Radioactivity was released, 90 millions bequerel to be exact. Have not found the technical description of how it happened, but it is not difficult to imagine that hot helium would evacuate the circuit, air would rush in, be heated by the core, and get out again carrying radioactivity.
PBR are built without containment as a safety measure, so that heat can be removed and a core meltdown cannot occur. This makes this kind of accident easier, though.
No, the German Pebble Bed Reactor worked perfectly for 21 years.
Except for the last week or so, when a pebble got stuck in the recycling system and the operators had to unclog the system manually, causing primary-circuit helium to be released in the atmosphere. One accident every 21 years does not cut it.
Also, there are significant issues with using helium as a primary circuit fluid. When water was used, you were pumping a liquid; for helium, you need a gas compressor, which is a significantly less efficient unit. Also, efficiency considerations practically dictate to use an axial compressor, which is the kind most sensitive to compressor surge. A surge in a large compressor can melt its casing in seconds. And guess what, the conditions in which surge occurs in compressors are those closest to high efficiency, where the compressor is supposed to operate.
In addition, when water from the secondary circuit leaks into the primary circuit's helium, there are risks of reaction between water and graphite pebbles if the temperature is too high (I suppose you can figure out what happens). In Germany, they were lucky they were running at about 500 degrees when that happened in 1978, but it took a year to dry the core.
I don't see how believing that "a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree" is any saner than the Xenu story.
The dangerous part about Scientology is that they are still in the early stages of religion, and are not yet hypocrites and live by the letter of their religion. A fundie who lived by the Bible would rape, kill, and enslave: reproachable behaviours in any civilised society, yet they are the Word of God®.
I keep having this crazy idea that I should run for president in '12. [...] My agenda: [2x constitutional amendments, 2x electoral laws]
You are running for the wrong office. President is executive power, i.e. they do not make laws, they enforce them. You want to make new laws. You should run for Congress.
It would be the "Kick the Politicians Out of Washington" campaign. I keep wondering if enough people are fed up enough with the establishment that a movement to kick them all out and replace them with "normal" people would actually work.
Y'know, I also loathe most of my country's politicians, but I think "normal" people + power => Corrupt politician. It takes enormous willpower to sit on power and not abuse it, and if you never actually did that you should not assume you would resist the temptation. It's a bit like heroine I suppose.
I have seen politicians that I considered honest (and who likely were, in their younger years) turning into sell-outs, schemers, even downright criminals: Veltroni, Violante, and last of the bunch Vendola. I really think the problem is in the system: corruption is a matter of unchecked power. I am not really sure what would be the best cure for it, possibly stronger lawmaker/executive separation; say, all by-laws are made in a sort of "Parliament for Cities" in the country capital, but enforced locally by the mayor. Bah, pipe dreams.
The only time when we did not have a prevalence of corrupt politicians was just after the war, when all politicians were from parties banned under Fascism, who had entered politics for strong personal beliefs, not to start a career. I suppose you just have to make sure that being a politician is guaranteed to be a career killer even in a democracy then.
I did not say all was "fine and dandy", I simply pointed out how harsh criticism is aimed at Chávez while worse offenders are left alone only because they either have no oil or they do not challenge the US.
how, exactly, does a TV station collaborate with a military coup?
By doctoring, spinning, and misreporting information. In particular, TV stations:
Showed a picture of Chávez supporters with a gun, claiming they were shooting at an opposition rally; they weren't, they were answering fire coming from the road below the bridge (that's why they are all seeking cover in the picture); besides, the road was devoid of people.
Reported that Chávez had resigned, whereas he had not;
Generally relayed the military junta's propaganda in Pravda style.
There is a nice documentary about that, "The revolution will not be televised". It's not a product of the Venezuelan government, it was made by Irish journalists on site at the time of the events. In fact, the Venezuelan attempted coup was one in which TV stations played a particularly prominent role.
Please note my use of the present tense, and yours of the past tense. It used to be that America was the best country to relocate to. It's not that anymore.
[Multiculturalism is what] the rest of the world will never be able to match us on.
What I find difficult to match is your parochialism. At my workplace we have had Indians (lots of them), a half-Pole, a Chinese guy, we came once close to hiring an Iranian, we should soon get a Korean, we collaborate with a Kosovan from neighbouring division, and by the way I am an immigrant myself. This is East Germany, the part with least immigrants. In the West there are entire communities of Turks, Italians, and Vietnamese. Today I was at an event where I could count at least the following nationalities: Italian, Polish, Serbian, Montenegrin, Chinese, Indian, plus other people I did not know but who did not look ethnic Germans. And then there are people who could be ethnic Germans but who are not, like me.
