Agreed, the reason for the trouble is that the "energy will be too cheap to meter" mindset of the 60's completely fubar'ed our sense of architectural design.
If you're in the east coast of the USA, go to Monticello. On a hot summer day, they'll open the windows at the top of the dome, and this sets up a convection current that draws air through the thermal mass of the box section which whirls into a vortex in the center, up and out. It will become quite a strong breeze, almost a gale sometimes, and there's not a fan blowing. If we combined this classic sensibility with our modern mechanization to use geothermal ducting and avoid unnecessary solar gain, our buildings would need very little AC in the summer, and none at all the rest of the year.
The original poster is correct. Before air conditioning, passive thermal building design was de facto. You put up awnings to keep out summer sun, but the winter sun comes in at lower angles and you make sure it goes through the window and heats up some dense mass - masonry, tile, a brick hearth, etc. Likewise, highly reflective roofs, southern walls ribbed like a saguaro cactus to prevent the sun from hitting much of the wall at once, geothermal ducting combined with windcatcher chimneys and convection - these have been known tricks for thousands of years.
I'm just shaking my head at the know-it-alls calling all this magical. It's been concrete knowledge for longer than there's even been concrete.
I think the missing piece in what you're noticing about death in nature is that it continues that whole circle of life thing. It perpetuates the unstable equilibrium of an ecosystem. Everything gets recycled as many times as a species can evolve to handle it; that's how Nature closes its loops.
Ecosystems are beautiful. They're absolutely worth saving. They contain a wealth of evolved information we're nowhere close to learning everything from. We're keeping supercomputers busy with protein folding simulations just to understand basic building blocks of life, and that doesn't touch what can happen out there. As a community of species, they're more than the sum of their individual parts. We can't even save individuals, meaningfully; so what if we resurrect the woolly mammoth now? Where would they live??
So no, we earthlings just are not meant to all die of old age, not naturally anyway. We humans as social creatures want to keep all our connections and postpone loss, and that's fair enough.
The biggest difference between human industrial systems and nature is that we're not closing loops. We're linear in our use of everything. We concentrate energy and mine/farm/refine resources. We use them. We throw them away as trash, a lot of it toxic to life and unfit even for the fungi to decompose. This plus the idea that we've all got to die of old age is what makes us so damaging to the ecosystems.
The ecosystems are our basic life support, though. We're liquidating them for a highly linear, unsustainable energy cycle. That's why we're in trouble unless we deeply rewire how we're doing things here on Earth.
So, it's common for protons to resist pressure greatly higher than that found in a neutron star's core. Doesn't 10x greater than a neutron star's core - how big of a neutron star? - reach into the realm of gravity high enough to trap light? Doesn't this mean that some objects we perceive as black holes aren't singularities on the inside, but that the same force that keeps protons from collapsing into singularities will work for a star? Hence, they'd be quark stars *and* they'd appear like black holes from the outside?
Incorrect. The more thoughtfully crafted bombs he sent all specifically targeted the homes of sociopolitically prominent people of color, and the rest that came later were of much lesser construction. I call diversion.
Moreover, the attitudes of the misogynistic and racist church and community is well known to us in Austin.
Now whatever you decide, please consider doing something for this kid who watched her father die right in front of her. https://www.gofundme.com/tx-bo...
Interesting. I agree that the NRA completely distorts the intention of the second amendment, which was written when it was hotly debated that the federal government should not be allowed a standing army in peacetime. *That* was the role of the well-regulated militia.
The NRA represents weapons manufacturers, not citizens whether they own guns or not. So, it makes sense that the NRA wants more guns, deregulated past any common sense, and to feed on our fear and neuroses as a nation. It wants to pitch a gun as the best answer to problems that engaged citizens could find any number of better answers to.
If mass surveillance is deadlier than guns in the wrong hands, as you mention, and I agree, the opposite is true:
Effective, engaged citizenship is a better answer to social issues, mental health, despair, radicalization, and yes, government tyranny than unregulated stockpiles of guns.
If the last resort need for a gun surfaces, I'd hope for an equal and just chance to serve accountably to the people in an organized, well-trained fashion, not caches in the hands of hoarders who own half the guns in this country. I'm tired of the debate over guns being restricted to extremes of unrestricted rights to loose cannons, or total bans - we have far better options than any of that.
