Prior to starting the mining, the company should have to commit to paying, say, 25% of top-line revenue into a fund to be held in escrow by the government. If the company cleans up adequately, and operates cleanly all along, then at termination of mining operations, they get the funds back with interest. If the government has to clean up, it uses the fund. There should be a penalty catch, something like: If the government has to spend more than 25% of the fund cleaning up, then the government fines the company the rest, and such money is made available to an R&D pool that companies and universities can access only for purposes of R&D into more environmentally responsible methods and technologies for extracting resources.
This is probably an appropriate place to state that my signature line is ironic, being a listing of two oxymorons.
Net neutrality matters most at the basic transport level. Because then, if I want to choose Apple's protective yet limited "walled garden of eden" I can, or I can choose the wild west, as long as I brought my six gun and know how to make my own campfire from belly button lint and a couple of stones. I think it is good to have both levels of choice and freedom. I personally give up freedom for the iPhone's superior usability and app quality control (less cruft to sort through.)
I may find a fart app, but it will be an easy to use fart app. On cellphones, speed of understanding of and operation of the app is paramount. I'm happy so far with Apple's design guidelines, and mostly, with their editorial choices. I have the freedom to move on if I don't like it.
Dear Mr/Ms Rockoon, We hereby demand that you cease and desist from your practice of copying lyrics of our client's copyrighted song "A Little Help From My Friends", and immediately remove all copies from public Internet sites.
We note that you have sought to profit, in the form of the loan of hearing appendages, in exchange for the performance of said song. This has clearly caused irreparable harm, not only to your hapless (and paradoxically earless) listener, but also to my client, the corporation representing the author of the aforementioned song.
You will need more than a little help from your friends to make my client whole. Yours Ominously, E. Scrooge, Payne & Fears LLP
OpenOffice, like Word and everything else I can think of, gets one fundamental thing wrong in the user interface design.
Documents are 8 1/2" wide x 11" tall with say 6.5" x 9" tall useable writing area.
Screens are not very tall, but quite wide these days, on average.
Therefore, all (yes, ALL!) of the available vertical space in the application window should be devoted to displaying the document. There is plenty of room for controls to the side, or perhaps sliding down from the top on demand. A one-line control bar at the top might be justified for inherently horizontal things like font and style names, but that's it.
As it is, we are editing our documents through the letter slot in the door.
Someday, when we are all enlightened, progress on a software product will be measured by the number of unnecessary features that have been removed, making a more focussed and easier-to-use product.
Many people here sound like the "that horseless carriage is useless" crowd.
Fiber to the endpoint or near the endpoint, with ridiculously high speed wireless for the rest, will increase. This may be driven by IPTV, who knows, but it is inevitable.
Clouds will become more sophisticated.
They will not be reliant on any single point of failure. Many cloudy infrastructures (like Google) are already pretty good at that. Much better than your crappy single backup hard-drive.
With luck, clouds will become a layer (stratus?) independent of single hosting companies. Moving clouds.
You can stick with your buggywhips if it will make you feel better.
We do know the world would be a better place if everyone shared their wi-fi securely using a technology like FON, don't we. (No I'm not associated with the company. Just recognize a great concept when I see one.)
I'm seriously tired of how, particularly in the US, sharing wi-fi gets implanted in peoples' brains as a criminal, borderline terrorist activity, with terms such as "theft of tele-communication resources" and similar Orwellian mindf**k terms.
Everytime I've been in or led a project that attempted the noble spiral model (which I do believe in), management and/or customer always said (ordered) two self-fulfilling and fatal things:
1. We need more features in iteration 1 (subtext: we don't believe you will ever get to iteration 2)
2. This iteration 1 thing is good enough. You are finished. We cannot pay for more dev.
Note how elegantly symbiotic the two positions are.
So let's say I am writing software for a factory that assembles machines.
It has to represent various component parts:
Some of the parts the program needs to organize and assemble are wheels (which have diameters), bodies (chassis or frames), and seats. The factory makes sit-down lawn mowers, push mowers, and bicycles.