Other thing: one of the five major German parties is headed by Cem Özdemir, a Muslim who did not even have citizenship 20 years ago.
Point being: America is still branded as The multicultural nation, but it is just one of many, and not necessarily the best to live in for immigrants anymore.
And yet, amazingly enough, Einstein decided to come here. He even wrote a letter to FDR encouraging him to undertake the development of a weapon of mass destruction.
Whose potential he did not know, that he later opposed, to which he did not contribute, and then there was that pesky issue of being at war with Nazi Germany that could have developed that weapon first, which changed perspectives a bit. But hey, don't let the fact that Einstein was a pacifist and a socialist get in the way of your selective quoting.
but when the chips are down you have no problems begging us to come and save your sorry ass.
When Churchill asked you to enter WW2, you stayed back because you did not want to enter. It took Japan to roundhouse-kick your ass at Pearl Harbor and Hitler's declaration of war on the US to get you into the war. Also, the US did not really do that much: the Soviets did most of the work against Germany, you only fought against 14- and 40-year-old that Hitler had placed on the Atlantic Wall. So learn some humility and stop posing as the world's saviour.
America wasn't an interventionist power until the rest of the free world got clobbered twice in the span of twenty years by aggressive non-free countries.
Seriously, you need to lay off the neo-con Kool-aid and read up some history. The US stole half of Mexico, conquered the kingdom of Hawai'i, invaded the Philippines, Cuba, made Latin America into series of satellites, and I have not yet started with the whole colonisation-of-the-West thing yet.
I seem also to read in that twice word of yours that WW1 was a war with an "evil" side. WW1 was a usual old-style war among European powers, and who won mattered very little for the state of civil rights in Europe. The US waited to see who was going to win before jumping on the winner's bandwagon.
Ireland is part of the British Isles but I don't hear anybody demanding that the British call themselves "UK'ians".
Curious indeed, "British Isles" actually is a controversial term rooted in colonialism, because Ireland is not British. "British" refers, er, to "[Great] Britain". In fact I recall distinctly a UK newspaper's article criticizing
No. I've used it, I've worked with it, I've cleaned up after it, and I'd rather date John McCain.
I did not say it was pleasurable, I said it was possible. My point being, I'd rather go for a solution that makes removing data a difficult administrative operation, rather than one that makes it easy for any user; for it is bound to happen, sooner or later, that Joe Schmo, having committed an entire DVD by mistake, mistypes the wrong revision number and obliterates the current HEAD. Why would I risk that?
That's the most propagandistic summary I have seen in a while. Chávez has been democratically elected and Venezuela has a freer press than Colombia, Mexico, Pakistan and other US allies, including puppet governments like Iraq and Afghanistan where the US could simply tell the leaders to enact laws and impose freedom of the press by decree. Not only that, TV stations actively collaborated with a coup d'état against Chávez, and instead of rounding up the criminals and sending them to jail or to the firing squad, he left them in place, and waited for the licence of one station to expire.
I do not agree with this law in principle, but this is not any different than what we have over here in Germany; for instance, Fallout 3 was heavily censored (no blood in Fallout 3. Seriously.), the other day I saw Apocalypto on TV and have seen almost no gore. I suppose I will torrent down the original version at some later time to see what the fuss was about.
What worries me is that I am seeing a replay of 2003 here: someone is whipping up unjustified hate for a foreign leader and disproportionally criticising every move of his; only, this time it's not a dictator (no matter what some elitist Venezuelan right-wing moochers who never worked in their lives may say), it is a man who won elections legitimately multiple times; he called for a referendum to amend the constitution, lost, and respected the vote and went on to another referendum to push his reforms through, he did not simply adjust the numbers or print trick ballots like Jeb Bush did in 2000.
I do not think Chávez is the second coming of Christ (he is not diplomatically savvy, not fighting corruption enough, and shows like Aló presidente are really cheesy), but I see you Americans going into Saddam-Hussein mode again. I am fed up with you starting wars and making life miserable for everybody else, and so is the rest of the globe. Please don't waste the PR capital you made by electing a guy with a brain for a change.
Uh, and guess what: Venezuela has oil. Maybe that has something to do with all that focus? Try putting your military money into energy research and maybe that will have a better payoff. And get off my lawn.
