There is an update on Andreas Barth's Blog that says "Update: There are media rumours floating around that "[Etch has] been delayed because some developers have deliberately slowed down their work". This doesn't reflect what I said."
The article did not say what packages were delayed specifically, but Debian is known to have an insane number of packages. Perhaps some culling is in order. I'm not part of the project, just an appreciative user, but here are my two cents.
Cut the distro down to what will fit on one CD (two max). That will reduce a lot of Debian's headaches. Less for them to maintain and less to test between releases. Everything else can be put into contributed non-official repositories
Don't be so anal and patch-happy with mainstream packages. Big projects like Gnome and KDE already do extensive testing upstream. Those packages should be able to move more quickly through the unstable-testing-stable cycle without sacrificing stability or extensive patching. How much of the debian patching on these type of big projects is *really* functionally necessary versus "I 'm the debian package mantainer and I want to put my mark on it".
About the project being "frozen", I don't know about that. I have a laptop running etch-testing. I did an apt-get dist-upgrade in mid-Nov , put it away for a few weeks and ran it again in early-Dec (don't remember exact dates). Something like 70 packages needed upgrades.
I agree that "identity theft" is an over-used term when "credit fraud" might be a better description in most situations. However, I've heard of "identity theft" that didn't involve credit fraud. During the immigration debate that was going on last summer, I read a story in the newspaper (sorry, don't have a link) about a woman on the east coast who applied for unemployment benefits, but was denied because records showed that she was currently employed somewhere in the midwest. Except, she wasn't working in the midwest; some illegal alien was using her SSN. There have also been cases where the IRS has audited people because their tax returns do not match the income reported for their SSNs (again, probably illegal aliens using stolen SSNs).
So even if an "identity thief" doesn't apply for credit in you name, they can still cause you major problems.
Agreed. I'm no expert on UI design myself, but the environment (widgets, window frames, scrollbars, window backgrounds, etc) should never be flashy or colorful enough to draw your attention away from the content. If the widgets are drawing the user's attention, then they are distracting (and detracting) from the application content. Widgets are functional knobs and buttons, not decoration. Imagine fluorescent buttons and borders on a TV; they would distract you from the show. Grey is unobtrusive.
A 'good' webpage can be written in xhtml and include every scrap of CSS defined in the 2.0 standard. Unfortunately, the standards in question (including the older CSS specs) are ambiguous in some places and even if they weren't there is no browser that fully implements them. You can write a 100% standard and validated webpage that doesn't rendered properly (read according to standard) in any modern browser.
This is further complicated because the implementations are not just incomplete, but no two browsers implement the same parts. And if the browsers all implement a function, the ambiguity of the standard comes into play and you will often seen something rendered differently in each to a small or large degree.
You bring up a good point about everybody breaking the standard through partial implementation. The Open Group approach might be a good way to fix this. Nobody has more disdain for the "Open Group" than me. (see my post berating Open Group as a bunch of greedy bastards) But, perhaps if the CSS standard was copyrighted/patented/trademark (royalty-free or nominal cost) such that a browser had to pass a test suite in order to implement it, then the web world might be a more interoperable (and better) place. So, the "Open Group" might have the basically right approach, if they just wouldn't charge exorbitant fees for the certification.
The test suite itself would seem trivial (just a bunch of xhtml pages with css) and be free (gratis). The browser would have to render a series of pages as expected to pass. Once the browser passed, the W3C would license the CSS patent/trademark at a nominal price.
I've seen several machines at tourist sites that you feed a penny (and a quarter). The machine then flattens the penny and stamps some design on the resulting token. Will these also now be illegal?
So they then apply sales tax which will come to a fraction of a nickle. Do you really think they will ever round down? No,they will always round up. You'll see your annual sales tax expenditure double (at least).
The Mil Token pictured is paper (cardbord). My Dad told me you could buy them by the sheet at the store register.
I once dug a mil token up in the back yard when I was a kid in the 1970s (when they were already long obsolete), it was made of aluminum or some other really light metal. I didn't know what it was until my parents told me it was a "tax mil".
While the basic concepts between C# and Java might be similiar (I haven't gotten around to C# myself yet), java has some pretty strange things entrenched in they way that it is employeed. For webapps, EJB and J2EE will leave you in a straight jacket. Granted there are alternatives to EJB (Spring, Hibernate, etc), but EJB is still "the standard" way to do java on webapps, if you are going for anything more than a servlet. I have poured over several J2EE books and I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around EJB and the umpteen levels of abtraction and interfaces required to use it properly. Somebody one said that "Java programers have a morbid fascination with complexity"; that is absoutlely true of the twisted minds who thought up EJB. My gosh, the J2EE Tutorial from Sun is *several hundred* pages long.
PHP has its problems, but I find it much more satifying because it is more straight forward. It's easy to write bad code in PHP, but its also easy to write good code in PHP. PHP is definately a less versitile and less powerful tool than Java, but its still a good tool for its intended job.
is this 'junk science' because my upper bound has dropped by 33%?
It is, if you are using your upper margin to **profoundly** influence public policy in a manner that will **drastically** effect the lifestyles of **BILLIONS** of people. Because the environmental movement is trying to spur people into action, they generally publicize the worst case scenarios.
I have no doubt that average recorded temperatures are rising and the recorded CO2 levels have risen as a result of industrial activity. What this article demonstrates is that uncontrolled and unknown variables make the current models inaccurate. The variable mentioned in the article was cooling caused by aerosols. But just how many more unknown variables are there? You don't know and neither do the world's best and brightest climatologists. Will we find another unknown variable that (from the article) reduces the "overall estimate of this effect by 25 per cent"? No models are perfect, but they should have a better margin of error than 25%, if they are going to be the basis of important public policy that will effect countless people.
