It is quite cleat that the industrial revolution has increased the CO2 level in the air.
It is suggested, but less clear, that the atmosphere is warming.
It is even less clear, that the CO2 is warming the atmosphere.
It is in no way clear, that the net effect of this warming will be negative.
It is absolutely unclear, if there are any good measures that we can take to stop this potential man made harm.
Disclaimer: What I'm about to say may not apply to you specifically. Indeed, it probably doesn't.
One of the things about the more fundamentalist forms of libertarianism is that they require that there is no such thing as a commons. If it is true that human industry is responsible for global warming, and that global warming is going to do bad things to the planet, then the atmosphere is a commons. It does the nation of Kiribati no good to sue each car owner individually when their country is underwater.
In fact, the Kyoto protocol solves the problem in a way that libertarians should, in theory, love: It turns the right to pollute into a property right. Entities can then sell their pollution rights if they don't need them.
The two approaches are two aspects of the same basic idea. Indeed, after seeing a few too many Bible Belt leaders talk about how it's God's will that Bush is in power, I wonder if they really believe in the Christian deity or a state one any more.
No, he's not. However, the reason why some people seem to believe is that a) he's not easily dismissed as a troll, b) he was too well-researched and well-prepared to be a small-time hoax and c) he was too limited to be a big-time hoax.
I think of the character of John Titor as a piece of performance art. It was an attempt to make some commentary on our society and human nature through the eyes of a detached observer. The thing I find the most amusing is that the audience on the forum where John Titor appeared often behaved in exactly the sorts of stereotypical manner that sums up his looking-from-the-future view of our era. One of my favourites is his reply when someone inevitably asked for tips on the stock market:
Are "stock tips" really the first thing you want to know about in the future? As a representative of your time period, do you realize what that says about you? You should probably know that this time is not remembered for its selflessness, charity or ability to work together.
What you say would have been controversial 100 years ago. This was explored by the Dada movement. (Is a urinal with writing on it art? How about a defaced postcard of the Mona Lisa?)
What's happened in the intervening time is that fine art has been distinguished from commercial art. Most of the people who can draw and paint "realistically" (i.e. those who are able to faithfully draw what they see; there are notable exceptions) are not part of the fine art community. They're doing advertising, architectural rendering, illustrations, video games, visual effects and stuff like that. They're using their skills to make a living. It's mostly those who can't or don't want to learn who are now "fine artists".
Naturally, this leads to controversy as to where to draw the lines. Some in the art community call anything which is too realistic "illustration" as opposed to art. By this measure, pretty much all of the great artists between the time of the Renaissance and the turn of the 20th century were not actually doing "art".
Prior to the 20th century, art was almost all paid for by patronage and commission. (Not all art was made for commission of course, but that's what let the artist eat while they made what they really wanted to make.) So in a sense, all artists were commercial, even if not all art was. Artists had to learn their craft well because they had to compete or starve.
Modern fine artists either can't do this (hence it's probably jealousy) or don't want to do this (so it's effected snobbery). To be an "artist" today, you merely need to be called an artist by another artist. Those who shun the art system tend to be those who have the luxury to do so because they've already been called artists.
There is no requirement for technical skill whatsoever. That's why we end up in the ridiculous situation where a famous art photographer like Andre Serrano not only doesn't develop, print or even crop his own photographs, he doesn't know what half the controls on his camera does. Being a geek, I tend to find this more repulsive than prudish people find his photographs.
So in summary, there kind of is a working definition of "art" today, but it's a circular and non-useful one.
You are legally and morally obligated to obey the law or to change it.
One of the ways that is morally acceptible to change an immoral law is to disobey it. However, it is immoral to do this in private. Civil disobedience must be done in the open, and the disobedient citizen should be prepared to wear any legal consequences.
There are, in the world, laws that are so immoral that it's worth spending time in jail to have them overthrown.
The fact that most people have no clue what ESR has contributed to open source is excellent evidence as to why open source works. Pretty much no project that ESR has worked on has been high-profile or sexy (nethack doesn't count), but a lot of them have been critical.
