While the so called summary claims that wikipedia is supposed to be this "war zone", the article's fucking summary states that they have concluded that "edit wars are mainly fought by few editors only." The article then proceeds with statements such as:
"Usually, different editors constructively extend each other’s text, correct minor errors and mistakes until a consensual article emerges – this is the most natural, and by far the most common, way for a WP entry to be developed.
and even
As we shall see, in the English WP close to 99% of the articles result from this rather smooth, constructive process.
So, fuck you slashdot for posting a story with such an inflamatory, patently wrong and misleading pile of crap which was supposed to be the summary. If you have to lie to desperately generate page hits then it's a clear sign that you are dead as a communications medium.
This acceptance can easily come to bite you in the ass. If you grant MS the priviledge of implementing this then you can expect OEMs to pump out "windows computers" that, because they are sold only with MS-approved software, do not accept or support other software other than the one signed and approved by MS for that specific product. And why? Because pretexts such as "MS gets a little security on their malware plagued OS".
Once that happens, say goodbye to being able to pop in a Knoppix CD and give linux a try. Why? Because you've purchased a windows computer, and windows computers are only supposed to run windows.
And you can't turn that off because you explicitly have purchased a windows computer, which represents a declaration that you accepted the requirements put in place by MS for only running MS-approved software on your windows computer. Because malware.
But hey, you may expect the free market to kick in and for OEMs to simply sell hardware which isn't castrated with UEFI nonsense. Except that's as likely as being able to purchase a computer which doesn't come with windows reinstalled. And this means that, due to economy of scale, OEMs will actually be pressured to not waste resources on producing and supporting hardware for a niche market, as running slackware.
So, by agreeing with this, you are actually stating that there is a theoretical possibility that everyone else could simply shut it off. But then the real world kicks in and you will never see that happen at all.
A more accurate definition of capitalism consists of two basic things: - right to private property - free market
The entire capitalist system is defined by these two aspects alone. If a state grants every citizen the right to own stuff, and also buy and sell to whoever they see fit not only their stuff but also the stuff they make and the services they provide then we have a capitalist system.
Some implementations of a capitalist system may have some limits and restrictions (i.e., only a selected few can sell services as medical doctors, including prescribe drugs) but these two aspects, right to private property and a free market, are the basis of capitalism.
Indeed. Prefab houses are nothing new. Even european architecture giants such as Le Corbusier wrote extensively on mass production housing since around 1920, and pretty much modern construction is deeply influenced by Le Corbusier's work. Even concrete structures had their origin in modular, prefabricated systems, with Hennebique's reinforced concrete system.
So, if the entire industry is based on the use of modular systems, I really don't get it how anyone can make such silly claims such as "North American's, and Europeans partially are not yet used to prefab houses." Not yet used to prefab houses? We live in them for decades now.
I happen to be in structural engineering, and I have to say that you clearly don't know what you are talking about. I'll tell you why.
Nowadays, and for a couple of decades now, there isn't a single european contractor who does not rely on prefabrication. Concrete structures tend to make this a bit harder to pull, but their building cost is so much lower than steel structures that the extra time spent on a project easily offsets costs. Even then, there are quite a number of prefab structural elements and modules, such as pre-slabs and composite slabs with profile steel sheeting, that help out a lot. With steel structures, even with composite slabs, it's quite easy to put up high numbers of floors in a limited number of days. The only limit that affects this is how fast you can hoist the beam and column elements, and how fast your crew is able to set the necessary connections.
I suspect that in the US it's even more widespread. There are companies which even put together factories to assemble entire houses in assembly lines, and steel construction is much more widespread than concrete.
So, your comment on the use of prefab techniques is obviously bullshit.
Then, regarding your conspiracy theory, it is once again bullshit. To start off, as any product on earth, housing prices aren't defined by construction costs, but only on what clients are willing to spend on them. Meanwhile, construction costs, with today's technology, basically depends only on what finishings the client wishes. As a demonstration, you claimed that 86k is such a great deal. Yet, that's the price Ikea asks for a tiny apartment with an area of about 70mÂ. This represents a unit cost of about 1228â/mÂ, and this without accounting for the price of the property and any licenses and services which are needed to build it. Knowing this, do you actually know what's the average unit cost for building a similar house on a property, including the price of the property itself? Between 500â/m and 900â/mÂ.
In other words, your example costs at least twice as much to build than a regular house.
So, at least take your tinfoil hat off once in a while. The world isn't set out to get you.
