We wont even need a war that becomes inevitable once resources get scarce. No, nature will take care of it first. The more there are people, the more densely populated the world, the more likely is a proper pandemic. People go every day from one end of the world to another. All you need is a germ that is highly contagious, lethal and has a 3 day latency period and most of that 7 billion will drop dead and it wont even take very long. This is bound to occur within this century. All the highly sterile environments we insist on keeping are perfect breeding grounds for such a disease.
So what's your point? We don't need to do anything, the problem will take care of itself? I think the point of people worrying about population growth is that we should do something deliberate about it before nature does something about that we have no control over. Or people will do something deliberate but undesirable. That disease you speak of may well kill you or me, not just the people overpopulating:-)
How is it the last space walk? I mean, it could be, but it's not like NASA is planning on never sending humans into space again-- they're just not using shuttles anymore. It may be awhile, but we'll certainly see more NASA astronauts in space, probably using rockets.
Read it carefully. It's the last space walk of the shuttle era. The ISS guys will probably be space walking again next month - it just won't be during the shuttle era then. So this one is really a big yawn.
You beat me to it. The last launch, the last docking, the last poop taken on the shuttle. Each of these (except the poop) has been hyped as the last thing or the end. Actually, the end should be when it lands, but then they'll bring it up again when it reaches its final resting place in a museum. I'd be glad to see it go, if only they had something better:-) Shame on NASA for not advancing human space vehicle design in 35 years. Lets flush this thing and move on.
Cairo has an OpenGL backend already, so it gives you some of that benefit already. Dumping anything without OpenGL for a 20 percent performance boost seems silly to me.
The heart of the Internet model is, as the saying goes "a sphere", where every node has equal access to every other node
No, it's not, nor has it ever been. Such a network would be completely impractical, both from a technological/economic perspective, and from a security perspective.
Society as a whole (when weighted by money rather than head-count) keeps trying to reject that in favour of it being a fancy way to broadcast: a few large hosts running Wal-Mart-sized data centres, many clients on as dumb a terminal as possible.
Right - people want functionality. They don't want every person to write their own version of facebook - they want a large service which everyone can access. Money has nothing to do with it - it's about usefulness.
Efforts to democratize information flow are opposed as either unserious utopianism or outright crime. (They can't seem to find a statute forbidding Wikileaks that doesn't forbid the Times, but from the rhetoric, you'd never guess.)
Complete nonsense, of course, supported by nothing other than your personal ideological biases.
Actually he's right on. The net has always been peer to peer. And while nobody wants to write their own facebook, a lot of us would like a small server at home that comes preloaded with an email server, facebook server (just for family profiles), and a few other services - like making my data available from anywhere (my personal cloud). All of this could be encrypted and backed up in a distributed way (on your friends servers for example). All communication could use public key encryption and require no middleman or "cloud services". It would be awesome, private, secure, distributed, and eventually illegal. Nobody with money wants it. The only thing stopping it is giving everyone a fixed IP and someone to put together a software bundle. It's all technically straight forward. You'd still go to the big guys for news and search and specific sites, but your IP would identify you - not some protocol that can be used from an anonymous virtual address:-)
Just mandate people get fixed IP addresses - or blocks of them. Sure, use SSL and such existing protocols. Oh right, the ISPs don't want you to have one.
Now that we've all learned from the Fuck-U-Shima accident in Japan, let me give you a refresher. The power to the plant is off, disconnected, out of order. That means the pumps for the spent fuel pool are running on diesel generators. That's all well and good, but you are one fuel shortage away from a complete power outage. If the power goes out for a few days, the spent fuel pools start to boil off water, the rods get exposed - which means not enough cooling - and then they melt - right there in the swimming pool which is not contained anything like a reactor core - in fact, since it's shut down the core is probably in the pool. Is this scenario likely to happen? If I had to bet money I'd say no. If I lived nearby I'd pay close attention. As it is, I eat enough food from the midwest to follow this one, and I'm down wind like half the country. It doesn't look easy to do maintenance there with a couple feet of water for miles around. Nuclear plants that are "shut down" are not safe to evacuate and leave until the flood waters subside - not even close.
Python is a pretty good language overall, but forcing beginners to understand that whitespace makes a difference in how something executes is asking for trouble.
