In the last ten years, smoking has killed 4 million Americans. Traffic has killed 400.000. Terrorism has killed 4.000. When will you stop handing total power to the government just to fight this one, close to irrelevant risk? And why not spend those many billions on the healthcare system and traffic safety?
Actually, the Red Cross was founded by a Swiss and the logo is based on the Swiss flag, so I think we could safely call this prior art:)
Give the right amount to the right places
on
Season's Givings?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Think about how many Africans will die (malnourishment, diseases) because you use your "charity" budget on stuff that makes your life better.
Think about exactly why you would be outraged if millions of people died of hunger or cold (think Pakistan) in your country, yet this is not such a big deal if it happens far enough away.
Think about how much suffering could be prevented if you gave 10% of your income, how little suffering that would cause you, and why you (like most people) consider it okay to give much less than that.
The back button can be made to work. We went to great lengths to make sure the back button takes you to the previous view in http://map.search.ch/ . Try clicking it for a zoom, then hit the back button.
The fact that URLs don't auto-update doesn't mean that permalinks are impossible. We create a permalink every time you do a search or enter the "email this page" screen. See http://map.search.ch/zurich
Even auto-updating URLs when navigating inside an AJAX app are possible, we have plans to implement that in the future.
And yes, we've had all of this from day one - months before google maps. Admitted, many AJAX apps still dont bother to do any of this - I'd say let's adress that instead of abandoning AJAX.
In the last ten years, traffic has killed about 400.000 Americans. Terrorism has killed less than 4.000. I'm still amazed how the American public is prepared the give up all kinds of civil liberties just to fight the risk that is 100 times smaller, not to mention that the success chances are doubtful. Accepting a small - tiny! - terrorism threat is a small price to pay for a free society.
My ergonomics advice: Try a laptop mouse; the smaller the better. The reason is: You can control it using your fingers alone while the base of the hand rests on the table without moving - and you can pull it under your palm for vertical moves. That way you get high precision so you can set the mouse pointer to high speed; minimal movements then are enough to reach any point on the screen accurately. I would guess that helps with RSI.
It's very disrespectful to the flag and the people who died for it.
<ot> Lots of people died for the Nazi flag, too, so should it be held in respect as well? I say we should stand up for values, not for countries and their symbols.
</ot>
"Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious."
--Oscar Wilde
Where is the problem in creating spyware that runs as user? Simply write the binary as dot-file to the home directory and append a call to.bashrc. Same goes for software that turns the computer in a spam-spewing zombie.
He does have a good point. The separation of root and user on single user machines is greatly overrated. It would only make a minor difference if a root-only software firewall were to block some outgoing connections, e.g. SMTP. But as is, the damage root can do is only slightly more than the damage a user can do - not to mention that root exploits are not uncommon.
Switzerland has a very successful car sharing system, 1700 cars in 950 locations. The pricing is cheaper, about $2 per hour and $0.50 per kilometer. The rest is similar: Reservations over web/phone, access using keycard.
Can I recommend it? For areas with good public transports, definitely. No worries about servicing, insurances, taxes, repairs, garages and all that stuff. Never had trouble getting a car, only sometimes I had to get one from a location a bit further away. Here in the town of Zurich, the next car sharing location is never more than a 5 minute walk off.
Does this make environmental sense? Definitely. Around 50% (IIRC) of the energy a car uses is used when making it - car sharing takes way less cars. And you use the car less since public transports are usually closer. Finally, when you use it, you can pick the smallest car that does the job on hand - usually a 2-seater in my case.
Will this take off elsewhere? I would hope so, but good public transports have to be there first (the Swiss are the strongest train users worldwide and most train stations include car sharing spots). Additionally, every car sharing organization has a chicken/egg problem (no locations -> no users) until it reaches a certain size, so booting it up can be hard.
If you can, go for it. I consider not worrying about a car and reading a newspaper on the way to work luxury.
The Curitiba bus system seems extremely cost-effecient and successful. SkyWeb would likely be more expensive and needs to be deployed at a large scale to yield noticeable improvements.
As for countries like Iran, Hussein's Iraq, Pakistan, etc, they were broken up for a reason. Very simply: we can't trust them as far as we can kick them. September 11 only proves that.
What do any of these have to do with September 11? The 9/11 commission unsurprisingly found no links. Saddam Hussein feared fundamentalism like Al Qaida's.
Everyone else in the Middle East is looking to point atomic weapons at each other. Why?
To prevent being invaded by the US based on phony reasons? Works nicely for North Korea.
Dual core makes economic sense. There is a sweet spot for die size (around 100mm squared), below which the production costs start becoming negligible. But with technology improvements, 100mm allow you to fit more and more transistors, and dual core is what gets you the maximum processing power (and therefore money) out of those extra transistors.