Because people go to the US mostly for the "branding" that was built over the last century: however, for what I have seen, conditions and opportunities are better elsewhere. One of the latest strips of PhD comics poked fun at graduate stipends being at about $18k/y. In Norway (got my PhD there) you get about 50, overall taxes at about 25%. This is bad for you because you are already losing the best candidates to Europe (except for excellence universities like Ivy league), and there are no US candidates to take their place. The immigration procedures at various airports never stroke me as particularly friendly, either.
Last but not least: a lot of research is defence-funded. Some do not have problems with that, but Einstein would not have accepted that. Guess where the next Einstein will look for a position?
It's American, not USian.
I'll tell you a secret: America goes from Canada to Argentina. The US are not America, whatever your language's customs may be. I was specifically restricting my focus to the US using an unusual word to avoid implying that non-US Americans do not already have to learn language at school (Canadian English speakers must learn French, all others have to learn English).
[Subversion's] designers absolute refusal to support deleting contents from the repository [is bad]
That is one great feature of Subversion: absolutely no way to screw up stuff that was committed. Revision control is about keeping track of stuff, any model that allows a user to remove information from a repository is a disaster quietly waiting to happen; sorry you did not understand that.
If you absolutely need to remove something from a SVN repository, you can do that with svndumpfilter, meaning you have to ask the repository's administrator. That's a good safeguard against accidental deletions.
Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Che and Castro all had former "friends" who happened to fall out of grace removed from pictures in their times.
[citationneeded]. We agree on Stalin, but all the others did not use damnatio memoriæ. In particular, Che Guevara was never head of any country, so he could not have done it even if he had wanted it. Counterexamples welcome.
I think you are projecting things a bit too fast, but yes—China is the next superpower, unless they screw up something bad time. They have an enormous population and a very well organised state, all things considered. I would say 50 years before the US become a has-been, like the UK and France. I would guess what will crack the US will ultimately be its disproportionate defence spending (where did I see this movie already?) and too much focus on unproductive sectors like pure finance. Who knows, maybe some states rich in resources (Texas? Alaska?) will try to secede at that point.
Among the most worrying signals is that research papers I read from the US are most often authored by people with foreign names; not just surnames, but first names as well, indicating they are likely immigrants, not hyphenated Americans. These people may leave as fast as they came, when they realise employment conditions in Scandinavia are much better e.g. for graduate students.
Cheer up, 50 years ago civil rights in the US were comparable to those in China today. There's a good chance China will improve its record in the next years, maybe they'll get their own Gandhi, Rudi Dutschke or Nelson Mandela. Make sure your kids learn Mandarin though, you USians are probably not used to the world expecting you to speak a language other than English.
Government hasn't even been able to completely solve hunger in individual developed nations. What makes you think it could do so on a global scale?
Because it would suddenly become the problem of a government actually able to solve it, for example. Of course it would need still the political will to do it, but at least it would have both motivation and means.
The story is over 10 years old, and I could not find any follow-up that indicated prosecution (yes I can read Italian). Anyway, as far as I know, one is not required to make his car a safe place for thieves; as long as detention of those knives was not illegal, the guy should not have had any trouble. You cannot be held responsible if someone breaks into your property and gets hurt; if you had invited him in, then that would be something.
Also, this man could simply have shut up: a car thief would probably never have reported the incident (ridiculous lawsuits are uncommon it Italy. No we don't have a sane system, it's insane in other ways). This looks like a tall story someone made up to scare off thieves.
Typically, you get most of your performance gains by rewriting 5% or less of the software in assembly [Citation needed...:-)]
<ref>Donald Knuth, in "Structured Programming with Goto Statements". Computing Surveys 6:4 (December 1974), p. 267: "Experience has shown [...] that most of the running time in non-IO-bound programs is concentrated in about 3% of the source text".</ref>
There is a reason why really old systems around have their code written even in Cobol, Fortran or Pascal. Languages for which you cannot find a decent programmer any more, and that companies are stuck with.
Corrected that for you. And frankly, I do not know enough about Cobol, but you must have never seen Fortran real-life code.
Editor's note: InfoWorld tried to interview Richard Stallman, who runs the Free Software Foundation that created and manages the GPL, on this issue, but he demanded control of what we published, so we declined.
