Either you missed or ignored the sarcasm in this statement.
Neither. I agree with you. I am well aware of the issues involved with getting people to take mass transit -- especially in areas were cars have become sacrosanct.
I don't pretend to know all of the answers. What I do know is that commuter cities cannot grow unchecked without suffocating themselves on the car exhaust. There are too many cars, and eight-lane highways are only a poor stopgap measure.
I'm not saying that public transit is up to snuff. What I'm saying is that we are trying to find all sorts of new ways to make cars safer, more comfortable, and more idiot proof and leaving public transit in its current sad state.
The issue for me isn't that public transit sucks. My issue is that it continues to suck while we drop tons of money on making stupid drivers suck less behind the wheel.
Know how to really stop stupid drivers from hurting themselves and others behind the wheel? Here's a hint: There's no steering wheel at the back of a bus.
Perfect for the majority of people who live in the suburbs and have to commute 20-30 miles into the city for work!
Actually, it is. Suburbs, locations with high densities of residential, are a perfect spot for train hubs and bus stops with routes going to industrial/commercial centers.
It's a well-known fact that *every* city in the country has a subway system!
No, they don't. That's a problem. But then we don't have smart cars for dumb people either. My point was that we should be working for long-term solutions that also cover traffic congestion (which the smart car doesn't address).
Just bike or walk the 30 miles in the 15-degree weather, with sleet/rain.
1) Different strokes for different folks. I'm not saying that everyone should send their cars to the scrapyard tomorrow. Different locales will have different requirements.
2) It doesn't rain/sleet everyday nor is it always 15-degree weather. If people always drove their cars in the winter time and rode public transit for the rest of the year, it would still be a win in my book.
I am not unsympathetic to your point. I'm not trying to institute a public transit gestapo and force you to bus. What I'm saying is that one person/one car doesn't work in the long run. New York City is the largest in the U.S. and yet there are people there that have never owned a car in their lives because of the public transit system there (and cabs). Los Angeles has a crap public transit system, everyone has a car, it takes forever to get anywhere with all of the traffic, once you're at your destination, there's nowhere to park, and it's getting worse every year.
Even if you absolutely love your car, if your area has major traffic congestion problems, it makes sense to promote public transit for no other reason than to get the other people off the road so your own commute is shorter.
But with a stupid cyclist, the worst that you get when they run into you is a bump or maybe a broken bone. When a stupid driver hits you, you can die -- especially if you aren't also in a car.
The article was about research into new methods that would require new outlays of cash to come into effect.
This is instead of spending money and research into better/cheaper/more convenient public transit systems. If you live in a predominantly residential area and your work is in a predominantly industrial/commercial area, there is no excuse for public transprotation to drop the ball there. This is not your fault. This is a public policy and city/county planning fubar.
I'm not saying it's a viable option for everyone today. I'm saying that we should be putting more time and effort into it for the future.
And of course in the case that you are definitely not a target for public transit, if you can get others who would find public transit more convenient to use, there would be fewer people on the roads competing with you; Your commute times would reduce/be more pleasant.
While all of the CSS stylesheets are downloaded, Firefox doesn't necessarily download all of the referenced images at the same time. Firefox must load all of the stylesheets so that when you switch the stylesheets, you are actually switching to something. If a particular CSS request returns a "404: Not found", that stylesheet is removed from your list of available styles.
As an exercise, go to CSS Zen Garden, and flip through the skins. After a new page has fully loaded (no more throbber activity), scroll down quickly to the bottom. You'll notice that some images fill in after you scroll to them. It's called lazy loading. It's just for people like you.
As for "massive bandwidth", I think you overstate the issue. A massive CSS document is 30KB. Mine are usually 10KB or less. Most images in the HTML are bigger than this. Remember that CSS is probably being served directly from the filesystem and therefore the server gives a Last-Modified header. If the CSS on the server isn't newer than the cached copy, the browser doesn't download it again -- just like any other static files. (Google for the HTTP header "If-Modified-Since") Also, if the server sets an Expires header, the browser won't even try the request until the expiry timestamp is passed by.
With HTTP 1.1 persistent connections (used by default by all of the major browsers and servers), and there's only ever one connection with multiple GETs. Coupled with mod_gzip or mod_deflate (or equivalent) on your server, you get very small items going over the wire. My 7,281 byte base CSS file compresses down to 1,779 bytes with standard gzip compression.
And finally note that without CSS, your HTML is full of tables, font tags, bold tags, italic tags, center tags, bgcolor attributes, spacer GIFs, etc. That's where massive bandwidth usage comes from. At least the CSS stylesheet can be reused. <b> tags only replicate.
It's called HTTP 1.1 and persistent connections. Every popular browser supports it.
A new connection isn't made, it simply executes a new GET request in the already opened socket. In addition, most browsers support gzip compression of content. CSS compresses very well -- a whole lot of repetitive info. Any popular web server released in the last five years will do the former. Enabling mod_gzip or mod_deflate will do the latter.
Persistent connection + gzip compression = all referenced stylesheets downloaded at once very efficiently.
And of course since CSS doesn't change all that often, the last modified header will keep the browser from downloading it over and over. In addition, a site maintainer could set the Expires header for all CSS. Then your CSS is only grabed once and the browser never even bothers to ask again for a refresh until the expiry elapses.
Ain't technology wonderful?
Re:Done right, CSS can help multi-platform use.
on
CSS for the LDP?
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Here's something that could work for you perhaps. It watches which stylesheet is active and uses it on subsequent pages.
It presupposes that you have consistent styling/naming on all of your pages though.
