The UK is importing nuclear power from France. I think that's a pretty clear indicator that nuclear power is currently fairly competitively priced.
You're looking at the marginal cost of a fleet of operating units. By itself, that tells you NOTHING about whether or not it makes sense for the next unit to be nuclear or not. Sure, it only costs $8/MWh for nuclear power, but you have to outlay a few BILLION dollars over a DECADE to put a plant online. Is nuclear power competitive on cost? You'd have to look at more numbers than the current market price of electricity to tell.
This scientific study has no religious or "spiritual" value whatsoever.
Humans tend to have a strong dualist mentality when it comes to concepts like "life", "consciousness", and "spiritual experience". Our intuitions strongly suggest that these things are somehow fundamentally different than ordinary matter. For whatever reason, religious tenants are often used to justify these intuitions and resist scientific change (e.g., blood transfusions, vaccines, genome-hacking, contraceptives, evolution, artificial intelligence). The benefit eventually outweighs people's resistance, with the amusing effect that they modify **their understanding of** their religion's beliefs to accommodate the intuitive violation.
A study like this helps us understand the material nature of cognition. It does not disprove any gods, but it does surprise some folks and open them to new possibilities. As a completely random example: imagine robots ordained as ministers. You'd want to know your minister was capable of religious experience, right? A study like this would be useful to sentient robots arguing for the right to be ordained.
...when you put your John Hancock under the QA document you give your word that the system's fault-free to the best of your efforts...
Not all software needs to be engineered to space shuttle reliability. Humanity has things to do and places to go, and we wouldn't have a technological revolution if was tied to some 40 lines of code per man-year. We don't have the time and talent for that. It makes sense to stratify our level of quality according to how critical the code is.
Okay. Adam, you shall be able to pee standing up. Now, what else was it I had in the bag.... oh yes. Multiple orgasms
I think about that joke whenever I find myself in a dirty public restroom. Especially when I'm able to take a leak without setting down my camera rig on a suspect surface (*shutter*).
One clock eliminates almost all calculations. It is by far the most convenient way of handling time.
Spoken like a true programmer! The "day"--the period of waking up, being active, going to sleep--is our one real biologically-rooted construct of time. You can't park midnight during the middle of lunch... the official calendar would not agree with people's conceptual calendars, and people would respond by developing new conventions that you'd then have to develop and re-gear your apps for and the calculations would be even messier and then you'd be back to square one.
Eliminating DST alltogether now--that's a good idea.
I see five factors that make the user-space side of security so hard.
6. Difficulty: Security is hard and unintuitive. How many scams--both online and offline--rely on duping people's epistimology? ("Yeah, I'm a cop. Call this number on the back of my badge to verify.") We're really quite bad at it, and even worse: computers make it especially difficult to tell where a piece of data is really coming from. Did that urgent security pop-up come from Windows, or is it just a GIF on the current website? You and I know (perhaps because we understand that multiple "people" [e.g., processes] are saying different things on our screen), but this stuff is impossible for some people (perhaps because they just see one "person"--the computer).
TPM modules aren't inherently bad. It's how they are used that makes the difference. If the owner of the computer is in charge of the module, they are a powerful tool. If someone else is, then it's a problem.
Umm... the whole point of TPM modules is to deny the owner full control. And even if that was not the case, that's the agenda and the intent behind this hardware. If you ignore such factors, then nothing--no artifact whatsoever--is inherently bad or good and your use of the distinction becomes vaccuous.
You're driving along, then mysteriously, 315 feet in front of you, something is stopped dead. What are the actual chances of this happening to any responsible, alert driver doing 70 MPH? Very small.
Be wary of applying particle physics to real-world situations. A lot of bizzare, wierd things happen on the road. I'd estimate that I face split-second encounters with hazardous debris (or stalled vehicles) on the interstate once every 5000 miles. Hazards can appear suddenly when obscured by darkness or other traffic. You can brake, dodge, or hit the hazard. Braking seems to be the last viable option on the interstate, but those 2 seconds are very handy for evaluating your options and making a judgement call.
I'm not disagreeing with your math... the 2 second rule is unfeasible in some situations, and it could be harmful to traffic health if everybody used it. Personally, though, I'm willing to pay that 2 second price as insurance against becoming a human pancake. And there are worser fates: imagine being quadraplegic, lying in a hospital bed, struggling to control your bowel functions. Imagine killing someone's child and having to face the parents in the eye, thinking that if you'd only given yourself one more car-length to work with. Sorry for the cheap emotional jabs, but driving is by far the most dangerous thing most of do, and it's easy to get complacent about safety.