Even if the warming model is accurate (i.e. a predicted warming is eventually born out exactly as predicted), it is not certain that the predicted disastrous consequences will follow exactly as predicted. Have you stopped to think that a unjustified drastic course of action might end up costing more lives from loss of production and lowering of lifestyles (food, goods, and shelter in simpler terms) than the actual change in the climate? No? Well, think about it before we go off the deep end.
Now going back to "recorded" temperatures. Do you know how many statistical data models have been fubar by unrepresentative sampling or flawed collection methodology? Lots. Do you know how many honest scientists and statisticians have been flummoxed and lead astray by seemingly good, but actually flawed data sets? Lots. What makes you so sure that this is any different? Bad data fed into bad models leading to bad public policy could be a medicine worse than the disease.
I happened to think that the data says we are getting warmer. Just how warmer, what the consequences will be, and exactly why (and in what proportions) are still up to debate because they are still unknown, regardless of what somebody's possibly flawed model says.
You might think that global-warming skeptics are anti-science or just plain stupid. But it is not anti-science to be reluctant to swallow every scientific fad "hook-line-and-sinker", especially one that has strong political overtones. It wasn't that long ago that the scientific consensus considered eugenics to be firmly grounded in biology and evolutionary theory. Countless papers on Eugenics were published in respected peer-reviewed journals. We now know that eugenics was pseudo-science, but for decades it influenced public policy in regards to social welfare and mental health and millions of lives were destroyed. Eugenics was a perfect vehicle for people with an agenda. Long before global warming was even thought up, environmentalists were looking for a (pseudo) scientific reason to justify reduction of industrial activity and to fight the "evil" that is the capitalist raping of the environment. Now they have latched onto global warming as their vehicle. Does that itself make the theory of global warming invalid? No, but it does mean it should be scrutinized.
My understanding is that VBA (event the version in Office2007) is largely based on VB6. Given the fact that Office2007 is a huge install already, why not include the.Net runtime environment with the install and move VBA into a.Net type language. While not completely backwards compatable with VB6/VBA, it would be a lot easier to upgrade a macro or VBA-app to VB.net than to something completely differet like C# because the learning curve from VBA/VB6 to VB.net is a lot easier and there are already a bunch of upgrade "wizards" to move VB6 code to VB.net. Once the macro language is moved to.Net, then the problem becomes implementing a.Net runtime environment to something besides windows and it looks like the Mono project already has done a lot of the heavy lifting in figuring that out. It seems that creating MacOs bindings for the forms is do-able, since Mono has already done similiar work with GTK.
The only reason I would think that MS would not want move Office to.Net is that a cross-platform runtime environment (e.g. Mono) that allowed running Office on any platform would propbably eat into sales of Windows, since Windows and Office are mutually supporting monopolies.
Organized and unorganzied have nothing to do with "regulated". "Organized" just means they are part of regularly established units (ie. the National Guard - see 10 U.S.C. 311). The unorganized militia, if it ever was called out to act as a militia, would still be expected to follow regulated discipline established by law. "Well Regulated" does not negate private ownership of arms. It referes to the power of the Congress and State Legislature to proscribe the discipline and lawful purposes of the miltia (See Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution) . That is what differentiates a militia from an armed mob. Both can be privately (self) armed. How they act once assembled is the difference. If they act contrary to law and discipline (i.e. contrary to the Well Regulated part), then they are an armed mob.
What is most telling in respect to private ownership, is that the 2nd Amendment has never been interpreted as demanding anything but a right to private ownership, until the gun-control craze started in the last 30 years. That indicates that somebody is coming up with new and novel interpretations of the constitution in order to justify their new-fangled (unconstitutional) ideas. The construct in the 2nd amendment, "the right of the people", is exactly the same as the 4th amendment ("The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures") and the 4th is clearly an indivdual right. Interpreting the 2nd Amendment to refere to a "collective" right is clearly rank revisionism.
If you think this should be differenct, then please use the democratic process to amend it. Please don't use unelected judges to "interpret" the constitution in new ways contrary to historical understanding. If the written words have no fixed meaning and you can "interpret" them to mean anything you like (even the opposite of historical understanding), then there is no point to having a written constitution.
You bring up some good points. But I still disagree because embracing High Tech does not mean we need to abandon manufacturing as a core part of our economy. Not everybody can be retrained to be in a directly High Tech job. We still need to provide working class jobs, because we will always have a working class
That's what is so great about a tech economy: you don't have to! The salaries of all jobs are dragged up via supply and demand. Why else would a janitor here have such a high salary compared to the rest of the world?
Well, there is a rachet-effect (downward inflexibility) in wages. When real wages fall, they tend to do so slowly (the exception being hyper-inflation). The relatively high wages that we have now are an artifact of the gains in the 1900s. Also, Tech workers and blue collar workers are in different labor markets. Wages are slowly but surely eroding for blue-collar workers, especially for those who are left behind for the reasons I noted in my previous post.
You're right. That was great in the 1900s. But we're not living in the 1900s anymore, and you either evolve or die. We can't freeze the clock and hope that Asia, Europe, etc don't catch up with us. They will, and as a result we need to stay ahead of them.
That would also be great now. I'm not arguing against evolution or adaptation. I'm not saying we should be making buggy-whips. Nor am I against automation and efficiency (as these advances lead to greater productivity and higher real wages). What I am saying is that we should be manufacturing the high-tech goods that we design, instead of farming the work out to virtual slave-laborers in China. Why doesn't Intel manufacture goods in Santa Clara? Because it cheaper to do it in China, Malaysia, etc (and not because the workers are more productive there, but because the regulatory enviroment is laxer)
In Virginia, where I also live, the unemployment is ridiculously low...
