No, that's stupidity and vanity. As Epicurus said, "There is also a limit in simple living, and he who fails to understand this falls into an error as great as that of the man who gives way to extravagance."
Would you use perl or Fortran to do fast and heavy number crunching?
Incredibly, there is a rather good 4th order Runge-Kutta ODE solver available in Perl. I used it once because I wanted something quick and dirty, and expected performance would be terrible, but when I later translated it into C++ I had to squeeze pretty hard to get more than a factor of two speed increase. And the difference between C++ and FORTRAN is less than a factor of two for most applications these days (although I do confess to missing FORTRAN's optimized exponentiation.)
Furthermore, with decent regex and string classes available for every language under the sun (except FORTRAN, of course...) there is less and less reason to prefer one language over another, and even less reason for people to go mad and write their own. And if you really need the performance of LAPACK in FORTRAN then you can call into it from C++ easily enough.
If one is writing applications, then it is very hard to beat C++, especially given the number of excellent cross-platform application frameworks (I'm currently very happy with wxWidgets, but have used Qt heavily in the past). For scripting one has a wide range of viable choices: perl, python, Java... These are all well-supported, have large user bases, and while they are unsuitable for serious application development for a number of reasons, they all do the sorts of things we want scripting languages to do: runtime optimization, garbage collection (admittedly broken in many JVMs, but working well in perl and python), and adequate cross-platform support.
So in this environment, new languages are more of an irritant than anything else, perhaps useful for their experimental value, but if you really want new features in perl or whatever, then the best way to get them there is to work on the development of that language, not re-capitulate everything with an almost-completely-but-not-quite-identically similar syntax. Given that perl 6 is near-as-damnit a new language anyway, this is a particularly auspicious time for such endeavours.
Could it be that people are addicted to inactivity itself? I dunno, just a thought. Are there book addicts? If so, is it regarded as a problem?
Addiction has two aspects. One is biochemical changes in the brain which make certain types of choice difficult or impossible for the affected person to make. The other is the social or personal consequences of the person's choice being physiologically limited in that way. Generally, if someone has their choice limited in a way that is not personally or socially relevant (coffee, anyone?) it isn't treated as an addiction, even though the biochemical changes associated with addiction may be present [Note to pendants: yeah, coffee is probably not addictive in the biochemical sense. But I'm sure if you're smart enough to know that you're smart enough to get my point.]
It's best to think of addiction as a perfectly ordinary physiological limitation, just like being crippled. A person may have a crippled finger (minor and not significantly affecting most day-to-day tasks, like a book addiction) but it is so mild that we would be unlikely to think of them as "crippled". Whereas if they had crippled legs we probably would. Of course, like any other physiological limitation addiction may be overcome by clever work-arounds, excercises of one kind or another, and various therapies. Some people may be able to do all of this recovery work on their own, just like any other physiological limitation.
People who believe that "choice" is some magical power unrelated to the physiology of the brain may want to claim that addiction is a causeless moral failing rather than a disease, and is best dealt with by punishing addicts until they impose their mystical "will-power" on the chemisty of their brain. I bet beating cripples would get some of them to walk, too (see the details of "treatment" of the shell-shocked in WWI for particularly horrific examples of this kind of thinking.)
Those middle eastern countries with oil have strings that have a pretty tight hold on us. We are trying to break them, but we can't do it within 5 years though. We need to learn how to use our position to better control the rest of the globe.
I wasn't aware you were trying to break them. What is the budget, in tens of billions of dollars, of the Office of Alternative Energy or whatever it's called? That is the only way you'll break those strings, and I am not aware of any significant investment by your government in that area. By "significant" investment I mean levels comparable to what a war would cost, but without the dead people.
I have a dream in which your president stands up in, say 2002, and announces that he is commiting your nation, before the decade is out, of reducing America's dependence on foreign oil to zero. That unfortunately did not happen, presumably as it would result in technological developments and economic reorganizations that would upset too many influencial people.
As to controlling the rest of the planet, it is this attitude that makes the rest of us extremely wary of the United States.
Not that I'm defending the move, but I can see where, in some ways, it makes sense to defend certain portions of space (say the parts above your country) where satelite based weapons could make easy targets of important sites.
One of the many problems with this policy is that those "certain portions of space" are six dimensional and time-varying. What the U.S. is trying to "defend" amounts to certain orbits. This is not like defending your coastal waters, which have zero momentum relative to your nation's landmass. For one, it is possible to change from an orbit that does not overfly a given country to one that does with relatively trivial delta-v.
Because of this, there is little or no practical value in preventing others from accessing just some orbits. Now, the U.S. government, particularly the Defense Department under Donald Rumsfeld, has a long history of doing stuff that has no practical value (often at the cost of American lives.) So it is possible that this policy will be acted upon in an ineffectual but relatively harmless way. But given the grip of fear that still has a big hold in the U.S. it is a matter of some concern that those who would put security before all else might decide to deny everyone access to all orbits.
Some drugs--tabacco and meth, for example--are far more aggressive than others in altering brain chemistry in ways that make the choice to quit harder. And some people are far more susceptible than others. But there is no doubt whatsoever that addiction is a perfectly ordinary physiological phenomenon, no different from any other crippling physical disorder, and it affects some people severely enough that they no more have a choice to quit and than a parapelegic has a choice to walk. They literally lack the physiological capacity to do so.
This does not mean that all people are so affected--like any other disease, additions have different effects on different people. Some people get smallpox and live. Others die. No one thinks that anyone has a choice about it.
In the case of addiction, some people's capacity to choose is physiologically limited to the point where they lack the ability to quit on their own, just like some polio patients lack the ability to breathe on their own. I don't see anyone saying, "Whichever way you look at it, polio patients have a choice."
The article I've linked above includes disenting voices, but no one is saying that the brains of addicts aren't fundamentally altered by drug use. They are arguing over what the policy implications of that are, based on some pretty clearly delineated, and extremely stupid, ideological biases on both sides. And non-drug-related things, like compulsive game-playing and compulsive gambling may or may not involve similar physiological changes, but there is no doubt that sometimes people do not have a choice, however much you might want to believe otherwise.
The study determined that the liquid that comes out of the machine is absolutely pure H2O, completely identical to all other water
Trivially false statements like this one are why people don't trust naive corporate apologists who say, "Trust us, it's exactly the same as some other stuff you already eat, but our profit margin is bigger!"