So Greg.. why don't you sue them? You've made your position clear, fight them. If you havn't got the money, contact the FSF, assign your copyright to them, get them to fight. Given the choice between opening their source code or not being able to distribute their software at all, NVIDIA will choose to open their source code.
We should look at the PR aspect of this: wouldn't suing Nvidia make other hardware manufactures more reluctant to support Linux? And what about the strategic aspect? Isn't 3D critical to winning the desktop (not to mention niche fields like scientific visualization)? Given that NVidia is the primary option for 3D acceleration on Linux, wouldn't it be a little short-sited to spend a few years in court getting the source code to today's graphics cards when it'll mean that we can't use tommorrow's hardware?
Re:I call this the LineOfView (as in PoV) Problem
on
Tim Bray Says RELAX
·
· Score: 1
I don't think that changing the Schema standard (or worse: introducing additional standards) will actually attack this hard problem.
A schema language is suppose to give the developer a tool for validating instance documents. Relax NG approaches this from the same Line of View (to use your terminology) that's being taught in thousands of compiler/information theory courses and that's been deeply baked into existing programming platforms (in the form of regular expressions, context-free grammars, etc.).
XML Schema, on the other hand, takes a schizophrenic's Line of View on the issue. All that extra verbage/abstraction/indirection is a castle in the cloud which obscures (instead of facilitating) meaning; it makes XSD a write-only language.
Nuclear power splits the atom. The judicial system determines the fate of men. Medicine tries to repair (and even restore) life to the patient. Farmers have hacked the geneome for millenia and geneticist have started making it serious. Engineers dam rivers and even make them flow backwards. All-seeing satellites monitor the globe. The Internet itself has become a sort of gigantic tower of Babel, pooling together the knowledge of humankind and making it instantly available to the masses.
Accusing someone of "playing god" is just a euphanism for saying that you're frightened or threatened by whatever new thing someone else is undertaking. Now fear is good--all of my examples above have had their catastrophic failures--but wrapping it up in a theological prohibition won't actually stop people from attempting it. When you're tempted to use the "playing god" argument, consider instead using your voice to encourage caution and research into the possible dangers.
Change is always happening; therefore change is normal, not bad.
Teenage pregnancy is always happening; therefore teenage pregancy is normal, not bad. Ditto for "genocide", "extinction", and "chronic disease".
We can't control the weather; what makes us think we can control the climate?
I have no control over how flames dance around in a fire, but I can dowse the fire. If we influenced the climate negatively, then we might be able to influence it positively.
Productive people (measured by income, capital gains, value added, sales, etc) are tired of being taxed to subsidize said protection.
The cost of protection grows with the amount of time you have to protect something. An annual tax fits the expenditure model much better than a flat tax. Duh. Gotta pay the police and firefighters somehow.
While we're at it, your measures for "productivity" soak up a lot of people who are good at cheating and ignores a lot of people who increase net happiness without making a lot of money.
I believe the opposite. I think people are an infinite well of potential, their decisions shape their potential.
That's a great attitude. True or not, I think studies have found that people who view intelligence this way (as something that can be grown and extended rather than innate) tend to act in ways that ends up making them smarter.
Why not just do your job and fix their computer like they asked you to. Would you like your waiter to try and convince you to change your order because they don't think it's right to eat lamb?
Damn... succinctly said. I'd be annoyed if somebody who was suppose to facilitate my intentions instead try to argue me into their agenda. Especially right before I eat!:O
When it comes to exposing users to open source, success is defined by the quality of the experience... not by it's depth, completeness, or intensity. If you love something, don't force it on others; prepare instead a first-rate experience-in-miniature. If they dig it, they'll do the rest of the work of getting fully engaged.
I sure hope somebody stops this so I can leverage my *valuable* intellectual property. I'd be making oodles of cash with my awesome ENG1001 essay Wrinkly Swellings: The Postmodern Feminist Virtues of Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun, but this evil website has me living hand-to-mouth so they can make money doing nothing more than increasing the value of my degree. How dare they!!!