When's the last time you used the termcap/terminfo database? You probably don't even know how often you use it. How about one of ESR's many HOWTOs and man pages? (The video timings HOWTO was for many years one of the most important there was.) Even if it wasn't a HOWTO or man page that he wrote, it's probably one that he converted the format of. If you're a BSD user, take a look at who wrote your PC speaker driver. If you're not, look who wrote the original GNU sed. Or the original giflib.
I encourage you to spare a thought, every now and then, for the people who do the unsexy infrastructure work. And think hard about why they do it at all, despite not getting any of the glory.
Perhaps more to the point, a toilet is the classic example of something that is mission critical. Sometimes safety critical, I'd suppose. It has to work under all sorts of conditions (e.g. power outage/flat battery) where it's not a huge deal if other devices like the iPod don't work.
The simplicity of a toilet is one of its strengths. Less can go wrong because there's less to go wrong.
After all, isn't that why people BUY on ebay, to save money?
The current eBay management certainly doesn't think so. They think that people go to eBay because auctions are exciting and draw people in.
They are, of course, completely wrong. Auctions are good for rare items (e.g. Freddie Mercury's car, piece of breakfast cereal that looks like ET, antiques perhaps) but for normal sales, auctions have been declining for years. Having to compete and wait for a commodity item adds a layer of inconvenience to shopping. Inconvenience is precisely the thing that people shopping on the net are trying to avoid.
It's only a matter of time before someone claims that the Founding Fathers(TM) supported the terrorists.
That grinding sound you hear is the cognitive dissonance in the brains of those who idolise the Founding Fathers(TM) and who bought into the terrorism panic.
Are you telling me that I can't pass values between Qt classes and those written by others?
The problem is that you can't throw an exception through Qt, or Qt will leak resources (most likely memory). If you want to use any library that throws exceptions (this includes the standard library; even allocating memory in C++ may throw an exception), and you want to do something with the exception other than abort the program, then at the very least you need to insulate Qt from the exception.
The situation is worse in KDE, because exceptions are turned off completely. You can't even reliably use a library which throws exceptions. (As previously noted, this includes the standard library. Ouch.)
If this is what you want, you're better off using Boost than Qt. The GUI library is what makes Qt great. If you just want a foundation library for smart pointers, signals/slots, containers, threads and a bunch of stuff that it never occurred to you that you might need, Boost is far, far superior.
Not only is Boost exception-safe (which almost none of Qt is), but today's Boost library is tomorrow's C++ standard library. Boost prepares you for the future.
So where's the chapter on exception safety? No, I didn't think so.
Qt does not play nice with C++. If all I want to write is a GUI, Qt is great. If I want to write a program with a GUI and other functionality that requires other C++ libraries, I'm stuck with a huge impedance mismatch.
"C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4" is a misleading title. You can either write a C++ program, or a Qt program. Not both.
Back in the day when the movie business was being unionised, everyone tried to grab an impressive job title. The coolest title was "director", so everyone tried to get that in their title. This is why the cinematographer is called the "director of photography" and the production designer was called the "art director" (that was changed recently, I believe).
The director's guild successfully complained about the dilution of the term "director", so no more titles were made with that word in it. (However, the grab for grandiose titles didn't stop. That's why the continuity clerk is now called "script supervisor". I digress.)
All of this had been forgotten by the time that digital elements started appearing in film. So the person responsible for running the technology took the title "technical director".
I'm not sure if it was the director's guild that complained this time, or just dilution of the term. In the days of Return of the Jedi, there were maybe one or two digital visual effects, and a small team to handle them, so "technical director" made some kind of sense. Nowadays, you might have hundreds working on an animated film or VFX-heavy film, and you can't call them all "director". So nowadays, we just say "TD".
And if you're an animation TD who has been assigned the task of creating a huge school of fish, each one of which should look different and yet still look like the right kind of fish, you'll be glad that someone has studied the problem of how to model animal markings.
No, this is not hypothetical. It's real, and it's done today.
While I agree that this usage of "literally" is stupid (and the war isn't over yet), it wouldn't be the first time that a word has completely reversed in meaning. The archaic phrase "without let or hinderance", for example, shows that the word "let" once meant something completely opposite than it does today.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: What I'm about to say may not apply to you specifically. Indeed, it probably doesn't.
