How do you suggest we help these sex slaves, carpet bomb their village? The west could wipe out ISIS in a week, faster if we used tactical nukes, the reason we don't do that is that we value the lives ISIS are so eager to sacrifice. Containing these arseholes to one patch of desert is the best we can do right now, they have bitten off way more than they can chew. We tried a ground army and it made things worse, we don't need to spill our own blood purging Saddam's generals from the desert, time is rapidly turning their own tribe against them.
In a historical sense ISIS may have actually done something useful, they concentrated the command and control of islamic extremists into one place and have united the Sunni's, Shiites, and Kurds in a fight against a common enemy. They are penned in on all sides by nations that are hostile towards them, they have no hope of expanding beyond Syria/Iraq (and possibly Afghanistan) via military means. What happens after ISIS is gone I don't know, but the idea of a caliphate where they are not in charge is scaring the shit out of all of the tribal leaders right now and may just force the three tribes to find a more civilised way of disagreeing.
This war is a muslim war, if we charge in now boots and all it will revert to a muslim vs the west war which is precisely what ISIS wants, they want us to try and root them out because they believe that would line up the tribes behind them (better the devil you know and all that). The best thing the west can do now is work with Russia to avoid falling into the old cold war pattern of fighting proxy wars using impoverished nations as their pawns. If the west and Russia start openly fighting for influence in the region, we are in a different and much more deadly ball park.
My lady friend is 51 and has been playing an MMO called "internet bridge" for well over a decade, there are some serious players, competitions offer good prize money, a high ranking player can actually make a decent living teaching others how to play well. She also enjoys "world of tanks" (no blood and guts), 20K+ battles under her belt. She's not upset because I won't play bridge, I'm not upset because she won't play StarCraft.
My lady friend also happens to have a PhD in marketing, the whole "controversy" is simply a marketing exercise so that people like my lady friend can identify with the label "gamer". However the way they have gone about trying to broaden the definition of "gamer" by associating it with adolescent "greifers" and throwing it overboard has blown up in their faces since the demographic you point to overwhelmingly interprets the whole thing as political correctness gone mad. Rather than broaden their audience they have divided it into two camps; people who play games, and people who claim the ability to read their minds....for a price.
I was taught OO was a design methodology, smalltalk was the only well-known implementation at the time, however it was made clear to us that most of the examples in K&R are also excellent examples of OO thinking. The fundamental dogmas of OO are encapsulation and reuse and this is a good thing when applied properly, the problem is that in the real world everything is interconnected and copy-paste-edit is often much more efficient in time/money than genuine reuse. Once you have generalized things to the point where the model is more complex than the subject of the model, then you have gone way too far. Personally I think the OO jargon just obfuscates some very simple and powerful design tools, it would have been more enlightening to reuse the existing engineering terminology and call it "modular design"
Watcom's (circa 1991) C++ compiler was simply their C compiler plus a layer of C macro's. Yes you read that correctly, the C++ language features were all implemented with C macros. I had to fight with the thing for two years, there was no other option for "PenOS". The GUI classes and other major chunks of the SDK were implemented with these macros, you could not just ignore them, nor could you avoid them with straight C workarounds.
I started developing software for a living in 1990, I used to teach C programming to second year engineering students. I'm not offended when someone displays their ignorance, and there's no shortage of arrogance in the software industry. Truth is, we all look at the code and think "surely there's a simpler way than this". Experience teaches you that there usually isn't.
Does shag pile carpet stop his air conditioner from working, not sure but it's worth thinking about. - Seriously, the sad part is that he is not simply ignorant, he's willfully ignorant.
Under a runaway GH scenario the Earth's limestone would ignite not longer after the oceans boil (assuming there's enough oxygen left for it to burn). H2O is a powerful GHG, the amount that can be held by the atmosphere depends solely on temperature and pressure. The Earth's water vapour content has risen by roughly 5% since 1980 due the the warmer climate, still a long way from evaporating completely but there is a point well below the boiling point of water where the oceans will evaporate. A point of no return for sure, but no human will witness it because we will be well and truly fucked long before we get there..
Believing that burning ALL fossil fuels would NOT result in a runaway GH is either wishful thinking or just plain ignorance. Science tells us that a runaway GH is the NATURAL fate of our planet and without our help will occur in about 500 million years from now. However if we put our minds to it we could accomplish the same thing in less than a 250yrs.
