Expensive luxury products are bought by people with lots of money who want luxury for themselves. This probably goes for quite nearly all apple products.
The muslim nations in the middle east stand zero chance of forcing Sharia Law on Europe, even without the US "protecting" us.
Then why don't you undo it in Anderlecht and Schaarbeek first ?
You see, I've been to Brussels. And anyone who actually goes to the trouble of visiting these neighborhoods can trivially see the open hostility and violence uncovered women encounter there. Is that part of Belgian law perhaps ?
I'm told similar situations exist in Antwerp and "Mechelen", though I haven't actually seen it. One Jewish Belgian from Antwerp we interviewed for a job did attest to the open violence Jews encounter in Antwerp at the hands of muslims. Say, isn't that forbidden under Belgian law ?
That Europeans, or at least the ones living in Brussels, usually don't know their neighbors, never mind their street, is another obvious feature of Brussels. Perhaps that's why you "don't know".
Say, what is the German translation of "we didn't know" again ?
Generally before saying something is impossible, one looks outside, thoroughly. You know, just so you don't claim that "that big yellow ball in the sky doesn't exist".
If it really is the case that you are forced into having a military that size against your nations will then surely you would be better off leaving the rest of the world to its own devices?
The problem is that piracy on the seas basically amounts to an extra tax on imports. And it's a fucking high tax, last time the muslims were unopposed on the seas this was, according to historians, 80-90%.
If the US were to implement this policy, the economic activity in the US would drop by a factor of 100 or-so, back to what it was in 1900.
by feeling it has a duty to police
Without a western fleet that controls the oceans, international trade is next-to-impossible. Just like it was during the dark ages. Incidentally, those "dark ages" started just when piracy started to control the mediterranean and atlantic, and ended less than 50 years after western nations managed to decimate the muslim fleets. Oh well... perhaps that's a coincidence...
This is not the behaviour of a benevolent police force who only have everyone elses best interests at heart
And this is a concern how ? You're sounding like a church sermon.
ALL fleets that ever controlled the international waters EXCEPT that of the US openly comitted piracy and kidnapped people into slavery. The muslims ("the ottomans") started this "tradition", and while other nations copied them, nobody ever did it on anywhere near the scale the muslims did it, and that's ignoring that they massacred slaves regularly, something no western nation has ever done.
And "laws of other people", so the US fleet should help stone women then ? And what about people with different laws moving about ? If your neighbours are muslim and they wish to stone you for a sharia offence, would you find that understandable ? (e.g. such as thinking you have the same rights as a muslim, which sharia clearly states is a sin punishable by death for an infidel)
Do you think acting like that would be reasonable ?
The US isn't securing the seas for anyone else, but for itself. It's doing it for free. The US is not enforcing US laws on international waters, it's enforcing the international agreements on behavior in international waters.
Your post reads like a "why can't we all get along ?" complaint from a 5 year old. Let me again iterate the response from the last muslim government, because it illustrates the problem quite clearly, and is quite similar to the answer from, say, the chinese, to the same question.
Why do you have to attack us when we leave you alone ?
“that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.”
Clear enough, no ?
There's also the fundamental reason this is so. It has to do with evolution. We are divided, and the whole point of evolution is to divide us in groups that are better and groups that are worse. Then those groups are supposed to fight. This doesn't have to mean war, but it does have to end with one of the groups extinct (but it can mean starvation, sickness, even earthquakes... anything you like, well... anything you probably don't like).
All groups will want to use up all resources available on this planet, and they will use these resources to expand. This means that at some point the choice is between war and starvation, and the only choice is war. We live in a period where we've gotten a little break from this (thanks to that oil).
But unless there is a major breakthrough in energy generation coming very soon, we will return to the kill-or-starve model of international (and national) relations.
The US (and everyone else just has the US do it for them (for free)) has to secure the seas around the middle eastern nations.
(and yes that means that all regimes with a coastline there are either friendly or at least what you might call "contained")
Read up on your history to see extensive documentation on what happens with those seas unsecured (and don't forget the mediterranean is one of those seas). Really. It's even plain in American history : google barbary wars.