The parts have all been painted in different colors (a Painted thing has a color, of course).
My program needs to tell all the red bicycle parts to go to assembly area B. Then it needs to attach the wheels to the bodies, and add a seat to each. We would like it to avoid making multi-colored lawnmowers with bicycle seats and bicycle wheels. Each model of lawnmower needs a different diameter of wheel. Each model of bicycle also needs a different diameter of wheel. Lawnmowers each need 4 wheels. Bicycles and push-mowers each need 2.
Please write me an elegant single inheritance data model to represent the entities that the factory program needs to work with. Please avoid making any representation choices that my buddy the other programmer would have a 50/50 chance of choosing the opposite representation convention for the same thing. Because you are writing half of the system, and he's writing the other half, then you have to integrate them.
Hint, he hates colored things that happen to be lawn mowers, but loves lawnmowers that happen to have a color.
Way back when I was taking my Comp Sci BSc using stone tools, I refused to do the COBOL programming assignment, which was maybe worth 1% of the course mark in Programming Languages.
I didn't want to be qualified for a COBOL job.
I guess I was prejudiced against the all caps and most particularly the lack of an ELSE statement to go with the IF.
I guess these problems have since been fixed, but I was also trying to avoid programming accounting systems, which would have been pretty much certain to have me banging my head against the desk in boredom.
Because paper bills are unnecessary now, and are therefore an unjustifiable environmental cost, the government should charge a "sin tax" on such unnecessary paperwork. The tax could then be passed on to the consumer, who of course has the option to turn off their paper bills and save the tax.
I know you Americans don't like government very much, but this might be a nice extra revenue that could be put to use for other environmentally beneficial programs.
Tax shifting is the way to go. Increase environmental sin taxes, and decrease income tax to compensate if you feel strongly that it should be revenue neutral. The Green Party has been advocating this for 25 years, and we're tired of being so far ahead. Catch up please. Steal our policy and call it your own!
Seriously, someone needs to explain the process of object-oriented domain modelling, analysis, and design to the USPTO, and explain how virtually every outcome of such a process is "obvious to a qualified practitioner in the field." These patents on every "complicated-seeming" computer system that uses basic symbolic modelling of a domain and implements a few obvious methods on the objects, are ridiculous beyond belief, and one can take no position on these patents except to studiously ignore them.
They did rid the region of one more crappy, mind-numbing AM station (fart-joke morning guys, "your 24/7 traffic copter" and possibly even C&W music), so there is something to be said for that.
I tested 160 on the "vanity" online IQ test. But to do that. I had to take about one and a half times the allotted time, so my score would officially be invalid. So I'm potentially very intelligent, but a little slow and ponderous in my reasoning.
Also, in one of those "program this in front of me" tests in an interview, my brain froze (looped?) due to the stress of the situation.
Now if we'd had a leisurely conversation about systems architecture trade-offs, or explored a problem and solution requirements space or a tough trade-off decision tree through socratic dialectic, I might have wowed them, but it was not to be.
And I even knew that the answer to "How would you move a mountain?" is "It's already moving. Please clarify."
If not, then this article's thesis is just someone's random, culturally relative, attention-relative opinion and is probably a crock.
The only thing I can think of would be the number of bits of information required to describe all the technologies we have, the processes they support, and the consequences thereof, at any given decade say.
That would give us a measure of the variety and complexity of what were were doing.
But is increase in variety and complexity of what we are doing necessarily progress? (ponders).
It's probable that the concept of "progress" is completely relative, and only makes sense with respect to well-defined goals.
One good goal would be "increase probability of human-species survival", or an even better one "increase probability of Earth eco-systems survival"
Here's my hypothesis to explain the "contradictory" results.
In the case of a violent TV show that is periodically interrupted by an ad, the brain perceives these as two different situational episodes or contexts. Another analogy would be if you were both reading a crime novel set in London, and periodically glancing up from your book to look out the train window at the sweeping mountain vistas. The brain/mind can separate those episodes, similar to how they would be separated if they followed each other in time.
