The very nature of "God" takes it outside the scope of science. A higher power, a creator, something omnipotent, etc.
Here you have already limited yourself to the idea of 'One God Only' - which is mainly a concept from the Jewish religions (Judaism,...). To me monotheism seems rather conceited - and logically unsound, a bit like the 'Set of all sets' of Russell's Paradox. If you are to believe in a god, then you have to have more than one; hence the need in Christianity for saints, angels, devils etc. Personally I feel much more comfortable with the view of gods that Terry Pratchett put forward in his books - especially in "Small Gods": gods are manifestations of human belief - IOW gods are created by us, not the other way round.
Science attempts to answer the question "How". Religion attempts to answer the question "Why".
Well said - but I think the real difference is that religion is concerned with the answer, whereas science is concerned with the question. When scientists have found the answer to a great problem, they immediately begin to ask "But if that is the case, what happens if...". In religion they simply state the answer, never mind the question, and I think that is why they always go on about the end of life's journey: what happens after death.
I think the weakness in this is that human societies are generally very conservative; which is why there are still tribes in isolated areas that haven't changed the way they live for perhaps 30,000 years or even longer. The basic attitude seems to be "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" - so when we have something that we know works well enough, we tend to stick with it rather than invent something new. Our inventiveness only really get fired up when we are squeezed, when there isn't enough food to go round etc. Fire was used at least as early as 300,000 years ago by Homo erectus, so cooked food was probably not unknown at that time; but there was no compelling need to change the diet to include the less edible plants/animals.
Starvation kills people, but the ones who were clever enough to find ways to eat things that you couldn't before, survived - IOW we got cleverer because we had to in order to survive, not because we happened to stumble over something that allowed us the luxury of a big calorie guzzler of a brain. In fairness, this was probably the message the researchers tried to get across, only it was lost on the reporter who thought this version sounded sexier.
I personally don't agree with the Tibet protests - I think they are way off the mark in the same way the exile Cubans' propaganda is. I mean, the ones in exile are the ones who lost power and huge possessions when China threw them out - of course they are pissed off about it, but I suspect their views are not the most neutral, even though they are the loudest.
But in this case I think the IOC are wrong - using the Olympic rings this is satire, as far as I can see, which is normally legal; or am I wrong?
But of course, no matter what the Bush administration does, it is always wrong.
There, fixed that for ya'. Isn't that what you meant in your first paragraph?
As a matter of fact, no. The problem with the Bush administration is not that nothing they do can ever be right, but that they have so amply demonstrated that they are not trustworthy. That and their smug incompetence; but enough about their failings - I have always felt that if one can't see both the good and the evil in every person, there is something missing in one's perception. I don't find it at all unthinkable that I might like GWB if I met him in person; but being likeable is simply not enough to make a good leader. And he really is an appalling leader, he really, really is.
the rushed nature of things like the even/odd car ban and the planting of millions of plants and trees in the months leading up to the Olympics seems entirely too coincidental.
Rushed? You don't think there is a need to get a bloody move on already? We have wasted the last 8 years of Bush admin on trying to avoid facing up to the enormous task ahead of us, and I won't be surprised at all if the next ten administrations are going to do the same. It is urgent that we do something - we still have time to think (quickly) before we act, but act we must.
The planting of trees may have picked un in recent months, but it has been going on for a long time in NW China in an effort to stop or at least slow down the desertification, that send such huge clouds of dust in over Beijing, among other things. The smog can be quite bad, but what really is bad is the dust, at least that is what I found when I lived there.
As for your cheap dig at the Dam - what, in your opinion would have been best, or at least the lesser of evils: building X new coal-fired powerstations or the Three Gorges Dam? I suspect the environmental impact of the dam is likely to be less in the long run. But of course, no matter what China does, it is always wrong. If they build green and introduce legislation to limit pollution, it is "oppression of the free market", if they don't, it shows how callous and uncaring they are about the plight of the common people. If they fight terrorism in Xinjiang it is "oppression of minorities" and if they don't it is because they are incompetent and don't care about the security of their people. Is it any wonder they simply choose to close their ears to whatever criticism comes from the West? How about we once in a while greeted them with some encouragement?
