Sell support. If you want to sell your product per see, then you can't go Open Source.
Not entirely true. The product may have to be customised for specific customers. The company I work for built an Open Source CMS, and while everybody can download it for free, most customers prefer to hire us to install it, build a website for it, and customise the CMS for their specific purposes. It's a bit on the borderline between selling a product and selling support.
Business is going quite well. And I can imagine our business model working for other companies that rely on a few large customers.
Eugeneticists may use this information to claim the superiority of Europeans, a counterpoint can be made that these people can't be superior because were having sex with sub-humans.
I'm sure there are also some people who will claim that it's sex with sub-humans and possibly even non-humans that makes them superior.
What's so surprising about this result? People will fuck anything and everything.
True, but people won't actually produce fertile offspring with everything. The big question is whether homo sapiens and neanderthal were interfertile. Most likely not, say most scientists, but this article suggests otherwise.
Reducing emissions is NOT the only way to reduce global tempurature, and it's certainly not the only way to reduce sea levels. In fact, for the cost, you can say it's a ridiculously expensive and terribly ineffecient way to accomplish that goal.
You could, but I think you'd be wrong. At today's oil prices, green energy should be able to compete. I pay less for the electricity from wind, biommass, water and solar energy in my home than I would have paid for regular energy from oil and gas plants. Ofcourse that's partially because of lower tax on green energy, but the price difference really isn't all that big, and with a bit more investment, it might eventually be able to out-compete oil.
In fact, it's sticking to oil that will eventually become ridiculously expensive and inefficient. We're running out, and prices will keep going up. We need a more sustainable energy economy, and sustainable automatically means less net CO2 emissions.
"Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong?"
Actually, just the way the article is written is a dead givaway. That second paragraph is classic conspiracy theory (oh no! the French want to rule the world!), and the rest of the article is extremely biased. It's written to scare conservative Anglosaxons, and I don't see how anyone who isn't desperately looking for arguments to deny global warming could possibly be convinced by this piece of crap.
Money very directly correlates to people's lives. Think of all the money it would cost to seriously reduce CO2 emissions, and imagine if we spent it on eliminating poverty, or other charitable works instead...
But are we spending it on eliminating poverty? I don't think so. Now, think of the eventual costs of global warming. For this century, realistic but somewhat conservative estimates predict a sea level rise of 85 cm. A recent stufy pointed out that Netherland could deal with a sea level rise of 1 meter, but at 1.5 meter, most of the country would have to be evacuated. So basically, in two centuries one of the wealthier countries in the world will cease to exist due to global warming.
Poorer low-lying countries like Bangladesh and the Maldives will get in trouble much sooner. And even the US has densely populated coastal areas. No idea how far above sea level Manhattan is, but I suspect it's not a lot. How much do you think it would cost to move Manhattan to higher ground?
I think in the long run, the cost of not doing anything about global warming will be much higher than the cost of reducing our emisions. (And at the current oil price, reducing emisions might actually save quite a bit of money very quickly. You just need some initial investment.)
Imagine we are in a cooling cycle and all this CO2 we are pumping out holds off another ice age.
Actually, it's quite possible that global warming will cause a new ice age in Europe. Europe has a much more comfortable climate than it should have at that latitude, and that's because the warm gulf stream brings warm, tropical water to our shores. Many years ago I read a theory of how the influx of sweet water from melting polar en Greenland ice could disrupt the gulf stream and cause Europe to cool. More recently, I read that the gulf stream has dropped 30% in strength.
Suddenly moving to Canada doesn't sound like such a bad idea...
And the consequences of over reacting in the other direction could be just as scary. Instaed of cooking like Venus we freeze like Mars.
Are you saying we would have been freezing is we hadn't had our industrial revolution?
I'll grant you that giant solar screens are a bit extreme, but bringing carbon that had been buried deep in the earth for hundreds of millions years, back in the atmosphere, might not have been such a good idea as it seemed at the time.