Microsoft and Apple still have the same attitude from the good old days of "It's not a new release until it breaks Lotus 1-2-3", and there's always the boatload of malware and spyware we don't want compatibility with.
In the meantime, I've used Linux as my primary desktop for the majority of the past two decades, and I don't even bother with dual-booting anymore. Why? You get a clean ecosystem of software right out of the box with all the popular distributions for office software, development, raster and line art, 3D modelling, mathematics, so on. The popular games are native or work well in Wine. If you're really hard up, a virtual machine and a second GPU with I/O bypass could see you through.
The trouble to migrate pays off with a lean, clean system that isn't riddled with spyware, and doesn't wake up at odd hours regardless of your settings to do Microsoft's bidding. It isn't license-restricted to your CPU - I've switched laptops simply by popping my SSD out of an old broken one into a new one and been fully up and running with my software and custom settings in minutes, without fuss.
I wouldn't give up those advantages just to run everything in Best Buy, and it's possible that, once over the speed bumps, you wouldn't want to either.
I agree. I've used KDE 5 for three years solid as my near-exclusive desktop for work and home use. Its consistency in applying keyboard shortcuts and other customizations, its detailed power management profiles that can shift with the Activities, its solid performance over time makes up for the occasional visual clunkiness. I've made an environment that approximates to Unity and MacOS on it, and it's comfortable even as I upgrade to new Fedora releases or transplant the SDD into other machines. KDE deserves more credit than it's gotten. It deserves to be front and center on more distributions.
Stability and agriculture are the primary concerns, not just landmass. If the ocean is washing up new sandbars from storms while the island is sinking, and there's saline intrusion into the soil, the land area can increase while the island loses its arable soil, which is going to sap the islander's means to feed and support themselves.
So, representing this as any counter to Tuvalu's crisis is obtuse.
If you want to get more hobbyist than that, here's an open high-performance 68000 processor core you can load onto an FPGA - possibly along with MiniMig or some other FPGA implementation of the Amiga. http://www.apollo-core.com/
I think this narrative both misses a lot of niches where open processing could make a difference, and overestimates the barriers to entry.
First, RISC-V is already being put into silicon. It's great wherever there's a need for a small, efficient core, and this means that embedded systems, microcontrollers, all that are up for grabs. Think Raspberry Pi and smaller. Think an upcoming generation of smartphones and wearables. Think more of competing with ARM than Intel and AMD.
Second, we need this to replace the firmware being used by mainstream Intel/AMD hardware. Right now, that's a black box. We just recently found out that Intel's ME is running Minix. It's riddled with security holes. AMD's SPS has got holes too. This is attracting widespread enough attention that there's momentum here. That computer-inside-a-computer is up for grabs, even on an Intel platform.
Third, this isn't so much competition as an open standard. This isn't of interest to some tiny upstarts, but a broad industry consortium. Apart from the Intel/AMD/POWER CPUs themselves, there's a lot of opportunity for a more efficient and open standard.
But let's just say that the open processor standard, most likely RISC-V, progressed to where it competes with Intel/AMD for the main CPU platform. What's it going to run, you ask? Well, RISC-V support is now a part of the Linux 4.15 kernel, and cross-compilation is not hard. All that open source software can be ported, and allowing for some QA to shake some bugs out, this is doable.
In short, I think there's more diverse and broad-based reasons for this to happen, reasons that are of interest to a lot of different players including Intel and AMD themselves, and getting to where this happens isn't as hard as some people make it sound. We're already a good part of the way there.
You really freaking don't get Snowden or why some of us appreciate him. There's not been any soup. I don't even know what you're comparing to the soup, and I actually don't think you do either. You couldn't even explain that payoff or gratifying factor.
It doesn't take much historical or political theory to see why what the NSA is doing fundamentally breaks the contract between the government and citizens that characterizes the USA. If you're an authoritarian and might makes right, well... you don't understand what the USA is supposed to be at least for the citizens it recognizes as such. But if you imagine yourself at all interested in the rule of law or the rights of people even against politically powerful entities, you're being dissonant and duped.
The USA's agencies make the East German Stasi look crude and, if you're outside the sphere of privilege, benign.
If you paid any attention to the expansion of war powers between Bush, Obama, and now Trump's administration and applied the same observation and concern to technology, you'd be clear on the danger and why Snowden did the world a huge favor.