Translation for you:
We wanted to ask Stallman some trick question, put a spin on it and make him look stupid. However he figured us out and asked to see the final article before approving it. So we are inserting this smudgy remark that makes him look like a control freak.
Misrepresenting other people's view is not part of your freedoms.
G++ was started as a proprietary fork of GCC, and could be liberated because of the GPL. Qt has grown and flourished under the GPL for years, enabling Trolltech to give us a great product for free and make serious money. KDE is mostly GPL too, so is MPlayer and almost two-thirds of projects on Sourceforge. And there is that Linux thingy, that happens to overshadow any *BSD, and has massive support from industry partners.
[The GPL] doesn't protect code from suddently [sic] becoming non-free because 1) corporations can't [probably meant "can"] do that anyway
Really? There is a nice website to make sure they do play by the rules. It seems to be working.
companies that do use non-GPL code tend to give back their improvements anyway
You either live in a fantasy world or you need to give me the name of your company so I can send them my CV. Are you serious? Have you got any idea of how many PHB's would freak out if you sent out company IP without being obliged to do that? At the very least, there is a small hill of paperwork to fill in; if you are on bad terms with some higher-up, it might even be used as an excuse for firing you. It is perfectly possible that a boss with programming experience understands that there is no point in maintaining a separate proprietary fork of a BSD project to fix a few bugs, but there is no way in hell he's going to allow you to contribute anything that required a significant amount of company time and effort.
The sad truth is, the actual value of the GPL is a lot less than everybody thinks.
The sad (for BSD) truth is another: without Stallman and the GPL there would be no Linux, no KDE, no Gnome, no GCC, no Free Software. Corporations are there to make money, not to gather "good karma": you either force them at legal gunpoint, or they will run away with the loot. And if they didn't, their shareholders could sue them for that.
Now, I need a proof of good faith, beelsebob. What BSD project are you working on?
I'm asking because, in my time as a professional programmer, I remember very well that finding a BSD application was a treasure trove: you could steal all the code and pretend to have done the work yourself.
So, sorry for the suspicion if you actually work on BSD projects, but I have had it with (fake) BSD fanboys who want other people to write BSD code so they can freeload on.
but if they paid $1,000,000 for it, chances are they're not going to [give it to others].
I am curious about your pattern of thinking. Why in the world would they not do that, since they know they legally can? People do that all the time with proprietary software, in which case they risk jail if caught.
The key is the nucleogenesis. Fluorine is orders of magnitude rarer than oxygen, and chlorine too. Silicon and Sulphur may be better candidates to substitute carbon and oxygen.
Let's write a very inflammatory post. Suppose, as you did, that this deformity is a perfect predictor of sociopaths, and is a cause (not a consequence) of their behaviour; that is, suppose we discover that sociopaths are born. Suppose also that we can precisely determine whether a foetus has this deformity.
What if governments mandate abortion of sociopathic foetuses? I am not really sure about the issue. On one hand, if a sociopath is born, we are pretty sure they are going to make people suffer or outright kill them. On the other hand we are removing people based on what they are, not what they have done.
The disturbing thing is that such a discovery would finally give a rational basis for eugenics: instead of silly things like "being aryan" or "son of a rich family, therefore of the better part of society", we would actually have a rational criterion to trash new members of society.
I am not sure at all here. Where do we draw the line? I almost wish they don't find this out, the moral questions are harder than the science.
Slashdot Mirror
Radioactivity was released, 90 millions bequerel to be exact. Have not found the technical description of how it happened, but it is not difficult to imagine that hot helium would evacuate the circuit, air would rush in, be heated by the core, and get out again carrying radioactivity.
PBR are built without containment as a safety measure, so that heat can be removed and a core meltdown cannot occur. This makes this kind of accident easier, though.
Except for the last week or so, when a pebble got stuck in the recycling system and the operators had to unclog the system manually, causing primary-circuit helium to be released in the atmosphere. One accident every 21 years does not cut it.
Also, there are significant issues with using helium as a primary circuit fluid. When water was used, you were pumping a liquid; for helium, you need a gas compressor, which is a significantly less efficient unit. Also, efficiency considerations practically dictate to use an axial compressor, which is the kind most sensitive to compressor surge. A surge in a large compressor can melt its casing in seconds. And guess what, the conditions in which surge occurs in compressors are those closest to high efficiency, where the compressor is supposed to operate.
