China has nukes, Japan doesn't. Unless you count the damage from leaking nuclear reactors.
Also, China has a large military and a young population, Japans population is aging with fewer service-aged citizens.
Both countries have all-volunteer militaries (conscripts tend to do a lot worse). But to be fair, Japan's military is much better trained (thanks to the U.S), and China's military tends to be politicized - it's similar to the U.S.S.R in WW II, in which Stalin kept interfering until Germany had taken half of Russia. At that point, he kept his hands off and let the professional fight the war, which pushed Germany back to Berlin.
Then again you'd have to consider the alliances of the area - even excluding the U.S. First Taiwan, despite disputes over ownership of the Senkaku (Tiaoyutai) islands, would side with Japan. And though Koreans tend to hate Japanese for former war atrocities (and Japan's censorship of its own guilt), Korea in general would probably ally with Japan (ironically, North Korea would provide the essential buffer keeping Korea safe from immediate retaliation from China). So between the three of them, much of China would be cut off from ocean-going world trade - including fuel and supplies.
After that it gets a bit fuzzy to predict. I think most countries would try to remain neutral initially, but woud be drawn in - particularly India, which has border disputes with China, and Russia, which distrusts China but kind of needs it to keep buying oil and resources, but also needs Europe, and is the greatest country in the world except for all its problems all caused by the United States and not corruption etc.. Add Australia, the U.S, Pakistan, etc., and you can keep yourself entertained for days predicting utterly improbably things.
But original point stands - Japan can't nuke China, despite many Japanese politicians advocating that they should be able to.
I don't have mod points today, but think people should read this.
The global drug trade is estimated at around $300 billion USD (I think that's wholesale, not end user), I find it hard to believe that it comes from homeless people.
At the same time, the actual loans covered by the CRA were not a problem. Many sources back this up, including this:
[director of the Federal Reserve’s consumer and community affairs division Sandra Braunstein] cited a Federal Reserve Board analysis which found that, in 2006, CRA-covered banks operating in CRA-targeted neighborhoods accounted for just six percent of the risky, high-cost loans largely responsible for the housing crisis.
So what you're saying is, the CRA made loans not covered by the CRA to default. Does that make any sense? I don't think it does. It sounds more like the "wishful blaming" that those responsible began doing once their expensive lies were exposed.
- mechanics --- a Phillips driver will ``cam out'' when it hits bottom, making triggering the retraction of the tool easy, a Robertson requires a more sophisticated system to measure the torque, stop applying force, then pull out
Torque wrenches for bolts just have a firm spring between the driver and the handle - past the torque limit, the spring twists. I can't think of anything simpler. Maybe that's was just an excuse?
As well, there was an advantage in production that Phillips heads had over Robertson, in that the driver bit pops out of the screw head when the screw tightens up. In old production environments before the advent of accurate torque-limiting drivers for all stations, it was a handy way to determine proper screw torque.
I've heard that, but how did they deal with hex (or square) nuts and bolts which would have the same problem? Sounds to me like it was just an excuse made up to justify an economic or political decision on nonexistant technical grounds - as often happens.
I assume when you say "Blackberry needs to..." you mean RIM, and this is just a slip-up, not an indication that you're ignorant of what you're talking about.
But what you're saying is correct, and that is what RIM is doing - any app that has a minimum of sales (fairly low, $1000) will be awarded an immediate guarantee of $10,000 (see this). I assume the fact that you didn't know that is, again, not an indication that you don't know much about the subject you're talking about.
Globalisation covers a lot of things, not just corporations. It's just as responsible for getting aspirin and antibiotics to the middle of Africa as McDonalds. Probably most important is the globalisation of culture.
Africa has a pretty terrible culture in many ways, and is resistant to change because worship of tradition is part of that culture. Not knocking Africa, tradition was a vital part of most societies up to a point. Prior to the industrial revolution in Europe, there was little progress because most progress wasn't scientific - if someone made pottery slightly differently, it probably cracked or failed. If they forged metal differently it was useless. Changing how you made bread or raised cattle or whatnot almost always resulted in problems. That's because nobody actually understood why doing things the traditional way worked, they just knew it did, so any change became ingrained as something to be avoided.
There was still progress on occasion, but that was still the exception, and often rejected by most people as long as possible. This notion changed first in the New World, as there was no "tradition" (or what there was wiped out by the settlers and their plagues), and came back to the colonizing European countries. Eventually it spread through political conquest, economic forces, and sometimes voluntarily (Japan was an early adopter of some Western attitudes), but the idea of constant improvement through change is not global yet. In particular, it's still rejected by the general population in Africa and the Middle East, even as they develop economically.
This is why those in power, or seeking power, are only interested in the power itself (or prestige), only benefitting those closest to them first, and their country and society last - and brutallly suppressing all opposition. And people don't really mind because they just expect this to be the normal thing - it's their culture, how it's traditionally been done.
This is where globalisation of culture helps - by showing that there are alternatives, and what the benefits are. Even if it doesn't convince the adults, the next generation grows up knowing there are alternatives, and they're willing to change. Little known fact, Iranian people in general are among the most pro-American in the Middle East, because they've experienced an entire generation of an anti-American government oppressing them, yet have been able to learn that it doesn't have to be that way (that's simplified, but essentially correct - the Iranian government is terrified of their own people being fed up, and a war with America is probably the best thing that could happen to them to keep them in power).
