The real test is to come up with the hypothesis first, then collect the data.
That's not the way the vast majority of science is done. Popper was a philosopher speaking in ignorance (but I repeat myself).
The challenge for these guys is not in the hypothesis testing, but in the cuts. You have to come up with some set of criteria for selecting "good" events in complex detectors of this kind. There is always a degree of arbitrariness in how you do that, and there have been cases in the past (the so-called 'GSI particle') where people tweaked and tuned multi-dimensional cuts to maximize peaks in the data.
In the present case it is clear their cuts are physics-based--they are described in the paper--and that the peak structure is consistent with the resolution one would expect (the GSI particle required some very weird physics to make the narrow peak widths plausible.)
However, the peak is also precisely in the region where their background spectra are varying most rapidly, and this is a huge red flag. It makes them sensitive to any number of minor mis-calibrations. It does NOT mean the phenomenon is not real, but if I had to make a bet on it being physics beyond the standard model or an instrumental artefact, my money would not be on new physics.
Seriously, I am reasonably expert on radiation safety (I've worked as a medical physicist and spent a good deal of my professional career around radiation sources of one kind or another) and I have no clue what anyone could possibly mean when they say "rates exceed 100 mSv". It's like saying, "the spacecraft was traveling in excess of 30 km when it impacted." If it was impact on the Moon that might mean "30 km/s", if it was impact on Earth it might mean "30 km/hr".
The only thing such statements certainly mean is that the person making them has no clue whatsoever about the topic they are pretending to report on.
And the only thing I find weirder than people reporting rates using units that have nothing to do with rate is people who assume they know how to translate nonsense into sense. Why do you assume that someone who knows nothing about radiation--the person reporting the story--can be relied upon the make the error you expect as opposed to some other error? Why do you think there is any communication going on here at all, instead of simply an idiot spouting gibberish?
I would call that an unimpressive figure, even non-newsworthy
And yet if one of those containers fell on you it would be impressive indeed. It's all about perspective.
We have this issue in any number of areas. Global capitalism is just so damned productive, such a powerful amplifier of human capability, that even small inefficiencies can result in significant consequences. This has been the argument around reprocessing nuclear fuel for decades: even at 0.1% loss rates, we would still have the potential for hundreds of kilograms of plutonium going "missing" every year, and we'd never know if it was a result of criminal activity or an accounting/process-control error until a mushroom cloud appeared in place of a major American city.
Probably not, but consider the economics: millions of containers, 0.1% loss rate, hundreds of dollars in hardware that has to be maintained (batteries swapped out once every few years at the very least.) Who is goiing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to fix a problem they don't have?
Then consider the politics: the only way you'd make this fly would be with a global treaty requiring it, which would be opposed by a small number of wealthy and well-organized companies and championed by a few disorganized individuals with very little at stake.
Technological solutions of this kind are only useful if they can be practically implemented.
Don't worry, I'm sure your millions of dollars will warm that blood right back up.
Not everyone who cruises is rich. I doubt even the majority would count as such. A lot of people who cruise want to get away from it all because they don't deal with "it all" very well, and people like that are rarely rich.
This suggests that it is only a matter of time before we can expect to see surplussed predators and such 'protecting and serving' here at home.
Yup, because using all that technology to actually create useful goods and services instead of applying to the deadweight loss sector of the economy would be stupid!
People in government and people running corporations are willing to spend billions developing machines so people can kill each other, but if you ask them to put a dime into clean water tech or clean energy tech that's suddenly "socialism".
In the meantime the murderous corporate fatcats and their governmental partners in crime get fat on taxpayer dollars, and useful idiots like the Tea Partiers actually support the process, voting eagerly for candiates in favour of larger government and more spending on corporate welfare to produce machines for killing.
The terrible thing is that there are scientists and engineers out there who think it is a good idea to spend their precious lives doing nothing more productive than wasting their education in the deadweight loss sector helping to build unproductive machines for killing.