What you are describing is distilled water: "The most toxic commercial beverages that people consume (i.e. cola beverages and other soft drinks) are made from distilled water. Studies have consistently shown that heavy consumers of soft drinks (with or without sugar) spill huge amounts of calcium, magnesium and other trace minerals into the urine. The more mineral loss, the greater the risk for osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, hypothyroidism, coronary artery disease, high blood pressure and a long list of degenerative diseases generally associated with premature aging."
So your example is in fact an excellent one. Of why naive corporate apologists should not be taken at face value when displaying their abject ignorance regarding matters of consumer health.
For an even more obvious example, check out most commercially available bananas
Yes, by all means do: "The common banana found at breakfast tables all over the developed world is in peril. Both pests and disease are threatening to make it extinct. The banana most familiar to us, and most in danger, is the Nanica variety of the Cavendish cultivar group. All Nanica banana plants are more or less genetically identical. Since the cultivar is sterile and seedless, it is spread by clippings, creating clones instead of offspring. It was adopted more than 50 years ago when the previous Gros Michel variety was killed off by a blight. The chief hazards to today's banana are pests, Black (and Yellow) Sigatoka fungi, and Panama disease." (emphasis added.)
Right now, I _HAVE_ to call because the labeling laws make it difficult to know what I'm eating. In Spring I called 15 "Zero Trans Fats" producers who verified that their products contain trans fats, just levels lower than the law requires (0.5 grams per serving). You might buy those products thinking their safe -- BECAUSE OF THE LAW! I had to take a step because of the law. Ridiculous
There is no law preventing producers from labelling their products accurately. They are allowed by current law to label things with less than 1 g of trans fat per serving as zero, but they are not required to do so.
So what you're telling us is: in the absence of laws forcing producers to label their products accurately, they will lie to consumers about the contents of their products.
The market in product labelling is perfectly free within the bounds set by current labelling laws. That is, beyond the government's minimum labelling requirements producers are perfectly free to tell the truth in greater detail about their products. You are pointing out that within this perfectly free market, producers are not in the least bit interested in providing labelling that is more accurate than the least-accurate labelling permitted by law.
This is what those of us in the reality-based community call a "fact", and most people at this point feel justified in concluding on the basis of this fact that if there were no labelling laws, producers would lie to a much greater degree. After all, in the absence of law, what's to stop someone from labelling anything as "zero grams trans fats"? If the FDA hadn't been there to raise concerns about Vioxx killing people Merck would have never pulled it from the market--it would be far more economically efficient to just fight a war of lies and obfuscation.
State-licensing makes things worse, more expensive and slower. See DMV for proof.
Some A are B does not imply all A are B, so your "proof" is lacking in logical strength, particularly in the face of the many cases, such as food quality standards and inspections, that have dramatically improved the situation they were intended to dramatically improve.
Of course, by the same token, not all forms of state licensing improves things. But there is no doubt in the mind of any rational individual that it does sometimes improve things.
Anyone who is interested in the mundane world of fact, rather than fanciful flights of political ideology, knows that prior to regulation and inspection, the quality of food was much lower than it is today. The quote above describes the situation in the mid-1800's, prior the the first national pure food act in the U.S. in 1906.
The law is a powerful instrument, and it has proven to be more effective than anything else in forcing people who are selling things to not lie about what they are selling.
The issue with food labelling has nothing to do with any rational concerns about food quality, however. The only issue is that consumers have a right to know what they are buying. In practice, the only way of ensuring that right is honoured is to have legal sanctions against lieing about what is being sold, and uniform labelling standards are by far the most efficient way of doing this.
Personally, I'm not at all keen on supporting an even more uniform agricultural monoculture than we have now, so if meat from cloned animals was labelled I would tend to avoid it.
Immigration per se isn't a divisive issue at all. Except for the very far-right fringe, I don't think anyone is seriously arguing that we should stop legitimate immigration of people with skills that are in-demand, here in the United States.
I think it would be very difficult for a fair-minded observer to square this claim with the hate-mongering that goes on in the mainstream media in the U.S.. For example, "They tell the illegals, become American citizens and vote Mexico's interests in the United States" does not sound like someone who is concerned about illegal immigrants--it sounds like someone who is concerned about immigration of any kind by people who are "not like us."
It is true that the adjective "illegal" is sometimes prepended to the term "immigrant" in the above-linked article and others like it, giving the racist cowards a fig leaf to hide behind, but a great deal of what they say makes no sense if it is applied only to illegals. In particular, it is totally unclear why Buchannan would be talking about his wife's grandparents, who entered the United States quite legally, if he is concerned about illegal immigration, which you and others contend it a totally different issue than legal immigration.
So nope, I don't buy it. I heard the original broadcast of the article linked above, and it was in tone and attitude pure race hatred, straight out of Nuremburg. You'll note that the summary of the article doesn't mention illegals: it mentions how the Republicans are catering to the interests of Hispanic immigrants (which makes sense, as they can vote while illegals cannot.)
In the quote I've pulled above, it isn't totally clear who "they" are, but in context it appears to mean the legal Hispanic immigrants in the United States, whom Buchannan believes are part of an international cabal to contaminate America's precious bodily fluids.
This kind of papers are what my collegues call "scientific pornography" -papers thrown up just to stir up controversy, but based on very fragile assumptions and with a few data inflated as much as possible.
For the lay-people in the audience, here's a quick way to evaluate any paper making a statistical claim: search for various forms of "p", "p=" and "p-value". If none appear (as none appear in this paper) it isn't science.
These guys have done some interesting natural history. When they generate some actual statements about the way the world is--that is, statements with p-values attached--they'll be doing science.
This is not to say that natural history is bad. It is the foundation for science. But for studies of this kind, the absense of p-values means that it gives no basis for treating the statement "Television is a cause of autism" as more plausible than it was before reading the paper.
The great misfortune here is that there are precious few venues for publishing natural history of this kind, so authors feel obliged to tart up their quite respectable observations in the lingerie of science.
The link on extraction is interesting and shows promising results.
I disagree that we face a choice between "nuclear and doom", although I am currently looking hard at the whole global warming thing, and am teetering on the edge of being convinced that nuclear is the right short-term option. Relatively poor uranium supplies requring the prompt deployment of breeder technlogy weighs against it. If uranium could be extracted from sea water in industrial quantities in an energy-efficient manner then the equation for nuclear changes a lot because it would let us avoid breeder technology for a good long time.