A big difference between Africa and the Americas is that natives in the Americas were wiped out by plagues shortly before European settlers moved in - huge pandemics that made Europe's Black Death look like allergies. If this hadn't happened, settling the Americas would have been like colonising Africa, at least in the populated coastal areas. Cultural traditions were lost. In Africa, this didn't happen, and male-dominated, tribe-oriented, and superstitious traditions remain the norm to this day.
Globalisation will inevitably change this, and for the better. That's what will eventually allow Africa to develop, organize, and improve the lives of its people.
You always have to know the format of a file that you're going to use. Any file with 32-bit time fields will be known as only valid within the 31-bit range +/- January 1, 1970, any data stored with dates outside that range (and that already happens - from bank mortgages to climate change data over millenia) will use appropriate formats - in the same way that you don't store 32-bit image data in a GIF (8-bit colour index) file.
My favourite is changing "ass" to "*ss". Exactly who thinks it's better to replace the letter "a" with a symbol that looks like an explicit, close-up view of the very anatomy you think is offensive? ( * )ss indeed.
FROM specifies which tables (or views), not which server, or network, or storage device.
That in itself isn't the point of SQL, rather it's non-procedural, meaning you don't specify how to get the data, you only describe the data you want (in terms of how it relates to others). If your data doesn't have that sort of structure, the "NOSQL" strategy is fine (and can be done in SQL anyway).
SQL's main problems are the inconsistent and sometimes misleading syntax, and the complexity of the where clauses. There are unpopular alternatives to the former (set based syntax is nice), but I'd really like to see deductive databases help with the latter. Foreign key constraints mean that the database can deduce much of the where clause itself, in the same way that Prolog resolves queries (I've seen a deductive database that uses a Prolog syntax, but there's no reason SQL can't be used instead). They're slower, but only for the first deduction, if it's cached), I don't know why they've never caught on.
Number one thing I'd do, allow you to specify your own DNS root. You could start with a default system like now, but you could specify a system (by IP or hostname) as a different, independent root for small subdomains - maybe for testing, maybe because you don't want to shell out for hundreds of related domains, some which might have been taken already, maybe to get around censorship. I'll give examples.
Syntax option A: Bring back bang paths! "dns.antioppression.org!sheepstore.tibet" would indicate you want to use a DNS server at "dns.antioppression.org" to resolve "sheepstore.tibet". Note that ".tibet" isn't an official TLD - who cares? If you run "dns.antioppression.org" you can decide to use whatever you want for a domain. You could also chain DNSes, as well as using IP addresses: "12.34.56.78!our.dns!good.tokes.mj" would use a DNS that doesn't have a registered name to look up another, to look up a third host.
Syntax option B: "cloud.243(cloudproject)(technohost.com)" would indicate "technohost.com" is the DNS for the firm that you're buying server space on, "cloudproject" is your project DNS, and "cloud.243" is one of a thousand or so hosts that you want the world at large to be able to look up.
I like this idea because it gets rid of the single chokepoint being used these days for internet censorship, as well as excessive trademark enforcement. The downside is it opens up more opportunities for phishing or fraud. However, since the DNS lookup chain is visible, you can judge the reliability of the result based on how much you trust the intermediate systems.
After that, there's virtually no limit to how to name hosts, domains, subdomains, and whatever else you want to, since everyone can have their own DNS to play around with.
Was that a typo? Did you mean 5 ppm? The current level of CO2 in the atmosphere is over 390 ppm and it will be over 400 ppm within 2 or 3 years.
I guess it was - or I didn't double check my memory before hitting submit like I should have, but I was feeling lazy. At least I admitted in the post that I wasn't claiming much accuracy on that point.
[...] First of all, you seem to not understand that we cannot mandate that the world use those technologies and in fact they would not because it would give them an advantage.
Why not, it worked for ozone destroying CFCs.
More generally, it doesn't have to be a world mandate, just enough of it that the rest gives up, or joins voluntarily. In the U.S you can now find Bisphenol-A free products widely available and advertised as a benefit (particularly baby cups, bowls, etc.) because all products with that chemical have been banned in Canada. Similarly many smaller or developing countries basically just follow FDA decisions for drug approval.
For carbon emissions in particular, a "carbon tax" strategy in developed countries could be applied to imports from non-complying countries, hindering them in of European, North American, and developed Pacific economies until they comply, much like U.S based intellectual property laws have been spread to Australia (free trade requirement) and elsewhere.
Secondly, you still have the problem of excess CO2. Which requires reduction, either through additional carbon sinks in the form of forests which requires killing people off to make room for those forests, or massive carbon sequestration.
Carbon gets absorbed naturally, though slowly, by natural processes. Also transformed to less damaging forms, such as methane oxidated to carbon dioxide. And human processes - paper buried in landfill will stay there for centuries, taking carbon dioxide out of the carbon.
Also, there is room for adjustment to changes in carbon levels. It's stressful on the species involved when this change happens too quickly, and some extinctions will probably occur, but as with most environmental changes, it will also open up new areas for some species to expand into. I remember an estimate that Earth could handle CO2 levels of around 400ppm without too much problem, so we have 50 ppm of leeway (that we're using up - I don't have a citation for this, sorry, so take it for what it's worth). So atmospheric carbon doesn't require reduction so much as limitation.
