Even the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the EPA had to consider cost when determining what was "necessary and proper." Cost trumps the freedoms guaranteed in the bill of rights. If my free speech costs someone money, the Bill of Rights has no standing. Government at least is prevented (heavily restricted) from prosecuting people for their speech. Business has no such Constitutional amendment restraining its desire to quelch speech it thinks offensive.
Business is fundamentally undemocratic and unconstitutional.
No, business behaves a sociopath because much of it is being run by a small, avaricious and sociopathic clique of oligarchs. You can run a business in a pretty democratic and egalitarian way. There are plenty of examples of that in may different forms, even in the USA. Such organizations just get dumped on a lot by right wing nuts for being 'socialists' but they exist and some are quite successful.
What's the use in crying terrorism to pass these kinds of laws when you can just blame it on the US? Seems like an easy way to gather all the data you want if you ask me. Makes perfect sense
Or you could ask yourself whether it is a positive development for the USA that people in other countries are now using the USA as an excuse to pass laws like this where in the past they used to use the likes of Al Qaeda as an excuse. Perhaps that's something the people of the USA might want to change before it fucks up their relationship with their oldest and closest ally who helped you wriggle out from under the iron heel of British tyranny and whose soldiers shed their blood to secure the independence of the USA as a nation at the battle of Yorktown? Just a thought...
The exact time of the next hard drive failure is about as easy to predict as an earthquake. However, there is a well know law of physics which states that the more time that passes from your last backup the more likely your hard disk is to fail more or less regardless of the dis's age and the odds of the damn thing failing increase exponentially if you have been doing something really important and/or time consuming in the interval.
The claim that the rhino horns are clamored as Chinese medicine is way over hyped - for the vast majority of the Chinese people, over 90%, do not believe in the effectiveness of the rhino horns, with the exception of those living in the Hong Kong and surrounding region (mainly Guangzhou)
This has been evidenced time and time again on the distribution data on where the rhino horns were used - over 80% of it were used inside Hong Kong
In fact one can go to Chinese medicinal shops in Hong Kong and find rhino horns display prominently, but in other places inside China, there is no rhino horn in sight as there is no market for it
It isn't just rhino horn, it's rare types of wood, tiger/lion skins and the skins of other endangered species, turtle shells, elephant tusks the list goes on and all of this to feed the Chinese taste for luxuries. There used to be a market for these products in the west and to an extent there still is. Conservationist groups have done a lot of work to shame people into not buying this stuff and for a while it was actually working. With the economic boom in China that changed. A while ago I watched an interview with an African ranger who commented that "Wherever the Chinese show up the animals disappear". The problem of poaching is bad enough without the Chinese über-class of nouveau rich luxury junkies making it worse and I don't give a hoot for arguments like there being a long and rich tradition of ivory carving in China that will die out if there is no ivory. If I have to choose between luxury obsessed people in China or the West getting their fix of ivory products or elephants surviving as a species I will pick elephants every time and the same goes for tigers, lions, turtles and less cuddly or less cute creatures like the short tailed albatross, 20 % of north american mussel species, the Ganges shark, the addax, pygmy three-toed sloth, the California condor, the Lord Howe Island stick-insect, the okapi, the European fresh water pearl mussel..... the list is so long it depresses me to think about it.
I've been an Apple user for 30+ years, have done work for them, know people within the company, etc. "Generous" is not a word associated with Apple in my experience....
It's just capitalism inaction, the maximization of profit. Isn't that the American way? Offer artists something totally unacceptable and make them laboriously negotiate you up to something a little bit above the least they will settle for. If you have ever tried to sell something you'll recognize the tactic, you ask 20 grand buyer offers 8 grand and eventually you settle on 14. The only reason this is news is because it's Apple that's doing it and everybody around here hates Apple. Poor oppressed artists vs. spawn of Lucifer, i.e. grade A clickbait.
Do Russian soldiers often take their tanks on vacation with them? How stupid do you have to be to believe this?
You would be surprised at the vehicles people drive around in:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
British grant you but funny none the less. I specially like where he comments: "I don't like driving along in the tank with my head sticking out but the good thing about the tank is that you can always find a parking space".. would you try to argue with him over a parking space?
That's just another word for authoritarian plutocratic rule through euergetism and patronage, which is basically taking the social order back to that of ancient Rome where the landless and unemployed population was at the mercy of powerful, wealthy, and corrupt magnets because the people were dependent upon these plutocrats for their sustenance.
