We're worried about 90% of life on Earth becoming unsustainable as a result of global warming.
No we're not - we have fossil records from, e.g. the Jurassic where high temperatures and CO2 at about 1300ppm resulted in mega- flora and fauna all around the earth, even in areas that have desertified as the Earth's moisture has become locked up in Antarctic ice sheets over the past several hundred years of cooling (as evidenced by ancient Chinese maps).
What "we" are worried about is the rich cultural and political elite losing their seaside mansions and other shore-line real estate investments. Because we can find seashells 15' underground 20 miles inland from them and we know that the Earth's climate oscillates on several timescales, it's inevitable that the Earth will return to those prior conditions at some point in time.
But if we can slow down the encroachment of the sea on the banksters' wealth at all, then it's worth any cost to be borne by the 99%.
If speed is absolutely critical, you're going to go with C/C++/ASM/whatever native-compiled-language works well for your problem.
If speed is not absolutely critical, there's plenty of "scripting" languages that get the job done more easily with less code.
Yeah, this is how most 2+-sigma programmers on the right side of the standard distribution of programmers approach problems.
All the rest (the vast majority) need languages with good error messages, good error landing, decent garbage collection, a lack of value/reference handling, etc., and frankly being more procedural than functional is an asset to a below-average programmer.
Code density is not the criterion most mid-level enterprise IT managers need to deal with. Even with a complex project and a team, you can take one guy and have him write the JNI bits in C++ for performance (BTDTGTTS) while the rest of the team handles other parts and they don't have to know as much. It's actually really bad economics to have all top-notch programmers on your team if your project does not require that.
And before all you kids who got trophies for losing a soccer game get into a snit - by mathematical definition, half of all programmers are below-average.
And Java works pretty well for them, and there are stable and scalable deployment platforms for their code. Expect the "cool kids" to be wondering about Java in 2024 - even if there were a better replacement available today (there isn't), the extant code bases would not get replaced in one decade.
And to top it off, somebody in Oregon selected Oracle to be their vendor in the first place. I'll eagaerly await the replies here from folks whose experience with Oracle was that they were on-time, on-budget, went above-and-beyond in the name of customer service, and were a pleasure to work with. Too bad no company in the entire state of Oregon was qualified to build a database-backed website!
If the entire student body doesn't shut down the school, or at least picket the office and generate some arrests, they should be horribly ashamed.
In a situation like this there are so many people complicit in intellectual censorship that the only way to deal with it and maintain the school's reputation is to have a special investigator find everybody who signed off on it, everybody who could have objected, and everybody who was complicit and did not specifically and provably object to it, and fire them for cause. Then fire everybody who tries to cover it up and impede the investigation.
I sure wouldn't send my kid there given the current leadership. Tweaking any one policy will leave the same anti-intellectual stooges in control of the school. There's either a strong pro-intellectual signal sent or the status quo remains.
So, what's the Board of Trustees' position on this? Typically they don't want to rock any boats and do nothing about such incidents - they love to get wined and dined, collect a stipend, and rubber stamp administrative decisions while occasionally approving a hire of a search firm to find a new President. The old days of active Trustees are nearly extinguished.
Anytime someone prohibits you from viewing, listening or reading something it is thought crime, and policing thought is barbaric and unjustifiable violence against individuals.
They need to police your thoughts so you can have freedom.
Not every GMO contains nicatoids (engineers would know that). There are still some kids in China who could use yellow rice, and they definitely could export it to their neighbors.
Monsanto deserves a firey death for setting back non-psychopathic GMO's by 30 years or more.
I don't want to be another complainer, but this site is begging me to stop visiting. I am not very happy.
There's a town nearby that is behaving similar to Slashdot '14. They have a tax shortfall, so they raise taxes, and people move out. This creates a tax shortfall so, GOTO 1.
The property values have literally fallen in half in the past decade, while other area towns' properties have maintained or slightly increased, and there are many abandoned properties now (with associated problems).