So in summary, you're pretty much wrong from the very start.
Even if you weren't, your "only two options" is also not correct, there are far more responses that reasonably intelligent people (apparently not you) can come up with.
To be fair, Germany is making Greece fire people because Greece went just a little too far in the bread and circuses department and thought they could borrow their way to happiness. Now the Greeks are upset because their life has been radically altered, but was there any situation where that could have continued indefinitely?
The traditional way would have been currency devaluation, then massive inflation. The effect would have been to reduce expenditures uniformly through the entire economy, stabilising at a new, sustainable level - in effect, people would remain employed, but be paid less. Adopting the Euro meant this couldn't happen, so instead a large section of the population is selected to be paid zero or have benefits cut, while the rest retain their salaries.
There would still have been aftershocks of unemployment the old way, but nothing like what has happened in this case. It's kind of like a large tank of water, in one case you drain a third of it, in the other you make a chunk disappear - it may be the same amount, but in the latter case the waves caused by the rushing water causes more damage than removing it.
That's not to say currency union can't work well. The U.S did it for over two centuries. But it results in a loss of sovereignty as local governments are limited in what they can do, either voluntarily, or involuntarily when an economy implodes and needs rescuing (like Greece - I think this happened in post-revolution U.S.A as well, setting the standard for federal-state relationships almost from the beginning).
The CoCo was an attempt to salvage a product to provide a low cost "videotex" terminal for farmers called AgVision (this is why the background was green, to seem "farm"-y). The product failed (farmers didn't think this "electrical net working" thing had anything to add to farming, or maybe the services like prices or weather reports just weren't worth the subscription price), but the cost reduction work by Motorola (which is why the 6809 was used) inspired also developing a home computer.
Rewriting the sage words of Mark Twain is a greater sin than burning his work. And anyone who claims Huck Finn is racist hasn't read the fucking book (or is too stupid to understand the entire point of the story).
Actually, that is the reason given for the changes. Specifically, the language is "known" to be so racist that it puts people off of reading it (and parents prevent their children as well). A "safe" version would remove that tabboo and more people would read it and realise it's not racist. The original still exists, for those who, now knowing better, want to read it and see what the difference is.
Here's something to consider - what if it's not "things" that become intelligent? What if intelligence becomes emergent from everyday activities?
Specifically, business. Ever since the first time-and-motion studies and assembly lines, businesses have been trying to codify and standardise best practices for more and more higher level activities. Generally this is in the form of "assistance" to remove the repetitive or redundant wading through raw data or shuffling paper. For example, do you know anyone with a physical "In-box" these days? It's all email - company memos are no longer typed pages, questions get sent and answered globally, etc. Similarly groupware and wikis let people collaborate without time-consuming meetings that get off-track and miss the point anyway. More recently data mining and business intelligence applications have been taking the fuzzy human judgement out of routine decisions. Loan applications are approved electronically in a fraction of the time they used to be, for simple cases.
More and more decision activities are being turned over to software - because they're boring, and because the software does a better job, for the most part (minus a few global stock market crashes as the bugs get worked out). At the same time, lower level activities are still being automated. It's been said that today "all companies are software companies, they just don't know it yet". Many companies get their software packaged from elsewhere - in which case, they're really being run by the software suppliers, they're just going through the motions. Or they don't, and get overtaken by companies which benefit from innovative ideas from all over the planet added to the software.
So when a business software infrastructure has the complexity to make complex decisions better than the people running the company, because it has far more data than a human could process in a lifetime, does it become "intelligent"? If not immediately, how about down the road? If software run companies outperform human run ones, so that the latter go out of business or get bought out, who would notice? Given that humans still get the money and write the announcements and graphically design the web site for other humans.
If that sofware becomes intelligent, then where is the intelligent "machine"? It's spread out across the world, on constantly interchangable machines, storage, networks. Maybe rented from one day to the next, the software might scoot around different servers and companies often enough nobody can tell just where it resides (you know about 90% or your atoms and molecules are replaced annually, but you're still "you").
Intelligent machines may eventually happen, as iPhones with Siri or hospital computers with Watson. But I'm pretty sure intelligence in the form of corporations is inevitable (Charles Stross's book "Accelerando" examines what this type of scenarion might be like - in one case, the main characters negotiate with a Ponzi Scheme in corporation form).
The government spent millions on technology, then shut it down after the Soviet spies stole it, so the USSR had the technology and Canada (who paid for it) didn't? Is that the sort of thing that passes for logic in your mind?
Cutting costs for production often shows up elsewhere. In the Arrow's case, maintenance was an afterthought, sometimes requiring unscrewing entire panels. Lining up the holes to re-fasten them was nearly impossible with the tension changed. Also it had major landing gear problems. It was an amazing jet, but a lot of its shortcomings were somewhat whitewashed in order to win support to continue the program.
I think the real problem is trying to measure code readability. Policies and coding standards try to address the issue while avoiding it by mandating frills that they think will kind or "imply" readability - function length, number of spaces in parentheses, badly defined Hungarian notation (dead, thankfully), Javadoc or similar commenting standards, and so on. But there's no getting around the fact that the only way to measure code readability is to read it.