Really: THE solar constant. That's what it's called.
A bit of modelling shows that solar sails are likely to be practical out to the orbit of Jupiter, as anyone who has actually studied the problem knows.
Mars is actually 1/4 the force per unit area (inverse square law and all that) but a bit of simple simulation shows that solar sails are probably practical out to Jupiter, where there is still sufficient sunlight to manage orbital insertion without much difficulty.
So yeah, I see the problem, and unlike you I've actually done to modelling to understand the limitations quantitatively, rather than just waving my hands about it.
Although you're still better than the clown who responded above, who doesn't know what the solar constant is.
You're going to have to come up with a new word for the "true" fiscal conservatives and point out what makes them true conservatives vs. all those that have been elected so far.
Operationally, true fiscal conservatives balance government budgets, the way Bill Clinton did. People can give all kinds of reasons why that "doesn't count" in an attempt to preserve their ideological blinders, but that is the reality.
No Republican president in my lifetime (I'm in my late 40's) has been a true fiscal conservative by this measure.
SAYING "I believe in smaller government and balanced budgets" and then growing the government and increasing spending and debt makes you a spendthrift and a hypocrite, not a conservative.
every single time a fiscal conservative is in charge of the US
You replied:
every time there is a republican in the white house the economy crashes
He is talking about fiscal conservatives. You are talking about Republicans. Republicans threw their fiscal conservatives over the side in the early 1980's, 30 years ago. Seriously, go and read the history of Reagan's first term, and David Stockman's critique of it: "he specifically criticized the failure of congressional Republicans to support a reduction in government spending as necessary offsets to the large tax cuts, in order to avoid the creation of large deficits and an exploding national debt."
A generation later people are still thinking of Republicans as the party of fiscal conservatism, and it is beyond me why this is so. You would have to be either not paying attention or completely delusional to think that Republicans are the least bit interested in balanced budgets, smaller government, or fiscal responsibility.
Now, tax reform to simplify tax law, reduce loopholes, etc, I think is something both parties can get behind
Why would either party get behind this when their constituents--the monied interests who run the American Oligarchy--are so firmly opposed to it?
In the 1980's in Canada we actually carried through with two major tax reforms, both of which resulted in great simplification to produce flatter, simpler, broader taxes. Our "Conservative" government in recent years has been busily chipping away at those reforms, because there is no money to be made in simplicity.
Until the tax policy debate in the US is entirely focused on simple vs complex there is zero chance of change because there are so many powerful interests in favour of complexity. The high vs low debate is a huge red hering, intended to distract voters from what matters, which is breadth and simplicity. Broad, simple taxes will always be low, because there won't be any of this nonsense about assuming the higher rates will only affect others. Everyone is in the same boat.
The WORST thing is light, because light has so very little momentum for so much energy.
Unless of course the light is free. The solar constant is about 1 kW/m**2, so solar sails get 1 N per 150,000 m**2, or a circle of about 250 m diameter.
“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven't got it.” -- Bernard Shaw
The clearly the/. editors or the dimwit who submitted this story are not cynics, because they certainly lack the power of accurate observation. This report speculates that the reactor pressure vessel may have melted, but for some unaccountable reason the summary suggests that the containment may have been breached.
This story is pure sensationalism by abstraction and amplification. The mental health effects of fear due to misinformation, sensationalism and lies surrounding nuclear accidents of this type are far greater than the physical health effects, and I dearly hope one day the ignorant assholes who promulgate these kinds of sensationalistic accounts get their propper cumuppance: a massive class-action suit brought by the victims of their voyeuristic fearmongering.
I am interested though: how do you define "solid coding?"
Start with Steve McConnell's book "Writing Solid Code", which of course you have read, right? Because good programming practice never goes out of style.
I see the flux in these things as pretty amusing, as the younger generation discards and then rediscovers the hard lessons their elders leaned.
