Look, I'm all for helping Africa get great colleges and postgrad institutions. It's a good thing, and certainly can't hurt. But if these people think that a postgrad center for math and physics is going to help pump great wealth into Africa, I'm afraid they'll be dissapointed. They'd be better off building business and engineering institutes. People like Patrice Motsepe will do far more to bring wealth to Africa than someone like Hawking. Certainly a postgraduate institution alone won't solve all the problems but I do think it will help more than you expect.
I suspect one thing sorely missing in a lot of Africa right now is pride. Political strife, poverty, and lack of education are common, it seems the only thing African nations can occasionally succeed at on a world stage is athletics.
If they do get a real legitimate world-class research institution I think it gives two main effects. First is pride, they see an African research institution with African scientists young kids now have a good intellectual role model to strive for. They won't be world leading, that will probably take a long time, but if they can really participate on the world stage I think that's a huge boon for African pride.
Second you get a group of actual scientific authorities who are able to influence public policy. Right now I don't know if you have a well established and intellectually rigorous set of African academic institutions available to educate the public. Creating one could very well help combat misconceptions about a lot of scientific concepts and diseases like AIDS.
Isn't "Freedom of Speech" exactly *about* allowing those messages to spread that you disagree with? With Freenet it is really rather simple, when people don't request the content, then it will fall out of the network and disappear, if they do request it, then it gets cached, maybe even on your node. You might not like that, but that is the price to pay for Freedom of Speech. There is a difference between allowing speech you disagree with, and actually promoting speech you disagree with.
If you're standing next to me you have the right to say whatever you want, but I have no obligation to stay around or listen, and I definitely have no obligation to lend you my bullhorn.
but if my computer is hosting content, I should have the freedom to choose what that content is
If you have the ability to choose what you host or don't host, then you become responsible for it. Its a bit like the concept of a "common carrier" in US telecommunications law. Freenet gives you freedom by preventing you from censoring the content you host. Its a feature, not a bug. Unfortunately a very valid point.
Freedom of speech is not an absolute
If not, then who gets to choose what speech is permissible? I think that what the grandparent describes isn't quite "freedom of speech". I believe that people should be allowed to talk about anything, however I have absolutely no obligation to endorse or facilitate the spread of messages I don't agree with, which is precisely what Freenet does.
If I had the ability to be reasonably sure I wasn't regularly passing along messages involving terrorism, CP, hate groups, and various other nefarious types of speech I don't endorse I'd happily participate. However, I won't join and facilitate those types of communication.
"Unless of course you are playing loose with definitions and "renewable technologies" includes geothermal, trash-to-steam, etc."
I did say "renewables". Including Hydro.
To switch some of your words in your parent post
"Acupuncture and massage therapy have been proven to work now. People have had their life expectancies and standard of living drastically improved by medical care."
Oh, I should mention, when I say "medical care" I'm including drugs, surgery, and other stuff that happens in hospitals.
The point is if you state 'A' and 'B' are examples of 'X', then claim that 'X' does 'Y', you're actually claiming that 'A' and 'B' do 'Y'.
To make that statement, when the effects of 'Y' in fact come from 'C', which was not mentioned at all, it not a correct statement.
"As much as he wanted solar, he couldn't afford it. Why? The payback period (without subsidies) is 100 years!"
You'd be very stupid to take an economic argument on this topic. You think burying all our CO2 is going to be cheap? You think it's going to get rid of all our emissions? No and no. I'm sure the calculations he made did not factor in the rising cost of energy due to the implemention of sequestration, the future scarcity of oil and coal, more wars being fought for energy, etc. etc.
It's very stupid to take a non-economic argument of this topic, if we took an economic approach we wouldn't have gotten in this massive corn ethanol mess.
Just like science is a method for discovering bits of reality economics is a method for deciding the proper actions to take. And, though it may not be as effective as science, economics as an approach has a very good track record.
We need to stop global warming because it's probably going to cost us big time, in a ton of different ways, all of which can be expressed in dollars.
