Look at the road worthiness of 10% to 15% of US drivers, and you'll see someone who changes lanes 5 to 6 times a minute to get one car ahead of the steady traffic flow. Add in the cultral truth that everyone drive 10 to 15 MPH over the speed limit on the freeways, and you have an accident rich environment.
No hazmat team, government, or citizen would put any kind of radioactive isotope in the powerplant of a vechile today. Doing so would only turn our freeways into highly concentrated radiation zones.
Yes, but if you roll back the clock just a little bit further...
My frigging '67 Karmann Ghia (VW bug rebody made by, well VW) got 25 MPG, in 2002.
So basically, you are stating that we've been so wasteful in the 70's and 80's that we should be jumping happy and doing cartwheels about a 10% improvement in gas milage over the 1960's.
By the way, my VW was rated well under 100 hp, so imagine what its MPG could have been if its engine was efficent. The United States needs to stop believing that they need to pull off of the line at every stop sign and red light like race scenes from American Graffitti.
Especially when the "in-house" cost of sequencing a DNA sample is around four to eight dollars.
Convincing the seller to provide a sample could be tricky, not many want a $100,000 football with a bunch of holes in it from overzealous sampling.
Allowing the seller to post proof of DNA sequence won't work either, lab results could be forged, or he could post credentials for another "valid" football.
I think our friend needs to take a course in probability. Or maybe biology, or perhaps common sense.
If the DNA is replicated enough times to be placed on 120 different footballs, then the chance of replicating it has been proven by example, so it's basically 100%.
The chance of replicating it without knowledge of it's base pairs is much lower, but if you can get a sample of the DNA (come in contact with a valid game ball), you can easily replicate it 100% without even knowing the sequence. After all, your replicate DNA in your own body tissues without knowledge of the sequence, and similar techniques have been used in the lab for a few decades now.
DNA oxidizes, right? I mean I'm just a lowly ex-research biologist who only worked with the stuff for a period of about 3.5 years; however, I wouldn't expect that base sequence pair to hold together for very long.
Plus DNA doesn't glow green (unless they've discovered something new). There are dyes that can work their way into the double helix and make it appear red (due to the dye being red), but shining a laser at DNA would probably result in a lot of disconnected (or abnormally bonded) base pairs, and a broken (or oxidized) ribose backbone.
I'm suspecting that they are actually tagging the DNA covalently with a flourescent marker that glows green. Such "bonded" markers have been available for quite some time (and in a variety of colors), so such dyes would be easily available to the football engineers (hehe) out there. As the parent poster suggested, then all you would have to do is add the marker to the existing DNA on any old football, and apart from sampling and sequencing the DNA, most people would be statisfied at first glance.
Even though DNA sequencing is getting cheaper every day (I imagine a private individual would have to pay a bit more, but in-house services usually charge around $4 to $8 per sample) so cost won't be a factor. However, the results can be forged, and not many people will tolerate "oversampling" of their prized $5000 football. "Excuse me sir, by may I take a slice?"
Finally, the DNA would oxidize over time, leaving less and less material that would test positive.
Provided that the base pair sequence is published (as it would have to be to allow verification), then sequencing it from scratch is a little more expensive, but an everyday task. And don't get into "authentic" vs. "knock-off" molecule debates please: if all of the atoms are in the same places, the orgins of both molecules are indistinguishable.
What would be cooler is to transgenically insert a sequence into pig zygotes that produces a protein which resists oxidation and flouresces with laser light. Then the whole football would glow, but it's glow would increase with intensity of the right wavelength. Players might complain about it being harder to see a slightly glowing football, but such complaints usually fall on deaf ears, and it's not like the football design never changes (or that we lack "neon" footballs today).
Flouride can also have a number of real (and perceived) negative health benefits.
I'm not saying that Flouride ranks all the way up there with Cyanoide, but part of the reasoning behind removing Flouride from water systems is that it gets ingested when in the water every day, where at a dentist's office or in tooth paste, it is customarily spit back out.
Since the contact of the Flouride with the tooth is what most people are after, I don't see any need to swallow the stuff afterwards. However, in it's own way, the Flouride / no Flouride in the public water systems argument is more heated (and relevant) than the Emacs / vi debate.
I mean, with the wrong text editor, you only FEEL like you're dying.:)
Let's see. You're all excited about it's 16" depth, because it will save space.