Yes there were times in the distant past when CO2 was ten times what it is now but there was also zero oxygen in the atmosphere for about 3.5 billion years, what's your point, do you really think we can't surpass pre-historic levels? There is also more carbon available on the Earth's surface today than a billion years ago, no pixies required, light elements such as carbon are still bleeding to the surface from the molten core via the actions of tectonic plates. These well studied scenarios are not the work of greenpeace, it is text book planetary science that we have known about for over half a century, had you done more thinking and less "criticising" you would already know that.
Coal and nuclear produce a flat supply curve, a modern city has a wavy demand curve. To meet the demand curve so-called "base load" power already pumps water up hill in off-peak, and uses gas turbines to make up the slack on-peak. In other words, the "complex grid" you say you need to match the demand curve already exists.
" your password recovery phrase will be the street you lived on in high school or the name of your first dog. This is not secure" if the email account it sends the password to has already been compromised.
Free markets are only optimal for exploiting resources...
That's a very astute observation, OTOH; OPEC is not a free market, it's a cartel. A free market is one where anyone is free to participate, it has nothing to do with the quantity or quality of regulation.
Nitpick: We have no fault divorce here in Oz and the "old" telstra was state owned up until the 1990's.
However your logic is spot on. Telstra can retrieve the information easily (and do on a regular basis for police work). However the law does not compel them to give it to customers and they don't want to set a precedent by doing so. The only way you will get it is to wave a court order at them. Good luck, their lawyers are very likely better qualified and more numerous than yours.
Calls actually haven't needed to be "traced" since the 1960s, but nobody told the government.
I think you meant to say, 'nobody told hollywood', I was born in 1959, it has been common knowledge since at least the early 70's that the "keep 'em on the line" trope is bullshit, in the same way CSI style "infinite zoom" is widely seen as a 'theatrical device" today.
Personally I appreciate it when hollywood takes pride in getting the scientific and technical detail straight and the idea seems to be more popular than ever with shows like the Simpsons, Futurama, BBT, etc. But I still enjoy Star Trek, Dr Who, Buffy, et-al because the trick to good entertainment is not accuracy, colour, or special effects, it's about "suspension of disbelief". We enjoy drama because it tells a human story, it's the fictional human interactions that enthrall us, not the fictional events they are reacting to. If the interactions are implausible the theater will be empty, if the events are implausible it often adds interesting twists to the human story, eg Douglas Adams infinite improbability drive..
I worked for them for several years, of course they can retrieve that information, they do it on a regular basis for the cops. Half of the info is on the itemised phone bill. What you won't get (without a court order) is the other half of the information about who called you.
Must be an American thing, here in Oz your average John-o and Steve-o play with their leg-o, great for keeping them occupied while dad nicks down to the bottle-o.
For me, Greenpeace lost all credibility in the 1980's when one by one the founding scientist left in disgust, the last one left in the early 90's when Greenpeace were using a mountain of pseudo-science to attack the use of chlorine in drinking water (arguably the most effective public health measure of the 20th century). Basically the leadership was taken over by political types and they lost their scientific roots. However I am grateful for the fact they put an end to nuking pacific islands in my neighbourhood, and wish them the best of luck in their efforts to kill the coal industry before it kills us.
Will the people who "stole" your credit card ever be caught? No.
I think you will find the remand centers of the western world are chock full of people defending credit card fraud charges.
Will the people who decided NOT to protect it ever be punished? No.
Not sure about the US but most of the western world have laws covering the storage of financial data, belive me you don't want to fuck with the banks on those rules.
Is there anything you can do? Aside from using cash everywhere? Not really.
Again, not sure what happens in the US but here in Oz the credit company foots the bill if you've been ripped off. People who foot the bill themselves are usually doing so to avoid having a relative or "friend" formally charged with fraud. If you do get stung by a drive by hacker it takes a few weeks to sort but everyone I know who has had that problem has had their money returned by the bank, one card was drained of 25K by people having a wonderful time touring Europe.
It's worked that way since the mid-90's, possibly earlier. At the end of the day it's in their best interest to keep the customer happy and claw back the "spillage" with interest rates. If they were to change their policy and tell everyone "tough titties" it wouldn't take more than a few years to reach the point where everyone had a few friends who really did lose thousands in one hit. At that point the credit cards would have a terminal problem with distrust since any rational person would start avoiding plastic like the plague.