How is it possible that the grandparent, who is quite obviously not serious, is being modded Troll, while the parent who takes him seriously is modded Insightful?
How can people possibly take a tongue-in-cheek protest against killing bacteria seriously? How would they imagine someone like that eats? You kill more life, and more highly advanced life, by eating an apple than by washing your hands.
What about the billions of deaths you cause everyday when you wash your hands? Does it not matter because they might have harmed you? Or because they are too small to be cute and identifiable as "life"?
Before worrying about prokariotes like bacteria, lets worry about the poor plants first. They're more closely related to us, have more highly developed cellular structure, etc. Yet we build giant machines to massacre millions of them per day!
Not true. Moslim fundamentalists are also generally creationists.
I have no idea how many moslims are creationists and how many accept a more scientific explanation, but I do know that many christians abhor the American creationist/ID movement. I know I do. Unfortunately it seems American creationism is slowly growing in Europe. I keep hearing worrying stories about Poland mostly, but also from England.
If there would be less debate about evolution in the US, I believe Fox News would have reported this as what it is : a dolphin with a malformation.
Isn't Fox News extremely conservstive? So wouldn't they be more likely to be on the creationism side of that debate? Because in that case, Fox would be more likely to call it a malformation instead of a proof of evolution, exactly because of that debate.
But instead, I see really conservative conservative media acknowledge this as proof of evolution.
The history of the planet has shown that there is a history of global temperature change. How is this any different?
The difference is that I'm living here now. Big extinction events in the past are all fine and dandy, but a big extinction event in the near future is suddenly a lot more personal. And if it's not me being theatened, it's my children or grandchildren (assuming I'll ever procreate -- no signs of that so far).
I can see how people could think that we are polluting the planet (we are dont get me wrong) but do you guys really think that 'man' is actually doing enough harm to this planet??
Do you think we should be doing more harm to the planet?
Im not saying that this article is nuts or something all im saying is that i think there should be more research into our contribution to raising the earths temperature before we start making it colder without knowing what will really happen.
There has been quite a lot of research about this already. The relationship between our polution, rising CO2 levels and global warming are well documented. It fits the theory and it fits the observed facts. What more do you want?
You can always do more research, ofcourse. But should that be a reason not to act? We don't know everything, but we know more than enough to act upon what we know. But I think launching a giant sunshade is a bit crazy, megalomaniac and carries a lot mmore risk than just reducing our CO2 emisions. Get a more economical car, take the train instead, let corporations pay for their polution, demand more green energy.
Compare the costs of that to the costs of building bigger and stronger levies, and eventually evacuating coastal regions.
According to realistic, somewhat conservative estimates, most of the Netherlands (where I live) may have to be evacuated within two centuries. And that's just the start. See wikipedia for an idea of where it might end. We still have enough land ice for another 80 meters of sea level rise.
Only the Sdu computers (a small minority) are banned. The rather thoroughly hacked Nedap computers are still okay, according to minister Nicolai. Instead of showing him some support, ask him to ban those too, because they're really not any better.
A few minor improvements have been made, but the basic problem remains: voting computers are a black box, and it's impossible for normal voters to check if they work properly, if their vote is being counted, if somebody has messed with it (and it is easy to mess with them), etc.
There was a third again as many errors, but I seem to recall the average article length was half again as long. So the average error rate evens out.
The article length comparison was done by a rather optimistic wikipedian, not by Nature. And wikipedia's articles are longer than EB's because EB is print on paper and can't afford to waste tons of space on trivia and redundancy like wikipedia does. EB is tightly edited, Wikipedia isn't. In other words, the article length comparison was rather meaningless.
Still, I'm pretty impressed with wikipedia's performance in that Nature study. And they're working to improve it further.
I either didn't see the Final Frontier or if I did I took something afterwards to blot out all memory of it. I don't have good memories of The Undiscovered Country either, though.