Realistically, nobody cares too much about depth in a rack, because very few racks are installed to accommodate only 24" of server. On a rack system, it's all about height.
This thing looks like it's a whopping 4U tall! Sure, maybe it's only 3U tall, but that's still missing the point. If you want to save space, you buy a 1U tall server, that way you can install 3 (or 4) of them in the same space. Since you will hardly be able to dictate the depth of all components, it won't matter much if some of your servers are 16" or more.
If you're designing a server room for a small business, you'd be a fool to only allow 16" of rack depth, as you'll never know when someone needs to install the latest full depth server from . Failure to account for such a need will cost you much more when you need to redesign the rack setup to install a new server. I've even seen some non-server components (KVM switches, keyboard / monitor slide-outs, switches, routers, etc) that require more depth for stability (mig case for small internals). People don't throw that stuff away, and you can't guranantee the best components to be in the exact size (or color) you want.
If you're designing a server room for a large business, this might be useful, but only if you can assure yourself that you'll have so many of these 16" servers that they will completely fill up multiple racks. But if you need that many servers, you'll go with 1U servers because then you'll only need 1/4 the number of racks.
Anyone that wants to find such a building doesn't have to resort to Google Maps. Google Maps will just print out a pretty online picuture.
I mean, the address of the White House was been well known for the past 100 years, and no city map of Washington D.C. fails to list it. It's been featured in song, the title of a film, and a trivial pursuit question for decades. I imagine that any Indian seat of power (residence or professional building) is equally as well known within the city's limits (and possibly nationwide).
Google Maps is only going to help the people that need a top-down photograph of the building and surrounding area. The only organizations which could easily profit from such information already have spy planes, satellite photography, survey maps, and other such tools. Other people just need a few dollars to buy the best street map of the city.
I guess that's why, after nearly 5 years of articles related to patents, there's still people thinking that patents / trademarks / copyrights are the same thing.
If you look around, there's a lot of charaties that perform similar functions. Sometimes they target the same demographic group, sometimes they are bound by the same activity, sometimes they are tied to the same organization.
For example, there's more than one charity that caters to childern in hospitals. Toys for Tots, Child's Play, Get Well Gamers, Candlelight Foundation, Make A Wish Foundation, and The Shriner's Organization. Apologies to those I've missed, as I can not even begin to list them all.
There's more than one charity that appeals to a particular activity. Runners can attest to every race being tied to one charity or another, the organization coordinating the race basically survives and coordinates the race by taking a small cut from the charity proceeds. It's not illegal or unethical, as few runners will pony up charity money un-prompted but most will not gripe about an entrance fee if a portion is going to promote public goodwill. Bingo is a simliar activity driven revenue source for charities, with bingo parlors happily donating a protion of the earnings to charaties to offset ill will towards gambling in the community, and the players love it as they can soothe their losses by knowing that some of the money went to a good cause. I know of bingo parlors in Texas where every game donates to a different charity.
Organizations are another binding agent in the distribution of charity money. If you donate to your alma mater or local college / university, you often can put stipulations on the donation which effictvely makes the organization a multi-charity. One example is to specify that the dontated money is to only be spent on the library, or the departement of Biology, etc. The US Goverment also accepts charity money under such circumstances, and have a departement to distribute charity funds to the correct recipients. I have known a few people who have placed clauses in their wills to have their assets forwarded to paying off the national debt.
So it's not a great travisty to have identical, or near-identical charities competeing in their various arenas. Without competition, even in charaties, they would soon fall prey to the problems inherit with any monopoly. For charaties, that would spell beaurocratic processes for donation, department-based "kingdom building", excessive administration, and less of the donation arriving to its intended recipient.
Be glad you have a choice, one day you may find that a charity is very inefficent in distributing funds, and you might consider changing charities to another that still fulfills your wishes, but is ran by someone else. Consumer reports did a published study of charity comparison, and it was shocking to see how some squandered over 60% of the funds in (mis-)management of the distribution of such funds.
If you're a budding programmer, one gem that tends to get overlooked is the so called "Dragon Book." Really it's tile is "Compilers -- Principles, Techniques, and Tools", and although some parts of it have been superceded by modern technology, there is no finer book for dealing with the intricacies of parsing and the ideas behind compiling which seems to crop up in various ways time and time again.
