Problem is its very difficult to do this, so much so it almost isn't worth it and would be very labor intensive such that it wouldn't be feasible. What makes iron feasible is an economically justifiable and feasible deposit, a large amount of iron in one place. It becomes far more difficult to extract and collect iron when it is much less densely deposited. There are issues of oxidisation which can deconsolidate metal bearing items. Also with our mining activity then incorporating the metal into things we are basically depleting what high density economically viable metal deposits there are. Taking iron out of a landfill from things people have thrown away is not realistic, the iron there tends to be rather sparse and massive amounts of other rubbish to be sifted through. It would be too resource and energy intensive at a time when we will have an energy shortage. Furthermore there are environmental issues which is what this article is about. The best way is mandate 100% recycling, or at least store all metal bearing items in a lined water tight facility so it can be recycled later.
I think word probably is still the best for most. OpenOffice lacks many of its features and useability. I have used both OpenOffice and Microsoft Office and always end up going back to Microsoft Office. With OpenOffice there are all sorts of little annoyances that start to add up quickly that make it quite unuseable, for instance it would only let me drag position floating boxes and items in a document by increments of roughly twenty pixels. It doesnt have an off document scratch area in the space surrounding the document, etc. There is nothing in OpenOffice that can do what Word or Publisher does.
I also think web applications are horrid and would never use them. I dont even use web e-mail. The reason is it is slow, clumsy, if you lose your internet connection you cant work. Plus you have everything you are doing sent to a server so there is no privacy. No thanks.
We have to look past wether or not it is economically viable NOW to recycle and at the long term picture. Iron and copper could be depleted by the end of the century. The results of this will be utterly disasterous as a global economic collapse would begin as it becomes harder to acquire this stuff and vastly expensive. Computers and appliances will become a thing of the past. I am a computer programmer and I have serious doubts about whether there will be a computer industry in 50 years, and about its negative effects on the environment and the planet, have made me question if it is doing more harm than good. To refuse to recycle now because we cant make profits off of it just shows how our capitalist system is destroying the future for our own short term needs and how it is apathetic towards long term consideration and human needs. The situation in the plant China is capitalism in extreme, basically no government oversight, the government does not care, is inept, impotent, corrupt or in the pockets of the plant owners, so basically its a free for all, chaos, with no rules and regulations where the wealthy elite can destroy and ruin the lives of innocent people for their own profit.
It is clear we have to make sure that recycling is being done responsibly and not one bit of pollution enters the environment, it can be done, it just takes more foresight, it takes putting public interest ahead of immediate profit and a system that allows for investment in safe technology even if it means it will not pull in an profit for decades. That is what pure corporate-capitalism does not do. Pure corporate capitalism is a short sighted, greedy system that tends to look at people as expendable resources whose only purpose is to make the wealthy wealthier and thats what we see in China in all kinds of ways. Its a broken, corrupt and deeply ill system on a ill planet.
On one hand, it is obvious that criminals are running these recycling operations and there needs to be stronger environmental regulations to make sure it is done safely. The situation in China is shocking and particularly there are technologies avialable to keep the toxins out of the environment, but they are not being used. Recycling done properly can be done safely and cleanly with no release of waste. We should not give up recycling, we desperately need to continue recycling, but we need to make sure it is done safely. It is possible that the earths supply of iron and copper will be depleted by the end of this century. We need to start reusing and recycling all copper and iron, if we dont there could be a major economic disaster as these become scarce and hard to obtain. We need to develop the technical expertize to recycle 100% of metals cleanly and safely, reusing them and keeping them out of landfills.
PS the STNG uniforms were changed later on in the STNG series to more lose fitting. Patrick Stewart developed back problems from the compression of the STNG spandex uniforms which forced this change.
You are referring to the STNG uniforms i suspect, made of tight fitting spandex. The 2-6 movie and original series uniforms were loose fitting. I think the movie uniforms looked the best out of all of them in my opinion.
I have used perl extensively adn one thing its OO is not is "complex". Bless is very easy to use, its a very simple model? It couldnt be easier.
As far as rewriting your existing scripts for perl 6, i wouldnt do this. Use Perl 6 for new projects, use Perl 5 for old ones.
Perl 5 remains a good quality platform for development so do not let the situation with perl 6 discourage you from using perl 5. Perl 5 is still a great development platform and is better than python and ruby in many ways.
Perl 5 development does continue and you notice they do make releases very often to make Perl 5 better. I dont really quite understand that one would allow the delay with Perl 6 cause them to stop using Perl 5 when Perl 5 is indeed a very capable language.
Perl 5 can also embed into Apache and has been able to do so for a long, long time so there is no excuse to not use it as an embeddable in web pages like PHP.
I do think a mistake with Perl 6 was not focusing more on the compiler first, making Perl 5 the first target of the Perl 6 compiler, so that more drawn out VM work wouldnt slow down Perl 6 development. . In perl 6 a from scratch rewrite was chosen. This may have been an important choice depending on the extendability of the Perl 5 systems. I have not taken a look at Perl 5 much so I cannot comment if the system is extendable or was worth expanding and extending. It is a good idea to keep the compiler parts seperate from the interpretor and from what I have heard Perl had some issues in this area.
Perl 5 will continue to be avialable for use of course, and I expect a bridge to exist between Perl 5 and Perl 6 to allow them to interoperate. There is so much XS code out there that Perl 6 calling the perl 5 VM to run modules is going to have to be a part of the the system.
