microsoft, every time its OS "phones home" for some reason while running on your computer. Somehow, I don't think that will fly.
It could easily be argued that this is the normal operation of the software that you purchased as part of your hardware purchase, and if you didn't want that you were quite capable of buying somebody else's product that didn't do that. It could also easily be argued that you are a mortal human being while Ford (like Microsoft) is comparatively an immortal being with unlimited resources, and thus they are quite capable of either buying enough lawyers to beat you in court, or if their case is particularly bad, just stalling in court until you either run out of money or die of old age.
"Couldn't Google just switch to Qt, which is becoming an industry standard?" It is? I haven't seen evidence of that.
On Windows, yes it is.
My employer, traditionally a very dedicated Microsoft toolchain Windows shop, is currently transitioning to Qt for GUIs. The only option MS really supports these days is.NET based, which means a closed-source vendor is forced to buy some expensive bytecode munging utility if they don't want their code reverse-engineerable back to its sources. Its also damned inconvenient if there's some reason your application needs to be "unmanaged".
Our alternatives are to go with way obsolete MFC, or use some other third-party toolkit. Qt appears to have been judged the best available of these.
As near as I can tell, we are far from alone. This appears to be a common logic path that Windows vendors are following to Qt.
I though most of it came from snow melt on the western half of the continental divide.
Yes. And where that all that snow come from? It came from precipitation (rain/snow) from water held up in the clouds in storm systems. Where did the water in those clouds come from? It all evaporated into the sky from the water in the Pacific Ocean.
At least that's what they taught me about the water cycle back in the 70's. Do they not teach this in school anymore? Is the next argument from these geniuses that we can solve this problem by irrigating crops with Brawndo?
now exporting some 100 billion gallons of water a year
Can someone explain to me how this sentence even makes sense? It seems to imply that the sate is somehow losing water forever by shipping it abroad. But when the water is consumed, whether in China or California, it will eventually make its way back out into the Pacific Ocean, which is the ultimate source for all of California's water. So once the water is used to grow a crop, for the purpose of California's future wetness, it doesn't really matter one iota where the crop ultimately gets consumed.
An aerodynamic two-seat half-width car (passengers sitting behind each other, not next to each other), that can drive about 70km/h is enough for most needs in a city and limited over-land travel.
For us USAsians, that's a hair over 43MPH. You would never sell such a "car" in the US. City streets here often have speed limits higher than that. The only people who buy EV's with top speeds that slow are golf courses.
Its somewhat of an American thing. However, where I live (Tulsa), even 25 miles would be considered a long commute. Mine is about 10, which is on the long side around here. I think my wife had one that was 30 for a while, but now her commute is 2 miles.:-)
However, in the larger metropolitan areas, it isn't uncommon for there to be no reasonably affordable housing available unless you drive way out to the exurbs. Our last census said about 8% of workers in the US commute more than an hour each way (ick). In the Bay Area the *average* is more than 30 minutes.
Slashdot Mirror
If I were picking a codename for my next product, I'm not sure I'd pick the name of a language famous for being useless for real work without vendor extensions.
Monster Grendel's tastes are plainish. Breakfast? Just a couple Danish.
King of Danes is frantic, very. Wait! Here comes the Malmo" ferry
Bring Beowulf, his neighbor, Mighty swinger with a saber!
Hrothgar's warriors hail the Swede, Knocking back a lot of mead;
Then, when night engulfs the Hall And the Monster makes his call,
Beowulf, with body-slam Wrenches off his arm, Shazam!
Monster's mother finds him slain, Grabs and eats another Dane!
Down her lair our hero jumps, Gives old Grendel's dam her lumps.
Later on, as king of Geats He performed prodigious feats
Till he met a foe too tough (Non-Beodegradable stuff)
And that scaly-armored dragon Scooped him up and fixed his wagon.
Sorrow-stricken, half the nation Flocked to Beowulf's cremation;
Round his pyre, with drums a-muffle Did a Nordic soft-shoe shuffle.
I'm normally one to scoff at privatization of things like space exploration, but frankly finding the best ways to lower costs is precisely the kind of thing the private sector does best. Let 30 little companies work on the problem. There's plenty of a market in satellite launches to finance this. The ones with ideas that don't pan out will go belly-up, and the one or two that hit on good solutions will survive. There's no possible way a single organization (eg: NASA) can do that job properly.
NASA needs to be working on things that we just flat out don't know how to do, or it would be totally impractical for more than one group to attempt.
There's no such thing as almost having Rule of Law. If the laws don't apply to the powerful, then you don't really have laws. Constraining the powerful is what laws are for. The powerful don't need protection.
It sounds like they went through a lot of effort to make this agreement with Russia. Why on earth someone would do that, when the country doesn't operate under Rule of Law anyway? The current regime has shown time after time that it considers itself bound neither by its own laws, nor its signed treaties. When a company starts to do well, they nationalize it and throw the former owners in jail. When they want some territory, they take it.
If you agree to any of their laws or treaties, they only bind you, not them. So why bother agreeing to anything with them?