That generation had the GI bill and an economy fully intact to become the powerhouse when the rest of the world is war torn. The boomers have taken that for granted and allowed the politicians to shred the bootstraps. You bet it's way different for veterans or anyone trying to get started now. Quality four-year education is nearly unaffordable, food and health care keep spiraling, and of particular relevance to San Francisco - a bunch of ridiculously rich and out of touch landlords are allowed to drive everyone's living costs up at a ridiculous rate. But, I'm stating what's blindingly obvious all around some of us, and somehow lost on others, and that clearly has to be because of their place, age, and/or assumptions.
You know what city realized that criminalizing a horrible human rights problem, which homelessness is, is far more expensive than just buying people apartments? Salt Lake City. https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10...
Just miles away from me they're doing better yet than that and are building a tiny house/RV/tent community and people are going from homeless to having work building a community lifting themselves up, because people *want* dignity and shelter. Why has San Francisco morphed into this cold capitalist place where you've got to be a millionaire to live comfortably? Why are people assuming the worst about an entire group of people who have large numbers of military veterans and domestic violence survivors among them??
> Besides, a stray dog or cat did NOT CHOOSE that lifestyle.
WOW. What makes you think those humans did?! Do you know how extremely gentrified San Francisco has gotten? Do you know how many people its landlords have aggressively made homeless? When I was there people were paying hundreds for a walk-in closet and it's gotten much worse since.
There are no panaceas in programming languages, but working with a framework that is carefully well-designed sure does cut down on human error down the road, even in the hands of a skilled programmer.
Ada is de facto for onboard systems in airplanes for a reason. Language constructs for design-by-contract matter when it's important, and we're learning from the masses of botnets and hackery that there's a lot that matters, not just hospital systems and jet planes.
Rust is in fact building important features into the core that C++ is just trying to bolt on. We need less error-prone, more validated and tested code, and the frameworks to support that. We're designing systems that society relies on, and it's irresponsible to society to assume that every programmer is a rock star 100% of the time.
Perl violates basic aspects of scope. I once pulled in a fellow programmer's library for a few functions which I added to my loop. It totally broke the whole thing. Why? Because a next statement in a called function affected the loop control in the calling function. That simply shows that lack of scope is broken at the language level - and that's inexcusable.
Perl makes sloppy quick scripts hard, but it makes doing the right thing in any larger project with a maintenance cycle hard. Globals are easy. Restricted scope and managed exposure between modules is hard. That's exactly the opposite of what it should be.
It is far easier to write in Python and turn to the appropriate PyPy, Cython, or however you want to wrap Rust or C++ into it where you need to.
I'll take engineering around clear design over a language designed by linguists than by programmers anyday!
That's right, because other people deciding what they like makes your favorite open source disappear. Like, how KDE went away because Gnome started.;)
Seriously, if a bunch of new users come on board and use Mint, they'll be all the more open to a better engineered solution. The real point is to have open source solutions that compete on merit rather than corporate marketing and lock-in.
C'mon SlashDot, we've seen this. A) Important advances make an old monopoly face a future of obsolescence. B) Monopolists lean on the government to use messaging or force to make everyone play ball the old way. C) It doesn't work in the end, making a waste of all the wrangling. Make no mistake: renewables are starting to undercut fossil fuels. If the USA didn't have a 220% or more tarriff on Chinese solar panels to protect its manufacturers, this would be even further along. The oil industry is pulling a lot of levers to get more money out of its old markets before they're obsolete is all. It doesn't change the fact that they're seeing their version of Napster.
"If the complexity grew linearly with the number of particles being simulated, then doubling the number of partices would mean doubling the computing power required. If, however, the complexity grows on an exponential scale – where the amount of computing power has to double every time a single particle is added – then the task quickly becomes impossible." - cosmosmagazine.com
"Oh that's easy, imagine a computer that could generate that with a procedural algorithm!", exclaimed the geeks, who then stayed glued to their screens in their efforts to prove they're trapped in a computer.
Shoot, I thought we'd have all figured this out from SimCity. Put a small store on every other corner and your traffic issues go away!
Seriously, though the places that I've lived where I could walk a half-mile to get anything I need on a daily basis have been delightful. Human-scale living is far better than car-scale, far more interesting, far less stressful, far more healthy and active. Anyone who knocks it probably hasn't tried it.