The bottom line is: writing good software is HARD. A good developer has a wide array of tools for dealing with the problem, including a diversity of coding styles from OO to functional to procedural and a deep knowledge of multiple lanaguages from APL to zed (neither of which I am a big fan of). "Developers" who are in fact one-language script kiddies are good for fast turn-over low-value applications on the Web, I guess, but at some point the Web environment is going to stablize and professionals will move in to write code that will last decades. This is what happened in the '80s with desktop programming, when a lot of idiots said it was OK to do the job badly because it would be obsolete in the next release. Having worked with code like that which is now nearly old enough to drink in most states, I can say that the judgement of the people who wrote it was bad in all respects.
This will perhaps get replies that say, "But it's different this time!" Sure it is. Now you're writing unmaintainable garbage in JS and PHP rather than FORTRAN, Pascal and C. Professional developers will make a lot of money in a few years cleaning up the mess you're making. In the meantime, we write embedded code that will be running solidly long after you amateurs are gone.
but I still prefer rigid typing that won't even let you use a bool or char as an int, even if that's how it's stored (if it's what you wanted to do.. cast it..).
What Python has a type system that's fairly strong, but it also has an oddball way of name binding that means a name takes its type from the last thing assigned to it. The object the name refers to still has a strong type, but the name can be recycled to refer to an object of different type.
C++ is actually drifting in this direction, with the absolutely wonderful "auto" keyword in C++0x, which flags a name so the compiler can assign its type based on the type of its initializer. If Python names could be declared of immutable type it would achieve the same functionality from the opposite direction.
Likewise, C++ prototypes were intended to give some of the "duck typing" flavour of Python, because there are times when type doesn't matter but interface does. I am not an unequivocal fan of duck typing because there are trivil cases in the language itself when the same operator on two different types has completely different semantics: strings and lists both support [], but the meaning of a character within a string is completely different from the meaning of an object within a container. The coupling between characters and the strings they are part of is is high, while the coupling between containers and the things they contain is low.
I haven't used Python 3 at all, but have found like so many others that once I got over the "OMG it's full of whitespace!" thing Python is an enormously powerful and fun language, and an excellent language for teaching software development.
Javascript is ugly but usable. PHP is astonishingly ugly and barely usable, and having spent the last week or two working on some Wordpress stuff in PHP I have to say it is hands down the most ridiculous language I have ever had the misfortune of using. I have no idea why anyone would prefer it to perl or Python on the server. My only guess is that it is sold to people who know nothing about software design as "you too can write amazing Web 2.0 applications!" Certainly if all the examples and tutorials out there are any indication there are no competent developers or designers working in PHP.
Which is what they said after TMI and Chernobyl and for all I know Windscale as well.
If nuclear power is so damned dangerous where are the piles of dead bodies?
Call me when the number of people in the past thirty years gets up to 0.1% of the number killed by automobiles, or half the number killed by coal power in all its dreadful glory.
Nuclear power has serious economic issues. If it had significant safety issues it would have killed WAY more people by now.
And no, Greenpeace propoganda about us not being able to prove that Chernobyl didn't kill 10,000 people world-wide per year in the past 20 years doesn't count. Every reputable health authority that has looked at the consequence of the Chernobyl disaster has pegged the number in the low thousands at the most. No fun fore those people, but the vastly larger number of people killed by coal and cars aren't having any fun either.
Given the abject failure of Patrick Henry's programme of war to create liberty in the United States or anywhere else, perhaps it is time to point out that he was wrong.
Peace is not surrender. War is not victory. War is FAILURE: the failure to think of a more interesting, creative, rational solution. It is an admission that you are an uncreative, often cowardly, idiot.
The NAZIs were worried about food security. That was their fundamental ethnographic concern: feeding the German people.
