get hip to how the world works, folks. this isn't a disney movie. the bad guys OFTEN win.
Nope, this is not the way the world work everywhere. Maybe in America, but not everywhere else; there are several nations on this planet where governments have gone against the interests of big companies simply because they believed it was best for common the people. Amazing, but true.
Apart from that, give Obama a break - he is the president, not the bloody Messiah. He can only do what reality allows him to do and in the real world things take time. And in the real-world America, big money and religious interests weigh far too much, that's true; but you only have yourselves to blame. Looking back on history, one can see that the American people has been able to change things on several occasions, against the will of those in power, but it takes an effort, so go out there and make a difference instead of just sitting around being gloomy.
I think you're being far too negative in your view. You seem to think that the only way of farming is to do it like they do it in the Mid-West with trillion-square-mile fields growing alfalfa that must grow in plain ole' dirt. You may be a dumbass farmboy, but I don't believe you are that ignorant; you are simply being contrary and thus disingenious.
Plants have massive root systems
Some plants do. But you can influence this in many ways, as you probably know, and you can actually use the . Apart from that, your assumption that we're talking about growing corn and raising cattle, is simply false - surely you are able to realize straight away that nobody imagines dragging a combine harvester up 200 flights of stairs or something similar. There are, fortunately other ways of farming; take, for example the way the grow rice in Yunnan in China, where they have in effect managed to stack lakes up all the way to the top of mountains, using terraces. I don't know how the hell that can be stable, but it clearly works, since they have been doing this for millennia.
If we want to grow food on high-rise buildings, we can find a way, no doubt about it. And it may even make sense.
Buildings don't like tons of weight with no architectural integrity.
I think you should probably leave the question of structural integrity to those that know about it. There is nothing inherently impossible in the proposed shapes, nature has managed outrageous structures on a massive scale for millions of years. We just need to figure out how to do the same.
Plants die & rot (it's natural). Rotting plants smell. People don't like smelly buildings.
What people in general don't like it the smell of hundreds of millions of gallons of effluent generated by cattle factories; or the smell of anearobic fermentation from a massive, soggy muckheap. If you've ever been to a forest or even a greenhouse in a botanical garden, you will have smelled the very pleasant rot of plants that is actually the natural smell of rotting plant material. There is nothing better - I would love the city to smell like that.
I could go on for hours and hours about how completely uninformed your opinion is, to paraphrase your own words. Try to be less outright negative and instead contribute something positive. This article is about dreaming up a better way of building cities - brainstorming, if you will. It addresses some problems - like the fact that our food is produced far away from the people who eat it, with all the costs and consequences implied; we would clearly not be able to make building like this with our current technology, but this could serve as an inspiration for something we could actually do.
As for the forests of the Northeast - all we have to is stop abusing the country, and the forest will come back. According to most religions we were meant to be responsible custodians of this planet; saying "Screw the Amazon, we just want our own back-yard to be pretty" is not really good enough, and it doesn't even make good sense from long-term economic point of view. We have to take good care of the whole planet, because what happens in your own neighborhood is ultimately connected to what happens in the rest of the world. As I'm sure you know.
I have lived on a farm in England until recently, with loads of rats. In my experience poison or predators are not all that effective - rats are very clever. And it is not always possible to cut off their food supply either. What is normally possible, though, is to maintain a good standard of repair - this shouldn't be too hard for something like a serverroom.
Of course, this depends on whether the serverroom is a heaving mess of cables or not - things like walls, floors and ceilings must be easily accessible, since it is often much easier to make repairs from inside the room. Repair all holes and cracks, and if some of them have to be there, cover them with a strong iron grille. Even rats can't seep through concrete, and they are only in a serverroom because it is easy for them get in; even though you hear they can gnaw through concrete, they only do that if there is something they are very keen on getting, and their IT needs are normally somewhat less pronounced thar ours.
I know - however, the LPARs on the mainframe are of a different nature from what you have on a pSeries or iSeries; the partitioning scheme on the latter are more similar VMware, whereas the mainframe do it more in "hardware" (or microcode, possibly). I should really say "IBM mainframe" here, I think Amdahl and Hitachi do it differently.
Many posts in here say the same thing. My question to them is: Have they actually spent the time and effort to inspect the source code? Do they have any such experience in the past?
I think one has to think of open source as a form of scientific discourse. For most of science it is true - fundamental, even - that it is open for everybody to inspect and form their opinion about. That is not to say that every can or will, but anybody can, potentially, if they are willing to spend the time and sweat it takes to understand it. It certainly makes a huge difference to the quality of science that no theory or hypothesis goes unchallenged; the theories that still stand after 100 or 200 years will have almost all errors weeded out. The same is true for software - the quality of open source can hardly avoid becoming better over time, exactly because it is under constant scrutiny by people who want to find weaknesses and errors, and with it comes better security as well.
I don't think your counterexamples disprove what I say - China and Russia may have been secretive societies, but they still took part in international science; being good at science was a matter of prestige. Making nuclear weapons and space rockets are not so much basic science as engineering: applications of established, scientific results; or that is my opinion, at least.
The fact that America was attacked and has made a number of stupid decisions doesn't mean that the US isn't a much more secure place than eg Burma - it only means that America isn't 100% safe, but no country is. And there isn't just simply linear relation between "openness" on one side, and "security" on the other, it is easy to find examples where openness is applied stupidly and leads to major problems. But in situations where all other things are the same, open systems will tend to become better than closed ones, for the reasons above. And if you have to choose between open source and closed source, you are in a situation where "all other factors are the same".
What they should do - what I am sure someone will do at some point - is to make an "LPARable" PC/laptop after the same general principle as IBM's newest pSeries servers. The system would come with a VM hypervisor in NVRAM, as the "BIOS", and all other systems would run under that, concurrently.