Most of the arguments for 102 extra planets in our solar system seem to be based on the public being excited about having a planet. I don't think it'd work that way. Having 110 planets would water the concept down. The problem is that an object is perceived as less interesting because of it, and that's not true at all.
There's nothing to stop a moon from being as large and complex as any planet. Ceres is categorized as a dwarf planet, and it's got surprising geology, even a chance of harboring water and life. The surface of comet 67P has proven to be amazingly interesting. Pluto didn't need planetary status to knock our socks off in 2015. We *are* going to find more rogue planets floating through space with no parent star that we can see. We are likely to find Planet 9 soon, and there's a chance it's not a planet which Jupiter and Saturn kicked out during our system's formation, but a captured exoplanet. These are all fascinating objects!
It's a question, though, of where they form, how they exist, what bodies they're interacting with. It makes no real sense to me for Europa and Ganymede to not be moons. Their primary gravitational attraction is to the planet they've formed around. That planet is something formed together with its parent star from the same disk, because of the gravitational eddies and changes that produced that star. They're all made from that system. That's what seems to be behind all the particular stipulations of what a planet is.
That's because you're not liquidating hundreds of million's years worth of accumulated fossil fuel in a century or two. Even leaving alone all the side effects, that was a one-time bonanza. In the meantime, the efficiency of solar has, with a R&D budget that's miniscule in comparison with all that's gone into fossil fuels, has improved by leaps and bounds. http://www.electroschematics.c...
The real problem is that renewable energy does not conform to a centralized model of concentrated wealth accumulation, so wealthy special interests are blowing a lot of smoke in your ears about it.
If you want your society to survive, you will make damn sure that there are enough jobs. Of course, if you are just in it for the short-term profits, then you have a point.
Ergo, if robots took all our jobs, we'd necessarily go extinct, because if all the productivity was taken care of, people who work would be meaningless, while the lives of people who "own" the robots their human employees built for them would still be very meaningful. Right.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, the reason for the trouble is that the "energy will be too cheap to meter" mindset of the 60's completely fubar'ed our sense of architectural design.
If you're in the east coast of the USA, go to Monticello. On a hot summer day, they'll open the windows at the top of the dome, and this sets up a convection current that draws air through the thermal mass of the box section which whirls into a vortex in the center, up and out. It will become quite a strong breeze, almost a gale sometimes, and there's not a fan blowing. If we combined this classic sensibility with our modern mechanization to use geothermal ducting and avoid unnecessary solar gain, our buildings would need very little AC in the summer, and none at all the rest of the year.
The original poster is correct. Before air conditioning, passive thermal building design was de facto. You put up awnings to keep out summer sun, but the winter sun comes in at lower angles and you make sure it goes through the window and heats up some dense mass - masonry, tile, a brick hearth, etc. Likewise, highly reflective roofs, southern walls ribbed like a saguaro cactus to prevent the sun from hitting much of the wall at once, geothermal ducting combined with windcatcher chimneys and convection - these have been known tricks for thousands of years.
I'm just shaking my head at the know-it-alls calling all this magical. It's been concrete knowledge for longer than there's even been concrete.
I think the missing piece in what you're noticing about death in nature is that it continues that whole circle of life thing. It perpetuates the unstable equilibrium of an ecosystem. Everything gets recycled as many times as a species can evolve to handle it; that's how Nature closes its loops.
Ecosystems are beautiful. They're absolutely worth saving. They contain a wealth of evolved information we're nowhere close to learning everything from. We're keeping supercomputers busy with protein folding simulations just to understand basic building blocks of life, and that doesn't touch what can happen out there. As a community of species, they're more than the sum of their individual parts. We can't even save individuals, meaningfully; so what if we resurrect the woolly mammoth now? Where would they live??
So no, we earthlings just are not meant to all die of old age, not naturally anyway. We humans as social creatures want to keep all our connections and postpone loss, and that's fair enough.
The biggest difference between human industrial systems and nature is that we're not closing loops. We're linear in our use of everything. We concentrate energy and mine/farm/refine resources. We use them. We throw them away as trash, a lot of it toxic to life and unfit even for the fungi to decompose. This plus the idea that we've all got to die of old age is what makes us so damaging to the ecosystems.