It isn't a matter of "proper funding". The current ideology is that large corporations are just plain better at everything that identically-sized groups that happen to be part of the government. Thus increasing funding to a non-military government agency for any reason is heresy.
There probably will eventually be future missions to Titan, but they will be for harvesting all that methane and natural gas so it can be hauled back to Earth and burned up in our atmosphere.
I know this is always a popular theme. Life may not be as we know it. However proper analisis makes it less likely than water based carbon life for a number of reasons.
Its popular for a reason. How do we know what exactly is required for life? Every time we've thought of a "requirement" before, we've looked somewhere on earth that doesn't meet those requirements and found life. Our knowledge of what is needed is limited, and frankly horribly blinded by our own experience. We know the mechanisms that we can see that life on earth uses, but that doesn't mean that's the only mechanism (or even the best possible mechanism). Humans can collectively be quite creative, but we are nothing compared to the universe at large.
Actually, not a horrible or unusual policy on /. , but you probably should read it before making assumptions about the contents. It keeps you from saying stupidly wrong thing like this.
He knew the game was rigged. How else could the @#$%! Seahawks win?
They had a much better defense. If you know nothing else about two teams in the superbowl, root for the one with the better defense.
In fact, Nate actually did predict this, with a 70% certainty the previous year. I guess he forgot. :-)
Yes, those MEN had the GALL to WATCH two women hula hooping. Which made her feel unsafe. In other words, she's a lunatic and you can safely ignore anything she says.
This incident was a very small aside after a long history of (unrelated except in a common culture) horrific events that happened to her. It was only brought up as the straw that broke the camel's back, not as THE reason she left. If that same series of events had happened to me, I would have left far before the hula-hooping thing happened. If it had happened to one of my daughters, I'd be lucky to not be in jail right now.
Anyone who sizes upon this as a reason to "ignore anything she says", pretty clearly came into this story looking really hard to find a reason to do just that. It says way more about you than about her.
I know Slashdot takes a lot of heat for reposting old stories, but this one is truly impressive. Its 45 years old! Most Slashdot readers weren't even born yet. The Beatles were still together. I was 2.
Its like the editors went, oh old stories huh? You think these are old stories? I'll show you old stories, mofo!
Tomorrow: Jules Verne in 1877 suggested it might be possible to bootstrap space navigation by hitching a ride on a passing comet (tagged: screwyouwhiners)
I dunno...
For one thing, a bog standard Tesla already has pretty good protection. The NTSA actually had to make up new tests to find any kind of limits to the thing. For example, when they tried doing standard crashes into poles, it kept breaking their poles. They flat out could not get the thing to roll over. You'd think with that as a standard to start from, they could achieve some pretty great things if given the extra custom design latitude and budget a POTUS limo vendor is typically given.
For another, with the extra space under a stretch limo, as the article points out they ought to be able to pack enough extra battery to make up for the extra weight.
For another, electric cars already have much more power at lower revs than gasoline cars. I'd think that would be a pretty attractive feature for people worried about someone trying to block off their vehicle in an ambush.
Back when I worked for one of the top defense contractors, they really didn't pay us very competitively. I was looking around, and encouraged a good friend of mine to do so as well. He was a really good engineer, and deserved better. Unfortunately, he told me he couldn't.
You see, a few months after hiring on right out of college, he discovered he had diabetes. Our employer's insurance continued covering him (because they had to), but if he tried to go anywhere else nothing diabetes-related would be covered, as it would be considered a "preexisting condition". He was trim, and healthy and kept good care of himself, but every 2 years or so something would go wrong and he'd end up in the hospital for a couple of weeks. Without coverage for this, he'd be a financial disaster. He was stuck working there.
This is the point where a person starts to wonder how many other folks like him were out there. How many people had developed conditions that made them essentially indentured servants? And how much had this situation screwed over the natural economy that our country should have?
I know "pre-existing condition" exceptions are outlawed now. But our current Congress tried to reinstate them more than 50 times, last session. We're just one good Republican election away from getting them back.
A very good analysis. My only complaint with it is that a lot of it is conjecture based on the theory that the money supply is currently being increased, which is not actually the case. The Fed is not printing money, and in fact is not capable of doing so. It might be a very good idea right now, for reasons you are quite eloquent about, but the agency that would have to do it would be the Treasury, not the Fed.
The basic situation is that we went through very nasty credit-induced recession. We don't know what's typical for such things really, but the last one is now called "The Great Depression", and took more than a decade (and some say a major war) to recover from. So we should be thankful things aren't far worse, but they still suck compared to a typical "recovery". There's a good chance it will recover on its own eventually, but for us humans "eventually" doesn't buy us groceries, so it would be a really good idea to do what we reasonably can to help it.
The problem there is that we are currently the proud holders of a congress that couldn't pass gas in a chili house. The political cynic in me would say that the Republican Congress doesn't want the economy to recover before the 2018 election, and is doing everything they can to stop recovery efforts. But even if you don't buy that, its undeniable that there's no way they are going to allow any further stimulus (that isn't war-related).