First the lecture: Communism and Socialism are ideologies - that is, ideas about how society should be run. The may or may not be good ideas, but that is all they are, and as such neither good nor bad. There are two groups of people in particular that insist that those ideologies can never, ever change: one is the wild-eyed reactionaries who use "communism" as another word for "evil", to whom any for of dissent is simply "communism". The other group consists of those that believe, or rather Believe, in One True Communist Ideology as written in the Holy Scriptures of Marx, Engels and Lenin, to whom "capitalism is another word for "evil"; they view any form of dissent as "capitalism". Both of those groups are enemies of common people.
And then of course there is everybody else, who realises that the world changes as time passes, and that our world view has to change with it. Some of them are Communists, some think Capitalism is best, but they all know that something in the middle, with elements from both is what makes real society work; we have to take care of the weak and protect them from harm to some extent, and we have to allow some degree of free trade and what have you. Politics in the real world is simply about figuring out what the balance should be.
So much for the lecture - so why would it be of any significance whether communists of one sort or the other use Linux? Are we suddenly going to see the Red Screen Of Death a lot? I think we should be generous enough to be glad that our favourite OS is a success everywhere.
Do you actually think that America would join them, even if it is in America's best interest?
I certainly expect so - Americans are no dumber than the rest of us, and I doubt Americans in general are going to let their misgivings about other world-views keep them from doing the right thing. I mean, would you stop eating beef if you found out that people in Cuba just love a good steak?
There is so much stupid nonsense in this that I don't really know where to begin. Just an example:
... a society that historically repressed individuality...
A what? The Chinese have preserved the importance of the family in their culture, not least due to Kng Fz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius) and things like the Tang Code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_Code), but nobody who has ever been close to Chinese culture can avoid noticing the immense creativity of the Chinese. The Chinese family values and principles of putting the individual lower than the family or society was the norm also in the west, at least until the beginning of the 20th century. So why wasn't that bred out of our genetic code?
What you are putting on display here isn't simply ignorance, but stupidity. Ignorance is the natural ground state of us all - it can be amended by learning; but stupidity is what you get when you are actively avoiding learning. I don't think there is any known cure for that.
Perhaps because it perpetuates the same, old tripe that was used as argument in favour of such things as imperialism and the superiority of the "white race"? I've seen this in many forms, trying to dusguise itself as "scientific" - like "The structure of language determines the way you think and that is why White, Germanic Speaking people are more creative and scientific". Or "The culture youlive in means that you breed out the traits that are contrary to that culture, which is why White, Germanic Speaking people are more creative and scientific". Do you see a pattern here? If not, maybe it is because self-criticism has been bred out of your culture.
I'm not normally one to speak up for Bill Gates or Microsoft, both of which I have a long habit of despising (although I think mr Gates appears more sympathetic since he left MS). However, I have always been in favour of doing basic research - without people being willing to "squander" time and resources on finding out about things that give no immediate return on investments, we wouldn't have most of the things we take for granted now: computers, radio, TV, cars, etc etc etc. In fact, most of what we consider human were once a waste of time, people fiddling idly with things they didn't need. Who knows, maybe once somebody was playing with the smouldering remains of a lightning stricken tree and his mates went "Why are you wasting your time on that nonsense, do you think you can eat it? Hur, hur, hur".
The strongest security is the one you get from everybody in the company being loyal and well educated about what they should and shouldn't do. Of course, you don't post your passwords on a sign outside, but that is about as much secresy as it is worth the effort to maintain, I think. Apart from that - if we know that Microsoft's security strategy uses "protocol X" and open source uses the same, what is the real difference? Only that in open source you can potentially inspect the implementation and verify that it doesn't contain inherent weaknesses that allow you to circumvent it. You can't do that with closed source, you have to trust the supplier; the big question then is: can you?
Open source works along the same lines as the open, scientific discourse that has brought us from pre-industrial society to the present day. If we had relied on secret research, we would still have lived in the mud; romantic, perhaps, but no computers. Or compare open societies to closed ones: are countries like Sweden, Germany and Switzerland less secure than, say, Burma? The only ones that feel more secure in Burma are the ones in power, but the country as a whole is less secure, as far as I can see.
I don't think we need to take the dark-age proponents of Creationism all that serious. We're only doing them a favour by doing so, as well as wasting time that could be better spent on conducting scientific research and teaching young people about real science.
What we should do is point the complete idiocy of their anti-scientific stance. It isn't as if you can pick and choose in science; if you accept, say, that quantum mechanics is valid, or astronomy or any of the other branches of science, then you will have a very, very hard time not accepting the theory of evolution. So if you want to reject evolution, please get rid of your computer and anything else with semiconductors in; we wouldn't have had those things without scientific research and the insight that quantum mechanics gives us. And stay out of cars and away from bridges too.
Apart from that - there is nothing in science that says there is no God or gods, science simply deals with what can be measured and which is subject to logical reasoning. And there is nothing in the Bible that claims that "this collection of stories is God's infallible truth" - that is simply a viewpoint that has been added since the time of Christ. I think what scares Creationists is that they don't understand what science is about and they basically don't understand what faith is about; and when people are scared, they become reactionary, they close their eyes and ears to shut out every part of reality that seems scary, and they become control freaks who want to decide everything. Creationists are, in a way as far from what their faith states, as you can get. They are not seeking the truth and they don't trust God; who, when you get right down to it, allegedly created this world in such a way that evolution seems to be very convincingly real.
All in all, I don't think we need to distance ourselves from Darwin or his views on evolution. If you read his works (which are available online), you will see that he is very careful in all his statements, that his reasoning is scientifically very sound and that his writing style is still very, very pleasant to read. What we should do more, all of us, is simply to stand up for science - understand it better, communicate it better.
You can't polish a turd, they say; which is not entirely true, of course, but the result is unlikely to please.
There is nothing new in artists trying to make themselves appear better than they can manage on their own. If you listen to music from the sixties or earlier, you can still spot it - back then they tried to mask bad singing of rubbish text with bigbands or similar. And it doesn't have to be wrong, really. It is like people using make-up; used without taste, you end up looking like Rafiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafiki), but applied cleverly, the result can be spectacular.
