Yes, but it will be used in situations like Boston.
Now, if only we had a well known principal about laws, something we could point at when a law is used for or does something which wasn't anticipated. Oh wait, we do!
And how many dead Germans do we have lying about with tempting war trophies on them, here in the US?
This war on terrorism bullshit has got to stop, it's so bad that we are jumping at shadows, and trying to justify it to ourselves. Yes, a group of terrorists got lucky on September 11th, 2001*. And they have done what since on US soil? Exactly dick. And, guess what, if they do decide to do something, odds are they are going to be successful. Even if we lock down our country into a police state, and have robots look at any suspicious packages, they are still going to get lucky again. Heck, even the best police states known to man, have had problems with subversives. Go look up the Stasi and the trouble they had keeping the East German people in line. They were very good, but still not perfect. If they couldn't do it, a reasonably free country like ours isn't going to stand a chance.
* note: a lot of the luck was the simple fact that the US people are so brainwashed to give in to criminals that a few hundred people couldn't overcome a couple with box cutters.
The memorization is the prerequisite for playing the *real* game
No, you're just being closed mined about it. What the game is simply changes. As for the skills you mentioned above, they all still play in to a random map:
1. Twitch
It's an FPS, this will always be part of the game. If anything, the randomness is going to emphasize this further. It takes little in the way of quick reaction to fire a rocket at a known location when you see the enemy. On the other hand, if you don't know where that enemy is going to come from, it's going to take a lot of speed and accuracy to get the first shot off.
2. Map control
Again, not gone at all. You will still need to control the map, you'll just have to learn how to do it on the fly. Yes, this means that you won't have the well developed strategies which come about from well known maps. But ignoring your terrain will still be fatal. What it does mean is that you will have to be more adaptable. You will have to find and control choke points, not just rush them. Also, the sniping camper will be in for a lot more trouble when someone discovers an easy way to him.
3. Enemy prediction
This one will be diminished a bit. You won't know what the enemy is doing, because there won't be several well hashed out tactics that each side uses every time. you will, instead, have to figure this out each time. There will still be base assumptions, it's still an FPS, and there will still be certain objectives (assuming non-deathmatch play). This seems like a good thing to me. I've spent too many hours playing the exact same map, with both sides using the exact same tactic, the result coming out as much to luck as anything else.
4. Self unpredictability
It's a random map, this should be a playground of unpredictability.
The problem isn't the idea, it's just that you are stuck in the "memorize and own the map" mentality. The game will be different, no doubt, but just discarding it out of hand because it's not what you are used to is just dumb.
I think I would have invoke the more apt clause of the Declaration of Independence: transporting us beyond our seas to be tried for pretend offenses.
A few posts back someone mentioned that the US government effectively owns the Australian government, this is probably close to true, but it does not have to be. Those of us living here in the States are screwed, we're going to have our very own police state soon, it is what the people want, after all. But with our military streched to the limit, off on military adventures around the globe, now is the time for other countries to revolt against US economic occupation. The US may not have troops in Australia, the US just has a lapdog government to keep the locals happy. Get rid of it now, before it's too late and you become just another province in the new empire.
Better yet, turn the box off, disconnect all of the cables and bury it in 100 feet of concrete on a US Marine base and tell them that it contains nuclear secrets, which must be protected at all costs. Then, your box will be secure, it will also be unusable. IT security is always a trade off between security and usability. A server with no open ports is not a server, it's an island of useless resources. It's not a bad admin who opens ports, it's just a function of the job. Now, as stated, that admin should be watching things, and making sure that nothing bad happens; but, nothing will every bee 100% secure. It was written by humans, there are bound to be a few mistakes in there somewhere. Yes, it helps to start with a better base, but IT security will never go away.
I agree that the sex issue will probably need to be resolved by going outside the current norms of American society, and probably will just be done queitly.
Death in space is easy. "We now commend this body to the deep..." The US Navy has been doing this since we stole the idea from the British, "the deep" will simply take on a new meaning. There will still be issues of emotional stress on the surviving members, but this is also something that we've been dealing with for a while in society, they'll cope.