So this means that the Treasury department will simply not be allowed to print money to help us out of this, no matter how good of an idea it may seem. The only government agencies that are capable of acting are independent agencies, and of those the only one with a mission of looking after the economy is The Fed. They can't print money of course, but what they can do is effectively give free loans to banks (which they are doing), and take treasury securities out of circulation by increasing reserve requirements (which they are also doing). Both of these in theory ought to make it easier and more attractive for banks to give out loans and people to buy stocks.
Of course this means that those who don't want the economy stimulated now hate the Fed, and are spewing all kinds of vitrol against it. It doesn't matter much if there's any truth in their complaints, because what the Fed actually does is so arcane that nobody can refute lies without making the typical American's eyes glaze over.
Anyone who thinks the fed "creates [money] out of thin air" and as a consequence is able to "raise revenue without increasing taxes or borrowing it" has undoubtedly received their economic education from a single source, namely youtube.com
Great point. Sadly, the rest devolved into another goofy anti-fed diatribe, from a different angle.
You may have noticed that inflation is actually at a historic low right now. So based on this external data, it doesn't really look like the money supply is being artificially increased right now, does it?
Well, that's because it isn't. What the Fed is doing to stimulate things right now is twofold: It is allowing banks to borrow money from it at almost no interest, and it is "buying" its own treasury securities to get them out of the market. There is no extra new cash flowing around the USA right now, and if the government wanted to do that, it would have to be the Treasury Department doing it, not the Fed.
So why the "printing money" meme? The cynic in my says its because the phrase tests well for Right-Wingers when they use it, and the truth is so complicated there's little danger of the fib going corrected.
By this logic, you could make the same claim about Microsoft, every time its OS "phones home" for some reason while running on your computer. Somehow, I don't think that will fly.
It could easily be argued that this is the normal operation of the software that you purchased as part of your hardware purchase, and if you didn't want that you were quite capable of buying somebody else's product that didn't do that. It could also easily be argued that you are a mortal human being while Ford (like Microsoft) is comparatively an immortal being with unlimited resources, and thus they are quite capable of either buying enough lawyers to beat you in court, or if their case is particularly bad, just stalling in court until you either run out of money or die of old age.
So good luck with that. I'll be rooting for you.
"Couldn't Google just switch to Qt, which is becoming an industry standard?" It is? I haven't seen evidence of that.
On Windows, yes it is.
My employer, traditionally a very dedicated Microsoft toolchain Windows shop, is currently transitioning to Qt for GUIs. The only option MS really supports these days is .NET based, which means a closed-source vendor is forced to buy some expensive bytecode munging utility if they don't want their code reverse-engineerable back to its sources. Its also damned inconvenient if there's some reason your application needs to be "unmanaged".
Our alternatives are to go with way obsolete MFC, or use some other third-party toolkit. Qt appears to have been judged the best available of these.
As near as I can tell, we are far from alone. This appears to be a common logic path that Windows vendors are following to Qt.
Now I'm really confused. How does your exposition about energy usage have anything to do with exporting?
Remind me again, what exactly is the downside to wind? Something more than the fact that some birds have a tendency to fly into large objects, I hope.
Noise.
So roughly the same problem that wind generates around trees?
I though most of it came from snow melt on the western half of the continental divide.
Yes. And where that all that snow come from? It came from precipitation (rain/snow) from water held up in the clouds in storm systems. Where did the water in those clouds come from? It all evaporated into the sky from the water in the Pacific Ocean.
At least that's what they taught me about the water cycle back in the 70's. Do they not teach this in school anymore? Is the next argument from these geniuses that we can solve this problem by irrigating crops with Brawndo?
Remind me again, what exactly is the downside to wind? Something more than the fact that some birds have a tendency to fly into large objects, I hope.
now exporting some 100 billion gallons of water a year
Can someone explain to me how this sentence even makes sense? It seems to imply that the sate is somehow losing water forever by shipping it abroad. But when the water is consumed, whether in China or California, it will eventually make its way back out into the Pacific Ocean, which is the ultimate source for all of California's water. So once the water is used to grow a crop, for the purpose of California's future wetness, it doesn't really matter one iota where the crop ultimately gets consumed.
An aerodynamic two-seat half-width car (passengers sitting behind each other, not next to each other), that can drive about 70km/h is enough for most needs in a city and limited over-land travel.
For us USAsians, that's a hair over 43MPH. You would never sell such a "car" in the US. City streets here often have speed limits higher than that. The only people who buy EV's with top speeds that slow are golf courses.
Its somewhat of an American thing. However, where I live (Tulsa), even 25 miles would be considered a long commute. Mine is about 10, which is on the long side around here. I think my wife had one that was 30 for a while, but now her commute is 2 miles. :-)
However, in the larger metropolitan areas, it isn't uncommon for there to be no reasonably affordable housing available unless you drive way out to the exurbs. Our last census said about 8% of workers in the US commute more than an hour each way (ick). In the Bay Area the *average* is more than 30 minutes.
But for me, the thing that finally got me away from emacsfor good was refactoring support in IDEs.
Exactly what refactoring support? I'm not being confrontational; I seriously want to know. Its a large part of what I do as well.