Slashdot will seemingly keep increasing the "revenue enhancers" until everybody has moved out. At that point, I guess they declare victory and go home.
If you want to get all strict-constructionist on this matter though, planes, cars, buses, and rail didn't even exist when the Constitution was written, so one could argue that there's no Constitutional protection when travelling by anything beyond horseback, carriage, or walking.
No you cannot argue that. The Constitution says nothing about technology and everything about how humans behave.
Then there's the other side, where airlines were allowed to be in charge of their own security, letting "the market" set the balance, but then nineteen men decided to kill about 3500 men, women, and children one day, and our society realized that it wasn't gonna work to let the airlines be in charge of security.
That strategy ceased to be effective at 9:03AM on 9/11/2001 over a field in Shanksville, PA. And you know who figured that out? Ordinary Americans, doing the security calculus themselves, where the government had completely failed to protect them, despite having many opportunities to do so.
To be double-sure the airlines all secured their cockpit doors. That risk no longer exists, which is why the TSA has never caught a terrorist. They do violate the human rights of Americans all day, every day. In an effort to stop the terrorists, they have become the terrorists, all because they consciously choose to violate the highest law of the land.
I'm not sure voluntarily going on a plane is the government violating your right to privacy.
Be sure.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated
Your houses have privacy, and so do your papers, and so do your effects, and so does your person. You do not need to keep all your things, including your body, in your house to keep your privacy. Traveling is *expected* behavior of people - it does not remove your civil rights.
Well, in theory. The Bill of Rights only says what the Government may do and not do - if it behaves otherwise it's behaving illegally, but so what? Complain and get violated some more. Just don't fool yourself into thinking the Constitution is more than a relic of a long-lost Republic. If you don't care about rule-of-law, then just go about your business and submit to virtual strip searches. Just don't act surprised when a right you do care about is violated.
First you guys complain about broken links in the summaries, and now when there are no broken links in the summaries you're complaining too! Can't an editor catch a break around here?
Licensing is more complex than program itself. Everybody's getting sucked in to the lawyers' game.
This isn't surprising because one side is working with human nature - the tendency to share whatever makes them happy, and the other side is focused on battling government monopolies called "intellectual property", which is artificial scarcity enforced at the point of a gun.
Copyleft is just a hack to route around copyright damage. Absent governments enforcing it, we'd all just either release code or not release code and the licensing friction would all go away. Some dude would just issue a pull request and move on. There'd be nobody jumping up and down shouting about courts, fines, SWAT raids, caging and sexual torture over duplicating digital data.
But that's the reality we have to face. If more people chose WTFPL we'd get more done as a non-zero-sum group. The trick with the 'rising tide' analogy is that it's the sum that's non-zero; every individual value may or may not be positive, and some of those values that are currently positive might be negative and, man do humans waste time protecting their downside risks to the point of eliminating their upside potential.
It's an engineering problem now, not something that is clearly impossible.
While entirely true, I was visiting the Princeton Plasma Physics lab in 1990 and heard just that. The sad part was I'd have to wait until 2012 for the first commercial fusion reactor to be viable! It was sweet to stand in the control room while they fused a few atoms in the tokamak. And the flywheels they had were the stuff of a steampunk's wet dream!
To be fair, funding did decrease over the same time period and J.H.F.C., if the money spent on screwing up Iraq even more than it was had been spent on fusion research instead, Iraq would be much less relevant today in so many ways.
IMHO, investments in such experiments should be expanded, by both government and industry. Just like getting a man on the moon, We need a JFK'esk commitment to making this work.
We just need "JFK" to get out of the way and stop squashing every attempt commercialize technologies that actually put a huge dent into the carbon energy industry. Big oil plus big taxes on it is the stuff of _DC_ wet dreams.
I guess you've never personally worked on a community broadband project and learned what's involved with getting pole space (in the supposed 'public' right of way).
How would you replace that? How does anarchy work exactly?
There are entire sections of libraries about how this has worked in the past, works now (every unregulated transaction), and what kinds of improvements could be made in the future, but you can YouTube Bob Murphy for some gentle introductions. Just be careful of the "but who would pick the cotton?" arguments.