Illness is going to be the tough one. Granted a good screening program will stop a lot of it. And, as with old sailing ships, once they've been out long enough, everyone is resistant to the diseases that went with them, so illness falls off. As you mentioned, cancer and degenerative diseases are going to be the tough ones. the mission is going to have to include a medical doctor, and a way to do surgery. It will help if there is a sterile area to do it in, but that is not an absolute necessity. We do that on Earth, because it makes post operation infection far less likely, but in a pinch, you can do without and then use anti-biotics. Keep in mind that the ancient Romans had some fairly advanced surgery techniques, but no anti-biotics or anesthesia for that matter, yet they still managed to keep people alive. This type of mission is going to be about managing risks, not eliminating them.
The math isn't really that different, the Chinese question just requires more of it. In both cases you are simply going to be applying trig functions over and over again. Though, having not worked both problems out, the Chinese one may require use of either the law of the sines or law of the cosines, neither of which do I remember off the top of my head these days (does anyone who isn't in school or an engineer?). Really, the hardest part about the Chinese one looks to be the fact that you are having to visualize a 3 dimensional object, and do trig against it; though, really once you get into that sort of thing, it's a matter of compartmentalizing the problem into a sequence of discrete 2 dimensional problems. So, really, the complaint against the UK test boils down to: it doesn't require 3D thinking and doesn't have a large number of steps.
Or, it's a technology test foisted on the public as the next operating system. Some of us remember Windows ME, I actually got a pre-release copy of it from Microsoft for attending one of their "get ready" events. After struggling with it on my home system for several months I upgraded to Windows 2000. Sure, I had some compatibility issues with games, it was better than the random registry corruption. When I got a copy of XP, same method as the ME license, I delayed installing it for quite a while. ME had made me gun-shy about new Microsoft OS's. In the end, XP was a good product; yes it had it's problems. None of these were even close to the problems of ME. And I've been happy with XP overall. So far Vista is not as bad as ME, but it does feel like a Microsoft test product. They want to make radical changes to Windows and Vista is a way of gaging reaction to it. They've also bloated it with features, and they need feedback on them, so out the door it goes as a version 1.0 product. Overall, I'm thinking that it may be better to wait until Service Pack 2 or so, or even wait until Windows Vista 2012 (or whatever they call the next client OS) releases.
Same experience here. Pentium 4 2.26Ghz, 1GB RAM, NVidia 6600GT, and it chugs with just the Vista basic interface. The worst part is that it occasioanlly just goes off and starts thrashing the hard drive, and pretty much locks the system up. I think it's the indexing service doing that, but I've not confirmed that. I also run it on a Pentium M 2.0Ghz, 1GB RAM, Radeon X700 laptop system, and it feels like I'm working on an XT.
The only positive feature for Vista, so far, is the built in chess game. For the price, you can get a better one on XP.
I don't know about trashing you, but I don't really agree with you.
Well written CRUD procedures will make everyone's life better. The application developer doesn't need to know the underlying data structure, and that structure can be changed to deal with modifications in the database, if there is a need. While it's nice to think that a database will be designed to handle all eventualities, this is not likely to happen in reality. If data access is handled through a standardized set of SP's, those can be updated and the applications tested, rather than having to update every application individually. In the end, the procedures should act as a data access layer, if they are not, then they need reviewing. Also, on this point, bad SQL is bad SQL. It doesn't matter where it is (code or SP's), if it is not taking advantage of the set based nature of a database, something is wrong.
Transactions are good, they protect your data. If data access is slow, take a good long look at your SQL code and database structure. If you have optimized everything correctly, and still are getting poor performance, get a better server; your data is worth it. Without transactions, one broken update statement and you get to either go back to the latest back, and lose any data between then and now, or you get to untangle a Gordian Knot of inconsistent data. No thank you! As you said: get in and get out as quickly as possible. But you missed something: don't trash the data while your in there.
I do agree with the Dynamic SQL being necessary some times. And when it's needed, it's probably going to be best implemented in code, as it is not likely to be reusable. This is much the same as cursors. They should be avoided if at all possible, but sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and use them.
At the GP post said, this argument is a can of worms. And I do find that how one answers this stuff tends to be based on one's background. I'm more database centric, having worked with and supported database applications my entire career. I tend to be very quick to jump to using a database, and am very protective of them.