What drug was the IE design team engineers taking when they decided to to let (or at least failed to prevent) untrusted program execution?
Never ascribe to incompetence that which can be explained by malice. Getting webmasters to deploy windows-x86 code onto websites forever ties the web to microsoft products. The security problems were just accepted.
motors uses 80% less energy than a conventional motor
A conventional electric motor motor uses at most 1.6 Joules of electric energy to produce 1 Joule of motion energy (German Wikipedia). If you reduce that by 80%, you use only 0.3 Joules to produce 1 Joule... nice perpetuum mobile.
I think that private transportation will remain the norm. The emphasis on ownership, of your transportation being your property, is very strong in the US.
Less so in Switzerland.
The average Swiss, despite being in a small country, travels 1200km/year by train, compared to about 600km in Germany and about 20km in the US. (from memory)
Zurich, the city with the world's highest quality of life according to mercer, got there in part by reducing roads and parking spots and giving priority (e.g. at each traffic light) to public transports. The average citizen here uses public transports more than once per day.
The biggest car-sharing company here (sort of an automated distributed car rental for people who don't want to own cars) already has close to 1% of the population for members, growing 10% per year.
Not all of this can be translated to the US, partly because the lower population density, partly because of chicken/egg problems with starting up public transports. But as you've stated: One big problem is changing the minds of the US citizens. How else could an idiocy like SUV's have become so successful?
Working software that's fast enough and is on time is what counts. How would assembly help there?
Your high level language programs run faster when you know assembly? Well, maybe 20%, but how is that relevant today? Computers will be 20% faster in 6 months. And better algorithms can get you 2000%.
Your HLL programs are better if you know assembly? None of today's techniques to create maintainable code (structured programming, object orientation) came out of assembly. Quite the opposite.
If you're a PHP or Perl programmer, how does assembly knowledge influence your programming style?
Most great programmers today have learned assembly - but that's just because they're older and assembly made more sense in the past. But that's no reason to look down on programmers who don't know it.
I know assembly and it has zero influence on my programming style. It's even quite impossible to use modern languages like PHP and java in an assembly (un)friendly way. Algorithms are what counts.
Of course there is a very small very high performance niche for assembly, but that's not what this book it promoted for.
"Branch likely" has been done - and deprecated - e.g. by MIPS.
You underestimate how much effort goes into branch prediction already. Modern predictors even notice that a certain branch is taken exactly every 4th time. Any hinting that can be provided at compile time - especially if it's done without profile feedback - would not add much value to this.
Slashdot Mirror
Repeat after me: The terrorist threat is minimal.
In the last ten years, smoking has killed 4 million Americans. Traffic has killed 400.000. Terrorism has killed 4.000. When will you stop handing total power to the government just to fight this one, close to irrelevant risk? And why not spend those many billions on the healthcare system and traffic safety?
Actually, the Red Cross was founded by a Swiss and the logo is based on the Swiss flag, so I think we could safely call this prior art :)
Think about how many Africans will die (malnourishment, diseases) because you use your "charity" budget on stuff that makes your life better.
Think about exactly why you would be outraged if millions of people died of hunger or cold (think Pakistan) in your country, yet this is not such a big deal if it happens far enough away.
Think about how much suffering could be prevented if you gave 10% of your income, how little suffering that would cause you, and why you (like most people) consider it okay to give much less than that.
International Red Cross
Médécins sans frontières
UN World Food Programme
And yes, we've had all of this from day one - months before google maps. Admitted, many AJAX apps still dont bother to do any of this - I'd say let's adress that instead of abandoning AJAX.
I wonder when we're gonna get an ad filter that catches Slashvertisements.
In the last ten years, traffic has killed about 400.000 Americans. Terrorism has killed less than 4.000. I'm still amazed how the American public is prepared the give up all kinds of civil liberties just to fight the risk that is 100 times smaller, not to mention that the success chances are doubtful. Accepting a small - tiny! - terrorism threat is a small price to pay for a free society.
My ergonomics advice: Try a laptop mouse; the smaller the better. The reason is: You can control it using your fingers alone while the base of the hand rests on the table without moving - and you can pull it under your palm for vertical moves. That way you get high precision so you can set the mouse pointer to high speed; minimal movements then are enough to reach any point on the screen accurately. I would guess that helps with RSI.
It's very disrespectful to the flag and the people who died for it.
<ot>
Lots of people died for the Nazi flag, too, so should it be held in respect as well? I say we should stand up for values, not for countries and their symbols.
</ot>
"Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious." --Oscar Wilde
One word: Spyware
.bashrc. Same goes for software that turns the computer in a spam-spewing zombie.
