Burning hydrocarbons en masse takes a toll on the environment, a shared resource and a limited resource. Untaxed, gas prizes will not reflect this limitation. So, taxation is necessary for any market mechanism to work. It's that simple.
An interesting approach would be to come up with the figure of how much CO2[m^3] we can produce to limit global warming to 2C with a 95% confidence and sell shares of that on a stock exchange. Sort of like Kyoto thought to the end. People could buy it directly, or there could be package deals: buying gas with the license to the resulting CO2 attached. Good stuff.
I don't follow. Why would living in an apartment make one nervous? Heating breakdown? That can happen in a house as well. Worse, if you're in your house, you're on your own and possible out of reach - in a city condo, if worst comes to worst you're close to help. Also, if you're really nervous, invest in a small electrical heater (like... a stack of computers), so that two central infrastructures have to break down for you to get cold.
Citing Wikipedia is a controversial issue, but there are resources[1] that at least help you to do it right. Most of my profs distinctly dislike it, personally, I think it's all right to cite it to provide a reference for an issue that isn't central to a paper - e.g. the history of a country when you're talking about current events (there are better examples). It should be obvious that you don't cite or quote Wikipedia for central points - you should have primary sources for that; if you don't, what are you writing your paper for? (For course credit, I know. Still.) For computer science, it's so easy to find resources to cite anyway, many papers are freely available online, and most of the others are available if your CS department has subscribed to certain libraries (ACM[2] etc.)
Not sure what makes Frets on Fire particularly geeky in your mind. I've seen some fairly non-geeky people play it. But it's not like I'm trying to convince anybody of anything...
Let me be the first (maybe) to post a link to Frets on Fire, the PC clone of Guitar Hero. It's open source, works on Windows, Linux and Intel OS X, three songs come with it, it imports the GH songs from CD and it's a lot of fun. Also nice when you have a couple of friends over - everybody can keep talking while a few "heros" take care of the music.;)
Worth downloading alone for the ingenious way they make you hold the keyboard as a makeshift Guitar Hero controller.
Great post. Like another poster said, I sometimes feel the same - only with the opposite point of view. This isn't limited to just global warming, either, it's a lot "worse" with other issues. That's a good thing: I think being aware of your own bias is the first step in having a chance of at least seeing the other side's arguments.
Re:Shared-state concurrency is harder than you thi
on
An Overview of Parallelism
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Just as a sidenote, the BlockingQueue you link to is a Java 5 feature, and indeed Java 5 has added a LOT of API classes that are a great help when dealing with threading. Not sure if you meant to refer to 1.5, since I'm sure 1.4 has also added some utility classes, but it's been touted as one of the major features of 5 aka 1.5.
It still provides some security: the transmitted content is encrypted, the remote party remains secret and it lets you contact parties that you cannot access without tunnelling, e.g. to circumvent the Great Firewall. Still, what you say is true.
Why are you using an XML parser within an inner loop? Or if you aren't, why are you benchmarking it? I still don't like XML, though, it's just not pretty.
Hmm. I just checked, and according to the German Wikipedia page on Cottbus, the yearly average is 8.8C, the average of the warmest month (July) is 18.6C. Of course, the lower night time temperatures are included in those numbers. As a reference, Hamburg's July average is 17.4C. Of course, there does seem to be a tendency, imagined or not, that summers are getting more extreme in the recent past.
But a well insulated house will have be less affected by the summer heat, right? So you save energy on AC - if you have air conditioning, which isn't all that common here in Germany, mostly because it just doesn't get that hot for more than a couple of days per year.
You're missing the point. I'm not saying it's incorrect or even inaccurate to refer to them as machines, it's just not politically wise. It's about what people think when they hear the word, and "we" want them to think of the prototypical computer and not the prototypical machine when they talk about voting, ah, devices. Like I said, politics.
One of the many good points Rob made during his talk at last year's 23C3 in Berlin was to call the things voting computers as opposed to voting machines. Machine is associated with a simple, understandable and verifiable piece of gear, while computers are very complex, difficult to understand even by experts and unverifiable. Although the commonly used term (in Dutch) was machines, too, they exclusively referred to computers, and within a fairly short period of time everybody called them that way. In a way this was their first major success. Funnily enough, when they - much later - got hold of an actual device, the label on the back said voting computer, too: that's what the manufacturer had called them all along, internally, that is.
The crucial thing is not that it's a beta or that it'r not supported, the crucial thing is that it is not part of Windows. It's an additional product, which happens to run on Windows. Apple would have a fairly hard time arguing that a patch to its hardware's firmware is a seperate product, the patch obviously adds a capability to a product Apple has already sold. It's also not a bugfix, since it's also a feature they haven't advertised in the past. (I'm not taking a position here, this is the reasoning as I understand it from the discussion on Ars Technica.)