Because Northern VA (where I also work) is driven by the Federal Gov't which dumps billions on the local economy.
...and you can't find a legal American who's willing to do the work they do for the wages they earn.
Exactly, because wages in that particular sector have been depressed by a glut of cheap imported labor. Perhaps had there been an effective immigration policy (restricting the labor pool), the wages would naturally rise, and internal migration (from say Flint, MI?) would have filled those jobs with unemployed Americans.
What force would you like to see artificially sustain the wages of menial labor jobs? Magic?
A properly regulated national (vs unregulated international) labor market. The only thing artificial is how wages are artificially suppressed by having a de-facto unregulated international labor market because of off-shoring and token border controls.
And all the while maintaining a healthy 4% unemployment rate. That's the problem that you don't get - we have no unemployment and *still* we have to outsurce jobs and bring immigrants in. So your best argument is that we're outsourcing manufacturing jobs because we're generating white collar jobs instead? That's a bad thing?
This brings to mind the old joke: "The Government says they created 1 million new jobs, I should know, because I have three of them". The point is not so much the raw number of jobs, but the **type** of jobs. Instead of manufacturing TVs for $20 per hour plus benefits, we're retailing them for $5.15 with no benefits. That is a very bad thing.
people in America who can work legally will choose higher paying more fulfilling jobs and leave the crappy low paying jobs for people who can't speak English. Please explain to me how this is bad. If there were a glut of experienced, responsible, hard-working, English-speaking people who were unemployed, you might have a case, but there aren't and you don't. Find me some guy who says "man, I wish I could work in a factory inst
We Still Need Blue Collar Jobs
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Saving U.S. Science
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· Score: 4, Insightful
What, low-paying manufacturing jobs that we send overseas? Good, I don't want them. Wouldn't you rather get rid of crappy jobs, while using research to generate new good ones?
Apologists for exporting our standard-of-living have been repeating this mantra for years. I'm sorry to burst your education-is-the-answer bubble, but not everybody is going to get a PhD (or even Bachelor) in engineering. We will always have a large section of our society who, for whatever reason (aptitude or personal perference, poor choice, etc) will NOT go to college and will NOT become engineers. We still have to provide meaningful jobs that pay a living wage to these people. And retraining these folks into programers or network support (or whatever) means nothing if we are going to also export that job to India or import an H-1b to take it away in a few years.
Manufacturing jobs are typically not rock-bottom low-paying. They are often moderately-paying union jobs with health insurance, pensions, and fringe benefits. They are the kind of jobs that allowed the development of a broad-based lower-middle class that formed the backbone of American society in the 1900s. They are the kind of jobs that allow a guy to own a small house with a yard on an affordable mortgage with enough left over to have a decent standard of living.
I agree with Cluckshot's post that we are waging a trade war against our own citizens. We are exporting manufacturing blue collar jobs while importing cheap immigant labor to take the remaining blue collar jobs. And please don't repeat the racist lie that these are "jobs American's won't do". That is a lie. They will do them for decent pay, but not for peanuts. I have relatives who work in landscaping (cutting grass) in rural Missouri, which has almost no immigant labor. They make a modest but decent living. They wouldn't be able to make a living in Virginia (where I live), because it is teeming with cheap illegal immigrant labor that has pushed out the native workforce in those types of jobs. I have no doubt that native born americans would do that work in Virginia, if they weren't undercut by an illegal workforce that does not get paid benefits, often gets paid "under the table", and is not subject to labor law. We have placed our blue-collar citizens in an unregulated and unfettered global labor market that really is a "race to the bottom".
I am normally a free-trade libertarian, but I've come to realize that something is wrong. There is a famous quote attributed to Yogi Bera - it goes something like "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is". In theory, and all other things being equal, trade will benefit both parties and increase the wealth of both. But in practice, all other things are not equal. This is where the ivory-tower economics of free-trade break down. There are just too many uncontrolled variables that their theories do not take into account. The largest uncontrolled varible is the dissimilar reglatory environoments between the US and the east asian economies. In China, free labor unions are outlawed, so workers can not bargin for higher wages or benefits as they could in a regulated true market economy (yes, true markets are also minimally regulated to preserve competition and bargining). Environmental and work safety regulations are unenforced, if they exist at all. This means that all the economic theories about efficiency and trade are blown out of the water. The classic theory is that if another country can make a good more efficiently, then it is good to close down the old inefficient factory and apply the resources to more efficient endevours. But China does not make goods more cheaply because they are more efficient. They make goods more cheaply because they have artificially low costs - no labor rights, can pollute to high-heaven without enforcement, and have a rigged exchange rate. That's not free trade, that's rigged trade.
You actually bring up a good point and I had to think about that for a minute, but your comparison is false and here is why. Walk down any non-residential street. You'll see many tens of businesses and likely a half-dozen churches. If you go to any town of any size over 100 people, you'll likely find a chamber of commerce and several churches. You'll see that business and religious groups are the "norm" in the culture (i.e. - The are not remarkable). Now how many gender-rights, ethnic-rights, gay-rights, or enviromental groups did you find during your stroll through town? Likely none. The prominence of such groups (typically identified as leftist) at universities is a good indication that university culture is different from the larger culture. So, I'll have to say that the existance of a Buisness department or a student religous club is not indicative of unusually right-wing culture given the context of the larger society.