Still, there is something in me that is against this intolerance to small, human flaws. Perfection is in-human and it feel alien; it makes you feel that you aren't allowed to to take part and sing along.
So it is hopeless, then? We might as well give up and die? Rubbish.
All this says is that
- we have to find some better solutions. Which is fair enough, since we've only just begun trying in the last few decades. - it would be a lot easier if we at the same were able to cut down on our wasteful lifestyles.
It does unfortunately take a while to get up to speed with new solutions to things, but we have done it before. So easily available resources are running? Well, fortunately we may be able to find cheap alternatives - I don't know the details, but it seems carbon nano-tubes are involved. That is not going to dry up anytime soon, I think.
Still, we have to cut back, not just on emissions and other pollution, but on wastefulness. Fortunately this is one area where we can make huge strides forward quite easily in the West.
In a way both the reactionaries, who are doing their best to pretend they don't know climate change is happening and is caused by ourselves, and the doomsdayers are a symptom that we have made our lives far too easy. One thing the current economic crisis ought to teach us is that we can manage with far less than we thought, and that we can feel good all the same. And you know what? There is something incredibly satisfying about overcoming big problems; just after WWII people felt they could overcome just about anything - you see it in films and literature, and even in advertising from the 50es and 60es. But as life got easier, each generation lost that confidence in themselves and the sense of community, and now we don't think we can tackle our problems.
I'm old - as I grew up the last rationings were abolished - so I know what we can achieve. We have to believe in ourselves, which is something quite different from having delusions of grandeur.
Calm down, just a bit or two, there is no need to overreact.
For one thing, whether it is OK to copy software without the consent of the one who produced it is mostly a matter of taste or culture - unlike, say, murder or burglary. The whole idea of "intellectual property rights" is something that is very recent and has come into the world in the West; not to mention the whole idea of private property that underpins it, which one may be excused for thinking is alien to a Communist nation. All that aside, it has long been a part of Chinese culture and tradition to copy things - it is seen as a perfectly legitimate thing to do. You learn calligraphy or other arts by copying the masters, after all; so why not literature or software?
China is well known for using corporate (and other) espionage to further their political agenda.
Really? It isn't well-known to me, among others. You see, when you make a claim like that you need to be able to prove your case. Otherwise it merely ranks as "smug ignorance", on par with all the other prejudices - such as "all muslims are terrorists" or "Jews are money-grabbing misers".
Apart from that, you could substitute "England", "USA", "Israel" or just about any nation for China in that statement and get something equally justified. There is every reason to believe that all countries do this kind of things. Just to take one example: Isn't it true that we keep hearing about how American government agencies want to induce eg. Microsoft to install backdoors in their software? And is that not "espionage to further their political agenda"?
It is too lame to drone on with this sort of automatic demonizing of everybody you don't like or don't understand. The only two effects that is like ly to have is alienating your opponents and making you look stupid. Right now China is storming forward in the world and they are opening up; this is among many other things a great opportunity for the western governments to make friends and influence their policies on all the issues we criticize them for. And who knows, maybe some time in the future we will be glad that we have a friend in China.
It's one of the noblest things about us, and I hope that sentient extraterrestrial life would also possess a sense of morality. But don't think for a second that nature itself is moral. Nature is completely impartial and completely absolute. How good or evil someone is does not factor into how quickly he falls if he walks off of a cliff.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean when you say "nature is completely absolute"; but that aside - I am rather hopeful about the morality and moral compatibility of other species, alien or not. Because although morality is something we mostly see in humans, it isn't entirely unique to us - all animal with sufficient intelligence and social structure seem to have elements of it; eg. wolves make personal sacrifices for the benefit of the group etc - I don't think that is down to basic instincts, they are too intelligent.
And there are good, theoretical reasons to expect that some sense of morality is a natural consequence of an advanced social structure amongst intelligent creatures. Things like mutual respect and trustworthiness are essential for cooperation, which in turn is essential for any advanced society. In fact, it seems likely that things like language, ability to abstract reasoning and the other things that are necessary in order to produce technological progress, are only possible in the context of an advanced society built on those basic, moral principles. In other words, if we meet an advanced, technological civilisation, then they will have moral values that humans can understand. I'm more worried about whether we will accept what we find, seeing how we are able to close our eyes to the plain truth of science in favour of holding on to religious misconceptions.
What is more - I think if we were to be visited by advanced aliens it is more likely that they would come with a peacful purpose than not. After all, if you are able to travel interstellar distances, you are not likely to need to take over the planet of another species for resources or space. It wouldn't make sense to wage a war when the planet next door contains all the reasources you need, minus the need to compete with other living beings.
I think the reason we haven't heard from other civilisations is quite simple: it is too difficult, at least with the technologies we understand. How would you pick out a signal from Earth from a distance of hundreds of lightyears? There are many problems involved - our signals are very weak, they are very confused (thousands of radio and tv stations), the information content of each signal is very complicated and so on. If we wanted to communicate over so large distances, we need to send a very strong signal and it needs to be very clear and simple; but then the problem is that it may all too easily look like any of the other, well-known, natural radio sources - they would have to know exactly what to look for, out there, and they don't. How could they?
This was one of the worst problems I've had to deal with - not the time when our UPS burned and the whole company was waiting desperately for me to get everything back in shape, not the time it turned out that our backup procedures were completely bonkers and it was my fault, somehow, that we lost a weeks worth of data, not even the time when I had rip our NIS becuase it didn't bloody work and I had to re-architect the entire set of UNIX servers, because they had been set with no idea about standardisation or portability. No, the worst was the war over server names. In the end I simply put down my foot and told everybody how I was going to do it; no an easy thing when you are up against nearly everybody from upper management to different factions on all levels. But I'm still here, though.