Seriously... why waste your political wad on intellectual property concerns when you could bring focus to more important questions? For instance, will reusing one's own material (in a class where that's okay) result in false accusations? What about short essay/math/programming assignments that have a high chance of being identical over thousands of instance documents? And imagine the additional judicial/privacy concerns if one student is accused of cheating off another student at a different university.
turnitin.com seems like a good tool. Students might be better off making sure that tool is used correctly and justly then trying to argue it shouldn't be used at all.
Somebody has decided when you turn 70 you lose a lot of your mind. I find this is ridiculous.
Companies make dumb blanket rules all the time. It's wasteful, slow, bureaucratic, and the tragedy far exceeds the bit of ageism shown here. It is interesting to think about how this decision got made: did some mid-level manager discover that senior citizens cost the company more than they brought in? Did the legal staff see liability issues stemming from unchecked admission ("my client was visibly senile and you should have known they would be an easy target for internet fraud")? Was the policy put in place with the thought that it would be sparingly used to cull clients on a case-by-case method? Did somebody not consult <<department that would have shot it down>>?
Decisions have to be made all the time, and good decisions are hard to find. Most people look to blanket restrictions based on dumb criteria because it's quick, cheap, and (often enough) pretty effective. Did you notice all the comments (plus the special interest group mentioned in the article) responded by calling for new laws? So both the company and protestors are using similar decision-making strategies.
Am I defending the company? Not really: bureaucracies and corporations are engines of inhumanity. While we humans waste a lot of time getting frustrated, making accusations, and demanding a perfect world, I suspect that it would more effective to focus on understanding how bad things happen and striving to find careful solutions for them.
Ultimately, it comes down to who has control of the data.
If the data exists, your insurance contract will stipulate that it be provided to satisfy a claim. Duh. And no, the market won't solve the problem. Oh, and swapping out chips or fritizing them might constitute fraud. On the bright side, you'll get 5 years in a state facility during which to study the OBD-IV spec....
I think there's more driving the elevation of a prestige dialect than some commentators on faux news. Cultures tend to exert a comprehensive set of expectations upon their members, and that includes expectations about how to talk and speak. We can argue the morality of society versus the individual, but it seems to me that there's a huge advantage to helping speakers converge on (admittedly arbitrary) prestige dialect. It helps the language stay more homogeneous over both time and space, thereby letting a larger group of people communicate with each other.
I'm not disagreeing with anything you say, per se... just pointing out that the prescriptivist approach--though maybe snobbish--isn't necessarily a bad thing.
You can't pick which rules to follow and which ones not to.
You can, and do. In your hypothetical example (violent assault of a public official), you made the wrong choice because you hurt another person and cheated the democratic process, not because you violated any law. (The law, in this case, exists so that we have a fair process for figuring out how to convict, jail, and execute you.)
Rules serve to protect the more intangible exchanges of human nature. To make things fairer. To gain efficencies by solving common problems. Etc. Yes, we should have a certain amount of respect for the rules, "just because they're the rules", but this is by no means absolute. This distinction is especially important for the citizens of failing empire-states to understand, that they might adapt more seasoned, rational rules instead of subcumbing to imaginary and overblown fears.:D
Just because a security policy is retarded is no reason to justify ignoring it.
That sounds like a good reason to me! You should follow rules that serve practical and ethical purposes, but you are morally obligated to circumvent the useless cock snot coughed out by some process consultants.
What's the deal with non-profits not providing receipts? Wikimedia didn't receipt me. Neither did Software in the Public Interest, despite including a SASE per their website.:( It's a small thing, but this has soured my plan to give heavily to open source this year, and for $100 donations it doesn't seem unreasonable. At least Red Cross sent me an email... and keeps sending me emails to my chagrin:(
Of course, I'm sure that running a charity is complex and there may be good reasons for this trend.
Who cares if someone breaks in and steals access to my science homework? In the worst case scenario, a cheater breaks in and uses my data for his grade.
And then you both get expelled for academic dishonesty. This scenario could cost you a career before you even get to start it. Granted, not everything needs military grade security, but there's a healthy secure-by-default attitude that many slashdotters feel uncomfortable without, especially when it comes to recommending the technology to others where you may not understand the extend of their data-securtity needs.
this is Slashdot and the term "think" does not apply
Mods: this type of humor used to be a little bit funny, but it's gone stale. Let's make slashdot a better place by steering mod points away from formulaic humor and towards posts that are unique or informative.