I've been a software developer for longer than some slashdotters have been alive, sure programming is a creative exercise, to quote Knuth it's both an "art and a science". However a programmer is merely using technology, not creating it. If you don't agree, think about the music world, is a good composer creating new technology or merely using it skillfully?
It's also hard to see how anyone but a megacorp or government could build a chip fab plant or a HDD factory. Take a look at those two commodity devices and compare them to their 1980's counterparts, now tell me again how corporations and/or governments stifle technology?
Ironically, your assumption that fish just calmly swim about waiting to be eaten by a 30 ton killer whale is an excellent example of the GP's original point about humans and jail cells.
Is a parrot "communicating" with you when it says "Polly want a cracker?"
If it wants one and has received them in the past using that sound, then clearly, yes. The "monkey see, monkey do" hypothesis is nonsense born from the perfectly natural tendency of humans to believe they hold a special place in the animal kingdom. For example, there's a native bird in the hills near where I live called a lyrebird. It's said to be the world's best mimic (check it out on YT), it will accurately mimic any other sound it hears.
What people rarely mention, or even notice, about this "mimic" is that it is also displaying creativity when it takes those sounds and forms a unique song. Once it has created its own unique song it remembers it and builds on it in the next mating season, similar to the way jazz musicians improvise around a basic theme. But a more accurate analogy would be a musician who creates aesthetically pleasing soundtracks from samples to attract and impress the opposite sex, both analogies also imply the opposite sex posses some form of "artistic taste".
What TFA really shows is that dolphins and whales adapt their "language" to the environment they find themselves in. Humans also do this, nobody is surprised when an English baby born in England but raised by Chinese parents in China, grows up speaking Chinese. Apes can do it via sign language but they will never speak to us because their vocal chord anatomy is not up to the task
Slashdot Mirror
How do you suggest we help these sex slaves, carpet bomb their village? The west could wipe out ISIS in a week, faster if we used tactical nukes, the reason we don't do that is that we value the lives ISIS are so eager to sacrifice. Containing these arseholes to one patch of desert is the best we can do right now, they have bitten off way more than they can chew. We tried a ground army and it made things worse, we don't need to spill our own blood purging Saddam's generals from the desert, time is rapidly turning their own tribe against them.
In a historical sense ISIS may have actually done something useful, they concentrated the command and control of islamic extremists into one place and have united the Sunni's, Shiites, and Kurds in a fight against a common enemy. They are penned in on all sides by nations that are hostile towards them, they have no hope of expanding beyond Syria/Iraq (and possibly Afghanistan) via military means. What happens after ISIS is gone I don't know, but the idea of a caliphate where they are not in charge is scaring the shit out of all of the tribal leaders right now and may just force the three tribes to find a more civilised way of disagreeing.
This war is a muslim war, if we charge in now boots and all it will revert to a muslim vs the west war which is precisely what ISIS wants, they want us to try and root them out because they believe that would line up the tribes behind them (better the devil you know and all that). The best thing the west can do now is work with Russia to avoid falling into the old cold war pattern of fighting proxy wars using impoverished nations as their pawns. If the west and Russia start openly fighting for influence in the region, we are in a different and much more deadly ball park.
My lady friend is 51 and has been playing an MMO called "internet bridge" for well over a decade, there are some serious players, competitions offer good prize money, a high ranking player can actually make a decent living teaching others how to play well. She also enjoys "world of tanks" (no blood and guts), 20K+ battles under her belt. She's not upset because I won't play bridge, I'm not upset because she won't play StarCraft.
My lady friend also happens to have a PhD in marketing, the whole "controversy" is simply a marketing exercise so that people like my lady friend can identify with the label "gamer". However the way they have gone about trying to broaden the definition of "gamer" by associating it with adolescent "greifers" and throwing it overboard has blown up in their faces since the demographic you point to overwhelmingly interprets the whole thing as political correctness gone mad. Rather than broaden their audience they have divided it into two camps; people who play games, and people who claim the ability to read their minds....for a price.