It is unfortunately necessary sometimes. If you use certain CSS directives, NS4 will crash. To avoid this, it is common to use @import because NS4 doesn't understand it. Case in point:
NS4 only understands media="screen" and therefore ignores this tag/style. But anyway, addition a "title" attribute to the link/style tag will allow easy stylesheet overrides like you were looking for. Of course, I advocate using parts of CSS2 since >90% of the browsers out there support at least rudimentary positioning like floats and absolutes. Support (or lack of support) for CSS2 selectors can be adequately used to distinguish which browser styles to use.
That said, it's better to simply make your stylesheets so that people can use the browser facilities to change font sizes instead of hard-coding the font sizes in the stylesheet. All popular browsers support font size alteration and this support is not page-specific. It's simply up to CSS authors to avoid disabling this functionality. Hint: don't use pixel values for font size.
On the other hand, if you were the only person working on it I would skip the CSS and put in some friggin content!
Ummm... you're missing the point. With a common CSS stylesheet, the content author never touches CSS. Let me repeat: the content author never touches CSS. If every author wrote CSS, TLDP would be no better off than with people writing font tags and using tables for layout. That is not what is being proposed.
We're talking about the programmatic addition of <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="common.css"/> so that all pages share the same look and feel. In addition, by changing "common.css" (or whatever it is named), all pages get the facelift without having to regenerate all of the HTML from content source.
Another issue at hand is division of labor. Those who would actually be good at page layout are almost never the same people that you want to update the XFree86 and ALSA HOWTOs. People who can hack code are not often as adept at making web pages attractive and appealing and vice versa. Work on the one does not necessarily mean less work on the other. There are two distict groups of people at work here who have a limited capacity for helping each other.
p.s. Don't go too wild on the CSS. Make it use the standard DocBook-XSL produced HTML.
Ahhh... I see now. You have no idea what you are talking about. Now now. Before you get all indignant about me calling you ignorant Mr. Grand Almighty FreeBSD User, let me reiterate something for everyone to hear.
Listen closely as this is important: CSS != XSLT. The HTML transformation method doesn't matter at all. Not one bit. Of course the output HTML should be semantically rich, but the CSS is applied on top of this. The HTML layer should have absolutely no knowledge of the CSS except for the extra link tag.
It is just a browser rendering issue, not a content generation issue.
Case in point, print stylesheets would be a great boon as the printed stock has different needs/constraints from the display version. If you were to do this directly with DocBook-XSL, you would ultimately end up having to make special "print" versions of the stylesheets. I'm not talking about PDF generation however useful that may be. I'm saying that when you hit print in the browser, all of the links display the URL next to it, the navigation bar links are removed, etc. In other words, nice print stock from HTML.
And all by just changing a CSS file or two. All of this without touching or regenerating the content.
But I don't know of any sizeable amount of birds killed by nuclear.
Heh heh. Just kidding. My bird quote was mostly to get the "What about the animals?" knee-jerkers to stop and think a moment.
My main issue with wind power is the power output. Assuming you live in an area with copious amounts of wind, that wind velocity remains above a certain level almost all of the time, and the land isn't being used for anything else, wind power generation is great!
For the rest of us (>90%?), wind ain't gonna help a bit with our overall energy demands. If the wind ain't blowin', the power ain't flowin'. As long as the uranium gets shipped at least every few years, nuclear keeps the lights stay on (with output in the orders of magnitude over wind).
If the number of deaths due to radiation caused cancer were, say, 100, it would be buried under random noise. But they'd still be deaths.
Indeed. But if the death rate is not statistically higher than those not exposed, the deaths specifically due to nuclear plant radiation is noise. However, if the death rate after 3-Mile Island went up past standard deviation, then it would be useful.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. The only question is if the timeline is ever considered too short.
Strictly speaking, I would expect someone who exercises regularly and was jogging within sight of 3-Mile Island to live longer than someone without a nuclear reactor nearby who sits on their fat ass all day. The same for smokers and for people who eat large amounts of red meat.
If flipping a compile switch could increase speeds in my applications by 10%, you'd better believe that I'd do it. That's what I'd call "low hanging fruit."
Apache 2.0 has a worker module that uses both threads and processes on Linux. 1.3 just preforks. Since one of the big improvements in 2.6 was threading support and since Apache 2.0 can run in either mode anyway, why test 1.3?
If you want to test something more "stable," why bother testing the 2.6 kernel? After all, the 2.6 kernel is newer than Apache 2.0.
It's not like it's cleaner than coal in collection, energy production, or cleanup.
Take a Geiger Counter outside of a nuclear plant. Now take one outside of a coal plant. Hmmm... Much higher readings outside of the coal plant. What? Coal ore contains radioactive isotopes? Those isotopes don't burn up like the coal around them? Coal ash has concentrated radioactive material? The coal industry isn't as highly regulated as the nuclear industry?
Health problems? Do a google search for black lung disease. Hell, do some research on the total number of deaths from nuclear power generation and coal/natural gas since nuclear power was introduced. Nuclear engineers will normally receive more radiation from a single round of CAT scans than from their entire career at the nuclear plant.
Chernobyl? You mean the substandard plant where operators intentionally ignored warnings and pushed the envelope of safety much too far? The final death count was less than four hundred. Yes, the town of 75,000 had to be abandoned. This is an argument for not intentionally doing stupid things with your power plant.
The worst U.S. nuclear disaster? 3-Mile Island? Go back and check your history books. Look up the number of deaths. Zero. Look up the number of injured. None.