The onus is on nation states' defenders to show that neighborly spats and other small disputes would do worse than that. It's not like private conflict-resolution services don't already exist (and are always preferred in business contracts). Every lack-of-imagination excuse people have for "needing" nation states must be justified vis-a-vis the demonstrated body count (and that's only taking the utilitarian stance, not even the moral one).
If somebody showed up today promising peace in exchange for executing a tenth of the world's population, they'd be locked up in the psychopath ward and the religious people would call him an antichrist.
quadrotor-cowboys that are more interested in whether they CAN obtain footage using their newfangled toys than stopping to think about whether they SHOULD
No doubt when film cameras were first invented people went apeshit about them too. Most aerobot operators are totally responsible, but there are always a few exceptions in every population.
Society will just accept these risks and move on, like in every other situation with new technology. Our problem is we have a caste that calls themselves "lawmakers" and so all they want to do is make new laws.
Disliking homosexuals is completely different from not liking capitalists, conservatives, liberals, etc. Disliking homosexuals is disliking people for something that they didn't choose and cannot change.
You mean like how the USSR succeeded because it worked with innate human values instead of against them?
Slashdot Mirror
We're worried about 90% of life on Earth becoming unsustainable as a result of global warming.
No we're not - we have fossil records from, e.g. the Jurassic where high temperatures and CO2 at about 1300ppm resulted in mega- flora and fauna all around the earth, even in areas that have desertified as the Earth's moisture has become locked up in Antarctic ice sheets over the past several hundred years of cooling (as evidenced by ancient Chinese maps).
What "we" are worried about is the rich cultural and political elite losing their seaside mansions and other shore-line real estate investments. Because we can find seashells 15' underground 20 miles inland from them and we know that the Earth's climate oscillates on several timescales, it's inevitable that the Earth will return to those prior conditions at some point in time.
But if we can slow down the encroachment of the sea on the banksters' wealth at all, then it's worth any cost to be borne by the 99%.
The amount of energy required to overcome not just the physical bonds of stone but the gravity of the mass of the earth
Yes, but is it stronger than emo angst? Queenish drama is immune to gravity wells.
If speed is absolutely critical, you're going to go with C/C++/ASM/whatever native-compiled-language works well for your problem.
If speed is not absolutely critical, there's plenty of "scripting" languages that get the job done more easily with less code.
Yeah, this is how most 2+-sigma programmers on the right side of the standard distribution of programmers approach problems.
All the rest (the vast majority) need languages with good error messages, good error landing, decent garbage collection, a lack of value/reference handling, etc., and frankly being more procedural than functional is an asset to a below-average programmer.
Code density is not the criterion most mid-level enterprise IT managers need to deal with. Even with a complex project and a team, you can take one guy and have him write the JNI bits in C++ for performance (BTDTGTTS) while the rest of the team handles other parts and they don't have to know as much. It's actually really bad economics to have all top-notch programmers on your team if your project does not require that.
And before all you kids who got trophies for losing a soccer game get into a snit - by mathematical definition, half of all programmers are below-average.
And Java works pretty well for them, and there are stable and scalable deployment platforms for their code. Expect the "cool kids" to be wondering about Java in 2024 - even if there were a better replacement available today (there isn't), the extant code bases would not get replaced in one decade.
There's no such right, though there are some EU governments creating an enforced privilege, even for stuff paraded out in public.
For everybody else, check the agreement you enter into voluntarily when creating an account.
Time to build more prisons for youngsters.
What, have Truancy Officers really been slacking that much?
And to top it off, somebody in Oregon selected Oracle to be their vendor in the first place. I'll eagaerly await the replies here from folks whose experience with Oracle was that they were on-time, on-budget, went above-and-beyond in the name of customer service, and were a pleasure to work with. Too bad no company in the entire state of Oregon was qualified to build a database-backed website!
If the entire student body doesn't shut down the school, or at least picket the office and generate some arrests, they should be horribly ashamed.