They're going to be forced to understand something. The whitespace thing probably is a little odd to a beginner, but if it's presented as "this is how it's done" then maybe it's OK. The worst thing when I was a kid would have been mandatory understanding of objects and data structures. I didn't even know what an array was until I tried to do a pac-man clone and wanted 4 ghosts. I figured they'd each have 2-letter variables: x1,y1,d1 for position and direction, but I'd need to replicate the logic 4 times. I complained to my dad that xn was another specific variable and I wanted to use a for loop with n specifying which x,y,d it was working with. He promptly showed me x(n), y(n), d(n) and I was ecstatic! Now contrast that with someone being told about arrays or data structures prior to them having the need... I think a lot of CS focuses on the abstractions too early. Of course that's what CS is all about, but for someone learning on their own they need to be able to experiment without all that "stuff" and boiler plate or the need to learn objects. I think Python would be ideal and the need for proper white-space can just be presented as a fact of life.
You didn't support this statement (which I'm actually interested in, as I've never developed for a Mac)... you just said that.net isn't cross-platform so is worse than the cross-platform GUIs you mentioned.
It is worse for *their* application. Because it is not cross platform they will need to maintain 2 large chunks of redundant code for the other platforms. I didn't mean to say.net is bad for windows, but it's bad for cross platform projects because it simply doesn't handle that for you, and using different GUI libraries within you product basically mean you reinvent wx in-house. And I'm only talking GUIs - they may have a bunch of.net code for other things that simply won't run on the others.
So if they knew they wanted a cross-platform product, why didn't your company select tools that work on all three platforms? For cross-platform GUIs there is ummm QT, GTK and wx. OK, wx is a wrapper but in some ways that's actually better because it uses native widgets. All three work on all 3 OSes you mentioned. Don't think your.net is better than what your MAC coworkers are doing - the company wants a cross-platform product and your chosen tool doesn't provide that - in fact, it hurts by not being common to all 3.
This is all what Joel said in his blog about Fire and Motion. Every second you have to think about platform changes, you're wasting time that would be better spent building your product or even making it platform independent or even competing with MS - hey, you're both writing software. Windows developers are on a treadmill and think that's a normal condition. There are mature ways to write mostly platform independent code these days. This entire discussion is for people who are not using them - the rest honestly don't care and will not be wasting time thinking about it.
The way I see it is that MS is trying to push toward an easy interface for creating apps
So they're switching to Qt or GTK? Probably Qt but it doesn't really matter because they'll also provide wx so you can use the language of your choice and the UI details will be transparent. So what that means is dumping a bunch of legacy code and providing wx.net. Sounds good to me, I won't have to change a thing to remain cross-platform.
If they needed to learn the lessons, they could have set up shop in Detroit and hired people who already knew the answers. I work with guys who have been doing this stuff since the early 90's. I even worked on battery systems for one of the big 3 last millenium before doing some other things. Now I'm back with some of the same guys working on volume production stuff now that the cost is down and the market is better. Oh, but teslas whole marketing message was that Detroit fucked up the electric car so their cool California company was going to show them how to do it right.
Considering that approximately 66% of electricity in the US is generated by fossil fuels, electric cars are not really much of an alternative. Just because you don't burn fossil fuels directly in the car doesn't mean they are not dependent on fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels are not restricted to oil. In fact very little of our electricity comes from oil. That means a shift from oil to electricity reduces our oil dependence which is a good thing. It's not the ultimate solution, just mid-term solution. I also didn't see you offer anything that would classify as an actual alternative...
Above and beyond that, Tesla has a lot of patents. They have the best batteries in the industry. Tesla is a long way from going out of business. If anything their biggest concern is probably trying to figure out how to not get gobbled up by another company who just wants their intellectual property.
Tesla doesn't make batteries. OK, they probably make "batteries" but not cells. I haven't heard of any interesting "IP" that tesla has. The Toyota deal struck me as odd. Toyota could certainly do it on their own, so it suggests that Tesla needed the money and Toyota figured they'd fill the plugin hole in their lineup with a minimum of effort. Nothing wrong with that BTW.