As it stands, U.S. nuclear power technology has fallen behind. Take a look at some of the French or, even better, German designs. I find it hard to believe that anything even approaches their level of safety or efficiency.
Terrorist attacks? Personally I'd be more worried about an exposed warehouse of natural gas where someone dropped a match. How about an oil refinery? Yeah, that'll be easy to clean up...
Nuclear waste? How about the euphemism (according to rabid environmental groups) "spent fuel"? Know why they call it a euphemism? Because all spent fuel in the U.S. is waste. Know why? Because in a bid to stop nuclear proliferation in the seventies, Jimmy Carter banned nuclear enrichment in power generation. No breeders for the U.S. Unfortunately for Carter, Europe gave him the finger and continued using nuclear -- including breeded reactors. Who listened? Japan. However Japan just sends its spent fuel to Europe for re-enrichment and buys it back for further processing.
What's the big deal. Let's take Diablo Canyon on the California coast. Only two turbines. 1/5 of the power production in the region. 20%!!! If anyone is curious, take a look at the number of >0.1MW powerplants in California. Diablo Canyon is on the coast about 2/3 of the way down from the top of the state. Look at all of those dams. Imagine all of the trucks, materials, and associated air/water pollution necessary for bringing the fuel to the plant.
Folks in California wouldn't even sell Diablo Canyon the water they needed even though the water/steam used to turn the turbines doesn't ever come into contact with the reactor; It isn't radioactive. So in addition to providing power, they had to set up a reverse osmosis water desalinization plant to get the water from the ocean. And it still gives 20% of the power for the region.
Solar? Anyone want to do the math on the number of panels necessary for even half of the national electricity usage? What about the power and materials required for their inital production?
Tidal? Will someone explain to me how land-locked regions would be able to take advantage of tidal power?
Fuel from soybeans? That would be a nice supplementary energy source. However, let's stop making food. Let's dedicate the nation's farmland to soybeans or other similar fuel generation crops. Reduce that number by the fuel necessary to s
1. Translation: I don't know how the universe could work on its own. I believe in God. God must have made the universe.
Aside from begging the question, this is the Ghost in the machine problem. Because there is a lack of knowledge about the machine, we assume that a secondary force acts upon it -- the ghost. The more we understand the workings of the machine, the less the ghost must do; the necessity of the "ghost" is reduced in the argument. You are preaching the God of the Gaps.
2. This has a two-part answer. The first part is that I believe that we are indeed deterministic. However, the number of variables and the number of interactions are so immense that to us this determinism is effectively indistinguishable from randomness.
The second part is the concept of God actually removes free will contrary to popular belief.
God created everything
God set everything into motion
God knows about everything
God knows the future
This equals "no free will." How so? If God knows how things will turn out and He created you, you have no choice in the matter. He created me to be a non-believer who would burn in the eternal fires of hell. He knew that I would take this choice even before I was born. He knew I would do this even before Adam and Eve. If He didn't, God becomes finite. God cannot have His knowledge limited, even by Himself. To do so would limit God: an entity which is by Judeo-Christian definition infinite.
You are probably either going to say, "No it doesn't for God can put things into motion and watch them unfold from our free will," or "God knows how we are going to choose but is still giving us the opportunity to choose without interference," or possibly "God can choose to ignore the events until they transpire."
No dice. If God can put things into motion without knowing how it turns out, the entity is no longer omniscient and thus, no longer the God everyone loves talking about. If God must limit His knowledge -- for whatever reason, it doesn't matter -- then God has limits. If God has limits -- a notion contrary to the Bible -- then how can we be sure that God is not limited in other ways as well? After all, if God can't do that, how do you know God can read your thoughts, hear your prayers, or see you in your bedroom at night? And if God has some sort of limitation, why must God be responsible for the creation of the universe? In for a penny, in for a pound. If God knows how we'll each turn out, it stands to reason that God knew before He created us. If He knew before He created us, then He created me for the expressed purpose of making me suffer eternally in Hell. I have no choice. He made me this way. He could've made me another way, but He chose not to. Gee. Thanks God. You're a swell guy.
Or perhaps you were going to go into the fact that something or someone had to create the universe. Who created God? No one? God just is? Then why can't the universe just be? Why can't the universe have winked itself into existence? If metaphysics is to be a player, a intelligent all-powerful Oz... err... God has no standing over the self-actuated universe. Correction: we can see and interact with the universe. We know the universe exists. God needs more support.
Let's assume we're ghosts: That begs the question of origin. Where did all these ghosts come from?
First of all, it doesn't beg the question; It raises the question. I know you may have heard friends, family, or television personalities use the term "beg the question" this way. It is wrong when they use it too.
But I digress. We are not robots. Robots are assumed to be metallic objects made by humanity. We are however machines. Biomechanical machines, but machines nonetheless. Machines that are discussing
First, the blind in this instance have no prior experience with sight. Even if everything about seeing were to be described to them in great detail, it would be so far beyond their experience as to be incomprehensible. Those who witnessed this act would construe it as supernatural, literally meaning above or more than what is natural, because for them blindness is natural.
Yes, the blind would have no personal experience with it. However I have not met any blind people in the world today who consider sight to be supernatural. Lance Armstrong rides a bicycle on a 30 degree upward slope faster than I can ride on flat ground. It is outside of my personal experience to be able to do what he does let alone for a long as he is able to do it. I do not, however, consider it supernatural.
An attribution of something above and beyond reality requires not only lack of experience with the subject at hand, but a dogmatic belief that the subject is intrinsically unknowable. (Not as unknown to me personally, but rather unknown to anyone.) This is the God of the Gaps that I cannot accept.