However, I am still not convinced that "conventional renewables"--particularly algal biodeisel--can't solve all our problems. Although nuclear has suffered from an extreme drought in investment, many other alternatives have not been given much support either. If a certain government had spent a few hundred billion on alternative energy and conservation technologies in the past five years, rather than invading harmless countries half a world away, we might be further ahead all 'round.
The high energy density of nuclear fuel is both a blessing and a curse. Although it means we need very little fuel, it also means that very small, absolutely inevitable mistakes on the part of plant operators can write-off the core. The public health risk from this is negligable. The economic risk to investors is huge. The low energy density of hydrocarbon fuels means that small mistakes result in small damage, unless it's a fire in a fuel storage depot, which I've seen, and which is profoundly nasty. However, hydrocarbon fuels have the added benefit of a very low neutron flux, which results in very little residual radioactivity, so when things do go wrong you can send a team of navvies in to fix it.
Hydrocarbon fuels are the Goldilocks of energy systems: not too dense, not too diffuse, but just right. Nuclear is too dense. Wind et al are too diffuse. Algal biodeisel has potential because it requires only very large area saline ponds, which we are pretty good at building, in very large hot dry areas, which we are well-supplied with.
The thing about all this talk of ocean extraction: the energy contained in a cubic metre of seawater is small, just like the energy we could get from a square metre of intercepted sunlight. But the figures get astonishingly large because there are so very many cubic and square metres out there.
According to the website you linked, the Black Current is carrying 6 micro-grams of uranium per square metre per second past the coast of Japan, which is 1E17 235U nuclei, giving us about 4 MW/m**2, which is actually a lot larger than I was expecting. Solar power is only 400 W/m**2, so solar installations have to be a factor of 100 larger (linear scale) than a system for extracting uranium from seawater. It's easier to build things on land, but something the size of two football fields vs something I could almost wrap my arms around would certainly favour the nuclear option.
In this case, people editing photos very rarely have any need for drawing circles,
One of the tasks I perform with the GIMP is annotation of photos--you know, the kind of image that no one ever sees anywhere that has a particular feature circled with some text describing what it is, and maybe a line connecting the text to the circle.
I'm sure I'm the only person on Earth who ever has to do this with any photo so I guess I can completely understand why "people" never what to do this.
But I do, and the GIMP makes it a great big pain in the ass.
Is that the sound of a knee jerking or have you actually bothered to check?
I have actually bothered to check. Extraction of industrial quantities of almost any mineral (other than salt and magnesium) is imaginary technology. Imaginary technology--like commercially-viable fusion power--is good, and should continue to command our imaginations, but it should not be the basis for public policy.
The claim that "there is enough economically extractable uranium to last billions of years" depends on a series of unjustified and quite possibly false claims. One of those claims is that it is possible to extract large quantities of uranium from sea water using less energy than the uranium contains.
So let's do the math. To make thing easy, I will give Cohen the full benefit of the doubt and use his own figures whenever possible. The article you link claims that a) there are 3.3 ppb U in sea water; b) 6500 tonnes of U per year would provide 25 times the current (1983) world electricity usage. A little quality time with Google shows world electricity usage in 1983 to be just below 8E12 kWhr, so a tiny amount of math tells us that based on the author's own figures we would have an energy budget of 360 kJ/kg of seawater processed, assuming we use 100% of the energy available in the uranium in its own extraction.
360 kJ is enough energy to keep a 100 W lightbulb alive for an hour. It needs to be enough to pump, process and discharge a litre of water to extract the 3.3 picograms of uranium it contains with nearly 100% efficiency to make this work. Maybe that's possible, maybe it isn't. It isn't a vast amount of energy--think about running a 1 kW generator for 6 minutes. Would that really supply enough energy to pump the water, run the chemical reactions, and concentrate the extractant by a factor of a billion or so?
It isn't obvious this is impossible, but it is a long, long way from obvious that it is possible, too. And without the factor of 1000 that you get from assumming breeder technology the you only have enough energy to keep that lightbulb on for 3.6 seconds, which makes it pretty obviously a non-starter.
As I pointed out, breeder technology has issues with moving thousands of kilos of plutonium around every year, resulting in inevitable uncertainties that will make it possible to lose enough plutonium each year to build multiple bombs, any one of which could ruin your whole day.
None of this proves that nuclear is a definite non-starter, but I wish nuclear advocates would acknowledge the problems, much as I wish nuclear opponents would acknowledge the benefits.
I say.. lets build some nuclear power plants. Use the efficient safe designs (pebble bed) and.. OHMYGOSH.. recycle the fuel.
This is kinda like saying, "Let's solve all our software problems. All we need is some inherently safe language (Java) and...OHMYGOSH... Xtreme Programming!"
Engineering is about tradeoffs, and the tradeoffs for nuclear are not particularly good. It is a large up-front investment in an unproven technology (if we go the pebble-bed route) that has known economic issues (the small errors that plant operators are absolutely certain to make result in writing off that large up-front investment) and limited fuel supply. Reprossessing extends the fuel supply considerably, but at the cost of losing enough plutonium per year to make multiple bombs.
Why will we lose plutonium, you ask? Because no one has ever been able to do inventory control at the level required to ensure it is all kept track of properly. Engineering optimism is all very well, but the fact is that if we are moving tonnes of plutonium around we will not be able to keep track of it accurately enough to ensure that virtually none is diverted.
The tradeoffs involved in nuclear power are complex, and knee-jerk anti-nuclear idiots don't help the issue with their moronic "us-against-them/we-must-save-the-world" attitudes. But overall it is doubtful that nuclear power is the best investment in future energy, although if the worst global-warming scenarios are true then we should probably be building new nukes now.
I mean, it isn't everyone's cup of tea, but clearly some people are turned on by this kind of thing, and so long as it's just a theatre of willing participants what's the problem?
If it isn't just a theatre of willing participants, then there are crimes being commited that need to be addressed by far stronger means than censoring website names, and anyone who is going to suggest that any resources be spent on censoring website names while such crimes are being committed must have a very strange notion of logic and priorities. I mean really, what kind of blithering idiot would say, "People are being tied up against their will! Quick, we must BAN CERTAIN WEBSITE NAMES! That will solve the problem!"
Or, for the homophobes in the audience, what about gayboys.ie? Or gaygirls.ie?