Why? MP3 works fine, and most of us have hearing so damaged they can't tell the different between a 192+ MP3 and the CD it was ripped from.
Good point, I've been working on device that runs a simple cross-browser live-streaming app. After taking a close look at RTSP which requires a client player or a plugin, as well as HTML5 and the cluster f**k that is the <video> tag. I concluded that the most cross browser way to do this without involving a crappy plugin is with websockets and MPEG-1 plus JavaScript MPEG decoder on the browser end. This has earned me a number lectures about how I'm a luddite but the thing is that MPEG-1 still achieves up to a 1:100 compression ratio, it supports fairly high resolutions, it's relatively light weight and amazingly this lash-up works half way decent on mobile browsers. Another plus is that all the patents have expired. Just because something is old it doesn't mean that it is useless.
Most developers? I don't know who you have been talking to or what you have been reading (maybe you work at Apple?), but the Android market share is much greater than the Apple market share. Plus it doesn't take much for a Java dev to turn his/her skills to Android, and C is the only language more popular than Java. In reality I doubt either platform will have issue finding developers.
He is talking about profit potential, not who's got his OS installed on the most devices. The implication is that iOS development is more profitable than Android development which is something that I have heard from more mobile developers than just him.
It's this generation's Rocky and Bullwinkle. Seriously this is Bullwinkle;)
Time to scale back the pointless spying. Also we spied on Merkel! Did we also spy on Angelina Jolie's shower? Because that would be even more convenient, also useless.
Yes but if you are the kind of weirdo who likes to spy on women in their showers it has to be said that spying on Angelina Jolie in the shower would seem to be lightyears more enjoyable than spying on Angela Merkel in the shower. One has to wonder what kind of twisted uber-weirdos work at the NSA. I'm convinced that if I was ever so unfortunate as to see Angela Merkel in the shower I would go blind but then again I've not reached NSA levels of weirdness and perversity. Getting to that level must require years upon years of diligent work.
Yes, and indeed ONLY to Safari. iAds in apps are not affected.
I prefer the rooted Android solution where ads are blocked in the hosts file. They are blocked then for ALL apps, not only the browser (and disabeling the Google add service with Lucky Patcher kills the remaining few).
Are you really complaining that you won't be able to block ads in those crappy free apps that sustain themselves by injecting ads into the GUI and sometimes also by stealing your personal data? I've been asked to 'fix' Android phones on a number of occasions and that includes installing the user's favorite apps and games. To it's credit Android conscientiously lists everything the app wants access to when an app is installed. Personal details, contacts list, media/photos and browsing history are standard requests with apps that have obvious reasons to access these things. I've even had a crappy quiz game demand access to the GPS chip and the camera. People just seem to install this crap and approve access without thinking. It is amazing what people will do to get a free app. I'm not trying to take a shot at Android users in general, I've experienced the same level of cluelessness with iOS users.
Germans suspect that the Russian foreign intelligence service SVR is behind the attack. On Thursday, the parliament will discuss how to address the situation.
So if this isn't enough, what constitutes an act of war these days?
I'm pretty sure somebody will implement GUI bindings.
I think it will be pretty straightforward: OpenStep already exists, which is already ObjC and the same model as OSX/iOS, given the same NextStep heritage.
AFAICT, Swift is essentially the ObjC machine and object model in a sane language, so it ought to plug right into OpenStep.
It's nice if that is true, but experience has taught me to believe that when I see my iOS/OS X program plug straight into OpenStep and compile, ready for deployment on Linux PCs and Mobile devices.
I seem to remember that during the presentation they explicitly stated that would be releasing a Linux version of the runtime libraries for Swift. At least that should give you the basics for a console/text user interface.
I doubt Apple is going to be making any GUI binding other than for Cocoa. I also doubt that the bindings for Cocoa will be included in the open source packages. It will be interesting to see how accepting they will be of community contributions.
I'm pretty sure somebody will implement GUI bindings. The ability to port iOS/OS X software to Linux and the ability to port Linux GUI programs to OS X without running an X11 server is far too interesting a capability to pass up. If there were GUI bindings for Linux as well as OS X you could simply recode your old GUI in Swift but leave the business logic in tact. Since Swift can link to C and C++ libraries (C++ with a Obj C wrapper) this should not be a big problem.
I haven't seen any estimates on the benefits/profits to US (tech) companies from the industrial espionage part of the NSA spying published anywhere? Would anyone have a number or a link to a source?
Just trying to get some perspective here.