They are going to build a green, carbon-neutral city? I think that is absolutely fabulous, and I hope they have every success. They open up to Western media, even if it is just a bit? I think it is good - and brave, considering that we can find nothing positive to say about what they do.
A trick for the rude part: just learn one sentence in french, then more parisian would try to speak back to you in english.
Well, it is a case of "the lesser evil" - having heard an English speaker pronounce their beautiful language, they want to get back at them. Attack is the best defence.
Because, of course the bloody commies are never going to do something good just because it is a good thing - they hate everything that is good. And of course they came up with this idea, the whole plan, the detailed architecture, the city planning, just like that in the about 5 days since the Olympics started.
Come to think of it - I don't know which is most impressive: Starting a massive, green initiative like that and showing us all the way to the future, or coming up with it in no time at all, when it would have taken everybody else years to work out the plans.
Back to reality, though: The Chinese have seen reality in the eye, just like we have - they know that this kind of things are necessary if we are to avoid choking in our own filth, and they know it has to happen on an absolutely epic scale. The difference is that they are taking action instead of waffling over who should pay and which foot to stand on.
Being able to 'bend' light around an object is only a minor part of invisibility, I think - an object isn't invisible unless you can't see it in any way. The problem is that there is no guarantee that the light will appear to have followed a straight line through the 'invisible' object, as far as I can see, so there will be a visible distortion of the background.
If it's taboo to spy on your neighbors then don't use Google's street view. Or at the very least keep the view centered on the road.
Ah, yes, always push responsibility away, isn't it? Don't you feel this clashes with all the fine words about privacy that we always hear so much about on Slashdot? Or is privacy only important when you hide your own lurid little affair from the view of the authorities? If privacy is all-important, then it is important even to people you don't care about.
We have been predicting the demise of both COBOL, FOTRAN and mainframes for how long, now? Decades? I have suspected for a long time that we are not going to lose them any time soon - COBOL is certainly no beauty, but it is proven and seems rock solid. And it is not even all that bad a language to work with, although I must admit it looks rather painful, doing anything but simple programs with it. Still, I worked with COBOL for years - and enjoyed it too.
The same goes for FORTRAN: an ugly language with some horrifying features; but one that has a huge, old code base in the science community - because it was first, but also because it has the exactly the features you need for numeric programming. A bit like a meat cleaver - not a thing of beauty that your girlfriend would have on her make-up table (depending on your relationship, of course), but functional and to the point.
One thing I still haven't seen anything like an explanation of is this: How is it possible to have any, let alone that many, technical and programmatic problems with something so conceptually simple? I mean, we are not talking about a control system for a Mars lander, or the entire Oracle database, or even a simple accounting application. This is a simple enough task: verify the user's eligibility to vote, accept a vote, save a log entry, send results to server. I bet I could make this work in a week in any language, up to and including Intercal. One would have to go out of one's way to create a transmission problem that would lose votes.
So perhaps the answer is that somebody has gone out of their way to make something that looks like a faulty system, so the result of elections could be manipulated under the cover of "technical difficulties". Or are they just criminally incompetent?
And that, boys and girls, is why the next world war will be fought between Russia and China.
You forget that Greenland is actually part of the American continent and therefore rightfully belongs to th US, just like Canada, so the next world war will of course be between Russia and USA.
Seriously, though, the way things are going, oil is less likely to be the cause of a world war - I suspect in the end the world will find a way to split this that isn't too outrageous, and we are slowly moving away from burning oil anyway because of the climate. I think the next world war will be over water, food and migrations. We, in the rich part of the world have become steadily less willing to receive immigrants, and as the climate worsens, there will be less water and food available, particularly in the poorer parts of the world, so they will migrate to our end of the world. This will give rise to WWIII - perhaps not a war between nations, as WWII, but regional conflicts all over the world.
It strikes as weird - and sad - that online fraud is considered important enough that we have loads of legislation in place to handle it, but the life of a teenager is not?
