...and the reason they do it is because nobody really wants to go without refrigerators, air conditioning, TV, cars, etc.. Geo-engineering schemes are inherently untestable, yet certain starry-eyed people continue to insist that we should deliberately fiddle with the climate rather than radically reduce our use of things that depend on fossil fuels.
I don't know where these optimistic folks got the idea that the science relating to Geo-engineering is sound enough to implement. How bad would humanity suffer if we accidentally induced another ice age?
I just can't see a future in these organizations suing the pants off of anyone and everyone in sight. It doesn't appear to do anyone any good, not even the rights-holders benefit in the end since they just turn themselves into litigation businesses. If this isn't a reason for far-reaching copyright reform, I don't know what is.
Many people, especially non-technical people, think of the OS as the visual presentation of the GUI.
Exactly. Consider that an increasing amount of people's daily business is conducted through the browser. Nobody cares what's under the hood. Could be windows, linux, OSX, you name it - it's increasingly irrelevant. If you integrated media file handling I'd never run any other app than a browser on my netbook. This reduces the OS to what is should be - nuts and bolts. MS started the fiction that the OS IS the computer. OS's need to fade from view and do less, not more. Who really gives a shit what file system is used?
What MS lacks is a compelling reason for people to switch from XP and I don't think they're ready to dare cutting off all support to force a switch. They're victims of their own success.
I played with win7 for about a month, became irritated at the difficulties networking with existing XP machines and failed to find a "must have" feature compelling enough for me to switch.
I also smell a screw job coming - either DRM or some other anti-consumer scheme built in to the OS that's going to offer me zero benefit and make my life more difficult.
OS's are becoming less relevant as computing becomes more browser-centric. Who cares what's under the hood if Firefox runs? The only real reason I still run xp is for gaming.
France? The allies were worried the french forces in algeria would side with the nazis. The british sunk part of the french fleet to prevent the nazis from using it after the french waffled on whether or not to go with the allies. DeGaulle was a self important ass. The real heros in france were the individuals working for the resistance, not the political leadership. Eisenhower was scornful of the french for good reason. You did get the "secondary" part correct - for the rest of the allies except Great Britain, who lacked the manpower and industrial capability.
The Soviets are the certainly ones that broke the back of the nazis, but they were almost as bad as the nazis themselves. Joe Stalin was not a great guy and the allies knew it. Credit Churchill and Roosevelt for understanding the limits of what the western allies could do on their own. They bought off Stalin by agreeing at Yalta to allow the Soviets to control eastern europe up to Berlin and let him grind down the nazis while they prepared for overlord.
Although you may be correct in saying the Allies would not have been able to defeat the nazis without the soviets, the reality was not the "What if" scenario you depict. The more relevant "What if" scenario I would invite you to consider is what would have happened if the US had stayed out of Europe during WW2.
You forgot the bit about American military leadership preventing the Nazis then the Soviets from dominating Europe - a watch that lasted half a century, or preventing the tinpot dictators in Pyongyang from controlling all of Korea, the same in Vietnam... oh wait, never mind that last one.
The fuzzy headed always get it backward. The US, for all its flaws, is still the best thing going compared to the dictatorships controlling Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran or all the unelected governments in the middle east, or the thugs and strongmen controlling most African nations, or the South and Central American Narcocracies. Even do-nothing popgun armies of Europe (with the exception of Great Britain) can't hold a candle to the US in terms of actually DOING something. Remember what finally ended the war in Bosnia? Not Euro-diplomacy but good old American FA-18's bombing the shit out of the Serbs until they cried "uncle". Witness the failure of any NATO nation other than the US and Great Britain to actually *fight* the Taliban - those vermin aren't going away by themselves.
The list goes on but the Rest of the World doesn't give us much to work with.
I talked to the guy stringing it up on our street last spring but I couldn't get anyone at Verizon to tell me when it would be ready to go. Once they did start marketing, the prices were unreasonable. If they made it cheaper than Comcast everyone everywhere would be onboard. Instead they're busy trying to gouge - giving Comcast time to roll out Docsys 3.0. They had a narrow window of time to beat the pants off Comcast and they missed it. Of course Comcast might have dropped prices to actually *compete*, but price competition is the LAST item on the list of things american telcos are willing to do for market share.