As to wind and solar, without some big advancements they are not feasible, we could do them if we had no alternatives but it would hurt a lot.
Nuclear on the other hand, it has its downsides but I've yet to see any that's it something other than our best option.
We can have super-cheap energy and with CO2 emissions comparable with any renewable, and we have the technology to do this NOW.
CO2 doesn't contaminate groundwater. Nuclear waste doesn't allow for huge amounts of enhanced oil recovery or coalbed methane recovery.
The capital costs are very high, but if used for a purpose, CO2 injection can pay for itself. CO2 injection in the US alone has the potential to recover ~100-400B barrels (restoring old, "used up" fields like the East Texas Field, plus injection into all of the large fields we're currently tapping and the ones we haven't started tapping yet). That's 10-40 trillion dollars at $100/barrel -- a couple times the size of the US GDP. There's not as much money in coalbed methane recovery, but it's still substantial. We inject CO2 into the ground and get oil?
Exactly how does this work? I know there are some plans to engineer micro-organisms that can do that but at this point they're not even vaporware, and I'm pretty sure the CO2 won't transform into oil on its own.
If the copyright holder can't be found or identified, why bother with limiting the penalties? Why not just make the work public domain? Identified by who?
Not all copyrights are registered and there's no sure way to tell if a work is truly abandoned or if you you just haven't found the holder.
OK, I severely doubt that. AFAIK, it hasn't happened yet that someone has fired up their pico-dremel, dipped it in a pool of amino acids, and spun a new life form. And if that were the case, that particular item would be the headline-cum-Nobel-prize, and not anything specific you could actually do with it.
So... - Maybe it was bred. Perhaps using something sexy like DNA splicing. - More likely it was newly discovered. - Most likely, it was identified from one of the nigh endless lists of prior discoveries of beasties that might do something useful, and refined by breeding. This sounds pretty close http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/227
we tire of you because you refuse to acknowldge basic climate science and refuse to follow proper scientific methods. Funny how you claim the mantle of "basic climate science" and "proper scientific methods" then proceed to establish a position contrary that to virtually every actual climate scientist out there.
1. CO2 is a very minor greenhouse gas
2. The amount of CO2 re release into the atmosphere is pathetic compared to the other gases - a mere 0.28% 3. The hottest years on record predate the industrial revolution
The first two are correct, just ask any climate scientist, however that doesn't disprove AGW.
The 3rd point, depending on timeframe, I'd argue, if I recall the medieval warming period wasn't as warm as previously thought and warm only confined to Europe, but I'm not certain.
Besides the worrying thing isn't the current temperature, it's how fast they are rising, and how fast they may rise in the future.
4. There are a number of other factors such as the above that you can't/don't give an explaination for (solar activity being one), and you simply resort to either the "your workin for big oil" or the "i'm more rightgous than you" defense, neither of which is a valid scientific defense. To my knowledge no one has a working climate model that can explain the current warming with any source other than CO2. However, I'm not an expert, or even a decent amateur, if you want to argue climate science take the arguments from climate scientists.
In my opinion the only line of argument you could take that has some validity of convincing me AGW is false is explaining why the entire community of climate scientists is so massively mistaken. I can't conceive of any scientific argument you could make on this forum that the scientists dedicating their lives to studying global warming haven't already gone through.
So yeah, maybe there is some input that we haven't yet discovered that explains the warming trend. Lord, that would be nice.
Do you really think that ? I don't.
Considering human acts the main cause of global warming (or whatever other catastrophe you want) is very comforting. Why ? Because we can do something about it.
On the other hand, if humans are not the cause, we have a really big problem. Imagine it is some kind of change on the sun. How do we handle that ?
These days, I take a great deal of comfort on the idea we are destroying out planet, our "natural" disaster are due to humans doing this or that.
Well the big worry with the scenario that we're the ones changing the temperature is the mechanism we're using to change it, CO2, is something we don't like we're going to slow down producing. If it's some natural cycle we have a few thousand years of evidence that it probably won't be that bad, and several million years of evidence that it probably won't be catastrophic. However, if we're the ones doing the warming all that prior evidence of non-disaster no longer applies.