I was taught OO was a design methodology, smalltalk was the only well-known implementation at the time, however it was made clear to us that most of the examples in K&R are also excellent examples of OO thinking. The fundamental dogmas of OO are encapsulation and reuse and this is a good thing when applied properly, the problem is that in the real world everything is interconnected and copy-paste-edit is often much more efficient in time/money than genuine reuse. Once you have generalized things to the point where the model is more complex than the subject of the model, then you have gone way too far. Personally I think the OO jargon just obfuscates some very simple and powerful design tools, it would have been more enlightening to reuse the existing engineering terminology and call it "modular design"
Watcom's (circa 1991) C++ compiler was simply their C compiler plus a layer of C macro's. Yes you read that correctly, the C++ language features were all implemented with C macros. I had to fight with the thing for two years, there was no other option for "PenOS". The GUI classes and other major chunks of the SDK were implemented with these macros, you could not just ignore them, nor could you avoid them with straight C workarounds.
Neat, but what's the problem? The code is valid in both languages and the output is correct in both cases.
people wrongly equate creating software with building something
Let's be honest, most software is a work of fiction.
features that are intentionally ambiguous or undefined because those are 'Implementation specific details
Such as the specific value of NULL or NAN? - Why would you want to dictate that sort of thing in a standard?
I would assert precisely the opposite.
Python 3.0 - QED.
I started developing software for a living in 1990, I used to teach C programming to second year engineering students. I'm not offended when someone displays their ignorance, and there's no shortage of arrogance in the software industry. Truth is, we all look at the code and think "surely there's a simpler way than this". Experience teaches you that there usually isn't.
Does shag pile carpet stop his air conditioner from working, not sure but it's worth thinking about. - Seriously, the sad part is that he is not simply ignorant, he's willfully ignorant.
Under a runaway GH scenario the Earth's limestone would ignite not longer after the oceans boil (assuming there's enough oxygen left for it to burn). H2O is a powerful GHG, the amount that can be held by the atmosphere depends solely on temperature and pressure. The Earth's water vapour content has risen by roughly 5% since 1980 due the the warmer climate, still a long way from evaporating completely but there is a point well below the boiling point of water where the oceans will evaporate. A point of no return for sure, but no human will witness it because we will be well and truly fucked long before we get there..
Believing that burning ALL fossil fuels would NOT result in a runaway GH is either wishful thinking or just plain ignorance. Science tells us that a runaway GH is the NATURAL fate of our planet and without our help will occur in about 500 million years from now. However if we put our minds to it we could accomplish the same thing in less than a 250yrs.
Yes there were times in the distant past when CO2 was ten times what it is now but there was also zero oxygen in the atmosphere for about 3.5 billion years, what's your point, do you really think we can't surpass pre-historic levels? There is also more carbon available on the Earth's surface today than a billion years ago, no pixies required, light elements such as carbon are still bleeding to the surface from the molten core via the actions of tectonic plates. These well studied scenarios are not the work of greenpeace, it is text book planetary science that we have known about for over half a century, had you done more thinking and less "criticising" you would already know that.
Coal and nuclear produce a flat supply curve, a modern city has a wavy demand curve. To meet the demand curve so-called "base load" power already pumps water up hill in off-peak, and uses gas turbines to make up the slack on-peak. In other words, the "complex grid" you say you need to match the demand curve already exists.
" your password recovery phrase will be the street you lived on in high school or the name of your first dog. This is not secure" if the email account it sends the password to has already been compromised.
Free markets are only optimal for exploiting resources...
That's a very astute observation, OTOH; OPEC is not a free market, it's a cartel. A free market is one where anyone is free to participate, it has nothing to do with the quantity or quality of regulation.
However your logic is spot on. Telstra can retrieve the information easily (and do on a regular basis for police work). However the law does not compel them to give it to customers and they don't want to set a precedent by doing so. The only way you will get it is to wave a court order at them. Good luck, their lawyers are very likely better qualified and more numerous than yours.
Calls actually haven't needed to be "traced" since the 1960s, but nobody told the government.
I think you meant to say, 'nobody told hollywood', I was born in 1959, it has been common knowledge since at least the early 70's that the "keep 'em on the line" trope is bullshit, in the same way CSI style "infinite zoom" is widely seen as a 'theatrical device" today.
Personally I appreciate it when hollywood takes pride in getting the scientific and technical detail straight and the idea seems to be more popular than ever with shows like the Simpsons, Futurama, BBT, etc. But I still enjoy Star Trek, Dr Who, Buffy, et-al because the trick to good entertainment is not accuracy, colour, or special effects, it's about "suspension of disbelief". We enjoy drama because it tells a human story, it's the fictional human interactions that enthrall us, not the fictional events they are reacting to. If the interactions are implausible the theater will be empty, if the events are implausible it often adds interesting twists to the human story, eg Douglas Adams infinite improbability drive..