Example, from America's own congressional record for the answer to Thomas Jefferson's question on why it cannot work peacefully to mutual benefit:
In 1786 Thomas Jefferson, then US ambassador to France, and John Adams, then US Ambassador to Britain, met in London with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, the Dey’s ambassador to Britain, in an attempt to negotiate a peace treaty based on Congress’ vote of funding. To the US Congress these two future Presidents later reported the reasons for the Muslims’ hostility towards America, a nation with which they had no previous contacts.
“that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.”
To be honest, I couldn't care less what the taliban does in its own backyard, It just needs to stay there. I feel exactly the same way though about the US. The US (and Britain, where I live) has a long history of meddling in the middle east.
Great idea ! Really !
How much oil do you use (heating, electricity + car) ? How many exploding subways have you been in ?
Actually they did. At the very least they are of the opinion that violence against people who stone women and rape children is not allowed.
If that isn't support, then I don't know what is. Trust me, if I see you going to court and demand that someone be set free who raped 1% as many children as these "muslim students" (taliban in english) did, would you seriously claim that's not support ?
You hide behind all sorts of subtle technicalities. However the only thing that matters is what you actually accomplish in the real world.
I understand that impressing the nearest set of boobs with your "tough guy pacifist" is much more important to you than tens of thousands of raped and murdered women, but let's not pretend it's anything else.
Your actions, in real life, have consequences for others. Being against the war, if it has any effect, will have the effect of advancing the causes of raping and stoning women, and religious persecution. That's a simple fact you can't deny.
So why do you support stoning women, killing gays, lesbians and anyone even slightly different ?
Because that's what your choice means, in the real world.
And yes, if the choice between the choice of warring over oil, and the total racist abomination that is islam(ic law), warring over oil is without any doubt the moral choice.
Maybe you're right about me being a bit too positive about the US. Still it's a FAR cry from stooping to the muslim students' moral abominations (that's "taliban" translated to English)
So in the end you're making the point "the US isn't 100% perfect, so it's as bad as Hitler/taliban/Chavez/North Korea/...".
The stupidity and discrimination that argument makes frankly baffles me, it even applies to you and me. Do you even really think it's true, when applied to you, me or the US ? But you don't get to apply that argument just to the US, of course.
You should analyse what these people are saying more closely.
The US has it's flaws. -> It's abused a few prisoners -> It's violated a few (totally unrealistic) human rights during extremely high-stress situations, mostly convicting the individuals responsible -> It's that most horrible of things... capitalist (meaning mainly that most things that happen in the US are not decided by corrupt politicians, like mostly everywhere else).
The taliban. -> stone women slowly to death for mostly imaginary offences, totally in violation of every human right (even the ones they signed a treaty for) -> execute minor children in the same manner -> rape the female minor children (and quite frankly, who here believes they don't rape the boys as well ?) -> rape female prisoners as a matter of policy ("to prevent them going to heaven" - right) -> kill gays as a matter of policy, by throwing them off high buildings (given how backwards they are, they generally have to throw them off the building at least twice until they're dead) -> kill dissidents -> kill anyone of different faith as a matter of policy -> destroy everything even remotely looking like it might have something to do with another religion, mostly with people inside
These facts are not disputed. Between these 2 actors, can there really be any argument which is the moral actor ? Personally I think on the whole, if the US simply exterminated the entirety of Afghanistan, it would still be able to claim the moral high ground over the Taliban. The Soviets were, undoubtedly, better people than the Afghans.
So let's not pretend these people have an actual, valid, beef with the moral attitude of the US. They don't. They're just haters who want a bit of attention and/or political power.
To the idiots defending the taliban : Wouldn't it be fair to say your pro-stoning ? Pro-raping children ? Pro-raping prisoners ? Pro-religious persecution ?
Because that's 1) what it looks like 2) the effect your "dangerous" (but obviously totally risk-free) idiocy has in the real world
Nevertheless C could do with some relatively trivial extensions. First class functions, lambdas given that C has function pointers, are trivial to implement. Why not do it ? "linkedlist.sort( { a, b -> a.phoneNumber b.phoneNumber } );" would rock.
And I've always wondered about the preprocessor. Let's face it, #include is such an ugly abomination that the C books should be fitted with an FBI warning, some sort of module system would be a very nice addition.
And on the subject of #include. It's a great idea to have macros in a language, but C is in reality 2 languages : preprocessor and C. Can't we do it with one language (like lisp does, but surely more complex languages can do the same). I have dreams of structures that get statically constructed (like in assembly) and then added to at runtime by basically the same code. "struct linkedList fib = { 0, 1 };" should result in the buildup of... a linked list at compile time.