How dare you compare those two? The Final Frontier (ST V) is the biggest piece of crap ever committed to film, whereas The Undiscovered Country (ST VI) is the best Star Trek film ever. It has everything: ice planets, prison worlds, mystery, conspiracy, intrigue, the prospect of either a bright future or a devastating war, and even some nuuggets of wisdom. I'm not generally a Star Trek fanatic, but this is absolutely the best work of art that the Star Trek franchise has ever produced.
Japanse?! This is the first time I've heard of that. Dutch steals a lot of words from English (like we stole lots of words from French in the past), but we try to adapt them to our grammar, which definitely does exist. At least more so than English grammar exists. Perhaps Dutch is easy for English speakers because it has a similarly flexible grammar? (Dutch grammar is actually a lot tighter, but possibly not as much as that of other languages.)
Speaking of Chomsky, I actually encountered his work in linguistics and theoretical computer science before I discovered he allso wrote lots of good stuff on politics. Very interesting guy.
The Netherlands. The fact that I couldn't become a citizen and I can't speak the language stops me. Oh yeah, plus I like America still.:-)
Not speaking the language isn't much of a problem for a visitor. Most Dutch aren't too bad at English (although they like to think they're fluent at it).
The real problem is that the country is going downhill almost as fast as the US. No torture as far as I know, but the current minister of immigration and integration would probably feel quite at home in nazi Germany. And before you think this is hyperbole or I'm just invoking Godwin's Law here, I really, truly, honestly do think she is the kind of person who could blindly follow inhuman orders, or give them, for that matter. She's not currently doing any of that, mind you, but considering the stuff she manages to get away with in our current relatively enlightened society (or at least formerly enlightened), I shudder to think of what she might be capable of as part of a more brutal regime.
To bring this back on topic, she is the main reason I might want to emigrate. She and the fact that she's immensely popular with a surprisingly large part of the population. She's at the same time the most popular and the most hated Dutch politician. Unfortunately, she's not the only problem this country has.
So where would I go? Not to the US, in any case, but Canada would be an option. I hear rumours that climate change could turn Canada into a really pleasant country. Sweden is also an option for me, although I'm also considering the southern hemisphere: Australia or New Zealand or something. Or perhaps I should just find a quiet, stable country in Africa. It's a beautiful continent, it's just that quiet and stability are hard to find there.
I think they lost an 'e' and a 's' in there. Maybe i'm wrong, but I dont think the english spelling of said countries is quite like that?
I actually prefer Netherland over Netherlands. We've been a unified country for over 200 years now. And Holland is only 2 of our 12 provinces, and "Dutch" is a downright medieval word.
The English language would do well to update to the 19th century at least.
Well different people have different ideas of what it means for the press to be free. For me, the right not to reveal sources is not fundamental to the freedom of press.
If journalists have to reveal their sources, then those sources may not speak to journalists, and free press is hurt. You may think that some things are more important than freedom of press, and you might be right, but the freedom not to reveal your sources is fundamental to a free press.
On the other hand, many of these countries ranking high in "freedom of press" outlaw "hate speech". I consider the ability to speak one's opinion, no matter how nasty it is, as a necessary prerequisite for freedom of speech. So if you change those two aspects of the rankings, I imagine the ordering would change dramatically.
Freedom of speech is not quite the same thing as a free press. Even so, whether outlawing "hate speech" really hurts freedom of expressing your opinion is questionable. In many countries where inciting hatred is illegal, it's not necessarily illegal to express your opinion on that matter, as long as you express it as an opinion. It's when people encourage others to act on that opinion that the trouble starts.
Although I do think that some countries crack down a bit too hard on just expressing racist opinions. Outlawing a book like "Mein Kampf" is also a bad idea, however disgusting the ideas expressed in that book may be.
how would you explain european (and euro-like countries like Canada) and also some poor countries are ahead of the ranking than US?
It's not about wealth, it's about freedom of press. If journalist can write what they want without any fear of persecution, if they can keep any sources that do fear persecution anonymous, then even the poorest country can end up high on the list. Many poor countries are some sort of dictatorship, but some are just really poor.