This means that you need to put code review at the centre of the process. Not necessarily anything heavyweight, but just require that one other developer reads and understands the code (and points out any obvious flaws) before committing - with the limit that any questions the reviewer has should only be answered by changes in the code, because a question implies a readability problem. The developer can add comments, or rename variables, or restructure the code to make it clearer, but the end result should be readable code with fewer bugs (bugs live in hard-to-understand code, simply adding some intermediate variables to a complex formula can make them go away).
As long as the code review itself doesn't get bogged down with issues of How The World Should Indent and things like that - that's always a risk with developers looking at each others code.
If only it were that simple. The big problem is deciding what to change into. A company in a declining market may have a very profitable, cash cow business. They can use that money to fund the search for a new business model. [...]
Having cash and recognition that your business is declining is not enough. The real rub is finding something else that you can succeed at. And I don't think there is any obvious way to go about that.
There is a different mindset between Japanese companies, such as FujiFilm, and American ones like Kodak. Japanese companies usually try to diversify at all times (not when in decline), so FujiFilm expanded from film to photocopiers, displays, and anything else they could (within Japan, large companies are often extremely diversified. Nintendo once ran taxis, Mitsubishi Electric makes elevators and televisions, Yamaha makes music keyboards and motorcycles). American companies have the phrase "core competency" as a mantra, and will often sell off profitable divisions (the entire technical equipment side of HP) or even wind them down if they're not profitable enough (HP calculators). The name for this is "unlocking shareholder value", and maybe it does, but it tends to weaken companies which no longer have the flexibility to adapt to market changes. Rather than one division growing while another shrinks, one spun-off company grows while another goes bankrupt.
Try a modern linux with bash completions installed. Type "ls --" and hit tab.
Why you'd want to "arrow through" a large list of commands is beyond me.
First, you wouldn't want to do that through a large list, only a small list. Also, a well designed interface would allow you to more powerful search tools that could be much faster (tree that expands as you type, giving you shortcuts to jump to or prune branches). I think that means you've missed the point.
The point is you're still thinking "text and only text" as the output from any command. Text based key completions (tab, arrow key, etc) are terribly old these days. I think you could find something like that on the old text-based Lotus 1-2-3, if not early word processor spelling checkers. "Modern" isn't a two decade old technology.
A lot of "words" on a command line have an implied object, the obvious example being the file names printed by "ls" - each file name implies there's a file. You can run "ls" again with a "-l" to see more attributes of the file, like size and permissions. You can use "more" to view the contents. And so on. By contrast, a GUI file manager shows you a representation of the file that you can manipulate, to list size and attributes, click to open, rename, and so on. The file appears on screen once, in a human readable form, you don't have to open a new view every time you want to see an attribute like you do with "ls".
So imagine a system where you could type "ls some_app/data" and get a huge list of files, but then decide to "select age > this month" to highlight only older files, then add more selects to add more criteria, sort by size, etc. Say you find the file you want, and want to view it, but don't know the name of the viewer command installed on this system (or if it has one), but you can click on the file to bring up a menu and select "view" to see your options.
To do something like that now you'd have to do your "ls" in a CLI, then open up a GUI file manager to the same directory to click on it. The question is, why can't "ls" output complete file objects to your window, instead of just one limited form (7 bit ASCII) of one single attribute (the name) of those objects? They don't need to look much different until you start clicking on them, you could keep doing things the CLI way until you need something more.
I hope that's clearer about why tab completion of text is insignificant compared to what could be done with CLI/GUI integration. That's one example, you should be able to imagine others (revision control system, system stats, debugging a crashed program).
I think there's still a disconnect between GUI and CLI at a more fundamental level - people think of CLI as meaning text and only text, and GUI as only graphics (despite labels, fields, etc. being textual). Most (or every, if possible) UI item should be interactable (is that a word?) by keyboard or GUI, but for an example I'll start with a command line - when you run a command, it should create one or more interactable objects as the output. In a lot of cases (say, "cp" or "rm"), it could be an exit code that just shows up as a widget next to the prompt on the next line. If you want to know more, you can click on it to get execution details like execution time or whatever - normally stuff you're not interested in, so it stays out of you way. If something went wrong, the object displays an error message, with widgets for diagnostics - anything from a stack trace or signal received to rerunning the command with a debugger attached.
A lot of commands would produce output objects. A "mkdir" like command would create a folder icon you could click on to open, move, rename, etc. "ls" could create an explosion of objects in your terminal window that you can manipulate just like you had clicked on a folder or selected files to view separately.
You might not scroll back through your output so much as flip back to previous window states, like the "Time Machine" interface on Mac OS X. IN each case, you could modify and re-run your command, it would fork into another tree of results. You could navigate these result trees until they expire, like web pages.
As for all the complicated options that some commands have, something like the <tab> key would create a command chooser (all commands matching the first letters you typed) that you could arrow through or click on. Once the command was selected, another <tab> could cause the command to create an option configurator (like the Windows PowerShell does).
And that's just some initial thoughts. Smarter people can probably come up with genuinely good ideas. Sadly, I've seen little of this even tried.
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China has nukes, Japan doesn't. Unless you count the damage from leaking nuclear reactors.
Also, China has a large military and a young population, Japans population is aging with fewer service-aged citizens.