That being said as a species we do have a tendency to procrastinate and if the situation does become obviously dire I think we have a good shot at panicking productively.
Even Wikipedia's article on open source is careful about pointing out there is more than one definition.
As was I, there are various definitions but the differences are small and rarely significant, and Sun's old Java license fulfills none of them.
You need to realize not everyone agrees with you on the definition. There is nothing wrong with the OSI version, but I feel like the phrase "open source" has been hijacked. It originally meant you could see the source code. Actually when the term "open source" was created they tried to trademark it so it couldn't be hijacked and diluted. It has never meant you could just see the source code, freedom to modify and redistribute has always been an essential part of any open source definition.
As a result, Java was already enjoying the vast majority of the benefits associated with open-source with free of its risks. Except the ones like distros being able to distribute their own versions of the jvm and take over the task of properly configuring java packages for their own systems instead of having sun try to properly package java for a zillion different linux systems.
There are very practical advantages to allowing re-distribution and I'd bet we see a lot more java on the linux desktop if they had. Fair enough, but that's what Sun preferred ten years ago, as was their right. My point is that this was a far cry from Java being closed-source as slashdot posters like to imply. They were completely in their right to do so, and they are dealing with the consequences, both good and bad, of the choice they made.
I think the term for Sun's former Java situation should be something like "source available" for the "look but don't touch" license conditions. However, left with the choice between open and closed source I'd definitely label it as closed source.
The source code has been open to the public for over 10 years. This includes the Java, C and ASM source code.
The license prevented anyone from distributing forked code but it *was* freely available to the public. Nothing prevented anyone from auditing the code or patching it for internal use so long as they didn't redistribute their changes to the general public and call it "Java". As a result, Java was already enjoying the vast majority of the benefits associated with open-source with free of its risks. Except the ones like distros being able to distribute their own versions of the jvm and take over the task of properly configuring java packages for their own systems instead of having sun try to properly package java for a zillion different linux systems.
There are very practical advantages to allowing re-distribution and I'd bet we see a lot more java on the linux desktop if they had.
The one where you can see the source code! The GP said open source, not FOSS.
Remember, most open source software has some form of strings attached as part of the license. Sometimes you have to provide code freedom, other times you have keep comments about who wrote the software, and still other times you can't use it at all but only look at it. That would be having the source available, which isn't completely bad, but is a far ways short from being open source.
Open source has an actual definition, even if you don't accept their precise terms that definition it is still pretty close to what most people consider to be open source and a far cry from what Java has had for 10 years.
Java has been open-source for over 10 years now. Open-source fanatics would have you believe otherwise. No one is able to please *everyone* in the open-source community (nor should they try). What definition of open source has Sun's Java fulfilled for 10 years?
I know a number of gcj and classpath developers and recall when the code for OpenJDK first came out. The general vibe I got is they were quite happy with the scenario of gcj and classpath falling away and everyone uniting behind a single open source version of Sun's JVM. There's not a lot of people who will dedicate years of their life to a project, then happily toss it aside when a better solution becomes available. I really respect them for that.
If your wireless connection is unsecured and offers DHCP configuration to anyone who wants to join, it's an open invitation.
No it isn't, no more than my front door opening to anyone who pulls the handle is an open invitation to burgle my house.
Good to see that the entitlement complex is still alive on this site though.
I don't think people are explaining it clearly enough.
I deliberately keep my wireless open, if someone needs a wireless connection I'm happy to share, if they abuse it I'll kick them off but my wireless is unsecured precisely so people can connect.
I know many other people do the same, and if I see an open wireless I don't really have a reliable way of knowing the owners true intension, however I don't think it's particularly bad of me to assume they'd be alright with me making use of that connection if I need it.
The most important lesson from Apple is that you can be successful in many ways (including making lots of money) with a few percent market share. Gauging Linux's success on market share is pointless.
Who cares if most people use Windows? All we need is enough of a Linux community to ensure a thriving and evolving platform for those who find that Windows and/or OS X does not meet their needs. You can easily achieve that with a market share of 0.5%.