In addition, when water from the secondary circuit leaks into the primary circuit's helium, there are risks of reaction between water and graphite pebbles if the temperature is too high (I suppose you can figure out what happens). In Germany, they were lucky they were running at about 500 degrees when that happened in 1978, but it took a year to dry the core.
It is a religion. That's what is evil about it.
I don't see how believing that "a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree" is any saner than the Xenu story.
The dangerous part about Scientology is that they are still in the early stages of religion, and are not yet hypocrites and live by the letter of their religion. A fundie who lived by the Bible would rape, kill, and enslave: reproachable behaviours in any civilised society, yet they are the Word of God®.
The Bill Gates as Borg icon was never more appropriate.
You are running for the wrong office. President is executive power, i.e. they do not make laws, they enforce them. You want to make new laws. You should run for Congress.
Y'know, I also loathe most of my country's politicians, but I think "normal" people + power => Corrupt politician. It takes enormous willpower to sit on power and not abuse it, and if you never actually did that you should not assume you would resist the temptation. It's a bit like heroine I suppose.
I have seen politicians that I considered honest (and who likely were, in their younger years) turning into sell-outs, schemers, even downright criminals: Veltroni, Violante, and last of the bunch Vendola. I really think the problem is in the system: corruption is a matter of unchecked power. I am not really sure what would be the best cure for it, possibly stronger lawmaker/executive separation; say, all by-laws are made in a sort of "Parliament for Cities" in the country capital, but enforced locally by the mayor. Bah, pipe dreams.
The only time when we did not have a prevalence of corrupt politicians was just after the war, when all politicians were from parties banned under Fascism, who had entered politics for strong personal beliefs, not to start a career. I suppose you just have to make sure that being a politician is guaranteed to be a career killer even in a democracy then.
I did not say all was "fine and dandy", I simply pointed out how harsh criticism is aimed at Chávez while worse offenders are left alone only because they either have no oil or they do not challenge the US.
By doctoring, spinning, and misreporting information. In particular, TV stations:
There is a nice documentary about that, "The revolution will not be televised". It's not a product of the Venezuelan government, it was made by Irish journalists on site at the time of the events. In fact, the Venezuelan attempted coup was one in which TV stations played a particularly prominent role.
Please note my use of the present tense, and yours of the past tense. It used to be that America was the best country to relocate to. It's not that anymore.
What I find difficult to match is your parochialism. At my workplace we have had Indians (lots of them), a half-Pole, a Chinese guy, we came once close to hiring an Iranian, we should soon get a Korean, we collaborate with a Kosovan from neighbouring division, and by the way I am an immigrant myself. This is East Germany, the part with least immigrants. In the West there are entire communities of Turks, Italians, and Vietnamese. Today I was at an event where I could count at least the following nationalities: Italian, Polish, Serbian, Montenegrin, Chinese, Indian, plus other people I did not know but who did not look ethnic Germans. And then there are people who could be ethnic Germans but who are not, like me.
Other thing: one of the five major German parties is headed by Cem Özdemir, a Muslim who did not even have citizenship 20 years ago.
Point being: America is still branded as The multicultural nation, but it is just one of many, and not necessarily the best to live in for immigrants anymore.
Whose potential he did not know, that he later opposed, to which he did not contribute, and then there was that pesky issue of being at war with Nazi Germany that could have developed that weapon first, which changed perspectives a bit. But hey, don't let the fact that Einstein was a pacifist and a socialist get in the way of your selective quoting.
When Churchill asked you to enter WW2, you stayed back because you did not want to enter. It took Japan to roundhouse-kick your ass at Pearl Harbor and Hitler's declaration of war on the US to get you into the war. Also, the US did not really do that much: the Soviets did most of the work against Germany, you only fought against 14- and 40-year-old that Hitler had placed on the Atlantic Wall. So learn some humility and stop posing as the world's saviour.
Seriously, you need to lay off the neo-con Kool-aid and read up some history. The US stole half of Mexico, conquered the kingdom of Hawai'i, invaded the Philippines, Cuba, made Latin America into series of satellites, and I have not yet started with the whole colonisation-of-the-West thing yet.
I seem also to read in that twice word of yours that WW1 was a war with an "evil" side. WW1 was a usual old-style war among European powers, and who won mattered very little for the state of civil rights in Europe. The US waited to see who was going to win before jumping on the winner's bandwagon.