In a situation like this there are so many people complicit in intellectual censorship that the only way to deal with it and maintain the school's reputation is to have a special investigator find everybody who signed off on it, everybody who could have objected, and everybody who was complicit and did not specifically and provably object to it, and fire them for cause. Then fire everybody who tries to cover it up and impede the investigation.
I sure wouldn't send my kid there given the current leadership. Tweaking any one policy will leave the same anti-intellectual stooges in control of the school. There's either a strong pro-intellectual signal sent or the status quo remains.
So, what's the Board of Trustees' position on this? Typically they don't want to rock any boats and do nothing about such incidents - they love to get wined and dined, collect a stipend, and rubber stamp administrative decisions while occasionally approving a hire of a search firm to find a new President. The old days of active Trustees are nearly extinguished.
We need way, way, more women like her on TV
They'd be silly to hitch their next decade to TV. They have plenty of fans if they want to Kickstart a YouTube channel.
These things could definitely be fixed, we just don't care to fix them.
And we don't even have the tools do to so. How many languages let you write:
secure char[] myPassword
much less:
secure objectType myObject
and have the language memset its memory to zero (or shred, etc.) for you when the variables go out of scope?
It's hard to do security right even if you're really trying. Anybody know if C++2014 made any gains here?
Anytime someone prohibits you from viewing, listening or reading something it is thought crime, and policing thought is barbaric and unjustifiable violence against individuals.
They need to police your thoughts so you can have freedom.
That is the reason.
Not every GMO contains nicatoids (engineers would know that). There are still some kids in China who could use yellow rice, and they definitely could export it to their neighbors.
Monsanto deserves a firey death for setting back non-psychopathic GMO's by 30 years or more.
I don't want to be another complainer, but this site is begging me to stop visiting. I am not very happy.
There's a town nearby that is behaving similar to Slashdot '14. They have a tax shortfall, so they raise taxes, and people move out. This creates a tax shortfall so, GOTO 1.
The property values have literally fallen in half in the past decade, while other area towns' properties have maintained or slightly increased, and there are many abandoned properties now (with associated problems).
Slashdot will seemingly keep increasing the "revenue enhancers" until everybody has moved out. At that point, I guess they declare victory and go home.
If you want to get all strict-constructionist on this matter though, planes, cars, buses, and rail didn't even exist when the Constitution was written, so one could argue that there's no Constitutional protection when travelling by anything beyond horseback, carriage, or walking.
No you cannot argue that. The Constitution says nothing about technology and everything about how humans behave.
Then there's the other side, where airlines were allowed to be in charge of their own security, letting "the market" set the balance, but then nineteen men decided to kill about 3500 men, women, and children one day, and our society realized that it wasn't gonna work to let the airlines be in charge of security.
That strategy ceased to be effective at 9:03AM on 9/11/2001 over a field in Shanksville, PA. And you know who figured that out? Ordinary Americans, doing the security calculus themselves, where the government had completely failed to protect them, despite having many opportunities to do so.
To be double-sure the airlines all secured their cockpit doors. That risk no longer exists, which is why the TSA has never caught a terrorist. They do violate the human rights of Americans all day, every day. In an effort to stop the terrorists, they have become the terrorists, all because they consciously choose to violate the highest law of the land.
I'm not sure voluntarily going on a plane is the government violating your right to privacy.
Be sure.
Your houses have privacy, and so do your papers, and so do your effects, and so does your person. You do not need to keep all your things, including your body, in your house to keep your privacy. Traveling is *expected* behavior of people - it does not remove your civil rights.
Well, in theory. The Bill of Rights only says what the Government may do and not do - if it behaves otherwise it's behaving illegally, but so what? Complain and get violated some more. Just don't fool yourself into thinking the Constitution is more than a relic of a long-lost Republic. If you don't care about rule-of-law, then just go about your business and submit to virtual strip searches. Just don't act surprised when a right you do care about is violated.
so some sort of article would be nice.