The cost of construction work, nowadays, is defined by labour wages, not the cost of building materials. Hence, obviously it is more expensive to build something in Australia, resorting to australian labour, than it is to build something in China, resorting to chinese labour.
And let's not even go into the issue of costs introduced by adhering to building and safety regulations.
If you pre-fab everything on the ground then its not really "building", more like "assembling".
If you believe that nonsense then I have news for you: the entire construction industry has been "kinda cheating" for decades now. With steel structures, every single structural element is prefabricated somewhere and only assembled in situ. This is even the case with large projects, such as concrete bridges. Nowadays, there are a hand full of different building techniques which rely on the prefabrication of structural modules somewhere, and bring them on site just to assemble it. Take this for example.
Graphics cards are, nowadays, a bit more than 3D gaming. Nowadays there are a number of markets that companies such as NVidia may cater and are of fundamental importance, such as smartphones/tablets (remember Tegra?) and HPC (remember CUDA/OpenCL?).
What these markets have in common is that linux is the only reason they exist and are relevant. Windows is,at the very best, a "also ran" in mobile devices. In the HPC world linux is essentially the only game in town. In fact, there is currently only a single entry proprietary OS entry in the Top500 list.
Do you expect NVidia to abandon any of those markets in protest of Linus Torvalds pointing out that NVidia sucks at supporting linux? Think again.
Why should Nvidia subscribe to the projects "goals and visions"? Thats the projects concern, not theirs.
NVidia isn't required to, as you put it, "subscribe to the projects goals and visions".
But Linus Torvalds is also not required to enjoy or approve of NVidia's policies, particularly when they generate bad publicity for Linus Torvalds' project and also cause a number of people to complain to Linus Torvalds about a problem which he didn't caused nor can he do anything at all about it. Hence, a very appropriate and sorely required "Fuck you, NVidia".
I've had problems with a NVidia card that I have, and the last time it gave me problems was with the latest upgrade to Kubuntu 12.04. With this upgrade, NVidia's very own proprietary driver either rendered 3D scenes excruciatingly slow or never rendered them at all, instead presenting only a black window. Strangely enough, 2D rendering worked without any noticeable hitch.
The fix came only about a month ago, with an upgrade to NVidia's proprietary driver.
I'm no Knuth biographer, but every single interview and presentation given by Knuth that I ever saw, he always spoke like that.
Going back to basketball, some people talk tons of shit about players such as Derrick Rose for not being very articulate, accusing him of being a moron, a retard and even autistic. Yet, people such as Knuth are also not very articulate, and no one in their right mind would accuse Knuth of being a moron. That says something about being prejudiced.
There's another way to fix the shortfall: simply raise the price of peak hour electricity until
...until industrial production is affected by the skyrocketing costs and the whole economy of Japan faces a recession caused by the increased production costs and lack of ability to compete in the economic field.
In alternative, they can simply turn on a couple of the 50 power generators they have just sitting there, that never exhibit a single problem in their entire existence.
It's basketball. Really, does anybody with a working brain really give a screw about this game?
I had a sarcastic reply but instead I'm going to simply say this: Donald Knuth was a basketball coach. See him talk about his baskeball coaching experience here.
There is no doubt that "everything will correct itself". This isn't up for debate.
What's up for debate is how will the correction happen. The whole point of this is in whose terms will this correction happen: will this be in humanity's good terms, by limiting growth and guaranteeing access to limited resources, will it be in humanity's bad terms, with wars for stuff such as access to food and drinking water and the accompanying indiscriminate killing of very large numbers of people, or will it be in nature's terms, with everyone simply dying off due to lack of subsistence.
It is in everyone's best interests that this adjustment is made on humanity's terms, to preserve quality of living and avoiding large scale deaths. Hence, reports such as the one reported here.
Because people listen to that hyperbole and then find out the population growth isn't "explosive"
I don't know about explosive, but right now it is in fact tigthly correlated with exponential growth. And the thing about exponential growth is that its essentially explosive in nature, as itsdoubling time is constant, and that it only ceases to be exponential to assume a form of a logistic function if either political measures are put in place to stunt growth in our terms, or nature naturally limits the amount of people that can actually live by imposing its own terms.
This is a natural fact which is widely know for over a century and no one in their right mind actually disputes this. So, why would calling a spade a space invalidate the whole message?
So what is the answer? Is a beheading video illegal? Why? What is the law that makes a beheading video illegal? What happens if it's legal in one country, but not in another?