There were at least two solutions to this problem: one was to go to war for the purpose of conquering Europe to create an agrarian slave state to the east that would be exploited to feed Germany. Another was the engage in the scientific study of agriculuture to increase crop yeilds, and to open trade with more agriculturally productive countries. The NAZIs chose the path of war and were left with a country in which barely one brick stood upon another and many Germans starved to death in the aftermath.
History gives us example after example after example of people chosing war--or the conceptual model of war, as in the War on Drugs--over rational, creative, efficient, effective solutions. One can only conclude that such choices reflect a desire to avoid solving the purported problem, as war is always the least effective, least efficient means of solution even on the rare occassions where it isn't an abject failure. A more reasonable supposition, given the empirically ineffiiciency and ineffectiveness of war is that people who advocate it simply like killing people.
Such individuals are the enemies of all humanity and all progress.
BTW, no, I've never been arrested and never will be unless the far lefties get their wish and turn the U.S. into some form of oligarchy.
I have to admire the political tribalism of the American people, who are so focused on the trivial public differences between the two wings of the oligarchy that the existence of the oligarchy itself is invisible to them.
UCSF suggests that measuring this radiation on the skin would result in a larger value.
It would. The TSA numbers come from taking the total dose, which is deposited in the skin and adjacent tissue, and dividing it by the mass of the body. This is a bit like having a person hold a sixteen tonne weight to reduce the effective dose of a drug: if you divide the drug quantity by the mass of the person plus the mass of the completely unaffected dead weight, you can get any dose number you want.
I've been surprised that these things haven't been seen more commonly until now, particularly for battlefield deployment where they would be really useful. I debated doing development on them myself--the algorithms are very much like particle-location algorithms used in large cherenkov detectrors like Kamiokande and SNO--but really prefer to focus my time on economically productive activity.
As military tech goes, though, this is fairly nice: it only endangers people who have already started shooting, and while shooting back is the dumbest possible thing to do in the big picture, the poor saps on the ground have an understandably different set of priorities in the short term.
It is possible to strip out all the comments and just use that non-copyrightable interface code
Then it should be possible to generate exactly the same information from other sources, in particular sources that are not covered by and licensed under the GPL. And it is important to do this because the process of stripping the header files of nominally all the copyrightable information is unquestionably creating a derivative work of the complete, copyright-protected, GPL-licensed work.
The owner's copyright and the GPL cover the WORK. This is the way copyright operates. When I write a book, the whole book is covered by the same copyright. If I sell you that book under an ordinary commerical license you have some well-established rights in law, which may include, for example, the right to republish a list of chapter headings from my book.
If on the other hand I explicitly license your use of the book under a GPL-like license, you would not have that right unless you also release the list under a similar license because that list of chapter headings is a derivative work, and the license under which a copy of the work has been conveyed to you forbids the creation/distribution of derivative works that are not distributed under a comparable license.
This has nothing to do with whether or not a list of chapter titles can be protected by copyright. If you were to create that list based on some other form of information gathering, for example, you would be just fine.
But there is no question whatsoever that given the means by which they were generated the header files that Google is actually using are derivative works of files that as a whole are PROBABLY covered by copyright and that are licensed under the GPL.
The only legal question is: are those headers, either singly or as a collection, covered by copyright? Reasonably legal opinions differ on this.
So you think IBM was also crazy to argue that back in SCO v IBM where that argument was held up by the court?
That ruling applied to the header files in question, which were not the same header files in the present case, as I understand it. While some header files may not be copyrightable, it does not follow that all are not.
Slashdot Mirror
The real test is to come up with the hypothesis first, then collect the data.
That's not the way the vast majority of science is done. Popper was a philosopher speaking in ignorance (but I repeat myself).
The challenge for these guys is not in the hypothesis testing, but in the cuts. You have to come up with some set of criteria for selecting "good" events in complex detectors of this kind. There is always a degree of arbitrariness in how you do that, and there have been cases in the past (the so-called 'GSI particle') where people tweaked and tuned multi-dimensional cuts to maximize peaks in the data.