I work in a health-related field where a lot of practitioners are focused more on the dollars than the patient's best interest. Unfortunately, this is human nature. The only thing you can really do is try to find the ones that aren't just trying to sell you stuff.
I think government mandated standards can be harmful in some cases. Practitioners must have the flexibility to treat as they see fit, since not everyone fits the same mold and it's not always clear what's going to work. I've seen instances where insurance companies (who dictate treatment simply by refusing to pay) require certain treatments be tried before others - and savvy doctors turn it into a factory business forcing patients through treatment protocols en-mass even when it's obvious that treatment won't work.
There is a lot of perpetuated mythology regarding treatment protocols - people do things simply because it's always been done that way. There are also legal ramifications for the doctors - if something is considered to be the standard of care, you can (and will, in today's litigious society) be sued for NOT doing a particular treatment. It's an extremely complex set of issues.
The mark of a good doctor is one who puts your best interest first and any system we devise needs to encourage that.
Isn't that contradictory? If you have a distributed-generation grid the idea is you don't have to transmit power a long way, yes?
I'd cover my roof in solar cells in a heartbeat if you could make money, or at least break even on it. One of the central problems is how to store power for off peak use. There have been lots of recent advances in batteries as well as capacitors. My personal favorite is flywheel technology, but regardless of how you go, it's all still a long way from being cheap enough.
Screw the utilities - those bastards would have us paying for coal generated electricity until we all choke to death on the smog. Coal may have it's place, but it's not the future.
The thing everyone apparently has overlooked is that a major byproduct of respiration is CO2. Since all animals utilize respiration in the production of energy, is anyone researching alternative methods of energy production to reduce or eliminate the amount of respiration in order to save the planet?
Here's the link for a freeware tethering app for just about all mobile os's including android. You install it on your pc while your phone is attached and it automatically sets itself up. Then you run the app on your phone and pc and you're ready to go. I've been using it for a few days without trouble and it beats the living hell out of tetherbot.
My recent experiences with am2 boards had all of them defaulting to 1.8v for ddr2 ram. This is fine for ram that conforms to the standard, unfortunately *my* ram was designed to run on 2.2v. Memtest didn't pick up anything even running the ram on 1.8v.
Most of the lockups I've had on newly built systems involved driver installation, particularly ide and bridge drivers. Also had problems with Nvidia software - the drivers are ok but the one that handles performance settings caused problems merely by installing it.
Diagnosing lockups - or worse, system slowdowns - is such a pain in the ass. My personal best problem originated with a bent contact wire on a ram slot.
If your lan isn't connected to the internet there's zero possibility of intrusion - although I've heard stories about people manually copying classified data from secure systems. (Blocking a deliberate intrusion by a person using the actual machine is another problem entirely) . Still, this is only logical if your lan is contains sensitive material and doesn't need to be on the 'net. It's not clear how they could "disconnect" an entire agency from the internet unless the agency's computer network is purpose-designed from the ground up to have that capability.
Warren Buffett threatened to sue Yahoo over the Microsoft merger fiasco. The only reason he didn't was because they gave him a seat on the board of directors. Lawsuits like that happen all the time.
Demonizing their actions is stupid. Shell is a for profit corporation and it's clear they are predicting cheap oil for the foreseeable future. What they are doing is both reasonable and predictable. By their own admission the alt-energy projects weren't financially feasible. Their own stockholders can and will sue if they keep dumping money into non-starter projects.
Stop expecting them to behave like philanthropists. The government can dump all the money it wants into economically questionable ventures - like ethanol fuel - but that doesn't mean it will ever make money or even work. The simple fact of the matter is that oil is too cheap. When companies like Shell can bank on profits from a proven alt-energy source you'll see an explosion of investment.
The key difference is the willingness to work well with others. In any organization you need cooperation or long term it just won't work. Coding strikes me as a task that's particularly vulnerable to long term maintenance issues if it isn't properly documented/commented.
You can blame management for putting up with difficult people, though perhaps they simply don't understand the depth and breadth of the problem. Sometimes all it takes is for someone to confront the person in question with a set of expectations - and be willing to pull the trigger if the standards aren't met.
What are you talking about? That is our fucking economy.
You aren't very bright, are you?
The world is what it is and it's entirely up to you to figure out how to deal with it, yet you continue crying foul. Every loser I ever met has had really great excuses.