Sure, if you want to build a parser that will beat the benchmarks off of the modern powerhouses, it's just an introductory text. However, before most of those dense research papers become comprehensible, you'll have to be introduced to the technology anyway.
(from Slashdot) Science: New Ocean Being Formed in Africa (from BBC NEWS) Geologists Witness 'Ocean Birth'
And then explaining that really it MAY be the birth of an Ocean, or MAY be a big rift that will settle down.
Fortunately, doing a bit of research shows that it's just lazy reporting, as many people with detailed knowledge of Geology have been aware of this "triple-junction" of plates, and the events that tend to indicate that the some of the plates will start moving away from each other. For those with a more graphical mind http://pubs.usgs.gov/publications/text/East_Africa .html will help.
My complaint is in how poorly this thing was headlined. It's overselling the news. A giant rift widening is exciting enough, and the article can then speculate that it could become an ocean. If it's generally believed that this rift's becoming an ocean is a foregone conclusion, then there's no need for the disclaimer about rifts stabilizing.
The disclaimer is silly. There's little liability for getting a prediction wrong when the results are projected to be apparent in a million years. It does nothing but weaken the article, muddling the facts with a bunch of posits until you can't determine if this is news or hyperbole.
Within the article it states that many prospective ocean basins fizz out and never really develop into ocean basins.
So, are there reasons to expect that this one will develop into a full fledged ocean? I mean, it is not easy to predict future events, but without some measure of certainty, wouldn't a more appropriate title have been "Giant Fissure in Ethiopia Continues to Grow"?
Well, if it's in the SkyMall magazine, I guess you could use it as a backup guidance system.
Delivery would be a pain though. I would suggest DHL, as they have those nifty flying vans that could probably pull alongside the plane. Pay for the "ship it right now" shipping, as the 2-day delivery option isn't very useful when you really need a guidance system.
And Slashdot has been reporting people doing this, for years.
It's just that Slashdot keeps reporting it as a "never-been-done-before" event, when it should be reporting this as "another-person-has-just-performed" event.
As another poster has already stated, it's not the first time that RedHat has bought something and then changed the license to an open-source license.
However, this story is just a bit more complicated.
RedHat open-sourced all of the code they could, which was quite a bit, but originally just the main directory daemon, ns-slapd, a few shared libraries and command-line tools were open source. The real news here is that the last of the "other" bits have finally been re-written under a new (open-source) license.
That's part of the motivation for resetting the release nubmer; note that this is verison "1.0" instead of (grumbles about memory) 8 or 9?
So now, it is a 100% open source solution, no more binary-only rpms.
If you are the center of your universe, then I guess it doesn't really make any difference.
However, there are a lot of people who are aware of the others around them, and aware that those others form perceptions based on a lot of silly things. Some of those things include your past work performance, but some of them include how you speak, how well you write, how you hold eye contact, the firmness of your hand shake, the style of your hair, what you wear, the cost of your accessories, the car you drive, your manners, your ability to communicate, and how you esteem others.
Most of the hard stuff to learn (technical aspects of the job, reading and writing well) isn't easy to assess. It takes a technically competent peer to appreciate them, and only in a review setting, and it costs that peer time and energy to appreciate it. On the other hand, nearly anyone appreciates the other stuff, and it's apparent without effort on the part of the observer.
These things are not "magic bullets", because one obviously deficent area always is noticed over the other passable (or even admirable) qualities. Still, it's honorable to not cripple your perception as seen by others. When it is a matter of changing dress, well, that is much easier to change than speaking ability, your skill on the job, or how well you treat others.
So yes, it is silly, but that dress shirt makes you a better person, and hence a better coder, in the eyes of someone who doesn't know good code from bad. Considering that a lot of corporate workers have business degrees, that might be a very good thing for your career.
Now if your the center of your own universe, then it doesn't matter what I wrote, or what others think. Just don't come griping when you dislike the consequences of not pandering to anyone.
There are many, many indisputible cases of tiny amounts of thing causing huge amounts of impact.
mercury posioning: Miniscule amounts of mercury permanently alter and damage developing brains, creating irreversible damage.
Enzymes within the metabolic pathway: The body reuses enzymes millions and millions of times to break down sugars, you don't create one enzyme for each stage in the cycle, for each sugar.
Acids and Bases: They change the pH of a large body of unbuffered water, reguarless of the miniscule quantities used.
