What about Florida and the Southern states? Sugar cane won't grow there? Why does it always have to be about the corn belt?
The sugar cane industrial complex in Brazil is not about the automotive sector only. Huge investments in plant research (genetics, plant physiology, etc.) have been made by the Brazilian agricultural research agency (Embrapa).
I'm sure the US can come up with smart solutions - if only it quits with its protectionism and stops yielding to pressure from the corn lobby.
Re:And Brazil is chopping down virgin forests to g
on
The Great Ethanol Scam
·
· Score: 1
Fact: Brazil has grown sugar cane for 500 years. It has expertise in doing it. It has never, ever, chosen the Amazon forest for it. It simply wouldn't work.
There's something you don't understand about labor and sugar cane in Brazil. The workers in this industry have had very little education and some of the regions where sugar cane is grown are ones of very small per capita income. Thus, these rural workers have very few options outside of manual labor.
As to slave labor, yes, there have been cases, but they are a tiny fraction and the federal police are always on the hunt for this criminal activity and the Ministry of Labor and the Justice departments continuosly oversee the industry so that they may happen less and less often. Anedoctal evidence about cocaine...I've never heard about it in the local press. It might be true, but I'm not taking a/. post (by a US American?) as a primary source of info.
Were the sugar cane industry to become heavily mechanized, it would probably create huge unemployment in rural areas.
In Brazil, ethanol is made of sugar cane, which has a high energy yield. Corn ethanol is the dud. The US will not be importing sugar cane ethanol anytime soon, thanks to the lobby of corn producers.
Furthermore, the cars Brazilians drive are not ordinary gas engines in which you dump ethanol fuel - yes, ethanol will damage parts in the unadapted engine. They have perfected alloy materials and computers so the car can use ethanol without damaging the engine.
The article is one where the author does not check the facts before writing a story. It's called a hit piece.
What's the use of "very fast code" if it's full of security holes and periodically infested with bugs?
Such is the case with C/C++. I think the Linux kernel, the joke called the Microsoft product line, and the exception that is OpenBSD C hacking illustrate my point.
Fact is, C sucks for most things. Too bad we don't have very good free Ada or Eiffel compilers (the ones dual-licensed with GPL have had zero impact - because of the GPL, I think).
A lot of people use Windows in academia, of course. The Unix die-hards will stick to their guns, but most will think it's great that Office 2010 can handle Math (BTW, the article never mentioned TeX).
Probably, this will introduce yet another rift in the culture, with some people demanding a document be made with Word. It'll be incompatible with everything else, as usual, creating yet another headache for those that avoid Microsoft (I do - I don't think they make good products - I prefer Mac, Linux and BSD).
Out of sheer ignorance Excel is used for statistics. The statistics community has published about the many errors in that spreadsheet but people outside math culture just assume if it's from Microsoft, hey, it must be ok (I'm actually quite baffled by that attitude - don't they know they have to use anti-virus software? Don't they know their Windows is buggy? )
Numerics never was Microsoft's expertise and you better look elsewhere. If I were an advisor or examining your theses, I'd run your data through professional software (yes, I'm saying Excel isn't "professional statistics software").
Saying something is dying is usually misinformed or more likely spreading FUD to hasten the decline.
I agree, and support
1) Cobol job openings still exist 2) VAX support is still available 3) Mainframes are still around... n) Lisp ain't dead n+1) Smalltalk ain't dead n+2) BSD ain't dead n+3) Assembly experts still exist n+4) Eiffel is still used n+5) Ada is still deployed in industries n+6) Forth is still deployed in electronics n+7) Somebody buys support for Rebol, believe it or not... What FUDders may consider a dying market might well be called "a niche market" (or "opportunity") for others, providing them with a comfortable life. And I only mentioned "big markets". There's stuff out there we haven't even heard of, and someone is developing for it and making money.
Re:Giving Them Drugs, Taking Their Lives Away?
on
Cosmetic Neurology
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· Score: 1
How hard is it to search for some credible evidence in the intertubes? Several studies have tried to estimate the prevalence of LSD-induced prolonged psychosis arriving at numbers of around 4 in 1,000 individuals
BTW, any ex-hippie knows this (not that I'm one). Just ask grandpa.