I've not worked with MySQL outside the hobbyist PHP/MySQL personal website, so I really didn't get into the guts of MySQL.
Looking at those links...Holy Hell! Someone willing uses this thing for anything more than the PHP/MySQL home page? I can see where one could forgive the lack of foreign keys. The complaints listed against them are mostly valid. Still, outside of very basic applications the extra checks on the program logic are well worth the extra overhead. This could put the database team in a situation where they may have to waste hours unraveling the after effects of a bug in an update statement; where a simple foreign key constraint would have stopped the bug cold. Most business's databases are mission critical these days, suck it up and buy a better server for it.
Then, for the sake of speed, they have sacrificed transactional integrity. Fark that! On a small, non-critical database, sure. I don't work with any of those.
if guys like you didn't oppose reasonable measures to ensure that only responsible citizens could bear arms...(emphasis added)
This is the problem, what do you consider reasonable? I'm willing to bet that we probably won't agree. I will agree that a large part of the problem is that there are the extremists, on both sides, which refuse to budge and which refuse to find a reasonable compromise. The problem is that, these are the people who seem to get the press; so, each side ends up pushing further and further to its own extreme. And we get what we have, a patchwork of gun laws which have arguable effects, and no useful dialog on guns.
So, the simple hack is, use Wikipedia's information to write your paper (maybe some of the other sources as well, depending upon required length), and just cite the sources Wikipedia cites.
Joking aside, I agree, it's a good starting point on most subjects; and lazy students are going to be lazy students no matter what.
A better example is a science teacher teaching evolution from a standard science book, and you decide you want to ignore the teacher's book and read your creationist book instead, and use that as the basis for your science papers.
And you would, quite rightly, get an 'F' for the paper, and possibly the class. Just as, anyone citing Wikipedia as a source in a paper should get nailed. On the other hand, Wikipedia articles (at least the non-volatile ones) tend to have references to good academic sources. for example, if we look up Fascism on Wikipedia (since it seems a popular word of the thread) we get the following sources (shortened, a lot, for brevity):
Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf (1992). London: Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-5254-X
"Labor Charter" (1927-1934)
Mussolini, Benito. Doctrine of Fascism which was published as part of the entry for fascismo in the Enciclopedia Italiana 1932.
Paxton, Robert O. 2004. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN 1-4000-4094-9
Sorel, Georges. Reflections on Violence.
De Felice, Renzo Interpretations of Fascism, translated by Brenda Huff Everett, Cambridge; London : Harvard University Press, 1977 ISBN 0-674-45962-8.
Eatwell, Roger. 1996. Fascism: A History. New York: Allen Lane.
Hughes, H. Stuart. 1953. The United States and Italy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Now, not all of these may be usable as sources, but I'm willing to bet that a student doing a report on fascism could go look some of these books up and actually put together a good paper. The problem is that most students are not willing to put the effort into some bullshit paper that has no real meaning in their life, and will just use Wikipedia as the source, and copy references. Of course, this is also done with the bibliographies of books, so it's really a "six of one..." situation. If nothing else, Wikipedia is a good jumping off point. Blocking it, and claiming that it has no educational value, is just silly.
Two words for you: Packet Shaping.
There are certainly those that will complain that it is low level censorship, but your college does have a significant interest in having bandwidth available for everyone. Just set a hard limit on the amount of bandwidth one port can pull, and then monitor beyond that for any sort of file-sharing traffic, and give that traffic only a minimum of bandwidth total.
I'll second that. I've played both Tiger Woods and Super Swing, Super Swing wins, hands down. Both are ports, Tecmo just did a much better job of using the new control. Of course, all of that is moot if you don't care much for golf.
As I said, population controls are a detestable choice, and looking at the success China had with them, they are probably unworkable. The reason I mention it, is that the parent seemed to indicate that conservation was some silver bullet which would solve all of our energy problems, forever. This argument is uninformed, at best, and downright disingenuous at worst. There really is no such thing as a "sustainable" level of consumption. The best we can do is consume at a comfortable level, and try to use technology to keep ahead of the inevitable disaster when the supply chain fails. The only really encouraging sign is that most first world countries have fallen below replacement level in births, and will start declining in population in about 50 years. Perhaps it is another control, which we don't really notice, that as a society gets to the state of opulence and stagnation it stops reproducing enough and collapses due to a lack of enough people to keep it going. Though, with the ease of movement we have today, immigration to such countries is able to offset that decline, so we may have even killed off this limiting factor.