You may argue that the experiment was performed by a reputable institution, but I would argue that a reputable institution wouldn't even dream of allowing such an insane person through their doors, much less let him do his little tricks.
Here is where we diverge greatly. I do not consider an institution to be reputable if it ignores information that is inconvenient. This is of course not the same as watching someone's "little tricks" and noting the use of smoke and mirrors.
In summary, fine-tuning theory states that the basic parameters of physics must be set to such specific values that it can only be accounted for by intelligent design. This is, in essence, the results of the seeing person's experiment - the probability that we (life) would be capable of existing at all (not to mention human consciousness) is so small as to be impossible - a much more distant prospect than the 1/24 chance that the colored objects are named correctly.
The chances of me winning a six-number lottery jackpot -- assuming I buy one ticket -- are 1 in 13,983,816. Everyone else has the same chance (assuming there is no cheating of course). From a realistic point of view, no one would never win the lottery. However, people do indeed win the lottery. Christians, jews, muslims, buddhists, and even atheists have all won the lottery at one time or another. Does this mean that at a given time, Jesus plucked those balls down just for you? Are you truly that arrogant? Or rather is it random chance that you won?
I am extremely lucky. I was born into a universe that was physically acceptable for formation, born on a planet upon which organic compounds are plentiful, have been birthed from a species of supreme bad-asses (to borrow a phrase from Cryptonomicon), and live in the wealthiest country on the planet. Woohoo! I won the lottery! And had I lost, we would not be having this discussion. A great improbability is not the same as an impossibility.
Now then, with regard to the Fine-Tuning Design Argument, I and others have a few issues. First and foremost is the notion that everything just seems to fit too perfectly. I take it that you don't know too many physicists or engineers do you? The general response I get from those communities is that it's a wonder that this chaotic and unordered world functions as well as it does. For further discussion and other important points, I'll have to simply say "look
Sighted person: Okay, stand right where you are.
Blind skeptic: Why?
SP: I'm going to take ten paces away from you.
BS: Okay.
SP: Now hold up one of your hands. Aha! You just raised your left hand.
BS: What about now?
SP: It's still your left hand.
BS: How did you know that?
SP: I can see.
Now have the sighted person get four items, each a different color, and hand them out. The items should have the same size, shape and texture. Have the sighted person identify each item to the person holding it. Have the sighted person occupied by a fifth volunteer so that the activites of the first four are hidden from sight. The first four will now trade with each other, whispering the color the sighted person attributed to the item he/she held. The sighted person is brought back into view and questioned about the items again. Repeat with a new group of blind volunteers. Assuming the blind are honest, this would provide proof. It's called "The Scientific Method."
On the other hand, the proofs I hear from theists include
I know God exists because I can feel his presence
Something amazingly good happened to me when it should have been bad
If God doesn't exist, how do you explain this world we live in?
95% of the people in the world believe in a supreme being. What makes you right and everyone else wrong?
I see God's work everywhere
The Bible/Koran/Torah
Responses:
Ever been camping and notice some insect or spider crawling on your leg? Or rather, you thought there was something crawling on your leg but when you looked and swatted, nothing was there. Our senses are fallible. The only way to know for sure would be to see the bug -- something observable that others can observe as well.
Yes, the NFL wide receiver argument. "I want to thank God for giving me the ability to make that touchdown..." Yet we never hear, "We were kicking the other team's ass when Jesus suddenly decided to make me fumble three times." Good people win the lottery. Bad people win the lottery. Good people survive car accidents. Bad people survive car accidents. What makes you, the God-fearing Christian, more special than the other God-fearing Christian who is now hamburger in their smashed up Toyota Celica?
If the Giant Burnt Umber Crayon didn't throw a rave one hundred years ago in Grand Central Station, how do you explain the world? Same argument, different subject. It begs the question. Your conclusion is the same as one of your premises.
Fallacy of argumentum ad populum. "Nature abhors a vacuum." At one time, it was accepted by most. Popular agreement is not the same as proof. All things considered, it was a good theory at the time. It is still wrong.
I see the same world as you, but with no god in it. Once again, begging the question. God exists. The world is a product of God. The world exists. Therefore God exists. Take away the first premise and the argument falls apart.
Giant Burnt Umber Crayon
I know that I will hear noise about "strawman." Fair enough. Provide proof and we'll be done with it. If you can't provide proof, God is as likely to exist as the Giant Burnt Umber Crayon.
You are free to believe what you will. But unless you can demonstrate it to others, don't be indignant when others point and laugh at you when you proclaim it as truth. Don't want pointing and laughter, keep it to yourself or prove it.
Taken with a grain of salt of course, but I heard that the issue was about 2.0's use of threading whereas 1.3 was always a prefork model. mod_php made certain assumptions in their implementation for the Apache 1.3 version that didn't turn out to be threadsafe -- an obvious problem for Apache 2.0. But then I would tend to say it was a PHP problem rather than an Apache2 problem.
It doesn't surprise me that 1.3 would be the performance winner at first. 2.0 was concentrating efforts on the worker (multi-process/multi-thread) model. Then again, it's been two years since that performance reference was written. Is the performance gap still that wide?
STLPort is not a complete environment, if you're compiler doesn't support templates properly (or at all) then STLPort isn't a solution. Also very few implementors do "ports" by taking the entire runtime with them from platform to platform... mainly because everything you use (Ie. third party libraries) now also need to use the new runtime.
Personally I've dealt with C++ code that's been "in production" for 8-10 years or more.