This has been on Slashdot a couple of times before. I'm wondering where they'll get the content from. In fact, I'm not sure who sources the content in a technical sense. Since it's those guys, I'd assume the source is a peer, and not a central server. Or is it a central server, with peers just helping with the distribution?
Anyway, they'll have a hard time delivering a TV like experience without TV like content. Purely YouTube style short movies won't cut it. Maybe they're building on the peers redistributing copyrighted content, but that didn't work out to well in the end for Kazaa.
Maybe they'll convince movie/TV studios to distribute their content, but what's in it for them? Ads?
Bah. I'm not some random person, I'm a citizen of an allied nation. And I'm not visiting your country anymore because apparantly you're okay with living in what can only be described as a neo-fascist police state. Your loss, not mine.
Of course, Pachelbel's music is in the public domain only because the intellectual property lobby wasn't as significant 300 years ago. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants. That's the issue with the perversion that is copyright today.
So, when a private person or company gets to a certain arbitrary size in terms of assets, then the government is allowed to use force to take property from them? That sounds soooo enlightened.
Yup, pretty much.
If I were running Microsoft, I would stop all shipments of all products to Europe (which is within their rights), and vigorously prosecute all copyright infrigment. That'll teach the government to mess with private property.
Good idea. I'm sure Microsoft is really keen on losing on the biggest single market for its software! And everybody would have to use alternative operating systems and office productivity software, essentially killing the MS lock-in once and for all - why didn't they think of that brilliant plan! You should be running Microsoft.
You're not hearing what I'm saying. I agree with you, and any drug fixing symptoms is good. It's most useful though if a short therapy fixes the symptoms for good, it's less useful if you have to keep taking it to keep them away.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm being ridiculous
That about sums it up. Politely speaking.
Burning hydrocarbons en masse takes a toll on the environment, a shared resource and a limited resource. Untaxed, gas prizes will not reflect this limitation. So, taxation is necessary for any market mechanism to work. It's that simple.
An interesting approach would be to come up with the figure of how much CO2[m^3] we can produce to limit global warming to 2C with a 95% confidence and sell shares of that on a stock exchange. Sort of like Kyoto thought to the end. People could buy it directly, or there could be package deals: buying gas with the license to the resulting CO2 attached. Good stuff.
I love that you linked to the Swedish Chef language version of Google Groups. Bork bork.
I don't follow. Why would living in an apartment make one nervous? Heating breakdown? That can happen in a house as well. Worse, if you're in your house, you're on your own and possible out of reach - in a city condo, if worst comes to worst you're close to help. Also, if you're really nervous, invest in a small electrical heater (like... a stack of computers), so that two central infrastructures have to break down for you to get cold.
Citing Wikipedia is a controversial issue, but there are resources[1] that at least help you to do it right. Most of my profs distinctly dislike it, personally, I think it's all right to cite it to provide a reference for an issue that isn't central to a paper - e.g. the history of a country when you're talking about current events (there are better examples). It should be obvious that you don't cite or quote Wikipedia for central points - you should have primary sources for that; if you don't, what are you writing your paper for? (For course credit, I know. Still.) For computer science, it's so easy to find resources to cite anyway, many papers are freely available online, and most of the others are available if your CS department has subscribed to certain libraries (ACM[2] etc.)
i a:Citing_Wikipedia&oldid=107657422t ion_for_Computing_Machinery&oldid=106348210
[1] Wikipedia:Citing Wikipedia. (2007, February 12). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 11:58, February 17, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikiped
[2] Association for Computing Machinery. (2007, February 7). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 12:02, February 17, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Associa
Not sure what makes Frets on Fire particularly geeky in your mind. I've seen some fairly non-geeky people play it. But it's not like I'm trying to convince anybody of anything...
Let me be the first (maybe) to post a link to Frets on Fire, the PC clone of Guitar Hero. It's open source, works on Windows, Linux and Intel OS X, three songs come with it, it imports the GH songs from CD and it's a lot of fun. Also nice when you have a couple of friends over - everybody can keep talking while a few "heros" take care of the music. ;)
Worth downloading alone for the ingenious way they make you hold the keyboard as a makeshift Guitar Hero controller.
Great post. Like another poster said, I sometimes feel the same - only with the opposite point of view. This isn't limited to just global warming, either, it's a lot "worse" with other issues. That's a good thing: I think being aware of your own bias is the first step in having a chance of at least seeing the other side's arguments.