Both countries have all-volunteer militaries (conscripts tend to do a lot worse). But to be fair, Japan's military is much better trained (thanks to the U.S), and China's military tends to be politicized - it's similar to the U.S.S.R in WW II, in which Stalin kept interfering until Germany had taken half of Russia. At that point, he kept his hands off and let the professional fight the war, which pushed Germany back to Berlin.
Then again you'd have to consider the alliances of the area - even excluding the U.S. First Taiwan, despite disputes over ownership of the Senkaku (Tiaoyutai) islands, would side with Japan. And though Koreans tend to hate Japanese for former war atrocities (and Japan's censorship of its own guilt), Korea in general would probably ally with Japan (ironically, North Korea would provide the essential buffer keeping Korea safe from immediate retaliation from China). So between the three of them, much of China would be cut off from ocean-going world trade - including fuel and supplies.
After that it gets a bit fuzzy to predict. I think most countries would try to remain neutral initially, but woud be drawn in - particularly India, which has border disputes with China, and Russia, which distrusts China but kind of needs it to keep buying oil and resources, but also needs Europe, and is the greatest country in the world except for all its problems all caused by the United States and not corruption etc.. Add Australia, the U.S, Pakistan, etc., and you can keep yourself entertained for days predicting utterly improbably things.
But original point stands - Japan can't nuke China, despite many Japanese politicians advocating that they should be able to.
I don't have mod points today, but think people should read this.
The global drug trade is estimated at around $300 billion USD (I think that's wholesale, not end user), I find it hard to believe that it comes from homeless people.
At the same time, the actual loans covered by the CRA were not a problem. Many sources back this up, including this:
[director of the Federal Reserve’s consumer and community affairs division Sandra Braunstein] cited a Federal Reserve Board analysis which found that, in 2006, CRA-covered banks operating in CRA-targeted neighborhoods accounted for just six percent of the risky, high-cost loans largely responsible for the housing crisis.
So what you're saying is, the CRA made loans not covered by the CRA to default. Does that make any sense? I don't think it does. It sounds more like the "wishful blaming" that those responsible began doing once their expensive lies were exposed.
- mechanics --- a Phillips driver will ``cam out'' when it hits bottom, making triggering the retraction of the tool easy, a Robertson requires a more sophisticated system to measure the torque, stop applying force, then pull out
Torque wrenches for bolts just have a firm spring between the driver and the handle - past the torque limit, the spring twists. I can't think of anything simpler. Maybe that's was just an excuse?
As well, there was an advantage in production that Phillips heads had over Robertson, in that the driver bit pops out of the screw head when the screw tightens up. In old production environments before the advent of accurate torque-limiting drivers for all stations, it was a handy way to determine proper screw torque.
I've heard that, but how did they deal with hex (or square) nuts and bolts which would have the same problem? Sounds to me like it was just an excuse made up to justify an economic or political decision on nonexistant technical grounds - as often happens.
I assume when you say "Blackberry needs to..." you mean RIM, and this is just a slip-up, not an indication that you're ignorant of what you're talking about.
But what you're saying is correct, and that is what RIM is doing - any app that has a minimum of sales (fairly low, $1000) will be awarded an immediate guarantee of $10,000 (see this). I assume the fact that you didn't know that is, again, not an indication that you don't know much about the subject you're talking about.
Globalisation covers a lot of things, not just corporations. It's just as responsible for getting aspirin and antibiotics to the middle of Africa as McDonalds. Probably most important is the globalisation of culture.
Africa has a pretty terrible culture in many ways, and is resistant to change because worship of tradition is part of that culture. Not knocking Africa, tradition was a vital part of most societies up to a point. Prior to the industrial revolution in Europe, there was little progress because most progress wasn't scientific - if someone made pottery slightly differently, it probably cracked or failed. If they forged metal differently it was useless. Changing how you made bread or raised cattle or whatnot almost always resulted in problems. That's because nobody actually understood why doing things the traditional way worked, they just knew it did, so any change became ingrained as something to be avoided.
There was still progress on occasion, but that was still the exception, and often rejected by most people as long as possible. This notion changed first in the New World, as there was no "tradition" (or what there was wiped out by the settlers and their plagues), and came back to the colonizing European countries. Eventually it spread through political conquest, economic forces, and sometimes voluntarily (Japan was an early adopter of some Western attitudes), but the idea of constant improvement through change is not global yet. In particular, it's still rejected by the general population in Africa and the Middle East, even as they develop economically.
This is why those in power, or seeking power, are only interested in the power itself (or prestige), only benefitting those closest to them first, and their country and society last - and brutallly suppressing all opposition. And people don't really mind because they just expect this to be the normal thing - it's their culture, how it's traditionally been done.
This is where globalisation of culture helps - by showing that there are alternatives, and what the benefits are. Even if it doesn't convince the adults, the next generation grows up knowing there are alternatives, and they're willing to change. Little known fact, Iranian people in general are among the most pro-American in the Middle East, because they've experienced an entire generation of an anti-American government oppressing them, yet have been able to learn that it doesn't have to be that way (that's simplified, but essentially correct - the Iranian government is terrified of their own people being fed up, and a war with America is probably the best thing that could happen to them to keep them in power).