The fact of the matter is that different groups are always going to want different naming schemes; in my company, we have fortunately seperated management of R&D systems from the rest of IT - this is because IT proper work with Windows and know nothing about UNIX (they think they do, but they don't), whereas R&D work with UNIX and other, more exotic systems. IT are a part of finances, so what they want to know is "asset numbers" - no, I don't know what that is, either. So they want to call machines something like "+", eg. TX234643782645 - that makes their life easy, perhaps. Their managers want names like "txw2kxyz" for "Texas, Windows 2000, and some label", because it gives them an illusion about knowing what that machine is for.
On the other hand, the people who actually work for a living (that comment earned me the title of "Communist of the Year") - the production staff: programmers, QA and support - they are the ones that actually have a legitimate need for convenient servernames. They want simple ones, like sun1, linux2, zlinux4, aix2 etc. I, on the other hand, just want names that are 1) easy to write, because I log on from the command line hundreds of times every day. and 2) easy to pronounce and talk about, like bear, puppy, banana and megalodon - and since I am in charge, that is what we have.
But fortunately it is possible to satisfy all the users' needs, since there is such a thing as "aliases" in DNS, which allows us to keep hostnames like "bear" and also have functional ones like qa-nas, bld-aix5, qa-solaris10 etc.
I went to their website, but I couldn't even find a Windows port. That's so lame, if we want people to use open source software, we need to port things to Windows. Useless, I say, useless.
Let it be said first that I don't agree with censorship - people in the public spotlight should develop thicker skin, IMO. But it is not all that important what I, or any of us think - the people of Thailand are very fond of their king and almost fully support the strictness of this legislation. And to be quite honest, I can't see that anybody loses much by not insulting the king Thailand; no-one says this means that you have to not express important political or religious viewpoints. Even if one might have a critical view about something or someone, it is generally possible to express that in a non-insulting way.
It is a fact of life that everywhere in the world there are some aspect of local culture that require us to refrain from doing or saying certain things that we think of as "obviously no problem at all". When we come in contact with other cultures, I think it is up to us to develop a bit of cultural sensitivity and make ourselves aware of what is acceptable to others. I know, there is a balance between "freedom of speech" and being diplomatic, but it isn't all that difficult, and I suspect too often "freedom of speech" is simply used as a cheap excuse for being too lazy to even try being a little bit sociable.
Freedom of speech is important - far too important to be used on trivial matters.
In other words, since the upper bounds of a catastrophic outcome is a least the probability that they were wrong
It is not clear that this is the case. In fact: P(X)!=P(X|A)P(A)!+P(X|A)P(A) [from the actual article]. Your interpretation is only correct if the probablity that it goes is 100% if the assumptions are wrong.
It's the old "Limits To Growth" bullshit back again.
I can see why this upsets you; it is scary. However, we all know that are limits to growth somewhere; we just don't know exactly where - yet. We live on a planet, which at the end of the day is of a limited size. There really isn't any such things as "unlimited".
Of course, the real limit is not the theoretical upper limit for how much we have if we could convert all the sea water to energy by fusion or that kind of things. We will without a doubt run in to combinations of limitations that have the potential to stop us dead, long before we have used up all the resources we theoretically have at hand. The only sensible thing to do, as far as I can see is to try to find out what those limitations might be and what we can do to avoid them. Just dismissing the thought as "bullshit" and waving your hand vaguely in the direction of "technology" is not going to answer the questions.
Looking back over the history of life, we can see that there has been many groups of organisms that dominated for a time; but they all crashed in the end, and the ones that survived were the ones that found a sustainable mode of existence. The way we live at the moment is not sustainable; we are living out some sort of pyramid scheme - and when the ones at the bottom can no longer be exploited, those on the top will have a long way to fall.
People like you have done your best to stifle any serious research into these subjects. You talk about new technology; don't you know that all the new technology has always, overall, meant another hike in resource spending? Now that cheap energy is coming to an end, what are you going to do? Spend more energy? Will you waste more drinking water when it runs dry? To me that sounds idiotic.
I think it's a bit premature to say that our computer models are so good that they can definitively say what global conditions will be like in 1,000 years
Your reasoning sounds plausible, but is in fact wrong. As we all know from the weather forecast, it is damned difficult to predict the exact weather for a short period of time in a small area, but it isn't hard to predict that it will be a good deal warmer in the US for several month in about 4 months' time; because the US is a very large area and we're talking about a long time interval of a couple of months.
In the same way it is a good deal easier predicting what the global temperature average will be over a whole year or decade a hundred or a thousand years in the future.
If taking pictures covertly of women isnt right then why do people buy magazines with pictures of celebrities taken by the paparatzi in this manner?
Because people aren't right? You know, the fact that lots of people do something doesn't make it right, good or even clever. Sometimes - some would argue most of the time - the majorioty are simply a bunch of oafs, who just follow a trend and don't even get as far as thinking about their actions from a moral or financial perspective. That is why so many now have a large number of credit cards, all maxed out. I mean, yes, the credit crunch has been caused in part because of highly questionable lending practises; but people went for it even though they ought to have known better.
But why kick up a fuss about cameras making a noise when you take pictures? Are you going to lose important business because of it? Paparazzis don't generally let it stop them - they use SLR cameras that make a real click. But people complain about CCTV cameras - so obviously they dont like haing their pictures taken witout their consent; a click sound will make it slightly more likely that they will know they are being photographed, so they can protest against it if they don't like it. Isn't that reasonable? Or does "reasonable" only apply to yourself?
I see that I've modded down as "flamebait" - I don't know whether to be annoyed of amused.
So, is a call to be more reasonable now "flamebaiting"? Or was it because the modder didn't actually read the text any further than to object to words like "moan and whine"; and then of course the terrible heresy of stating the opnion that a government agency may in fact be right once in a while?
Slashdot Mirror
get hip to how the world works, folks. this isn't a disney movie. the bad guys OFTEN win.