Please, no more "World Domination" bullshit. We need more users if we want to talk with the rest of the world.
How many times have you tried to view a video on some website only to see "Sorry, your browser is not supported" or had to wrestle with a binary driver, or some other incompatibility. Heck I have to run XP under vmware at work just to check my email, sure IT could click a button and we could use our own mail clients, but we're so few that they just don't care (it's a miracle we get to run linux).
Get us to 5%-10%, together with apple we should be enough to force the rest of the world away from a pure windows mindset, until then we're stuck trying to integrate with an operating system that hates our guts.
People who are excellent at programming are like people who are excellent at a lot of other things - they started doing it well before college.
How many athletes do you know who started playing a sport in college? How many musicians? Even things like Chemistry, Math, Medicine, Law - you started learning the basics of those careers in junior high and high school.
Programming isn't any different. People who are going to be great at programming started doing it in high school (or earlier) and are going to get a more structured education out of college. I already knew how to program before I got to college, but I learned a lot of stuff I would not have learned on my own by going - and I wasn't even in a straight CS program.
Someone who shows up at college with no programming experience is likely not going to be a GREAT programmer. It's too late. They're competing against people who have been programming for 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 years. It's too much of a head start. Sorry, don't buy it.
With athletics and music in order to reach an elite level you need to start early to train those muscles to perform at a high level.
To become a great coder you don't need to train yourself in algorithms or binary numbers when you're young, it's just your brain that has to be in shape.
The correlation between young computer enthusiasts and great programmers isn't because they trained their brains to become great programmers, there are countless ways to exercise your brain in a logical manner growing up. The correlation is there because that is one of the good methods of preparing their brains, but more importantly they're already computer enthusiasts so of course they're going to go disproportionately towards programming.
I went into CS not having written a line of code, I wouldn't qualify myself as a great programmer but I'm strong enough that within a year I was better than most of the people who were coding in high school and earlier.
I think the biggest problem is people tend to conform to expectations.
I recall seeing a study a while ago (tried but couldn't find it again) where they took a group of students at the beginning of the school year, gave them "intelligence tests" that randomly told them they were smart or dumb.
By the end of the year the students who were randomly told there weren't good students ended up performing significantly worse than the "smart" group.
I feel this is extremely relevant to the socio-economic performance of different races. Everyone knows that black people perform poorly on tests and have trouble with gangs. Therefore if you are black, even if you're brought up well in a good environment, there's a huge cultural inertia telling you the characteristics you should have on accounts of your race.
I suspect the way to fix that is to manage to convince young children that they're probably going to grow up to be smart and well adjusted adults regardless or race.
Imagine the odds that would have to be overcome if it takes a specific type of meteor to react with a specific type of dead planet to make life. If that is true the odds of the right elements being present in both cases could be so high that they could be conceivably called divine. It would be pretty funny as well if the chain reaction took 7 days. I googled the number of stars in the universe and got numbers from 10^21 to 10^23.
Even if the odds were 1/10^23 that life got started by some particular fluke it's still no surprise that we're here (it does however, put a bit of a damper on the Drake Equation).
Maybe they'd wait if, I dunno, we didn't advertise the details of suspects publicly on the basis of some random allegation that has yet to be proven in court?
I understand your position but unfortunately the only other alternative is to make the court secret which can seriously jeopardize the result at the end.
I can't see a way of reducing the punishment that society doles out to people charged with crimes, however I think you might be able to remove some of the more dubious charges by introducing some kind of negative incentive for charging someone only to have them found innocent. Sure a few more guilty will go free but there should be a lot fewer innocents charged.
Of course when they're actually in the trial the prosecutor now has a much stronger motivation to get a conviction which may have unfortunate consequences...
I'm not pretending the army is full of Einsteins, but they all graduated high school or earned a GED (vast vast majority graduated high school), and all of them are required to learn math skills involving chemical attack detection, navigation, operating a frequency hopping radio, etc. I don't consider learning those math skills to be a sign of intelligence as it's not that hard to teach someone to carryout the a small subset of procedure and theory required.