This is mostly a copy and paste from another of my earlier posts with a few edits
The overwhelming majority of scientists (who would describe themselves as working scientists versus simple degree holders in the field) are academics working in academic university environments, or even in the case of goverment or corporate research labs, are in the academic revolving door. It is no secret that major universities are basically immersed in left-wing culture both at the official level (such as having ethnic or women's studies departments, speech codes, etc) and at the unofficial level (such as student protest groups). So, these guys are working and living in what amounts to a left-wing echo chamber and anti-industrial environmentalism is a core tenet of modern leftist orthodoxy. People working in that enviornment can not help but have a certain amount of cultural bias. As in most social environments, there is great pressure to conform. I do not doubt that in some cases, non-conforming academics have been ostracized as cretins or kooks, denied tenure, and passed up for promotion. So it is not surprising that a "majority of scientists" would land of the left-wing side of any particular debate, given the implications of being on the "wrong" side.
Also, without accusing anybody of consciously cooking the data, its easy to see what you want to see in data when you have pre-conceived notions. I would say that even the questions researchers ask or don't ask (i.e. what they choose to subject to a study or ignore) is influenced by their preconceived cultural notions.
When somebody says "science is on our side", I basically evaluate it the same as if they said "the statistics are on our side" (especially if its based on statistical or computer models instead of "hard science" that is reproducable in the lab). When somebody says, "the majority of scientists" are on our side, they are just using a logical fallacy - appeal to authority.
As much as we would all like to believe that scientists are selflessly searching for the "truth", they have motivations similar to everybody else (greed, fame, power, money, personel vendettas, etc). They also are capable of political bias. These motivations and bias can color the "truth".Throw in grant money and the prestige of getting published in well-respected journals and the results can be toxic to "truth".
I personally believe that the warming trend itself is undeniable. The extent of it that can be blamed on man versus natural climatic cycles is debatable. There probably is an anti-industrial environmental bias built into most climatic studies conducted at any university or government institutions. All claims should be filtered and evaluated with that in mind.
BTW, this is one of the funniest links around that pokes fun at politicized Science They are from some radio ads that a lobbyist group ran in the Washington, DC market. Obviously biased themselves, but very funny.
An unremarkable death of a dissident by random accident, common crime, or seemingly natural causes makes no notoriety. It might get rid of the immediate disident, but it will not prevent other disidents from 'causing trouble'. Killing a disident via a not-so-subtle and paticularly gruesome manner sends an unmistakeable message. The message is 'obey, or this could be you'. Killing him overseas means 'we can get you anywhere, anytime'. They want people to know, because fear is an effective means of suppressing dissent.
Russia is dangerous. It is nationalistic, it is autocratic, it feels humiliated and condescended upon by the West, it is paranoid, it is jealous, and its economy is fragile and only propped up by the current run-up in oil and gas prices. It only needs a ruthless populist (read 'demagogue') to push it over the edge to full-on fascism. It already has pretext for expansion based up the plight of ethnic russian minorities in its former empire.
Just a dangerous is that for a nationalist Russia, this would be a rational and likely succesful course of action. Russia need but bluster and Europe will cower, while the US is busy elsewhere. Russia would be able to get away with suppressing internal dissent and perhaps annexing some of their neighbors, and they know it. Europe is not psychologically prepared to fight WW3 over the Baltic nations, or Ukraine, or Trans-Dneister and the Russians know this. They need not fear any UN action because they possess a veto in the Security Council (not that the UN is to be feared by anyone anyway, its last meaningful military action was Korea in the 1950s).
IIRC - MS "licensed" some UNIX technologies from SCO
IIRC, MS was discontinuing Unix Services because some of it was being incorporated into Windows itself
In the Novell vs SCO case, it came out that the Asset Purchase Agreement between Novell and Santa Cruz excluded patents and copyrights, so Novell still owns whatever old AT&T Unix patents that might exist (although, these would be getting close to expiring, if they have not already)
Ergo, by including UNIX technologies into Windows, MS may have put Novell's patented technology Windows.
IANAQP. Can you change the particle from a known state to something else? Or do you not know the initial state beforehand? If so you know and can change the state, you would be able to send a message. It is either the predetermined known state (1) or not (0). A binary message.
The "machine readable" part should not need to contain anything more than a unique number (i.e. primary key) and perhaps a pki type hash to verify authenticity. The rest can be contained in a (hopefully) secure database using an international common format or schema. The id number could also be soley used as a passport serial number and not used for any finanical purposes.
The old analogy "Linux is Free like a puppy is free" is not always fud.
The article quotes the charity as saying:
"Microsoft skills are easily available throughout the world in terms of an organisation, and it is more effective for us to have Microsoft software which we can employ people easily for...."
So its easier and less expensive for them to find both volunteers and employees who already know how to use MS software as opposed to having to go through the time and expense of training them anew on something different. That is a valid concern if they are trying to operate on a shoe-string budget. The noted that the licensing cost for the charity is "pay pence in the pound for the licence" (i.e. cents on the dollar). So the training and support become major expenses.
All three branches of the government jealously guard their constitutional prerogatives. You'll notice that almost all of the signing statements assert exemptions for "foreign relations, national security, or the workings of the executive branch" or words to that effect. Every modern administration, both Democratic and Republican, have asserted constitutional "executive privilege" or reserved executive powers (under the separation of powers doctrine) in those areas. The Bush Administration just happens to be more vigilant (or strident) in asserting those doctrines, even in relatively trivial or arcane instances, because they never want to set a precedent of surrendering any of the Presidency's constitutional powers.