The idiots behind this project explicitly don't care about the legality of censoring the web, or any accountability of their decisions. From the Clean IT project website:
The main objective of this project is to develop a non-legislative framework that consists of general principles and best practices. The general principles will be developed through a bottom up process where the private sector will be in the lead. Through a series of workshops and conferences, the private and public sector will define their problems and try to draw up principles. These principles can be used as a guideline or gentlemen’s agreement, and can be adopted by many partners. They will describe responsibilities and concrete steps public and private partners can take to counter the illegal use of Internet.
This is nice and all - but I find in practice that people who are all gung-ho on patterns spend most of the time up in a sky where what they say is correct, but not terribly relevant to getting things done. To use your example, if you talk about an observer pattern rather than describing the mechanism, you are providing much less information about what you're doing.
Any reference to a specific design pattern is nothing more than a reference to very concise but detailed description of the mechanism. An adequate parallel is referring to specific construction techniques, such as Berlin/king post retaining walls. Instead of wasting time and effort describing how the construction process works, what are the pros and cons, what materials to use, how to phase the construction, how to design them and other necessary but tedious information, we simply refer to it through a proper name.
So, by referring to individual design patterns, we are actually providing much more information in a concise manner, due to the fact that if someone is really interested in more information then that person is free to pick up any reference on the subject and wrap their head around it.
Really 64-bit is what people are after for desktops and laptops today.
That is only relevant if you wish to access more than 2 or 3GB of RAM per process. If you consider that the majority of netbooks being sold only come with about 1GB of RAM, then 64-bit CPUs are essentiallly meaningless. And this even without considering PAE stuff.
This doesn't make sense, and I am lead to believe that you actually don't know what a design pattern is. After all, no matter how complete a programming language or library might be, you still need to put stuff together, and when you put stuff up together you better choose to put them together in the best way possible, that actually solves your problems.
To better explain what design patterns are, we can compare them to a more mundane field: civil engineering/construction. You see, while a programming language and API represents the individual building materials used in construction, such as mortar, concrete, steel rebar and I-beams, design patterns represent a specific way which these buildig materials are put together and made to work, such as reinforced concrete slabs, prefabricated joists, trusses, columns, beams, etc... It is helpful to think of a construction project in terms of individual components, by decomposing the entire structure into structural elements and the construction techniques that are used to implement them, than wasting time thinking about how you will arrange individual pebbles in a concrete mix, or how a rebar will be gripped by the concrete.
So, in essence, design patterns provide you with a very convenient and useful way to think about pre-made solutions to specific problems, while saving you the time and need to reinvent the wheel each time you need to create a new component.
I am a senior developer at a large publicly traded company. We have some pretty high volume systems, and I have yet to really use any other patterns besides MVC in my daily activities. I have also worked at several smaller consultant firms and never used them much before my current place. Maybe it's just because the type of problems I have been working on aren't complicated enough?
I would guess that you do in fact use other patterns, but you actually do so without knowing. That isn't a bad thing, because ultimately what really counts is getting stuff done, and not write some kind of whitepaper announcing to the world that your company's current work is the result of an academically perfect implementation of a wide variety of design patterns.
Nonetheless, I find design patterns to be very important and extremely helpful, mainly because they can be seen as a set of pre-defined solutions to a set of well-known problems. In other words, they represent building blocks which have been adequately studied and therefore provide important properties that are already known beforehand.
Knowing these properties is extremely helpful when designing an application, because it lets you minimize the amount of work you will need to do to add some features, or even completely avoid it. By knowing design patterns you are able to come up with solutions to potential problems simply by identifying them and adopting the adequate design patterns to side-step it.
As an example, let's imagine we were developing some sort of 3D modelling application. We could start by defining that the application would consist of a database component, which stores all the information regarding the model, and a GUI component.
As you are already familiar with the MVC pattern, we could design the database component with as a model and implement any representation of the 3D model as a different view. But let's go a bit beyond that.
In a 3D modelling application, we can expect that for each database component we might have multiple views. In addition, we might have an indeterminate number of components which might need to be aware of any information stored in the database. A nice way to pull this off is to design the database component as an observer pattern. By doing this, you are free to extend the 3D modelling any time in the future to add a new component without any trouble at all. In addition, you are also able to completely replace other components by simply taking them off and plug in a replacement.