In the case of the billboard ads in the driving game, these ads are impressions that are part of the in-game world, seen while your brain/mind perceives you to be in the driving situational episode.
Why this distinction is important is probably that your brain adds strong-emotion-related "tags" to memories of the traumatic situational episode. These tags (first biochemical, then reflected in the structure of the long-term memory) assist to prioritize later recall of important memories. Of course, this recall may be somewhat uncontrollable (as in PTSD), but there is no doubt that these memories will be recallable for longer than memories of unrelated and unremarkable episodes near in time to the traumatic episode. This is as it should be for our survival through avoidance of future similar situation function.
So, to sum up, the billboards are part of the situational episode context for the traumatic incident, so are included in the emotion-tag-enhanced strong memory of that incident, whereas the interstitial ads (which take your brain/mind to a different situation in the world of the ad) are committed to memory as uneventful situations worthy of only moderate recall. And it is even probable that situational episodes near to (but different from and not causally related to) the traumatic episode are in fact inhibited, because memory-commitment resources are being used to strongly commit the traumatic episode, or perhaps to set it in sharp relief to the irrelevant nearby episodes, for more distinct and more certain recall of the "correct" important episode around that time period.
Slashdot Mirror
Prior to starting the mining, the company should have to commit
to paying, say, 25% of top-line revenue into a fund to be held in escrow
by the government.
If the company cleans up adequately, and operates cleanly all along,
then at termination of mining operations, they get the funds back with interest.
If the government has to clean up, it uses the fund. There should be a penalty
catch, something like: If the government has to spend more than 25% of the
fund cleaning up, then the government fines the company the rest, and
such money is made available to an R&D pool that companies and universities
can access only for purposes of R&D into more environmentally responsible
methods and technologies for extracting resources.
This is probably an appropriate place to state that my signature line is ironic,
being a listing of two oxymorons.
Net neutrality matters most at the basic transport level.
Because then, if I want to choose Apple's protective
yet limited "walled garden of eden" I can, or I can
choose the wild west, as long as I brought my six gun
and know how to make my own campfire from belly button
lint and a couple of stones.
I think it is good to have both levels of choice and freedom.
I personally give up freedom for the iPhone's superior
usability and app quality control (less cruft to sort through.)
I may find a fart app, but it will be an easy to use fart app.
On cellphones, speed of understanding of and operation of
the app is paramount. I'm happy so far with Apple's design
guidelines, and mostly, with their editorial choices. I have
the freedom to move on if I don't like it.
Dear Mr/Ms Rockoon,
We hereby demand that you cease and desist from your practice of copying lyrics of our client's copyrighted song "A Little Help From My Friends", and immediately remove all copies from public Internet sites.
We note that you have sought to profit, in the form of the loan of hearing appendages, in exchange for the performance of said song. This has clearly caused irreparable harm, not only to your hapless (and paradoxically earless) listener, but also to my client, the corporation representing the author of the aforementioned song.
You will need more than a little help from your friends to make my client whole.
Yours Ominously,
E. Scrooge,
Payne & Fears LLP
Seems the only balanced and appropriate response.
OpenOffice, like Word and everything else I can think of, gets
one fundamental thing wrong in the user interface design.
Documents are 8 1/2" wide x 11" tall with say 6.5" x 9" tall
useable writing area.
Screens are not very tall, but quite wide these days, on average.
Therefore, all (yes, ALL!) of the available vertical space in the application
window should be devoted to displaying the document.
There is plenty of room for controls to the side, or perhaps sliding down
from the top on demand. A one-line control bar at the top might be
justified for inherently horizontal things like font and style names, but
that's it.
As it is, we are editing our documents through the letter slot in the door.
Maybe that will be version 4.0
Someday, when we are all enlightened,
progress on a software product will be measured by the number
of unnecessary features that have been removed, making
a more focussed and easier-to-use product.
He knows that by whining and dining,
he will convince the 1-candlepower legislators to pass laws to protect his virtual monopoly.
If you don't want to be hyperlinked to, you might consider
not putting your content on the worldwide web.