The ecosystems are our basic life support, though. We're liquidating them for a highly linear, unsustainable energy cycle. That's why we're in trouble unless we deeply rewire how we're doing things here on Earth.
So, it's common for protons to resist pressure greatly higher than that found in a neutron star's core. Doesn't 10x greater than a neutron star's core - how big of a neutron star? - reach into the realm of gravity high enough to trap light? Doesn't this mean that some objects we perceive as black holes aren't singularities on the inside, but that the same force that keeps protons from collapsing into singularities will work for a star? Hence, they'd be quark stars *and* they'd appear like black holes from the outside?
Incorrect. The more thoughtfully crafted bombs he sent all specifically targeted the homes of sociopolitically prominent people of color, and the rest that came later were of much lesser construction. I call diversion.
Moreover, the attitudes of the misogynistic and racist church and community is well known to us in Austin.
Now whatever you decide, please consider doing something for this kid who watched her father die right in front of her. https://www.gofundme.com/tx-bo...
Interesting. I agree that the NRA completely distorts the intention of the second amendment, which was written when it was hotly debated that the federal government should not be allowed a standing army in peacetime. *That* was the role of the well-regulated militia.
The NRA represents weapons manufacturers, not citizens whether they own guns or not. So, it makes sense that the NRA wants more guns, deregulated past any common sense, and to feed on our fear and neuroses as a nation. It wants to pitch a gun as the best answer to problems that engaged citizens could find any number of better answers to.
If mass surveillance is deadlier than guns in the wrong hands, as you mention, and I agree, the opposite is true:
Effective, engaged citizenship is a better answer to social issues, mental health, despair, radicalization, and yes, government tyranny than unregulated stockpiles of guns.
If the last resort need for a gun surfaces, I'd hope for an equal and just chance to serve accountably to the people in an organized, well-trained fashion, not caches in the hands of hoarders who own half the guns in this country. I'm tired of the debate over guns being restricted to extremes of unrestricted rights to loose cannons, or total bans - we have far better options than any of that.
Microsoft and Apple still have the same attitude from the good old days of "It's not a new release until it breaks Lotus 1-2-3", and there's always the boatload of malware and spyware we don't want compatibility with.
In the meantime, I've used Linux as my primary desktop for the majority of the past two decades, and I don't even bother with dual-booting anymore. Why? You get a clean ecosystem of software right out of the box with all the popular distributions for office software, development, raster and line art, 3D modelling, mathematics, so on. The popular games are native or work well in Wine. If you're really hard up, a virtual machine and a second GPU with I/O bypass could see you through.
The trouble to migrate pays off with a lean, clean system that isn't riddled with spyware, and doesn't wake up at odd hours regardless of your settings to do Microsoft's bidding. It isn't license-restricted to your CPU - I've switched laptops simply by popping my SSD out of an old broken one into a new one and been fully up and running with my software and custom settings in minutes, without fuss.
I wouldn't give up those advantages just to run everything in Best Buy, and it's possible that, once over the speed bumps, you wouldn't want to either.
I agree. I've used KDE 5 for three years solid as my near-exclusive desktop for work and home use. Its consistency in applying keyboard shortcuts and other customizations, its detailed power management profiles that can shift with the Activities, its solid performance over time makes up for the occasional visual clunkiness. I've made an environment that approximates to Unity and MacOS on it, and it's comfortable even as I upgrade to new Fedora releases or transplant the SDD into other machines. KDE deserves more credit than it's gotten. It deserves to be front and center on more distributions.
Stability and agriculture are the primary concerns, not just landmass. If the ocean is washing up new sandbars from storms while the island is sinking, and there's saline intrusion into the soil, the land area can increase while the island loses its arable soil, which is going to sap the islander's means to feed and support themselves.
So, representing this as any counter to Tuvalu's crisis is obtuse.
Not sure whether you want more Amiga nostalgia or 68000-family processing, but either way, your cake's already baked.
Here's a top-quality Amiga hardware emulator. https://www.armigaproject.com/
If you want to get more hobbyist than that, here's an open high-performance 68000 processor core you can load onto an FPGA - possibly along with MiniMig or some other FPGA implementation of the Amiga. http://www.apollo-core.com/
I think this narrative both misses a lot of niches where open processing could make a difference, and overestimates the barriers to entry.