Jews and Muslims may have scriptural grounds for hating gays, but Christians do not, and Ireland is a nominally Catholic country. Jesus never said anything about homosexuality (unlike remarriage after divorce, which he strictly forbade), Paul only referred to it ambiguously, and the Old Testament rules against it have the same force as those against wearing cotton-polyester (Deut 22:11). And nowhere in the Bible is there a single word against lesbians, so we must conclude that God is ok with all that hot girl-on-girl action we see on the web.
What kind of "morality" is opposed to the free expression of sexuality? And why? If the claim is that the free expression of sexuality is "harmful" due to some purported indirect and subtle effect, then why wouldn't such a morality be far, far more opposed to far greater harms, like warfare?
The logic: "We must ban all depictions of sex to prevent some subtle and non-obvious kind of harm" seems far weaker than "We must ban all depictions of violence to help prevent the clear and obvious harm that violence does." I'm not in favour of banning any depictions, because depictions don't do harm.
So why is anyone concerned with banning depictions of sex, while Arnold Schwartznegger gets elected governor of California on the strength of movies that glorify violence?
This is a serious question, and I think it's about time the would-be censors answered it in clear, unambiguous and consistent language.
juden-raus.ie, I suspect, would convert many here into willing censors.
This kind of weak ad hominem, which doesn't even have the courage to declare itself openly, was lame even in the days before the 'Net. But today, when anyone can find facts to evaluate the plausibility of any claim with a few clever searches, it is beyond lame. It's almost stupid enough to be cheney.
So please, do get back to us when you have something other than your own feeling of suspicion to base your position on. Until then, you've added nothing at all to the discourse.
So they went out of the business of actually making anything (presumably because their products were not competitive in the market place), so NOW they turn to their IP to make any money. I really don't know if they've got a valid case or not, but they certainly seem to be trolling.
We know that "the marketplace" is frequently an impediment to new and better technology, with entrenched players having the ability to resist new entrants in a variety of ways. So-called predatory pricing and outright theft of technology are two favourites in the high-tech world.
Free-market abstractionists argue that predatory pricing "in the long run" is infeasible, because any company that practices it will eventually go broke and the consumer is better off in any case for getting inferior technology at below cost. This position completely ignores the realities of time-scales and capital burn, which allow existing players with deep pockets to price specific competitors into oblivion, and then implement their technology with little risk of being sued because patent suits cost millions.
So this appears to be a case of "the market" (or rather, this particular market, defined as it is by real, concrete existing laws rather than abstract fantasies) working as designed. TransMeta had a superior technology. This market was incapable of taking advantage of it, and now they are behaving like good little capitalists and finding investors who are willing to take a risk on the outcome of a very expensive, time-consuming lawsuit. That is the mechanism that this market provides for redressing some of the other problems that this market has.
Like any other machine designed by humans to fulfill human needs, different markets will have different trade-offs in their design. Existing IP laws are a hack to fix other issues that this market has, and what TransMeta is doing is a perfectly legitimate business move within the context of this market.
As a security-conscious programmer with a lot of corporate development history, I support Vista's blocking of non-signed drivers 100%
What does security-consciousness or corporate development history have to do with supporting an absolute, irrevocable blocking strategy for all unsigned drivers?
All of the same security advantages accrue from a system that can be unblocked by an advanced user. Simply have a password-protected unblocking feature, enabled by default, that corporate IT nannies can use to prevent the morons on the shop floor from running unsigned drivers.
I'd be far more interested in seeing a feature that lets me run a checksum against the kernel and display via a hardwired LCD display for visual comparison against an expected value. That would let me trust my machine. These silly DRM schemes do nothing to enhance my trust of my machine, because as others have pointed out, it is easy to obtain certificates if you're a black hat.
As Sowell would say, there is not a shortage of oil - there is only a shortage of oil at today's prices.
Which misses the point completely, much like global-warming-deniers miss the point that when you increase the effective insolation at the top of the troposphere by 2% the climate will respond, although it may not do so in complex ways.
The point is that the oil is going to get much more expensive as conventional supplies follow the Hubert curve into oblivion and unconventional (read: more expensive) supplies come on line. The response to diminishing conventional oil supplies may be shortages, higher prices, or both. What cannot be rationally claimed is BOTH: a) conventional supplies are close to peak production and will soon pass into a period of secular decline AND b) this will have no significant impact on any economy anywhere.
So Thomas Sowell is correct: at sufficiently high prices there are many alternative sources of hydrocarbon fuels that may or may not be economically viable. But to pretend that an increase in oil prices to, say, over $100 per barrel won't be hugely disruptive to the world economy is to miss the point completely.
As to Hubert's prediction of peak oil, it is a sound first-order model that is almost certainly accurate for extraction rates from conventional wells. It may not account properly for unconventional sources like tar sands, but it remains to be seen how expensive and how plentiful tar sand oil will be, and what quality of light crude can be extracted.
Unfortunately, to paraphrase Faraday, nothing is too stupid to be true.
In some jurisdictions compressed air is considered a "tangible commodity" and therefore subject to sales tax (not VAT or GST, but ordinary sales tax that nominally applies only to manufactured goods.) The dive shop in my home town had a letter from the provincial government posted explaining this, as a lot of customers were asking, "Why the hell to I have to pay provicial sales tax when I get my tanks filled--isn't this a service? And aren't services not subject to provincial sales tax?"
So the bottom line is that governments have always been willing to redefine terms and just make stuff up when it helps generate tax revenue. Much like every other human organization, in fact.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that's self control.
No, that's stupidity and vanity. As Epicurus said, "There is also a limit in simple living, and he who fails to understand this falls into an error as great as that of the man who gives way to extravagance."
Would you use perl or Fortran to do fast and heavy number crunching?
Incredibly, there is a rather good 4th order Runge-Kutta ODE solver available in Perl. I used it once because I wanted something quick and dirty, and expected performance would be terrible, but when I later translated it into C++ I had to squeeze pretty hard to get more than a factor of two speed increase. And the difference between C++ and FORTRAN is less than a factor of two for most applications these days (although I do confess to missing FORTRAN's optimized exponentiation.)
Furthermore, with decent regex and string classes available for every language under the sun (except FORTRAN, of course...) there is less and less reason to prefer one language over another, and even less reason for people to go mad and write their own. And if you really need the performance of LAPACK in FORTRAN then you can call into it from C++ easily enough.