Curious indeed, "British Isles" actually is a controversial term rooted in colonialism, because Ireland is not British. "British" refers, er, to "[Great] Britain". In fact I recall distinctly a UK newspaper's article criticizing
I did not say it was pleasurable, I said it was possible. My point being, I'd rather go for a solution that makes removing data a difficult administrative operation, rather than one that makes it easy for any user; for it is bound to happen, sooner or later, that Joe Schmo, having committed an entire DVD by mistake, mistypes the wrong revision number and obliterates the current HEAD. Why would I risk that?
That's the most propagandistic summary I have seen in a while. Chávez has been democratically elected and Venezuela has a freer press than Colombia, Mexico, Pakistan and other US allies, including puppet governments like Iraq and Afghanistan where the US could simply tell the leaders to enact laws and impose freedom of the press by decree. Not only that, TV stations actively collaborated with a coup d'état against Chávez, and instead of rounding up the criminals and sending them to jail or to the firing squad, he left them in place, and waited for the licence of one station to expire.
I do not agree with this law in principle, but this is not any different than what we have over here in Germany; for instance, Fallout 3 was heavily censored (no blood in Fallout 3. Seriously.), the other day I saw Apocalypto on TV and have seen almost no gore. I suppose I will torrent down the original version at some later time to see what the fuss was about.
What worries me is that I am seeing a replay of 2003 here: someone is whipping up unjustified hate for a foreign leader and disproportionally criticising every move of his; only, this time it's not a dictator (no matter what some elitist Venezuelan right-wing moochers who never worked in their lives may say), it is a man who won elections legitimately multiple times; he called for a referendum to amend the constitution, lost, and respected the vote and went on to another referendum to push his reforms through, he did not simply adjust the numbers or print trick ballots like Jeb Bush did in 2000.
I do not think Chávez is the second coming of Christ (he is not diplomatically savvy, not fighting corruption enough, and shows like Aló presidente are really cheesy), but I see you Americans going into Saddam-Hussein mode again. I am fed up with you starting wars and making life miserable for everybody else, and so is the rest of the globe. Please don't waste the PR capital you made by electing a guy with a brain for a change.
Uh, and guess what: Venezuela has oil. Maybe that has something to do with all that focus? Try putting your military money into energy research and maybe that will have a better payoff. And get off my lawn.
Because people go to the US mostly for the "branding" that was built over the last century: however, for what I have seen, conditions and opportunities are better elsewhere. One of the latest strips of PhD comics poked fun at graduate stipends being at about $18k/y. In Norway (got my PhD there) you get about 50, overall taxes at about 25%. This is bad for you because you are already losing the best candidates to Europe (except for excellence universities like Ivy league), and there are no US candidates to take their place. The immigration procedures at various airports never stroke me as particularly friendly, either.
Last but not least: a lot of research is defence-funded. Some do not have problems with that, but Einstein would not have accepted that. Guess where the next Einstein will look for a position?
I'll tell you a secret: America goes from Canada to Argentina. The US are not America, whatever your language's customs may be. I was specifically restricting my focus to the US using an unusual word to avoid implying that non-US Americans do not already have to learn language at school (Canadian English speakers must learn French, all others have to learn English).
SINTEF is not a think tank, it is a major applied-research institution. It is similar (with due proportions) to the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany.
That is one great feature of Subversion: absolutely no way to screw up stuff that was committed. Revision control is about keeping track of stuff, any model that allows a user to remove information from a repository is a disaster quietly waiting to happen; sorry you did not understand that.
If you absolutely need to remove something from a SVN repository, you can do that with svndumpfilter, meaning you have to ask the repository's administrator. That's a good safeguard against accidental deletions.
For "cleaner code" you just need svn delete.
[citationneeded]. We agree on Stalin, but all the others did not use damnatio memoriæ. In particular, Che Guevara was never head of any country, so he could not have done it even if he had wanted it. Counterexamples welcome.
I think you are projecting things a bit too fast, but yes—China is the next superpower, unless they screw up something bad time. They have an enormous population and a very well organised state, all things considered. I would say 50 years before the US become a has-been, like the UK and France. I would guess what will crack the US will ultimately be its disproportionate defence spending (where did I see this movie already?) and too much focus on unproductive sectors like pure finance. Who knows, maybe some states rich in resources (Texas? Alaska?) will try to secede at that point.
Among the most worrying signals is that research papers I read from the US are most often authored by people with foreign names; not just surnames, but first names as well, indicating they are likely immigrants, not hyphenated Americans. These people may leave as fast as they came, when they realise employment conditions in Scandinavia are much better e.g. for graduate students.