Re:a remedy for low creativity - MediCann?
on
Cosmetic Neurology
·
· Score: 1
This proposition - that marijuana makes one a more creative person - is often claimed by those who consume marijuana but, AFAIK, has not been demonstrated scientifically. On the contrary, it seems the intelectual and artistic production of those under its effect are quite mediocre. To belabor the point, I'm not aware of any great theorem in mathematics or physics that was proved when one was having a joint (magic mushrooms, who knows?)
Now, I'm aware you can point to some people in, say, rock music and claim they are very heavy users and very creative individuals, and infer a correlation. But there might be confounding factors at play: the individual was very creative, regardless of pot, he's a genius bipolar, etc. However, you'd forget to notice a thousandfold more people who become lame, lazy bums after consuming it, whose greatest creative act is the optimized path to the fridge.
SIGINT isn't the right tool for tracking terrorist cells anyway. They don't generate enough signals.
Yeah, I think you might be right. I suspect what this really means is that they're incapable of actual, old-style spy-work. Here's what a CIA Near-East operative said:
"The CIA probably doesn't have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with shitty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ's sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don't do that kind of thing." A younger case officer boils the problem down even further: "Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen."
That's from The Atlantic's The Counterterrorist Myth:
Pay some unmarried dude 20 million a year to live this shitty life in return for his services and, additionally, pay well some willing prostitues to be shipped in secret CIA planes to have fun with him secretly - call it "operation secret panties". Are there too many religious right-wingers at the CIA for ideas like this to stick?
The problem is that people have come to expect features that can't be easily delivered without a general purpose OS, and the issues that come with that are pretty much invisible to anyone who would be likely to scream about it, including the FDA. Users get used to periodic failures and work around them, just like desktop users do.
We can't expect Mr. Surgeon, who's been rebooting his Wintel boxen for two decades, who thinks it's "natural" for computers to get a "virus" to scream about it.
However, the physicians, engineers and computer people who make the devices and softwares should display a higher standard. IMHO, for instance, it's unacceptable to just "hack away" at C/C++ in such systems. At the very least some formal methods should be applied. Safe(r) languages, like SPARKAda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_language) Code analyzers with formal theory behind them, such as PolySpace http://www.mathworks.com/products/polyspace/index.html Etc. If a system needs rebooting in the middle of surgery, than it's criminal. There's cultural barrier against safer languages and formal methods and we need to overcome it.
Here's a vaccine: use Unix and Unix-like systems. No medical device should be running Windows. You do see stuff with Unix, such as some CT scans, but the way Microsoft's marketing is strong, you see a lot of stuff on Windows. Also, because it allows for easy installation on a widespread platform.
Here's a big opportunity for open-source developers: ship the whole thing, computer, OS, *and* your image analysis software for microscopy - or whatever (of course, the ugly part for Linux is the GPL - but then there's always a choice of BSD or solaris).
BTW, how come retarded managers get to choose Windows for medical devices, and the NYSE sticks to Linux for their systems? Answer: because there is a shitload of money in the NYSE and big fish at the sea and they can't afford retards managing their IT infrasructure.
On another note, I suspect things are even worse in other corners of the world. For instance, a couple of weeks ago I was having a coffee with the guy reponsible for major IT infrastructure in the government health sector (this in Brazil, and I'll not disclose specific info), and he told me a horror story of how they run very old, unpatched software, that they *can't possibly* upgrade because, as these things go in the developing world, the budget wasn't always there when they needed, so they missed upgrades, and to upgrade the things, they can't just go from, say, version 5 to 7, because Microsoft doesn't work that way...BTW, the guy - a top manager - was clueless regarding, say, OpenBSD. He just bought pre-packaged Microsoft shite. How sad...He did mention that TCO for Linux was higher, because of lack of specialized workers (as opposed to a legion of incompetent sysadmins wannabes we see all the time in the Free Software meetings), and that they had made a half-assed atempt once.
OTOH, the public health sector should run open source software for security reasons. Period. If.mil does, why doesn't.gov?
One thing the GPL offers that BSD-type licenses don't: protection from competitors.(blah-blah-blah). As a business that means that you're always giving to your competitors but they don't have to give anything to you in return.