One of the things about the more fundamentalist forms of libertarianism is that they require that there is no such thing as a commons. If it is true that human industry is responsible for global warming, and that global warming is going to do bad things to the planet, then the atmosphere is a commons. It does the nation of Kiribati no good to sue each car owner individually when their country is underwater.
In fact, the Kyoto protocol solves the problem in a way that libertarians should, in theory, love: It turns the right to pollute into a property right. Entities can then sell their pollution rights if they don't need them.
I have three words for you: The Garbage Chronicles.
The dramatic irony is, that book is very well-named.
The two approaches are two aspects of the same basic idea. Indeed, after seeing a few too many Bible Belt leaders talk about how it's God's will that Bush is in power, I wonder if they really believe in the Christian deity or a state one any more.
My pineal gland is tingling!
No, he's not. However, the reason why some people seem to believe is that a) he's not easily dismissed as a troll, b) he was too well-researched and well-prepared to be a small-time hoax and c) he was too limited to be a big-time hoax.
I think of the character of John Titor as a piece of performance art. It was an attempt to make some commentary on our society and human nature through the eyes of a detached observer. The thing I find the most amusing is that the audience on the forum where John Titor appeared often behaved in exactly the sorts of stereotypical manner that sums up his looking-from-the-future view of our era. One of my favourites is his reply when someone inevitably asked for tips on the stock market:
Ain't that the truth.
What you say would have been controversial 100 years ago. This was explored by the Dada movement. (Is a urinal with writing on it art? How about a defaced postcard of the Mona Lisa?)
What's happened in the intervening time is that fine art has been distinguished from commercial art. Most of the people who can draw and paint "realistically" (i.e. those who are able to faithfully draw what they see; there are notable exceptions) are not part of the fine art community. They're doing advertising, architectural rendering, illustrations, video games, visual effects and stuff like that. They're using their skills to make a living. It's mostly those who can't or don't want to learn who are now "fine artists".
Naturally, this leads to controversy as to where to draw the lines. Some in the art community call anything which is too realistic "illustration" as opposed to art. By this measure, pretty much all of the great artists between the time of the Renaissance and the turn of the 20th century were not actually doing "art".
Prior to the 20th century, art was almost all paid for by patronage and commission. (Not all art was made for commission of course, but that's what let the artist eat while they made what they really wanted to make.) So in a sense, all artists were commercial, even if not all art was. Artists had to learn their craft well because they had to compete or starve.
Modern fine artists either can't do this (hence it's probably jealousy) or don't want to do this (so it's effected snobbery). To be an "artist" today, you merely need to be called an artist by another artist. Those who shun the art system tend to be those who have the luxury to do so because they've already been called artists.
There is no requirement for technical skill whatsoever. That's why we end up in the ridiculous situation where a famous art photographer like Andre Serrano not only doesn't develop, print or even crop his own photographs, he doesn't know what half the controls on his camera does. Being a geek, I tend to find this more repulsive than prudish people find his photographs.
So in summary, there kind of is a working definition of "art" today, but it's a circular and non-useful one.
All too truthy.
One of the ways that is morally acceptible to change an immoral law is to disobey it. However, it is immoral to do this in private. Civil disobedience must be done in the open, and the disobedient citizen should be prepared to wear any legal consequences.
There are, in the world, laws that are so immoral that it's worth spending time in jail to have them overthrown.
When? And where?
The fact that most people have no clue what ESR has contributed to open source is excellent evidence as to why open source works. Pretty much no project that ESR has worked on has been high-profile or sexy (nethack doesn't count), but a lot of them have been critical.
When's the last time you used the termcap/terminfo database? You probably don't even know how often you use it. How about one of ESR's many HOWTOs and man pages? (The video timings HOWTO was for many years one of the most important there was.) Even if it wasn't a HOWTO or man page that he wrote, it's probably one that he converted the format of. If you're a BSD user, take a look at who wrote your PC speaker driver. If you're not, look who wrote the original GNU sed. Or the original giflib.
I encourage you to spare a thought, every now and then, for the people who do the unsexy infrastructure work. And think hard about why they do it at all, despite not getting any of the glory.
But then she'll keep hounding the pilot to stop and ask for directions when they get lost!