Cheer up, 50 years ago civil rights in the US were comparable to those in China today. There's a good chance China will improve its record in the next years, maybe they'll get their own Gandhi, Rudi Dutschke or Nelson Mandela. Make sure your kids learn Mandarin though, you USians are probably not used to the world expecting you to speak a language other than English.
Because it would suddenly become the problem of a government actually able to solve it, for example. Of course it would need still the political will to do it, but at least it would have both motivation and means.
The story is over 10 years old, and I could not find any follow-up that indicated prosecution (yes I can read Italian). Anyway, as far as I know, one is not required to make his car a safe place for thieves; as long as detention of those knives was not illegal, the guy should not have had any trouble. You cannot be held responsible if someone breaks into your property and gets hurt; if you had invited him in, then that would be something.
Also, this man could simply have shut up: a car thief would probably never have reported the incident (ridiculous lawsuits are uncommon it Italy. No we don't have a sane system, it's insane in other ways). This looks like a tall story someone made up to scare off thieves.
<ref>Donald Knuth, in "Structured Programming with Goto Statements". Computing Surveys 6:4 (December 1974), p. 267: "Experience has shown [...] that most of the running time in non-IO-bound programs is concentrated in about 3% of the source text".</ref>
Corrected that for you. And frankly, I do not know enough about Cobol, but you must have never seen Fortran real-life code.
Sounds like the Randian hero, it's only missing the self-entitlement part in which he claims that he's the only one who does worthy work.
*ducks, runs and seeks shelter*
Translation for you:
Misrepresenting other people's view is not part of your freedoms.
G++ was started as a proprietary fork of GCC, and could be liberated because of the GPL. Qt has grown and flourished under the GPL for years, enabling Trolltech to give us a great product for free and make serious money. KDE is mostly GPL too, so is MPlayer and almost two-thirds of projects on Sourceforge. And there is that Linux thingy, that happens to overshadow any *BSD, and has massive support from industry partners.
Really? There is a nice website to make sure they do play by the rules. It seems to be working.
You either live in a fantasy world or you need to give me the name of your company so I can send them my CV. Are you serious? Have you got any idea of how many PHB's would freak out if you sent out company IP without being obliged to do that? At the very least, there is a small hill of paperwork to fill in; if you are on bad terms with some higher-up, it might even be used as an excuse for firing you. It is perfectly possible that a boss with programming experience understands that there is no point in maintaining a separate proprietary fork of a BSD project to fix a few bugs, but there is no way in hell he's going to allow you to contribute anything that required a significant amount of company time and effort.
The sad (for BSD) truth is another: without Stallman and the GPL there would be no Linux, no KDE, no Gnome, no GCC, no Free Software. Corporations are there to make money, not to gather "good karma": you either force them at legal gunpoint, or they will run away with the loot. And if they didn't, their shareholders could sue them for that.
Now, I need a proof of good faith, beelsebob. What BSD project are you working on?
I'm asking because, in my time as a professional programmer, I remember very well that finding a BSD application was a treasure trove: you could steal all the code and pretend to have done the work yourself.
So, sorry for the suspicion if you actually work on BSD projects, but I have had it with (fake) BSD fanboys who want other people to write BSD code so they can freeload on.
I am curious about your pattern of thinking. Why in the world would they not do that, since they know they legally can? People do that all the time with proprietary software, in which case they risk jail if caught.
The key is the nucleogenesis. Fluorine is orders of magnitude rarer than oxygen, and chlorine too. Silicon and Sulphur may be better candidates to substitute carbon and oxygen.
Let's write a very inflammatory post. Suppose, as you did, that this deformity is a perfect predictor of sociopaths, and is a cause (not a consequence) of their behaviour; that is, suppose we discover that sociopaths are born. Suppose also that we can precisely determine whether a foetus has this deformity.
What if governments mandate abortion of sociopathic foetuses? I am not really sure about the issue. On one hand, if a sociopath is born, we are pretty sure they are going to make people suffer or outright kill them. On the other hand we are removing people based on what they are, not what they have done.
The disturbing thing is that such a discovery would finally give a rational basis for eugenics: instead of silly things like "being aryan" or "son of a rich family, therefore of the better part of society", we would actually have a rational criterion to trash new members of society.
I am not sure at all here. Where do we draw the line? I almost wish they don't find this out, the moral questions are harder than the science.