Nope, this is not the way the world work everywhere. Maybe in America, but not everywhere else; there are several nations on this planet where governments have gone against the interests of big companies simply because they believed it was best for common the people. Amazing, but true.
Apart from that, give Obama a break - he is the president, not the bloody Messiah. He can only do what reality allows him to do and in the real world things take time. And in the real-world America, big money and religious interests weigh far too much, that's true; but you only have yourselves to blame. Looking back on history, one can see that the American people has been able to change things on several occasions, against the will of those in power, but it takes an effort, so go out there and make a difference instead of just sitting around being gloomy.
I think you're being far too negative in your view. You seem to think that the only way of farming is to do it like they do it in the Mid-West with trillion-square-mile fields growing alfalfa that must grow in plain ole' dirt. You may be a dumbass farmboy, but I don't believe you are that ignorant; you are simply being contrary and thus disingenious.
Plants have massive root systems
Some plants do. But you can influence this in many ways, as you probably know, and you can actually use the . Apart from that, your assumption that we're talking about growing corn and raising cattle, is simply false - surely you are able to realize straight away that nobody imagines dragging a combine harvester up 200 flights of stairs or something similar. There are, fortunately other ways of farming; take, for example the way the grow rice in Yunnan in China, where they have in effect managed to stack lakes up all the way to the top of mountains, using terraces. I don't know how the hell that can be stable, but it clearly works, since they have been doing this for millennia.
If we want to grow food on high-rise buildings, we can find a way, no doubt about it. And it may even make sense.
Buildings don't like tons of weight with no architectural integrity.
I think you should probably leave the question of structural integrity to those that know about it. There is nothing inherently impossible in the proposed shapes, nature has managed outrageous structures on a massive scale for millions of years. We just need to figure out how to do the same.
Plants die & rot (it's natural). Rotting plants smell. People don't like smelly buildings.
What people in general don't like it the smell of hundreds of millions of gallons of effluent generated by cattle factories; or the smell of anearobic fermentation from a massive, soggy muckheap. If you've ever been to a forest or even a greenhouse in a botanical garden, you will have smelled the very pleasant rot of plants that is actually the natural smell of rotting plant material. There is nothing better - I would love the city to smell like that.
I could go on for hours and hours about how completely uninformed your opinion is, to paraphrase your own words. Try to be less outright negative and instead contribute something positive. This article is about dreaming up a better way of building cities - brainstorming, if you will. It addresses some problems - like the fact that our food is produced far away from the people who eat it, with all the costs and consequences implied; we would clearly not be able to make building like this with our current technology, but this could serve as an inspiration for something we could actually do.
As for the forests of the Northeast - all we have to is stop abusing the country, and the forest will come back. According to most religions we were meant to be responsible custodians of this planet; saying "Screw the Amazon, we just want our own back-yard to be pretty" is not really good enough, and it doesn't even make good sense from long-term economic point of view. We have to take good care of the whole planet, because what happens in your own neighborhood is ultimately connected to what happens in the rest of the world. As I'm sure you know.
I have lived on a farm in England until recently, with loads of rats. In my experience poison or predators are not all that effective - rats are very clever. And it is not always possible to cut off their food supply either. What is normally possible, though, is to maintain a good standard of repair - this shouldn't be too hard for something like a serverroom.
Of course, this depends on whether the serverroom is a heaving mess of cables or not - things like walls, floors and ceilings must be easily accessible, since it is often much easier to make repairs from inside the room. Repair all holes and cracks, and if some of them have to be there, cover them with a strong iron grille. Even rats can't seep through concrete, and they are only in a serverroom because it is easy for them get in; even though you hear they can gnaw through concrete, they only do that if there is something they are very keen on getting, and their IT needs are normally somewhat less pronounced thar ours.
I know - however, the LPARs on the mainframe are of a different nature from what you have on a pSeries or iSeries; the partitioning scheme on the latter are more similar VMware, whereas the mainframe do it more in "hardware" (or microcode, possibly). I should really say "IBM mainframe" here, I think Amdahl and Hitachi do it differently.
Many posts in here say the same thing. My question to them is: Have they actually spent the time and effort to inspect the source code? Do they have any such experience in the past?
I think one has to think of open source as a form of scientific discourse. For most of science it is true - fundamental, even - that it is open for everybody to inspect and form their opinion about. That is not to say that every can or will, but anybody can, potentially, if they are willing to spend the time and sweat it takes to understand it. It certainly makes a huge difference to the quality of science that no theory or hypothesis goes unchallenged; the theories that still stand after 100 or 200 years will have almost all errors weeded out. The same is true for software - the quality of open source can hardly avoid becoming better over time, exactly because it is under constant scrutiny by people who want to find weaknesses and errors, and with it comes better security as well.
I don't think your counterexamples disprove what I say - China and Russia may have been secretive societies, but they still took part in international science; being good at science was a matter of prestige. Making nuclear weapons and space rockets are not so much basic science as engineering: applications of established, scientific results; or that is my opinion, at least.
The fact that America was attacked and has made a number of stupid decisions doesn't mean that the US isn't a much more secure place than eg Burma - it only means that America isn't 100% safe, but no country is. And there isn't just simply linear relation between "openness" on one side, and "security" on the other, it is easy to find examples where openness is applied stupidly and leads to major problems. But in situations where all other things are the same, open systems will tend to become better than closed ones, for the reasons above. And if you have to choose between open source and closed source, you are in a situation where "all other factors are the same".
What they should do - what I am sure someone will do at some point - is to make an "LPARable" PC/laptop after the same general principle as IBM's newest pSeries servers. The system would come with a VM hypervisor in NVRAM, as the "BIOS", and all other systems would run under that, concurrently.
... strongly labeled as Communist/Socialist...