Gee, that reads like the usual cliche, off-the-shelf argument, doesn't it? Now, let's fact-check with Reality. Google releases code under the BSD license, not GPL. Explain "competitive advantages". In fact, Apple used FreeBSD code and contributed back. Explain.FreeBSD didn't die because of this, or because of Linux (and neither are the other BSDs dead). Explain.
A major software house can take this code, modify it, resell it and not have to give back the modifications. This is fine if all you want to do is give away your code.
Let's fiddle with your argument:
A small software house can take this code, modify it, resell it and not have to give back the modifications. This is fine if all you want to do is give away your code.
If you're the small software vendor, what is the problem? Remember, BSD projects are open source by choice. Nothing is being "stolen", this isn't warez we're talking about.
I'm in a business where we welcome GPL-licensed apps with open arms. Of course, we don't sell software, we sell services and expertise.
Well, many people sell service and expertise and they use non-GPL products. For instance, the URLs below will take to people who sell services and expertise in *BSD systems.
One question for you: how is that you create scarcity if you use BSD licensed open-source software - to put it in another way - if there's no scarcity of the original resource, since code is simply copied.
That's a serious problem with your argument. You want to prove an argument, but then you start from the end and fabricate the premises. It's a flawed argument.
Now, I might create a little scarcity around the niche market I am in, since I am not giving away code, since I don't work for big iron - so that's to my interest. But I drew upon a fountain of endless capacity to provide me with my basic needs. I also might choose to give back, since the cooperation is to my interest.
Slashdot Mirror
What about Florida and the Southern states? Sugar cane won't grow there? Why does it always have to be about the corn belt?
The sugar cane industrial complex in Brazil is not about the automotive sector only. Huge investments in plant research (genetics, plant physiology, etc.) have been made by the Brazilian agricultural research agency (Embrapa).
I'm sure the US can come up with smart solutions - if only it quits with its protectionism and stops yielding to pressure from the corn lobby.
Fact: Brazil has grown sugar cane for 500 years. It has expertise in doing it. It has never, ever, chosen the Amazon forest for it. It simply wouldn't work.
There's something you don't understand about labor and sugar cane in Brazil. The workers in this industry have had very little education and some of the regions where sugar cane is grown are ones of very small per capita income. Thus, these rural workers have very few options outside of manual labor.
As to slave labor, yes, there have been cases, but they are a tiny fraction and the federal police are always on the hunt for this criminal activity and the Ministry of Labor and the Justice departments continuosly oversee the industry so that they may happen less and less often. Anedoctal evidence about cocaine...I've never heard about it in the local press. It might be true, but I'm not taking a /. post (by a US American?) as a primary source of info.
Were the sugar cane industry to become heavily mechanized, it would probably create huge unemployment in rural areas.
In Brazil, ethanol is made of sugar cane, which has a high energy yield. Corn ethanol is the dud. The US will not be importing sugar cane ethanol anytime soon, thanks to the lobby of corn producers.
Furthermore, the cars Brazilians drive are not ordinary gas engines in which you dump ethanol fuel - yes, ethanol will damage parts in the unadapted engine. They have perfected alloy materials and computers so the car can use ethanol without damaging the engine.
The article is one where the author does not check the facts before writing a story. It's called a hit piece.
SML ray tracer vs. C++ ray tracer.
High-level "nifty shit" language is 30% faster than C++.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/languages/ray_tracer/comparison_cpp_vs_sml.html
What's the use of "very fast code" if it's full of security holes and periodically infested with bugs?
Such is the case with C/C++. I think the Linux kernel, the joke called the Microsoft product line, and the exception that is OpenBSD C hacking illustrate my point.
Fact is, C sucks for most things. Too bad we don't have very good free Ada or Eiffel compilers (the ones dual-licensed with GPL have had zero impact - because of the GPL, I think).
A lot of people use Windows in academia, of course. The Unix die-hards will stick to their guns, but most will think it's great that Office 2010 can handle Math (BTW, the article never mentioned TeX).