Bad smells: Merthancapter (Sp?) is routinely used by natural gas companies to give natural gas it's bad smell, they add it in at one part per billion, or (%0.0001), and we can smell it quite easily. At those levels of sensitivity, I imagine we'll notice a change of (%0.0375) and other life will too.
Now to look at your examples:
We went from 260ppm CO2 to 375ppm CO2. Atmospheric CO2 is part of a carbon cycle which stays in equilibrium due to plants pulling it out of the atmosphere. Add more plants, the number drops. Add more CO2, and the atmosphere gets better for plant life. So even with conditions being prime for plants, and plants pulling out even more CO2 than before, there's still an increase in CO2 levels. It's not like we added a measly 115ppm, it's just that we added so much that the planet can't handle it. Also, if you expected it to be a lot more, please consider the size of a CO2 molecule in comparison to the size of the atmosphere.
And it is a planetary issue, so pointing fingers at China may make us feel better, until we realize that we are all on the same planet (and that we did nothing because finger pointing it the best excuse for our own bad behavior).
The Earth also kills off massive amounts of life in cycles.
Just because it is a cycle doesn't mean it is a good thing.
Just because it is a natural process doesn't mean it is good for us.
Consider how much damage you would sustain should your vehicle stop from normal cruising speed by hitting a fixed concrete bride. Please remember that deacceleration, intertia, force, momentum, and velocity are all natural things which change in cycles on your daily drive. Also realize that there is no need to divert your path into a bridge because of the "natural-ness" of these phenomena or their cyclic tendencies.
We know that we assist in "making the world warmer sooner". Yet we argue that it's not a bad thing, because the planet sometimes was warmer and sometimes was cooler. It is sad when you consider that all of the major warmer and cooler periods of our plante were not periods when human population was dominant like it is today. By the same logic, arguments that we shouldn't care about global warming since it's a natural process are simlar to arguments that we shouldn't care about our own massive population reduction (and possible exinction) by the natural pressures of living on a warmer planet.
Warming the plant (not just having a warm season or two) melts ice, which releases water, which raises shorelines. It changes wind patterns, making local weather changes in communities. The air and water has more energy than before, leading to more hurricanes and more severe weather in general. Warmer oceans allow beds of frozen methane underneath the oceans to melt, releasing methane into the atmosphere (sometimes violently). Warmer weather puts easily combustible items a bit closer to their burning point, creating better conditions for forest fires, underground coal fires, and fire in general. And we have not mentioned the number of people that already die or are permanently injured by heat stroke, or the cost of lost production due to "cool down" breaks due to warm weather.
Life does not take kindly to most climate changes. What lives around you is there because it thrives in the climate typical for your area. If that climate changes, these plants / insects / animals will no longer be suited to their habitat, allowing foreign plants / insects / animals to intrude.
So look around. If you like what you see, then perhaps you should be arguing that we should not hurry nature, after all, nature has this nasty habit of killing off and radically changing the life that is on our planet's surface. Yes, global warming is a cycle, but so is the carbon cycle, and I don't believe you are in a rush to decompose and release your carbon back into the atmosphere anytime soon.
How does assisting in one effort deny other efforts.
Assuming Google does NOTHING to help the MacOSX community, they will still make 00.org smaller, and that will still make it easier for those who do perform the port.
Maybe one thing has something to do with the other?
Or if you don't want the core issues worked on, perhaps a patch can be put in place that shows you a blank document, but doesn't allow you to touch it for two minutes.
Just imagine, and Digital kept pushing their Alpha CPUs on everyone. The didn't even make it to Beta, and it's no wonder that HP scrapped thier remains.
Or, you could perhaps look at the software to see if it meets your needs, and not get so excited about the release name / revision. Considering that there are not a lot of ways to make Windows executables run on Linux, even a pre-that-thing-before-alpha sounds better than nothing at all.
And no, virtual machines running windows isn't the same thing as running a windows exe on Linux, but those who's needs are met by such workarounds are not those who drive the Wine project anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
That last part was a joke, right?
Look at the road worthiness of 10% to 15% of US drivers, and you'll see someone who changes lanes 5 to 6 times a minute to get one car ahead of the steady traffic flow. Add in the cultral truth that everyone drive 10 to 15 MPH over the speed limit on the freeways, and you have an accident rich environment.