There was a report issued by the European Parliament some years ago about how the NSA used the Echelon system on behalf of US corporations to spy on their competitors. That report cited somel successful NSA industrial espionage operations but it is a bit dated now. Back then the conclusion was that any company that did not switch all of its communications to encrypted tech and didn't hire security consultants was basically asking the NSA to hand its trade secrets to American competitors (and I'm sure the same applies to US companies vis a vis Russian/Chinese/European competitors). Of course very few people listened back then. I'll be disappointed if the NSA hasn't taken their industrial espionage operation to the next level since then. I keep hoping the the European Parliament will issue an updated second edition of this report.
Does the leak actually count as part of the cause?
I was thinking the same thing, Snowden is more of an inevitable effect. There was no way they were going to keep a lid on an operation like this forever. It was never aquestion of whether, it was always only a question of when the scab would break open up and the pus would come flowing out.
It's easy to say "grow up" when the biggest loan you had to take out was for a motorcycle. An education in the US can cost 10s-100s of thousands of dollars not including living expenses. Couple this with low earnings coming out of college and interest rates that capitalize (interest is added to principle) which occurs during forbearance, deferment, or even while you're still in school. For the vast majority of people, repayment is not so simple when the average wage for a US employee is $45,327 as of 2012 according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. This doesn't take into account the costs of living, healthcare, health insurance, transportation, or god-forbid entertainment.
Reading numbers like that make me glad I was born in 'socialist' Europe. A two year CS masters degree cost me less than $10.000 in school related fees and I went to a privately operated school that is relatively expensive by our standards.
I'm not raging against anything.
I don't see why I should care if it was an 'American idea' even if I thought that was a meaningful distinction.
I do like most of Elon's projects and I don't think he would have used a system like this because he's looking to build a rocket that could potentially land on Mars, but that's irrelevant.
I merely object to this design being presented as 'simplified' and having 'no need for extra rocket fuel'.
I personally find the SpaceX approach more elegant and I don't think that because we've had a hundred years of air flight experience that makes it any simpler or better of a solution.
I don't see the elegance. It is overly complicated. I have worked around tall structures long enough to know what wind will do to something like an antenna mast or wind generator mounting column floating in mid air under a crane and I don't expect it will do anything much different to a rocket trying to land end up. If Airbus can really add airplane parts to a rocket stage using ultra light high strength modern composts and land the thing like an airplane that and do it in a fairly broad range of weather conditions it seems like just as good an idea to me as a rocket that lands end up and can't be expected to landed successfully except in very low winds. There is a lot of elegance about a Range Rover, there is little elegance about a Willys Jeep. If I had to pick the most reliable vehicle I wouldn't give a shit about elegance, I'd pick the Willys MB. It seems to me that in space travel reliability is more important than earning nerd points with complicated systems. 'Elegant' solutions aren't always automatically the best ones it's the ones that work reliably under a wide variety of sub optimal conditions.
A first stage is not an airplane. Making it land like an airplane entails adding most of an airplane to it...wings, jet engines, unfolding propellers, substantial, steerable landing gear, various covers and other mechanisms that open and close in flight, mechanisms to detach the disposable tanks, etc. This is not making things simpler.
And making a long cylindrical object landin end up on a platform in any kind of wind is simple?
So they bolt on a pair of wings, add some propellers that have to be deployed from a casing that protects them during launch, oh and another stage separation event, a mechanism for separating the fuel tank from the engine.
And that's supposed to be simpler than some hydraulic landing legs and grid fins?
And carrying all those additions to space doesn't cost them any extra fuel?
Are you raging against this because it is a bad idea? Because it isn't an American idea? Because it wasn't thought up by golden boy Elon Musk? Or is it all three? The idea of landing the first stage like an airplane is a well understood process and it sure as hell seems simpler and more straight forward to me than what Musk is trying to achieve, which is to land a rocket standing up at the mercy if the wind; and simpler is usually better.
Please refrain from redundant inflammatory statements. Seriously, he wasn't wrong any more than you are.
I have been reading about the US American electoral college system on and off for decades and I still don't understand it which I am told puts me on an even footing with most US Americans.
But similarly, the length of feet and yards are pretty convenient for measuring spaces. Being a relatively average-sized man, my foot is about a foot long, for example. If I want to measure the size of a room, I can put one foot in front of the other and walk, counting my footsteps. In the end, I have a pretty good approximation. Measuring a person's height in feet also gives a range with pretty good resolution with adults typically being between 5 and 7 when you round. With meters, when you round, basically everyone is 2 meters tall.