Slashdot Mirror
A study like this helps us understand the material nature of cognition. It does not disprove any gods, but it does surprise some folks and open them to new possibilities. As a completely random example: imagine robots ordained as ministers. You'd want to know your minister was capable of religious experience, right? A study like this would be useful to sentient robots arguing for the right to be ordained.
I think about that joke whenever I find myself in a dirty public restroom. Especially when I'm able to take a leak without setting down my camera rig on a suspect surface (*shutter*).
Good call, Adam.
Eliminating DST alltogether now--that's a good idea.
6. Difficulty: Security is hard and unintuitive. How many scams--both online and offline--rely on duping people's epistimology? ("Yeah, I'm a cop. Call this number on the back of my badge to verify.") We're really quite bad at it, and even worse: computers make it especially difficult to tell where a piece of data is really coming from. Did that urgent security pop-up come from Windows, or is it just a GIF on the current website? You and I know (perhaps because we understand that multiple "people" [e.g., processes] are saying different things on our screen), but this stuff is impossible for some people (perhaps because they just see one "person"--the computer).
Umm... the whole point of TPM modules is to deny the owner full control. And even if that was not the case, that's the agenda and the intent behind this hardware. If you ignore such factors, then nothing--no artifact whatsoever--is inherently bad or good and your use of the distinction becomes vaccuous.
Be wary of applying particle physics to real-world situations. A lot of bizzare, wierd things happen on the road. I'd estimate that I face split-second encounters with hazardous debris (or stalled vehicles) on the interstate once every 5000 miles. Hazards can appear suddenly when obscured by darkness or other traffic. You can brake, dodge, or hit the hazard. Braking seems to be the last viable option on the interstate, but those 2 seconds are very handy for evaluating your options and making a judgement call.
I'm not disagreeing with your math... the 2 second rule is unfeasible in some situations, and it could be harmful to traffic health if everybody used it. Personally, though, I'm willing to pay that 2 second price as insurance against becoming a human pancake. And there are worser fates: imagine being quadraplegic, lying in a hospital bed, struggling to control your bowel functions. Imagine killing someone's child and having to face the parents in the eye, thinking that if you'd only given yourself one more car-length to work with. Sorry for the cheap emotional jabs, but driving is by far the most dangerous thing most of do, and it's easy to get complacent about safety.
We should look at the PR aspect of this: wouldn't suing Nvidia make other hardware manufactures more reluctant to support Linux? And what about the strategic aspect? Isn't 3D critical to winning the desktop (not to mention niche fields like scientific visualization)? Given that NVidia is the primary option for 3D acceleration on Linux, wouldn't it be a little short-sited to spend a few years in court getting the source code to today's graphics cards when it'll mean that we can't use tommorrow's hardware?
A schema language is suppose to give the developer a tool for validating instance documents. Relax NG approaches this from the same Line of View (to use your terminology) that's being taught in thousands of compiler/information theory courses and that's been deeply baked into existing programming platforms (in the form of regular expressions, context-free grammars, etc.).
XML Schema, on the other hand, takes a schizophrenic's Line of View on the issue. All that extra verbage/abstraction/indirection is a castle in the cloud which obscures (instead of facilitating) meaning; it makes XSD a write-only language.
Nuclear power splits the atom. The judicial system determines the fate of men. Medicine tries to repair (and even restore) life to the patient. Farmers have hacked the geneome for millenia and geneticist have started making it serious. Engineers dam rivers and even make them flow backwards. All-seeing satellites monitor the globe. The Internet itself has become a sort of gigantic tower of Babel, pooling together the knowledge of humankind and making it instantly available to the masses.
Accusing someone of "playing god" is just a euphanism for saying that you're frightened or threatened by whatever new thing someone else is undertaking. Now fear is good--all of my examples above have had their catastrophic failures--but wrapping it up in a theological prohibition won't actually stop people from attempting it. When you're tempted to use the "playing god" argument, consider instead using your voice to encourage caution and research into the possible dangers.
Teenage pregnancy is always happening; therefore teenage pregancy is normal, not bad. Ditto for "genocide", "extinction", and "chronic disease".
I have no control over how flames dance around in a fire, but I can dowse the fire. If we influenced the climate negatively, then we might be able to influence it positively.
The cost of protection grows with the amount of time you have to protect something. An annual tax fits the expenditure model much better than a flat tax. Duh. Gotta pay the police and firefighters somehow.