In the present case it is clear their cuts are physics-based--they are described in the paper--and that the peak structure is consistent with the resolution one would expect (the GSI particle required some very weird physics to make the narrow peak widths plausible.)
However, the peak is also precisely in the region where their background spectra are varying most rapidly, and this is a huge red flag. It makes them sensitive to any number of minor mis-calibrations. It does NOT mean the phenomenon is not real, but if I had to make a bet on it being physics beyond the standard model or an instrumental artefact, my money would not be on new physics.
I don't see a workable plan to stop the water, since they are still pouring it on.
That's an extremely weird thing to say, as they are actively working to get recirculation going in all the damaged reactors.
Perhaps you don't see the workable plan that is being worked on because you aren't paying attention?
I assumed they meant per hour.
Why?
Seriously, I am reasonably expert on radiation safety (I've worked as a medical physicist and spent a good deal of my professional career around radiation sources of one kind or another) and I have no clue what anyone could possibly mean when they say "rates exceed 100 mSv". It's like saying, "the spacecraft was traveling in excess of 30 km when it impacted." If it was impact on the Moon that might mean "30 km/s", if it was impact on Earth it might mean "30 km/hr".
The only thing such statements certainly mean is that the person making them has no clue whatsoever about the topic they are pretending to report on.
And the only thing I find weirder than people reporting rates using units that have nothing to do with rate is people who assume they know how to translate nonsense into sense. Why do you assume that someone who knows nothing about radiation--the person reporting the story--can be relied upon the make the error you expect as opposed to some other error? Why do you think there is any communication going on here at all, instead of simply an idiot spouting gibberish?
I really don't understand it.
I would call that an unimpressive figure, even non-newsworthy
And yet if one of those containers fell on you it would be impressive indeed. It's all about perspective.
We have this issue in any number of areas. Global capitalism is just so damned productive, such a powerful amplifier of human capability, that even small inefficiencies can result in significant consequences. This has been the argument around reprocessing nuclear fuel for decades: even at 0.1% loss rates, we would still have the potential for hundreds of kilograms of plutonium going "missing" every year, and we'd never know if it was a result of criminal activity or an accounting/process-control error until a mushroom cloud appeared in place of a major American city.
Or, did I just dream that one up?
Probably not, but consider the economics: millions of containers, 0.1% loss rate, hundreds of dollars in hardware that has to be maintained (batteries swapped out once every few years at the very least.) Who is goiing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to fix a problem they don't have?
Then consider the politics: the only way you'd make this fly would be with a global treaty requiring it, which would be opposed by a small number of wealthy and well-organized companies and championed by a few disorganized individuals with very little at stake.
Technological solutions of this kind are only useful if they can be practically implemented.
Don't worry, I'm sure your millions of dollars will warm that blood right back up.
Not everyone who cruises is rich. I doubt even the majority would count as such. A lot of people who cruise want to get away from it all because they don't deal with "it all" very well, and people like that are rarely rich.
This suggests that it is only a matter of time before we can expect to see surplussed predators and such 'protecting and serving' here at home.
Yup, because using all that technology to actually create useful goods and services instead of applying to the deadweight loss sector of the economy would be stupid!
People in government and people running corporations are willing to spend billions developing machines so people can kill each other, but if you ask them to put a dime into clean water tech or clean energy tech that's suddenly "socialism".
In the meantime the murderous corporate fatcats and their governmental partners in crime get fat on taxpayer dollars, and useful idiots like the Tea Partiers actually support the process, voting eagerly for candiates in favour of larger government and more spending on corporate welfare to produce machines for killing.
The terrible thing is that there are scientists and engineers out there who think it is a good idea to spend their precious lives doing nothing more productive than wasting their education in the deadweight loss sector helping to build unproductive machines for killing.
Really: THE solar constant. That's what it's called.