I worked for them for several years, of course they can retrieve that information, they do it on a regular basis for the cops. Half of the info is on the itemised phone bill. What you won't get (without a court order) is the other half of the information about who called you.
say you play with legos, like the rest of us do
Must be an American thing, here in Oz your average John-o and Steve-o play with their leg-o, great for keeping them occupied while dad nicks down to the bottle-o.
For me, Greenpeace lost all credibility in the 1980's when one by one the founding scientist left in disgust, the last one left in the early 90's when Greenpeace were using a mountain of pseudo-science to attack the use of chlorine in drinking water (arguably the most effective public health measure of the 20th century). Basically the leadership was taken over by political types and they lost their scientific roots. However I am grateful for the fact they put an end to nuking pacific islands in my neighbourhood, and wish them the best of luck in their efforts to kill the coal industry before it kills us.
iii - Mention pseudo scientists and one will always turn up to tell you how cold it's been lately.
Troll food: The min temp anomaly map for Australia over the past six months, it's clear minimum temperatures have been warmer across most of the continent. It also clear that maximum temps have been well above average for the same period.
Is it just me, or do the roles and rituals in agile development sound a bit like a dungeons and dragons game?
Will the people who "stole" your credit card ever be caught? No.
I think you will find the remand centers of the western world are chock full of people defending credit card fraud charges.
Will the people who decided NOT to protect it ever be punished? No.
Not sure about the US but most of the western world have laws covering the storage of financial data, belive me you don't want to fuck with the banks on those rules.
Is there anything you can do? Aside from using cash everywhere? Not really.
Again, not sure what happens in the US but here in Oz the credit company foots the bill if you've been ripped off. People who foot the bill themselves are usually doing so to avoid having a relative or "friend" formally charged with fraud. If you do get stung by a drive by hacker it takes a few weeks to sort but everyone I know who has had that problem has had their money returned by the bank, one card was drained of 25K by people having a wonderful time touring Europe.
It's worked that way since the mid-90's, possibly earlier. At the end of the day it's in their best interest to keep the customer happy and claw back the "spillage" with interest rates. If they were to change their policy and tell everyone "tough titties" it wouldn't take more than a few years to reach the point where everyone had a few friends who really did lose thousands in one hit. At that point the credit cards would have a terminal problem with distrust since any rational person would start avoiding plastic like the plague.
I've been a software developer for longer than some slashdotters have been alive, sure programming is a creative exercise, to quote Knuth it's both an "art and a science". However a programmer is merely using technology, not creating it. If you don't agree, think about the music world, is a good composer creating new technology or merely using it skillfully?
It's also hard to see how anyone but a megacorp or government could build a chip fab plant or a HDD factory. Take a look at those two commodity devices and compare them to their 1980's counterparts, now tell me again how corporations and/or governments stifle technology?
what's the problem?
Ironically, your assumption that fish just calmly swim about waiting to be eaten by a 30 ton killer whale is an excellent example of the GP's original point about humans and jail cells.
Is a parrot "communicating" with you when it says "Polly want a cracker?"
If it wants one and has received them in the past using that sound, then clearly, yes. The "monkey see, monkey do" hypothesis is nonsense born from the perfectly natural tendency of humans to believe they hold a special place in the animal kingdom. For example, there's a native bird in the hills near where I live called a lyrebird. It's said to be the world's best mimic (check it out on YT), it will accurately mimic any other sound it hears.
What people rarely mention, or even notice, about this "mimic" is that it is also displaying creativity when it takes those sounds and forms a unique song. Once it has created its own unique song it remembers it and builds on it in the next mating season, similar to the way jazz musicians improvise around a basic theme. But a more accurate analogy would be a musician who creates aesthetically pleasing soundtracks from samples to attract and impress the opposite sex, both analogies also imply the opposite sex posses some form of "artistic taste".
What TFA really shows is that dolphins and whales adapt their "language" to the environment they find themselves in. Humans also do this, nobody is surprised when an English baby born in England but raised by Chinese parents in China, grows up speaking Chinese. Apes can do it via sign language but they will never speak to us because their vocal chord anatomy is not up to the task