Dolt.
Many people here sound like the "that horseless carriage is useless" crowd.
Fiber to the endpoint or near the endpoint, with ridiculously high speed wireless for the rest,
will increase. This may be driven by IPTV, who knows, but it is inevitable.
Clouds will become more sophisticated.
They will not be reliant on any single point of failure. Many cloudy infrastructures (like Google)
are already pretty good at that. Much better than your crappy single backup hard-drive.
With luck, clouds will become a layer (stratus?) independent of single hosting companies. Moving clouds.
You can stick with your buggywhips if it will make you feel better.
We do know the world would be a better place if everyone shared their wi-fi securely using
a technology like FON, don't we. (No I'm not associated with the company. Just recognize a
great concept when I see one.)
I'm seriously tired of how, particularly in the US, sharing wi-fi gets implanted in peoples'
brains as a criminal, borderline terrorist activity, with terms such as
"theft of tele-communication resources" and similar Orwellian mindf**k terms.
Everytime I've been in or led a project that attempted the noble spiral model
(which I do believe in),
management and/or customer always said (ordered) two self-fulfilling and fatal things:
1. We need more features in iteration 1 (subtext: we don't believe you will ever get to iteration 2)
2. This iteration 1 thing is good enough. You are finished. We cannot pay for more dev.
Note how elegantly symbiotic the two positions are.
So let's say I am writing software for a factory that assembles machines.
It has to represent various component parts:
Some of the parts the program needs to organize and assemble are
wheels (which have diameters), bodies (chassis or frames), and seats.
The factory makes sit-down lawn mowers, push mowers, and bicycles.
The parts have all been painted in different colors (a Painted thing has a color, of course).
My program needs to tell all the red bicycle parts to go to assembly area B.
Then it needs to attach the wheels to the bodies, and add a seat to each.
We would like it to avoid making multi-colored lawnmowers with bicycle seats
and bicycle wheels. Each model of lawnmower needs a different diameter
of wheel. Each model of bicycle also needs a different diameter of wheel.
Lawnmowers each need 4 wheels. Bicycles and push-mowers each need 2.
Please write me an elegant single inheritance data model to represent the entities
that the factory program needs to work with. Please avoid making any representation
choices that my buddy the other programmer would have a 50/50 chance of choosing
the opposite representation convention for the same thing. Because you are writing half
of the system, and he's writing the other half, then you have to integrate them.
Hint, he hates colored things that happen to be lawn mowers, but loves lawnmowers
that happen to have a color.
Delivers fast, gets paid, walks away, starts running to avoid being hit by the shrapnel.
Not so good for those who are left to pick up the pieces.
Way back when I was taking my Comp Sci BSc using stone tools,
I refused to do the COBOL programming assignment, which was
maybe worth 1% of the course mark in Programming Languages.
I didn't want to be qualified for a COBOL job.
I guess I was prejudiced against the all caps and most particularly
the lack of an ELSE statement to go with the IF.
I guess these problems have since been fixed, but I was
also trying to avoid programming accounting systems, which
would have been pretty much certain to have me banging my head
against the desk in boredom.
Because paper bills are unnecessary now,
and are therefore an unjustifiable environmental cost,
the government should charge a "sin tax" on such unnecessary
paperwork. The tax could then be passed on to the consumer,
who of course has the option to turn off their paper bills and
save the tax.
I know you Americans don't like government very much,
but this might be a nice extra revenue that could be put to use
for other environmentally beneficial programs.
Tax shifting is the way to go. Increase environmental sin taxes,
and decrease income tax to compensate if you feel strongly that
it should be revenue neutral. The Green Party has been advocating
this for 25 years, and we're tired of being so far ahead. Catch up
please. Steal our policy and call it your own!
All programmers in Russia are permitted to work only a single 8 hour shift
today instead of the usual 16 hour shift !
Where I can ignore the insane US patent system.