Get a clue. Prior art is relevant to "first to file" as well as "first to invent". You cannot invent something which already exists, so prior art is an absolute obstacle in either case. The difference between first to file and first to invent is that it's much easier to determine who was first to file. For first to invent, it's necessary to examine the evidence of invention (lab notebooks, internal emails, notes of discussions, etc.).
You put out a product. Someone else gets a patent on some feature (possibly hidden from view, they didn't even know you did it). Now, because they filed and you didn't, you are screwed. You seem to be saying that under the new rules you could use your prior "invention" as a way to overturn the patent entirely. As it is now, you can use your prior invention to get exemption from paying royalties. Under which system will the big guys fight harder in court to squash you? Under the old system they can roll over and let you "infringe", under the new one that would completely invalidate the patent. You're ignoring what "first to file" actually means - it means you get patents for filing, not inventing. And that's where the constitutional challenge lies - government is allowed to reward inventors, not filers.
The PTO says it costs $400,000-$500,000 to pursue an interference proceeding, claiming the right to a patent based on an earlier invention.
That sounds like a savings, but the reality is that the change means you're just FUCKED. Now, if you find you're infringing a patent you can spend 400 to 500K and show that you invented it first and you are not infringing (other may be, but not you). After this, the option to defend yourself WILL BE GONE. Because some company patents something you're already doing, you will be barred from doing it. period. end of story. Because they filed first.
I find it odd that the US considers itself to be a leader in innovation, but we need to change our system to match the rest of the world...
But why does the criminal part say "commenced within 5 years after the cause of action arose." and the civil one says "commenced within three years after the claim accrued."? What is this distinction?
I suppose defining the number of bits in types would be too much to ask? They give an example that uses an LL suffix for long long. I assume this means a 64bit integer. Would it be too much to define something like int16 or int_16? We have lots of code that uses typedefs to get these, and different projects sometimes define them differently. I know they'd argue that it breaks existing code - since people have already defined these types - but search and replace could be used. Perhaps they could provide a migration tool like Python did from 2.x to 3.0.
These guys engaged in industrial espionage, pure and simple.
One 'violated the privacy policy of the company,' two got information through 'illegal means' causing 'huge losses,' and they all 'infringed trade secrets.'
Violating company "privacy policy" is not industrial espionage, nor should it be a criminal matter. Getting the information through illegal means is. Causing "huge loesse" through competition... Hmm did they actually sell any? before the product launched (i.e. the could have designed it anyway)? I'll give you the industrial espionage, but that's not what they were charged with. Or maybe it was just lost in translation.
It appears that this move isn't meddling from Redmond; rather, the private equity firm that owns a 70 percent stake in Skype wanted to cut back on the payout to company execs that would normally accompany this kind of transaction.
If the situation is what the summary suggests, the execs will sue them and the investor will end up paying legal fees AND whatever their obligation would have been had they not been fired.
About 50% of the Sun's energy is absorbed at the Earth's surface and the rest is reflected or absorbed by the atmosphere. The reflection of light back into space—largely by clouds—does not much affect the basic mechanism; this light, effectively, is lost to the system.
This seems to be a hand waving rejection that increased cloud cover would reduce global temperatures. Since cloud formation can be initiated by con-trails, this seems to me a nontrival thing, but they reject it. If you look at the article on pan evaporation rates, they also downplay (ignore) the fact that sunlight is the primary driver of the evaporation rate - even though some of the references indicate that - and make it sound like a complex dependence on ground level atmospheric conditions. Hence global dimming isn't a real phenomenon.
Bottom line is that real data gets thrown out whenever a topic gets infected by politics.
Slashdot Mirror
So what's your point? We don't need to do anything, the problem will take care of itself? I think the point of people worrying about population growth is that we should do something deliberate about it before nature does something about that we have no control over. Or people will do something deliberate but undesirable. That disease you speak of may well kill you or me, not just the people overpopulating :-)
Read it carefully. It's the last space walk of the shuttle era. The ISS guys will probably be space walking again next month - it just won't be during the shuttle era then. So this one is really a big yawn.
You beat me to it. The last launch, the last docking, the last poop taken on the shuttle. Each of these (except the poop) has been hyped as the last thing or the end. Actually, the end should be when it lands, but then they'll bring it up again when it reaches its final resting place in a museum. I'd be glad to see it go, if only they had something better :-) Shame on NASA for not advancing human space vehicle design in 35 years. Lets flush this thing and move on.