First the lecture: Communism and Socialism are ideologies - that is, ideas about how society should be run. The may or may not be good ideas, but that is all they are, and as such neither good nor bad. There are two groups of people in particular that insist that those ideologies can never, ever change: one is the wild-eyed reactionaries who use "communism" as another word for "evil", to whom any for of dissent is simply "communism". The other group consists of those that believe, or rather Believe, in One True Communist Ideology as written in the Holy Scriptures of Marx, Engels and Lenin, to whom "capitalism is another word for "evil"; they view any form of dissent as "capitalism". Both of those groups are enemies of common people.
And then of course there is everybody else, who realises that the world changes as time passes, and that our world view has to change with it. Some of them are Communists, some think Capitalism is best, but they all know that something in the middle, with elements from both is what makes real society work; we have to take care of the weak and protect them from harm to some extent, and we have to allow some degree of free trade and what have you. Politics in the real world is simply about figuring out what the balance should be.
So much for the lecture - so why would it be of any significance whether communists of one sort or the other use Linux? Are we suddenly going to see the Red Screen Of Death a lot? I think we should be generous enough to be glad that our favourite OS is a success everywhere.
Do you actually think that America would join them, even if it is in America's best interest?
I certainly expect so - Americans are no dumber than the rest of us, and I doubt Americans in general are going to let their misgivings about other world-views keep them from doing the right thing. I mean, would you stop eating beef if you found out that people in Cuba just love a good steak?
There is so much stupid nonsense in this that I don't really know where to begin. Just an example:
... a society that historically repressed individuality...
A what? The Chinese have preserved the importance of the family in their culture, not least due to Kng Fz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius) and things like the Tang Code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_Code), but nobody who has ever been close to Chinese culture can avoid noticing the immense creativity of the Chinese. The Chinese family values and principles of putting the individual lower than the family or society was the norm also in the west, at least until the beginning of the 20th century. So why wasn't that bred out of our genetic code?
What you are putting on display here isn't simply ignorance, but stupidity. Ignorance is the natural ground state of us all - it can be amended by learning; but stupidity is what you get when you are actively avoiding learning. I don't think there is any known cure for that.
Why is this modded, "Flamebait"?
Perhaps because it perpetuates the same, old tripe that was used as argument in favour of such things as imperialism and the superiority of the "white race"? I've seen this in many forms, trying to dusguise itself as "scientific" - like "The structure of language determines the way you think and that is why White, Germanic Speaking people are more creative and scientific". Or "The culture youlive in means that you breed out the traits that are contrary to that culture, which is why White, Germanic Speaking people are more creative and scientific". Do you see a pattern here? If not, maybe it is because self-criticism has been bred out of your culture.
I'm not normally one to speak up for Bill Gates or Microsoft, both of which I have a long habit of despising (although I think mr Gates appears more sympathetic since he left MS). However, I have always been in favour of doing basic research - without people being willing to "squander" time and resources on finding out about things that give no immediate return on investments, we wouldn't have most of the things we take for granted now: computers, radio, TV, cars, etc etc etc. In fact, most of what we consider human were once a waste of time, people fiddling idly with things they didn't need. Who knows, maybe once somebody was playing with the smouldering remains of a lightning stricken tree and his mates went "Why are you wasting your time on that nonsense, do you think you can eat it? Hur, hur, hur".
The strongest security is the one you get from everybody in the company being loyal and well educated about what they should and shouldn't do. Of course, you don't post your passwords on a sign outside, but that is about as much secresy as it is worth the effort to maintain, I think. Apart from that - if we know that Microsoft's security strategy uses "protocol X" and open source uses the same, what is the real difference? Only that in open source you can potentially inspect the implementation and verify that it doesn't contain inherent weaknesses that allow you to circumvent it. You can't do that with closed source, you have to trust the supplier; the big question then is: can you?
Open source works along the same lines as the open, scientific discourse that has brought us from pre-industrial society to the present day. If we had relied on secret research, we would still have lived in the mud; romantic, perhaps, but no computers. Or compare open societies to closed ones: are countries like Sweden, Germany and Switzerland less secure than, say, Burma? The only ones that feel more secure in Burma are the ones in power, but the country as a whole is less secure, as far as I can see.
I don't think we need to take the dark-age proponents of Creationism all that serious. We're only doing them a favour by doing so, as well as wasting time that could be better spent on conducting scientific research and teaching young people about real science.
What we should do is point the complete idiocy of their anti-scientific stance. It isn't as if you can pick and choose in science; if you accept, say, that quantum mechanics is valid, or astronomy or any of the other branches of science, then you will have a very, very hard time not accepting the theory of evolution. So if you want to reject evolution, please get rid of your computer and anything else with semiconductors in; we wouldn't have had those things without scientific research and the insight that quantum mechanics gives us. And stay out of cars and away from bridges too.
Apart from that - there is nothing in science that says there is no God or gods, science simply deals with what can be measured and which is subject to logical reasoning. And there is nothing in the Bible that claims that "this collection of stories is God's infallible truth" - that is simply a viewpoint that has been added since the time of Christ. I think what scares Creationists is that they don't understand what science is about and they basically don't understand what faith is about; and when people are scared, they become reactionary, they close their eyes and ears to shut out every part of reality that seems scary, and they become control freaks who want to decide everything. Creationists are, in a way as far from what their faith states, as you can get. They are not seeking the truth and they don't trust God; who, when you get right down to it, allegedly created this world in such a way that evolution seems to be very convincingly real.
All in all, I don't think we need to distance ourselves from Darwin or his views on evolution. If you read his works (which are available online), you will see that he is very careful in all his statements, that his reasoning is scientifically very sound and that his writing style is still very, very pleasant to read. What we should do more, all of us, is simply to stand up for science - understand it better, communicate it better.
Just a thought - I wonder if the Freeview boxes you can buy for about 10 - 20 GBP in all UK supermarkets would work in the US?
You can't polish a turd, they say; which is not entirely true, of course, but the result is unlikely to please.