Probably, this will introduce yet another rift in the culture, with some people demanding a document be made with Word. It'll be incompatible with everything else, as usual, creating yet another headache for those that avoid Microsoft (I do - I don't think they make good products - I prefer Mac, Linux and BSD).
Out of sheer ignorance Excel is used for statistics. The statistics community has published about the many errors in that spreadsheet but people outside math culture just assume if it's from Microsoft, hey, it must be ok (I'm actually quite baffled by that attitude - don't they know they have to use anti-virus software? Don't they know their Windows is buggy? )
Numerics never was Microsoft's expertise and you better look elsewhere. If I were an advisor or examining your theses, I'd run your data through professional software (yes, I'm saying Excel isn't "professional statistics software").
Scilab is developed by a top French academic institution and has behind it an industry consortium support.
http://www.scilab.org/
Saying something is dying is usually misinformed or more likely spreading FUD to hasten the decline.
I agree, and support
1) Cobol job openings still exist ... ...
2) VAX support is still available
3) Mainframes are still around
n) Lisp ain't dead
n+1) Smalltalk ain't dead
n+2) BSD ain't dead
n+3) Assembly experts still exist
n+4) Eiffel is still used
n+5) Ada is still deployed in industries
n+6) Forth is still deployed in electronics
n+7) Somebody buys support for Rebol, believe it or not
What FUDders may consider a dying market might well be called "a niche market" (or "opportunity") for others, providing them with a comfortable life. And I only mentioned "big markets". There's stuff out there we haven't even heard of, and someone is developing for it and making money.
How hard is it to search for some credible evidence in the intertubes?
Several studies have tried to estimate the prevalence of LSD-induced prolonged psychosis arriving at numbers of around 4 in 1,000 individuals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD#Psychosis
Hallucinogen persisting perception disorder after psilocybin consumption: a case study
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VM1-4GDBT8V-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=2e61e47d1b85590dfcf1081263b02d83
BTW, any ex-hippie knows this (not that I'm one). Just ask grandpa.
This proposition - that marijuana makes one a more creative person - is often claimed by those who consume marijuana but, AFAIK, has not been demonstrated scientifically. On the contrary, it seems the intelectual and artistic production of those under its effect are quite mediocre. To belabor the point, I'm not aware of any great theorem in mathematics or physics that was proved when one was having a joint (magic mushrooms, who knows?)
Now, I'm aware you can point to some people in, say, rock music and claim they are very heavy users and very creative individuals, and infer a correlation. But there might be confounding factors at play: the individual was very creative, regardless of pot, he's a genius bipolar, etc. However, you'd forget to notice a thousandfold more people who become lame, lazy bums after consuming it, whose greatest creative act is the optimized path to the fridge.
Hahaha! You're probably right!
Oh, wait, prostitution is illegal in the US, right? Then cooperate with the Netherlands. Hehehe.
SIGINT isn't the right tool for tracking terrorist cells anyway. They don't generate enough signals.
Yeah, I think you might be right. I suspect what this really means is that they're incapable of actual, old-style spy-work. Here's what a CIA Near-East operative said:
"The CIA probably doesn't have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with shitty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ's sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don't do that kind of thing." A younger case officer boils the problem down even further: "Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen."
That's from The Atlantic's The Counterterrorist Myth:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200107/gerecht
Pay some unmarried dude 20 million a year to live this shitty life in return for his services and, additionally, pay well some willing prostitues to be shipped in secret CIA planes to have fun with him secretly - call it "operation secret panties". Are there too many religious right-wingers at the CIA for ideas like this to stick?
The problem is that people have come to expect features that can't be easily delivered without a general purpose OS, and the issues that come with that are pretty much invisible to anyone who would be likely to scream about it, including the FDA. Users get used to periodic failures and work around them, just like desktop users do.
We can't expect Mr. Surgeon, who's been rebooting his Wintel boxen for two decades, who thinks it's "natural" for computers to get a "virus" to scream about it.
However, the physicians, engineers and computer people who make the devices and softwares should display a higher standard. IMHO, for instance, it's unacceptable to just "hack away" at C/C++ in such systems. At the very least some formal methods should be applied. Safe(r) languages, like SPARKAda
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_language)
Code analyzers with formal theory behind them, such as PolySpace
http://www.mathworks.com/products/polyspace/index.html
Etc.