Too bad they destroyed the airport, or I'd fly in to see the show.
Cairo has an OpenGL backend already, so it gives you some of that benefit already. Dumping anything without OpenGL for a 20 percent performance boost seems silly to me.
Actually he's right on. The net has always been peer to peer. And while nobody wants to write their own facebook, a lot of us would like a small server at home that comes preloaded with an email server, facebook server (just for family profiles), and a few other services - like making my data available from anywhere (my personal cloud). All of this could be encrypted and backed up in a distributed way (on your friends servers for example). All communication could use public key encryption and require no middleman or "cloud services". It would be awesome, private, secure, distributed, and eventually illegal. Nobody with money wants it. The only thing stopping it is giving everyone a fixed IP and someone to put together a software bundle. It's all technically straight forward. You'd still go to the big guys for news and search and specific sites, but your IP would identify you - not some protocol that can be used from an anonymous virtual address :-)
Just mandate people get fixed IP addresses - or blocks of them. Sure, use SSL and such existing protocols. Oh right, the ISPs don't want you to have one.
Now that we've all learned from the Fuck-U-Shima accident in Japan, let me give you a refresher. The power to the plant is off, disconnected, out of order. That means the pumps for the spent fuel pool are running on diesel generators. That's all well and good, but you are one fuel shortage away from a complete power outage. If the power goes out for a few days, the spent fuel pools start to boil off water, the rods get exposed - which means not enough cooling - and then they melt - right there in the swimming pool which is not contained anything like a reactor core - in fact, since it's shut down the core is probably in the pool. Is this scenario likely to happen? If I had to bet money I'd say no. If I lived nearby I'd pay close attention. As it is, I eat enough food from the midwest to follow this one, and I'm down wind like half the country. It doesn't look easy to do maintenance there with a couple feet of water for miles around. Nuclear plants that are "shut down" are not safe to evacuate and leave until the flood waters subside - not even close.
They're going to be forced to understand something. The whitespace thing probably is a little odd to a beginner, but if it's presented as "this is how it's done" then maybe it's OK. The worst thing when I was a kid would have been mandatory understanding of objects and data structures. I didn't even know what an array was until I tried to do a pac-man clone and wanted 4 ghosts. I figured they'd each have 2-letter variables: x1,y1,d1 for position and direction, but I'd need to replicate the logic 4 times. I complained to my dad that xn was another specific variable and I wanted to use a for loop with n specifying which x,y,d it was working with. He promptly showed me x(n), y(n), d(n) and I was ecstatic! Now contrast that with someone being told about arrays or data structures prior to them having the need... I think a lot of CS focuses on the abstractions too early. Of course that's what CS is all about, but for someone learning on their own they need to be able to experiment without all that "stuff" and boiler plate or the need to learn objects. I think Python would be ideal and the need for proper white-space can just be presented as a fact of life.
It is worse for *their* application. Because it is not cross platform they will need to maintain 2 large chunks of redundant code for the other platforms. I didn't mean to say .net is bad for windows, but it's bad for cross platform projects because it simply doesn't handle that for you, and using different GUI libraries within you product basically mean you reinvent wx in-house. And I'm only talking GUIs - they may have a bunch of .net code for other things that simply won't run on the others.
They say the atmosphere is 95 percent CO2. They should see if any plant species can grow there.
Is a 1280x800 resolution screen - perhaps 11 inch size.
So if they knew they wanted a cross-platform product, why didn't your company select tools that work on all three platforms? For cross-platform GUIs there is ummm QT, GTK and wx. OK, wx is a wrapper but in some ways that's actually better because it uses native widgets. All three work on all 3 OSes you mentioned. Don't think your .net is better than what your MAC coworkers are doing - the company wants a cross-platform product and your chosen tool doesn't provide that - in fact, it hurts by not being common to all 3.
This is all what Joel said in his blog about Fire and Motion. Every second you have to think about platform changes, you're wasting time that would be better spent building your product or even making it platform independent or even competing with MS - hey, you're both writing software. Windows developers are on a treadmill and think that's a normal condition. There are mature ways to write mostly platform independent code these days. This entire discussion is for people who are not using them - the rest honestly don't care and will not be wasting time thinking about it.