First, RISC-V is already being put into silicon. It's great wherever there's a need for a small, efficient core, and this means that embedded systems, microcontrollers, all that are up for grabs. Think Raspberry Pi and smaller. Think an upcoming generation of smartphones and wearables. Think more of competing with ARM than Intel and AMD.
Second, we need this to replace the firmware being used by mainstream Intel/AMD hardware. Right now, that's a black box. We just recently found out that Intel's ME is running Minix. It's riddled with security holes. AMD's SPS has got holes too. This is attracting widespread enough attention that there's momentum here. That computer-inside-a-computer is up for grabs, even on an Intel platform.
Third, this isn't so much competition as an open standard. This isn't of interest to some tiny upstarts, but a broad industry consortium. Apart from the Intel/AMD/POWER CPUs themselves, there's a lot of opportunity for a more efficient and open standard.
But let's just say that the open processor standard, most likely RISC-V, progressed to where it competes with Intel/AMD for the main CPU platform. What's it going to run, you ask? Well, RISC-V support is now a part of the Linux 4.15 kernel, and cross-compilation is not hard. All that open source software can be ported, and allowing for some QA to shake some bugs out, this is doable.
In short, I think there's more diverse and broad-based reasons for this to happen, reasons that are of interest to a lot of different players including Intel and AMD themselves, and getting to where this happens isn't as hard as some people make it sound. We're already a good part of the way there.
You really freaking don't get Snowden or why some of us appreciate him. There's not been any soup. I don't even know what you're comparing to the soup, and I actually don't think you do either. You couldn't even explain that payoff or gratifying factor.
It doesn't take much historical or political theory to see why what the NSA is doing fundamentally breaks the contract between the government and citizens that characterizes the USA. If you're an authoritarian and might makes right, well... you don't understand what the USA is supposed to be at least for the citizens it recognizes as such. But if you imagine yourself at all interested in the rule of law or the rights of people even against politically powerful entities, you're being dissonant and duped.
The USA's agencies make the East German Stasi look crude and, if you're outside the sphere of privilege, benign.
If you paid any attention to the expansion of war powers between Bush, Obama, and now Trump's administration and applied the same observation and concern to technology, you'd be clear on the danger and why Snowden did the world a huge favor.
That generation had the GI bill and an economy fully intact to become the powerhouse when the rest of the world is war torn. The boomers have taken that for granted and allowed the politicians to shred the bootstraps. You bet it's way different for veterans or anyone trying to get started now. Quality four-year education is nearly unaffordable, food and health care keep spiraling, and of particular relevance to San Francisco - a bunch of ridiculously rich and out of touch landlords are allowed to drive everyone's living costs up at a ridiculous rate. But, I'm stating what's blindingly obvious all around some of us, and somehow lost on others, and that clearly has to be because of their place, age, and/or assumptions.
Some progressive city.
You know what city realized that criminalizing a horrible human rights problem, which homelessness is, is far more expensive than just buying people apartments? Salt Lake City. https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10...
Just miles away from me they're doing better yet than that and are building a tiny house/RV/tent community and people are going from homeless to having work building a community lifting themselves up, because people *want* dignity and shelter. Why has San Francisco morphed into this cold capitalist place where you've got to be a millionaire to live comfortably? Why are people assuming the worst about an entire group of people who have large numbers of military veterans and domestic violence survivors among them??
> Besides, a stray dog or cat did NOT CHOOSE that lifestyle.
WOW. What makes you think those humans did?! Do you know how extremely gentrified San Francisco has gotten? Do you know how many people its landlords have aggressively made homeless? When I was there people were paying hundreds for a walk-in closet and it's gotten much worse since.
There are no panaceas in programming languages, but working with a framework that is carefully well-designed sure does cut down on human error down the road, even in the hands of a skilled programmer.
Ada is de facto for onboard systems in airplanes for a reason. Language constructs for design-by-contract matter when it's important, and we're learning from the masses of botnets and hackery that there's a lot that matters, not just hospital systems and jet planes.
Rust is in fact building important features into the core that C++ is just trying to bolt on. We need less error-prone, more validated and tested code, and the frameworks to support that. We're designing systems that society relies on, and it's irresponsible to society to assume that every programmer is a rock star 100% of the time.