I know what people say - that it is "not likely" or even "impossible" that cyberbullying is as bad as that, and that those that commit suicide must have had other issues - well, so what? Of course you have "other issues" if you kill yourself for any reason. It is only in movies that people kill themselves for only one thing - shall we simply dismiss them as "weak" and therefore no better than rubbish? That is a very shortsighted way of looking at things - we can all end up in this situation, where we have lost somebody "because they were weak".
In my view it should always be investigated as homicide when a person causes the death of another; and it should be prosecuted on that basis too, if a person is considered the cause of another person's death.
I am getting a little bit tired of the word 'freedom' - or at least the way it is being thrown around here on/. as if everyone knew exactly what it means. Can't you see it is nothing but a buzzword? Something that people throw in to make whichever nonsense they peddle smell sweetp; from "freedom fries" and "Operation Iraqi Freedom" to the idea that circumventing a firewall in order to access pornographic websites is somehow "freedom".
How about respecting the concept of freedom a little? If freedom matters so much to you, at least learn what it means and learn that in a universe where there are physical laws, there is no such thing as absolute freedom. Hell, there isn't even a universal 'optimal' freedom - what one person thinks of as freedom may be another person's slavery. Take yourself as an example - you are probably American, right? So you feel you have freedom, because you can air whichever opinion you like, as loudly and as stupidly as you care; on the other hand, you probably can't go to work and earn money without owning a car and perhaps you have made yourself dependent on a lot of technological stuff, that you feel you can't live without. To me that looks rather like you are not all that free. Yeah, you can stand on a street corner and yell, bless you.
True freedom is in your mind - if you are free in your mind, you let others live like they choose, whether they like to be ruled by an Imam and Shia laws or whether they prefer Communism. You can't force freedom on people, just like you can't force them to have 'good taste'.
Unfortunate translations from one language to another are probably some of the funniest humour there is - but let us remember that it goes both ways. Like eg. the term "GP", which in UK means "General Practitioner" - IOW your regular doctor. "GP" sounds uncannily like "chickenarse" to a Chinese.
This sounds like an euphemism for "How To Look Good While Still Being A Greedy Bastard".
The sad truth is that capitalism, at least in the form we have seen hitherto, is dependent on there being social differences, ie in capitalism there must be some that are poor and some that are rich - otherwise the dream of getting wealthy loses its value as incentive. You have to know that you can become desperately poor, so you work hard to avoid it, and you have to know that there is at least a theoretical possibility that you can become very rich, once you have avoided the immediate danger of poverty. Isn't this what we have always been told?
All this talk about how capitalism in some form or other is going to save the world will never be anything but a sham, so let's stop pretending.
The fundamental issue at the very bottom of this mire that is internet trolling and harrassment is not whether to protect the privacy of citizens or whether freedom of speech is more or less important than anything else. Instead it is one about basic human behaviour - what one could call 'secular moral'. This is things like trustworthyness, reliability and a certain measure of willingness to fit into society.
In the case of trolling I think we are seeing important principles, like freedom of speech and right to privacy, being abused to take away people's right to assemble peacefully. So, is the privacy and freedom of speech of a single bully more important than the rights of many to go about their legal business?
This is not religious intolerance - it is called humour. I don't mind Jehovah's Witnesses, as long as they don't come and bother me. Religious intolerance is when religious people are intolerant of non-believers, as far as I know.
It is strange to see - although not at all surprising - how a group of people make a heroic effort to explain away facts now on/.: "A person is not online unless (s)he can access the same crap everybody else can". Wow, you guys really have found "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth". Last time I looked 'online' simply meant 'connected to the internet'; but then I am not the guy who has got it all sussed, of course.
Funny how some seem to think - or perhaps it is not so much thinking as knee-jerk reaction. First the general tone was that all the Chinese were oppressed and really hated their Communist government; then it came out that in fact they were quite happy, the ungrateful bastards. But then, fortunately there is the censure and the Great, Big Firewall - which it turns out isn't all that effective, and probably not needed at all, since most Chinese aren't interested in Good, American Family and Freedom Values, such as internet porn and SPAM; because, can you believe it, they don't read English. I mean, sometimes you despair - it is as if they don't even make the effort to do as they are bloody well told and reach for Freedom(TM). So, obviously, they aren't really online at all.