I still hold on to hope for the power of genius in the face of dire need.
As do I. One of the reasons this problem exists is that we have managed to push the boundaries of what we can accomplish. The industrial revolution, modern medicine, etc. have provided us with a society which can consume at the level we do, with the population we have. With any luck, we can keep winning the race, but that is not guaranteed.
I do agree with your post, though -- at some level, we're no more than bacteria in a dish. We will reproduce to consume all available resources and then evolve to compete for the effluent of prior generations until there is nothing left. Or we'll escape the dish. Or both.
This is true of most animals, they will consume and reproduce while food is plentiful, and then the population crashes once the food supply gives out; usually the effect will ripple up the food chain, as well. If anything, we have managed to improve above this slightly, in that we can see the impending disaster and try to do something about it. Though, I still expect that we won't and we will get to live through large population crash some day.
There is one solution and one solution only: energy efficiency and conservation.
Ultimately, this is just as doomed as any other, non-external, energy source option. As you stated: Energy demand = Growing rapidly without forseeable upper bound. Pick any reasonable level of consumption for a human being, then simply keep increasing the population of the planet. Eventually, this demand will outstrip the supply. And that's the real problem, no matter what level we consume at, eventually, our population will grow too large for the existing supply. Historically, this has been handled by either exploration and expansion, war, disease, or famine.
At the moment, we're solving the problem with the expansion fix. i.e. We're cutting down rain-forests; however, there is a finite amount of expansion which can be done. War is not longer a good population control, as we have turned it into less of a societal catastrophe and more of a selectively lethal video game. Disease is less of a problem than it used to be, and as third world countries modernize, the impact of disease will be reduced further. What we are going to be left with is famine, which is what the article is warning of. While the problem is being artificially accelerated, by using corn for ethanol, it really is inevitable. We are either going to have to find a way to expand into space, which is very problematic; or, as horrible as it sounds, we are going to have to pick a level of consumption which we want and then enforce population controls to keep that level sustainable, adjusting as technology improves. Or, we can let the latter happen naturally, i.e. unrestrained growth until we have massive famine and eventually large scale resource wars.
The long term is nice to think of, but bullets will end the lives of your family now.
With the way our government is going, I sort expect that they will just start "disappearing" any dissidents and their families soon. As has been said, it's easy to revolt when you are young and have little to no responsibility beyond taking care of yourself, when others are involved, things change quite a bit.
Actually considering what I was going for is the commonly bastardized French expression: voila. And assuming that the bit at the bottom of this page is correct: It is also a fairly common mis-spelling of the French "voila!" (there it is!); "viola" actually means "raped" in French.
I really fucked it up.;)
I had the same problem. I'm running Vista Business and I have a Creative Live! card (from before they added all the other adjectives). By default it doesn't work with Vista, and it looks like Creative is using this as an excuse to get people to upgrade (i.e. Buy a new one, we're not making drivers). Truth be told, I am still happy with this card, so I see no reason to upgrade. Fortunately, I did find a work around. Download the XP driver from Creative's site, and run the setup in XP Compatibility mode. Viola! I have sound, and the OS doesn't seem any worse for the wear. Now, if you're on 64-bit, my understanding is that you'll have to jump through some hoops to disable the driver signing bullshit, and as always YMMV. caveat emptor.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned I.M.P.S.: The Relentless yet. Episode one was one of the best FanFics I have seen, now if episode 2 would just make it out.
Though, having read a little bit, it sounds like it can't be entered as it is being done as a serious work, rather than a parody. I realize that Lucas technically needs to protect his franchise, but that just seems over the top; let the fans do your marketing for you, and pat them on the head once in a while, it won't hurt you that much.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but it will be used in situations like Boston.
Now, if only we had a well known principal about laws, something we could point at when a law is used for or does something which wasn't anticipated.