Or look at it more complex. Say you have some struct declaration. Why not have a full macro language ? Say you could have a struct, like any other, and then generate a function "char * (*structToJson) (t) structToJsonGenerator(type t)". Given how "easily readable" that function pointer declaration is, perhaps some form of type inference (other than void *) would be great.
I've always wondered why compilers find it such a great idea to make type information available to the program at runtime, and yet no-one has a decent (compiled) language that really makes types available to the program at compile time.
And the thing everyone loves about C++ would be a great addition to C as well : struct constructors and destructors. Surely that can't be that hard to implement.
Furthermore C really needs some sort of javadoc function... Anything, just as long as it gets accepted upstream. Something that could generate anything from manpages to html indices.
I've had a compiler construction course, and one thing that I wondered about is that type inference and a few other tricks can make nearly all of a language like python available in something that can be compiled down directly to machine code, except perhaps eval(string_I_just_received_from_a_really_nice_chinese_ip_address). Even things like __getattr__ are perfectly translateable to a switch statement, as long as you don't allow runtime expansion of class definitions (but compile time class expansion... go wild).
Even python's "yield" is not that hard to implement
Pics are still less than satisfactory. What goes into this design, and what are the catches ? Slow as hell ? No touchscreen ?
Incidentially the second part of the article is (potentially) revealing:
"The aim is to reach such devices to the students of colleges and universities, and to provide these institutions a host of choices of low-cost access devices around Rs 1,500 ($35) or less in near future," the human resources ministry said at the launch of the computer.
Meaning it's not this tablet that's $35, it's just that they're working on devices like that. Could this mean that they don't actually have device schematics for this device at $35 ?
Someone needs to explain me how you can create 5 megawatts with only 30.000 square meters. That would make the plant produce 160 Watts/sq. meter on average.
Theoretical maximum efficiency for any kind of solar plant (on the equator) is less than 200 Watts per square meter (to give you an idea, in southern florida it drops below 150, and this is north of florida). That would make this plant over 120% efficient (at least).
Unless, of course, you know, they're lying and it's like 5 megawatts peak capacity at 12h noon at that optimal day in spring when the sun is directly overhead for its longest period, and only counting the total energy circulating in the plant, not what's actually coming out to the grid, which should be a bit under 2/3rd of that, or, say 3.8 megawatts. And 3, at best, during winter.
Really ? When did Europeans restore the massive forests of Europe they've burned ? The surface tar ? The swamps ? The coal mines ? The rivers they've "fixed" ? The coal ? The natural gas ? Even the very sea is modified : very few coastlines have their natural shapes. And this list is far from complete.
When did Americans restore the animal populations of northern America ? The forests ? The lakes ? The mountaintops ? The coal ? The oil ?...
And let's not pretend anyone, from African tribes, to chinese, to arabs, to... fares better in comparisons like this.
We've always survived by switching to new energy sources, by adapting once the damage began to affect us. We've NEVER survived by preventing damage. We started by using woods and caught animals. Then woods and agriculture. Then woods, agriculture and bred animals. Then surface tar, agriculture and bred animals (this is when using fossil fuels to speed up agriculture started). Tar->stoned wood->coal->animal oil (the first cars were driven by whale oil and corn oil, not fossil fuels, needless to say we ran out quickly, and there was a biofuel debacle : the rich let the poor starve so they could drive cars)->oil generated from coal->gas generated from coil (all of these are somewhat mixed up in history)->fossil oil (and then during WWI and WWII we switched back to coal oil and even biofuels for a while out of necessity)
We've always adapted. Never even once in history have we begun to live in a sustainable way.
“It’s always nice when people agree with you. We’ve maintained that nuclear power is a dangerous distraction to the real solutions to the climate crisis for a long time now. It’s dirty, it’s unsafe, it’s a threat to world peace and it is terribly, terribly expensive.”
When people are starting to use multiple unfounded insults to describe something, it generally means they don't like it.
See ? When it comes to actually thinking about solutions to becoming renewable, in 3 posts, you become that most hated of things : a mining, stripping, non-recycling, capitalist who doesn't care about the future.
Like anyone else who has to live in the real world.