Huh?!? When I want to measure a room I know that the distance between my two middle fingers when I stretch my arms out (a unit of measurement know for centuries as "a fathom") is about the same as my height which in my case is about 2 meters. The distance from my chest to the tip of my middle finger is about 1 meter and the distance from my elbow to the tip of my middle finger is about a quarter of my height, i.e. 50 centimetres (a unit of measurement also know for centuries as "a cubit"). The distance from the tip of my thumb to the tip of my little finger is just under 25 cm (A unit of measurement know for centuries as the "greater span"). You can make the case that people vary in size but by and large I don't think the variations in these body proportions and sizes are any more radical than variations in the length of people's feet and if you know your height and can do sums in your head you can get pretty accurate measurements. As for metric users being so bad at estimating how high another human is that they think everybody is 2 meter tall... well quite frankly that's just about the funniest thing I have ever heard. Most people know their own height and can estimate the height of somebody else with a pretty high degree of accuracy.
People want to make threats go away. That is easier than making one's self powerful enough to deal with the threat.
Gun control proponents think that taking guns away from other people will make them safer. In fact, it will just make them and their neighbors attractive targets. But logic is powerless against strong emotions like fear.
Painting gun control advocates as people who want to take all guns and melt them down is about as intelligent as claiming that gun owners are people who want it to be easy for criminal gangs to amass huge arsenals. There are differing levels of extremism on both sides. Just last week I went to the range and came across a guy trying to zero his 223. He had fired off around 30 cartridges by the time I got there and the barrel of his rifle was getting pretty hot. So this guy asks me if I can help him zero the gun. I attached a laser to the muzzle, set up a reflective target and told him to harmonise the crosshairs on his scope with the laser dot. He cranked the elevation knob a full revolution to bring the POI down before he had the thing centred on the laser spot, 5 rounds later we had the thing pretty well zeroed at 100m. Basically this guy had been overshooting the target by huge a margin. Fortunately for the general public our shooting range is situated in such a way that there is a big old hill at the end of it precisely because of people like this. I have, however, come across people zeroing or just shooting their rifles outside of shooting ranges and paying no attention to having a proper backstop or that rounds might ricochet off the ground and go flying god knows how far into the hinterland. Both I and other serious shooters at our range regularly find ourselves educating a new haul of newly minted gung-ho shooters who swing rifles around on the range with magazines in place and the bots locked in the range safety rules only to have snotty comments thrown in our faces. I'm in favour of a certain level of gun control because while many gun owners know what they are doing and shooting clubs do good work educating shooters, the ease with which guns can be obtained has also resulted in the firearms community being full of compete morons who do not know how to properly operate a firearm. These people, have no respect for firearms and they seem to think guns are toys. To me gun control means first and foremost that nobody should be allowed to own a gun without having been taught how to use it properly and safely. It mystifies me that so many gun owners are against at least making sure that new gun owners are made to learn to shoot before being allowed to own guns so as to reduce the number of clueless idiots who make serious shooters look bad to an absolute minimum. It's a bit like fighting tooth and nail to allow people to buy cars and drive them without having ever learned how or what the traffic rules are.
Yeah, parent doesn't know what he's talking about. My uncles collected all types of war stuff (from Civil War to Desert Storm) and when he died, I was tasked to sell it. After taking out the best pieces (all German) to sell to people I know paid top dollar, the rest went to auction. The WW2 German stuff sold best, highest, and vastly more interest. Followed by Civil War, then the WW1 German stuff, followed by WW1/2 American stuff. The Korean/Vietnam/Other US stuff sold like shit in comparison. Although I will say WW2 US went up a lot since my uncles bought it pre-90s.
People watch the history channel and want a piece of the bad guys from the most visited topic: WW2. Nothing creepy about it.
That depends on how you define "Nazi collectables". To me it does not mean Mauser 98 rifles, Stalhelms or Wehrmacht badges. To me "Nazi collectables" means Nazi flags with swastikas, Gestapo badges and jackets, Gauleiter uniforms, party pins, concentration camp guard unit badges... etc. In Europe crap like that is very much niche collectibles especially since in some places like Germany for example you can be sent to f**k you in the a** jail for trading in that shit . Oh, and if you think it is so acceptable to trade in Nazi collectables why are you two posting AC?