Oh wait, we do!
And how many dead Germans do we have lying about with tempting war trophies on them, here in the US?
This war on terrorism bullshit has got to stop, it's so bad that we are jumping at shadows, and trying to justify it to ourselves. Yes, a group of terrorists got lucky on September 11th, 2001*. And they have done what since on US soil? Exactly dick. And, guess what, if they do decide to do something, odds are they are going to be successful. Even if we lock down our country into a police state, and have robots look at any suspicious packages, they are still going to get lucky again. Heck, even the best police states known to man, have had problems with subversives. Go look up the Stasi and the trouble they had keeping the East German people in line. They were very good, but still not perfect. If they couldn't do it, a reasonably free country like ours isn't going to stand a chance.
* note: a lot of the luck was the simple fact that the US people are so brainwashed to give in to criminals that a few hundred people couldn't overcome a couple with box cutters.
The memorization is the prerequisite for playing the *real* game
No, you're just being closed mined about it. What the game is simply changes. As for the skills you mentioned above, they all still play in to a random map:
1. Twitch
It's an FPS, this will always be part of the game. If anything, the randomness is going to emphasize this further. It takes little in the way of quick reaction to fire a rocket at a known location when you see the enemy. On the other hand, if you don't know where that enemy is going to come from, it's going to take a lot of speed and accuracy to get the first shot off.
2. Map control
Again, not gone at all. You will still need to control the map, you'll just have to learn how to do it on the fly. Yes, this means that you won't have the well developed strategies which come about from well known maps. But ignoring your terrain will still be fatal. What it does mean is that you will have to be more adaptable. You will have to find and control choke points, not just rush them. Also, the sniping camper will be in for a lot more trouble when someone discovers an easy way to him.
3. Enemy prediction
This one will be diminished a bit. You won't know what the enemy is doing, because there won't be several well hashed out tactics that each side uses every time. you will, instead, have to figure this out each time. There will still be base assumptions, it's still an FPS, and there will still be certain objectives (assuming non-deathmatch play). This seems like a good thing to me. I've spent too many hours playing the exact same map, with both sides using the exact same tactic, the result coming out as much to luck as anything else.
4. Self unpredictability
It's a random map, this should be a playground of unpredictability.
The problem isn't the idea, it's just that you are stuck in the "memorize and own the map" mentality. The game will be different, no doubt, but just discarding it out of hand because it's not what you are used to is just dumb.
I think I would have invoke the more apt clause of the Declaration of Independence:
transporting us beyond our seas to be tried for pretend offenses.
A few posts back someone mentioned that the US government effectively owns the Australian government, this is probably close to true, but it does not have to be. Those of us living here in the States are screwed, we're going to have our very own police state soon, it is what the people want, after all. But with our military streched to the limit, off on military adventures around the globe, now is the time for other countries to revolt against US economic occupation. The US may not have troops in Australia, the US just has a lapdog government to keep the locals happy. Get rid of it now, before it's too late and you become just another province in the new empire.
Better yet, turn the box off, disconnect all of the cables and bury it in 100 feet of concrete on a US Marine base and tell them that it contains nuclear secrets, which must be protected at all costs. Then, your box will be secure, it will also be unusable. IT security is always a trade off between security and usability. A server with no open ports is not a server, it's an island of useless resources. It's not a bad admin who opens ports, it's just a function of the job. Now, as stated, that admin should be watching things, and making sure that nothing bad happens; but, nothing will every bee 100% secure. It was written by humans, there are bound to be a few mistakes in there somewhere. Yes, it helps to start with a better base, but IT security will never go away.
I agree that the sex issue will probably need to be resolved by going outside the current norms of American society, and probably will just be done queitly.
Death in space is easy. "We now commend this body to the deep..." The US Navy has been doing this since we stole the idea from the British, "the deep" will simply take on a new meaning. There will still be issues of emotional stress on the surviving members, but this is also something that we've been dealing with for a while in society, they'll cope.