No hazmat team, government, or citizen would put any kind of radioactive isotope in the powerplant of a vechile today. Doing so would only turn our freeways into highly concentrated radiation zones.
Yes, but if you roll back the clock just a little bit further... My frigging '67 Karmann Ghia (VW bug rebody made by, well VW) got 25 MPG, in 2002. So basically, you are stating that we've been so wasteful in the 70's and 80's that we should be jumping happy and doing cartwheels about a 10% improvement in gas milage over the 1960's. By the way, my VW was rated well under 100 hp, so imagine what its MPG could have been if its engine was efficent. The United States needs to stop believing that they need to pull off of the line at every stop sign and red light like race scenes from American Graffitti.
The side effect that someone notices just indicates that it's mind control "beta".
Especially when the "in-house" cost of sequencing a DNA sample is around four to eight dollars.
Convincing the seller to provide a sample could be tricky, not many want a $100,000 football with a bunch of holes in it from overzealous sampling.
Allowing the seller to post proof of DNA sequence won't work either, lab results could be forged, or he could post credentials for another "valid" football.
I think our friend needs to take a course in probability. Or maybe biology, or perhaps common sense.
If the DNA is replicated enough times to be placed on 120 different footballs, then the chance of replicating it has been proven by example, so it's basically 100%.
The chance of replicating it without knowledge of it's base pairs is much lower, but if you can get a sample of the DNA (come in contact with a valid game ball), you can easily replicate it 100% without even knowing the sequence. After all, your replicate DNA in your own body tissues without knowledge of the sequence, and similar techniques have been used in the lab for a few decades now.
Ok, here we go.
DNA oxidizes, right? I mean I'm just a lowly ex-research biologist who only worked with the stuff for a period of about 3.5 years; however, I wouldn't expect that base sequence pair to hold together for very long.
Plus DNA doesn't glow green (unless they've discovered something new). There are dyes that can work their way into the double helix and make it appear red (due to the dye being red), but shining a laser at DNA would probably result in a lot of disconnected (or abnormally bonded) base pairs, and a broken (or oxidized) ribose backbone.
I'm suspecting that they are actually tagging the DNA covalently with a flourescent marker that glows green. Such "bonded" markers have been available for quite some time (and in a variety of colors), so such dyes would be easily available to the football engineers (hehe) out there. As the parent poster suggested, then all you would have to do is add the marker to the existing DNA on any old football, and apart from sampling and sequencing the DNA, most people would be statisfied at first glance.
Even though DNA sequencing is getting cheaper every day (I imagine a private individual would have to pay a bit more, but in-house services usually charge around $4 to $8 per sample) so cost won't be a factor. However, the results can be forged, and not many people will tolerate "oversampling" of their prized $5000 football. "Excuse me sir, by may I take a slice?"
Finally, the DNA would oxidize over time, leaving less and less material that would test positive.
Provided that the base pair sequence is published (as it would have to be to allow verification), then sequencing it from scratch is a little more expensive, but an everyday task. And don't get into "authentic" vs. "knock-off" molecule debates please: if all of the atoms are in the same places, the orgins of both molecules are indistinguishable.
What would be cooler is to transgenically insert a sequence into pig zygotes that produces a protein which resists oxidation and flouresces with laser light. Then the whole football would glow, but it's glow would increase with intensity of the right wavelength. Players might complain about it being harder to see a slightly glowing football, but such complaints usually fall on deaf ears, and it's not like the football design never changes (or that we lack "neon" footballs today).
Before people arrive with torches to burn the grammar nazi....
Without posts like this, in about 20 more years any random collection of keystrokes will express some sort of valid English thought.
I no u c wat I m3an.
Flouride can also have a number of real (and perceived) negative health benefits.
:)
I'm not saying that Flouride ranks all the way up there with Cyanoide, but part of the reasoning behind removing Flouride from water systems is that it gets ingested when in the water every day, where at a dentist's office or in tooth paste, it is customarily spit back out.
Since the contact of the Flouride with the tooth is what most people are after, I don't see any need to swallow the stuff afterwards. However, in it's own way, the Flouride / no Flouride in the public water systems argument is more heated (and relevant) than the Emacs / vi debate.
I mean, with the wrong text editor, you only FEEL like you're dying.
Let's see. You're all excited about it's 16" depth, because it will save space.
Realistically, nobody cares too much about depth in a rack, because very few racks are installed to accommodate only 24" of server. On a rack system, it's all about height.