Perhaps an economy where merely having a job, any job is valued as being preferable to starvation and homelessness? I can't overvalue the importance of taking responsibility for yourself and not finding excuses.
There's an entire branch of Psychology called cognitive therapy in which the goal is, basically, to teach the patient to stop bullshitting himself. Stop allowing yourself to be defeated by perceived obstacles and start looking for ways to achieve your goals. And stop whining because it's fucking annoying.
I think the web contributes. You can find websites with ready-made "communities" for any absurd group. Facebook, Twitter and the like feed on the inherent ego-centrism & narcissism of the age group - as if people really CARE what you're doing minute to minute. It all fosters a false sense of importance and belonging that just doesn't exist in the real world. On the other hand, shifting the blame to anyone but yourself is another issue. Sure, your parents told you you were special, but you believed it.
We do kids a disservice by constantly telling them how wonderful they are. Fact is, people build a real sense of self-worth by working hard to overcome challenges, not by being given prizes.
They had all the resources they needed to produce perfectly compliant browsers, so one must inevitably conclude that the incompatibilities were deliberate. If your average clueless Joe has trouble with anything but the bundled IE, there's big incentive not to change, right? It's not done 'til Firefox won't run!
It's quite ironic that MS's shenanigans are coming back to haunt them.
Your counterpoint about good teachers vs parental involvement is always cited whenever the topic of education is raised, but it's a red herring. Having your parents there to motivate you for your entire life is a far better predictor of lifetime academic achievement than waiting around for a great teacher. Teachers are not, nor should they ever be considered an adequate replacement for parental involvement. Only parents have the motivation and tenure over a person's entire life to make a difference in the face of bad teachers in a poor school system.
In fact, if you can explain how we can reliably train teachers to inspire for the student's entire life, the entire world would like to hear it. I don't think you can train someone to inspire.
Slashdot Mirror
You aren't kidding.
Contrast that with how capitalism should work - people who are most productive accumulate resources that expands their influence.
Don't you mean "expands their productivity"? Expanding influence is what we have now.
...and the reason they do it is because nobody really wants to go without refrigerators, air conditioning, TV, cars, etc.. Geo-engineering schemes are inherently untestable, yet certain starry-eyed people continue to insist that we should deliberately fiddle with the climate rather than radically reduce our use of things that depend on fossil fuels.
I don't know where these optimistic folks got the idea that the science relating to Geo-engineering is sound enough to implement. How bad would humanity suffer if we accidentally induced another ice age?
I just can't see a future in these organizations suing the pants off of anyone and everyone in sight. It doesn't appear to do anyone any good, not even the rights-holders benefit in the end since they just turn themselves into litigation businesses. If this isn't a reason for far-reaching copyright reform, I don't know what is.
Because it doesn't require a rooted phone.
Many people, especially non-technical people, think of the OS as the visual presentation of the GUI.
Exactly. Consider that an increasing amount of people's daily business is conducted through the browser. Nobody cares what's under the hood. Could be windows, linux, OSX, you name it - it's increasingly irrelevant. If you integrated media file handling I'd never run any other app than a browser on my netbook. This reduces the OS to what is should be - nuts and bolts. MS started the fiction that the OS IS the computer. OS's need to fade from view and do less, not more. Who really gives a shit what file system is used?
What MS lacks is a compelling reason for people to switch from XP and I don't think they're ready to dare cutting off all support to force a switch. They're victims of their own success.
I played with win7 for about a month, became irritated at the difficulties networking with existing XP machines and failed to find a "must have" feature compelling enough for me to switch.
I also smell a screw job coming - either DRM or some other anti-consumer scheme built in to the OS that's going to offer me zero benefit and make my life more difficult.
OS's are becoming less relevant as computing becomes more browser-centric. Who cares what's under the hood if Firefox runs? The only real reason I still run xp is for gaming.
Forgive me for failing to say "western" europe.
France? The allies were worried the french forces in algeria would side with the nazis. The british sunk part of the french fleet to prevent the nazis from using it after the french waffled on whether or not to go with the allies. DeGaulle was a self important ass. The real heros in france were the individuals working for the resistance, not the political leadership. Eisenhower was scornful of the french for good reason. You did get the "secondary" part correct - for the rest of the allies except Great Britain, who lacked the manpower and industrial capability.