This notion simply disgusts me and is a dangerous development, which clearly sets dangerous precedents which may be used to supress certain political dissent and create a saudi arabia like totalitarian state where everything from perfectly harmless pornography of consenting adults for consenting adults, to certain kinds of music and political views are illegal. this creeping vicious totalitarian trend is quite disturbing to me and creepy. As a supporter of free speech and liberty, I strongly oppose this idea, and that to protect our freedoms and human rights, this horrible idea which threatens the rights of the people should be totally defeated. It is quite clear that many countries are degenerating into a totalitarian police state where powerful elites may decide what you are allowed to see and hear. People did not fight and die in vain so that we would give up the freedoms we fought for. I am surprised that a country like the UK, which had a near death experience from the Nazis and was nearly invaded, and barely escaped having a totalitarian Nazi regime imposed on it, and fought hard to defend their rights and freedoms, will now willingly give up those rights and freedoms it worked so hard to protect.It seems, the mentality is, they saved their rights and freedoms from the Nazis just in time for them to willingly give themselves up themselves and turn their country into a big brother totalitarian police state of horrific proportions from within. The UK seems to be especially degenerationg into a police state very quickly, with more cameras per capita in London than any other city in a western country, and with police state tactics including mass surveillance and ID cars (nazi phrase: your papers please!).
I strongly hope that the citizens of the UK do not tolerate this gross abuse of power and erosion of their rights and liberties. Government should not be in a position to determine what people are allowed and not allowed to look at, and what they are allowed to say and publish and not allowed to say and publish. Government is clearly treating people like children, by creating a nanny state, a big brother state, which endangers the well being and safety of all people. Privacy is an essential part of freedom, and so is free speech and both are being totally violated by the UK government, through net surveillance and now censorship. The surveillance is an enabling factor which further allows establishment of a police state tyrannical order and destroys basic privacy expections at the cornerstone of any free society. This power can very easily be abused by governments seeking to create dossiers of views and opinions of its people,. this is the first step that allows them to be singled out and attacked by a government. And even if i am just e-mailing my grocery list, its not really any of the governments godd*#% business if I prefer to drink 2% lowfat organic milk. Just the concept of government of prying into our daily lives and personal communications and preferences, should outrage us and should be completely intolerable to us.
The censorship aspect should be completely defeated. The only thing which even remotely one could say it might be justified to censor is child pornography, but I am concerned that even that system could be abused, it would be too easy to add websites which might be politically unpopular by some to such a filter, "accidentilly", such as socialist or communist websites or ones critical of the prime minister or the queen. So for that reason i am opposed to the idea of any filter at all since it is a far greater danger to our freedom and is not warranted. Child pornography should be combatted by going after producers of it.
As far as a self ratings system which would encourage websites to self label themselves with a PICS label in the HTML code, for instance for violence and such,and thus allowing the consumer to choose whether or not to allow such content, this might be acceptable, as long as the consumer is control and will decide if any filtering will be applied. I do support putting the consumer in control and being able to opt-in by installing a filter on their computer. I am against any forced filtering which would be in direct violation of basic human and civil liberties.
Im not so sure about putting graphics stuff in the kernel? Why? Why not make it a part of X and thus platform independant. Now we will have a class of drivers locked to linux. Great, just what we need, incompatabilities.
I think he is right on target with this one. Doing quality journalism is not cheap and those who believe it can be done by hobbyist journalism on blogs which do not generate much revenue are naive. The type of reporting big media has done, especially international reporting going into often dangerous countries and requiring security considerations, travel expense and so on, is not cheap. At the same time, with the web model, people are recieving this without actually contributing enough to cover the cost of this high quality journalism. The result is not good, a collapse of quality in depth international reporting and a loss of journalism that keeps americans informed and updated about the world, which means a more ignorant population, more cheap stories about britney spears and less of what americans desperately need to know about more complex international situations and what is going on in other countries. A complaint has often been expressed that Americans are ill informed and ignorant about the world, and with less quality journalism this will get even worse.
I think that there are possible solutions. Perhaps one is an alliance of newspapers, web users would pay a single fee to their local newspaper, in exchange they would get online access to that papers website and as well all other newspapers websites as well. This would assure a revenue stream for the local papers in an region and as well funding for AP/national content through this as well, while allowing consumers to still benefit from access to news content from all over the country with ease that the internet has brought.
for 500 GB that would be a lot of CD-Rs. While CD-R lasts longer than DVD-R, i am still skeptical. Buying 3 500 GB hard drives every few years and using them in RAID might still be the best solution.
I do agree that much more needs to be done to make sure our education system is inspiring and challenging children to excel and to have aspirations and goals, not just at passing tests and meeting standards, but at exceeding commonality, being uncommon and exceptional. We need to invest more in gifted and accelerated learning for the brightest and gaurantee that they can skip grades and progress as far as they wish. We should not squander the resource we have in talent in young people and discourage them from excelling and exceeding expectations and working at a their own much faster pace.
As far as the mars mission or a moon mission, these should be on the back burner in my opinion. I am not sure if they are worth the enormous cost and expense when we can often get quite a bit accomplished with unmanned probes.
I do think that ares or orion needs to be fixed or we should have some sort of manned system for servicing the ISS.
I do think its also important that we address health care and nutritional needs as well and poverty and those are also high priorities.
Our economy has been deeply wounded by capitalist greed and corruption and that is a major problem that threatens all objectives at science and humanitarian goals. We need to make sure the system works for the public benefit and we need to strengthen the middle class, our main economic driver rather than continue to allow the income gap to widen and the middle class to shrink. This can be done by stimulating new jobs in the area of clean renewable energy and science and technology, and preserving Americas technical and industrial capabilities.
Actually extending medicare to everyone would actually reduce the per person cost for medical care. Evidence shows that a universal health care system can be operated more efficiently, provide better coverage and more preventative care, reducing costs through preventative treatment, and operating at an at cost basis to provide the best service for the lowest cost. So actually doing universal health care would save us money, and everything has to be paid for in one way or another, universal health care is designed to make it affordable and ability to pay for all. Universal health care would save individuals money, otherwise health care, as with roads and energy systems, education and so on have to be paid for one way or another. Health care and education are basic rights and without public funding of these only the wealthy would be able to afford it. I am tired of conservatives saying how will it be paid for, of course we pay for it, but this will be democratically controlled and operated in the public interest, our interest, I think what we want is a government that operates efficiently and makes good use of money, and thats who I vote for and why I voted for Obama, not people who just want to cut or raise spending just to cut or raise spending. Republicans cut spending just for the hell of it, it doesnt matter if the money is being spent in the most efficient way or if other ways to acheive the same goal would be worse, or if the money is being used for important things.