Illness is going to be the tough one. Granted a good screening program will stop a lot of it. And, as with old sailing ships, once they've been out long enough, everyone is resistant to the diseases that went with them, so illness falls off. As you mentioned, cancer and degenerative diseases are going to be the tough ones. the mission is going to have to include a medical doctor, and a way to do surgery. It will help if there is a sterile area to do it in, but that is not an absolute necessity. We do that on Earth, because it makes post operation infection far less likely, but in a pinch, you can do without and then use anti-biotics. Keep in mind that the ancient Romans had some fairly advanced surgery techniques, but no anti-biotics or anesthesia for that matter, yet they still managed to keep people alive. This type of mission is going to be about managing risks, not eliminating them.
The math isn't really that different, the Chinese question just requires more of it. In both cases you are simply going to be applying trig functions over and over again. Though, having not worked both problems out, the Chinese one may require use of either the law of the sines or law of the cosines, neither of which do I remember off the top of my head these days (does anyone who isn't in school or an engineer?). Really, the hardest part about the Chinese one looks to be the fact that you are having to visualize a 3 dimensional object, and do trig against it; though, really once you get into that sort of thing, it's a matter of compartmentalizing the problem into a sequence of discrete 2 dimensional problems. So, really, the complaint against the UK test boils down to: it doesn't require 3D thinking and doesn't have a large number of steps.
I work in IT. And most likely Vista will become the standard client operating system in a year or so. Learning it now puts me ahead of the curve.
Or, it's a technology test foisted on the public as the next operating system. Some of us remember Windows ME, I actually got a pre-release copy of it from Microsoft for attending one of their "get ready" events. After struggling with it on my home system for several months I upgraded to Windows 2000. Sure, I had some compatibility issues with games, it was better than the random registry corruption. When I got a copy of XP, same method as the ME license, I delayed installing it for quite a while. ME had made me gun-shy about new Microsoft OS's. In the end, XP was a good product; yes it had it's problems. None of these were even close to the problems of ME. And I've been happy with XP overall. So far Vista is not as bad as ME, but it does feel like a Microsoft test product. They want to make radical changes to Windows and Vista is a way of gaging reaction to it. They've also bloated it with features, and they need feedback on them, so out the door it goes as a version 1.0 product. Overall, I'm thinking that it may be better to wait until Service Pack 2 or so, or even wait until Windows Vista 2012 (or whatever they call the next client OS) releases.
Anything but Vista, huh?
Finally, I've found a way to dump our Windows ME licenses!
Same experience here. Pentium 4 2.26Ghz, 1GB RAM, NVidia 6600GT, and it chugs with just the Vista basic interface. The worst part is that it occasioanlly just goes off and starts thrashing the hard drive, and pretty much locks the system up. I think it's the indexing service doing that, but I've not confirmed that. I also run it on a Pentium M 2.0Ghz, 1GB RAM, Radeon X700 laptop system, and it feels like I'm working on an XT.
The only positive feature for Vista, so far, is the built in chess game. For the price, you can get a better one on XP.
Would you believe it, most places in the world are not in any of the states within the USA
Yes, but Pax Imperium will be coming soon to liberate a country near you.
I don't know about trashing you, but I don't really agree with you.
Well written CRUD procedures will make everyone's life better. The application developer doesn't need to know the underlying data structure, and that structure can be changed to deal with modifications in the database, if there is a need. While it's nice to think that a database will be designed to handle all eventualities, this is not likely to happen in reality. If data access is handled through a standardized set of SP's, those can be updated and the applications tested, rather than having to update every application individually. In the end, the procedures should act as a data access layer, if they are not, then they need reviewing. Also, on this point, bad SQL is bad SQL. It doesn't matter where it is (code or SP's), if it is not taking advantage of the set based nature of a database, something is wrong.
Transactions are good, they protect your data. If data access is slow, take a good long look at your SQL code and database structure. If you have optimized everything correctly, and still are getting poor performance, get a better server; your data is worth it. Without transactions, one broken update statement and you get to either go back to the latest back, and lose any data between then and now, or you get to untangle a Gordian Knot of inconsistent data. No thank you! As you said: get in and get out as quickly as possible. But you missed something: don't trash the data while your in there.
I do agree with the Dynamic SQL being necessary some times. And when it's needed, it's probably going to be best implemented in code, as it is not likely to be reusable. This is much the same as cursors. They should be avoided if at all possible, but sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and use them.