I would like to apologize to all the Germans for calling their country Germany (Deutschland). I would like to also appologize to the citizens of Japan (Nihon), Vienna (Vien), Cologne (Koln), Rome (Roma), Bombay (Mumbai), Lisbon (Lisboa), Warsaw (Warszawa), and Leghorn (Livorno). I would also like to apologize to the Dutch (Nederlanders). Please accept my apology on behalf of all English speaking peoples everywhere for using perfectly proper english names for your countries, people, languages, and cities when speaking English. I shall henceforth brush up on my Japanese, Hindi, German, and Polish, and every other languange in the world so I can refere to you in your native language, even when speaking my own.
And why would the USA be on the list and not Germany or France? Germany outright bans certain speech and political thought (i.e. Nazism). France bans both Nazism and denial of the Armenian genocide. Such bans are unconstitutional in the USA.
Neither the USA, France, or Germany deserve to be on this list, because their restrictions, such as they are, are rather mild. I think your anti-Americanism has gotten the better of you, or you're trolling.
And as far "pariah" being a tautology for "military", that speaks for itself. Societies do not ostracize those who sacrifice for the community, but honor them.
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The article did not say what packages were delayed specifically, but Debian is known to have an insane number of packages. Perhaps some culling is in order. I'm not part of the project, just an appreciative user, but here are my two cents.
About the project being "frozen", I don't know about that. I have a laptop running etch-testing. I did an apt-get dist-upgrade in mid-Nov , put it away for a few weeks and ran it again in early-Dec (don't remember exact dates). Something like 70 packages needed upgrades.
In Debian, they call this "stable". See - packages.debian.org/stable/misc/postgresql
oh, wait...nevermind.
I agree that "identity theft" is an over-used term when "credit fraud" might be a better description in most situations. However, I've heard of "identity theft" that didn't involve credit fraud. During the immigration debate that was going on last summer, I read a story in the newspaper (sorry, don't have a link) about a woman on the east coast who applied for unemployment benefits, but was denied because records showed that she was currently employed somewhere in the midwest. Except, she wasn't working in the midwest; some illegal alien was using her SSN. There have also been cases where the IRS has audited people because their tax returns do not match the income reported for their SSNs (again, probably illegal aliens using stolen SSNs).
So even if an "identity thief" doesn't apply for credit in you name, they can still cause you major problems.
Agreed. I'm no expert on UI design myself, but the environment (widgets, window frames, scrollbars, window backgrounds, etc) should never be flashy or colorful enough to draw your attention away from the content. If the widgets are drawing the user's attention, then they are distracting (and detracting) from the application content. Widgets are functional knobs and buttons, not decoration. Imagine fluorescent buttons and borders on a TV; they would distract you from the show. Grey is unobtrusive.
You bring up a good point about everybody breaking the standard through partial implementation. The Open Group approach might be a good way to fix this. Nobody has more disdain for the "Open Group" than me. (see my post berating Open Group as a bunch of greedy bastards) But, perhaps if the CSS standard was copyrighted/patented/trademark (royalty-free or nominal cost) such that a browser had to pass a test suite in order to implement it, then the web world might be a more interoperable (and better) place. So, the "Open Group" might have the basically right approach, if they just wouldn't charge exorbitant fees for the certification.
The test suite itself would seem trivial (just a bunch of xhtml pages with css) and be free (gratis). The browser would have to render a series of pages as expected to pass. Once the browser passed, the W3C would license the CSS patent/trademark at a nominal price.
I've seen several machines at tourist sites that you feed a penny (and a quarter). The machine then flattens the penny and stamps some design on the resulting token. Will these also now be illegal?
So they then apply sales tax which will come to a fraction of a nickle. Do you really think they will ever round down? No,they will always round up. You'll see your annual sales tax expenditure double (at least).
The Mil Token pictured is paper (cardbord). My Dad told me you could buy them by the sheet at the store register.
I once dug a mil token up in the back yard when I was a kid in the 1970s (when they were already long obsolete), it was made of aluminum or some other really light metal. I didn't know what it was until my parents told me it was a "tax mil".
While the basic concepts between C# and Java might be similiar (I haven't gotten around to C# myself yet), java has some pretty strange things entrenched in they way that it is employeed. For webapps, EJB and J2EE will leave you in a straight jacket. Granted there are alternatives to EJB (Spring, Hibernate, etc), but EJB is still "the standard" way to do java on webapps, if you are going for anything more than a servlet. I have poured over several J2EE books and I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around EJB and the umpteen levels of abtraction and interfaces required to use it properly. Somebody one said that "Java programers have a morbid fascination with complexity"; that is absoutlely true of the twisted minds who thought up EJB. My gosh, the J2EE Tutorial from Sun is *several hundred* pages long.
PHP has its problems, but I find it much more satifying because it is more straight forward. It's easy to write bad code in PHP, but its also easy to write good code in PHP. PHP is definately a less versitile and less powerful tool than Java, but its still a good tool for its intended job.
It is, if you are using your upper margin to **profoundly** influence public policy in a manner that will **drastically** effect the lifestyles of **BILLIONS** of people. Because the environmental movement is trying to spur people into action, they generally publicize the worst case scenarios.
I have no doubt that average recorded temperatures are rising and the recorded CO2 levels have risen as a result of industrial activity. What this article demonstrates is that uncontrolled and unknown variables make the current models inaccurate. The variable mentioned in the article was cooling caused by aerosols. But just how many more unknown variables are there? You don't know and neither do the world's best and brightest climatologists. Will we find another unknown variable that (from the article) reduces the "overall estimate of this effect by 25 per cent"? No models are perfect, but they should have a better margin of error than 25%, if they are going to be the basis of important public policy that will effect countless people.