Or could the truth be that the continuously repeated mantras about China are simply false? If you are moderately interested in the truth, at least you should entertain the possibility that what you hear repeated over and over by people who don't really know anything could actually be wrong.
Why don't we just send up a bunch of Jehovah's Witnesses with pamphlets? I have seen even the biggest, strongest men hide behind the sofa when just one of them is at the door; it shouldn't take more than, say, ten to make an average sized asteroid go away.
The reason why computer chips have kept to Moore's Law is that the whole area of research has constantly attracted huge funding from very big companies, who had an interest in it. Perhaps we could have seen something similar for solar cells and fuel cells, if there had been enough investments. It is worth noting, however, that developing these technologies would have gone against the interests of some very major players: the oil and coal companies. If we could suddenly produce energy cheaply, simply by erecting solar panels with an efficiency above 50%, why would we buy fossil fuel? We all know that those things are bad for our environment, and there is every reason to suspect that research has been actively stifled by the fossil fuel producers.
There are no obvious, physical reasons why a solar cell shouldn't be able to reach a substantial efficiency - recently there has been a number of articles on that very subject suggesting efficiencies in the 80'es - and of course it will become much cheaper to produce them, just like it is now absurdly cheap to produce computer chips.
But apart from that, there is so much energy floating around in our environment: wind and water, just to mention the two most obvious. Don't let anyone dupe you into thinking that the only way to utilize that energy is by making huge powerstations that are plugged into the main grid. Centralised power production is geared towards extracting energy from concentrated sources, like fossil or nuclear fuels, whereas wind and water power mostly occur in relatively low concentrations, which will make distributed production more efficient - like in one windmill per household, if one can imagine such a thing, or a small number of large windmills per smallish community.
1. Proper indentation 2. Proper comments 3. Proper blockstructure 4. No code block exceeds a screen page (80 col x 25 lines)
The first three should be obvious, I hope. No. 4 is about legibililty for everybody involved. It may well be that you feel comfortable with very long lines and use a small font, so you can hold 200 lines on screen, but the common minimum standard is still 80 x 25, and some people still prefer to use that format.
The worst standards are the ones that have too many details - it's like micromanagement. Trust your coders to do the right thing, but enforce a few, important rules. The way source looks should only be a matter of importance if it helps make the code more understandable and thus easier to change or debug.
It seems to be a bit premature, imagining that the mouse (or the keyboard, for that matter) will go out of fashion anytime soon. To say that there are ways to capture motion more accurately - well, what a surprise, but is that really a major problem for most users? A mouse can easily be navigated to within, say, +/- 5 pixels, which is not far from the precision of our eyes, at least when things move at normal speeds. Sub-millimeter precision or exact conversion of real-world motion to screen-motion is not often essential.
It may be cool to imagine the miracles of future technology, but even in the future the simple practicality and usability will be the most important factor, and I don't see how face-recognition and precise motion sensors are going to make the use of computers in our daily work-lives much more efficient. The problem here isn't the computers, but the humans and the work we do - we don't constantly work at our highest efficiency level; we take breaks, we smalltalk, we waste time being indecisive etc. And the work we do is never simple and clearcut - if it was, it would be done by machines - so when are we actually going to utilise the vastly superior precision or whatever?
On top of that, we have some mature and reliable tecnologies - keyboard and mouse - that do the job well enough, whereas face-recognition and magical wands from Nintendo are new and fairly unproven. Is the ability to interact with the computer via taichi and scowling, attractive though it is, a big enough improvement to make the problems with drivers a minor matter?
I have never really seen Linus as a prophet, unlike some, and although I can see the sense in being as open as possible - because that gives developers a strong incentive to fix things - I can also see that it may not be completely stupid to allow developers a bit of time to try to fix a newly discovered security vulnerability. I mean, it is not as if we are talking about keeping things very secret in order to avoid doing anything about it; but most of the time, if the news about a problem isn't bellowed out in public as soon as it is discovered, it buys people just a little bit of valuable time.
Slashdot Mirror
The very nature of "God" takes it outside the scope of science. A higher power, a creator, something omnipotent, etc.