In disney movies, yes. In practice those governments regularly massacred their neighbors (and if you think about what happens in such a government with population growth, you understand why that must happen).
The arguments for "the free market" can sound pretty compelling to someone who is naive and basically decent, who doesn't appreciate the depths of human depravity in the wild.
That exactly the reason you want "the free market". You see, however bad the depravity of individual humans is, governments are worse. A lot worse. In a free market you have a chance. Many fail, few succeed. But everyone is equal and everyone gets a chance. With government regulation none succeed. All fail.
Holocaust Gulags Devshirme (the muslim "child tax", literally) Dhimmi Ceremoniously cutting out the hearts of people who were arrested at random, after torturing them for a month Eating the children of the enemy (Carthagens did this to Roman children, and when those were protected, they just robbed some of their own villages).
All were enforced by governments. Can you name even 1 act by an individual that matches any of those ?
Actually if you think monsanto has a bad track record, you should check out the "general thinking" a few hundred years back.
How about feeding babies lead ? How about painting watches with radium, a highly radioactive substance, so you could read them in the dark ? How about having the painters of said radium paint LICK the brushes into shape ? (needless to say, nobody lived 15 years after doing that) How about swimming (I'm not kidding) in heavy water (literally swimming inside the reactor of a nuclear plant at it's lowest setting. Surely taking up all that energy is healthy) How about treating bacterial infections with nerve gas ? (and more general, just look up what they gave people before penicillin, you'll be amused and utterly horrified. Note : this was done 40 years ago (and in Afghanistan or some other backwards hellhole, perhaps they're still doing it)) How about taking regular doses of a lethal toxin, each dose too small to kill (but mess up your measurement or composition once and...) How about the "all-American" treatment for a cannabis habit that consisted of force feeding the addicted a near-overdose of cocaine (this was once "normal" medical practice. I'll say this for it though : it most definitely fixed any addiction. The long term consequences... *ahem*) Or how about doing surgery on people after... knocking them out (the patient actually paid separately for this). There are colorful descriptions of how if these people woke up during the operation and the spasms of pain literally threw their intestines into the air before they could be knocked out again (general practice before the discovery of anasthasia)
We have a long history of utterly stupid treatments and ways to deal with the environment. Any company older than even a mere 50 years is going to have a track record that would make the devil himself feel pity for the victims. But so does the entire nation. And all nations on this earth.
And make no mistake, at least the "using poison on sick people to make them better" chances are your granddad did that.
So adding taxes will : a) damage the economy b) boost living standards
Unless I'm once again "reading what I want you to have written" you might want to look into that signature change to "consistently inconsistent" again.
You know, I've always wondered and you seem the perfect person to ask : where I can get me some water that's not wet ?
So 5000 years is a short time for you then ? Judging by the sales figures of Tivo descendants anything over 30 seconds is considered intolerably long in the 21st century.
Regardless, the point was that the Dutch totally destroyed the natural environment of the Netherlands, and now they're worried about energy efficiency. It all seems a bit...
Well, like burning down a piece of 5000 year old forest, then build a garden and then "environmentally protect" your garden.
Heh, I even know a European who did just that with a piece of forest in Poland. Beautiful though. Much better, quite frankly, than that dreadful forest.
Heh, guess I agree with the Dutch. I don't claim that anything about this behavior "protects natural habitats" of course.
And the natural environment we had here centuries ago was already fast-changing, the rivers and sea shaped the land constantly. It was not an environment you could live in comfortably, and there weren't any old forests.
River's fast changing ?
You know, when they say Verizon's ping times are geological timescales... they don't mean really short...
Slashdot Mirror
You know, there's a reason it gets modded funny. If you need a "portable consumption device" you're exactly what the article claims.
In other news :
Expensive luxury products are bought by people with lots of money who want luxury for themselves. This probably goes for quite nearly all apple products.
- Captain Obvious
Actually I live in Brussels.
The muslim nations in the middle east stand zero chance of forcing Sharia Law on Europe, even without the US "protecting" us.
Then why don't you undo it in Anderlecht and Schaarbeek first ?
You see, I've been to Brussels. And anyone who actually goes to the trouble of visiting these neighborhoods can trivially see the open hostility and violence uncovered women encounter there. Is that part of Belgian law perhaps ?