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Even the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the EPA had to consider cost when determining what was "necessary and proper." Cost trumps the freedoms guaranteed in the bill of rights. If my free speech costs someone money, the Bill of Rights has no standing. Government at least is prevented (heavily restricted) from prosecuting people for their speech. Business has no such Constitutional amendment restraining its desire to quelch speech it thinks offensive.
Business is fundamentally undemocratic and unconstitutional.
No, business behaves a sociopath because much of it is being run by a small, avaricious and sociopathic clique of oligarchs. You can run a business in a pretty democratic and egalitarian way. There are plenty of examples of that in may different forms, even in the USA. Such organizations just get dumped on a lot by right wing nuts for being 'socialists' but they exist and some are quite successful.
What's the use in crying terrorism to pass these kinds of laws when you can just blame it on the US? Seems like an easy way to gather all the data you want if you ask me. Makes perfect sense
Or you could ask yourself whether it is a positive development for the USA that people in other countries are now using the USA as an excuse to pass laws like this where in the past they used to use the likes of Al Qaeda as an excuse. Perhaps that's something the people of the USA might want to change before it fucks up their relationship with their oldest and closest ally who helped you wriggle out from under the iron heel of British tyranny and whose soldiers shed their blood to secure the independence of the USA as a nation at the battle of Yorktown? Just a thought...
When Will Your Hard Drive Fail?
The exact time of the next hard drive failure is about as easy to predict as an earthquake. However, there is a well know law of physics which states that the more time that passes from your last backup the more likely your hard disk is to fail more or less regardless of the dis's age and the odds of the damn thing failing increase exponentially if you have been doing something really important and/or time consuming in the interval.
The claim that the rhino horns are clamored as Chinese medicine is way over hyped - for the vast majority of the Chinese people, over 90%, do not believe in the effectiveness of the rhino horns, with the exception of those living in the Hong Kong and surrounding region (mainly Guangzhou) This has been evidenced time and time again on the distribution data on where the rhino horns were used - over 80% of it were used inside Hong Kong In fact one can go to Chinese medicinal shops in Hong Kong and find rhino horns display prominently, but in other places inside China, there is no rhino horn in sight as there is no market for it
It isn't just rhino horn, it's rare types of wood, tiger/lion skins and the skins of other endangered species, turtle shells, elephant tusks the list goes on and all of this to feed the Chinese taste for luxuries. There used to be a market for these products in the west and to an extent there still is. Conservationist groups have done a lot of work to shame people into not buying this stuff and for a while it was actually working. With the economic boom in China that changed. A while ago I watched an interview with an African ranger who commented that "Wherever the Chinese show up the animals disappear". The problem of poaching is bad enough without the Chinese über-class of nouveau rich luxury junkies making it worse and I don't give a hoot for arguments like there being a long and rich tradition of ivory carving in China that will die out if there is no ivory. If I have to choose between luxury obsessed people in China or the West getting their fix of ivory products or elephants surviving as a species I will pick elephants every time and the same goes for tigers, lions, turtles and less cuddly or less cute creatures like the short tailed albatross, 20 % of north american mussel species, the Ganges shark, the addax, pygmy three-toed sloth, the California condor, the Lord Howe Island stick-insect, the okapi, the European fresh water pearl mussel..... the list is so long it depresses me to think about it.
I've been an Apple user for 30+ years, have done work for them, know people within the company, etc. "Generous" is not a word associated with Apple in my experience....
It's just capitalism inaction, the maximization of profit. Isn't that the American way? Offer artists something totally unacceptable and make them laboriously negotiate you up to something a little bit above the least they will settle for. If you have ever tried to sell something you'll recognize the tactic, you ask 20 grand buyer offers 8 grand and eventually you settle on 14. The only reason this is news is because it's Apple that's doing it and everybody around here hates Apple. Poor oppressed artists vs. spawn of Lucifer, i.e. grade A clickbait.
Do Russian soldiers often take their tanks on vacation with them? How stupid do you have to be to believe this?
You would be surprised at the vehicles people drive around in: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new... British grant you but funny none the less. I specially like where he comments: "I don't like driving along in the tank with my head sticking out but the good thing about the tank is that you can always find a parking space" .. would you try to argue with him over a parking space?
...or through philanthropic capitalism.
That's just another word for authoritarian plutocratic rule through euergetism and patronage, which is basically taking the social order back to that of ancient Rome where the landless and unemployed population was at the mercy of powerful, wealthy, and corrupt magnets because the people were dependent upon these plutocrats for their sustenance.
Why? MP3 works fine, and most of us have hearing so damaged they can't tell the different between a 192+ MP3 and the CD it was ripped from.