Here you have already limited yourself to the idea of 'One God Only' - which is mainly a concept from the Jewish religions (Judaism, ...). To me monotheism seems rather conceited - and logically unsound, a bit like the 'Set of all sets' of Russell's Paradox. If you are to believe in a god, then you have to have more than one; hence the need in Christianity for saints, angels, devils etc. Personally I feel much more comfortable with the view of gods that Terry Pratchett put forward in his books - especially in "Small Gods": gods are manifestations of human belief - IOW gods are created by us, not the other way round.
Science attempts to answer the question "How". Religion attempts to answer the question "Why".
Well said - but I think the real difference is that religion is concerned with the answer, whereas science is concerned with the question. When scientists have found the answer to a great problem, they immediately begin to ask "But if that is the case, what happens if ...". In religion they simply state the answer, never mind the question, and I think that is why they always go on about the end of life's journey: what happens after death.
I think the weakness in this is that human societies are generally very conservative; which is why there are still tribes in isolated areas that haven't changed the way they live for perhaps 30,000 years or even longer. The basic attitude seems to be "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" - so when we have something that we know works well enough, we tend to stick with it rather than invent something new. Our inventiveness only really get fired up when we are squeezed, when there isn't enough food to go round etc. Fire was used at least as early as 300,000 years ago by Homo erectus, so cooked food was probably not unknown at that time; but there was no compelling need to change the diet to include the less edible plants/animals.
Starvation kills people, but the ones who were clever enough to find ways to eat things that you couldn't before, survived - IOW we got cleverer because we had to in order to survive, not because we happened to stumble over something that allowed us the luxury of a big calorie guzzler of a brain. In fairness, this was probably the message the researchers tried to get across, only it was lost on the reporter who thought this version sounded sexier.
Thank you, that's very kind.
I personally don't agree with the Tibet protests - I think they are way off the mark in the same way the exile Cubans' propaganda is. I mean, the ones in exile are the ones who lost power and huge possessions when China threw them out - of course they are pissed off about it, but I suspect their views are not the most neutral, even though they are the loudest.
But in this case I think the IOC are wrong - using the Olympic rings this is satire, as far as I can see, which is normally legal; or am I wrong?
But of course, no matter what the Bush administration does, it is always wrong.
There, fixed that for ya'. Isn't that what you meant in your first paragraph?
As a matter of fact, no. The problem with the Bush administration is not that nothing they do can ever be right, but that they have so amply demonstrated that they are not trustworthy. That and their smug incompetence; but enough about their failings - I have always felt that if one can't see both the good and the evil in every person, there is something missing in one's perception. I don't find it at all unthinkable that I might like GWB if I met him in person; but being likeable is simply not enough to make a good leader. And he really is an appalling leader, he really, really is.
the rushed nature of things like the even/odd car ban and the planting of millions of plants and trees in the months leading up to the Olympics seems entirely too coincidental.
Rushed? You don't think there is a need to get a bloody move on already? We have wasted the last 8 years of Bush admin on trying to avoid facing up to the enormous task ahead of us, and I won't be surprised at all if the next ten administrations are going to do the same. It is urgent that we do something - we still have time to think (quickly) before we act, but act we must.
The planting of trees may have picked un in recent months, but it has been going on for a long time in NW China in an effort to stop or at least slow down the desertification, that send such huge clouds of dust in over Beijing, among other things. The smog can be quite bad, but what really is bad is the dust, at least that is what I found when I lived there.
As for your cheap dig at the Dam - what, in your opinion would have been best, or at least the lesser of evils: building X new coal-fired powerstations or the Three Gorges Dam? I suspect the environmental impact of the dam is likely to be less in the long run. But of course, no matter what China does, it is always wrong. If they build green and introduce legislation to limit pollution, it is "oppression of the free market", if they don't, it shows how callous and uncaring they are about the plight of the common people. If they fight terrorism in Xinjiang it is "oppression of minorities" and if they don't it is because they are incompetent and don't care about the security of their people. Is it any wonder they simply choose to close their ears to whatever criticism comes from the West? How about we once in a while greeted them with some encouragement?