Compare that to kids in the average US city, where 50% do not graduate high school.
The Army is certainly a lot smarter than the general population. They may be more willing to rely on titles (like MWR)... I don't know about that, but I'd like to know who is buying the Carter era propaganda that the army is a bunch of idiots. I don't believe they're dumb but I doubt the claim that "The Army is certainly a lot smarter than the general population".
I grew up in a community with a large Canadian air force base (which should be higher than the army). Judging from my military classmates (who are probably a good reflection of the intelligence of their parents) they were essentially ordinary students without the bottom of the bell curve. There were a few top students among them, though to my knowledge none of them followed their parents military footsteps.
My hunch is that the average army member is competent or better, incompetent people are filtered out but a lot of smart people tend towards other professions.
For about 5-10 years until the search algos get smart enough that they can beat a human.
Seriously how far off is that? We're not talking about the singularity though it would have to be pretty close to the turing test. Ask the search engine a question, not quite what you want? Ask to narrow it down, if you cleverly crossreference the results with the narrowing question it should be fairly feasible to do comparably as well as talking to a live person who knows how to search. I'm not sure I'd want to build, or invest in, a company built on the premise that they'll make up their investment before computers become better searchers than humans in a few years.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect one thing sorely missing in a lot of Africa right now is pride. Political strife, poverty, and lack of education are common, it seems the only thing African nations can occasionally succeed at on a world stage is athletics.
If they do get a real legitimate world-class research institution I think it gives two main effects. First is pride, they see an African research institution with African scientists young kids now have a good intellectual role model to strive for. They won't be world leading, that will probably take a long time, but if they can really participate on the world stage I think that's a huge boon for African pride.
Second you get a group of actual scientific authorities who are able to influence public policy. Right now I don't know if you have a well established and intellectually rigorous set of African academic institutions available to educate the public. Creating one could very well help combat misconceptions about a lot of scientific concepts and diseases like AIDS.
If you're standing next to me you have the right to say whatever you want, but I have no obligation to stay around or listen, and I definitely have no obligation to lend you my bullhorn.
If you have the ability to choose what you host or don't host, then you become responsible for it. Its a bit like the concept of a "common carrier" in US telecommunications law. Freenet gives you freedom by preventing you from censoring the content you host. Its a feature, not a bug. Unfortunately a very valid point.
If not, then who gets to choose what speech is permissible? I think that what the grandparent describes isn't quite "freedom of speech". I believe that people should be allowed to talk about anything, however I have absolutely no obligation to endorse or facilitate the spread of messages I don't agree with, which is precisely what Freenet does.
If I had the ability to be reasonably sure I wasn't regularly passing along messages involving terrorism, CP, hate groups, and various other nefarious types of speech I don't endorse I'd happily participate. However, I won't join and facilitate those types of communication.
"Unless of course you are playing loose with definitions and "renewable technologies" includes geothermal, trash-to-steam, etc."
I did say "renewables". Including Hydro.
To switch some of your words in your parent post"Acupuncture and massage therapy have been proven to work now. People have had their life expectancies and standard of living drastically improved by medical care."
Oh, I should mention, when I say "medical care" I'm including drugs, surgery, and other stuff that happens in hospitals.
The point is if you state 'A' and 'B' are examples of 'X', then claim that 'X' does 'Y', you're actually claiming that 'A' and 'B' do 'Y'.
To make that statement, when the effects of 'Y' in fact come from 'C', which was not mentioned at all, it not a correct statement.
"As much as he wanted solar, he couldn't afford it. Why? The payback period (without subsidies) is 100 years!"
You'd be very stupid to take an economic argument on this topic. You think burying all our CO2 is going to be cheap? You think it's going to get rid of all our emissions? No and no. I'm sure the calculations he made did not factor in the rising cost of energy due to the implemention of sequestration, the future scarcity of oil and coal, more wars being fought for energy, etc. etc.