Social security has always partly been a needs based system, the disability aspect of it for those who have serious medical conditions. Part of it has been a retirement security system. With a privatized sytem the cost of both of these would be higher and would leave many people unable to afford basic essentials. Al Gore in 2000 wanted to place social security funds in a lock box to assure they could not be raided, if we had done so we would not have a crisis. The system can be managed in a way to avert such a crisis, there is no need to deny essential service that many need to survive.
Inefficiency is not how government works. In fact, evidence show that governments provide services more efficiently than private corporations would, and have better public accountability through democracy. For instance, it has been shown that public health care systems tend to be more efficient, have lower overhead and provide better quality and coverage than profit motivated private systems. I think this idea that government is particularly inefficient is just a myth promoted by idealogical conservatives. I think we would find great inefficiencies, even more so in corporations. If we are supposedly a democratic country, why do conservatives every chance they get try to destroy that very democracy and render it impossible for the people through democracy to solve their problems, in making the democratic channel impotent and destroying unions which is the only thing we have that gives people a voice in the companies they work for?
There should be no regulation of what content flows over the internet. particularly these are attempts by an ever paranoid government to shut down dissent and monitor its opponents. Monitoring and censorship such as this is a sure sign of an end to a democratic, free society and one where people live in shackles, are arrested for any reason, have no privacy and are afraid to say anything, living in constant fear of the government. Regulation, by ISPs or government is unacceptable, this includes any blocking or monitoring of content. Net Nuetrality is designed to basically prevent regulation or censorship of the internet by prohibiting ISPs from blocking access to certain web pages or impeding or altering content. We need to assert our free speech rights and not allow these to be taken away by big corporations or government.
This deserves a "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag. They will end up developing some horrible new superbug that will kill us all or create some other horrible disease, or mess something up. When dealing with these sorts of things there are unintended consequences and the results can be disasterous. Manipulating genetics is far too dangerous in my opinion, especially since organisms self reproduce. We could end up contaminating our food supply or unleashing mutants that invade the world. It has already been shown that some genetically altered organisms cause kidney and liver damage and cancer, since these genes can escape into the environment reversing this damage can be nearly impossible. It has been shown that genetic engineering leads to totally unexpected, and often deadly results yeilding toxic foods and highly deformed organisms. This is due to the sheer complexity of the genetic system that we will never be able to understand, and that humans have evolved and developed to be able to process and utililize certain naturally occuring chemicals proteins, genetic engineering creates proteins which have never been consumed before and are well outside the normal limits of what would be produced by natural conception processes, as the food we have eaten for millions of years has been so, it is not surprising that these artificial synthetic foods are causing problems in peoples bodies. We are best staying with what our bodies are naturally adapted to handle over millions of years of evolution and away from risky frankenstienian experiments, and messing with or altering living things. Technology is great in your ipod, but i dont want it on my plate.
I do not believe any government should censor speech. This sort of technology is ripe for abuse. There will probably be sites which "accidently" are filtered, maybe sites with unpopular political views, or legal material, such as adult pornography. As well, this sets dangerous precedents as well, that government has a right to censor things. It could set a dangerous precedent for censoring things we all agree should not be censored, like pornography of consenting adults and unpopular (communist, marxist, etc) political views.
As far as FOSS being something that has serious business problems in regarding to sustaining the developers who work on it, this is indeed a serious problem. It generally can be very hard to raise revenue with FOSS, projects can ask for donations and sell packaged versions, but you often end up with just a trickle with these sorts of things. Programmers should obviously be able to work full time developing software. With FOSS directly competing with commercial software an eroding those markets, could it be that programmers will end up waiting tables during the day just to support the time they spend writing code? fOSS does indeed wipe out commercial software markets and it can actuall
I am supportive of the freedom aspect of FOSS. For far too long commercial software has shut down innovation and stifled the development of improvements through cooperative development with its closed model. FOSS is on the other extreme, its an open model but it leaves programmers in a situation where they cant afford to live. Perhaps a solution for some projects lies in the middle, with a commercial source tiered licence system, where the source code is provided with all licences, the developers are receptive to improvements from customers, and the cost of software is set according to the ability of the customer to pay, a hobbyist who is using the software for fun would pay far less than someone using it in a high revenue business. This assures that the software does have a high degree of openness and accessibility to all, but also assures revenue can be raised to develop the software.
P.S. Accepting aid from a foreign country, as long as they request it, would also not violate Sealands soveriegnty. Big states do this often. Sealand using the court systems of other countries, since they choose this, and even choosing to accept military aid, does not necessarily invalidate its sovereignty, as long as it is making these decisions and choosing to accept this assistance and may reject it.
Sealand would be soveriegn as long as they can remain in control of their territory. It is not that hard to defend a very small country even against the military of a large one. The biggest threat is a WMD, complete annihilation, rather than from soldiers with guns. WMD is also a huge problem with big countries. Larger countries have such much larger territories it requires much more military to handle all of the borders and police for internal matters. As far as their internet connections, if disruptions to these occur outside of their jurisdiction, utilizing the courts of the countries where they are located to address the issues in the foreign countries where the issue exists, would not necessarily mean that sealand does not have jurisdiction and soveriegnty over its own territory.