Good point, I've been working on device that runs a simple cross-browser live-streaming app. After taking a close look at RTSP which requires a client player or a plugin, as well as HTML5 and the cluster f**k that is the <video> tag. I concluded that the most cross browser way to do this without involving a crappy plugin is with websockets and MPEG-1 plus JavaScript MPEG decoder on the browser end. This has earned me a number lectures about how I'm a luddite but the thing is that MPEG-1 still achieves up to a 1:100 compression ratio, it supports fairly high resolutions, it's relatively light weight and amazingly this lash-up works half way decent on mobile browsers. Another plus is that all the patents have expired. Just because something is old it doesn't mean that it is useless.
Most developers? I don't know who you have been talking to or what you have been reading (maybe you work at Apple?), but the Android market share is much greater than the Apple market share. Plus it doesn't take much for a Java dev to turn his/her skills to Android, and C is the only language more popular than Java. In reality I doubt either platform will have issue finding developers.
He is talking about profit potential, not who's got his OS installed on the most devices. The implication is that iOS development is more profitable than Android development which is something that I have heard from more mobile developers than just him.
It's this generation's Rocky and Bullwinkle. Seriously this is Bullwinkle ;)
Time to scale back the pointless spying. Also we spied on Merkel! Did we also spy on Angelina Jolie's shower? Because that would be even more convenient, also useless.
Yes but if you are the kind of weirdo who likes to spy on women in their showers it has to be said that spying on Angelina Jolie in the shower would seem to be lightyears more enjoyable than spying on Angela Merkel in the shower. One has to wonder what kind of twisted uber-weirdos work at the NSA. I'm convinced that if I was ever so unfortunate as to see Angela Merkel in the shower I would go blind but then again I've not reached NSA levels of weirdness and perversity. Getting to that level must require years upon years of diligent work.
Yes, and indeed ONLY to Safari. iAds in apps are not affected.
I prefer the rooted Android solution where ads are blocked in the hosts file. They are blocked then for ALL apps, not only the browser (and disabeling the Google add service with Lucky Patcher kills the remaining few).
Are you really complaining that you won't be able to block ads in those crappy free apps that sustain themselves by injecting ads into the GUI and sometimes also by stealing your personal data? I've been asked to 'fix' Android phones on a number of occasions and that includes installing the user's favorite apps and games. To it's credit Android conscientiously lists everything the app wants access to when an app is installed. Personal details, contacts list, media/photos and browsing history are standard requests with apps that have obvious reasons to access these things. I've even had a crappy quiz game demand access to the GPS chip and the camera. People just seem to install this crap and approve access without thinking. It is amazing what people will do to get a free app. I'm not trying to take a shot at Android users in general, I've experienced the same level of cluelessness with iOS users.
Why aren't they running OpenBSD? It's the only practical operating system to use in truly high-risk, high-security deployments.
DUH! Because Netcraft has confirmed that BSD is dying.
Germans suspect that the Russian foreign intelligence service SVR is behind the attack. On Thursday, the parliament will discuss how to address the situation.
So if this isn't enough, what constitutes an act of war these days?
I'm pretty sure somebody will implement GUI bindings.
I think it will be pretty straightforward: OpenStep already exists, which is already ObjC and the same model as OSX/iOS, given the same NextStep heritage.
AFAICT, Swift is essentially the ObjC machine and object model in a sane language, so it ought to plug right into OpenStep.
It's nice if that is true, but experience has taught me to believe that when I see my iOS/OS X program plug straight into OpenStep and compile, ready for deployment on Linux PCs and Mobile devices.
I seem to remember that during the presentation they explicitly stated that would be releasing a Linux version of the runtime libraries for Swift. At least that should give you the basics for a console/text user interface.
I doubt Apple is going to be making any GUI binding other than for Cocoa. I also doubt that the bindings for Cocoa will be included in the open source packages. It will be interesting to see how accepting they will be of community contributions.
I'm pretty sure somebody will implement GUI bindings. The ability to port iOS/OS X software to Linux and the ability to port Linux GUI programs to OS X without running an X11 server is far too interesting a capability to pass up. If there were GUI bindings for Linux as well as OS X you could simply recode your old GUI in Swift but leave the business logic in tact. Since Swift can link to C and C++ libraries (C++ with a Obj C wrapper) this should not be a big problem.
I haven't seen any estimates on the benefits/profits to US (tech) companies from the industrial espionage part of the NSA spying published anywhere? Would anyone have a number or a link to a source?