There is nothing new in artists trying to make themselves appear better than they can manage on their own. If you listen to music from the sixties or earlier, you can still spot it - back then they tried to mask bad singing of rubbish text with bigbands or similar. And it doesn't have to be wrong, really. It is like people using make-up; used without taste, you end up looking like Rafiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafiki), but applied cleverly, the result can be spectacular.
Still, there is something in me that is against this intolerance to small, human flaws. Perfection is in-human and it feel alien; it makes you feel that you aren't allowed to to take part and sing along.
So it is hopeless, then? We might as well give up and die? Rubbish.
All this says is that
- we have to find some better solutions. Which is fair enough, since we've only just begun trying in the last few decades.
- it would be a lot easier if we at the same were able to cut down on our wasteful lifestyles.
It does unfortunately take a while to get up to speed with new solutions to things, but we have done it before. So easily available resources are running? Well, fortunately we may be able to find cheap alternatives - I don't know the details, but it seems carbon nano-tubes are involved. That is not going to dry up anytime soon, I think.
Still, we have to cut back, not just on emissions and other pollution, but on wastefulness. Fortunately this is one area where we can make huge strides forward quite easily in the West.
In a way both the reactionaries, who are doing their best to pretend they don't know climate change is happening and is caused by ourselves, and the doomsdayers are a symptom that we have made our lives far too easy. One thing the current economic crisis ought to teach us is that we can manage with far less than we thought, and that we can feel good all the same. And you know what? There is something incredibly satisfying about overcoming big problems; just after WWII people felt they could overcome just about anything - you see it in films and literature, and even in advertising from the 50es and 60es. But as life got easier, each generation lost that confidence in themselves and the sense of community, and now we don't think we can tackle our problems.
I'm old - as I grew up the last rationings were abolished - so I know what we can achieve. We have to believe in ourselves, which is something quite different from having delusions of grandeur.
Calm down, just a bit or two, there is no need to overreact.
For one thing, whether it is OK to copy software without the consent of the one who produced it is mostly a matter of taste or culture - unlike, say, murder or burglary. The whole idea of "intellectual property rights" is something that is very recent and has come into the world in the West; not to mention the whole idea of private property that underpins it, which one may be excused for thinking is alien to a Communist nation. All that aside, it has long been a part of Chinese culture and tradition to copy things - it is seen as a perfectly legitimate thing to do. You learn calligraphy or other arts by copying the masters, after all; so why not literature or software?
China is well known for using corporate (and other) espionage to further their political agenda.
Really? It isn't well-known to me, among others. You see, when you make a claim like that you need to be able to prove your case. Otherwise it merely ranks as "smug ignorance", on par with all the other prejudices - such as "all muslims are terrorists" or "Jews are money-grabbing misers".
Apart from that, you could substitute "England", "USA", "Israel" or just about any nation for China in that statement and get something equally justified. There is every reason to believe that all countries do this kind of things. Just to take one example: Isn't it true that we keep hearing about how American government agencies want to induce eg. Microsoft to install backdoors in their software? And is that not "espionage to further their political agenda"?
It is too lame to drone on with this sort of automatic demonizing of everybody you don't like or don't understand. The only two effects that is like ly to have is alienating your opponents and making you look stupid. Right now China is storming forward in the world and they are opening up; this is among many other things a great opportunity for the western governments to make friends and influence their policies on all the issues we criticize them for. And who knows, maybe some time in the future we will be glad that we have a friend in China.
It's one of the noblest things about us, and I hope that sentient extraterrestrial life would also possess a sense of morality. But don't think for a second that nature itself is moral. Nature is completely impartial and completely absolute. How good or evil someone is does not factor into how quickly he falls if he walks off of a cliff.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean when you say "nature is completely absolute"; but that aside - I am rather hopeful about the morality and moral compatibility of other species, alien or not. Because although morality is something we mostly see in humans, it isn't entirely unique to us - all animal with sufficient intelligence and social structure seem to have elements of it; eg. wolves make personal sacrifices for the benefit of the group etc - I don't think that is down to basic instincts, they are too intelligent.
And there are good, theoretical reasons to expect that some sense of morality is a natural consequence of an advanced social structure amongst intelligent creatures. Things like mutual respect and trustworthiness are essential for cooperation, which in turn is essential for any advanced society. In fact, it seems likely that things like language, ability to abstract reasoning and the other things that are necessary in order to produce technological progress, are only possible in the context of an advanced society built on those basic, moral principles. In other words, if we meet an advanced, technological civilisation, then they will have moral values that humans can understand. I'm more worried about whether we will accept what we find, seeing how we are able to close our eyes to the plain truth of science in favour of holding on to religious misconceptions.
What is more - I think if we were to be visited by advanced aliens it is more likely that they would come with a peacful purpose than not. After all, if you are able to travel interstellar distances, you are not likely to need to take over the planet of another species for resources or space. It wouldn't make sense to wage a war when the planet next door contains all the reasources you need, minus the need to compete with other living beings.
I think the reason we haven't heard from other civilisations is quite simple: it is too difficult, at least with the technologies we understand. How would you pick out a signal from Earth from a distance of hundreds of lightyears? There are many problems involved - our signals are very weak, they are very confused (thousands of radio and tv stations), the information content of each signal is very complicated and so on. If we wanted to communicate over so large distances, we need to send a very strong signal and it needs to be very clear and simple; but then the problem is that it may all too easily look like any of the other, well-known, natural radio sources - they would have to know exactly what to look for, out there, and they don't. How could they?
Sigh.
This was one of the worst problems I've had to deal with - not the time when our UPS burned and the whole company was waiting desperately for me to get everything back in shape, not the time it turned out that our backup procedures were completely bonkers and it was my fault, somehow, that we lost a weeks worth of data, not even the time when I had rip our NIS becuase it didn't bloody work and I had to re-architect the entire set of UNIX servers, because they had been set with no idea about standardisation or portability. No, the worst was the war over server names. In the end I simply put down my foot and told everybody how I was going to do it; no an easy thing when you are up against nearly everybody from upper management to different factions on all levels. But I'm still here, though.