I do think that open source softwate is making it more difficult to make money from commercial software. People are basically giving away their time and this also cuts into commercial developers as well. After all, programmers have to eat, and people need to be paid for their work in this kind of economy. Open Source projects still can try to use feature tiers, donations, manuals, support and associated add ons. On the other hand the commercial software development paradigm partly has itself to blame, in not allowing enough freedom to its users. Weve seen polarisation between two extremes, on one end, completely closed, rigid, closed source, high cost software, and on the other end open source, and nothing in the middle. A compromise might have worked better in many cases consisting of 1) source available with commercial software under commercial licence 2) commercial developers willing to accept improvments from users 3) a tiered pricing scheme, giving very low cost licences to hobbyists and more expensive licences to corporations and commercial users, or pricing based on a customers revenue or incoming, etc. This combines the best aspects of commercial and open source, the openness of open source while requiring those who use the software, to help pay for its development, those who can afford to.
Have you looked at BSD instead? Its an open free operating system, but the licence allows you to not publish any changes you make to it. There are many flavours to choose from, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, and DragonflyBSD.
We have the first amendment but it needs to be further reinforced with law in this specific, explicit case. The first amendment is very broad and general, by design, but often needs to be backed up by more explicit law which further reinforce this right in specific circumstances, such as to assert that ISPs should not be allowed to censor the internet, nor anyone else. So the law proposed will protect and expand our freedom, assert it, who could complain about that unless you dislike free speech.
I should reinforce that the role of government is to protect the rights of all persons, their equal rights, and to protect animals and the environment. One has a right to self determination but not to deprive others of the same right. The role of law is to protect self determination, but this does not mean allowing people to violate the rights of other persons, to harm animals or the environment. So the right to equal self determination rights is self determination, if one has such rights we do not have a right to take it from another. It is also important to have a bill of rights which contains basic rights of the people, such as free speech, due process of law, and to a clean environment, to protect the rights of all persons including the less powerful and the minorities. it should be the role of government to protect those including the less fortunate and less powerful. Without such an egalitarian purposed system and a democracy and a basic charter of rights, it is too easy for the "might makes right" and "only the strongest survive" paradigms to set in, which oppress the less fortunate for the benefit of expanding the power of the elite. It is wrong for some, a powerful few, to hoard large aggregations of essentials, so they can then deny those essentials to others, and thus their right to life, or use this control to enforce control over them, that in order to gain access to essentials the common people have to do what the elite say. This is the world corporations are creating through controlling resources, they control people. Now they just need to get democratic government out of the way or make it ineffective and they can become defacto governments with their own private security forces and be free to do whatever they please. The only thing that stands in the way of this is the people and their democratic elected governments to force these corporations to work in the common public interest of the people rather than for the elites, and to respect the rights of all people, including the right to a living wage and to safe working conditions, reasonable hours and other such considerations. In the world libertarians envision, we would see a people enslaved as such by large corporations and their lives ordered by them through such mechanisms, and people would few or no rights or recourse, representation through democratic process to advocate for their own rights or needs of the common people. Corporations would be able to do whatever they wanted and there would be nothing at all to stop them. Thats the world, the hellish world of suffering and misery, for all but an elite few, a world consisting of a vast and utterly impoverished and miserable majority and a very small exceedingly wealthy elite, instead of a more fair and egalitarian society where wealth is more broadly and evenly distributed among all the people and all people can make a good living wage from their work in safe conditions. Under libertarian idealogy, It would be a system that serves the elite at the expense of everyone else, treating the common people as a slave labor class to be exploited and discarded when no longer needed, with no respect for their rights or freedoms.
I think you missed the point. Net Neutrality protections will keep government AND corporations out of meddling by censorship of the internet. The Net Neutrality law asserts and reaffirms our right to free speech. It would actually not allow the government you are concerned about to censor and will prevent the corporations from censoring. It would protect our freedom and our liberty to free speech as it should be. Law should be used as a tool in this case to protect the rights of the individual to free speech and to free expression, not to have these censored or impeded by corporations, government or anyone else. That is what net neutrality is meant to do. To protect your freedom and to keep government and corporations from making decisions about what you have a right to say. Generally law should be made to protect peoples rights and self determination, not to take away the rights of individuals, all of whom have equal rights to self determination, liberty, and to live, and to protect our environment, animals and so on, not protect the rights of a few wealthy elite or large corporations.
Your argument is perplexing. Its like saying we should not have a first amendment protection of free speech and that this is government going "too far". With your line of thinking we would have no first amendment and which could lead to eventual full blown censorship, just like in Australia and other places where there is already a trend developing in that direction. Net neutrality does not give government more power, It actually reduces anyones power to censor another's speech.
Your notion that government is more dangerous than corporations is naive. If democratic institutions of government were dissolved, this would leave corporations, that have develop or would develop, by ammassing power, economically and militarilly, to take their place as de facto governments. Corporations would establish private police forces to assert their order and their perogatives, and could seize economic resources by force and thus through control of resources make people dependant on them, none of it in a democratic manner. Without a democratic government with law enforcement and regulatory powers, this is the sort of totalitarianism that would emerge, where the strong and powerful become more so and crush the less fortunate. The challenges to a people faced with such would be no different than had this corporation been named a totalitarian undemocratic government. They would be in effect, functional governments, but totalitarian ones. The only way to ensure your freedom is to assure the existance of democratic institutions with law enforcement power and to provide social security systems, and work through that to protect your freedom and to encourage and support legislation which gaurantees your freedom and oppose efforts that would endanger it. For government to carry out its proper role of protecting the rights of the people and of as a safety net to assure safe employment and access to basic necessities, necessary as an aspect of the right to life, an ability to pay system of taxation is reasonable for the benefits that are received. Another key and necessary protection of your liberty is that all institutions should be subject to independant oversight. Corporations should be subject to independant regulation by government, and thus should not be financially tied to corporations. There should be an independant media not tied to corporations or government or having any conflict of interest so they are able to independantly report on and investigate the activities of both government and corporations. All of this is essential to a functioning, open, free society.