Just as a sidenote, the BlockingQueue you link to is a Java 5 feature, and indeed Java 5 has added a LOT of API classes that are a great help when dealing with threading. Not sure if you meant to refer to 1.5, since I'm sure 1.4 has also added some utility classes, but it's been touted as one of the major features of 5 aka 1.5.
A product recall creates negative press, too, so D, E and F figure into the costs of a recall in some way as well.
It still provides some security: the transmitted content is encrypted, the remote party remains secret and it lets you contact parties that you cannot access without tunnelling, e.g. to circumvent the Great Firewall. Still, what you say is true.
Why are you using an XML parser within an inner loop? Or if you aren't, why are you benchmarking it? I still don't like XML, though, it's just not pretty.
Executing your configuration files? Worst idea ever. (Yes, I'm aware you offer an alternative. It's still... twisted.)
Unless the hookers know how to take a Sun sight and are willing to go over the side to scrape the hull.
Hmm. Those sexual innuendoes are real thinkers.
Hmm. I just checked, and according to the German Wikipedia page on Cottbus, the yearly average is 8.8C, the average of the warmest month (July) is 18.6C. Of course, the lower night time temperatures are included in those numbers. As a reference, Hamburg's July average is 17.4C. Of course, there does seem to be a tendency, imagined or not, that summers are getting more extreme in the recent past.
But a well insulated house will have be less affected by the summer heat, right? So you save energy on AC - if you have air conditioning, which isn't all that common here in Germany, mostly because it just doesn't get that hot for more than a couple of days per year.
You're missing the point. I'm not saying it's incorrect or even inaccurate to refer to them as machines, it's just not politically wise. It's about what people think when they hear the word, and "we" want them to think of the prototypical computer and not the prototypical machine when they talk about voting, ah, devices. Like I said, politics.
One of the many good points Rob made during his talk at last year's 23C3 in Berlin was to call the things voting computers as opposed to voting machines. Machine is associated with a simple, understandable and verifiable piece of gear, while computers are very complex, difficult to understand even by experts and unverifiable. Although the commonly used term (in Dutch) was machines, too, they exclusively referred to computers, and within a fairly short period of time everybody called them that way. In a way this was their first major success. Funnily enough, when they - much later - got hold of an actual device, the label on the back said voting computer, too: that's what the manufacturer had called them all along, internally, that is.
I just got the horrible vision of future historians digging out a 24 DVD set and taking it to be a documentary.
The crucial thing is not that it's a beta or that it'r not supported, the crucial thing is that it is not part of Windows. It's an additional product, which happens to run on Windows. Apple would have a fairly hard time arguing that a patch to its hardware's firmware is a seperate product, the patch obviously adds a capability to a product Apple has already sold. It's also not a bugfix, since it's also a feature they haven't advertised in the past. (I'm not taking a position here, this is the reasoning as I understand it from the discussion on Ars Technica.)
This has been on Slashdot a couple of times before. I'm wondering where they'll get the content from. In fact, I'm not sure who sources the content in a technical sense. Since it's those guys, I'd assume the source is a peer, and not a central server. Or is it a central server, with peers just helping with the distribution?
Anyway, they'll have a hard time delivering a TV like experience without TV like content. Purely YouTube style short movies won't cut it. Maybe they're building on the peers redistributing copyrighted content, but that didn't work out to well in the end for Kazaa.
Maybe they'll convince movie/TV studios to distribute their content, but what's in it for them? Ads?
Bah. I'm not some random person, I'm a citizen of an allied nation. And I'm not visiting your country anymore because apparantly you're okay with living in what can only be described as a neo-fascist police state. Your loss, not mine.
Of course, Pachelbel's music is in the public domain only because the intellectual property lobby wasn't as significant 300 years ago. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants. That's the issue with the perversion that is copyright today.
So, when a private person or company gets to a certain arbitrary size in terms of assets, then the government is allowed to use force to take property from them? That sounds soooo enlightened.
Yup, pretty much.
If I were running Microsoft, I would stop all shipments of all products to Europe (which is within their rights), and vigorously prosecute all copyright infrigment. That'll teach the government to mess with private property.
Good idea. I'm sure Microsoft is really keen on losing on the biggest single market for its software! And everybody would have to use alternative operating systems and office productivity software, essentially killing the MS lock-in once and for all - why didn't they think of that brilliant plan! You should be running Microsoft.
You're not hearing what I'm saying. I agree with you, and any drug fixing symptoms is good. It's most useful though if a short therapy fixes the symptoms for good, it's less useful if you have to keep taking it to keep them away.