A big difference between Africa and the Americas is that natives in the Americas were wiped out by plagues shortly before European settlers moved in - huge pandemics that made Europe's Black Death look like allergies. If this hadn't happened, settling the Americas would have been like colonising Africa, at least in the populated coastal areas. Cultural traditions were lost. In Africa, this didn't happen, and male-dominated, tribe-oriented, and superstitious traditions remain the norm to this day.
Globalisation will inevitably change this, and for the better. That's what will eventually allow Africa to develop, organize, and improve the lives of its people.
You always have to know the format of a file that you're going to use. Any file with 32-bit time fields will be known as only valid within the 31-bit range +/- January 1, 1970, any data stored with dates outside that range (and that already happens - from bank mortgages to climate change data over millenia) will use appropriate formats - in the same way that you don't store 32-bit image data in a GIF (8-bit colour index) file.
Use empty toilet paper rolls to take up the slack, that makes most cable messes a lot neater. Either for individual cables or for storage
My favourite is changing "ass" to "*ss". Exactly who thinks it's better to replace the letter "a" with a symbol that looks like an explicit, close-up view of the very anatomy you think is offensive? ( * )ss indeed.
FROM specifies which tables (or views), not which server, or network, or storage device.
That in itself isn't the point of SQL, rather it's non-procedural, meaning you don't specify how to get the data, you only describe the data you want (in terms of how it relates to others). If your data doesn't have that sort of structure, the "NOSQL" strategy is fine (and can be done in SQL anyway).
SQL's main problems are the inconsistent and sometimes misleading syntax, and the complexity of the where clauses. There are unpopular alternatives to the former (set based syntax is nice), but I'd really like to see deductive databases help with the latter. Foreign key constraints mean that the database can deduce much of the where clause itself, in the same way that Prolog resolves queries (I've seen a deductive database that uses a Prolog syntax, but there's no reason SQL can't be used instead). They're slower, but only for the first deduction, if it's cached), I don't know why they've never caught on.
That's a tangent, but at least it's irrelevant.
Number one thing I'd do, allow you to specify your own DNS root. You could start with a default system like now, but you could specify a system (by IP or hostname) as a different, independent root for small subdomains - maybe for testing, maybe because you don't want to shell out for hundreds of related domains, some which might have been taken already, maybe to get around censorship. I'll give examples.
Syntax option A: Bring back bang paths! "dns.antioppression.org!sheepstore.tibet" would indicate you want to use a DNS server at "dns.antioppression.org" to resolve "sheepstore.tibet". Note that ".tibet" isn't an official TLD - who cares? If you run "dns.antioppression.org" you can decide to use whatever you want for a domain. You could also chain DNSes, as well as using IP addresses: "12.34.56.78!our.dns!good.tokes.mj" would use a DNS that doesn't have a registered name to look up another, to look up a third host.
Syntax option B: "cloud.243(cloudproject)(technohost.com)" would indicate "technohost.com" is the DNS for the firm that you're buying server space on, "cloudproject" is your project DNS, and "cloud.243" is one of a thousand or so hosts that you want the world at large to be able to look up.
I like this idea because it gets rid of the single chokepoint being used these days for internet censorship, as well as excessive trademark enforcement. The downside is it opens up more opportunities for phishing or fraud. However, since the DNS lookup chain is visible, you can judge the reliability of the result based on how much you trust the intermediate systems.
After that, there's virtually no limit to how to name hosts, domains, subdomains, and whatever else you want to, since everyone can have their own DNS to play around with.
Was that a typo? Did you mean 5 ppm? The current level of CO2 in the atmosphere is over 390 ppm and it will be over 400 ppm within 2 or 3 years.
I guess it was - or I didn't double check my memory before hitting submit like I should have, but I was feeling lazy. At least I admitted in the post that I wasn't claiming much accuracy on that point.
[...] First of all, you seem to not understand that we cannot mandate that the world use those technologies and in fact they would not because it would give them an advantage.
Why not, it worked for ozone destroying CFCs.
More generally, it doesn't have to be a world mandate, just enough of it that the rest gives up, or joins voluntarily. In the U.S you can now find Bisphenol-A free products widely available and advertised as a benefit (particularly baby cups, bowls, etc.) because all products with that chemical have been banned in Canada. Similarly many smaller or developing countries basically just follow FDA decisions for drug approval.
For carbon emissions in particular, a "carbon tax" strategy in developed countries could be applied to imports from non-complying countries, hindering them in of European, North American, and developed Pacific economies until they comply, much like U.S based intellectual property laws have been spread to Australia (free trade requirement) and elsewhere.
Secondly, you still have the problem of excess CO2. Which requires reduction, either through additional carbon sinks in the form of forests which requires killing people off to make room for those forests, or massive carbon sequestration.
Carbon gets absorbed naturally, though slowly, by natural processes. Also transformed to less damaging forms, such as methane oxidated to carbon dioxide. And human processes - paper buried in landfill will stay there for centuries, taking carbon dioxide out of the carbon .
Also, there is room for adjustment to changes in carbon levels. It's stressful on the species involved when this change happens too quickly, and some extinctions will probably occur, but as with most environmental changes, it will also open up new areas for some species to expand into. I remember an estimate that Earth could handle CO2 levels of around 400ppm without too much problem, so we have 50 ppm of leeway (that we're using up - I don't have a citation for this, sorry, so take it for what it's worth). So atmospheric carbon doesn't require reduction so much as limitation.