I'm told similar situations exist in Antwerp and "Mechelen", though I haven't actually seen it. One Jewish Belgian from Antwerp we interviewed for a job did attest to the open violence Jews encounter in Antwerp at the hands of muslims. Say, isn't that forbidden under Belgian law ?
That Europeans, or at least the ones living in Brussels, usually don't know their neighbors, never mind their street, is another obvious feature of Brussels. Perhaps that's why you "don't know".
Say, what is the German translation of "we didn't know" again ?
Generally before saying something is impossible, one looks outside, thoroughly. You know, just so you don't claim that "that big yellow ball in the sky doesn't exist".
If it really is the case that you are forced into having a military that size against your nations will then surely you would be better off leaving the rest of the world to its own devices?
The problem is that piracy on the seas basically amounts to an extra tax on imports. And it's a fucking high tax, last time the muslims were unopposed on the seas this was, according to historians, 80-90%.
If the US were to implement this policy, the economic activity in the US would drop by a factor of 100 or-so, back to what it was in 1900.
by feeling it has a duty to police
Without a western fleet that controls the oceans, international trade is next-to-impossible. Just like it was during the dark ages. Incidentally, those "dark ages" started just when piracy started to control the mediterranean and atlantic, and ended less than 50 years after western nations managed to decimate the muslim fleets. Oh well ... perhaps that's a coincidence ...
This is not the behaviour of a benevolent police force who only have everyone elses best interests at heart
And this is a concern how ? You're sounding like a church sermon.
ALL fleets that ever controlled the international waters EXCEPT that of the US openly comitted piracy and kidnapped people into slavery. The muslims ("the ottomans") started this "tradition", and while other nations copied them, nobody ever did it on anywhere near the scale the muslims did it, and that's ignoring that they massacred slaves regularly, something no western nation has ever done.
And "laws of other people", so the US fleet should help stone women then ? And what about people with different laws moving about ? If your neighbours are muslim and they wish to stone you for a sharia offence, would you find that understandable ? (e.g. such as thinking you have the same rights as a muslim, which sharia clearly states is a sin punishable by death for an infidel)
Do you think acting like that would be reasonable ?
The US isn't securing the seas for anyone else, but for itself. It's doing it for free. The US is not enforcing US laws on international waters, it's enforcing the international agreements on behavior in international waters.
Your post reads like a "why can't we all get along ?" complaint from a 5 year old. Let me again iterate the response from the last muslim government, because it illustrates the problem quite clearly, and is quite similar to the answer from, say, the chinese, to the same question.
Why do you have to attack us when we leave you alone ?
“that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.”
Clear enough, no ?
There's also the fundamental reason this is so. It has to do with evolution. We are divided, and the whole point of evolution is to divide us in groups that are better and groups that are worse. Then those groups are supposed to fight. This doesn't have to mean war, but it does have to end with one of the groups extinct (but it can mean starvation, sickness, even earthquakes ... anything you like, well ... anything you probably don't like).
All groups will want to use up all resources available on this planet, and they will use these resources to expand. This means that at some point the choice is between war and starvation, and the only choice is war. We live in a period where we've gotten a little break from this (thanks to that oil).
But unless there is a major breakthrough in energy generation coming very soon, we will return to the kill-or-starve model of international (and national) relations.
The US (and everyone else just has the US do it for them (for free)) has to secure the seas around the middle eastern nations.
(and yes that means that all regimes with a coastline there are either friendly or at least what you might call "contained")
Read up on your history to see extensive documentation on what happens with those seas unsecured (and don't forget the mediterranean is one of those seas). Really. It's even plain in American history : google barbary wars.
Example, from America's own congressional record for the answer to Thomas Jefferson's question on why it cannot work peacefully to mutual benefit :
In 1786 Thomas Jefferson, then US ambassador to France, and John Adams, then US Ambassador to Britain, met in London with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, the Dey’s ambassador to Britain, in an attempt to negotiate a peace treaty based on Congress’ vote of funding. To the US Congress these two future Presidents later reported the reasons for the Muslims’ hostility towards America, a nation with which they had no previous contacts.
“that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.”
This was 1786, and nothing has changed.
To be honest, I couldn't care less what the taliban does in its own backyard, It just needs to stay there. I feel exactly the same way though about the US. The US (and Britain, where I live) has a long history of meddling in the middle east.
Great idea ! Really !