So they're switching to Qt or GTK? Probably Qt but it doesn't really matter because they'll also provide wx so you can use the language of your choice and the UI details will be transparent. So what that means is dumping a bunch of legacy code and providing wx.net. Sounds good to me, I won't have to change a thing to remain cross-platform.
If they needed to learn the lessons, they could have set up shop in Detroit and hired people who already knew the answers. I work with guys who have been doing this stuff since the early 90's. I even worked on battery systems for one of the big 3 last millenium before doing some other things. Now I'm back with some of the same guys working on volume production stuff now that the cost is down and the market is better. Oh, but teslas whole marketing message was that Detroit fucked up the electric car so their cool California company was going to show them how to do it right.
Fossil fuels are not restricted to oil. In fact very little of our electricity comes from oil. That means a shift from oil to electricity reduces our oil dependence which is a good thing. It's not the ultimate solution, just mid-term solution. I also didn't see you offer anything that would classify as an actual alternative...
Tesla doesn't make batteries. OK, they probably make "batteries" but not cells. I haven't heard of any interesting "IP" that tesla has. The Toyota deal struck me as odd. Toyota could certainly do it on their own, so it suggests that Tesla needed the money and Toyota figured they'd fill the plugin hole in their lineup with a minimum of effort. Nothing wrong with that BTW.
You put out a product. Someone else gets a patent on some feature (possibly hidden from view, they didn't even know you did it). Now, because they filed and you didn't, you are screwed. You seem to be saying that under the new rules you could use your prior "invention" as a way to overturn the patent entirely. As it is now, you can use your prior invention to get exemption from paying royalties. Under which system will the big guys fight harder in court to squash you? Under the old system they can roll over and let you "infringe", under the new one that would completely invalidate the patent. You're ignoring what "first to file" actually means - it means you get patents for filing, not inventing. And that's where the constitutional challenge lies - government is allowed to reward inventors, not filers.
That sounds like a savings, but the reality is that the change means you're just FUCKED. Now, if you find you're infringing a patent you can spend 400 to 500K and show that you invented it first and you are not infringing (other may be, but not you). After this, the option to defend yourself WILL BE GONE. Because some company patents something you're already doing, you will be barred from doing it. period. end of story. Because they filed first.
I find it odd that the US considers itself to be a leader in innovation, but we need to change our system to match the rest of the world...
You should be modded up for that.
But why does the criminal part say "commenced within 5 years after the cause of action arose." and the civil one says "commenced within three years after the claim accrued."? What is this distinction?
I suppose defining the number of bits in types would be too much to ask? They give an example that uses an LL suffix for long long. I assume this means a 64bit integer. Would it be too much to define something like int16 or int_16? We have lots of code that uses typedefs to get these, and different projects sometimes define them differently. I know they'd argue that it breaks existing code - since people have already defined these types - but search and replace could be used. Perhaps they could provide a migration tool like Python did from 2.x to 3.0.
One 'violated the privacy policy of the company,' two got information through 'illegal means' causing 'huge losses,' and they all 'infringed trade secrets.'
Violating company "privacy policy" is not industrial espionage, nor should it be a criminal matter. Getting the information through illegal means is. Causing "huge loesse" through competition... Hmm did they actually sell any? before the product launched (i.e. the could have designed it anyway)? I'll give you the industrial espionage, but that's not what they were charged with. Or maybe it was just lost in translation.
If the situation is what the summary suggests, the execs will sue them and the investor will end up paying legal fees AND whatever their obligation would have been had they not been fired.
From the Wikipedia entry on greenhouse effect:
This seems to be a hand waving rejection that increased cloud cover would reduce global temperatures. Since cloud formation can be initiated by con-trails, this seems to me a nontrival thing, but they reject it. If you look at the article on pan evaporation rates, they also downplay (ignore) the fact that sunlight is the primary driver of the evaporation rate - even though some of the references indicate that - and make it sound like a complex dependence on ground level atmospheric conditions. Hence global dimming isn't a real phenomenon.
Bottom line is that real data gets thrown out whenever a topic gets infected by politics.