So in summary, you're pretty much wrong from the very start.
Even if you weren't, your "only two options" is also not correct, there are far more responses that reasonably intelligent people (apparently not you) can come up with.
Victor should decide not to entangle the photons whenever Alice and Bob's polarizations are correlated. That'll rip physics a new one...
That would require observing the Alice / Bob results first, thus "changing" the Victor photons before he can do anything.
To be fair, Germany is making Greece fire people because Greece went just a little too far in the bread and circuses department and thought they could borrow their way to happiness. Now the Greeks are upset because their life has been radically altered, but was there any situation where that could have continued indefinitely?
The traditional way would have been currency devaluation, then massive inflation. The effect would have been to reduce expenditures uniformly through the entire economy, stabilising at a new, sustainable level - in effect, people would remain employed, but be paid less. Adopting the Euro meant this couldn't happen, so instead a large section of the population is selected to be paid zero or have benefits cut, while the rest retain their salaries.
There would still have been aftershocks of unemployment the old way, but nothing like what has happened in this case. It's kind of like a large tank of water, in one case you drain a third of it, in the other you make a chunk disappear - it may be the same amount, but in the latter case the waves caused by the rushing water causes more damage than removing it.
That's not to say currency union can't work well. The U.S did it for over two centuries. But it results in a loss of sovereignty as local governments are limited in what they can do, either voluntarily, or involuntarily when an economy implodes and needs rescuing (like Greece - I think this happened in post-revolution U.S.A as well, setting the standard for federal-state relationships almost from the beginning).
The CoCo was an attempt to salvage a product to provide a low cost "videotex" terminal for farmers called AgVision (this is why the background was green, to seem "farm"-y). The product failed (farmers didn't think this "electrical net working" thing had anything to add to farming, or maybe the services like prices or weather reports just weren't worth the subscription price), but the cost reduction work by Motorola (which is why the 6809 was used) inspired also developing a home computer.
Rewriting the sage words of Mark Twain is a greater sin than burning his work. And anyone who claims Huck Finn is racist hasn't read the fucking book (or is too stupid to understand the entire point of the story).
Actually, that is the reason given for the changes. Specifically, the language is "known" to be so racist that it puts people off of reading it (and parents prevent their children as well). A "safe" version would remove that tabboo and more people would read it and realise it's not racist. The original still exists, for those who, now knowing better, want to read it and see what the difference is.
Here's something to consider - what if it's not "things" that become intelligent? What if intelligence becomes emergent from everyday activities?
Specifically, business. Ever since the first time-and-motion studies and assembly lines, businesses have been trying to codify and standardise best practices for more and more higher level activities. Generally this is in the form of "assistance" to remove the repetitive or redundant wading through raw data or shuffling paper. For example, do you know anyone with a physical "In-box" these days? It's all email - company memos are no longer typed pages, questions get sent and answered globally, etc. Similarly groupware and wikis let people collaborate without time-consuming meetings that get off-track and miss the point anyway. More recently data mining and business intelligence applications have been taking the fuzzy human judgement out of routine decisions. Loan applications are approved electronically in a fraction of the time they used to be, for simple cases.
More and more decision activities are being turned over to software - because they're boring, and because the software does a better job, for the most part (minus a few global stock market crashes as the bugs get worked out). At the same time, lower level activities are still being automated. It's been said that today "all companies are software companies, they just don't know it yet". Many companies get their software packaged from elsewhere - in which case, they're really being run by the software suppliers, they're just going through the motions. Or they don't, and get overtaken by companies which benefit from innovative ideas from all over the planet added to the software.
So when a business software infrastructure has the complexity to make complex decisions better than the people running the company, because it has far more data than a human could process in a lifetime, does it become "intelligent"? If not immediately, how about down the road? If software run companies outperform human run ones, so that the latter go out of business or get bought out, who would notice? Given that humans still get the money and write the announcements and graphically design the web site for other humans.
If that sofware becomes intelligent, then where is the intelligent "machine"? It's spread out across the world, on constantly interchangable machines, storage, networks. Maybe rented from one day to the next, the software might scoot around different servers and companies often enough nobody can tell just where it resides (you know about 90% or your atoms and molecules are replaced annually, but you're still "you").
Intelligent machines may eventually happen, as iPhones with Siri or hospital computers with Watson. But I'm pretty sure intelligence in the form of corporations is inevitable (Charles Stross's book "Accelerando" examines what this type of scenarion might be like - in one case, the main characters negotiate with a Ponzi Scheme in corporation form).
The government spent millions on technology, then shut it down after the Soviet spies stole it, so the USSR had the technology and Canada (who paid for it) didn't? Is that the sort of thing that passes for logic in your mind?
Cutting costs for production often shows up elsewhere. In the Arrow's case, maintenance was an afterthought, sometimes requiring unscrewing entire panels. Lining up the holes to re-fasten them was nearly impossible with the tension changed. Also it had major landing gear problems. It was an amazing jet, but a lot of its shortcomings were somewhat whitewashed in order to win support to continue the program.