A bit of modelling shows that solar sails are likely to be practical out to the orbit of Jupiter, as anyone who has actually studied the problem knows.
Mars is actually 1/4 the force per unit area (inverse square law and all that) but a bit of simple simulation shows that solar sails are probably practical out to Jupiter, where there is still sufficient sunlight to manage orbital insertion without much difficulty.
So yeah, I see the problem, and unlike you I've actually done to modelling to understand the limitations quantitatively, rather than just waving my hands about it.
Although you're still better than the clown who responded above, who doesn't know what the solar constant is.
You're going to have to come up with a new word for the "true" fiscal conservatives and point out what makes them true conservatives vs. all those that have been elected so far.
Operationally, true fiscal conservatives balance government budgets, the way Bill Clinton did. People can give all kinds of reasons why that "doesn't count" in an attempt to preserve their ideological blinders, but that is the reality.
No Republican president in my lifetime (I'm in my late 40's) has been a true fiscal conservative by this measure.
SAYING "I believe in smaller government and balanced budgets" and then growing the government and increasing spending and debt makes you a spendthrift and a hypocrite, not a conservative.
He said:
every single time a fiscal conservative is in charge of the US
You replied:
every time there is a republican in the white house the economy crashes
He is talking about fiscal conservatives. You are talking about Republicans. Republicans threw their fiscal conservatives over the side in the early 1980's, 30 years ago. Seriously, go and read the history of Reagan's first term, and David Stockman's critique of it: "he specifically criticized the failure of congressional Republicans to support a reduction in government spending as necessary offsets to the large tax cuts, in order to avoid the creation of large deficits and an exploding national debt."
A generation later people are still thinking of Republicans as the party of fiscal conservatism, and it is beyond me why this is so. You would have to be either not paying attention or completely delusional to think that Republicans are the least bit interested in balanced budgets, smaller government, or fiscal responsibility.
Now, tax reform to simplify tax law, reduce loopholes, etc, I think is something both parties can get behind
Why would either party get behind this when their constituents--the monied interests who run the American Oligarchy--are so firmly opposed to it?
In the 1980's in Canada we actually carried through with two major tax reforms, both of which resulted in great simplification to produce flatter, simpler, broader taxes. Our "Conservative" government in recent years has been busily chipping away at those reforms, because there is no money to be made in simplicity.
Until the tax policy debate in the US is entirely focused on simple vs complex there is zero chance of change because there are so many powerful interests in favour of complexity. The high vs low debate is a huge red hering, intended to distract voters from what matters, which is breadth and simplicity. Broad, simple taxes will always be low, because there won't be any of this nonsense about assuming the higher rates will only affect others. Everyone is in the same boat.
The WORST thing is light, because light has so very little momentum for so much energy.
Unless of course the light is free. The solar constant is about 1 kW/m**2, so solar sails get 1 N per 150,000 m**2, or a circle of about 250 m diameter.
“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven't got it.” -- Bernard Shaw
The clearly the /. editors or the dimwit who submitted this story are not cynics, because they certainly lack the power of accurate observation. This report speculates that the reactor pressure vessel may have melted, but for some unaccountable reason the summary suggests that the containment may have been breached.
There are probably better discussions out there, but here's my take on the reactor design, which includes a pretty picture from Wikipedia that gives an idea of the difference between the pressure vessel and the containment.
This story is pure sensationalism by abstraction and amplification. The mental health effects of fear due to misinformation, sensationalism and lies surrounding nuclear accidents of this type are far greater than the physical health effects, and I dearly hope one day the ignorant assholes who promulgate these kinds of sensationalistic accounts get their propper cumuppance: a massive class-action suit brought by the victims of their voyeuristic fearmongering.
I am interested though: how do you define "solid coding?"
Start with Steve McConnell's book "Writing Solid Code", which of course you have read, right? Because good programming practice never goes out of style.
I see the flux in these things as pretty amusing, as the younger generation discards and then rediscovers the hard lessons their elders leaned.