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Problem is its very difficult to do this, so much so it almost isn't worth it and would be very labor intensive such that it wouldn't be feasible. What makes iron feasible is an economically justifiable and feasible deposit, a large amount of iron in one place. It becomes far more difficult to extract and collect iron when it is much less densely deposited. There are issues of oxidisation which can deconsolidate metal bearing items. Also with our mining activity then incorporating the metal into things we are basically depleting what high density economically viable metal deposits there are. Taking iron out of a landfill from things people have thrown away is not realistic, the iron there tends to be rather sparse and massive amounts of other rubbish to be sifted through. It would be too resource and energy intensive at a time when we will have an energy shortage. Furthermore there are environmental issues which is what this article is about. The best way is mandate 100% recycling, or at least store all metal bearing items in a lined water tight facility so it can be recycled later.
I think word probably is still the best for most. OpenOffice lacks many of its features and useability. I have used both OpenOffice and Microsoft Office and always end up going back to Microsoft Office. With OpenOffice there are all sorts of little annoyances that start to add up quickly that make it quite unuseable, for instance it would only let me drag position floating boxes and items in a document by increments of roughly twenty pixels. It doesnt have an off document scratch area in the space surrounding the document, etc. There is nothing in OpenOffice that can do what Word or Publisher does.
I also think web applications are horrid and would never use them. I dont even use web e-mail. The reason is it is slow, clumsy, if you lose your internet connection you cant work. Plus you have everything you are doing sent to a server so there is no privacy. No thanks.
We have to look past wether or not it is economically viable NOW to recycle and at the long term picture. Iron and copper could be depleted by the end of the century. The results of this will be utterly disasterous as a global economic collapse would begin as it becomes harder to acquire this stuff and vastly expensive. Computers and appliances will become a thing of the past. I am a computer programmer and I have serious doubts about whether there will be a computer industry in 50 years, and about its negative effects on the environment and the planet, have made me question if it is doing more harm than good. To refuse to recycle now because we cant make profits off of it just shows how our capitalist system is destroying the future for our own short term needs and how it is apathetic towards long term consideration and human needs. The situation in the plant China is capitalism in extreme, basically no government oversight, the government does not care, is inept, impotent, corrupt or in the pockets of the plant owners, so basically its a free for all, chaos, with no rules and regulations where the wealthy elite can destroy and ruin the lives of innocent people for their own profit.
It is clear we have to make sure that recycling is being done responsibly and not one bit of pollution enters the environment, it can be done, it just takes more foresight, it takes putting public interest ahead of immediate profit and a system that allows for investment in safe technology even if it means it will not pull in an profit for decades. That is what pure corporate-capitalism does not do. Pure corporate capitalism is a short sighted, greedy system that tends to look at people as expendable resources whose only purpose is to make the wealthy wealthier and thats what we see in China in all kinds of ways. Its a broken, corrupt and deeply ill system on a ill planet.
On one hand, it is obvious that criminals are running these recycling operations and there needs to be stronger environmental regulations to make sure it is done safely. The situation in China is shocking and particularly there are technologies avialable to keep the toxins out of the environment, but they are not being used. Recycling done properly can be done safely and cleanly with no release of waste. We should not give up recycling, we desperately need to continue recycling, but we need to make sure it is done safely. It is possible that the earths supply of iron and copper will be depleted by the end of this century. We need to start reusing and recycling all copper and iron, if we dont there could be a major economic disaster as these become scarce and hard to obtain. We need to develop the technical expertize to recycle 100% of metals cleanly and safely, reusing them and keeping them out of landfills.
PS the STNG uniforms were changed later on in the STNG series to more lose fitting. Patrick Stewart developed back problems from the compression of the STNG spandex uniforms which forced this change.
You are referring to the STNG uniforms i suspect, made of tight fitting spandex. The 2-6 movie and original series uniforms were loose fitting. I think the movie uniforms looked the best out of all of them in my opinion.
I have used perl extensively adn one thing its OO is not is "complex". Bless is very easy to use, its a very simple model? It couldnt be easier.
As far as rewriting your existing scripts for perl 6, i wouldnt do this. Use Perl 6 for new projects, use Perl 5 for old ones.
Perl 5 remains a good quality platform for development so do not let the situation with perl 6 discourage you from using perl 5. Perl 5 is still a great development platform and is better than python and ruby in many ways.
Perl 5 development does continue and you notice they do make releases very often to make Perl 5 better. I dont really quite understand that one would allow the delay with Perl 6 cause them to stop using Perl 5 when Perl 5 is indeed a very capable language.
Perl 5 can also embed into Apache and has been able to do so for a long, long time so there is no excuse to not use it as an embeddable in web pages like PHP.
I do think a mistake with Perl 6 was not focusing more on the compiler first, making Perl 5 the first target of the Perl 6 compiler, so that more drawn out VM work wouldnt slow down Perl 6 development. . In perl 6 a from scratch rewrite was chosen. This may have been an important choice depending on the extendability of the Perl 5 systems. I have not taken a look at Perl 5 much so I cannot comment if the system is extendable or was worth expanding and extending. It is a good idea to keep the compiler parts seperate from the interpretor and from what I have heard Perl had some issues in this area.
Perl 5 will continue to be avialable for use of course, and I expect a bridge to exist between Perl 5 and Perl 6 to allow them to interoperate. There is so much XS code out there that Perl 6 calling the perl 5 VM to run modules is going to have to be a part of the the system.