The Soviets are the certainly ones that broke the back of the nazis, but they were almost as bad as the nazis themselves. Joe Stalin was not a great guy and the allies knew it. Credit Churchill and Roosevelt for understanding the limits of what the western allies could do on their own. They bought off Stalin by agreeing at Yalta to allow the Soviets to control eastern europe up to Berlin and let him grind down the nazis while they prepared for overlord.
Although you may be correct in saying the Allies would not have been able to defeat the nazis without the soviets, the reality was not the "What if" scenario you depict. The more relevant "What if" scenario I would invite you to consider is what would have happened if the US had stayed out of Europe during WW2.
You forgot the bit about American military leadership preventing the Nazis then the Soviets from dominating Europe - a watch that lasted half a century, or preventing the tinpot dictators in Pyongyang from controlling all of Korea, the same in Vietnam... oh wait, never mind that last one.
The fuzzy headed always get it backward. The US, for all its flaws, is still the best thing going compared to the dictatorships controlling Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran or all the unelected governments in the middle east, or the thugs and strongmen controlling most African nations, or the South and Central American Narcocracies. Even do-nothing popgun armies of Europe (with the exception of Great Britain) can't hold a candle to the US in terms of actually DOING something. Remember what finally ended the war in Bosnia? Not Euro-diplomacy but good old American FA-18's bombing the shit out of the Serbs until they cried "uncle". Witness the failure of any NATO nation other than the US and Great Britain to actually *fight* the Taliban - those vermin aren't going away by themselves.
The list goes on but the Rest of the World doesn't give us much to work with.
I talked to the guy stringing it up on our street last spring but I couldn't get anyone at Verizon to tell me when it would be ready to go. Once they did start marketing, the prices were unreasonable. If they made it cheaper than Comcast everyone everywhere would be onboard. Instead they're busy trying to gouge - giving Comcast time to roll out Docsys 3.0. They had a narrow window of time to beat the pants off Comcast and they missed it. Of course Comcast might have dropped prices to actually *compete*, but price competition is the LAST item on the list of things american telcos are willing to do for market share.
I work in a health-related field where a lot of practitioners are focused more on the dollars than the patient's best interest. Unfortunately, this is human nature. The only thing you can really do is try to find the ones that aren't just trying to sell you stuff.
I think government mandated standards can be harmful in some cases. Practitioners must have the flexibility to treat as they see fit, since not everyone fits the same mold and it's not always clear what's going to work. I've seen instances where insurance companies (who dictate treatment simply by refusing to pay) require certain treatments be tried before others - and savvy doctors turn it into a factory business forcing patients through treatment protocols en-mass even when it's obvious that treatment won't work.
There is a lot of perpetuated mythology regarding treatment protocols - people do things simply because it's always been done that way. There are also legal ramifications for the doctors - if something is considered to be the standard of care, you can (and will, in today's litigious society) be sued for NOT doing a particular treatment. It's an extremely complex set of issues.
The mark of a good doctor is one who puts your best interest first and any system we devise needs to encourage that.
Isn't that contradictory? If you have a distributed-generation grid the idea is you don't have to transmit power a long way, yes?
I'd cover my roof in solar cells in a heartbeat if you could make money, or at least break even on it. One of the central problems is how to store power for off peak use. There have been lots of recent advances in batteries as well as capacitors. My personal favorite is flywheel technology, but regardless of how you go, it's all still a long way from being cheap enough.
Screw the utilities - those bastards would have us paying for coal generated electricity until we all choke to death on the smog. Coal may have it's place, but it's not the future.
The thing everyone apparently has overlooked is that a major byproduct of respiration is CO2. Since all animals utilize respiration in the production of energy, is anyone researching alternative methods of energy production to reduce or eliminate the amount of respiration in order to save the planet?
Here's the link for a freeware tethering app for just about all mobile os's including android. You install it on your pc while your phone is attached and it automatically sets itself up. Then you run the app on your phone and pc and you're ready to go. I've been using it for a few days without trouble and it beats the living hell out of tetherbot.
http://www.junefabrics.com/android/index.php
Tethering has turned into a must have for me and it's baffling why the telcos aren't exploiting this market.