The bottom line is: writing good software is HARD. A good developer has a wide array of tools for dealing with the problem, including a diversity of coding styles from OO to functional to procedural and a deep knowledge of multiple lanaguages from APL to zed (neither of which I am a big fan of). "Developers" who are in fact one-language script kiddies are good for fast turn-over low-value applications on the Web, I guess, but at some point the Web environment is going to stablize and professionals will move in to write code that will last decades. This is what happened in the '80s with desktop programming, when a lot of idiots said it was OK to do the job badly because it would be obsolete in the next release. Having worked with code like that which is now nearly old enough to drink in most states, I can say that the judgement of the people who wrote it was bad in all respects.
This will perhaps get replies that say, "But it's different this time!" Sure it is. Now you're writing unmaintainable garbage in JS and PHP rather than FORTRAN, Pascal and C. Professional developers will make a lot of money in a few years cleaning up the mess you're making. In the meantime, we write embedded code that will be running solidly long after you amateurs are gone.
but I still prefer rigid typing that won't even let you use a bool or char as an int, even if that's how it's stored (if it's what you wanted to do.. cast it..).
What Python has a type system that's fairly strong, but it also has an oddball way of name binding that means a name takes its type from the last thing assigned to it. The object the name refers to still has a strong type, but the name can be recycled to refer to an object of different type.
C++ is actually drifting in this direction, with the absolutely wonderful "auto" keyword in C++0x, which flags a name so the compiler can assign its type based on the type of its initializer. If Python names could be declared of immutable type it would achieve the same functionality from the opposite direction.
Likewise, C++ prototypes were intended to give some of the "duck typing" flavour of Python, because there are times when type doesn't matter but interface does. I am not an unequivocal fan of duck typing because there are trivil cases in the language itself when the same operator on two different types has completely different semantics: strings and lists both support [], but the meaning of a character within a string is completely different from the meaning of an object within a container. The coupling between characters and the strings they are part of is is high, while the coupling between containers and the things they contain is low.
I haven't used Python 3 at all, but have found like so many others that once I got over the "OMG it's full of whitespace!" thing Python is an enormously powerful and fun language, and an excellent language for teaching software development.
Javascript is ugly but usable. PHP is astonishingly ugly and barely usable, and having spent the last week or two working on some Wordpress stuff in PHP I have to say it is hands down the most ridiculous language I have ever had the misfortune of using. I have no idea why anyone would prefer it to perl or Python on the server. My only guess is that it is sold to people who know nothing about software design as "you too can write amazing Web 2.0 applications!" Certainly if all the examples and tutorials out there are any indication there are no competent developers or designers working in PHP.
They said we're all gonna dieeeeee!!!!!
Which is what they said after TMI and Chernobyl and for all I know Windscale as well.
If nuclear power is so damned dangerous where are the piles of dead bodies?
Call me when the number of people in the past thirty years gets up to 0.1% of the number killed by automobiles, or half the number killed by coal power in all its dreadful glory.
Nuclear power has serious economic issues. If it had significant safety issues it would have killed WAY more people by now.
And no, Greenpeace propoganda about us not being able to prove that Chernobyl didn't kill 10,000 people world-wide per year in the past 20 years doesn't count. Every reputable health authority that has looked at the consequence of the Chernobyl disaster has pegged the number in the low thousands at the most. No fun fore those people, but the vastly larger number of people killed by coal and cars aren't having any fun either.
Partick Henry to the Second Virginia Convention.
Given the abject failure of Patrick Henry's programme of war to create liberty in the United States or anywhere else, perhaps it is time to point out that he was wrong.
Peace is not surrender. War is not victory. War is FAILURE: the failure to think of a more interesting, creative, rational solution. It is an admission that you are an uncreative, often cowardly, idiot.
The NAZIs were worried about food security. That was their fundamental ethnographic concern: feeding the German people.