This notion simply disgusts me and is a dangerous development, which clearly sets dangerous precedents which may be used to supress certain political dissent and create a saudi arabia like totalitarian state where everything from perfectly harmless pornography of consenting adults for consenting adults, to certain kinds of music and political views are illegal. this creeping vicious totalitarian trend is quite disturbing to me and creepy. As a supporter of free speech and liberty, I strongly oppose this idea, and that to protect our freedoms and human rights, this horrible idea which threatens the rights of the people should be totally defeated. It is quite clear that many countries are degenerating into a totalitarian police state where powerful elites may decide what you are allowed to see and hear. People did not fight and die in vain so that we would give up the freedoms we fought for. I am surprised that a country like the UK, which had a near death experience from the Nazis and was nearly invaded, and barely escaped having a totalitarian Nazi regime imposed on it, and fought hard to defend their rights and freedoms, will now willingly give up those rights and freedoms it worked so hard to protect.It seems, the mentality is, they saved their rights and freedoms from the Nazis just in time for them to willingly give themselves up themselves and turn their country into a big brother totalitarian police state of horrific proportions from within. The UK seems to be especially degenerationg into a police state very quickly, with more cameras per capita in London than any other city in a western country, and with police state tactics including mass surveillance and ID cars (nazi phrase: your papers please!).
I strongly hope that the citizens of the UK do not tolerate this gross abuse of power and erosion of their rights and liberties. Government should not be in a position to determine what people are allowed and not allowed to look at, and what they are allowed to say and publish and not allowed to say and publish. Government is clearly treating people like children, by creating a nanny state, a big brother state, which endangers the well being and safety of all people. Privacy is an essential part of freedom, and so is free speech and both are being totally violated by the UK government, through net surveillance and now censorship. The surveillance is an enabling factor which further allows establishment of a police state tyrannical order and destroys basic privacy expections at the cornerstone of any free society. This power can very easily be abused by governments seeking to create dossiers of views and opinions of its people,. this is the first step that allows them to be singled out and attacked by a government. And even if i am just e-mailing my grocery list, its not really any of the governments godd*#% business if I prefer to drink 2% lowfat organic milk. Just the concept of government of prying into our daily lives and personal communications and preferences, should outrage us and should be completely intolerable to us.
The censorship aspect should be completely defeated. The only thing which even remotely one could say it might be justified to censor is child pornography, but I am concerned that even that system could be abused, it would be too easy to add websites which might be politically unpopular by some to such a filter, "accidentilly", such as socialist or communist websites or ones critical of the prime minister or the queen. So for that reason i am opposed to the idea of any filter at all since it is a far greater danger to our freedom and is not warranted. Child pornography should be combatted by going after producers of it.
As far as a self ratings system which would encourage websites to self label themselves with a PICS label in the HTML code, for instance for violence and such,and thus allowing the consumer to choose whether or not to allow such content, this might be acceptable, as long as the consumer is control and will decide if any filtering will be applied. I do support putting the consumer in control and being able to opt-in by installing a filter on their computer. I am against any forced filtering which would be in direct violation of basic human and civil liberties.
Im not so sure about putting graphics stuff in the kernel? Why? Why not make it a part of X and thus platform independant. Now we will have a class of drivers locked to linux. Great, just what we need, incompatabilities.
I think he is right on target with this one. Doing quality journalism is not cheap and those who believe it can be done by hobbyist journalism on blogs which do not generate much revenue are naive. The type of reporting big media has done, especially international reporting going into often dangerous countries and requiring security considerations, travel expense and so on, is not cheap. At the same time, with the web model, people are recieving this without actually contributing enough to cover the cost of this high quality journalism. The result is not good, a collapse of quality in depth international reporting and a loss of journalism that keeps americans informed and updated about the world, which means a more ignorant population, more cheap stories about britney spears and less of what americans desperately need to know about more complex international situations and what is going on in other countries. A complaint has often been expressed that Americans are ill informed and ignorant about the world, and with less quality journalism this will get even worse.
I think that there are possible solutions. Perhaps one is an alliance of newspapers, web users would pay a single fee to their local newspaper, in exchange they would get online access to that papers website and as well all other newspapers websites as well. This would assure a revenue stream for the local papers in an region and as well funding for AP/national content through this as well, while allowing consumers to still benefit from access to news content from all over the country with ease that the internet has brought.
for 500 GB that would be a lot of CD-Rs. While CD-R lasts longer than DVD-R, i am still skeptical. Buying 3 500 GB hard drives every few years and using them in RAID might still be the best solution.
I do agree that much more needs to be done to make sure our education system is inspiring and challenging children to excel and to have aspirations and goals, not just at passing tests and meeting standards, but at exceeding commonality, being uncommon and exceptional. We need to invest more in gifted and accelerated learning for the brightest and gaurantee that they can skip grades and progress as far as they wish. We should not squander the resource we have in talent in young people and discourage them from excelling and exceeding expectations and working at a their own much faster pace.
As far as the mars mission or a moon mission, these should be on the back burner in my opinion. I am not sure if they are worth the enormous cost and expense when we can often get quite a bit accomplished with unmanned probes.
I do think that ares or orion needs to be fixed or we should have some sort of manned system for servicing the ISS.
I do think its also important that we address health care and nutritional needs as well and poverty and those are also high priorities.
Our economy has been deeply wounded by capitalist greed and corruption and that is a major problem that threatens all objectives at science and humanitarian goals. We need to make sure the system works for the public benefit and we need to strengthen the middle class, our main economic driver rather than continue to allow the income gap to widen and the middle class to shrink. This can be done by stimulating new jobs in the area of clean renewable energy and science and technology, and preserving Americas technical and industrial capabilities.
Actually extending medicare to everyone would actually reduce the per person cost for medical care. Evidence shows that a universal health care system can be operated more efficiently, provide better coverage and more preventative care, reducing costs through preventative treatment, and operating at an at cost basis to provide the best service for the lowest cost. So actually doing universal health care would save us money, and everything has to be paid for in one way or another, universal health care is designed to make it affordable and ability to pay for all. Universal health care would save individuals money, otherwise health care, as with roads and energy systems, education and so on have to be paid for one way or another. Health care and education are basic rights and without public funding of these only the wealthy would be able to afford it. I am tired of conservatives saying how will it be paid for, of course we pay for it, but this will be democratically controlled and operated in the public interest, our interest, I think what we want is a government that operates efficiently and makes good use of money, and thats who I vote for and why I voted for Obama, not people who just want to cut or raise spending just to cut or raise spending. Republicans cut spending just for the hell of it, it doesnt matter if the money is being spent in the most efficient way or if other ways to acheive the same goal would be worse, or if the money is being used for important things.