Perl violates basic aspects of scope. I once pulled in a fellow programmer's library for a few functions which I added to my loop. It totally broke the whole thing. Why? Because a next statement in a called function affected the loop control in the calling function. That simply shows that lack of scope is broken at the language level - and that's inexcusable.
Perl makes sloppy quick scripts hard, but it makes doing the right thing in any larger project with a maintenance cycle hard. Globals are easy. Restricted scope and managed exposure between modules is hard. That's exactly the opposite of what it should be.
It is far easier to write in Python and turn to the appropriate PyPy, Cython, or however you want to wrap Rust or C++ into it where you need to.
I'll take engineering around clear design over a language designed by linguists than by programmers anyday!
That's right, because other people deciding what they like makes your favorite open source disappear. Like, how KDE went away because Gnome started. ;)
Seriously, if a bunch of new users come on board and use Mint, they'll be all the more open to a better engineered solution. The real point is to have open source solutions that compete on merit rather than corporate marketing and lock-in.
C'mon SlashDot, we've seen this. A) Important advances make an old monopoly face a future of obsolescence. B) Monopolists lean on the government to use messaging or force to make everyone play ball the old way. C) It doesn't work in the end, making a waste of all the wrangling. Make no mistake: renewables are starting to undercut fossil fuels. If the USA didn't have a 220% or more tarriff on Chinese solar panels to protect its manufacturers, this would be even further along. The oil industry is pulling a lot of levers to get more money out of its old markets before they're obsolete is all. It doesn't change the fact that they're seeing their version of Napster.
"If the complexity grew linearly with the number of particles being simulated, then doubling the number of partices would mean doubling the computing power required. If, however, the complexity grows on an exponential scale – where the amount of computing power has to double every time a single particle is added – then the task quickly becomes impossible." - cosmosmagazine.com
"Oh that's easy, imagine a computer that could generate that with a procedural algorithm!", exclaimed the geeks, who then stayed glued to their screens in their efforts to prove they're trapped in a computer.
Shoot, I thought we'd have all figured this out from SimCity. Put a small store on every other corner and your traffic issues go away!
Seriously, though the places that I've lived where I could walk a half-mile to get anything I need on a daily basis have been delightful. Human-scale living is far better than car-scale, far more interesting, far less stressful, far more healthy and active. Anyone who knocks it probably hasn't tried it.
Most of the arguments for 102 extra planets in our solar system seem to be based on the public being excited about having a planet. I don't think it'd work that way. Having 110 planets would water the concept down. The problem is that an object is perceived as less interesting because of it, and that's not true at all.
There's nothing to stop a moon from being as large and complex as any planet. Ceres is categorized as a dwarf planet, and it's got surprising geology, even a chance of harboring water and life. The surface of comet 67P has proven to be amazingly interesting. Pluto didn't need planetary status to knock our socks off in 2015. We *are* going to find more rogue planets floating through space with no parent star that we can see. We are likely to find Planet 9 soon, and there's a chance it's not a planet which Jupiter and Saturn kicked out during our system's formation, but a captured exoplanet. These are all fascinating objects!
It's a question, though, of where they form, how they exist, what bodies they're interacting with. It makes no real sense to me for Europa and Ganymede to not be moons. Their primary gravitational attraction is to the planet they've formed around. That planet is something formed together with its parent star from the same disk, because of the gravitational eddies and changes that produced that star. They're all made from that system. That's what seems to be behind all the particular stipulations of what a planet is.
I'm okay with that!
That's because you're not liquidating hundreds of million's years worth of accumulated fossil fuel in a century or two. Even leaving alone all the side effects, that was a one-time bonanza. In the meantime, the efficiency of solar has, with a R&D budget that's miniscule in comparison with all that's gone into fossil fuels, has improved by leaps and bounds. http://www.electroschematics.c...
In fact, it's the cheapest form of energy in large swathes of the world already. http://www.popularmechanics.co...
The real problem is that renewable energy does not conform to a centralized model of concentrated wealth accumulation, so wealthy special interests are blowing a lot of smoke in your ears about it.
If you want your society to survive, you will make damn sure that there are enough jobs. Of course, if you are just in it for the short-term profits, then you have a point.
Ergo, if robots took all our jobs, we'd necessarily go extinct, because if all the productivity was taken care of, people who work would be meaningless, while the lives of people who "own" the robots their human employees built for them would still be very meaningful. Right.
Because they're comparing installation+running costs to running costs.