Just trying to get some perspective here.
There was a report issued by the European Parliament some years ago about how the NSA used the Echelon system on behalf of US corporations to spy on their competitors. That report cited somel successful NSA industrial espionage operations but it is a bit dated now. Back then the conclusion was that any company that did not switch all of its communications to encrypted tech and didn't hire security consultants was basically asking the NSA to hand its trade secrets to American competitors (and I'm sure the same applies to US companies vis a vis Russian/Chinese/European competitors). Of course very few people listened back then. I'll be disappointed if the NSA hasn't taken their industrial espionage operation to the next level since then. I keep hoping the the European Parliament will issue an updated second edition of this report.
Does the leak actually count as part of the cause?
I was thinking the same thing, Snowden is more of an inevitable effect. There was no way they were going to keep a lid on an operation like this forever. It was never aquestion of whether, it was always only a question of when the scab would break open up and the pus would come flowing out.
It's easy to say "grow up" when the biggest loan you had to take out was for a motorcycle. An education in the US can cost 10s-100s of thousands of dollars not including living expenses. Couple this with low earnings coming out of college and interest rates that capitalize (interest is added to principle) which occurs during forbearance, deferment, or even while you're still in school. For the vast majority of people, repayment is not so simple when the average wage for a US employee is $45,327 as of 2012 according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. This doesn't take into account the costs of living, healthcare, health insurance, transportation, or god-forbid entertainment.
Reading numbers like that make me glad I was born in 'socialist' Europe. A two year CS masters degree cost me less than $10.000 in school related fees and I went to a privately operated school that is relatively expensive by our standards.
I'm not raging against anything. I don't see why I should care if it was an 'American idea' even if I thought that was a meaningful distinction. I do like most of Elon's projects and I don't think he would have used a system like this because he's looking to build a rocket that could potentially land on Mars, but that's irrelevant.
I merely object to this design being presented as 'simplified' and having 'no need for extra rocket fuel'.
I personally find the SpaceX approach more elegant and I don't think that because we've had a hundred years of air flight experience that makes it any simpler or better of a solution.
I don't see the elegance. It is overly complicated. I have worked around tall structures long enough to know what wind will do to something like an antenna mast or wind generator mounting column floating in mid air under a crane and I don't expect it will do anything much different to a rocket trying to land end up. If Airbus can really add airplane parts to a rocket stage using ultra light high strength modern composts and land the thing like an airplane that and do it in a fairly broad range of weather conditions it seems like just as good an idea to me as a rocket that lands end up and can't be expected to landed successfully except in very low winds. There is a lot of elegance about a Range Rover, there is little elegance about a Willys Jeep. If I had to pick the most reliable vehicle I wouldn't give a shit about elegance, I'd pick the Willys MB. It seems to me that in space travel reliability is more important than earning nerd points with complicated systems. 'Elegant' solutions aren't always automatically the best ones it's the ones that work reliably under a wide variety of sub optimal conditions.
A first stage is not an airplane. Making it land like an airplane entails adding most of an airplane to it...wings, jet engines, unfolding propellers, substantial, steerable landing gear, various covers and other mechanisms that open and close in flight, mechanisms to detach the disposable tanks, etc. This is not making things simpler.
And making a long cylindrical object landin end up on a platform in any kind of wind is simple?
So they bolt on a pair of wings, add some propellers that have to be deployed from a casing that protects them during launch, oh and another stage separation event, a mechanism for separating the fuel tank from the engine. And that's supposed to be simpler than some hydraulic landing legs and grid fins? And carrying all those additions to space doesn't cost them any extra fuel?
Are you raging against this because it is a bad idea? Because it isn't an American idea? Because it wasn't thought up by golden boy Elon Musk? Or is it all three? The idea of landing the first stage like an airplane is a well understood process and it sure as hell seems simpler and more straight forward to me than what Musk is trying to achieve, which is to land a rocket standing up at the mercy if the wind; and simpler is usually better.
> Wrong. We have to vote for
Please refrain from redundant inflammatory statements. Seriously, he wasn't wrong any more than you are.
I have been reading about the US American electoral college system on and off for decades and I still don't understand it which I am told puts me on an even footing with most US Americans.
But similarly, the length of feet and yards are pretty convenient for measuring spaces. Being a relatively average-sized man, my foot is about a foot long, for example. If I want to measure the size of a room, I can put one foot in front of the other and walk, counting my footsteps. In the end, I have a pretty good approximation. Measuring a person's height in feet also gives a range with pretty good resolution with adults typically being between 5 and 7 when you round. With meters, when you round, basically everyone is 2 meters tall.