A 3D modelling application also needs to provide the user with a way to operate on the 3D model. Yet, more often than not we don't know everything the user wants to do and how he wants to do it. This means that it is a good idea to implement these operators in a way that you are free to add them in the future without being forced to rummage through half the source code tree. A good way to do this is to implement these modelling operators as a visitor pattern. By doing this, you've just defined a generic interface for every operator you might need, and basically you only need to add a single class to implement any extra feature for the 3D modeller. In addition, if you also make sure you also include the inverse operator for every operator then an undo system will pretty much write itself.
The list goes on and on. You can implement your scene graph by employing a composite pattern, you might implement the components to import models from an assorted list of data formats by writing each component as a strategy pattern, you may implement a series of UI animations and input states around a state pattern, etc
The UN can't agree on mass murdering dictatorships, Why would they all of a sudden be on the same page wrt the internet?
Oddly enough, this is an argument in favour of UN control. Contrary to what some business interests claim, the internet works perfecly fine and doesn't need any intervention by any state to improve the way it works.
So, if the control over the internet is transfered to the UN, and if the UN essentially stalemates any proposed change to the internet, then we are all in a much better position than we are right now, because it protects the internet at a communication medium which actually works and actually benefits the people, instead of a hand full of corporations.
Right. I want to judge the validity of a paper on the Higgs boson, so I rent time on the SSC to reproduce the experiment. Everyone else who wants to judge does the same thing. Seems like a good use of limited resources. Can you find me a funding agency that will pay for this?
Boy, aren't we exaggerating.
Before thinking about purchasing a particle accelerator, you have a considerable number of things which you can and must actually do by yourself in order to test the paper's validity. One of those things is actually reading the paper, understanding the theoretical hypothesis which were laid out, analyse the data which was used as a basis for the results presented in the paper, check if it holds out, evaluate the results... You know, the peer review process.
In this context, the need for a particle accelerator only enters the equation if you suspect that the results presented in the paper aren't up to par, and you wish to replicate them to see if you aren't being duped. Even in that case, you still need to run the series of tests which I pointed out.
So, if you actually intend to judge the validity of a paper on the Higgs boson then it's safe to say that purchasing a particle accelerator is the least of your concerns. In fact, how many of those actually involved in reviewing that sort of papers have access to their own personal particle accelerator? And does that stop them from doing it? Precisely.
Peer review puts this work in the hands of a few people who are allegedly experts in the field, and their job is to judge the validity of the paper, not necessarily the results of the experiment that it may be reporting on. Was the scientific process followed? Were there controls where necessary? Does the data support the conclusion, whatever it may be? Is the data presented in a logical and reasonable manner? Are the assumptions underlying the paper reasonable? Is there some glaring error of omission or execution? Is the material itself publishable? Is it fresh and new, or simply reworked decades old textbook material? Are there proper citations for previous work, or previous work that should have been cited but was not?
Notice that you actually don't need access to a particle accelerator to do any of those things. You actually only need to have an academic interest in the subject. If you are interested in scientific problems such as the validity of the Higgs boson and you are curious enough to be willing to spend your time rummaging through articles on the Higgs boson then odds are to actually know something about it, and you are actually in a position to judge by yourself at least a portion of those details.
So, unless you intend to avoid having to think about the stuff and instead you want an authority to tell you what you must believe in, whether a paper is published in a journal or is distributed directly from the site of a university or research institution is actually irrelevant, because you are quite able and willing to turn on your brain and actually do science.
You forget, the readers may not be experts in the field. They may be expanding their horizons or looking for new research questions, and expecting every one of them to "test the explanations and predictions" for themselves is silly. Expecting them to know that Smith and Wesson in 1975 did a similar experiment and came up with similar results but a different conclusion, and that the paper they are reading is incomplete because it did not discuss that experiment, is outrageous.
You aren't required to be an expert in the field. If you are interested enough on a given field to actually read the papers then you are certainly already knowledgeable about the subject. Moreover, you certainly are already aware that a paper is supposed to be food for thought, not a textbook.
... because organizations such as universities and research institutions are more than willing to pu
NO!!!! the whole point of peer review is to judge a paper BEFORE it is published. whatever. I'm sick of this thread. a bunch of egghead wannabees thinking they know what goes into academic work. I'm in academia, and I know
Considering what you've been posting, your claim, that you are in academia, is not believable.
Yes, but without journals, how will we per-judge the quality of others' work? This may sound facetious, but it's not. Any fool can write a journal article, and many fools can write compelling article. A journal offers getting and review by members in the field. How else can I judge the validity of a paper, especially if I'm not in the field myself?