If one is writing applications, then it is very hard to beat C++, especially given the number of excellent cross-platform application frameworks (I'm currently very happy with wxWidgets, but have used Qt heavily in the past). For scripting one has a wide range of viable choices: perl, python, Java... These are all well-supported, have large user bases, and while they are unsuitable for serious application development for a number of reasons, they all do the sorts of things we want scripting languages to do: runtime optimization, garbage collection (admittedly broken in many JVMs, but working well in perl and python), and adequate cross-platform support.
So in this environment, new languages are more of an irritant than anything else, perhaps useful for their experimental value, but if you really want new features in perl or whatever, then the best way to get them there is to work on the development of that language, not re-capitulate everything with an almost-completely-but-not-quite-identically similar syntax. Given that perl 6 is near-as-damnit a new language anyway, this is a particularly auspicious time for such endeavours.
Could it be that people are addicted to inactivity itself? I dunno, just a thought. Are there book addicts? If so, is it regarded as a problem?
Addiction has two aspects. One is biochemical changes in the brain which make certain types of choice difficult or impossible for the affected person to make. The other is the social or personal consequences of the person's choice being physiologically limited in that way. Generally, if someone has their choice limited in a way that is not personally or socially relevant (coffee, anyone?) it isn't treated as an addiction, even though the biochemical changes associated with addiction may be present [Note to pendants: yeah, coffee is probably not addictive in the biochemical sense. But I'm sure if you're smart enough to know that you're smart enough to get my point.]
It's best to think of addiction as a perfectly ordinary physiological limitation, just like being crippled. A person may have a crippled finger (minor and not significantly affecting most day-to-day tasks, like a book addiction) but it is so mild that we would be unlikely to think of them as "crippled". Whereas if they had crippled legs we probably would. Of course, like any other physiological limitation addiction may be overcome by clever work-arounds, excercises of one kind or another, and various therapies. Some people may be able to do all of this recovery work on their own, just like any other physiological limitation.
People who believe that "choice" is some magical power unrelated to the physiology of the brain may want to claim that addiction is a causeless moral failing rather than a disease, and is best dealt with by punishing addicts until they impose their mystical "will-power" on the chemisty of their brain. I bet beating cripples would get some of them to walk, too (see the details of "treatment" of the shell-shocked in WWI for particularly horrific examples of this kind of thinking.)
Those middle eastern countries with oil have strings that have a pretty tight hold on us. We are trying to break them, but we can't do it within 5 years though. We need to learn how to use our position to better control the rest of the globe.
I wasn't aware you were trying to break them. What is the budget, in tens of billions of dollars, of the Office of Alternative Energy or whatever it's called? That is the only way you'll break those strings, and I am not aware of any significant investment by your government in that area. By "significant" investment I mean levels comparable to what a war would cost, but without the dead people.
I have a dream in which your president stands up in, say 2002, and announces that he is commiting your nation, before the decade is out, of reducing America's dependence on foreign oil to zero. That unfortunately did not happen, presumably as it would result in technological developments and economic reorganizations that would upset too many influencial people.
As to controlling the rest of the planet, it is this attitude that makes the rest of us extremely wary of the United States.
Not that I'm defending the move, but I can see where, in some ways, it makes sense to defend certain portions of space (say the parts above your country) where satelite based weapons could make easy targets of important sites.
One of the many problems with this policy is that those "certain portions of space" are six dimensional and time-varying. What the U.S. is trying to "defend" amounts to certain orbits. This is not like defending your coastal waters, which have zero momentum relative to your nation's landmass. For one, it is possible to change from an orbit that does not overfly a given country to one that does with relatively trivial delta-v.
Because of this, there is little or no practical value in preventing others from accessing just some orbits. Now, the U.S. government, particularly the Defense Department under Donald Rumsfeld, has a long history of doing stuff that has no practical value (often at the cost of American lives.) So it is possible that this policy will be acted upon in an ineffectual but relatively harmless way. But given the grip of fear that still has a big hold in the U.S. it is a matter of some concern that those who would put security before all else might decide to deny everyone access to all orbits.
Whichever way you look at it, people have a choice.
"What the science shows, he says, is that the brain of an addict is fundamentally different from that of a non-addict. Initially, when a person uses hard drugs like heroin or cocaine, the chemistry of the brain is not much affected, and the decision to take the drugs remains voluntary. But at a certain point, he says, a "metaphorical switch in the brain" gets thrown, and the individual moves into a state of addiction characterized by compulsive drug use."
Some drugs--tabacco and meth, for example--are far more aggressive than others in altering brain chemistry in ways that make the choice to quit harder. And some people are far more susceptible than others. But there is no doubt whatsoever that addiction is a perfectly ordinary physiological phenomenon, no different from any other crippling physical disorder, and it affects some people severely enough that they no more have a choice to quit and than a parapelegic has a choice to walk. They literally lack the physiological capacity to do so.
This does not mean that all people are so affected--like any other disease, additions have different effects on different people. Some people get smallpox and live. Others die. No one thinks that anyone has a choice about it.
In the case of addiction, some people's capacity to choose is physiologically limited to the point where they lack the ability to quit on their own, just like some polio patients lack the ability to breathe on their own. I don't see anyone saying, "Whichever way you look at it, polio patients have a choice."
The article I've linked above includes disenting voices, but no one is saying that the brains of addicts aren't fundamentally altered by drug use. They are arguing over what the policy implications of that are, based on some pretty clearly delineated, and extremely stupid, ideological biases on both sides. And non-drug-related things, like compulsive game-playing and compulsive gambling may or may not involve similar physiological changes, but there is no doubt that sometimes people do not have a choice, however much you might want to believe otherwise.
The study determined that the liquid that comes out of the machine is absolutely pure H2O, completely identical to all other water
Trivially false statements like this one are why people don't trust naive corporate apologists who say, "Trust us, it's exactly the same as some other stuff you already eat, but our profit margin is bigger!"
What you are describing is distilled water: "The most toxic commercial beverages that people consume (i.e. cola beverages and other soft drinks) are made from distilled water. Studies have consistently shown that heavy consumers of soft drinks (with or without sugar) spill huge amounts of calcium, magnesium and other trace minerals into the urine. The more mineral loss, the greater the risk for osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, hypothyroidism, coronary artery disease, high blood pressure and a long list of degenerative diseases generally associated with premature aging."