Even if the warming model is accurate (i.e. a predicted warming is eventually born out exactly as predicted), it is not certain that the predicted disastrous consequences will follow exactly as predicted. Have you stopped to think that a unjustified drastic course of action might end up costing more lives from loss of production and lowering of lifestyles (food, goods, and shelter in simpler terms) than the actual change in the climate? No? Well, think about it before we go off the deep end.
Now going back to "recorded" temperatures. Do you know how many statistical data models have been fubar by unrepresentative sampling or flawed collection methodology? Lots. Do you know how many honest scientists and statisticians have been flummoxed and lead astray by seemingly good, but actually flawed data sets? Lots. What makes you so sure that this is any different? Bad data fed into bad models leading to bad public policy could be a medicine worse than the disease.
I happened to think that the data says we are getting warmer. Just how warmer, what the consequences will be, and exactly why (and in what proportions) are still up to debate because they are still unknown, regardless of what somebody's possibly flawed model says.
You might think that global-warming skeptics are anti-science or just plain stupid. But it is not anti-science to be reluctant to swallow every scientific fad "hook-line-and-sinker", especially one that has strong political overtones. It wasn't that long ago that the scientific consensus considered eugenics to be firmly grounded in biology and evolutionary theory. Countless papers on Eugenics were published in respected peer-reviewed journals. We now know that eugenics was pseudo-science, but for decades it influenced public policy in regards to social welfare and mental health and millions of lives were destroyed. Eugenics was a perfect vehicle for people with an agenda. Long before global warming was even thought up, environmentalists were looking for a (pseudo) scientific reason to justify reduction of industrial activity and to fight the "evil" that is the capitalist raping of the environment. Now they have latched onto global warming as their vehicle. Does that itself make the theory of global warming invalid? No, but it does mean it should be scrutinized.
My understanding is that VBA (event the version in Office2007) is largely based on VB6. Given the fact that Office2007 is a huge install already, why not include the .Net runtime environment with the install and move VBA into a .Net type language. While not completely backwards compatable with VB6/VBA, it would be a lot easier to upgrade a macro or VBA-app to VB.net than to something completely differet like C# because the learning curve from VBA/VB6 to VB.net is a lot easier and there are already a bunch of upgrade "wizards" to move VB6 code to VB.net. Once the macro language is moved to .Net, then the problem becomes implementing a .Net runtime environment to something besides windows and it looks like the Mono project already has done a lot of the heavy lifting in figuring that out. It seems that creating MacOs bindings for the forms is do-able, since Mono has already done similiar work with GTK.
.Net is that a cross-platform runtime environment (e.g. Mono) that allowed running Office on any platform would propbably eat into sales of Windows, since Windows and Office are mutually supporting monopolies.
The only reason I would think that MS would not want move Office to
Organized and unorganzied have nothing to do with "regulated". "Organized" just means they are part of regularly established units (ie. the National Guard - see 10 U.S.C. 311). The unorganized militia, if it ever was called out to act as a militia, would still be expected to follow regulated discipline established by law. "Well Regulated" does not negate private ownership of arms. It referes to the power of the Congress and State Legislature to proscribe the discipline and lawful purposes of the miltia (See Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution) . That is what differentiates a militia from an armed mob. Both can be privately (self) armed. How they act once assembled is the difference. If they act contrary to law and discipline (i.e. contrary to the Well Regulated part), then they are an armed mob.
What is most telling in respect to private ownership, is that the 2nd Amendment has never been interpreted as demanding anything but a right to private ownership, until the gun-control craze started in the last 30 years. That indicates that somebody is coming up with new and novel interpretations of the constitution in order to justify their new-fangled (unconstitutional) ideas. The construct in the 2nd amendment, "the right of the people", is exactly the same as the 4th amendment ("The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures") and the 4th is clearly an indivdual right. Interpreting the 2nd Amendment to refere to a "collective" right is clearly rank revisionism.
If you think this should be differenct, then please use the democratic process to amend it. Please don't use unelected judges to "interpret" the constitution in new ways contrary to historical understanding. If the written words have no fixed meaning and you can "interpret" them to mean anything you like (even the opposite of historical understanding), then there is no point to having a written constitution.
You bring up some good points. But I still disagree because embracing High Tech does not mean we need to abandon manufacturing as a core part of our economy. Not everybody can be retrained to be in a directly High Tech job. We still need to provide working class jobs, because we will always have a working class
...and you can't find a legal American who's willing to do the work they do for the wages they earn.
That's what is so great about a tech economy: you don't have to! The salaries of all jobs are dragged up via supply and demand. Why else would a janitor here have such a high salary compared to the rest of the world?
Well, there is a rachet-effect (downward inflexibility) in wages. When real wages fall, they tend to do so slowly (the exception being hyper-inflation). The relatively high wages that we have now are an artifact of the gains in the 1900s. Also, Tech workers and blue collar workers are in different labor markets. Wages are slowly but surely eroding for blue-collar workers, especially for those who are left behind for the reasons I noted in my previous post.
You're right. That was great in the 1900s. But we're not living in the 1900s anymore, and you either evolve or die. We can't freeze the clock and hope that Asia, Europe, etc don't catch up with us. They will, and as a result we need to stay ahead of them.
That would also be great now. I'm not arguing against evolution or adaptation. I'm not saying we should be making buggy-whips. Nor am I against automation and efficiency (as these advances lead to greater productivity and higher real wages). What I am saying is that we should be manufacturing the high-tech goods that we design, instead of farming the work out to virtual slave-laborers in China. Why doesn't Intel manufacture goods in Santa Clara? Because it cheaper to do it in China, Malaysia, etc (and not because the workers are more productive there, but because the regulatory enviroment is laxer)
In Virginia, where I also live, the unemployment is ridiculously low...