Where is the problem in creating spyware that runs as user? Simply write the binary as dot-file to the home directory and append a call to
He does have a good point. The separation of root and user on single user machines is greatly overrated. It would only make a minor difference if a root-only software firewall were to block some outgoing connections, e.g. SMTP. But as is, the damage root can do is only slightly more than the damage a user can do - not to mention that root exploits are not uncommon.
Nuremberg will introduce a completely driverless subway next year. Good article with lots of pictures. See (partially English) PDF
Switzerland has a very successful car sharing system, 1700 cars in 950 locations. The pricing is cheaper, about $2 per hour and $0.50 per kilometer. The rest is similar: Reservations over web/phone, access using keycard.
Can I recommend it? For areas with good public transports, definitely. No worries about servicing, insurances, taxes, repairs, garages and all that stuff. Never had trouble getting a car, only sometimes I had to get one from a location a bit further away. Here in the town of Zurich, the next car sharing location is never more than a 5 minute walk off.
Does this make environmental sense? Definitely. Around 50% (IIRC) of the energy a car uses is used when making it - car sharing takes way less cars. And you use the car less since public transports are usually closer. Finally, when you use it, you can pick the smallest car that does the job on hand - usually a 2-seater in my case.
Will this take off elsewhere? I would hope so, but good public transports have to be there first (the Swiss are the strongest train users worldwide and most train stations include car sharing spots). Additionally, every car sharing organization has a chicken/egg problem (no locations -> no users) until it reaches a certain size, so booting it up can be hard.
If you can, go for it. I consider not worrying about a car and reading a newspaper on the way to work luxury.
Cool. The owner of mortgage.info can now DoS any site he wants by changing the DNS entry.
The Curitiba bus system seems extremely cost-effecient and successful. SkyWeb would likely be more expensive and needs to be deployed at a large scale to yield noticeable improvements.
As for countries like Iran, Hussein's Iraq, Pakistan, etc, they were broken up for a reason. Very simply: we can't trust them as far as we can kick them. September 11 only proves that.
What do any of these have to do with September 11? The 9/11 commission unsurprisingly found no links. Saddam Hussein feared fundamentalism like Al Qaida's.
Everyone else in the Middle East is looking to point atomic weapons at each other. Why?
To prevent being invaded by the US based on phony reasons? Works nicely for North Korea.
Dual core makes economic sense. There is a sweet spot for die size (around 100mm squared), below which the production costs start becoming negligible. But with technology improvements, 100mm allow you to fit more and more transistors, and dual core is what gets you the maximum processing power (and therefore money) out of those extra transistors.
Using your built in ruler?
Never ascribe to incompetence that which can be explained by malice. Getting webmasters to deploy windows-x86 code onto websites forever ties the web to microsoft products. The security problems were just accepted.
motors uses 80% less energy than a conventional motor
A conventional electric motor motor uses at most 1.6 Joules of electric energy to produce 1 Joule of motion energy (German Wikipedia). If you reduce that by 80%, you use only 0.3 Joules to produce 1 Joule... nice perpetuum mobile.
Less so in Switzerland.
- The average Swiss, despite being in a small country, travels 1200km/year by train, compared to about 600km in Germany and about 20km in the US. (from memory)
- Zurich, the city with the world's highest quality of life according to mercer, got there in part by reducing roads and parking spots and giving priority (e.g. at each traffic light) to public transports. The average citizen here uses public transports more than once per day.
- The biggest car-sharing company here (sort of an automated distributed car rental for people who don't want to own cars) already has close to 1% of the population for members, growing 10% per year.
Not all of this can be translated to the US, partly because the lower population density, partly because of chicken/egg problems with starting up public transports. But as you've stated: One big problem is changing the minds of the US citizens. How else could an idiocy like SUV's have become so successful?it's not impossible, it's just infinitely improbable.
"Imagine a RAID5 of these!"
- Your high level language programs run faster when you know assembly? Well, maybe 20%, but how is that relevant today? Computers will be 20% faster in 6 months. And better algorithms can get you 2000%.
- Your HLL programs are better if you know assembly? None of today's techniques to create maintainable code (structured programming, object orientation) came out of assembly. Quite the opposite.
If you're a PHP or Perl programmer, how does assembly knowledge influence your programming style?Most great programmers today have learned assembly - but that's just because they're older and assembly made more sense in the past. But that's no reason to look down on programmers who don't know it.
I know assembly and it has zero influence on my programming style. It's even quite impossible to use modern languages like PHP and java in an assembly (un)friendly way. Algorithms are what counts.
Of course there is a very small very high performance niche for assembly, but that's not what this book it promoted for.
"Branch likely" has been done - and deprecated - e.g. by MIPS.
You underestimate how much effort goes into branch prediction already. Modern predictors even notice that a certain branch is taken exactly every 4th time. Any hinting that can be provided at compile time - especially if it's done without profile feedback - would not add much value to this.