It's very stupid to take a non-economic argument of this topic, if we took an economic approach we wouldn't have gotten in this massive corn ethanol mess.Just like science is a method for discovering bits of reality economics is a method for deciding the proper actions to take. And, though it may not be as effective as science, economics as an approach has a very good track record.
We need to stop global warming because it's probably going to cost us big time, in a ton of different ways, all of which can be expressed in dollars.
As to wind and solar, without some big advancements they are not feasible, we could do them if we had no alternatives but it would hurt a lot.
Nuclear on the other hand, it has its downsides but I've yet to see any that's it something other than our best option.
We can have super-cheap energy and with CO2 emissions comparable with any renewable, and we have the technology to do this NOW.
Explain to me the economic argument against this.
Nuclear waste doesn't allow for huge amounts of enhanced oil recovery or coalbed methane recovery.
The capital costs are very high, but if used for a purpose, CO2 injection can pay for itself. CO2 injection in the US alone has the potential to recover ~100-400B barrels (restoring old, "used up" fields like the East Texas Field, plus injection into all of the large fields we're currently tapping and the ones we haven't started tapping yet). That's 10-40 trillion dollars at $100/barrel -- a couple times the size of the US GDP. There's not as much money in coalbed methane recovery, but it's still substantial. We inject CO2 into the ground and get oil?
Exactly how does this work? I know there are some plans to engineer micro-organisms that can do that but at this point they're not even vaporware, and I'm pretty sure the CO2 won't transform into oil on its own.
Not all copyrights are registered and there's no sure way to tell if a work is truly abandoned or if you you just haven't found the holder.
AUSTIN, Texas -- A newly created microbe [...]
OK, I severely doubt that. AFAIK, it hasn't happened yet that someone has fired up their pico-dremel, dipped it in a pool of amino acids, and spun a new life form. And if that were the case, that particular item would be the headline-cum-Nobel-prize, and not anything specific you could actually do with it.
So
- Maybe it was bred. Perhaps using something sexy like DNA splicing.
- More likely it was newly discovered.
- Most likely, it was identified from one of the nigh endless lists of prior discoveries of beasties that might do something useful, and refined by breeding. This sounds pretty close
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/227
The first two are correct, just ask any climate scientist, however that doesn't disprove AGW.2. The amount of CO2 re release into the atmosphere is pathetic compared to the other gases - a mere 0.28%
3. The hottest years on record predate the industrial revolution
The 3rd point, depending on timeframe, I'd argue, if I recall the medieval warming period wasn't as warm as previously thought and warm only confined to Europe, but I'm not certain.
Besides the worrying thing isn't the current temperature, it's how fast they are rising, and how fast they may rise in the future. 4. There are a number of other factors such as the above that you can't/don't give an explaination for (solar activity being one), and you simply resort to either the "your workin for big oil" or the "i'm more rightgous than you" defense, neither of which is a valid scientific defense. To my knowledge no one has a working climate model that can explain the current warming with any source other than CO2. However, I'm not an expert, or even a decent amateur, if you want to argue climate science take the arguments from climate scientists.
In my opinion the only line of argument you could take that has some validity of convincing me AGW is false is explaining why the entire community of climate scientists is so massively mistaken. I can't conceive of any scientific argument you could make on this forum that the scientists dedicating their lives to studying global warming haven't already gone through.
Do you really think that ? I don't.
Considering human acts the main cause of global warming (or whatever other catastrophe you want) is very comforting. Why ? Because we can do something about it.
On the other hand, if humans are not the cause, we have a really big problem. Imagine it is some kind of change on the sun. How do we handle that ?
These days, I take a great deal of comfort on the idea we are destroying out planet, our "natural" disaster are due to humans doing this or that.
Well the big worry with the scenario that we're the ones changing the temperature is the mechanism we're using to change it, CO2, is something we don't like we're going to slow down producing. If it's some natural cycle we have a few thousand years of evidence that it probably won't be that bad, and several million years of evidence that it probably won't be catastrophic. However, if we're the ones doing the warming all that prior evidence of non-disaster no longer applies.