Because Northern VA (where I also work) is driven by the Federal Gov't which dumps billions on the local economy.
Exactly, because wages in that particular sector have been depressed by a glut of cheap imported labor. Perhaps had there been an effective immigration policy (restricting the labor pool), the wages would naturally rise, and internal migration (from say Flint, MI?) would have filled those jobs with unemployed Americans.
What force would you like to see artificially sustain the wages of menial labor jobs? Magic?
A properly regulated national (vs unregulated international) labor market. The only thing artificial is how wages are artificially suppressed by having a de-facto unregulated international labor market because of off-shoring and token border controls.
And all the while maintaining a healthy 4% unemployment rate. That's the problem that you don't get - we have no unemployment and *still* we have to outsurce jobs and bring immigrants in. So your best argument is that we're outsourcing manufacturing jobs because we're generating white collar jobs instead? That's a bad thing?
This brings to mind the old joke: "The Government says they created 1 million new jobs, I should know, because I have three of them". The point is not so much the raw number of jobs, but the **type** of jobs. Instead of manufacturing TVs for $20 per hour plus benefits, we're retailing them for $5.15 with no benefits. That is a very bad thing.
people in America who can work legally will choose higher paying more fulfilling jobs and leave the crappy low paying jobs for people who can't speak English. Please explain to me how this is bad. If there were a glut of experienced, responsible, hard-working, English-speaking people who were unemployed, you might have a case, but there aren't and you don't. Find me some guy who says "man, I wish I could work in a factory inst
Apologists for exporting our standard-of-living have been repeating this mantra for years. I'm sorry to burst your education-is-the-answer bubble, but not everybody is going to get a PhD (or even Bachelor) in engineering. We will always have a large section of our society who, for whatever reason (aptitude or personal perference, poor choice, etc) will NOT go to college and will NOT become engineers. We still have to provide meaningful jobs that pay a living wage to these people. And retraining these folks into programers or network support (or whatever) means nothing if we are going to also export that job to India or import an H-1b to take it away in a few years.
Manufacturing jobs are typically not rock-bottom low-paying. They are often moderately-paying union jobs with health insurance, pensions, and fringe benefits. They are the kind of jobs that allowed the development of a broad-based lower-middle class that formed the backbone of American society in the 1900s. They are the kind of jobs that allow a guy to own a small house with a yard on an affordable mortgage with enough left over to have a decent standard of living.
I agree with Cluckshot's post that we are waging a trade war against our own citizens. We are exporting manufacturing blue collar jobs while importing cheap immigant labor to take the remaining blue collar jobs. And please don't repeat the racist lie that these are "jobs American's won't do". That is a lie. They will do them for decent pay, but not for peanuts. I have relatives who work in landscaping (cutting grass) in rural Missouri, which has almost no immigant labor. They make a modest but decent living. They wouldn't be able to make a living in Virginia (where I live), because it is teeming with cheap illegal immigrant labor that has pushed out the native workforce in those types of jobs. I have no doubt that native born americans would do that work in Virginia, if they weren't undercut by an illegal workforce that does not get paid benefits, often gets paid "under the table", and is not subject to labor law. We have placed our blue-collar citizens in an unregulated and unfettered global labor market that really is a "race to the bottom".
I am normally a free-trade libertarian, but I've come to realize that something is wrong. There is a famous quote attributed to Yogi Bera - it goes something like "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is". In theory, and all other things being equal, trade will benefit both parties and increase the wealth of both. But in practice, all other things are not equal. This is where the ivory-tower economics of free-trade break down. There are just too many uncontrolled variables that their theories do not take into account. The largest uncontrolled varible is the dissimilar reglatory environoments between the US and the east asian economies. In China, free labor unions are outlawed, so workers can not bargin for higher wages or benefits as they could in a regulated true market economy (yes, true markets are also minimally regulated to preserve competition and bargining). Environmental and work safety regulations are unenforced, if they exist at all. This means that all the economic theories about efficiency and trade are blown out of the water. The classic theory is that if another country can make a good more efficiently, then it is good to close down the old inefficient factory and apply the resources to more efficient endevours. But China does not make goods more cheaply because they are more efficient. They make goods more cheaply because they have artificially low costs - no labor rights, can pollute to high-heaven without enforcement, and have a rigged exchange rate. That's not free trade, that's rigged trade.
I've digressed, so going back to the orig
You actually bring up a good point and I had to think about that for a minute, but your comparison is false and here is why. Walk down any non-residential street. You'll see many tens of businesses and likely a half-dozen churches. If you go to any town of any size over 100 people, you'll likely find a chamber of commerce and several churches. You'll see that business and religious groups are the "norm" in the culture (i.e. - The are not remarkable). Now how many gender-rights, ethnic-rights, gay-rights, or enviromental groups did you find during your stroll through town? Likely none. The prominence of such groups (typically identified as leftist) at universities is a good indication that university culture is different from the larger culture. So, I'll have to say that the existance of a Buisness department or a student religous club is not indicative of unusually right-wing culture given the context of the larger society.
This is mostly a copy and paste from another of my earlier posts with a few edits
The overwhelming majority of scientists (who would describe themselves as working scientists versus simple degree holders in the field) are academics working in academic university environments, or even in the case of goverment or corporate research labs, are in the academic revolving door. It is no secret that major universities are basically immersed in left-wing culture both at the official level (such as having ethnic or women's studies departments, speech codes, etc) and at the unofficial level (such as student protest groups). So, these guys are working and living in what amounts to a left-wing echo chamber and anti-industrial environmentalism is a core tenet of modern leftist orthodoxy. People working in that enviornment can not help but have a certain amount of cultural bias. As in most social environments, there is great pressure to conform. I do not doubt that in some cases, non-conforming academics have been ostracized as cretins or kooks, denied tenure, and passed up for promotion. So it is not surprising that a "majority of scientists" would land of the left-wing side of any particular debate, given the implications of being on the "wrong" side.