Perhaps more to the point, a toilet is the classic example of something that is mission critical. Sometimes safety critical, I'd suppose. It has to work under all sorts of conditions (e.g. power outage/flat battery) where it's not a huge deal if other devices like the iPod don't work.
The simplicity of a toilet is one of its strengths. Less can go wrong because there's less to go wrong.
Why does that remind me of the Prisoner's dilemma?
Any system which depends on eBay taking notice and/or taking action is doomed to fail.
The current eBay management certainly doesn't think so. They think that people go to eBay because auctions are exciting and draw people in.
They are, of course, completely wrong. Auctions are good for rare items (e.g. Freddie Mercury's car, piece of breakfast cereal that looks like ET, antiques perhaps) but for normal sales, auctions have been declining for years. Having to compete and wait for a commodity item adds a layer of inconvenience to shopping. Inconvenience is precisely the thing that people shopping on the net are trying to avoid.
It's only a matter of time before someone claims that the Founding Fathers(TM) supported the terrorists.
That grinding sound you hear is the cognitive dissonance in the brains of those who idolise the Founding Fathers(TM) and who bought into the terrorism panic.
Neither. It's pretty easy to spot the worst forms of exception non-safety with a code inspection if you know what you're looking for.
(The reason why I did the code inspection was a failed attempt to integrate a third-party C++ library with KDE.)
Any code which looks like this is immediately suspicious:
QSomething* something = new QSomething();As is this:
QMySomething::QMySomething(){
m_something = new QSomething();
}
The problem is that you can't throw an exception through Qt, or Qt will leak resources (most likely memory). If you want to use any library that throws exceptions (this includes the standard library; even allocating memory in C++ may throw an exception), and you want to do something with the exception other than abort the program, then at the very least you need to insulate Qt from the exception.
The situation is worse in KDE, because exceptions are turned off completely. You can't even reliably use a library which throws exceptions. (As previously noted, this includes the standard library. Ouch.)
C doesn't throw C++ exceptions.
If this is what you want, you're better off using Boost than Qt. The GUI library is what makes Qt great. If you just want a foundation library for smart pointers, signals/slots, containers, threads and a bunch of stuff that it never occurred to you that you might need, Boost is far, far superior.
Not only is Boost exception-safe (which almost none of Qt is), but today's Boost library is tomorrow's C++ standard library. Boost prepares you for the future.
So where's the chapter on exception safety? No, I didn't think so.
Qt does not play nice with C++. If all I want to write is a GUI, Qt is great. If I want to write a program with a GUI and other functionality that requires other C++ libraries, I'm stuck with a huge impedance mismatch.
"C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4" is a misleading title. You can either write a C++ program, or a Qt program. Not both.
Ah, now there's a long story.
Back in the day when the movie business was being unionised, everyone tried to grab an impressive job title. The coolest title was "director", so everyone tried to get that in their title. This is why the cinematographer is called the "director of photography" and the production designer was called the "art director" (that was changed recently, I believe).
The director's guild successfully complained about the dilution of the term "director", so no more titles were made with that word in it. (However, the grab for grandiose titles didn't stop. That's why the continuity clerk is now called "script supervisor". I digress.)
All of this had been forgotten by the time that digital elements started appearing in film. So the person responsible for running the technology took the title "technical director".
I'm not sure if it was the director's guild that complained this time, or just dilution of the term. In the days of Return of the Jedi, there were maybe one or two digital visual effects, and a small team to handle them, so "technical director" made some kind of sense. Nowadays, you might have hundreds working on an animated film or VFX-heavy film, and you can't call them all "director". So nowadays, we just say "TD".
And if you're an animation TD who has been assigned the task of creating a huge school of fish, each one of which should look different and yet still look like the right kind of fish, you'll be glad that someone has studied the problem of how to model animal markings.
No, this is not hypothetical. It's real, and it's done today.
Or outsource to India.
Of course. If they've done nothing wrong, they have nothing to fear.
While I agree that this usage of "literally" is stupid (and the war isn't over yet), it wouldn't be the first time that a word has completely reversed in meaning. The archaic phrase "without let or hinderance", for example, shows that the word "let" once meant something completely opposite than it does today.