Seriously, someone needs to explain the process of object-oriented
domain modelling, analysis, and design to the USPTO, and explain
how virtually every outcome of such a process is "obvious to a qualified
practitioner in the field." These patents on every "complicated-seeming"
computer system that uses basic symbolic modelling of a domain and
implements a few obvious methods on the objects, are ridiculous
beyond belief, and one can take no position on these patents
except to studiously ignore them.
Yes, having all of the world's literature available for instant full text search sounds
disastrous for scholars.
They did rid the region of one more crappy, mind-numbing AM station
(fart-joke morning guys, "your 24/7 traffic copter" and possibly even C&W music),
so there is something to be said for that.
Just saying...
Does anyone know if there is any practical and non-quantum
ENCRYPTION method that is potentially safe from quantum
cryptanalysis?
Are one-time pads (assuming they could be copied around safely)
proof against these techniques?
You are not hiring 007 or a fighter pilot.
I tested 160 on the "vanity" online IQ test.
But to do that. I had to take about one and a half times the allotted
time, so my score would officially be invalid. So I'm potentially
very intelligent, but a little slow and ponderous in my reasoning.
Also, in one of those "program this in front of me" tests in an interview,
my brain froze (looped?) due to the stress of the situation.
Now if we'd had a leisurely conversation about systems architecture
trade-offs, or explored a problem and solution requirements space
or a tough trade-off decision tree through socratic
dialectic, I might have wowed them, but it was not to be.
And I even knew that the answer to "How would you move a mountain?"
is "It's already moving. Please clarify."
The following phrases are among the few common uses of the word "patent"
as an adjective:
"That is patent nonsense."
"That is a patent lie."
Is there any formal measure of the amount of it?
If not, then this article's thesis is just someone's random, culturally
relative, attention-relative opinion and is probably a crock.
The only thing I can think of would be the number of bits of information
required to describe all the technologies we have, the processes they
support, and the consequences thereof, at any given decade say.
That would give us a measure of the variety and complexity of what were were doing.
But is increase in variety and complexity of what we are doing necessarily
progress? (ponders).
It's probable that the concept of "progress" is completely relative, and only
makes sense with respect to well-defined goals.
One good goal would be "increase probability of human-species survival",
or an even better one "increase probability of Earth eco-systems survival"
How are we doing on that one anyway?
Here's my hypothesis to explain the "contradictory" results.
In the case of a violent TV show that is periodically interrupted by an ad, the brain perceives these
as two different situational episodes or contexts.
Another analogy would be if you were both reading a crime novel set in London, and periodically glancing up from your book
to look out the train window at the sweeping mountain vistas. The brain/mind can separate those episodes, similar to how they
would be separated if they followed each other in time.
In the case of the billboard ads in the driving game, these ads are impressions that are part of the in-game world, seen while
your brain/mind perceives you to be in the driving situational episode.
Why this distinction is important is probably that your brain adds strong-emotion-related "tags" to memories of the traumatic
situational episode. These tags (first biochemical, then reflected in the structure of the long-term memory) assist to prioritize
later recall of important memories. Of course, this recall may be somewhat uncontrollable (as in PTSD), but there is no
doubt that these memories will be recallable for longer than memories of unrelated and unremarkable episodes near in
time to the traumatic episode. This is as it should be for our survival through avoidance of future similar situation function.
So, to sum up, the billboards are part of the situational episode context for the traumatic incident, so are included in the
emotion-tag-enhanced strong memory of that incident, whereas the interstitial ads (which take your brain/mind to a different
situation in the world of the ad) are committed to memory as uneventful situations worthy of only moderate recall. And it
is even probable that situational episodes near to (but different from and not causally related to) the traumatic episode
are in fact inhibited, because memory-commitment resources are being used to strongly commit the traumatic episode,
or perhaps to set it in sharp relief to the irrelevant nearby episodes, for more distinct and more certain recall of the "correct"
important episode around that time period.
Just a guess.
just so there's no risk he turns into a girlie man.
Every boy needs to learn that you have to have a big cannon and wield it with authority should any dispute come up.
(Warning: Failure to recognize sarcasm is the eighth deadly sin, specially in a world of manly men.)