How much oil do you use (heating, electricity + car) ? How many exploding subways have you been in ?
Just wondering ...
Actually they did. At the very least they are of the opinion that violence against people who stone women and rape children is not allowed.
If that isn't support, then I don't know what is. Trust me, if I see you going to court and demand that someone be set free who raped 1% as many children as these "muslim students" (taliban in english) did, would you seriously claim that's not support ?
You hide behind all sorts of subtle technicalities. However the only thing that matters is what you actually accomplish in the real world.
I understand that impressing the nearest set of boobs with your "tough guy pacifist" is much more important to you than tens of thousands of raped and murdered women, but let's not pretend it's anything else.
Your actions, in real life, have consequences for others. Being against the war, if it has any effect, will have the effect of advancing the causes of raping and stoning women, and religious persecution. That's a simple fact you can't deny.
So why do you support stoning women, killing gays, lesbians and anyone even slightly different ?
Because that's what your choice means, in the real world.
And yes, if the choice between the choice of warring over oil, and the total racist abomination that is islam(ic law), warring over oil is without any doubt the moral choice.
Maybe you're right about me being a bit too positive about the US. Still it's a FAR cry from stooping to the muslim students' moral abominations (that's "taliban" translated to English)
So in the end you're making the point "the US isn't 100% perfect, so it's as bad as Hitler/taliban/Chavez/North Korea/...".
The stupidity and discrimination that argument makes frankly baffles me, it even applies to you and me. Do you even really think it's true, when applied to you, me or the US ? But you don't get to apply that argument just to the US, of course.
You should analyse what these people are saying more closely.
The US has it's flaws. ... capitalist (meaning mainly that most things that happen in the US are not decided by corrupt politicians, like mostly everywhere else).
-> It's abused a few prisoners
-> It's violated a few (totally unrealistic) human rights during extremely high-stress situations, mostly convicting the individuals responsible
-> It's that most horrible of things
The taliban.
-> stone women slowly to death for mostly imaginary offences, totally in violation of every human right (even the ones they signed a treaty for)
-> execute minor children in the same manner
-> rape the female minor children (and quite frankly, who here believes they don't rape the boys as well ?)
-> rape female prisoners as a matter of policy ("to prevent them going to heaven" - right)
-> kill gays as a matter of policy, by throwing them off high buildings (given how backwards they are, they generally have to throw them off the building at least twice until they're dead)
-> kill dissidents
-> kill anyone of different faith as a matter of policy
-> destroy everything even remotely looking like it might have something to do with another religion, mostly with people inside
These facts are not disputed. Between these 2 actors, can there really be any argument which is the moral actor ? Personally I think on the whole, if the US simply exterminated the entirety of Afghanistan, it would still be able to claim the moral high ground over the Taliban. The Soviets were, undoubtedly, better people than the Afghans.
So let's not pretend these people have an actual, valid, beef with the moral attitude of the US. They don't. They're just haters who want a bit of attention and/or political power.
To the idiots defending the taliban :
Wouldn't it be fair to say your pro-stoning ? Pro-raping children ? Pro-raping prisoners ? Pro-religious persecution ?
Because that's
1) what it looks like
2) the effect your "dangerous" (but obviously totally risk-free) idiocy has in the real world
That's great, really. But how much power is the "smoothed" output ?
I'm thinking 2 megawatts. 3 at best.
Nevertheless C could do with some relatively trivial extensions. First class functions, lambdas given that C has function pointers, are trivial to implement. Why not do it ? "linkedlist.sort( { a, b -> a.phoneNumber b.phoneNumber } );" would rock.
And I've always wondered about the preprocessor. Let's face it, #include is such an ugly abomination that the C books should be fitted with an FBI warning, some sort of module system would be a very nice addition.
And on the subject of #include. It's a great idea to have macros in a language, but C is in reality 2 languages : preprocessor and C. Can't we do it with one language (like lisp does, but surely more complex languages can do the same). I have dreams of structures that get statically constructed (like in assembly) and then added to at runtime by basically the same code. "struct linkedList fib = { 0, 1 };" should result in the buildup of ... a linked list at compile time.
Or look at it more complex. Say you have some struct declaration. Why not have a full macro language ? Say you could have a struct, like any other, and then generate a function "char * (*structToJson) (t) structToJsonGenerator(type t)". Given how "easily readable" that function pointer declaration is, perhaps some form of type inference (other than void *) would be great.