This thing looks like it's a whopping 4U tall! Sure, maybe it's only 3U tall, but that's still missing the point. If you want to save space, you buy a 1U tall server, that way you can install 3 (or 4) of them in the same space. Since you will hardly be able to dictate the depth of all components, it won't matter much if some of your servers are 16" or more.
If you're designing a server room for a small business, you'd be a fool to only allow 16" of rack depth, as you'll never know when someone needs to install the latest full depth server from . Failure to account for such a need will cost you much more when you need to redesign the rack setup to install a new server. I've even seen some non-server components (KVM switches, keyboard / monitor slide-outs, switches, routers, etc) that require more depth for stability (mig case for small internals). People don't throw that stuff away, and you can't guranantee the best components to be in the exact size (or color) you want.
If you're designing a server room for a large business, this might be useful, but only if you can assure yourself that you'll have so many of these 16" servers that they will completely fill up multiple racks. But if you need that many servers, you'll go with 1U servers because then you'll only need 1/4 the number of racks.
So either way, you lose.
Anyone that wants to find such a building doesn't have to resort to Google Maps. Google Maps will just print out a pretty online picuture.
I mean, the address of the White House was been well known for the past 100 years, and no city map of Washington D.C. fails to list it. It's been featured in song, the title of a film, and a trivial pursuit question for decades. I imagine that any Indian seat of power (residence or professional building) is equally as well known within the city's limits (and possibly nationwide).
Google Maps is only going to help the people that need a top-down photograph of the building and surrounding area. The only organizations which could easily profit from such information already have spy planes, satellite photography, survey maps, and other such tools. Other people just need a few dollars to buy the best street map of the city.
It should finish up right after the War on Poverty and the War on Illiteracy.
I guess that's why, after nearly 5 years of articles related to patents, there's still people thinking that patents / trademarks / copyrights are the same thing.
And, NO, I will not explain it again.
Not unusual at all.
c e/charity-watchdogs-1205.htm
If you look around, there's a lot of charaties that perform similar functions. Sometimes they target the same demographic group, sometimes they are bound by the same activity, sometimes they are tied to the same organization.
For example, there's more than one charity that caters to childern in hospitals. Toys for Tots, Child's Play, Get Well Gamers, Candlelight Foundation, Make A Wish Foundation, and The Shriner's Organization. Apologies to those I've missed, as I can not even begin to list them all.
There's more than one charity that appeals to a particular activity. Runners can attest to every race being tied to one charity or another, the organization coordinating the race basically survives and coordinates the race by taking a small cut from the charity proceeds. It's not illegal or unethical, as few runners will pony up charity money un-prompted but most will not gripe about an entrance fee if a portion is going to promote public goodwill. Bingo is a simliar activity driven revenue source for charities, with bingo parlors happily donating a protion of the earnings to charaties to offset ill will towards gambling in the community, and the players love it as they can soothe their losses by knowing that some of the money went to a good cause. I know of bingo parlors in Texas where every game donates to a different charity.
Organizations are another binding agent in the distribution of charity money. If you donate to your alma mater or local college / university, you often can put stipulations on the donation which effictvely makes the organization a multi-charity. One example is to specify that the dontated money is to only be spent on the library, or the departement of Biology, etc. The US Goverment also accepts charity money under such circumstances, and have a departement to distribute charity funds to the correct recipients. I have known a few people who have placed clauses in their wills to have their assets forwarded to paying off the national debt.
So it's not a great travisty to have identical, or near-identical charities competeing in their various arenas. Without competition, even in charaties, they would soon fall prey to the problems inherit with any monopoly. For charaties, that would spell beaurocratic processes for donation, department-based "kingdom building", excessive administration, and less of the donation arriving to its intended recipient.
Be glad you have a choice, one day you may find that a charity is very inefficent in distributing funds, and you might consider changing charities to another that still fulfills your wishes, but is ran by someone else. Consumer reports did a published study of charity comparison, and it was shocking to see how some squandered over 60% of the funds in (mis-)management of the distribution of such funds.
There's an excellent description of the problem at http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/personal-finan
And if you want to donate, http://www.charitywatch.org/ is useful in separating out the dogs from the winners.