At the GP post said, this argument is a can of worms. And I do find that how one answers this stuff tends to be based on one's background. I'm more database centric, having worked with and supported database applications my entire career. I tend to be very quick to jump to using a database, and am very protective of them.
I've not worked with MySQL outside the hobbyist PHP/MySQL personal website, so I really didn't get into the guts of MySQL.
Looking at those links...Holy Hell! Someone willing uses this thing for anything more than the PHP/MySQL home page? I can see where one could forgive the lack of foreign keys. The complaints listed against them are mostly valid. Still, outside of very basic applications the extra checks on the program logic are well worth the extra overhead. This could put the database team in a situation where they may have to waste hours unraveling the after effects of a bug in an update statement; where a simple foreign key constraint would have stopped the bug cold. Most business's databases are mission critical these days, suck it up and buy a better server for it.
Then, for the sake of speed, they have sacrificed transactional integrity. Fark that! On a small, non-critical database, sure. I don't work with any of those.
if guys like you didn't oppose reasonable measures to ensure that only responsible citizens could bear arms...(emphasis added)
This is the problem, what do you consider reasonable? I'm willing to bet that we probably won't agree. I will agree that a large part of the problem is that there are the extremists, on both sides, which refuse to budge and which refuse to find a reasonable compromise. The problem is that, these are the people who seem to get the press; so, each side ends up pushing further and further to its own extreme. And we get what we have, a patchwork of gun laws which have arguable effects, and no useful dialog on guns.
So, the simple hack is, use Wikipedia's information to write your paper (maybe some of the other sources as well, depending upon required length), and just cite the sources Wikipedia cites.
Joking aside, I agree, it's a good starting point on most subjects; and lazy students are going to be lazy students no matter what.
And you would, quite rightly, get an 'F' for the paper, and possibly the class. Just as, anyone citing Wikipedia as a source in a paper should get nailed. On the other hand, Wikipedia articles (at least the non-volatile ones) tend to have references to good academic sources. for example, if we look up Fascism on Wikipedia (since it seems a popular word of the thread) we get the following sources (shortened, a lot, for brevity):
- Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf (1992). London: Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-5254-X
- "Labor Charter" (1927-1934)
- Mussolini, Benito. Doctrine of Fascism which was published as part of the entry for fascismo in the Enciclopedia Italiana 1932.
- Paxton, Robert O. 2004. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN 1-4000-4094-9
- Sorel, Georges. Reflections on Violence.
- De Felice, Renzo Interpretations of Fascism, translated by Brenda Huff Everett, Cambridge; London : Harvard University Press, 1977 ISBN 0-674-45962-8.
- Eatwell, Roger. 1996. Fascism: A History. New York: Allen Lane.
- Hughes, H. Stuart. 1953. The United States and Italy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Now, not all of these may be usable as sources, but I'm willing to bet that a student doing a report on fascism could go look some of these books up and actually put together a good paper. The problem is that most students are not willing to put the effort into some bullshit paper that has no real meaning in their life, and will just use Wikipedia as the source, and copy references. Of course, this is also done with the bibliographies of books, so it's really a "six of one..." situation. If nothing else, Wikipedia is a good jumping off point. Blocking it, and claiming that it has no educational value, is just silly.Two words for you: Packet Shaping.
There are certainly those that will complain that it is low level censorship, but your college does have a significant interest in having bandwidth available for everyone. Just set a hard limit on the amount of bandwidth one port can pull, and then monitor beyond that for any sort of file-sharing traffic, and give that traffic only a minimum of bandwidth total.
I'll second that. I've played both Tiger Woods and Super Swing, Super Swing wins, hands down. Both are ports, Tecmo just did a much better job of using the new control. Of course, all of that is moot if you don't care much for golf.