I've always wondered why compilers find it such a great idea to make type information available to the program at runtime, and yet no-one has a decent (compiled) language that really makes types available to the program at compile time.
And the thing everyone loves about C++ would be a great addition to C as well : struct constructors and destructors. Surely that can't be that hard to implement.
Furthermore C really needs some sort of javadoc function ... Anything, just as long as it gets accepted upstream. Something that could generate anything from manpages to html indices.
I've had a compiler construction course, and one thing that I wondered about is that type inference and a few other tricks can make nearly all of a language like python available in something that can be compiled down directly to machine code, except perhaps eval(string_I_just_received_from_a_really_nice_chinese_ip_address). Even things like __getattr__ are perfectly translateable to a switch statement, as long as you don't allow runtime expansion of class definitions (but compile time class expansion ... go wild).
Even python's "yield" is not that hard to implement
You sound like exactly the kind of programmer we want ! How about an interview ? We'll pay the flight to redmond.
Pics are still less than satisfactory. What goes into this design, and what are the catches ? Slow as hell ? No touchscreen ?
Incidentially the second part of the article is (potentially) revealing :
"The aim is to reach such devices to the students of colleges and universities, and to provide these institutions a host of choices of low-cost access devices around Rs 1,500 ($35) or less in near future," the human resources ministry said at the launch of the computer.
Meaning it's not this tablet that's $35, it's just that they're working on devices like that. Could this mean that they don't actually have device schematics for this device at $35 ?
Someone needs to explain me how you can create 5 megawatts with only 30.000 square meters. That would make the plant produce 160 Watts/sq. meter on average.
Theoretical maximum efficiency for any kind of solar plant (on the equator) is less than 200 Watts per square meter (to give you an idea, in southern florida it drops below 150, and this is north of florida). That would make this plant over 120% efficient (at least).
Unless, of course, you know, they're lying and it's like 5 megawatts peak capacity at 12h noon at that optimal day in spring when the sun is directly overhead for its longest period, and only counting the total energy circulating in the plant, not what's actually coming out to the grid, which should be a bit under 2/3rd of that, or, say 3.8 megawatts. And 3, at best, during winter.
Really ? When did Europeans restore the massive forests of Europe they've burned ? The surface tar ? The swamps ? The coal mines ? The rivers they've "fixed" ? The coal ? The natural gas ? Even the very sea is modified : very few coastlines have their natural shapes. And this list is far from complete.
When did Americans restore the animal populations of northern America ? The forests ? The lakes ? The mountaintops ? The coal ? The oil ? ...
And let's not pretend anyone, from African tribes, to chinese, to arabs, to ... fares better in comparisons like this.
We've always survived by switching to new energy sources, by adapting once the damage began to affect us. We've NEVER survived by preventing damage. We started by using woods and caught animals. Then woods and agriculture. Then woods, agriculture and bred animals. Then surface tar, agriculture and bred animals (this is when using fossil fuels to speed up agriculture started). Tar->stoned wood->coal->animal oil (the first cars were driven by whale oil and corn oil, not fossil fuels, needless to say we ran out quickly, and there was a biofuel debacle : the rich let the poor starve so they could drive cars)->oil generated from coal->gas generated from coil (all of these are somewhat mixed up in history)->fossil oil (and then during WWI and WWII we switched back to coal oil and even biofuels for a while out of necessity)
We've always adapted. Never even once in history have we begun to live in a sustainable way.
Not a single (living) animal has.
Let's pretend you don't know this yet : anyone who's "against global warming" in the democrat party is a whole lot more against nuclear power.
Let's pretend, however unlikely it sounds, that this is a discovery for you.
example :
http://www.green-blog.org/2009/03/18/al-gore-nuclear-power-is-not-the-answer-to-our-energy-and-climate-crisis/
“It’s always nice when people agree with you. We’ve maintained that nuclear power is a dangerous distraction to the real solutions to the climate crisis for a long time now. It’s dirty, it’s unsafe, it’s a threat to world peace and it is terribly, terribly expensive.”
When people are starting to use multiple unfounded insults to describe something, it generally means they don't like it.
See ? When it comes to actually thinking about solutions to becoming renewable, in 3 posts, you become that most hated of things : a mining, stripping, non-recycling, capitalist who doesn't care about the future.