If a system needs rebooting in the middle of surgery, than it's criminal.
There's cultural barrier against safer languages and formal methods and we need to overcome it.
For a life-critical system they probably shouldn't be running ANY version of Windows.
"Hahahaha, children, the things we've seen."
Like telemedicine types wiring ECG real-time data to Linux (*) with MySQL and PHP interfaces. Is that acceptable/safe? I don't think so...
(*) not Real-Time Linux.
And OS/2 warp is, like, totally supported today.
Here's a vaccine: use Unix and Unix-like systems. No medical device should be running Windows. You do see stuff with Unix, such as some CT scans, but the way Microsoft's marketing is strong, you see a lot of stuff on Windows. Also, because it allows for easy installation on a widespread platform.
Here's a big opportunity for open-source developers: ship the whole thing, computer, OS, *and* your image analysis software for microscopy - or whatever (of course, the ugly part for Linux is the GPL - but then there's always a choice of BSD or solaris).
BTW, how come retarded managers get to choose Windows for medical devices, and the NYSE sticks to Linux for their systems? Answer: because there is a shitload of money in the NYSE and big fish at the sea and they can't afford retards managing their IT infrasructure.
On another note, I suspect things are even worse in other corners of the world. For instance, a couple of weeks ago I was having a coffee with the guy reponsible for major IT infrastructure in the government health sector (this in Brazil, and I'll not disclose specific info), and he told me a horror story of how they run very old, unpatched software, that they *can't possibly* upgrade because, as these things go in the developing world, the budget wasn't always there when they needed, so they missed upgrades, and to upgrade the things, they can't just go from, say, version 5 to 7, because Microsoft doesn't work that way...BTW, the guy - a top manager - was clueless regarding, say, OpenBSD. He just bought pre-packaged Microsoft shite. How sad...He did mention that TCO for Linux was higher, because of lack of specialized workers (as opposed to a legion of incompetent sysadmins wannabes we see all the time in the Free Software meetings), and that they had made a half-assed atempt once.
OTOH, the public health sector should run open source software for security reasons. Period. If .mil does, why doesn't .gov?
Exacly. Stay in your FSF Church and don't bother the rest of us with your cult of personality.
One thing the GPL offers that BSD-type licenses don't: protection from competitors.(blah-blah-blah). As a business that means that you're always giving to your competitors but they don't have to give anything to you in return.
Gee, that reads like the usual cliche, off-the-shelf argument, doesn't it? Now, let's fact-check with Reality. Google releases code under the BSD license, not GPL. Explain "competitive advantages". In fact, Apple used FreeBSD code and contributed back. Explain.FreeBSD didn't die because of this, or because of Linux (and neither are the other BSDs dead). Explain.
A major software house can take this code, modify it, resell it and not have to give back the modifications. This is fine if all you want to do is give away your code.
Let's fiddle with your argument:
A small software house can take this code, modify it, resell it and not have to give back the modifications. This is fine if all you want to do is give away your code.
If you're the small software vendor, what is the problem? Remember, BSD projects are open source by choice. Nothing is being "stolen", this isn't warez we're talking about.
I'm in a business where we welcome GPL-licensed apps with open arms. Of course, we don't sell software, we sell services and expertise.
Well, many people sell service and expertise and they use non-GPL products. For instance, the URLs below will take to people who sell services and expertise in *BSD systems.
http://www.freebsd.org/commercial/consult.html
http://www.openbsd.org/support.html
http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/consultants.html
http://www.ixsystems.com/
One question for you: how is that you create scarcity if you use BSD licensed open-source software - to put it in another way - if there's no scarcity of the original resource, since code is simply copied.
That's a serious problem with your argument. You want to prove an argument, but then you start from the end and fabricate the premises. It's a flawed argument.
Now, I might create a little scarcity around the niche market I am in, since I am not giving away code, since I don't work for big iron - so that's to my interest. But I drew upon a fountain of endless capacity to provide me with my basic needs. I also might choose to give back, since the cooperation is to my interest.
Sorry, I forgot to post the URL:
http://www.freebsd.org/commercial/hardware.html