My recent experiences with am2 boards had all of them defaulting to 1.8v for ddr2 ram. This is fine for ram that conforms to the standard, unfortunately *my* ram was designed to run on 2.2v. Memtest didn't pick up anything even running the ram on 1.8v.
Most of the lockups I've had on newly built systems involved driver installation, particularly ide and bridge drivers. Also had problems with Nvidia software - the drivers are ok but the one that handles performance settings caused problems merely by installing it.
Diagnosing lockups - or worse, system slowdowns - is such a pain in the ass. My personal best problem originated with a bent contact wire on a ram slot.
If your lan isn't connected to the internet there's zero possibility of intrusion - although I've heard stories about people manually copying classified data from secure systems. (Blocking a deliberate intrusion by a person using the actual machine is another problem entirely) . Still, this is only logical if your lan is contains sensitive material and doesn't need to be on the 'net. It's not clear how they could "disconnect" an entire agency from the internet unless the agency's computer network is purpose-designed from the ground up to have that capability.
Warren Buffett threatened to sue Yahoo over the Microsoft merger fiasco. The only reason he didn't was because they gave him a seat on the board of directors. Lawsuits like that happen all the time.
Demonizing their actions is stupid. Shell is a for profit corporation and it's clear they are predicting cheap oil for the foreseeable future. What they are doing is both reasonable and predictable. By their own admission the alt-energy projects weren't financially feasible. Their own stockholders can and will sue if they keep dumping money into non-starter projects.
Stop expecting them to behave like philanthropists. The government can dump all the money it wants into economically questionable ventures - like ethanol fuel - but that doesn't mean it will ever make money or even work. The simple fact of the matter is that oil is too cheap. When companies like Shell can bank on profits from a proven alt-energy source you'll see an explosion of investment.
The key difference is the willingness to work well with others. In any organization you need cooperation or long term it just won't work. Coding strikes me as a task that's particularly vulnerable to long term maintenance issues if it isn't properly documented/commented.
You can blame management for putting up with difficult people, though perhaps they simply don't understand the depth and breadth of the problem. Sometimes all it takes is for someone to confront the person in question with a set of expectations - and be willing to pull the trigger if the standards aren't met.
What are you talking about? That is our fucking economy.
You aren't very bright, are you?
The world is what it is and it's entirely up to you to figure out how to deal with it, yet you continue crying foul. Every loser I ever met has had really great excuses.
Corporate control that bypasses government via international treaty. Welcome to the new world order.
Perhaps an economy where merely having a job, any job is valued as being preferable to starvation and homelessness? I can't overvalue the importance of taking responsibility for yourself and not finding excuses.
There's an entire branch of Psychology called cognitive therapy in which the goal is, basically, to teach the patient to stop bullshitting himself. Stop allowing yourself to be defeated by perceived obstacles and start looking for ways to achieve your goals. And stop whining because it's fucking annoying.
I think the web contributes. You can find websites with ready-made "communities" for any absurd group. Facebook, Twitter and the like feed on the inherent ego-centrism & narcissism of the age group - as if people really CARE what you're doing minute to minute. It all fosters a false sense of importance and belonging that just doesn't exist in the real world. On the other hand, shifting the blame to anyone but yourself is another issue. Sure, your parents told you you were special, but you believed it.
We do kids a disservice by constantly telling them how wonderful they are. Fact is, people build a real sense of self-worth by working hard to overcome challenges, not by being given prizes.
That's exactly why he's being prosecuted. The corporation's constitutional right to sell expensive crap is being trampled!
They had all the resources they needed to produce perfectly compliant browsers, so one must inevitably conclude that the incompatibilities were deliberate. If your average clueless Joe has trouble with anything but the bundled IE, there's big incentive not to change, right? It's not done 'til Firefox won't run!
It's quite ironic that MS's shenanigans are coming back to haunt them.
Your counterpoint about good teachers vs parental involvement is always cited whenever the topic of education is raised, but it's a red herring. Having your parents there to motivate you for your entire life is a far better predictor of lifetime academic achievement than waiting around for a great teacher. Teachers are not, nor should they ever be considered an adequate replacement for parental involvement. Only parents have the motivation and tenure over a person's entire life to make a difference in the face of bad teachers in a poor school system.
In fact, if you can explain how we can reliably train teachers to inspire for the student's entire life, the entire world would like to hear it. I don't think you can train someone to inspire.