We are talking about science.
You know, testable explanations and predictions about everything.
You judge the validity of a paper by testing their explanations and predictions. That's essentially what the scientific community does for a living. Some person finds something odd, some other person comes up with an explanation, others test that explanation to see if its valid, and in the process might find other odd stuff. Rince and repeat.
If you are worried that, without journals, you might not get a conforting authority dictating what you should and should not believe then rest assure, because organizations such as universities and research institutions are more than willing to put their logo on the cover of their member's papers, and also distribute them to the public.
Slashdot Mirror
While the so called summary claims that wikipedia is supposed to be this "war zone", the article's fucking summary states that they have concluded that "edit wars are mainly fought by few editors only." The article then proceeds with statements such as:
and even
So, fuck you slashdot for posting a story with such an inflamatory, patently wrong and misleading pile of crap which was supposed to be the summary. If you have to lie to desperately generate page hits then it's a clear sign that you are dead as a communications medium.
This acceptance can easily come to bite you in the ass. If you grant MS the priviledge of implementing this then you can expect OEMs to pump out "windows computers" that, because they are sold only with MS-approved software, do not accept or support other software other than the one signed and approved by MS for that specific product. And why? Because pretexts such as "MS gets a little security on their malware plagued OS".
Once that happens, say goodbye to being able to pop in a Knoppix CD and give linux a try. Why? Because you've purchased a windows computer, and windows computers are only supposed to run windows.
And you can't turn that off because you explicitly have purchased a windows computer, which represents a declaration that you accepted the requirements put in place by MS for only running MS-approved software on your windows computer. Because malware.
But hey, you may expect the free market to kick in and for OEMs to simply sell hardware which isn't castrated with UEFI nonsense. Except that's as likely as being able to purchase a computer which doesn't come with windows reinstalled. And this means that, due to economy of scale, OEMs will actually be pressured to not waste resources on producing and supporting hardware for a niche market, as running slackware.
So, by agreeing with this, you are actually stating that there is a theoretical possibility that everyone else could simply shut it off. But then the real world kicks in and you will never see that happen at all.
I also don't know, but if it supports mongodb then it must be webscale.
A more accurate definition of capitalism consists of two basic things:
- right to private property
- free market
The entire capitalist system is defined by these two aspects alone. If a state grants every citizen the right to own stuff, and also buy and sell to whoever they see fit not only their stuff but also the stuff they make and the services they provide then we have a capitalist system.
Some implementations of a capitalist system may have some limits and restrictions (i.e., only a selected few can sell services as medical doctors, including prescribe drugs) but these two aspects, right to private property and a free market, are the basis of capitalism.
Indeed. Prefab houses are nothing new. Even european architecture giants such as Le Corbusier wrote extensively on mass production housing since around 1920, and pretty much modern construction is deeply influenced by Le Corbusier's work. Even concrete structures had their origin in modular, prefabricated systems, with Hennebique's reinforced concrete system.
So, if the entire industry is based on the use of modular systems, I really don't get it how anyone can make such silly claims such as "North American's, and Europeans partially are not yet used to prefab houses." Not yet used to prefab houses? We live in them for decades now.
I happen to be in structural engineering, and I have to say that you clearly don't know what you are talking about. I'll tell you why.
Nowadays, and for a couple of decades now, there isn't a single european contractor who does not rely on prefabrication. Concrete structures tend to make this a bit harder to pull, but their building cost is so much lower than steel structures that the extra time spent on a project easily offsets costs. Even then, there are quite a number of prefab structural elements and modules, such as pre-slabs and composite slabs with profile steel sheeting, that help out a lot. With steel structures, even with composite slabs, it's quite easy to put up high numbers of floors in a limited number of days. The only limit that affects this is how fast you can hoist the beam and column elements, and how fast your crew is able to set the necessary connections.
I suspect that in the US it's even more widespread. There are companies which even put together factories to assemble entire houses in assembly lines, and steel construction is much more widespread than concrete.
So, your comment on the use of prefab techniques is obviously bullshit.
Then, regarding your conspiracy theory, it is once again bullshit. To start off, as any product on earth, housing prices aren't defined by construction costs, but only on what clients are willing to spend on them. Meanwhile, construction costs, with today's technology, basically depends only on what finishings the client wishes. As a demonstration, you claimed that 86k is such a great deal. Yet, that's the price Ikea asks for a tiny apartment with an area of about 70mÂ. This represents a unit cost of about 1228â/mÂ, and this without accounting for the price of the property and any licenses and services which are needed to build it. Knowing this, do you actually know what's the average unit cost for building a similar house on a property, including the price of the property itself? Between 500â/m and 900â/mÂ.