They are going to build a green, carbon-neutral city? I think that is absolutely fabulous, and I hope they have every success. They open up to Western media, even if it is just a bit? I think it is good - and brave, considering that we can find nothing positive to say about what they do.
A trick for the rude part: just learn one sentence in french, then more parisian would try to speak back to you in english.
Well, it is a case of "the lesser evil" - having heard an English speaker pronounce their beautiful language, they want to get back at them. Attack is the best defence.
My God, This Is So Insightful Of You!!!!
Because, of course the bloody commies are never going to do something good just because it is a good thing - they hate everything that is good. And of course they came up with this idea, the whole plan, the detailed architecture, the city planning, just like that in the about 5 days since the Olympics started.
Come to think of it - I don't know which is most impressive: Starting a massive, green initiative like that and showing us all the way to the future, or coming up with it in no time at all, when it would have taken everybody else years to work out the plans.
Back to reality, though: The Chinese have seen reality in the eye, just like we have - they know that this kind of things are necessary if we are to avoid choking in our own filth, and they know it has to happen on an absolutely epic scale. The difference is that they are taking action instead of waffling over who should pay and which foot to stand on.
Being able to 'bend' light around an object is only a minor part of invisibility, I think - an object isn't invisible unless you can't see it in any way. The problem is that there is no guarantee that the light will appear to have followed a straight line through the 'invisible' object, as far as I can see, so there will be a visible distortion of the background.
If it's taboo to spy on your neighbors then don't use Google's street view. Or at the very least keep the view centered on the road.
Ah, yes, always push responsibility away, isn't it? Don't you feel this clashes with all the fine words about privacy that we always hear so much about on Slashdot? Or is privacy only important when you hide your own lurid little affair from the view of the authorities? If privacy is all-important, then it is important even to people you don't care about.
We have been predicting the demise of both COBOL, FOTRAN and mainframes for how long, now? Decades? I have suspected for a long time that we are not going to lose them any time soon - COBOL is certainly no beauty, but it is proven and seems rock solid. And it is not even all that bad a language to work with, although I must admit it looks rather painful, doing anything but simple programs with it. Still, I worked with COBOL for years - and enjoyed it too.
The same goes for FORTRAN: an ugly language with some horrifying features; but one that has a huge, old code base in the science community - because it was first, but also because it has the exactly the features you need for numeric programming. A bit like a meat cleaver - not a thing of beauty that your girlfriend would have on her make-up table (depending on your relationship, of course), but functional and to the point.
One thing I still haven't seen anything like an explanation of is this: How is it possible to have any, let alone that many, technical and programmatic problems with something so conceptually simple? I mean, we are not talking about a control system for a Mars lander, or the entire Oracle database, or even a simple accounting application. This is a simple enough task: verify the user's eligibility to vote, accept a vote, save a log entry, send results to server. I bet I could make this work in a week in any language, up to and including Intercal. One would have to go out of one's way to create a transmission problem that would lose votes.
So perhaps the answer is that somebody has gone out of their way to make something that looks like a faulty system, so the result of elections could be manipulated under the cover of "technical difficulties". Or are they just criminally incompetent?
And that, boys and girls, is why the next world war will be fought between Russia and China.
You forget that Greenland is actually part of the American continent and therefore rightfully belongs to th US, just like Canada, so the next world war will of course be between Russia and USA.
Seriously, though, the way things are going, oil is less likely to be the cause of a world war - I suspect in the end the world will find a way to split this that isn't too outrageous, and we are slowly moving away from burning oil anyway because of the climate. I think the next world war will be over water, food and migrations. We, in the rich part of the world have become steadily less willing to receive immigrants, and as the climate worsens, there will be less water and food available, particularly in the poorer parts of the world, so they will migrate to our end of the world. This will give rise to WWIII - perhaps not a war between nations, as WWII, but regional conflicts all over the world.
It strikes as weird - and sad - that online fraud is considered important enough that we have loads of legislation in place to handle it, but the life of a teenager is not?