As I said, population controls are a detestable choice, and looking at the success China had with them, they are probably unworkable. The reason I mention it, is that the parent seemed to indicate that conservation was some silver bullet which would solve all of our energy problems, forever. This argument is uninformed, at best, and downright disingenuous at worst. There really is no such thing as a "sustainable" level of consumption. The best we can do is consume at a comfortable level, and try to use technology to keep ahead of the inevitable disaster when the supply chain fails. The only really encouraging sign is that most first world countries have fallen below replacement level in births, and will start declining in population in about 50 years. Perhaps it is another control, which we don't really notice, that as a society gets to the state of opulence and stagnation it stops reproducing enough and collapses due to a lack of enough people to keep it going. Though, with the ease of movement we have today, immigration to such countries is able to offset that decline, so we may have even killed off this limiting factor.
I still hold on to hope for the power of genius in the face of dire need.
As do I. One of the reasons this problem exists is that we have managed to push the boundaries of what we can accomplish. The industrial revolution, modern medicine, etc. have provided us with a society which can consume at the level we do, with the population we have. With any luck, we can keep winning the race, but that is not guaranteed.
I do agree with your post, though -- at some level, we're no more than bacteria in a dish. We will reproduce to consume all available resources and then evolve to compete for the effluent of prior generations until there is nothing left. Or we'll escape the dish. Or both.
This is true of most animals, they will consume and reproduce while food is plentiful, and then the population crashes once the food supply gives out; usually the effect will ripple up the food chain, as well. If anything, we have managed to improve above this slightly, in that we can see the impending disaster and try to do something about it. Though, I still expect that we won't and we will get to live through large population crash some day.
There is one solution and one solution only: energy efficiency and conservation.
Ultimately, this is just as doomed as any other, non-external, energy source option. As you stated: Energy demand = Growing rapidly without forseeable upper bound. Pick any reasonable level of consumption for a human being, then simply keep increasing the population of the planet. Eventually, this demand will outstrip the supply. And that's the real problem, no matter what level we consume at, eventually, our population will grow too large for the existing supply. Historically, this has been handled by either exploration and expansion, war, disease, or famine.
At the moment, we're solving the problem with the expansion fix. i.e. We're cutting down rain-forests; however, there is a finite amount of expansion which can be done. War is not longer a good population control, as we have turned it into less of a societal catastrophe and more of a selectively lethal video game. Disease is less of a problem than it used to be, and as third world countries modernize, the impact of disease will be reduced further. What we are going to be left with is famine, which is what the article is warning of. While the problem is being artificially accelerated, by using corn for ethanol, it really is inevitable. We are either going to have to find a way to expand into space, which is very problematic; or, as horrible as it sounds, we are going to have to pick a level of consumption which we want and then enforce population controls to keep that level sustainable, adjusting as technology improves. Or, we can let the latter happen naturally, i.e. unrestrained growth until we have massive famine and eventually large scale resource wars.
The long term is nice to think of, but bullets will end the lives of your family now.
With the way our government is going, I sort expect that they will just start "disappearing" any dissidents and their families soon. As has been said, it's easy to revolt when you are young and have little to no responsibility beyond taking care of yourself, when others are involved, things change quite a bit.
Actually considering what I was going for is the commonly bastardized French expression: voila. And assuming that the bit at the bottom of this page is correct: ;)
It is also a fairly common mis-spelling of the French "voila!" (there it is!); "viola" actually means "raped" in French.
I really fucked it up.
I had the same problem. I'm running Vista Business and I have a Creative Live! card (from before they added all the other adjectives). By default it doesn't work with Vista, and it looks like Creative is using this as an excuse to get people to upgrade (i.e. Buy a new one, we're not making drivers). Truth be told, I am still happy with this card, so I see no reason to upgrade. Fortunately, I did find a work around. Download the XP driver from Creative's site, and run the setup in XP Compatibility mode. Viola! I have sound, and the OS doesn't seem any worse for the wear. Now, if you're on 64-bit, my understanding is that you'll have to jump through some hoops to disable the driver signing bullshit, and as always YMMV. caveat emptor.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned I.M.P.S.: The Relentless yet. Episode one was one of the best FanFics I have seen, now if episode 2 would just make it out.
Though, having read a little bit, it sounds like it can't be entered as it is being done as a serious work, rather than a parody. I realize that Lucas technically needs to protect his franchise, but that just seems over the top; let the fans do your marketing for you, and pat them on the head once in a while, it won't hurt you that much.