That being said as a species we do have a tendency to procrastinate and if the situation does become obviously dire I think we have a good shot at panicking productively.
Even Wikipedia's article on open source is careful about pointing out there is more than one definition.
As was I, there are various definitions but the differences are small and rarely significant, and Sun's old Java license fulfills none of them. You need to realize not everyone agrees with you on the definition. There is nothing wrong with the OSI version, but I feel like the phrase "open source" has been hijacked. It originally meant you could see the source code. Actually when the term "open source" was created they tried to trademark it so it couldn't be hijacked and diluted. It has never meant you could just see the source code, freedom to modify and redistribute has always been an essential part of any open source definition.There are very practical advantages to allowing re-distribution and I'd bet we see a lot more java on the linux desktop if they had. Fair enough, but that's what Sun preferred ten years ago, as was their right. My point is that this was a far cry from Java being closed-source as slashdot posters like to imply. They were completely in their right to do so, and they are dealing with the consequences, both good and bad, of the choice they made.
I think the term for Sun's former Java situation should be something like "source available" for the "look but don't touch" license conditions. However, left with the choice between open and closed source I'd definitely label it as closed source.
The license prevented anyone from distributing forked code but it *was* freely available to the public. Nothing prevented anyone from auditing the code or patching it for internal use so long as they didn't redistribute their changes to the general public and call it "Java". As a result, Java was already enjoying the vast majority of the benefits associated with open-source with free of its risks. Except the ones like distros being able to distribute their own versions of the jvm and take over the task of properly configuring java packages for their own systems instead of having sun try to properly package java for a zillion different linux systems.
There are very practical advantages to allowing re-distribution and I'd bet we see a lot more java on the linux desktop if they had.
Remember, most open source software has some form of strings attached as part of the license. Sometimes you have to provide code freedom, other times you have keep comments about who wrote the software, and still other times you can't use it at all but only look at it. That would be having the source available, which isn't completely bad, but is a far ways short from being open source.
Open source has an actual definition, even if you don't accept their precise terms that definition it is still pretty close to what most people consider to be open source and a far cry from what Java has had for 10 years.
I know a number of gcj and classpath developers and recall when the code for OpenJDK first came out. The general vibe I got is they were quite happy with the scenario of gcj and classpath falling away and everyone uniting behind a single open source version of Sun's JVM. There's not a lot of people who will dedicate years of their life to a project, then happily toss it aside when a better solution becomes available. I really respect them for that.
I deliberately keep my wireless open, if someone needs a wireless connection I'm happy to share, if they abuse it I'll kick them off but my wireless is unsecured precisely so people can connect.
I know many other people do the same, and if I see an open wireless I don't really have a reliable way of knowing the owners true intension, however I don't think it's particularly bad of me to assume they'd be alright with me making use of that connection if I need it.
Who cares if most people use Windows? All we need is enough of a Linux community to ensure a thriving and evolving platform for those who find that Windows and/or OS X does not meet their needs. You can easily achieve that with a market share of 0.5%.
Please, no more "World Domination" bullshit. We need more users if we want to talk with the rest of the world.
How many times have you tried to view a video on some website only to see "Sorry, your browser is not supported" or had to wrestle with a binary driver, or some other incompatibility. Heck I have to run XP under vmware at work just to check my email, sure IT could click a button and we could use our own mail clients, but we're so few that they just don't care (it's a miracle we get to run linux).
Get us to 5%-10%, together with apple we should be enough to force the rest of the world away from a pure windows mindset, until then we're stuck trying to integrate with an operating system that hates our guts.
How many athletes do you know who started playing a sport in college? How many musicians? Even things like Chemistry, Math, Medicine, Law - you started learning the basics of those careers in junior high and high school.
Programming isn't any different. People who are going to be great at programming started doing it in high school (or earlier) and are going to get a more structured education out of college. I already knew how to program before I got to college, but I learned a lot of stuff I would not have learned on my own by going - and I wasn't even in a straight CS program.