Tell that line about becoming very, very dangerous to the police dealing with poorly-integrated immigrants to France, rioting in the estates and torching hundreds of cars per day. Tell it to Theo van Gogh. Then we can talk.
Theo van Gogh is dead, so I don't think anyone can tell it to him anymore. But if we'd had that kind of biased loony news here (in Netherland) and people had taken it seriously, it could indeed have gotten quite a bit more dangerous than it did.
Fortunately Dutch media are quite a bit more sane than that. I wish I could say the same about the politicians. (And now prime minister Balkenende is trying to take credit for the situation not getting out of hand after the murder on Theo van Gogh. I really hope nobody takes that too seriously.)
I often thought wouldn't the best way to fight spam be via spam? i.e. grab all mail addresses from the spam mail and subscribe them to every mailing list on the planet using something like avalanche, it wouldn't stop them from sending, but at least they'd end up with no useable replies
This used to work in the early days oof spam. A friend once sent a forged mail to a spammer with another spammer's address in the From:. Both spammers replied automatically, and their servers quickly went down. Unfortunately, spammers have grown a lot more devious since those days.
(they're nowhere near the most densly populated country in the world).
Not if you count city states and tiny islands. But if you only count countries that are over 10.000 square km, Netherland is the fourth most densely populated country in the world, after Bangladesh, Taiwan and South Korea.
"Up next... the prescription medication you bought may in fact be pwned by that super-duper company who is roffling poopsickles to pimp the quick buck, ha ha."/. is better than that.
No, you want/. to be better than that. It isn't. Apparently.
Slashdot Mirror
Not entirely true. The product may have to be customised for specific customers. The company I work for built an Open Source CMS, and while everybody can download it for free, most customers prefer to hire us to install it, build a website for it, and customise the CMS for their specific purposes. It's a bit on the borderline between selling a product and selling support.
Business is going quite well. And I can imagine our business model working for other companies that rely on a few large customers.
I'm sure there are also some people who will claim that it's sex with sub-humans and possibly even non-humans that makes them superior.
True, but people won't actually produce fertile offspring with everything. The big question is whether homo sapiens and neanderthal were interfertile. Most likely not, say most scientists, but this article suggests otherwise.
You could, but I think you'd be wrong. At today's oil prices, green energy should be able to compete. I pay less for the electricity from wind, biommass, water and solar energy in my home than I would have paid for regular energy from oil and gas plants. Ofcourse that's partially because of lower tax on green energy, but the price difference really isn't all that big, and with a bit more investment, it might eventually be able to out-compete oil.
In fact, it's sticking to oil that will eventually become ridiculously expensive and inefficient. We're running out, and prices will keep going up. We need a more sustainable energy economy, and sustainable automatically means less net CO2 emissions.
Actually, just the way the article is written is a dead givaway. That second paragraph is classic conspiracy theory (oh no! the French want to rule the world!), and the rest of the article is extremely biased. It's written to scare conservative Anglosaxons, and I don't see how anyone who isn't desperately looking for arguments to deny global warming could possibly be convinced by this piece of crap.
But are we spending it on eliminating poverty? I don't think so. Now, think of the eventual costs of global warming. For this century, realistic but somewhat conservative estimates predict a sea level rise of 85 cm. A recent stufy pointed out that Netherland could deal with a sea level rise of 1 meter, but at 1.5 meter, most of the country would have to be evacuated. So basically, in two centuries one of the wealthier countries in the world will cease to exist due to global warming.
Poorer low-lying countries like Bangladesh and the Maldives will get in trouble much sooner. And even the US has densely populated coastal areas. No idea how far above sea level Manhattan is, but I suspect it's not a lot. How much do you think it would cost to move Manhattan to higher ground?
I think in the long run, the cost of not doing anything about global warming will be much higher than the cost of reducing our emisions. (And at the current oil price, reducing emisions might actually save quite a bit of money very quickly. You just need some initial investment.)