That was of course the point of STLPort: giving a leg up to incomplete versions. Is it perfect? No. But it allowed many people to write standard code until your main compiler caught up.
Bad template support? Yeah, nothing to be done about that. Just like the fact that there are C compilers out there that don't support the C99 standard.
Congrats about 8-10 years of production C++. Me, I only have 6-7 years.
So now you agree? What you originally said isn't true. std::string implementations on Solaris/NT seem to do the same thing for.data() and.c_str()... so when moving to Linux say, you can have bugs (it also doesn't help that RogueWave's string type has.data() as the.c_str() equivilent).
No, I don't agree with you. Repeat after me:.data() is not guaranteed to be portable between implementations. If you use it, you are tying yourself to the implementation. For example, the way you embed assembly into C programs is the same. However once you put the assembly in -- assuming of course that you aren't delimiting with #ifdefs -- it isn't portable.
std::string's.data() does the same thing on all platforms: it ties you to a particular implementation so that you can do low-level hacks.
And it was first released in a real product, RHEL 3, in Oct. 2003.
Are you kidding? RedHat Enterprise is, by definition, slow to release new products. It's been available in all standard distributions for far longer than that. I know. I've been using it. So compile on your dev box and put the binary on your production box running RHEL 3. You aren't doing development on your production boxes are you?
You seem to be confused between the real world, and "writing toy apps. in my bedroom". If you think C++ is wonderful, that's fine have your delusions... and if you don't care that it's been 10 years in the making and there are only starting to be something closer to C++ compilers now, that delusion is also fine. But to suggest that the implementation of the Runtime is as similar across platforms as Java,.net or even python and perl is just obvious and easily refuted untruth.
You're right. The different C++ vendors had wildly different implementations. This was the impetus for standardization: you couldn't write a program that compiled everywhere. Now it is much closer to that goal, but you still complain because it's not happening fast enough for you.
And for the record, while I was writing toy apps in my bedroom/dormroom in CFront days, I've been working professionally with C++ for 6-7 years. I remember what it was like. This is why I welcome the new changes.
Now, that said, I think C++'s standard library is too small. The stuff at boost is a good next step though.
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I don't pretend to know all of the answers. What I do know is that commuter cities cannot grow unchecked without suffocating themselves on the car exhaust. There are too many cars, and eight-lane highways are only a poor stopgap measure.
Missing the point.
I'm not saying that public transit is up to snuff. What I'm saying is that we are trying to find all sorts of new ways to make cars safer, more comfortable, and more idiot proof and leaving public transit in its current sad state.
The issue for me isn't that public transit sucks. My issue is that it continues to suck while we drop tons of money on making stupid drivers suck less behind the wheel.
Know how to really stop stupid drivers from hurting themselves and others behind the wheel? Here's a hint: There's no steering wheel at the back of a bus.
No, they don't. That's a problem. But then we don't have smart cars for dumb people either. My point was that we should be working for long-term solutions that also cover traffic congestion (which the smart car doesn't address).
1) Different strokes for different folks. I'm not saying that everyone should send their cars to the scrapyard tomorrow. Different locales will have different requirements.
2) It doesn't rain/sleet everyday nor is it always 15-degree weather. If people always drove their cars in the winter time and rode public transit for the rest of the year, it would still be a win in my book.
I am not unsympathetic to your point. I'm not trying to institute a public transit gestapo and force you to bus. What I'm saying is that one person/one car doesn't work in the long run. New York City is the largest in the U.S. and yet there are people there that have never owned a car in their lives because of the public transit system there (and cabs). Los Angeles has a crap public transit system, everyone has a car, it takes forever to get anywhere with all of the traffic, once you're at your destination, there's nowhere to park, and it's getting worse every year.
Even if you absolutely love your car, if your area has major traffic congestion problems, it makes sense to promote public transit for no other reason than to get the other people off the road so your own commute is shorter.
But with a stupid cyclist, the worst that you get when they run into you is a bump or maybe a broken bone. When a stupid driver hits you, you can die -- especially if you aren't also in a car.
The article was about research into new methods that would require new outlays of cash to come into effect.
This is instead of spending money and research into better/cheaper/more convenient public transit systems. If you live in a predominantly residential area and your work is in a predominantly industrial/commercial area, there is no excuse for public transprotation to drop the ball there. This is not your fault. This is a public policy and city/county planning fubar.
I'm not saying it's a viable option for everyone today. I'm saying that we should be putting more time and effort into it for the future.
And of course in the case that you are definitely not a target for public transit, if you can get others who would find public transit more convenient to use, there would be fewer people on the roads competing with you; Your commute times would reduce/be more pleasant.
And even cheaper than getting a smart car for every stupid person. Get ready for it. Get ready for it.
...but that's crazy talk.
The bus, the subway, the train, the bike, and walking.
While all of the CSS stylesheets are downloaded, Firefox doesn't necessarily download all of the referenced images at the same time. Firefox must load all of the stylesheets so that when you switch the stylesheets, you are actually switching to something. If a particular CSS request returns a "404: Not found", that stylesheet is removed from your list of available styles.
As an exercise, go to CSS Zen Garden, and flip through the skins. After a new page has fully loaded (no more throbber activity), scroll down quickly to the bottom. You'll notice that some images fill in after you scroll to them. It's called lazy loading. It's just for people like you.
As for "massive bandwidth", I think you overstate the issue. A massive CSS document is 30KB. Mine are usually 10KB or less. Most images in the HTML are bigger than this. Remember that CSS is probably being served directly from the filesystem and therefore the server gives a Last-Modified header. If the CSS on the server isn't newer than the cached copy, the browser doesn't download it again -- just like any other static files. (Google for the HTTP header "If-Modified-Since") Also, if the server sets an Expires header, the browser won't even try the request until the expiry timestamp is passed by.