Huh?!? When I want to measure a room I know that the distance between my two middle fingers when I stretch my arms out (a unit of measurement know for centuries as "a fathom") is about the same as my height which in my case is about 2 meters. The distance from my chest to the tip of my middle finger is about 1 meter and the distance from my elbow to the tip of my middle finger is about a quarter of my height, i.e. 50 centimetres (a unit of measurement also know for centuries as "a cubit"). The distance from the tip of my thumb to the tip of my little finger is just under 25 cm (A unit of measurement know for centuries as the "greater span"). You can make the case that people vary in size but by and large I don't think the variations in these body proportions and sizes are any more radical than variations in the length of people's feet and if you know your height and can do sums in your head you can get pretty accurate measurements. As for metric users being so bad at estimating how high another human is that they think everybody is 2 meter tall... well quite frankly that's just about the funniest thing I have ever heard. Most people know their own height and can estimate the height of somebody else with a pretty high degree of accuracy.
Regards
J Q Metricuser
People want to make threats go away. That is easier than making one's self powerful enough to deal with the threat.
Gun control proponents think that taking guns away from other people will make them safer. In fact, it will just make them and their neighbors attractive targets. But logic is powerless against strong emotions like fear.
Painting gun control advocates as people who want to take all guns and melt them down is about as intelligent as claiming that gun owners are people who want it to be easy for criminal gangs to amass huge arsenals. There are differing levels of extremism on both sides. Just last week I went to the range and came across a guy trying to zero his 223. He had fired off around 30 cartridges by the time I got there and the barrel of his rifle was getting pretty hot. So this guy asks me if I can help him zero the gun. I attached a laser to the muzzle, set up a reflective target and told him to harmonise the crosshairs on his scope with the laser dot. He cranked the elevation knob a full revolution to bring the POI down before he had the thing centred on the laser spot, 5 rounds later we had the thing pretty well zeroed at 100m. Basically this guy had been overshooting the target by huge a margin. Fortunately for the general public our shooting range is situated in such a way that there is a big old hill at the end of it precisely because of people like this. I have, however, come across people zeroing or just shooting their rifles outside of shooting ranges and paying no attention to having a proper backstop or that rounds might ricochet off the ground and go flying god knows how far into the hinterland. Both I and other serious shooters at our range regularly find ourselves educating a new haul of newly minted gung-ho shooters who swing rifles around on the range with magazines in place and the bots locked in the range safety rules only to have snotty comments thrown in our faces. I'm in favour of a certain level of gun control because while many gun owners know what they are doing and shooting clubs do good work educating shooters, the ease with which guns can be obtained has also resulted in the firearms community being full of compete morons who do not know how to properly operate a firearm. These people, have no respect for firearms and they seem to think guns are toys. To me gun control means first and foremost that nobody should be allowed to own a gun without having been taught how to use it properly and safely. It mystifies me that so many gun owners are against at least making sure that new gun owners are made to learn to shoot before being allowed to own guns so as to reduce the number of clueless idiots who make serious shooters look bad to an absolute minimum. It's a bit like fighting tooth and nail to allow people to buy cars and drive them without having ever learned how or what the traffic rules are.
Yeah, parent doesn't know what he's talking about. My uncles collected all types of war stuff (from Civil War to Desert Storm) and when he died, I was tasked to sell it. After taking out the best pieces (all German) to sell to people I know paid top dollar, the rest went to auction. The WW2 German stuff sold best, highest, and vastly more interest. Followed by Civil War, then the WW1 German stuff, followed by WW1/2 American stuff. The Korean/Vietnam/Other US stuff sold like shit in comparison. Although I will say WW2 US went up a lot since my uncles bought it pre-90s.
People watch the history channel and want a piece of the bad guys from the most visited topic: WW2. Nothing creepy about it.
That depends on how you define "Nazi collectables". To me it does not mean Mauser 98 rifles, Stalhelms or Wehrmacht badges. To me "Nazi collectables" means Nazi flags with swastikas, Gestapo badges and jackets, Gauleiter uniforms, party pins, concentration camp guard unit badges... etc. In Europe crap like that is very much niche collectibles especially since in some places like Germany for example you can be sent to f**k you in the a** jail for trading in that shit . Oh, and if you think it is so acceptable to trade in Nazi collectables why are you two posting AC?