Social security has always partly been a needs based system, the disability aspect of it for those who have serious medical conditions. Part of it has been a retirement security system. With a privatized sytem the cost of both of these would be higher and would leave many people unable to afford basic essentials. Al Gore in 2000 wanted to place social security funds in a lock box to assure they could not be raided, if we had done so we would not have a crisis. The system can be managed in a way to avert such a crisis, there is no need to deny essential service that many need to survive.
Inefficiency is not how government works. In fact, evidence show that governments provide services more efficiently than private corporations would, and have better public accountability through democracy. For instance, it has been shown that public health care systems tend to be more efficient, have lower overhead and provide better quality and coverage than profit motivated private systems. I think this idea that government is particularly inefficient is just a myth promoted by idealogical conservatives. I think we would find great inefficiencies, even more so in corporations. If we are supposedly a democratic country, why do conservatives every chance they get try to destroy that very democracy and render it impossible for the people through democracy to solve their problems, in making the democratic channel impotent and destroying unions which is the only thing we have that gives people a voice in the companies they work for?
There should be no regulation of what content flows over the internet. particularly these are attempts by an ever paranoid government to shut down dissent and monitor its opponents. Monitoring and censorship such as this is a sure sign of an end to a democratic, free society and one where people live in shackles, are arrested for any reason, have no privacy and are afraid to say anything, living in constant fear of the government. Regulation, by ISPs or government is unacceptable, this includes any blocking or monitoring of content. Net Nuetrality is designed to basically prevent regulation or censorship of the internet by prohibiting ISPs from blocking access to certain web pages or impeding or altering content. We need to assert our free speech rights and not allow these to be taken away by big corporations or government.
This deserves a "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag. They will end up developing some horrible new superbug that will kill us all or create some other horrible disease, or mess something up. When dealing with these sorts of things there are unintended consequences and the results can be disasterous. Manipulating genetics is far too dangerous in my opinion, especially since organisms self reproduce. We could end up contaminating our food supply or unleashing mutants that invade the world. It has already been shown that some genetically altered organisms cause kidney and liver damage and cancer, since these genes can escape into the environment reversing this damage can be nearly impossible. It has been shown that genetic engineering leads to totally unexpected, and often deadly results yeilding toxic foods and highly deformed organisms. This is due to the sheer complexity of the genetic system that we will never be able to understand, and that humans have evolved and developed to be able to process and utililize certain naturally occuring chemicals proteins, genetic engineering creates proteins which have never been consumed before and are well outside the normal limits of what would be produced by natural conception processes, as the food we have eaten for millions of years has been so, it is not surprising that these artificial synthetic foods are causing problems in peoples bodies. We are best staying with what our bodies are naturally adapted to handle over millions of years of evolution and away from risky frankenstienian experiments, and messing with or altering living things. Technology is great in your ipod, but i dont want it on my plate.
I do not believe any government should censor speech. This sort of technology is ripe for abuse. There will probably be sites which "accidently" are filtered, maybe sites with unpopular political views, or legal material, such as adult pornography. As well, this sets dangerous precedents as well, that government has a right to censor things. It could set a dangerous precedent for censoring things we all agree should not be censored, like pornography of consenting adults and unpopular (communist, marxist, etc) political views.
As far as FOSS being something that has serious business problems in regarding to sustaining the developers who work on it, this is indeed a serious problem. It generally can be very hard to raise revenue with FOSS, projects can ask for donations and sell packaged versions, but you often end up with just a trickle with these sorts of things. Programmers should obviously be able to work full time developing software. With FOSS directly competing with commercial software an eroding those markets, could it be that programmers will end up waiting tables during the day just to support the time they spend writing code? fOSS does indeed wipe out commercial software markets and it can actuall
I am supportive of the freedom aspect of FOSS. For far too long commercial software has shut down innovation and stifled the development of improvements through cooperative development with its closed model. FOSS is on the other extreme, its an open model but it leaves programmers in a situation where they cant afford to live. Perhaps a solution for some projects lies in the middle, with a commercial source tiered licence system, where the source code is provided with all licences, the developers are receptive to improvements from customers, and the cost of software is set according to the ability of the customer to pay, a hobbyist who is using the software for fun would pay far less than someone using it in a high revenue business. This assures that the software does have a high degree of openness and accessibility to all, but also assures revenue can be raised to develop the software.
P.S. Accepting aid from a foreign country, as long as they request it, would also not violate Sealands soveriegnty. Big states do this often. Sealand using the court systems of other countries, since they choose this, and even choosing to accept military aid, does not necessarily invalidate its sovereignty, as long as it is making these decisions and choosing to accept this assistance and may reject it.
Sealand would be soveriegn as long as they can remain in control of their territory. It is not that hard to defend a very small country even against the military of a large one. The biggest threat is a WMD, complete annihilation, rather than from soldiers with guns. WMD is also a huge problem with big countries. Larger countries have such much larger territories it requires much more military to handle all of the borders and police for internal matters. As far as their internet connections, if disruptions to these occur outside of their jurisdiction, utilizing the courts of the countries where they are located to address the issues in the foreign countries where the issue exists, would not necessarily mean that sealand does not have jurisdiction and soveriegnty over its own territory.