There were at least two solutions to this problem: one was to go to war for the purpose of conquering Europe to create an agrarian slave state to the east that would be exploited to feed Germany. Another was the engage in the scientific study of agriculuture to increase crop yeilds, and to open trade with more agriculturally productive countries. The NAZIs chose the path of war and were left with a country in which barely one brick stood upon another and many Germans starved to death in the aftermath.
History gives us example after example after example of people chosing war--or the conceptual model of war, as in the War on Drugs--over rational, creative, efficient, effective solutions. One can only conclude that such choices reflect a desire to avoid solving the purported problem, as war is always the least effective, least efficient means of solution even on the rare occassions where it isn't an abject failure. A more reasonable supposition, given the empirically ineffiiciency and ineffectiveness of war is that people who advocate it simply like killing people.
Such individuals are the enemies of all humanity and all progress.
BTW, no, I've never been arrested and never will be unless the far lefties get their wish and turn the U.S. into some form of oligarchy.
I have to admire the political tribalism of the American people, who are so focused on the trivial public differences between the two wings of the oligarchy that the existence of the oligarchy itself is invisible to them.
UCSF suggests that measuring this radiation on the skin would result in a larger value.
It would. The TSA numbers come from taking the total dose, which is deposited in the skin and adjacent tissue, and dividing it by the mass of the body. This is a bit like having a person hold a sixteen tonne weight to reduce the effective dose of a drug: if you divide the drug quantity by the mass of the person plus the mass of the completely unaffected dead weight, you can get any dose number you want.
Skin dose is what matters for the backscatter machines, and the dosimetry done on them is appropriate only to whole-body dose.
I've been surprised that these things haven't been seen more commonly until now, particularly for battlefield deployment where they would be really useful. I debated doing development on them myself--the algorithms are very much like particle-location algorithms used in large cherenkov detectrors like Kamiokande and SNO--but really prefer to focus my time on economically productive activity.
As military tech goes, though, this is fairly nice: it only endangers people who have already started shooting, and while shooting back is the dumbest possible thing to do in the big picture, the poor saps on the ground have an understandably different set of priorities in the short term.
It is possible to strip out all the comments and just use that non-copyrightable interface code
Then it should be possible to generate exactly the same information from other sources, in particular sources that are not covered by and licensed under the GPL. And it is important to do this because the process of stripping the header files of nominally all the copyrightable information is unquestionably creating a derivative work of the complete, copyright-protected, GPL-licensed work.
The owner's copyright and the GPL cover the WORK. This is the way copyright operates. When I write a book, the whole book is covered by the same copyright. If I sell you that book under an ordinary commerical license you have some well-established rights in law, which may include, for example, the right to republish a list of chapter headings from my book.
If on the other hand I explicitly license your use of the book under a GPL-like license, you would not have that right unless you also release the list under a similar license because that list of chapter headings is a derivative work, and the license under which a copy of the work has been conveyed to you forbids the creation/distribution of derivative works that are not distributed under a comparable license.
This has nothing to do with whether or not a list of chapter titles can be protected by copyright. If you were to create that list based on some other form of information gathering, for example, you would be just fine.
But there is no question whatsoever that given the means by which they were generated the header files that Google is actually using are derivative works of files that as a whole are PROBABLY covered by copyright and that are licensed under the GPL.
The only legal question is: are those headers, either singly or as a collection, covered by copyright? Reasonably legal opinions differ on this.
So you think IBM was also crazy to argue that back in SCO v IBM where that argument was held up by the court?
That ruling applied to the header files in question, which were not the same header files in the present case, as I understand it. While some header files may not be copyrightable, it does not follow that all are not.
Can't... I'm too busy imagining the performance...
Indeed, google "SCO linux headers" or "SCO errno.h".
So you conclude that because some headers are not subject to copyright, no headers are subject to copyright?
The phone book contains no copyrightable information. Does that mean no book is subjec to copyright?