I think the real problem is trying to measure code readability. Policies and coding standards try to address the issue while avoiding it by mandating frills that they think will kind or "imply" readability - function length, number of spaces in parentheses, badly defined Hungarian notation (dead, thankfully), Javadoc or similar commenting standards, and so on. But there's no getting around the fact that the only way to measure code readability is to read it.
This means that you need to put code review at the centre of the process. Not necessarily anything heavyweight, but just require that one other developer reads and understands the code (and points out any obvious flaws) before committing - with the limit that any questions the reviewer has should only be answered by changes in the code, because a question implies a readability problem. The developer can add comments, or rename variables, or restructure the code to make it clearer, but the end result should be readable code with fewer bugs (bugs live in hard-to-understand code, simply adding some intermediate variables to a complex formula can make them go away).
As long as the code review itself doesn't get bogged down with issues of How The World Should Indent and things like that - that's always a risk with developers looking at each others code.
If only it were that simple. The big problem is deciding what to change into. A company in a declining market may have a very profitable, cash cow business. They can use that money to fund the search for a new business model. [...]
Having cash and recognition that your business is declining is not enough. The real rub is finding something else that you can succeed at. And I don't think there is any obvious way to go about that.
There is a different mindset between Japanese companies, such as FujiFilm, and American ones like Kodak. Japanese companies usually try to diversify at all times (not when in decline), so FujiFilm expanded from film to photocopiers, displays, and anything else they could (within Japan, large companies are often extremely diversified. Nintendo once ran taxis, Mitsubishi Electric makes elevators and televisions, Yamaha makes music keyboards and motorcycles). American companies have the phrase "core competency" as a mantra, and will often sell off profitable divisions (the entire technical equipment side of HP) or even wind them down if they're not profitable enough (HP calculators). The name for this is "unlocking shareholder value", and maybe it does, but it tends to weaken companies which no longer have the flexibility to adapt to market changes. Rather than one division growing while another shrinks, one spun-off company grows while another goes bankrupt.
Try a modern linux with bash completions installed. Type "ls --" and hit tab.
Why you'd want to "arrow through" a large list of commands is beyond me.
First, you wouldn't want to do that through a large list, only a small list. Also, a well designed interface would allow you to more powerful search tools that could be much faster (tree that expands as you type, giving you shortcuts to jump to or prune branches). I think that means you've missed the point.
The point is you're still thinking "text and only text" as the output from any command. Text based key completions (tab, arrow key, etc) are terribly old these days. I think you could find something like that on the old text-based Lotus 1-2-3, if not early word processor spelling checkers. "Modern" isn't a two decade old technology.
A lot of "words" on a command line have an implied object, the obvious example being the file names printed by "ls" - each file name implies there's a file. You can run "ls" again with a "-l" to see more attributes of the file, like size and permissions. You can use "more" to view the contents. And so on. By contrast, a GUI file manager shows you a representation of the file that you can manipulate, to list size and attributes, click to open, rename, and so on. The file appears on screen once, in a human readable form, you don't have to open a new view every time you want to see an attribute like you do with "ls".
So imagine a system where you could type "ls some_app/data" and get a huge list of files, but then decide to "select age > this month" to highlight only older files, then add more selects to add more criteria, sort by size, etc. Say you find the file you want, and want to view it, but don't know the name of the viewer command installed on this system (or if it has one), but you can click on the file to bring up a menu and select "view" to see your options.
To do something like that now you'd have to do your "ls" in a CLI, then open up a GUI file manager to the same directory to click on it. The question is, why can't "ls" output complete file objects to your window, instead of just one limited form (7 bit ASCII) of one single attribute (the name) of those objects? They don't need to look much different until you start clicking on them, you could keep doing things the CLI way until you need something more.
I hope that's clearer about why tab completion of text is insignificant compared to what could be done with CLI/GUI integration. That's one example, you should be able to imagine others (revision control system, system stats, debugging a crashed program).
I think there's still a disconnect between GUI and CLI at a more fundamental level - people think of CLI as meaning text and only text, and GUI as only graphics (despite labels, fields, etc. being textual). Most (or every, if possible) UI item should be interactable (is that a word?) by keyboard or GUI, but for an example I'll start with a command line - when you run a command, it should create one or more interactable objects as the output. In a lot of cases (say, "cp" or "rm"), it could be an exit code that just shows up as a widget next to the prompt on the next line. If you want to know more, you can click on it to get execution details like execution time or whatever - normally stuff you're not interested in, so it stays out of you way. If something went wrong, the object displays an error message, with widgets for diagnostics - anything from a stack trace or signal received to rerunning the command with a debugger attached.
A lot of commands would produce output objects. A "mkdir" like command would create a folder icon you could click on to open, move, rename, etc. "ls" could create an explosion of objects in your terminal window that you can manipulate just like you had clicked on a folder or selected files to view separately.
You might not scroll back through your output so much as flip back to previous window states, like the "Time Machine" interface on Mac OS X. IN each case, you could modify and re-run your command, it would fork into another tree of results. You could navigate these result trees until they expire, like web pages.
As for all the complicated options that some commands have, something like the <tab> key would create a command chooser (all commands matching the first letters you typed) that you could arrow through or click on. Once the command was selected, another <tab> could cause the command to create an option configurator (like the Windows PowerShell does).
And that's just some initial thoughts. Smarter people can probably come up with genuinely good ideas. Sadly, I've seen little of this even tried.