The fact of the matter is that different groups are always going to want different naming schemes; in my company, we have fortunately seperated management of R&D systems from the rest of IT - this is because IT proper work with Windows and know nothing about UNIX (they think they do, but they don't), whereas R&D work with UNIX and other, more exotic systems. IT are a part of finances, so what they want to know is "asset numbers" - no, I don't know what that is, either. So they want to call machines something like "+", eg. TX234643782645 - that makes their life easy, perhaps. Their managers want names like "txw2kxyz" for "Texas, Windows 2000, and some label", because it gives them an illusion about knowing what that machine is for.
On the other hand, the people who actually work for a living (that comment earned me the title of "Communist of the Year") - the production staff: programmers, QA and support - they are the ones that actually have a legitimate need for convenient servernames. They want simple ones, like sun1, linux2, zlinux4, aix2 etc. I, on the other hand, just want names that are 1) easy to write, because I log on from the command line hundreds of times every day. and 2) easy to pronounce and talk about, like bear, puppy, banana and megalodon - and since I am in charge, that is what we have.
But fortunately it is possible to satisfy all the users' needs, since there is such a thing as "aliases" in DNS, which allows us to keep hostnames like "bear" and also have functional ones like qa-nas, bld-aix5, qa-solaris10 etc.
I went to their website, but I couldn't even find a Windows port. That's so lame, if we want people to use open source software, we need to port things to Windows. Useless, I say, useless.
Let it be said first that I don't agree with censorship - people in the public spotlight should develop thicker skin, IMO. But it is not all that important what I, or any of us think - the people of Thailand are very fond of their king and almost fully support the strictness of this legislation. And to be quite honest, I can't see that anybody loses much by not insulting the king Thailand; no-one says this means that you have to not express important political or religious viewpoints. Even if one might have a critical view about something or someone, it is generally possible to express that in a non-insulting way.
It is a fact of life that everywhere in the world there are some aspect of local culture that require us to refrain from doing or saying certain things that we think of as "obviously no problem at all". When we come in contact with other cultures, I think it is up to us to develop a bit of cultural sensitivity and make ourselves aware of what is acceptable to others. I know, there is a balance between "freedom of speech" and being diplomatic, but it isn't all that difficult, and I suspect too often "freedom of speech" is simply used as a cheap excuse for being too lazy to even try being a little bit sociable.
Freedom of speech is important - far too important to be used on trivial matters.
In other words, since the upper bounds of a catastrophic outcome is a least the probability that they were wrong
It is not clear that this is the case. In fact: P(X)!=P(X|A)P(A)!+P(X|A)P(A) [from the actual article]. Your interpretation is only correct if the probablity that it goes is 100% if the assumptions are wrong.
It's the old "Limits To Growth" bullshit back again.
I can see why this upsets you; it is scary. However, we all know that are limits to growth somewhere; we just don't know exactly where - yet. We live on a planet, which at the end of the day is of a limited size. There really isn't any such things as "unlimited".
Of course, the real limit is not the theoretical upper limit for how much we have if we could convert all the sea water to energy by fusion or that kind of things. We will without a doubt run in to combinations of limitations that have the potential to stop us dead, long before we have used up all the resources we theoretically have at hand. The only sensible thing to do, as far as I can see is to try to find out what those limitations might be and what we can do to avoid them. Just dismissing the thought as "bullshit" and waving your hand vaguely in the direction of "technology" is not going to answer the questions.
Looking back over the history of life, we can see that there has been many groups of organisms that dominated for a time; but they all crashed in the end, and the ones that survived were the ones that found a sustainable mode of existence. The way we live at the moment is not sustainable; we are living out some sort of pyramid scheme - and when the ones at the bottom can no longer be exploited, those on the top will have a long way to fall.
People like you have done your best to stifle any serious research into these subjects. You talk about new technology; don't you know that all the new technology has always, overall, meant another hike in resource spending? Now that cheap energy is coming to an end, what are you going to do? Spend more energy? Will you waste more drinking water when it runs dry? To me that sounds idiotic.
I think it's a bit premature to say that our computer models are so good that they can definitively say what global conditions will be like in 1,000 years
Your reasoning sounds plausible, but is in fact wrong. As we all know from the weather forecast, it is damned difficult to predict the exact weather for a short period of time in a small area, but it isn't hard to predict that it will be a good deal warmer in the US for several month in about 4 months' time; because the US is a very large area and we're talking about a long time interval of a couple of months.
In the same way it is a good deal easier predicting what the global temperature average will be over a whole year or decade a hundred or a thousand years in the future.
If taking pictures covertly of women isnt right then why do people buy magazines with pictures of celebrities taken by the paparatzi in this manner?
Because people aren't right? You know, the fact that lots of people do something doesn't make it right, good or even clever. Sometimes - some would argue most of the time - the majorioty are simply a bunch of oafs, who just follow a trend and don't even get as far as thinking about their actions from a moral or financial perspective. That is why so many now have a large number of credit cards, all maxed out. I mean, yes, the credit crunch has been caused in part because of highly questionable lending practises; but people went for it even though they ought to have known better.
But why kick up a fuss about cameras making a noise when you take pictures? Are you going to lose important business because of it? Paparazzis don't generally let it stop them - they use SLR cameras that make a real click. But people complain about CCTV cameras - so obviously they dont like haing their pictures taken witout their consent; a click sound will make it slightly more likely that they will know they are being photographed, so they can protest against it if they don't like it. Isn't that reasonable? Or does "reasonable" only apply to yourself?
I see that I've modded down as "flamebait" - I don't know whether to be annoyed of amused.
So, is a call to be more reasonable now "flamebaiting"? Or was it because the modder didn't actually read the text any further than to object to words like "moan and whine"; and then of course the terrible heresy of stating the opnion that a government agency may in fact be right once in a while?