I know what people say - that it is "not likely" or even "impossible" that cyberbullying is as bad as that, and that those that commit suicide must have had other issues - well, so what? Of course you have "other issues" if you kill yourself for any reason. It is only in movies that people kill themselves for only one thing - shall we simply dismiss them as "weak" and therefore no better than rubbish? That is a very shortsighted way of looking at things - we can all end up in this situation, where we have lost somebody "because they were weak".
In my view it should always be investigated as homicide when a person causes the death of another; and it should be prosecuted on that basis too, if a person is considered the cause of another person's death.
I am getting a little bit tired of the word 'freedom' - or at least the way it is being thrown around here on /. as if everyone knew exactly what it means. Can't you see it is nothing but a buzzword? Something that people throw in to make whichever nonsense they peddle smell sweetp; from "freedom fries" and "Operation Iraqi Freedom" to the idea that circumventing a firewall in order to access pornographic websites is somehow "freedom".
How about respecting the concept of freedom a little? If freedom matters so much to you, at least learn what it means and learn that in a universe where there are physical laws, there is no such thing as absolute freedom. Hell, there isn't even a universal 'optimal' freedom - what one person thinks of as freedom may be another person's slavery. Take yourself as an example - you are probably American, right? So you feel you have freedom, because you can air whichever opinion you like, as loudly and as stupidly as you care; on the other hand, you probably can't go to work and earn money without owning a car and perhaps you have made yourself dependent on a lot of technological stuff, that you feel you can't live without. To me that looks rather like you are not all that free. Yeah, you can stand on a street corner and yell, bless you.
True freedom is in your mind - if you are free in your mind, you let others live like they choose, whether they like to be ruled by an Imam and Shia laws or whether they prefer Communism. You can't force freedom on people, just like you can't force them to have 'good taste'.
Unfortunate translations from one language to another are probably some of the funniest humour there is - but let us remember that it goes both ways. Like eg. the term "GP", which in UK means "General Practitioner" - IOW your regular doctor. "GP" sounds uncannily like "chickenarse" to a Chinese.
This sounds like an euphemism for "How To Look Good While Still Being A Greedy Bastard".
The sad truth is that capitalism, at least in the form we have seen hitherto, is dependent on there being social differences, ie in capitalism there must be some that are poor and some that are rich - otherwise the dream of getting wealthy loses its value as incentive. You have to know that you can become desperately poor, so you work hard to avoid it, and you have to know that there is at least a theoretical possibility that you can become very rich, once you have avoided the immediate danger of poverty. Isn't this what we have always been told?
All this talk about how capitalism in some form or other is going to save the world will never be anything but a sham, so let's stop pretending.
The fundamental issue at the very bottom of this mire that is internet trolling and harrassment is not whether to protect the privacy of citizens or whether freedom of speech is more or less important than anything else. Instead it is one about basic human behaviour - what one could call 'secular moral'. This is things like trustworthyness, reliability and a certain measure of willingness to fit into society.
In the case of trolling I think we are seeing important principles, like freedom of speech and right to privacy, being abused to take away people's right to assemble peacefully. So, is the privacy and freedom of speech of a single bully more important than the rights of many to go about their legal business?
This is not religious intolerance - it is called humour. I don't mind Jehovah's Witnesses, as long as they don't come and bother me. Religious intolerance is when religious people are intolerant of non-believers, as far as I know.
It is strange to see - although not at all surprising - how a group of people make a heroic effort to explain away facts now on /.: "A person is not online unless (s)he can access the same crap everybody else can". Wow, you guys really have found "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth". Last time I looked 'online' simply meant 'connected to the internet'; but then I am not the guy who has got it all sussed, of course.
Funny how some seem to think - or perhaps it is not so much thinking as knee-jerk reaction. First the general tone was that all the Chinese were oppressed and really hated their Communist government; then it came out that in fact they were quite happy, the ungrateful bastards. But then, fortunately there is the censure and the Great, Big Firewall - which it turns out isn't all that effective, and probably not needed at all, since most Chinese aren't interested in Good, American Family and Freedom Values, such as internet porn and SPAM; because, can you believe it, they don't read English. I mean, sometimes you despair - it is as if they don't even make the effort to do as they are bloody well told and reach for Freedom(TM). So, obviously, they aren't really online at all.