Actually, it's quite possible that global warming will cause a new ice age in Europe. Europe has a much more comfortable climate than it should have at that latitude, and that's because the warm gulf stream brings warm, tropical water to our shores. Many years ago I read a theory of how the influx of sweet water from melting polar en Greenland ice could disrupt the gulf stream and cause Europe to cool. More recently, I read that the gulf stream has dropped 30% in strength.
Suddenly moving to Canada doesn't sound like such a bad idea...
Are you saying we would have been freezing is we hadn't had our industrial revolution?
I'll grant you that giant solar screens are a bit extreme, but bringing carbon that had been buried deep in the earth for hundreds of millions years, back in the atmosphere, might not have been such a good idea as it seemed at the time.
How is it possible that the grandparent, who is quite obviously not serious, is being modded Troll, while the parent who takes him seriously is modded Insightful?
How can people possibly take a tongue-in-cheek protest against killing bacteria seriously? How would they imagine someone like that eats? You kill more life, and more highly advanced life, by eating an apple than by washing your hands.
Before worrying about prokariotes like bacteria, lets worry about the poor plants first. They're more closely related to us, have more highly developed cellular structure, etc. Yet we build giant machines to massacre millions of them per day!
Not true. Moslim fundamentalists are also generally creationists.
I have no idea how many moslims are creationists and how many accept a more scientific explanation, but I do know that many christians abhor the American creationist/ID movement. I know I do. Unfortunately it seems American creationism is slowly growing in Europe. I keep hearing worrying stories about Poland mostly, but also from England.
Isn't Fox News extremely conservstive? So wouldn't they be more likely to be on the creationism side of that debate? Because in that case, Fox would be more likely to call it a malformation instead of a proof of evolution, exactly because of that debate.
But instead, I see really conservative conservative media acknowledge this as proof of evolution.
The difference is that I'm living here now. Big extinction events in the past are all fine and dandy, but a big extinction event in the near future is suddenly a lot more personal. And if it's not me being theatened, it's my children or grandchildren (assuming I'll ever procreate -- no signs of that so far).
Do you think we should be doing more harm to the planet?
There has been quite a lot of research about this already. The relationship between our polution, rising CO2 levels and global warming are well documented. It fits the theory and it fits the observed facts. What more do you want?
You can always do more research, ofcourse. But should that be a reason not to act? We don't know everything, but we know more than enough to act upon what we know. But I think launching a giant sunshade is a bit crazy, megalomaniac and carries a lot mmore risk than just reducing our CO2 emisions. Get a more economical car, take the train instead, let corporations pay for their polution, demand more green energy. Compare the costs of that to the costs of building bigger and stronger levies, and eventually evacuating coastal regions.
According to realistic, somewhat conservative estimates, most of the Netherlands (where I live) may have to be evacuated within two centuries. And that's just the start. See wikipedia for an idea of where it might end. We still have enough land ice for another 80 meters of sea level rise.
Only the Sdu computers (a small minority) are banned. The rather thoroughly hacked Nedap computers are still okay, according to minister Nicolai. Instead of showing him some support, ask him to ban those too, because they're really not any better.
A few minor improvements have been made, but the basic problem remains: voting computers are a black box, and it's impossible for normal voters to check if they work properly, if their vote is being counted, if somebody has messed with it (and it is easy to mess with them), etc.
The article length comparison was done by a rather optimistic wikipedian, not by Nature. And wikipedia's articles are longer than EB's because EB is print on paper and can't afford to waste tons of space on trivia and redundancy like wikipedia does. EB is tightly edited, Wikipedia isn't. In other words, the article length comparison was rather meaningless.
Still, I'm pretty impressed with wikipedia's performance in that Nature study. And they're working to improve it further.
How dare you compare those two? The Final Frontier (ST V) is the biggest piece of crap ever committed to film, whereas The Undiscovered Country (ST VI) is the best Star Trek film ever. It has everything: ice planets, prison worlds, mystery, conspiracy, intrigue, the prospect of either a bright future or a devastating war, and even some nuuggets of wisdom. I'm not generally a Star Trek fanatic, but this is absolutely the best work of art that the Star Trek franchise has ever produced.