Like anyone else who has to live in the real world.
In disney movies, yes. In practice those governments regularly massacred their neighbors (and if you think about what happens in such a government with population growth, you understand why that must happen).
The arguments for "the free market" can sound pretty compelling to someone who is naive and basically decent, who doesn't appreciate the depths of human depravity in the wild.
That exactly the reason you want "the free market". You see, however bad the depravity of individual humans is, governments are worse. A lot worse. In a free market you have a chance. Many fail, few succeed. But everyone is equal and everyone gets a chance. With government regulation none succeed. All fail.
Holocaust
Gulags
Devshirme (the muslim "child tax", literally)
Dhimmi
Ceremoniously cutting out the hearts of people who were arrested at random, after torturing them for a month
Eating the children of the enemy (Carthagens did this to Roman children, and when those were protected, they just robbed some of their own villages).
All were enforced by governments. Can you name even 1 act by an individual that matches any of those ?
It's a fake crisis, like so many others. Photoshopped news is not that rare. And often, it's for more than just aesthetics
http://www.speroforum.com/a/34500/Reuters-admits-to-doctored-photos-of-Gaza-Flotilla
(after all the story was that Israel attacked "unarmed" protestors, can't have huge knives in the hands of protestors, especially when they appear to be using them on soldiers)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Lebanon_War_photographs_controversies
http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/184452.php
I guess in some cases, these fotos are simply "fake, but accurate", right ? And then there are the tings never shown :
http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/2009/02/a-dispatch-from.php
Actually if you think monsanto has a bad track record, you should check out the "general thinking" a few hundred years back.
How about feeding babies lead ? ...) ... *ahem*) ... knocking them out (the patient actually paid separately for this). There are colorful descriptions of how if these people woke up during the operation and the spasms of pain literally threw their intestines into the air before they could be knocked out again (general practice before the discovery of anasthasia)
How about painting watches with radium, a highly radioactive substance, so you could read them in the dark ?
How about having the painters of said radium paint LICK the brushes into shape ? (needless to say, nobody lived 15 years after doing that)
How about swimming (I'm not kidding) in heavy water (literally swimming inside the reactor of a nuclear plant at it's lowest setting. Surely taking up all that energy is healthy)
How about treating bacterial infections with nerve gas ? (and more general, just look up what they gave people before penicillin, you'll be amused and utterly horrified. Note : this was done 40 years ago (and in Afghanistan or some other backwards hellhole, perhaps they're still doing it))
How about taking regular doses of a lethal toxin, each dose too small to kill (but mess up your measurement or composition once and
How about the "all-American" treatment for a cannabis habit that consisted of force feeding the addicted a near-overdose of cocaine (this was once "normal" medical practice. I'll say this for it though : it most definitely fixed any addiction. The long term consequences
Or how about doing surgery on people after
We have a long history of utterly stupid treatments and ways to deal with the environment. Any company older than even a mere 50 years is going to have a track record that would make the devil himself feel pity for the victims. But so does the entire nation. And all nations on this earth.
And make no mistake, at least the "using poison on sick people to make them better" chances are your granddad did that.
So adding taxes will :
a) damage the economy
b) boost living standards
Unless I'm once again "reading what I want you to have written" you might want to look into that signature change to "consistently inconsistent" again.
You know, I've always wondered and you seem the perfect person to ask : where I can get me some water that's not wet ?
So 5000 years is a short time for you then ? Judging by the sales figures of Tivo descendants anything over 30 seconds is considered intolerably long in the 21st century.
Regardless, the point was that the Dutch totally destroyed the natural environment of the Netherlands, and now they're worried about energy efficiency. It all seems a bit ...
Well, like burning down a piece of 5000 year old forest, then build a garden and then "environmentally protect" your garden.
Heh, I even know a European who did just that with a piece of forest in Poland. Beautiful though. Much better, quite frankly, than that dreadful forest.
Heh, guess I agree with the Dutch. I don't claim that anything about this behavior "protects natural habitats" of course.
And the natural environment we had here centuries ago was already fast-changing, the rivers and sea shaped the land constantly. It was not an environment you could live in comfortably, and there weren't any old forests.
River's fast changing ?
You know, when they say Verizon's ping times are geological timescales ... they don't mean really short ...