Or could the truth be that the continuously repeated mantras about China are simply false? If you are moderately interested in the truth, at least you should entertain the possibility that what you hear repeated over and over by people who don't really know anything could actually be wrong.
Why don't we just send up a bunch of Jehovah's Witnesses with pamphlets? I have seen even the biggest, strongest men hide behind the sofa when just one of them is at the door; it shouldn't take more than, say, ten to make an average sized asteroid go away.
The reason why computer chips have kept to Moore's Law is that the whole area of research has constantly attracted huge funding from very big companies, who had an interest in it. Perhaps we could have seen something similar for solar cells and fuel cells, if there had been enough investments. It is worth noting, however, that developing these technologies would have gone against the interests of some very major players: the oil and coal companies. If we could suddenly produce energy cheaply, simply by erecting solar panels with an efficiency above 50%, why would we buy fossil fuel? We all know that those things are bad for our environment, and there is every reason to suspect that research has been actively stifled by the fossil fuel producers.
There are no obvious, physical reasons why a solar cell shouldn't be able to reach a substantial efficiency - recently there has been a number of articles on that very subject suggesting efficiencies in the 80'es - and of course it will become much cheaper to produce them, just like it is now absurdly cheap to produce computer chips.
But apart from that, there is so much energy floating around in our environment: wind and water, just to mention the two most obvious. Don't let anyone dupe you into thinking that the only way to utilize that energy is by making huge powerstations that are plugged into the main grid. Centralised power production is geared towards extracting energy from concentrated sources, like fossil or nuclear fuels, whereas wind and water power mostly occur in relatively low concentrations, which will make distributed production more efficient - like in one windmill per household, if one can imagine such a thing, or a small number of large windmills per smallish community.
Rules of thumb:
1. Proper indentation
2. Proper comments
3. Proper blockstructure
4. No code block exceeds a screen page (80 col x 25 lines)
The first three should be obvious, I hope. No. 4 is about legibililty for everybody involved. It may well be that you feel comfortable with very long lines and use a small font, so you can hold 200 lines on screen, but the common minimum standard is still 80 x 25, and some people still prefer to use that format.
The worst standards are the ones that have too many details - it's like micromanagement. Trust your coders to do the right thing, but enforce a few, important rules. The way source looks should only be a matter of importance if it helps make the code more understandable and thus easier to change or debug.
It seems to be a bit premature, imagining that the mouse (or the keyboard, for that matter) will go out of fashion anytime soon. To say that there are ways to capture motion more accurately - well, what a surprise, but is that really a major problem for most users? A mouse can easily be navigated to within, say, +/- 5 pixels, which is not far from the precision of our eyes, at least when things move at normal speeds. Sub-millimeter precision or exact conversion of real-world motion to screen-motion is not often essential.
It may be cool to imagine the miracles of future technology, but even in the future the simple practicality and usability will be the most important factor, and I don't see how face-recognition and precise motion sensors are going to make the use of computers in our daily work-lives much more efficient. The problem here isn't the computers, but the humans and the work we do - we don't constantly work at our highest efficiency level; we take breaks, we smalltalk, we waste time being indecisive etc. And the work we do is never simple and clearcut - if it was, it would be done by machines - so when are we actually going to utilise the vastly superior precision or whatever?
On top of that, we have some mature and reliable tecnologies - keyboard and mouse - that do the job well enough, whereas face-recognition and magical wands from Nintendo are new and fairly unproven. Is the ability to interact with the computer via taichi and scowling, attractive though it is, a big enough improvement to make the problems with drivers a minor matter?
I have never really seen Linus as a prophet, unlike some, and although I can see the sense in being as open as possible - because that gives developers a strong incentive to fix things - I can also see that it may not be completely stupid to allow developers a bit of time to try to fix a newly discovered security vulnerability. I mean, it is not as if we are talking about keeping things very secret in order to avoid doing anything about it; but most of the time, if the news about a problem isn't bellowed out in public as soon as it is discovered, it buys people just a little bit of valuable time.