In other words, your example costs at least twice as much to build than a regular house.
So, at least take your tinfoil hat off once in a while. The world isn't set out to get you.
The cost of construction work, nowadays, is defined by labour wages, not the cost of building materials. Hence, obviously it is more expensive to build something in Australia, resorting to australian labour, than it is to build something in China, resorting to chinese labour.
And let's not even go into the issue of costs introduced by adhering to building and safety regulations.
If you believe that nonsense then I have news for you: the entire construction industry has been "kinda cheating" for decades now. With steel structures, every single structural element is prefabricated somewhere and only assembled in situ. This is even the case with large projects, such as concrete bridges. Nowadays, there are a hand full of different building techniques which rely on the prefabrication of structural modules somewhere, and bring them on site just to assemble it. Take this for example.
Graphics cards are, nowadays, a bit more than 3D gaming. Nowadays there are a number of markets that companies such as NVidia may cater and are of fundamental importance, such as smartphones/tablets (remember Tegra?) and HPC (remember CUDA/OpenCL?).
What these markets have in common is that linux is the only reason they exist and are relevant. Windows is,at the very best, a "also ran" in mobile devices. In the HPC world linux is essentially the only game in town. In fact, there is currently only a single entry proprietary OS entry in the Top500 list.
Do you expect NVidia to abandon any of those markets in protest of Linus Torvalds pointing out that NVidia sucks at supporting linux? Think again.
NVidia isn't required to, as you put it, "subscribe to the projects goals and visions".
But Linus Torvalds is also not required to enjoy or approve of NVidia's policies, particularly when they generate bad publicity for Linus Torvalds' project and also cause a number of people to complain to Linus Torvalds about a problem which he didn't caused nor can he do anything at all about it. Hence, a very appropriate and sorely required "Fuck you, NVidia".
I've had problems with a NVidia card that I have, and the last time it gave me problems was with the latest upgrade to Kubuntu 12.04. With this upgrade, NVidia's very own proprietary driver either rendered 3D scenes excruciatingly slow or never rendered them at all, instead presenting only a black window. Strangely enough, 2D rendering worked without any noticeable hitch.
The fix came only about a month ago, with an upgrade to NVidia's proprietary driver.
I'm no Knuth biographer, but every single interview and presentation given by Knuth that I ever saw, he always spoke like that.
Going back to basketball, some people talk tons of shit about players such as Derrick Rose for not being very articulate, accusing him of being a moron, a retard and even autistic. Yet, people such as Knuth are also not very articulate, and no one in their right mind would accuse Knuth of being a moron. That says something about being prejudiced.
In alternative, they can simply turn on a couple of the 50 power generators they have just sitting there, that never exhibit a single problem in their entire existence.
I wonder what's the best option.
I had a sarcastic reply but instead I'm going to simply say this: Donald Knuth was a basketball coach. See him talk about his baskeball coaching experience here.
There is no doubt that "everything will correct itself". This isn't up for debate.
What's up for debate is how will the correction happen. The whole point of this is in whose terms will this correction happen: will this be in humanity's good terms, by limiting growth and guaranteeing access to limited resources, will it be in humanity's bad terms, with wars for stuff such as access to food and drinking water and the accompanying indiscriminate killing of very large numbers of people, or will it be in nature's terms, with everyone simply dying off due to lack of subsistence.
It is in everyone's best interests that this adjustment is made on humanity's terms, to preserve quality of living and avoiding large scale deaths. Hence, reports such as the one reported here.
I don't know about explosive, but right now it is in fact tigthly correlated with exponential growth. And the thing about exponential growth is that its essentially explosive in nature, as itsdoubling time is constant, and that it only ceases to be exponential to assume a form of a logistic function if either political measures are put in place to stunt growth in our terms, or nature naturally limits the amount of people that can actually live by imposing its own terms.
This is a natural fact which is widely know for over a century and no one in their right mind actually disputes this. So, why would calling a spade a space invalidate the whole message?