If you're a budding programmer, one gem that tends to get overlooked is the so called "Dragon Book." Really it's tile is "Compilers -- Principles, Techniques, and Tools", and although some parts of it have been superceded by modern technology, there is no finer book for dealing with the intricacies of parsing and the ideas behind compiling which seems to crop up in various ways time and time again.
Sure, if you want to build a parser that will beat the benchmarks off of the modern powerhouses, it's just an introductory text. However, before most of those dense research papers become comprehensible, you'll have to be introduced to the technology anyway.
Sort of like posting:
a .html will help.
(from Slashdot) Science: New Ocean Being Formed in Africa
(from BBC NEWS) Geologists Witness 'Ocean Birth'
And then explaining that really it MAY be the birth of an Ocean, or MAY be a big rift that will settle down.
Fortunately, doing a bit of research shows that it's just lazy reporting, as many people with detailed knowledge of Geology have been aware of this "triple-junction" of plates, and the events that tend to indicate that the some of the plates will start moving away from each other. For those with a more graphical mind http://pubs.usgs.gov/publications/text/East_Afric
My complaint is in how poorly this thing was headlined. It's overselling the news. A giant rift widening is exciting enough, and the article can then speculate that it could become an ocean. If it's generally believed that this rift's becoming an ocean is a foregone conclusion, then there's no need for the disclaimer about rifts stabilizing.
The disclaimer is silly. There's little liability for getting a prediction wrong when the results are projected to be apparent in a million years. It does nothing but weaken the article, muddling the facts with a bunch of posits until you can't determine if this is news or hyperbole.
Within the article it states that many prospective ocean basins fizz out and never really develop into ocean basins.
So, are there reasons to expect that this one will develop into a full fledged ocean? I mean, it is not easy to predict future events, but without some measure of certainty, wouldn't a more appropriate title have been "Giant Fissure in Ethiopia Continues to Grow"?
Well, if it's in the SkyMall magazine, I guess you could use it as a backup guidance system.
Delivery would be a pain though. I would suggest DHL, as they have those nifty flying vans that could probably pull alongside the plane. Pay for the "ship it right now" shipping, as the 2-day delivery option isn't very useful when you really need a guidance system.
Yes, people have been doing this for years.
And Slashdot has been reporting people doing this, for years.
It's just that Slashdot keeps reporting it as a "never-been-done-before" event, when it should be reporting this as "another-person-has-just-performed" event.
As another poster has already stated, it's not the first time that RedHat has bought something and then changed the license to an open-source license.
However, this story is just a bit more complicated.
RedHat open-sourced all of the code they could, which was quite a bit, but originally just the main directory daemon, ns-slapd, a few shared libraries and command-line tools were open source. The real news here is that the last of the "other" bits have finally been re-written under a new (open-source) license.
That's part of the motivation for resetting the release nubmer; note that this is verison "1.0" instead of (grumbles about memory) 8 or 9?
So now, it is a 100% open source solution, no more binary-only rpms.
If you are the center of your universe, then I guess it doesn't really make any difference.
However, there are a lot of people who are aware of the others around them, and aware that those others form perceptions based on a lot of silly things. Some of those things include your past work performance, but some of them include how you speak, how well you write, how you hold eye contact, the firmness of your hand shake, the style of your hair, what you wear, the cost of your accessories, the car you drive, your manners, your ability to communicate, and how you esteem others.
Most of the hard stuff to learn (technical aspects of the job, reading and writing well) isn't easy to assess. It takes a technically competent peer to appreciate them, and only in a review setting, and it costs that peer time and energy to appreciate it. On the other hand, nearly anyone appreciates the other stuff, and it's apparent without effort on the part of the observer.
These things are not "magic bullets", because one obviously deficent area always is noticed over the other passable (or even admirable) qualities. Still, it's honorable to not cripple your perception as seen by others. When it is a matter of changing dress, well, that is much easier to change than speaking ability, your skill on the job, or how well you treat others.
So yes, it is silly, but that dress shirt makes you a better person, and hence a better coder, in the eyes of someone who doesn't know good code from bad. Considering that a lot of corporate workers have business degrees, that might be a very good thing for your career.
Now if your the center of your own universe, then it doesn't matter what I wrote, or what others think. Just don't come griping when you dislike the consequences of not pandering to anyone.
There are many, many indisputible cases of tiny amounts of thing causing huge amounts of impact.
mercury posioning: Miniscule amounts of mercury permanently alter and damage developing brains, creating irreversible damage.