Japanse?! This is the first time I've heard of that. Dutch steals a lot of words from English (like we stole lots of words from French in the past), but we try to adapt them to our grammar, which definitely does exist. At least more so than English grammar exists. Perhaps Dutch is easy for English speakers because it has a similarly flexible grammar? (Dutch grammar is actually a lot tighter, but possibly not as much as that of other languages.)
Speaking of Chomsky, I actually encountered his work in linguistics and theoretical computer science before I discovered he allso wrote lots of good stuff on politics. Very interesting guy.
Not speaking the language isn't much of a problem for a visitor. Most Dutch aren't too bad at English (although they like to think they're fluent at it).
The real problem is that the country is going downhill almost as fast as the US. No torture as far as I know, but the current minister of immigration and integration would probably feel quite at home in nazi Germany. And before you think this is hyperbole or I'm just invoking Godwin's Law here, I really, truly, honestly do think she is the kind of person who could blindly follow inhuman orders, or give them, for that matter. She's not currently doing any of that, mind you, but considering the stuff she manages to get away with in our current relatively enlightened society (or at least formerly enlightened), I shudder to think of what she might be capable of as part of a more brutal regime.
To bring this back on topic, she is the main reason I might want to emigrate. She and the fact that she's immensely popular with a surprisingly large part of the population. She's at the same time the most popular and the most hated Dutch politician. Unfortunately, she's not the only problem this country has.
So where would I go? Not to the US, in any case, but Canada would be an option. I hear rumours that climate change could turn Canada into a really pleasant country. Sweden is also an option for me, although I'm also considering the southern hemisphere: Australia or New Zealand or something. Or perhaps I should just find a quiet, stable country in Africa. It's a beautiful continent, it's just that quiet and stability are hard to find there.
I actually prefer Netherland over Netherlands. We've been a unified country for over 200 years now. And Holland is only 2 of our 12 provinces, and "Dutch" is a downright medieval word.
The English language would do well to update to the 19th century at least.
If journalists have to reveal their sources, then those sources may not speak to journalists, and free press is hurt. You may think that some things are more important than freedom of press, and you might be right, but the freedom not to reveal your sources is fundamental to a free press.
Freedom of speech is not quite the same thing as a free press. Even so, whether outlawing "hate speech" really hurts freedom of expressing your opinion is questionable. In many countries where inciting hatred is illegal, it's not necessarily illegal to express your opinion on that matter, as long as you express it as an opinion. It's when people encourage others to act on that opinion that the trouble starts.
Although I do think that some countries crack down a bit too hard on just expressing racist opinions. Outlawing a book like "Mein Kampf" is also a bad idea, however disgusting the ideas expressed in that book may be.
It's not about wealth, it's about freedom of press. If journalist can write what they want without any fear of persecution, if they can keep any sources that do fear persecution anonymous, then even the poorest country can end up high on the list. Many poor countries are some sort of dictatorship, but some are just really poor.
Theo van Gogh is dead, so I don't think anyone can tell it to him anymore. But if we'd had that kind of biased loony news here (in Netherland) and people had taken it seriously, it could indeed have gotten quite a bit more dangerous than it did.
Fortunately Dutch media are quite a bit more sane than that. I wish I could say the same about the politicians. (And now prime minister Balkenende is trying to take credit for the situation not getting out of hand after the murder on Theo van Gogh. I really hope nobody takes that too seriously.)
This used to work in the early days oof spam. A friend once sent a forged mail to a spammer with another spammer's address in the From:. Both spammers replied automatically, and their servers quickly went down. Unfortunately, spammers have grown a lot more devious since those days.
Not if you count city states and tiny islands. But if you only count countries that are over 10.000 square km, Netherland is the fourth most densely populated country in the world, after Bangladesh, Taiwan and South Korea.
No, you want /. to be better than that. It isn't. Apparently.