First you guys complain about broken links in the summaries, and now when there are no broken links in the summaries you're complaining too! Can't an editor catch a break around here?
Licensing is more complex than program itself. Everybody's getting sucked in to the lawyers' game.
This isn't surprising because one side is working with human nature - the tendency to share whatever makes them happy, and the other side is focused on battling government monopolies called "intellectual property", which is artificial scarcity enforced at the point of a gun.
Copyleft is just a hack to route around copyright damage. Absent governments enforcing it, we'd all just either release code or not release code and the licensing friction would all go away. Some dude would just issue a pull request and move on. There'd be nobody jumping up and down shouting about courts, fines, SWAT raids, caging and sexual torture over duplicating digital data.
But that's the reality we have to face. If more people chose WTFPL we'd get more done as a non-zero-sum group. The trick with the 'rising tide' analogy is that it's the sum that's non-zero; every individual value may or may not be positive, and some of those values that are currently positive might be negative and, man do humans waste time protecting their downside risks to the point of eliminating their upside potential.
It's an engineering problem now, not something that is clearly impossible.
While entirely true, I was visiting the Princeton Plasma Physics lab in 1990 and heard just that. The sad part was I'd have to wait until 2012 for the first commercial fusion reactor to be viable! It was sweet to stand in the control room while they fused a few atoms in the tokamak. And the flywheels they had were the stuff of a steampunk's wet dream!
To be fair, funding did decrease over the same time period and J.H.F.C., if the money spent on screwing up Iraq even more than it was had been spent on fusion research instead, Iraq would be much less relevant today in so many ways.
IMHO, investments in such experiments should be expanded, by both government and industry. Just like getting a man on the moon, We need a JFK'esk commitment to making this work.
We just need "JFK" to get out of the way and stop squashing every attempt commercialize technologies that actually put a huge dent into the carbon energy industry. Big oil plus big taxes on it is the stuff of _DC_ wet dreams.
I guess you've never personally worked on a community broadband project and learned what's involved with getting pole space (in the supposed 'public' right of way).
Give it a try - you'll learn something!
How would you replace that? How does anarchy work exactly?
There are entire sections of libraries about how this has worked in the past, works now (every unregulated transaction), and what kinds of improvements could be made in the future, but you can YouTube Bob Murphy for some gentle introductions. Just be careful of the "but who would pick the cotton?" arguments.
Hell, if people could actually trust each other, we wouldn't *need* nation states in the first place.
Nation states killed 350 million people in the last century alone.
The onus is on nation states' defenders to show that neighborly spats and other small disputes would do worse than that. It's not like private conflict-resolution services don't already exist (and are always preferred in business contracts). Every lack-of-imagination excuse people have for "needing" nation states must be justified vis-a-vis the demonstrated body count (and that's only taking the utilitarian stance, not even the moral one).
If somebody showed up today promising peace in exchange for executing a tenth of the world's population, they'd be locked up in the psychopath ward and the religious people would call him an antichrist.
ob. Joker:
"Spy on entire nations and nobody bats an eye - spy on a few government officials, and suddenly everybody loses their shit."
When the law says X, you break it at your own risk.
When a stupid law says X, you follow it at your own risk.
quadrotor-cowboys that are more interested in whether they CAN obtain footage using their newfangled toys than stopping to think about whether they SHOULD
No doubt when film cameras were first invented people went apeshit about them too. Most aerobot operators are totally responsible, but there are always a few exceptions in every population.
Society will just accept these risks and move on, like in every other situation with new technology. Our problem is we have a caste that calls themselves "lawmakers" and so all they want to do is make new laws.
As the meme goes, "WTF - stop banning shit."
Adam has been asking for more money every day for months...every episode of every show on the Carolla Digital network
Ah, there's the problem. Many of his biggest supporters in this effort have no interest in his shows at all.
Disliking homosexuals is completely different from not liking capitalists, conservatives, liberals, etc. Disliking homosexuals is disliking people for something that they didn't choose and cannot change.
You mean like how the USSR succeeded because it worked with innate human values instead of against them?