While we're at it, your measures for "productivity" soak up a lot of people who are good at cheating and ignores a lot of people who increase net happiness without making a lot of money.
That's a great attitude. True or not, I think studies have found that people who view intelligence this way (as something that can be grown and extended rather than innate) tend to act in ways that ends up making them smarter.
Damn... succinctly said. I'd be annoyed if somebody who was suppose to facilitate my intentions instead try to argue me into their agenda. Especially right before I eat! :O
When it comes to exposing users to open source, success is defined by the quality of the experience... not by it's depth, completeness, or intensity. If you love something, don't force it on others; prepare instead a first-rate experience-in-miniature. If they dig it, they'll do the rest of the work of getting fully engaged.
Seriously... why waste your political wad on intellectual property concerns when you could bring focus to more important questions? For instance, will reusing one's own material (in a class where that's okay) result in false accusations? What about short essay/math/programming assignments that have a high chance of being identical over thousands of instance documents? And imagine the additional judicial/privacy concerns if one student is accused of cheating off another student at a different university.
turnitin.com seems like a good tool. Students might be better off making sure that tool is used correctly and justly then trying to argue it shouldn't be used at all.
Companies make dumb blanket rules all the time. It's wasteful, slow, bureaucratic, and the tragedy far exceeds the bit of ageism shown here. It is interesting to think about how this decision got made: did some mid-level manager discover that senior citizens cost the company more than they brought in? Did the legal staff see liability issues stemming from unchecked admission ("my client was visibly senile and you should have known they would be an easy target for internet fraud")? Was the policy put in place with the thought that it would be sparingly used to cull clients on a case-by-case method? Did somebody not consult <<department that would have shot it down>>?
Decisions have to be made all the time, and good decisions are hard to find. Most people look to blanket restrictions based on dumb criteria because it's quick, cheap, and (often enough) pretty effective. Did you notice all the comments (plus the special interest group mentioned in the article) responded by calling for new laws? So both the company and protestors are using similar decision-making strategies.
Am I defending the company? Not really: bureaucracies and corporations are engines of inhumanity. While we humans waste a lot of time getting frustrated, making accusations, and demanding a perfect world, I suspect that it would more effective to focus on understanding how bad things happen and striving to find careful solutions for them.
If the data exists, your insurance contract will stipulate that it be provided to satisfy a claim. Duh. And no, the market won't solve the problem. Oh, and swapping out chips or fritizing them might constitute fraud. On the bright side, you'll get 5 years in a state facility during which to study the OBD-IV spec....
I think there's more driving the elevation of a prestige dialect than some commentators on faux news. Cultures tend to exert a comprehensive set of expectations upon their members, and that includes expectations about how to talk and speak. We can argue the morality of society versus the individual, but it seems to me that there's a huge advantage to helping speakers converge on (admittedly arbitrary) prestige dialect. It helps the language stay more homogeneous over both time and space, thereby letting a larger group of people communicate with each other.
I'm not disagreeing with anything you say, per se... just pointing out that the prescriptivist approach--though maybe snobbish--isn't necessarily a bad thing.
You can, and do. In your hypothetical example (violent assault of a public official), you made the wrong choice because you hurt another person and cheated the democratic process, not because you violated any law. (The law, in this case, exists so that we have a fair process for figuring out how to convict, jail, and execute you.)
Rules serve to protect the more intangible exchanges of human nature. To make things fairer. To gain efficencies by solving common problems. Etc. Yes, we should have a certain amount of respect for the rules, "just because they're the rules", but this is by no means absolute. This distinction is especially important for the citizens of failing empire-states to understand, that they might adapt more seasoned, rational rules instead of subcumbing to imaginary and overblown fears. :D
Just because a security policy is retarded is no reason to justify ignoring it.
That sounds like a good reason to me! You should follow rules that serve practical and ethical purposes, but you are morally obligated to circumvent the useless cock snot coughed out by some process consultants.
Of course, I'm sure that running a charity is complex and there may be good reasons for this trend.
And then you both get expelled for academic dishonesty. This scenario could cost you a career before you even get to start it. Granted, not everything needs military grade security, but there's a healthy secure-by-default attitude that many slashdotters feel uncomfortable without, especially when it comes to recommending the technology to others where you may not understand the extend of their data-securtity needs.
Mods: this type of humor used to be a little bit funny, but it's gone stale. Let's make slashdot a better place by steering mod points away from formulaic humor and towards posts that are unique or informative.