Someone who shows up at college with no programming experience is likely not going to be a GREAT programmer. It's too late. They're competing against people who have been programming for 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 years. It's too much of a head start. Sorry, don't buy it.
With athletics and music in order to reach an elite level you need to start early to train those muscles to perform at a high level.
To become a great coder you don't need to train yourself in algorithms or binary numbers when you're young, it's just your brain that has to be in shape.
The correlation between young computer enthusiasts and great programmers isn't because they trained their brains to become great programmers, there are countless ways to exercise your brain in a logical manner growing up. The correlation is there because that is one of the good methods of preparing their brains, but more importantly they're already computer enthusiasts so of course they're going to go disproportionately towards programming.
I went into CS not having written a line of code, I wouldn't qualify myself as a great programmer but I'm strong enough that within a year I was better than most of the people who were coding in high school and earlier.
I think the biggest problem is people tend to conform to expectations.
I recall seeing a study a while ago (tried but couldn't find it again) where they took a group of students at the beginning of the school year, gave them "intelligence tests" that randomly told them they were smart or dumb.
By the end of the year the students who were randomly told there weren't good students ended up performing significantly worse than the "smart" group.
I feel this is extremely relevant to the socio-economic performance of different races. Everyone knows that black people perform poorly on tests and have trouble with gangs. Therefore if you are black, even if you're brought up well in a good environment, there's a huge cultural inertia telling you the characteristics you should have on accounts of your race.
I suspect the way to fix that is to manage to convince young children that they're probably going to grow up to be smart and well adjusted adults regardless or race.
How to accomplish that I naturally have no clue.
I'm glad that the oil sands reign as the most environmentally devastating source of oil will be coming to an end!
Even if the odds were 1/10^23 that life got started by some particular fluke it's still no surprise that we're here (it does however, put a bit of a damper on the Drake Equation).
Maybe they'd wait if, I dunno, we didn't advertise the details of suspects publicly on the basis of some random allegation that has yet to be proven in court?
I understand your position but unfortunately the only other alternative is to make the court secret which can seriously jeopardize the result at the end.I can't see a way of reducing the punishment that society doles out to people charged with crimes, however I think you might be able to remove some of the more dubious charges by introducing some kind of negative incentive for charging someone only to have them found innocent. Sure a few more guilty will go free but there should be a lot fewer innocents charged.
Of course when they're actually in the trial the prosecutor now has a much stronger motivation to get a conviction which may have unfortunate consequences...
+1 Terrorist ?
I'm not pretending the army is full of Einsteins, but they all graduated high school or earned a GED (vast vast majority graduated high school), and all of them are required to learn math skills involving chemical attack detection, navigation, operating a frequency hopping radio, etc. I don't consider learning those math skills to be a sign of intelligence as it's not that hard to teach someone to carryout the a small subset of procedure and theory required. Compare that to kids in the average US city, where 50% do not graduate high school.
The Army is certainly a lot smarter than the general population. They may be more willing to rely on titles (like MWR)... I don't know about that, but I'd like to know who is buying the Carter era propaganda that the army is a bunch of idiots. I don't believe they're dumb but I doubt the claim that "The Army is certainly a lot smarter than the general population".
I grew up in a community with a large Canadian air force base (which should be higher than the army). Judging from my military classmates (who are probably a good reflection of the intelligence of their parents) they were essentially ordinary students without the bottom of the bell curve. There were a few top students among them, though to my knowledge none of them followed their parents military footsteps.
My hunch is that the average army member is competent or better, incompetent people are filtered out but a lot of smart people tend towards other professions.
For about 5-10 years until the search algos get smart enough that they can beat a human.
Seriously how far off is that? We're not talking about the singularity though it would have to be pretty close to the turing test. Ask the search engine a question, not quite what you want? Ask to narrow it down, if you cleverly crossreference the results with the narrowing question it should be fairly feasible to do comparably as well as talking to a live person who knows how to search. I'm not sure I'd want to build, or invest in, a company built on the premise that they'll make up their investment before computers become better searchers than humans in a few years.