With HTTP 1.1 persistent connections (used by default by all of the major browsers and servers), and there's only ever one connection with multiple GETs. Coupled with mod_gzip or mod_deflate (or equivalent) on your server, you get very small items going over the wire. My 7,281 byte base CSS file compresses down to 1,779 bytes with standard gzip compression.
And finally note that without CSS, your HTML is full of tables, font tags, bold tags, italic tags, center tags, bgcolor attributes, spacer GIFs, etc. That's where massive bandwidth usage comes from. At least the CSS stylesheet can be reused. <b> tags only replicate.
CSS is not your enemy.
It's called HTTP 1.1 and persistent connections. Every popular browser supports it.
A new connection isn't made, it simply executes a new GET request in the already opened socket. In addition, most browsers support gzip compression of content. CSS compresses very well -- a whole lot of repetitive info. Any popular web server released in the last five years will do the former. Enabling mod_gzip or mod_deflate will do the latter.
Persistent connection + gzip compression = all referenced stylesheets downloaded at once very efficiently.
And of course since CSS doesn't change all that often, the last modified header will keep the browser from downloading it over and over. In addition, a site maintainer could set the Expires header for all CSS. Then your CSS is only grabed once and the browser never even bothers to ask again for a refresh until the expiry elapses.
Ain't technology wonderful?
Here's something that could work for you perhaps. It watches which stylesheet is active and uses it on subsequent pages.
It presupposes that you have consistent styling/naming on all of your pages though.
Dude. Lighten up.
No, I'm not Japanese. I'm just a gaijin trying to say "cheers."
Thanks... Just starting out.
Sumimasen. Sake o kudasai.
It is unfortunately necessary sometimes. If you use certain CSS directives, NS4 will crash. To avoid this, it is common to use @import because NS4 doesn't understand it. Case in point:
<style type="text/css" title="foo">@import url("my.css")</style>
This gives the ability to switch stylesheets while still hiding from NS4. Personally I prefer the media="all" hack:
<link rel="stylesheet" title="foo" type="text/css" media="all" href="my.css"/>
NS4 only understands media="screen" and therefore ignores this tag/style. But anyway, addition a "title" attribute to the link/style tag will allow easy stylesheet overrides like you were looking for. Of course, I advocate using parts of CSS2 since >90% of the browsers out there support at least rudimentary positioning like floats and absolutes. Support (or lack of support) for CSS2 selectors can be adequately used to distinguish which browser styles to use.
That said, it's better to simply make your stylesheets so that people can use the browser facilities to change font sizes instead of hard-coding the font sizes in the stylesheet. All popular browsers support font size alteration and this support is not page-specific. It's simply up to CSS authors to avoid disabling this functionality. Hint: don't use pixel values for font size.
We're talking about the programmatic addition of <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="common.css"/> so that all pages share the same look and feel. In addition, by changing "common.css" (or whatever it is named), all pages get the facelift without having to regenerate all of the HTML from content source.
Another issue at hand is division of labor. Those who would actually be good at page layout are almost never the same people that you want to update the XFree86 and ALSA HOWTOs. People who can hack code are not often as adept at making web pages attractive and appealing and vice versa. Work on the one does not necessarily mean less work on the other. There are two distict groups of people at work here who have a limited capacity for helping each other.
Ahhh... I see now. You have no idea what you are talking about. Now now. Before you get all indignant about me calling you ignorant Mr. Grand Almighty FreeBSD User, let me reiterate something for everyone to hear.
Listen closely as this is important: CSS != XSLT. The HTML transformation method doesn't matter at all. Not one bit. Of course the output HTML should be semantically rich, but the CSS is applied on top of this. The HTML layer should have absolutely no knowledge of the CSS except for the extra link tag.
It is just a browser rendering issue, not a content generation issue.
Case in point, print stylesheets would be a great boon as the printed stock has different needs/constraints from the display version. If you were to do this directly with DocBook-XSL, you would ultimately end up having to make special "print" versions of the stylesheets. I'm not talking about PDF generation however useful that may be. I'm saying that when you hit print in the browser, all of the links display the URL next to it, the navigation bar links are removed, etc. In other words, nice print stock from HTML.
And all by just changing a CSS file or two. All of this without touching or regenerating the content.
But I don't know of any sizeable amount of birds killed by nuclear.
Heh heh. Just kidding. My bird quote was mostly to get the "What about the animals?" knee-jerkers to stop and think a moment.
My main issue with wind power is the power output. Assuming you live in an area with copious amounts of wind, that wind velocity remains above a certain level almost all of the time, and the land isn't being used for anything else, wind power generation is great!
For the rest of us (>90%?), wind ain't gonna help a bit with our overall energy demands. If the wind ain't blowin', the power ain't flowin'. As long as the uranium gets shipped at least every few years, nuclear keeps the lights stay on (with output in the orders of magnitude over wind).
It's not partisanship. It's reality.
Indeed. But if the death rate is not statistically higher than those not exposed, the deaths specifically due to nuclear plant radiation is noise. However, if the death rate after 3-Mile Island went up past standard deviation, then it would be useful.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. The only question is if the timeline is ever considered too short.
Strictly speaking, I would expect someone who exercises regularly and was jogging within sight of 3-Mile Island to live longer than someone without a nuclear reactor nearby who sits on their fat ass all day. The same for smokers and for people who eat large amounts of red meat.