The idiots behind this project explicitly don't care about the legality of censoring the web, or any accountability of their decisions. From the Clean IT project website:
The main objective of this project is to develop a non-legislative framework that consists of general principles and best practices. The general principles will be developed through a bottom up process where the private sector will be in the lead. Through a series of workshops and conferences, the private and public sector will define their problems and try to draw up principles. These principles can be used as a guideline or gentlemen’s agreement, and can be adopted by many partners. They will describe responsibilities and concrete steps public and private partners can take to counter the illegal use of Internet.
Any reference to a specific design pattern is nothing more than a reference to very concise but detailed description of the mechanism. An adequate parallel is referring to specific construction techniques, such as Berlin/king post retaining walls. Instead of wasting time and effort describing how the construction process works, what are the pros and cons, what materials to use, how to phase the construction, how to design them and other necessary but tedious information, we simply refer to it through a proper name.
So, by referring to individual design patterns, we are actually providing much more information in a concise manner, due to the fact that if someone is really interested in more information then that person is free to pick up any reference on the subject and wrap their head around it.
That is only relevant if you wish to access more than 2 or 3GB of RAM per process. If you consider that the majority of netbooks being sold only come with about 1GB of RAM, then 64-bit CPUs are essentiallly meaningless. And this even without considering PAE stuff.
This doesn't make sense, and I am lead to believe that you actually don't know what a design pattern is. After all, no matter how complete a programming language or library might be, you still need to put stuff together, and when you put stuff up together you better choose to put them together in the best way possible, that actually solves your problems.
To better explain what design patterns are, we can compare them to a more mundane field: civil engineering/construction. You see, while a programming language and API represents the individual building materials used in construction, such as mortar, concrete, steel rebar and I-beams, design patterns represent a specific way which these buildig materials are put together and made to work, such as reinforced concrete slabs, prefabricated joists, trusses, columns, beams, etc... It is helpful to think of a construction project in terms of individual components, by decomposing the entire structure into structural elements and the construction techniques that are used to implement them, than wasting time thinking about how you will arrange individual pebbles in a concrete mix, or how a rebar will be gripped by the concrete.
So, in essence, design patterns provide you with a very convenient and useful way to think about pre-made solutions to specific problems, while saving you the time and need to reinvent the wheel each time you need to create a new component.
I am a senior developer at a large publicly traded company. We have some pretty high volume systems, and I have yet to really use any other patterns besides MVC in my daily activities. I have also worked at several smaller consultant firms and never used them much before my current place. Maybe it's just because the type of problems I have been working on aren't complicated enough?
I would guess that you do in fact use other patterns, but you actually do so without knowing. That isn't a bad thing, because ultimately what really counts is getting stuff done, and not write some kind of whitepaper announcing to the world that your company's current work is the result of an academically perfect implementation of a wide variety of design patterns.
Nonetheless, I find design patterns to be very important and extremely helpful, mainly because they can be seen as a set of pre-defined solutions to a set of well-known problems. In other words, they represent building blocks which have been adequately studied and therefore provide important properties that are already known beforehand.
Knowing these properties is extremely helpful when designing an application, because it lets you minimize the amount of work you will need to do to add some features, or even completely avoid it. By knowing design patterns you are able to come up with solutions to potential problems simply by identifying them and adopting the adequate design patterns to side-step it.
As an example, let's imagine we were developing some sort of 3D modelling application. We could start by defining that the application would consist of a database component, which stores all the information regarding the model, and a GUI component.
As you are already familiar with the MVC pattern, we could design the database component with as a model and implement any representation of the 3D model as a different view. But let's go a bit beyond that.
In a 3D modelling application, we can expect that for each database component we might have multiple views. In addition, we might have an indeterminate number of components which might need to be aware of any information stored in the database. A nice way to pull this off is to design the database component as an observer pattern. By doing this, you are free to extend the 3D modelling any time in the future to add a new component without any trouble at all. In addition, you are also able to completely replace other components by simply taking them off and plug in a replacement.
A 3D modelling application also needs to provide the user with a way to operate on the 3D model. Yet, more often than not we don't know everything the user wants to do and how he wants to do it. This means that it is a good idea to implement these operators in a way that you are free to add them in the future without being forced to rummage through half the source code tree. A good way to do this is to implement these modelling operators as a visitor pattern. By doing this, you've just defined a generic interface for every operator you might need, and basically you only need to add a single class to implement any extra feature for the 3D modeller. In addition, if you also make sure you also include the inverse operator for every operator then an undo system will pretty much write itself.