So your example is in fact an excellent one. Of why naive corporate apologists should not be taken at face value when displaying their abject ignorance regarding matters of consumer health.
For an even more obvious example, check out most commercially available bananas
Yes, by all means do: "The common banana found at breakfast tables all over the developed world is in peril. Both pests and disease are threatening to make it extinct. The banana most familiar to us, and most in danger, is the Nanica variety of the Cavendish cultivar group. All Nanica banana plants are more or less genetically identical. Since the cultivar is sterile and seedless, it is spread by clippings, creating clones instead of offspring. It was adopted more than 50 years ago when the previous Gros Michel variety was killed off by a blight. The chief hazards to today's banana are pests, Black (and Yellow) Sigatoka fungi, and Panama disease." (emphasis added.)
Monocultures are susceptible to disease, and the case of bananas is empirical proof that monocultures do die off from disease. Widespread use of artificial insemination in cattle production already means that most beeves in North America are the offspring of a relatively small number of bulls. There is already a concern within the veterinary community regarding inbreeding and genetic homogeneity. Cloning has the potential to make this problem worse.
Right now, I _HAVE_ to call because the labeling laws make it difficult to know what I'm eating. In Spring I called 15 "Zero Trans Fats" producers who verified that their products contain trans fats, just levels lower than the law requires (0.5 grams per serving). You might buy those products thinking their safe -- BECAUSE OF THE LAW! I had to take a step because of the law. Ridiculous
There is no law preventing producers from labelling their products accurately. They are allowed by current law to label things with less than 1 g of trans fat per serving as zero, but they are not required to do so.
So what you're telling us is: in the absence of laws forcing producers to label their products accurately, they will lie to consumers about the contents of their products.
The market in product labelling is perfectly free within the bounds set by current labelling laws. That is, beyond the government's minimum labelling requirements producers are perfectly free to tell the truth in greater detail about their products. You are pointing out that within this perfectly free market, producers are not in the least bit interested in providing labelling that is more accurate than the least-accurate labelling permitted by law.
This is what those of us in the reality-based community call a "fact", and most people at this point feel justified in concluding on the basis of this fact that if there were no labelling laws, producers would lie to a much greater degree. After all, in the absence of law, what's to stop someone from labelling anything as "zero grams trans fats"? If the FDA hadn't been there to raise concerns about Vioxx killing people Merck would have never pulled it from the market--it would be far more economically efficient to just fight a war of lies and obfuscation.
State-licensing makes things worse, more expensive and slower. See DMV for proof.
Some A are B does not imply all A are B, so your "proof" is lacking in logical strength, particularly in the face of the many cases, such as food quality standards and inspections, that have dramatically improved the situation they were intended to dramatically improve.
Of course, by the same token, not all forms of state licensing improves things. But there is no doubt in the mind of any rational individual that it does sometimes improve things.
Forcing companies to label properly does NOT work.
Shady processors adulterated fertilizers, deodorized rotten eggs, revived rancid butter, substituted glucose for honey. Farmers began to learn about such deceptions from a new breed of agriculture chemists, often trained in Germany, located in State officialdom and helped by Federal funds. These chemists could apply their scientific skills to expose the work of chemists employed by industry to depreciate food products, as the Senate Report put it, in "a greed for gain."
Anyone who is interested in the mundane world of fact, rather than fanciful flights of political ideology, knows that prior to regulation and inspection, the quality of food was much lower than it is today. The quote above describes the situation in the mid-1800's, prior the the first national pure food act in the U.S. in 1906.
The law is a powerful instrument, and it has proven to be more effective than anything else in forcing people who are selling things to not lie about what they are selling.
The issue with food labelling has nothing to do with any rational concerns about food quality, however. The only issue is that consumers have a right to know what they are buying. In practice, the only way of ensuring that right is honoured is to have legal sanctions against lieing about what is being sold, and uniform labelling standards are by far the most efficient way of doing this.
Personally, I'm not at all keen on supporting an even more uniform agricultural monoculture than we have now, so if meat from cloned animals was labelled I would tend to avoid it.
Immigration per se isn't a divisive issue at all. Except for the very far-right fringe, I don't think anyone is seriously arguing that we should stop legitimate immigration of people with skills that are in-demand, here in the United States.
I think it would be very difficult for a fair-minded observer to square this claim with the hate-mongering that goes on in the mainstream media in the U.S.. For example, "They tell the illegals, become American citizens and vote Mexico's interests in the United States" does not sound like someone who is concerned about illegal immigrants--it sounds like someone who is concerned about immigration of any kind by people who are "not like us."
It is true that the adjective "illegal" is sometimes prepended to the term "immigrant" in the above-linked article and others like it, giving the racist cowards a fig leaf to hide behind, but a great deal of what they say makes no sense if it is applied only to illegals. In particular, it is totally unclear why Buchannan would be talking about his wife's grandparents, who entered the United States quite legally, if he is concerned about illegal immigration, which you and others contend it a totally different issue than legal immigration.
So nope, I don't buy it. I heard the original broadcast of the article linked above, and it was in tone and attitude pure race hatred, straight out of Nuremburg. You'll note that the summary of the article doesn't mention illegals: it mentions how the Republicans are catering to the interests of Hispanic immigrants (which makes sense, as they can vote while illegals cannot.)
In the quote I've pulled above, it isn't totally clear who "they" are, but in context it appears to mean the legal Hispanic immigrants in the United States, whom Buchannan believes are part of an international cabal to contaminate America's precious bodily fluids.
This kind of papers are what my collegues call "scientific pornography" -papers thrown up just to stir up controversy, but based on very fragile assumptions and with a few data inflated as much as possible.
For the lay-people in the audience, here's a quick way to evaluate any paper making a statistical claim: search for various forms of "p", "p=" and "p-value". If none appear (as none appear in this paper) it isn't science.
These guys have done some interesting natural history. When they generate some actual statements about the way the world is--that is, statements with p-values attached--they'll be doing science.
This is not to say that natural history is bad. It is the foundation for science. But for studies of this kind, the absense of p-values means that it gives no basis for treating the statement "Television is a cause of autism" as more plausible than it was before reading the paper.
The great misfortune here is that there are precious few venues for publishing natural history of this kind, so authors feel obliged to tart up their quite respectable observations in the lingerie of science.
The link on extraction is interesting and shows promising results.