Enzymes within the metabolic pathway: The body reuses enzymes millions and millions of times to break down sugars, you don't create one enzyme for each stage in the cycle, for each sugar.
Acids and Bases: They change the pH of a large body of unbuffered water, reguarless of the miniscule quantities used.
Bad smells: Merthancapter (Sp?) is routinely used by natural gas companies to give natural gas it's bad smell, they add it in at one part per billion, or (%0.0001), and we can smell it quite easily. At those levels of sensitivity, I imagine we'll notice a change of (%0.0375) and other life will too.
Now to look at your examples:
We went from 260ppm CO2 to 375ppm CO2. Atmospheric CO2 is part of a carbon cycle which stays in equilibrium due to plants pulling it out of the atmosphere. Add more plants, the number drops. Add more CO2, and the atmosphere gets better for plant life. So even with conditions being prime for plants, and plants pulling out even more CO2 than before, there's still an increase in CO2 levels. It's not like we added a measly 115ppm, it's just that we added so much that the planet can't handle it. Also, if you expected it to be a lot more, please consider the size of a CO2 molecule in comparison to the size of the atmosphere.
And it is a planetary issue, so pointing fingers at China may make us feel better, until we realize that we are all on the same planet (and that we did nothing because finger pointing it the best excuse for our own bad behavior).
The Earth also kills off massive amounts of life in cycles.
Just because it is a cycle doesn't mean it is a good thing.
Just because it is a natural process doesn't mean it is good for us.
Consider how much damage you would sustain should your vehicle stop from normal cruising speed by hitting a fixed concrete bride. Please remember that deacceleration, intertia, force, momentum, and velocity are all natural things which change in cycles on your daily drive. Also realize that there is no need to divert your path into a bridge because of the "natural-ness" of these phenomena or their cyclic tendencies.
We know that we assist in "making the world warmer sooner". Yet we argue that it's not a bad thing, because the planet sometimes was warmer and sometimes was cooler. It is sad when you consider that all of the major warmer and cooler periods of our plante were not periods when human population was dominant like it is today. By the same logic, arguments that we shouldn't care about global warming since it's a natural process are simlar to arguments that we shouldn't care about our own massive population reduction (and possible exinction) by the natural pressures of living on a warmer planet.
Warming the plant (not just having a warm season or two) melts ice, which releases water, which raises shorelines. It changes wind patterns, making local weather changes in communities. The air and water has more energy than before, leading to more hurricanes and more severe weather in general. Warmer oceans allow beds of frozen methane underneath the oceans to melt, releasing methane into the atmosphere (sometimes violently). Warmer weather puts easily combustible items a bit closer to their burning point, creating better conditions for forest fires, underground coal fires, and fire in general. And we have not mentioned the number of people that already die or are permanently injured by heat stroke, or the cost of lost production due to "cool down" breaks due to warm weather.
Life does not take kindly to most climate changes. What lives around you is there because it thrives in the climate typical for your area. If that climate changes, these plants / insects / animals will no longer be suited to their habitat, allowing foreign plants / insects / animals to intrude.
So look around. If you like what you see, then perhaps you should be arguing that we should not hurry nature, after all, nature has this nasty habit of killing off and radically changing the life that is on our planet's surface. Yes, global warming is a cycle, but so is the carbon cycle, and I don't believe you are in a rush to decompose and release your carbon back into the atmosphere anytime soon.
How does assisting in one effort deny other efforts.
Assuming Google does NOTHING to help the MacOSX community, they will still make 00.org smaller, and that will still make it easier for those who do perform the port.
Maybe one thing has something to do with the other?
Or if you don't want the core issues worked on, perhaps a patch can be put in place that shows you a blank document, but doesn't allow you to touch it for two minutes.
Sort of like the windows login!
Just imagine, and Digital kept pushing their Alpha CPUs on everyone. The didn't even make it to Beta, and it's no wonder that HP scrapped thier remains.
Or, you could perhaps look at the software to see if it meets your needs, and not get so excited about the release name / revision. Considering that there are not a lot of ways to make Windows executables run on Linux, even a pre-that-thing-before-alpha sounds better than nothing at all.
And no, virtual machines running windows isn't the same thing as running a windows exe on Linux, but those who's needs are met by such workarounds are not those who drive the Wine project anyway.