I do think that open source softwate is making it more difficult to make money from commercial software. People are basically giving away their time and this also cuts into commercial developers as well. After all, programmers have to eat, and people need to be paid for their work in this kind of economy. Open Source projects still can try to use feature tiers, donations, manuals, support and associated add ons. On the other hand the commercial software development paradigm partly has itself to blame, in not allowing enough freedom to its users. Weve seen polarisation between two extremes, on one end, completely closed, rigid, closed source, high cost software, and on the other end open source, and nothing in the middle. A compromise might have worked better in many cases consisting of 1) source available with commercial software under commercial licence 2) commercial developers willing to accept improvments from users 3) a tiered pricing scheme, giving very low cost licences to hobbyists and more expensive licences to corporations and commercial users, or pricing based on a customers revenue or incoming, etc. This combines the best aspects of commercial and open source, the openness of open source while requiring those who use the software, to help pay for its development, those who can afford to.
Have you looked at BSD instead? Its an open free operating system, but the licence allows you to not publish any changes you make to it. There are many flavours to choose from, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, and DragonflyBSD.
We have the first amendment but it needs to be further reinforced with law in this specific, explicit case. The first amendment is very broad and general, by design, but often needs to be backed up by more explicit law which further reinforce this right in specific circumstances, such as to assert that ISPs should not be allowed to censor the internet, nor anyone else. So the law proposed will protect and expand our freedom, assert it, who could complain about that unless you dislike free speech.
I should reinforce that the role of government is to protect the rights of all persons, their equal rights, and to protect animals and the environment. One has a right to self determination but not to deprive others of the same right. The role of law is to protect self determination, but this does not mean allowing people to violate the rights of other persons, to harm animals or the environment. So the right to equal self determination rights is self determination, if one has such rights we do not have a right to take it from another. It is also important to have a bill of rights which contains basic rights of the people, such as free speech, due process of law, and to a clean environment, to protect the rights of all persons including the less powerful and the minorities. it should be the role of government to protect those including the less fortunate and less powerful. Without such an egalitarian purposed system and a democracy and a basic charter of rights, it is too easy for the "might makes right" and "only the strongest survive" paradigms to set in, which oppress the less fortunate for the benefit of expanding the power of the elite. It is wrong for some, a powerful few, to hoard large aggregations of essentials, so they can then deny those essentials to others, and thus their right to life, or use this control to enforce control over them, that in order to gain access to essentials the common people have to do what the elite say. This is the world corporations are creating through controlling resources, they control people. Now they just need to get democratic government out of the way or make it ineffective and they can become defacto governments with their own private security forces and be free to do whatever they please. The only thing that stands in the way of this is the people and their democratic elected governments to force these corporations to work in the common public interest of the people rather than for the elites, and to respect the rights of all people, including the right to a living wage and to safe working conditions, reasonable hours and other such considerations. In the world libertarians envision, we would see a people enslaved as such by large corporations and their lives ordered by them through such mechanisms, and people would few or no rights or recourse, representation through democratic process to advocate for their own rights or needs of the common people. Corporations would be able to do whatever they wanted and there would be nothing at all to stop them. Thats the world, the hellish world of suffering and misery, for all but an elite few, a world consisting of a vast and utterly impoverished and miserable majority and a very small exceedingly wealthy elite, instead of a more fair and egalitarian society where wealth is more broadly and evenly distributed among all the people and all people can make a good living wage from their work in safe conditions. Under libertarian idealogy, It would be a system that serves the elite at the expense of everyone else, treating the common people as a slave labor class to be exploited and discarded when no longer needed, with no respect for their rights or freedoms.
I think you missed the point. Net Neutrality protections will keep government AND corporations out of meddling by censorship of the internet. The Net Neutrality law asserts and reaffirms our right to free speech. It would actually not allow the government you are concerned about to censor and will prevent the corporations from censoring. It would protect our freedom and our liberty to free speech as it should be. Law should be used as a tool in this case to protect the rights of the individual to free speech and to free expression, not to have these censored or impeded by corporations, government or anyone else. That is what net neutrality is meant to do. To protect your freedom and to keep government and corporations from making decisions about what you have a right to say. Generally law should be made to protect peoples rights and self determination, not to take away the rights of individuals, all of whom have equal rights to self determination, liberty, and to live, and to protect our environment, animals and so on, not protect the rights of a few wealthy elite or large corporations.
Your argument is perplexing. Its like saying we should not have a first amendment protection of free speech and that this is government going "too far". With your line of thinking we would have no first amendment and which could lead to eventual full blown censorship, just like in Australia and other places where there is already a trend developing in that direction. Net neutrality does not give government more power, It actually reduces anyones power to censor another's speech.
Your notion that government is more dangerous than corporations is naive. If democratic institutions of government were dissolved, this would leave corporations, that have develop or would develop, by ammassing power, economically and militarilly, to take their place as de facto governments. Corporations would establish private police forces to assert their order and their perogatives, and could seize economic resources by force and thus through control of resources make people dependant on them, none of it in a democratic manner. Without a democratic government with law enforcement and regulatory powers, this is the sort of totalitarianism that would emerge, where the strong and powerful become more so and crush the less fortunate. The challenges to a people faced with such would be no different than had this corporation been named a totalitarian undemocratic government. They would be in effect, functional governments, but totalitarian ones. The only way to ensure your freedom is to assure the existance of democratic institutions with law enforcement power and to provide social security systems, and work through that to protect your freedom and to encourage and support legislation which gaurantees your freedom and oppose efforts that would endanger it. For government to carry out its proper role of protecting the rights of the people and of as a safety net to assure safe employment and access to basic necessities, necessary as an aspect of the right to life, an ability to pay system of taxation is reasonable for the benefits that are received. Another key and necessary protection of your liberty is that all institutions should be subject to independant oversight. Corporations should be subject to independant regulation by government, and thus should not be financially tied to corporations. There should be an independant media not tied to corporations or government or having any conflict of interest so they are able to independantly report on and investigate the activities of both government and corporations. All of this is essential to a functioning, open, free society.