I disagree that we face a choice between "nuclear and doom", although I am currently looking hard at the whole global warming thing, and am teetering on the edge of being convinced that nuclear is the right short-term option. Relatively poor uranium supplies requring the prompt deployment of breeder technlogy weighs against it. If uranium could be extracted from sea water in industrial quantities in an energy-efficient manner then the equation for nuclear changes a lot because it would let us avoid breeder technology for a good long time.
However, I am still not convinced that "conventional renewables"--particularly algal biodeisel--can't solve all our problems. Although nuclear has suffered from an extreme drought in investment, many other alternatives have not been given much support either. If a certain government had spent a few hundred billion on alternative energy and conservation technologies in the past five years, rather than invading harmless countries half a world away, we might be further ahead all 'round.
The high energy density of nuclear fuel is both a blessing and a curse. Although it means we need very little fuel, it also means that very small, absolutely inevitable mistakes on the part of plant operators can write-off the core. The public health risk from this is negligable. The economic risk to investors is huge. The low energy density of hydrocarbon fuels means that small mistakes result in small damage, unless it's a fire in a fuel storage depot, which I've seen, and which is profoundly nasty. However, hydrocarbon fuels have the added benefit of a very low neutron flux, which results in very little residual radioactivity, so when things do go wrong you can send a team of navvies in to fix it.
Hydrocarbon fuels are the Goldilocks of energy systems: not too dense, not too diffuse, but just right. Nuclear is too dense. Wind et al are too diffuse. Algal biodeisel has potential because it requires only very large area saline ponds, which we are pretty good at building, in very large hot dry areas, which we are well-supplied with.
The thing about all this talk of ocean extraction: the energy contained in a cubic metre of seawater is small, just like the energy we could get from a square metre of intercepted sunlight. But the figures get astonishingly large because there are so very many cubic and square metres out there.
According to the website you linked, the Black Current is carrying 6 micro-grams of uranium per square metre per second past the coast of Japan, which is 1E17 235U nuclei, giving us about 4 MW/m**2, which is actually a lot larger than I was expecting. Solar power is only 400 W/m**2, so solar installations have to be a factor of 100 larger (linear scale) than a system for extracting uranium from seawater. It's easier to build things on land, but something the size of two football fields vs something I could almost wrap my arms around would certainly favour the nuclear option.
Hmmm...
In this case, people editing photos very rarely have any need for drawing circles,
One of the tasks I perform with the GIMP is annotation of photos--you know, the kind of image that no one ever sees anywhere that has a particular feature circled with some text describing what it is, and maybe a line connecting the text to the circle.
I'm sure I'm the only person on Earth who ever has to do this with any photo so I guess I can completely understand why "people" never what to do this.
But I do, and the GIMP makes it a great big pain in the ass.
Is that the sound of a knee jerking or have you actually bothered to check?
I have actually bothered to check. Extraction of industrial quantities of almost any mineral (other than salt and magnesium) is imaginary technology. Imaginary technology--like commercially-viable fusion power--is good, and should continue to command our imaginations, but it should not be the basis for public policy.
The claim that "there is enough economically extractable uranium to last billions of years" depends on a series of unjustified and quite possibly false claims. One of those claims is that it is possible to extract large quantities of uranium from sea water using less energy than the uranium contains.
So let's do the math. To make thing easy, I will give Cohen the full benefit of the doubt and use his own figures whenever possible. The article you link claims that a) there are 3.3 ppb U in sea water; b) 6500 tonnes of U per year would provide 25 times the current (1983) world electricity usage. A little quality time with Google shows world electricity usage in 1983 to be just below 8E12 kWhr, so a tiny amount of math tells us that based on the author's own figures we would have an energy budget of 360 kJ/kg of seawater processed, assuming we use 100% of the energy available in the uranium in its own extraction.
360 kJ is enough energy to keep a 100 W lightbulb alive for an hour. It needs to be enough to pump, process and discharge a litre of water to extract the 3.3 picograms of uranium it contains with nearly 100% efficiency to make this work. Maybe that's possible, maybe it isn't. It isn't a vast amount of energy--think about running a 1 kW generator for 6 minutes. Would that really supply enough energy to pump the water, run the chemical reactions, and concentrate the extractant by a factor of a billion or so?
It isn't obvious this is impossible, but it is a long, long way from obvious that it is possible, too. And without the factor of 1000 that you get from assumming breeder technology the you only have enough energy to keep that lightbulb on for 3.6 seconds, which makes it pretty obviously a non-starter.
As I pointed out, breeder technology has issues with moving thousands of kilos of plutonium around every year, resulting in inevitable uncertainties that will make it possible to lose enough plutonium each year to build multiple bombs, any one of which could ruin your whole day.
None of this proves that nuclear is a definite non-starter, but I wish nuclear advocates would acknowledge the problems, much as I wish nuclear opponents would acknowledge the benefits.
I say .. lets build some nuclear power plants. Use the efficient safe designs (pebble bed) and .. OHMYGOSH .. recycle the fuel.
This is kinda like saying, "Let's solve all our software problems. All we need is some inherently safe language (Java) and...OHMYGOSH... Xtreme Programming!"
Engineering is about tradeoffs, and the tradeoffs for nuclear are not particularly good. It is a large up-front investment in an unproven technology (if we go the pebble-bed route) that has known economic issues (the small errors that plant operators are absolutely certain to make result in writing off that large up-front investment) and limited fuel supply. Reprossessing extends the fuel supply considerably, but at the cost of losing enough plutonium per year to make multiple bombs.
Why will we lose plutonium, you ask? Because no one has ever been able to do inventory control at the level required to ensure it is all kept track of properly. Engineering optimism is all very well, but the fact is that if we are moving tonnes of plutonium around we will not be able to keep track of it accurately enough to ensure that virtually none is diverted.
The tradeoffs involved in nuclear power are complex, and knee-jerk anti-nuclear idiots don't help the issue with their moronic "us-against-them/we-must-save-the-world" attitudes. But overall it is doubtful that nuclear power is the best investment in future energy, although if the worst global-warming scenarios are true then we should probably be building new nukes now.
It would be hard to defend "bondagegirls.ie"
Why?
I mean, it isn't everyone's cup of tea, but clearly some people are turned on by this kind of thing, and so long as it's just a theatre of willing participants what's the problem?