Also, without accusing anybody of consciously cooking the data, its easy to see what you want to see in data when you have pre-conceived notions. I would say that even the questions researchers ask or don't ask (i.e. what they choose to subject to a study or ignore) is influenced by their preconceived cultural notions.
When somebody says "science is on our side", I basically evaluate it the same as if they said "the statistics are on our side" (especially if its based on statistical or computer models instead of "hard science" that is reproducable in the lab). When somebody says, "the majority of scientists" are on our side, they are just using a logical fallacy - appeal to authority.
As much as we would all like to believe that scientists are selflessly searching for the "truth", they have motivations similar to everybody else (greed, fame, power, money, personel vendettas, etc). They also are capable of political bias. These motivations and bias can color the "truth".Throw in grant money and the prestige of getting published in well-respected journals and the results can be toxic to "truth".
I personally believe that the warming trend itself is undeniable. The extent of it that can be blamed on man versus natural climatic cycles is debatable. There probably is an anti-industrial environmental bias built into most climatic studies conducted at any university or government institutions. All claims should be filtered and evaluated with that in mind.
BTW, this is one of the funniest links around that pokes fun at politicized Science They are from some radio ads that a lobbyist group ran in the Washington, DC market. Obviously biased themselves, but very funny.
An unremarkable death of a dissident by random accident, common crime, or seemingly natural causes makes no notoriety. It might get rid of the immediate disident, but it will not prevent other disidents from 'causing trouble'. Killing a disident via a not-so-subtle and paticularly gruesome manner sends an unmistakeable message. The message is 'obey, or this could be you'. Killing him overseas means 'we can get you anywhere, anytime'. They want people to know, because fear is an effective means of suppressing dissent.
Russia is dangerous. It is nationalistic, it is autocratic, it feels humiliated and condescended upon by the West, it is paranoid, it is jealous, and its economy is fragile and only propped up by the current run-up in oil and gas prices. It only needs a ruthless populist (read 'demagogue') to push it over the edge to full-on fascism. It already has pretext for expansion based up the plight of ethnic russian minorities in its former empire.
Just a dangerous is that for a nationalist Russia, this would be a rational and likely succesful course of action. Russia need but bluster and Europe will cower, while the US is busy elsewhere. Russia would be able to get away with suppressing internal dissent and perhaps annexing some of their neighbors, and they know it. Europe is not psychologically prepared to fight WW3 over the Baltic nations, or Ukraine, or Trans-Dneister and the Russians know this. They need not fear any UN action because they possess a veto in the Security Council (not that the UN is to be feared by anyone anyway, its last meaningful military action was Korea in the 1950s).
IANAQP. Can you change the particle from a known state to something else? Or do you not know the initial state beforehand? If so you know and can change the state, you would be able to send a message. It is either the predetermined known state (1) or not (0). A binary message.
Are these "data rich"? If so, why?
The "machine readable" part should not need to contain anything more than a unique number (i.e. primary key) and perhaps a pki type hash to verify authenticity. The rest can be contained in a (hopefully) secure database using an international common format or schema. The id number could also be soley used as a passport serial number and not used for any finanical purposes.
The article quotes the charity as saying: So its easier and less expensive for them to find both volunteers and employees who already know how to use MS software as opposed to having to go through the time and expense of training them anew on something different. That is a valid concern if they are trying to operate on a shoe-string budget. The noted that the licensing cost for the charity is "pay pence in the pound for the licence" (i.e. cents on the dollar). So the training and support become major expenses.
All three branches of the government jealously guard their constitutional prerogatives. You'll notice that almost all of the signing statements assert exemptions for "foreign relations, national security, or the workings of the executive branch" or words to that effect. Every modern administration, both Democratic and Republican, have asserted constitutional "executive privilege" or reserved executive powers (under the separation of powers doctrine) in those areas. The Bush Administration just happens to be more vigilant (or strident) in asserting those doctrines, even in relatively trivial or arcane instances, because they never want to set a precedent of surrendering any of the Presidency's constitutional powers.
Sorry.. I wasn't addressing you personally. I just find the entire line of conversation preposterous.
I would like to apologize to all the Germans for calling their country Germany (Deutschland). I would like to also appologize to the citizens of Japan (Nihon), Vienna (Vien), Cologne (Koln), Rome (Roma), Bombay (Mumbai), Lisbon (Lisboa), Warsaw (Warszawa), and Leghorn (Livorno). I would also like to apologize to the Dutch (Nederlanders). Please accept my apology on behalf of all English speaking peoples everywhere for using perfectly proper english names for your countries, people, languages, and cities when speaking English. I shall henceforth brush up on my Japanese, Hindi, German, and Polish, and every other languange in the world so I can refere to you in your native language, even when speaking my own.
And why would the USA be on the list and not Germany or France? Germany outright bans certain speech and political thought (i.e. Nazism). France bans both Nazism and denial of the Armenian genocide. Such bans are unconstitutional in the USA.
Neither the USA, France, or Germany deserve to be on this list, because their restrictions, such as they are, are rather mild. I think your anti-Americanism has gotten the better of you, or you're trolling.
And as far "pariah" being a tautology for "military", that speaks for itself. Societies do not ostracize those who sacrifice for the community, but honor them.