Is that sufficient clarification of my position?
If flipping a compile switch could increase speeds in my applications by 10%, you'd better believe that I'd do it. That's what I'd call "low hanging fruit."
Apache 2.0 has a worker module that uses both threads and processes on Linux. 1.3 just preforks. Since one of the big improvements in 2.6 was threading support and since Apache 2.0 can run in either mode anyway, why test 1.3?
If you want to test something more "stable," why bother testing the 2.6 kernel? After all, the 2.6 kernel is newer than Apache 2.0.
It's not like it's cleaner than coal in collection, energy production, or cleanup.
Take a Geiger Counter outside of a nuclear plant. Now take one outside of a coal plant. Hmmm... Much higher readings outside of the coal plant. What? Coal ore contains radioactive isotopes? Those isotopes don't burn up like the coal around them? Coal ash has concentrated radioactive material? The coal industry isn't as highly regulated as the nuclear industry?
Health problems? Do a google search for black lung disease. Hell, do some research on the total number of deaths from nuclear power generation and coal/natural gas since nuclear power was introduced. Nuclear engineers will normally receive more radiation from a single round of CAT scans than from their entire career at the nuclear plant.
Chernobyl? You mean the substandard plant where operators intentionally ignored warnings and pushed the envelope of safety much too far? The final death count was less than four hundred. Yes, the town of 75,000 had to be abandoned. This is an argument for not intentionally doing stupid things with your power plant.
The worst U.S. nuclear disaster? 3-Mile Island? Go back and check your history books. Look up the number of deaths. Zero. Look up the number of injured. None.
As it stands, U.S. nuclear power technology has fallen behind. Take a look at some of the French or, even better, German designs. I find it hard to believe that anything even approaches their level of safety or efficiency.
Terrorist attacks? Personally I'd be more worried about an exposed warehouse of natural gas where someone dropped a match. How about an oil refinery? Yeah, that'll be easy to clean up...
Nuclear waste? How about the euphemism (according to rabid environmental groups) "spent fuel"? Know why they call it a euphemism? Because all spent fuel in the U.S. is waste. Know why? Because in a bid to stop nuclear proliferation in the seventies, Jimmy Carter banned nuclear enrichment in power generation. No breeders for the U.S. Unfortunately for Carter, Europe gave him the finger and continued using nuclear -- including breeded reactors. Who listened? Japan. However Japan just sends its spent fuel to Europe for re-enrichment and buys it back for further processing.
What's the big deal. Let's take Diablo Canyon on the California coast. Only two turbines. 1/5 of the power production in the region. 20%!!! If anyone is curious, take a look at the number of >0.1MW powerplants in California. Diablo Canyon is on the coast about 2/3 of the way down from the top of the state. Look at all of those dams. Imagine all of the trucks, materials, and associated air/water pollution necessary for bringing the fuel to the plant.
Folks in California wouldn't even sell Diablo Canyon the water they needed even though the water/steam used to turn the turbines doesn't ever come into contact with the reactor; It isn't radioactive. So in addition to providing power, they had to set up a reverse osmosis water desalinization plant to get the water from the ocean. And it still gives 20% of the power for the region.
For all of the people whining about the number of birds killed by power poles and cell phone towers, I encourage you to take a look at the number of birds killed by power-generating windmills.
Solar? Anyone want to do the math on the number of panels necessary for even half of the national electricity usage? What about the power and materials required for their inital production?
Tidal? Will someone explain to me how land-locked regions would be able to take advantage of tidal power?
Fuel from soybeans? That would be a nice supplementary energy source. However, let's stop making food. Let's dedicate the nation's farmland to soybeans or other similar fuel generation crops. Reduce that number by the fuel necessary to s
Aside from begging the question, this is the Ghost in the machine problem. Because there is a lack of knowledge about the machine, we assume that a secondary force acts upon it -- the ghost. The more we understand the workings of the machine, the less the ghost must do; the necessity of the "ghost" is reduced in the argument. You are preaching the God of the Gaps.
2. This has a two-part answer. The first part is that I believe that we are indeed deterministic. However, the number of variables and the number of interactions are so immense that to us this determinism is effectively indistinguishable from randomness.
The second part is the concept of God actually removes free will contrary to popular belief.
This equals "no free will." How so? If God knows how things will turn out and He created you, you have no choice in the matter. He created me to be a non-believer who would burn in the eternal fires of hell. He knew that I would take this choice even before I was born. He knew I would do this even before Adam and Eve. If He didn't, God becomes finite. God cannot have His knowledge limited, even by Himself. To do so would limit God: an entity which is by Judeo-Christian definition infinite.
You are probably either going to say, "No it doesn't for God can put things into motion and watch them unfold from our free will," or "God knows how we are going to choose but is still giving us the opportunity to choose without interference," or possibly "God can choose to ignore the events until they transpire."
No dice. If God can put things into motion without knowing how it turns out, the entity is no longer omniscient and thus, no longer the God everyone loves talking about. If God must limit His knowledge -- for whatever reason, it doesn't matter -- then God has limits. If God has limits -- a notion contrary to the Bible -- then how can we be sure that God is not limited in other ways as well? After all, if God can't do that, how do you know God can read your thoughts, hear your prayers, or see you in your bedroom at night? And if God has some sort of limitation, why must God be responsible for the creation of the universe? In for a penny, in for a pound. If God knows how we'll each turn out, it stands to reason that God knew before He created us. If He knew before He created us, then He created me for the expressed purpose of making me suffer eternally in Hell. I have no choice. He made me this way. He could've made me another way, but He chose not to. Gee. Thanks God. You're a swell guy.