The list goes on and on. You can implement your scene graph by employing a composite pattern, you might implement the components to import models from an assorted list of data formats by writing each component as a strategy pattern, you may implement a series of UI animations and input states around a state pattern, etc
Oddly enough, this is an argument in favour of UN control. Contrary to what some business interests claim, the internet works perfecly fine and doesn't need any intervention by any state to improve the way it works.
So, if the control over the internet is transfered to the UN, and if the UN essentially stalemates any proposed change to the internet, then we are all in a much better position than we are right now, because it protects the internet at a communication medium which actually works and actually benefits the people, instead of a hand full of corporations.
Right. I want to judge the validity of a paper on the Higgs boson, so I rent time on the SSC to reproduce the experiment. Everyone else who wants to judge does the same thing. Seems like a good use of limited resources. Can you find me a funding agency that will pay for this?
Boy, aren't we exaggerating.
Before thinking about purchasing a particle accelerator, you have a considerable number of things which you can and must actually do by yourself in order to test the paper's validity. One of those things is actually reading the paper, understanding the theoretical hypothesis which were laid out, analyse the data which was used as a basis for the results presented in the paper, check if it holds out, evaluate the results... You know, the peer review process.
In this context, the need for a particle accelerator only enters the equation if you suspect that the results presented in the paper aren't up to par, and you wish to replicate them to see if you aren't being duped. Even in that case, you still need to run the series of tests which I pointed out.
So, if you actually intend to judge the validity of a paper on the Higgs boson then it's safe to say that purchasing a particle accelerator is the least of your concerns. In fact, how many of those actually involved in reviewing that sort of papers have access to their own personal particle accelerator? And does that stop them from doing it? Precisely.
Peer review puts this work in the hands of a few people who are allegedly experts in the field, and their job is to judge the validity of the paper, not necessarily the results of the experiment that it may be reporting on. Was the scientific process followed? Were there controls where necessary? Does the data support the conclusion, whatever it may be? Is the data presented in a logical and reasonable manner? Are the assumptions underlying the paper reasonable? Is there some glaring error of omission or execution? Is the material itself publishable? Is it fresh and new, or simply reworked decades old textbook material? Are there proper citations for previous work, or previous work that should have been cited but was not?
Notice that you actually don't need access to a particle accelerator to do any of those things. You actually only need to have an academic interest in the subject. If you are interested in scientific problems such as the validity of the Higgs boson and you are curious enough to be willing to spend your time rummaging through articles on the Higgs boson then odds are to actually know something about it, and you are actually in a position to judge by yourself at least a portion of those details.
So, unless you intend to avoid having to think about the stuff and instead you want an authority to tell you what you must believe in, whether a paper is published in a journal or is distributed directly from the site of a university or research institution is actually irrelevant, because you are quite able and willing to turn on your brain and actually do science.
You forget, the readers may not be experts in the field. They may be expanding their horizons or looking for new research questions, and expecting every one of them to "test the explanations and predictions" for themselves is silly. Expecting them to know that Smith and Wesson in 1975 did a similar experiment and came up with similar results but a different conclusion, and that the paper they are reading is incomplete because it did not discuss that experiment, is outrageous.
You aren't required to be an expert in the field. If you are interested enough on a given field to actually read the papers then you are certainly already knowledgeable about the subject. Moreover, you certainly are already aware that a paper is supposed to be food for thought, not a textbook.
... because organizations such as universities and research institutions are more than willing to pu
NO!!!! the whole point of peer review is to judge a paper BEFORE it is published. whatever. I'm sick of this thread. a bunch of egghead wannabees thinking they know what goes into academic work. I'm in academia, and I know
Considering what you've been posting, your claim, that you are in academia, is not believable.
Yes, but without journals, how will we per-judge the quality of others' work? This may sound facetious, but it's not. Any fool can write a journal article, and many fools can write compelling article. A journal offers getting and review by members in the field. How else can I judge the validity of a paper, especially if I'm not in the field myself?
We are talking about science.
You know, testable explanations and predictions about everything.
You judge the validity of a paper by testing their explanations and predictions. That's essentially what the scientific community does for a living. Some person finds something odd, some other person comes up with an explanation, others test that explanation to see if its valid, and in the process might find other odd stuff. Rince and repeat.
If you are worried that, without journals, you might not get a conforting authority dictating what you should and should not believe then rest assure, because organizations such as universities and research institutions are more than willing to put their logo on the cover of their member's papers, and also distribute them to the public.
So, it's safe to say that the sky isn't falling.