If it isn't just a theatre of willing participants, then there are crimes being commited that need to be addressed by far stronger means than censoring website names, and anyone who is going to suggest that any resources be spent on censoring website names while such crimes are being committed must have a very strange notion of logic and priorities. I mean really, what kind of blithering idiot would say, "People are being tied up against their will! Quick, we must BAN CERTAIN WEBSITE NAMES! That will solve the problem!"
Or, for the homophobes in the audience, what about gayboys.ie? Or gaygirls.ie?
Jews and Muslims may have scriptural grounds for hating gays, but Christians do not, and Ireland is a nominally Catholic country. Jesus never said anything about homosexuality (unlike remarriage after divorce, which he strictly forbade), Paul only referred to it ambiguously, and the Old Testament rules against it have the same force as those against wearing cotton-polyester (Deut 22:11). And nowhere in the Bible is there a single word against lesbians, so we must conclude that God is ok with all that hot girl-on-girl action we see on the web.
What kind of "morality" is opposed to the free expression of sexuality? And why? If the claim is that the free expression of sexuality is "harmful" due to some purported indirect and subtle effect, then why wouldn't such a morality be far, far more opposed to far greater harms, like warfare?
The logic: "We must ban all depictions of sex to prevent some subtle and non-obvious kind of harm" seems far weaker than "We must ban all depictions of violence to help prevent the clear and obvious harm that violence does." I'm not in favour of banning any depictions, because depictions don't do harm.
So why is anyone concerned with banning depictions of sex, while Arnold Schwartznegger gets elected governor of California on the strength of movies that glorify violence?
This is a serious question, and I think it's about time the would-be censors answered it in clear, unambiguous and consistent language.
juden-raus.ie, I suspect, would convert many here into willing censors.
This kind of weak ad hominem, which doesn't even have the courage to declare itself openly, was lame even in the days before the 'Net. But today, when anyone can find facts to evaluate the plausibility of any claim with a few clever searches, it is beyond lame. It's almost stupid enough to be cheney.
So please, do get back to us when you have something other than your own feeling of suspicion to base your position on. Until then, you've added nothing at all to the discourse.
Happy parents == happy kids
Yup. That's why I got divorced.
I'm happy. My ex is happy. My kids are happy.
Couldn't say any of that when we were married.
But wait, that isn't what strikes you as odd...it strikes you as odd that students need the 'Net in order to learn.
What strikes me is odd is that what strikes you as odd is completely unrelated to anything in TFA.
But wait, this is
Ok, the irrelevance of your comment, and the insightful mod it got, no longer strikes me as odd at all.
So they went out of the business of actually making anything (presumably because their products were not competitive in the market place), so NOW they turn to their IP to make any money. I really don't know if they've got a valid case or not, but they certainly seem to be trolling.
We know that "the marketplace" is frequently an impediment to new and better technology, with entrenched players having the ability to resist new entrants in a variety of ways. So-called predatory pricing and outright theft of technology are two favourites in the high-tech world.
Free-market abstractionists argue that predatory pricing "in the long run" is infeasible, because any company that practices it will eventually go broke and the consumer is better off in any case for getting inferior technology at below cost. This position completely ignores the realities of time-scales and capital burn, which allow existing players with deep pockets to price specific competitors into oblivion, and then implement their technology with little risk of being sued because patent suits cost millions.
So this appears to be a case of "the market" (or rather, this particular market, defined as it is by real, concrete existing laws rather than abstract fantasies) working as designed. TransMeta had a superior technology. This market was incapable of taking advantage of it, and now they are behaving like good little capitalists and finding investors who are willing to take a risk on the outcome of a very expensive, time-consuming lawsuit. That is the mechanism that this market provides for redressing some of the other problems that this market has.
Like any other machine designed by humans to fulfill human needs, different markets will have different trade-offs in their design. Existing IP laws are a hack to fix other issues that this market has, and what TransMeta is doing is a perfectly legitimate business move within the context of this market.
As a security-conscious programmer with a lot of corporate development history, I support Vista's blocking of non-signed drivers 100%
What does security-consciousness or corporate development history have to do with supporting an absolute, irrevocable blocking strategy for all unsigned drivers?
All of the same security advantages accrue from a system that can be unblocked by an advanced user. Simply have a password-protected unblocking feature, enabled by default, that corporate IT nannies can use to prevent the morons on the shop floor from running unsigned drivers.
I'd be far more interested in seeing a feature that lets me run a checksum against the kernel and display via a hardwired LCD display for visual comparison against an expected value. That would let me trust my machine. These silly DRM schemes do nothing to enhance my trust of my machine, because as others have pointed out, it is easy to obtain certificates if you're a black hat.
As Sowell would say, there is not a shortage of oil - there is only a shortage of oil at today's prices.
Which misses the point completely, much like global-warming-deniers miss the point that when you increase the effective insolation at the top of the troposphere by 2% the climate will respond, although it may not do so in complex ways.
The point is that the oil is going to get much more expensive as conventional supplies follow the Hubert curve into oblivion and unconventional (read: more expensive) supplies come on line. The response to diminishing conventional oil supplies may be shortages, higher prices, or both. What cannot be rationally claimed is BOTH: a) conventional supplies are close to peak production and will soon pass into a period of secular decline AND b) this will have no significant impact on any economy anywhere.
So Thomas Sowell is correct: at sufficiently high prices there are many alternative sources of hydrocarbon fuels that may or may not be economically viable. But to pretend that an increase in oil prices to, say, over $100 per barrel won't be hugely disruptive to the world economy is to miss the point completely.
As to Hubert's prediction of peak oil, it is a sound first-order model that is almost certainly accurate for extraction rates from conventional wells. It may not account properly for unconventional sources like tar sands, but it remains to be seen how expensive and how plentiful tar sand oil will be, and what quality of light crude can be extracted.
Unfortunately, to paraphrase Faraday, nothing is too stupid to be true.
In some jurisdictions compressed air is considered a "tangible commodity" and therefore subject to sales tax (not VAT or GST, but ordinary sales tax that nominally applies only to manufactured goods.) The dive shop in my home town had a letter from the provincial government posted explaining this, as a lot of customers were asking, "Why the hell to I have to pay provicial sales tax when I get my tanks filled--isn't this a service? And aren't services not subject to provincial sales tax?"
So the bottom line is that governments have always been willing to redefine terms and just make stuff up when it helps generate tax revenue. Much like every other human organization, in fact.