Or perhaps you were going to go into the fact that something or someone had to create the universe. Who created God? No one? God just is? Then why can't the universe just be? Why can't the universe have winked itself into existence? If metaphysics is to be a player, a intelligent all-powerful Oz... err... God has no standing over the self-actuated universe. Correction: we can see and interact with the universe. We know the universe exists. God needs more support.
First of all, it doesn't beg the question; It raises the question. I know you may have heard friends, family, or television personalities use the term "beg the question" this way. It is wrong when they use it too.
But I digress. We are not robots. Robots are assumed to be metallic objects made by humanity. We are however machines. Biomechanical machines, but machines nonetheless. Machines that are discussing
Yes, the blind would have no personal experience with it. However I have not met any blind people in the world today who consider sight to be supernatural. Lance Armstrong rides a bicycle on a 30 degree upward slope faster than I can ride on flat ground. It is outside of my personal experience to be able to do what he does let alone for a long as he is able to do it. I do not, however, consider it supernatural.
An attribution of something above and beyond reality requires not only lack of experience with the subject at hand, but a dogmatic belief that the subject is intrinsically unknowable. (Not as unknown to me personally, but rather unknown to anyone.) This is the God of the Gaps that I cannot accept.
Here is where we diverge greatly. I do not consider an institution to be reputable if it ignores information that is inconvenient. This is of course not the same as watching someone's "little tricks" and noting the use of smoke and mirrors.
The chances of me winning a six-number lottery jackpot -- assuming I buy one ticket -- are 1 in 13,983,816. Everyone else has the same chance (assuming there is no cheating of course). From a realistic point of view, no one would never win the lottery. However, people do indeed win the lottery. Christians, jews, muslims, buddhists, and even atheists have all won the lottery at one time or another. Does this mean that at a given time, Jesus plucked those balls down just for you? Are you truly that arrogant? Or rather is it random chance that you won?
I am extremely lucky. I was born into a universe that was physically acceptable for formation, born on a planet upon which organic compounds are plentiful, have been birthed from a species of supreme bad-asses (to borrow a phrase from Cryptonomicon), and live in the wealthiest country on the planet. Woohoo! I won the lottery! And had I lost, we would not be having this discussion. A great improbability is not the same as an impossibility.
Now then, with regard to the Fine-Tuning Design Argument, I and others have a few issues. First and foremost is the notion that everything just seems to fit too perfectly. I take it that you don't know too many physicists or engineers do you? The general response I get from those communities is that it's a wonder that this chaotic and unordered world functions as well as it does. For further discussion and other important points, I'll have to simply say "look
Sighted person: Okay, stand right where you are.
Blind skeptic: Why?
SP: I'm going to take ten paces away from you.
BS: Okay.
SP: Now hold up one of your hands. Aha! You just raised your left hand.
BS: What about now?
SP: It's still your left hand.
BS: How did you know that?
SP: I can see.
Now have the sighted person get four items, each a different color, and hand them out. The items should have the same size, shape and texture. Have the sighted person identify each item to the person holding it. Have the sighted person occupied by a fifth volunteer so that the activites of the first four are hidden from sight. The first four will now trade with each other, whispering the color the sighted person attributed to the item he/she held. The sighted person is brought back into view and questioned about the items again. Repeat with a new group of blind volunteers. Assuming the blind are honest, this would provide proof. It's called "The Scientific Method."
On the other hand, the proofs I hear from theists include
Responses:
I know that I will hear noise about "strawman." Fair enough. Provide proof and we'll be done with it. If you can't provide proof, God is as likely to exist as the Giant Burnt Umber Crayon.
You are free to believe what you will. But unless you can demonstrate it to others, don't be indignant when others point and laugh at you when you proclaim it as truth. Don't want pointing and laughter, keep it to yourself or prove it.
Prefork or worker?
It's almost two years old.
Taken with a grain of salt of course, but I heard that the issue was about 2.0's use of threading whereas 1.3 was always a prefork model. mod_php made certain assumptions in their implementation for the Apache 1.3 version that didn't turn out to be threadsafe -- an obvious problem for Apache 2.0. But then I would tend to say it was a PHP problem rather than an Apache2 problem.
It doesn't surprise me that 1.3 would be the performance winner at first. 2.0 was concentrating efforts on the worker (multi-process/multi-thread) model. Then again, it's been two years since that performance reference was written. Is the performance gap still that wide?
That was of course the point of STLPort: giving a leg up to incomplete versions. Is it perfect? No. But it allowed many people to write standard code until your main compiler caught up.
Bad template support? Yeah, nothing to be done about that. Just like the fact that there are C compilers out there that don't support the C99 standard.
Congrats about 8-10 years of production C++. Me, I only have 6-7 years.
No, I don't agree with you. Repeat after me:
std::string's
Are you kidding? RedHat Enterprise is, by definition, slow to release new products. It's been available in all standard distributions for far longer than that. I know. I've been using it. So compile on your dev box and put the binary on your production box running RHEL 3. You aren't doing development on your production boxes are you?
You're right. The different C++ vendors had wildly different implementations. This was the impetus for standardization: you couldn't write a program that compiled everywhere. Now it is much closer to that goal, but you still complain because it's not happening fast enough for you.
And for the record, while I was writing toy apps in my bedroom/dormroom in CFront days, I've been working professionally with C++ for 6-7 years. I remember what it was like. This is why I welcome the new changes.
Now, that said, I think C++'s standard library is too small. The stuff at boost is a good next step though.