Ultimately the same mindset that is representative of their heritage.
And which heritage is that? The heritage of having invented democracy, perhaps? Or the republic? Rule of law and the independent court? The heritage that settlers took with them to the colonies and which ultimately went into founding countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, etc.? Or the heritage of blathering about something you see somewhere far, far away without really knowing how it works?
How many EU countries still have monarchs?
Six. Do you know which countries they are?
How many more EU countries right up until approximately 200 years ago had autocratic monarchies?
How do you want me to adjust for coutries that don't exist anymore (or countries that didn't exist then)?
They have been bred for 1000 years to let other people tell them what is good for them or not.
Well, given that our breeding went into the group of people nowadays called Americans, that would explain why they have naturally progressed into a society ruled from the White House with only token counterweight from the elected body and a court handpicked by the autocratic ruler to do his bidding.
Oh no, wait, that doesn't work. The ideas of republic and elected representation also come from here.
Why do Europeans allow a non-elected commission to determine economic policy?
The Commission doesn't determine economic policy. Insofar as economic policy is decided at the EU level, it is decided by Council and the EP. The Commission suggests policy, much like a government suggests laws to a parliament.
What a revolutionary point of view/complaint this article gives! In the sense that "revolutionary" means that history goes through a loop and comes back to where it was before...
It is interesting to see though, how every so many years the same ideas pop up in new guises. Edger Dijkstra for instance said more or less the same thing about Software Engineering and its mantra of process phases and planned testing. And the same argument can (and has) been brought against Kent Beck's Extreme Programming methodology.
Oh well, just goes to show you: the only lesson ever learned from history is that nobody ever learns from history.
It just seems really odd that when the elected groups say "game over" the other group can just say "too bad, we're doing it".
They didn't say "game over". They requested a restart of the procedure. That's not like the military a-request-is-an-order -- that's really a request.
From here on, the Council has to get together to come up with a common position. That goes to the EP and we go to the second reading of the Commission's proposal by the EP (i.e. the common position of the Council). As a result of that, the EP can approve (the proposal is passed), reject (the proposal is scrap metal) or amend (there is a Dutch MEP who is going to shoot for bringing the EP's previous amendments back).
In case of amendment, the commission delivers an opinion on the amendments by the EP. We can assume that this will be negative at this point. The ball is then in the Council's court. The Council can approve the amendments unanimously (to override the objecting opinion of the Commission; the proposal as amended by the EP is then passed). Or the Council can reject the amendments. We then go into the Concilliation phase.
The concilliation phase is a last-ditch attempt to reach agreement between Council and EP. It consists of a meeting between represenatives of the Council and the EP and the relevant Commissioner. They try to work out a text everybody can agree upon. If they can't reach a joint text, the proposal is dead. If they reach a joint text, the Council and EP both take a vote on that text. Both approve, the joint text is law. Either rejects, the proposal is dead.
In other words, the EP still has plenty of ways to shove software patenting up the Commission's ass. Also, don't forget, the Council has yet to reach a joint position -- and the national parliaments of several countries are also working to get their ministers (representatives of nations in the Council) to change their vote, plus the new members get a first say and we don't know what that will be either.
Why don't we get all those smart young engineers from prestigious universities to start messing around with rockets or jet engines at medium scale?
Because they aren't interested. Solar-powered vehicles bring together research from all sorts of different fields of physics and chemistry, from fluid- and gas dynamics to materials research to energy-efficient engineering to, indeed, development of more efficient photovoltaic elements. There is a lot of real science involved in that, despite your best efforts too pooh-pooh it. More than enough science in fact that it fascinates those people working on it and many more waiting in the wings for their turn to work on the problems in these fields. And you cannot simply tell them to go work on rockets -- to them, rocket technology is boring.
We might actually see some groundbreaking work.
Your outsider's idea of "groundbreaking work" does not coincide with the ideas on groundbreaking work held by those who actually have an overview of what is being done at the different universities working on advancing these fields.
While much of the masses have been hoodwinked into believing hydrogen fuel is alternative, an important detail few realize is that hydrogen is NOT an energy source... it's only a tranport medium.
Ahem. The exact same thing is true of oil.
folks will pay more for more complicated vehicles which cost more to operate
Actually, the examples of hydrogen-driven vehicles that I have seen so far have all been considerably simpler in design than any oil or gas combustion engine design -- which are typically so complex that any real engineer's first reaction on seeing one is "How can this monster possibly work?" In most cases the reason lies in the dropping of a central engine and the switch to individual engines for each wheel, but even GM's concept car with a central power supply for a central electromotor is a simpler design than any "normal" car you could care to mention.
No, if you want to to talk about really complex you want to talk about Toyota's Prius. but then, that's a combustion/electric hybrid and has nothing to do with hydrogen.
and there will likely be about the same, if not more pollution than now when factoring in the production of the hydrogen fuel
Possibly. That will have to be worked on. Surely the American "hydrogen" solution will have to go.
the way to truly reduce pollution from energy production/use is less consumption and/or more efficient energy production methods.
That is not entirely true. Depending on what you count as pollution, there are better methods available. Nuclear, for instance, if you look only at CO2. Hydro, wind and solar are even better in the long run, the "pollution" they create is in materials that can be reused. However, their major drawback right now is cost.
though its possible to bank the CO2, pump it underground, for example in to old oil fields where its already used at great expense to increase their yield.
Which is a totally insane method from an environmental point of view. Pumping the CO2 into the field takes energy -- i.e., at the current time, it produces more CO2. And far more than is being pumped under.
This is a nice thread. Not so much because of the content (which is slightly inane) but since it sort of embodies the underlying idea of open source (software, science, knowledge, etc.) that involving many voluntarily in the process of bringing about a thing will gradually lead to improvement of that thing and in fact movement towards an optimal form of that same thing. The constant wonderment at seeing this process in action is one of the things that so attracts me to initiatives like the Wikipedia.
At this point, let me offer one final revision: in 1955 the European Community had no members. It was founded in 1957. In 1955, the European Coal and Steel Community has six members.
Hydrogen is not a fuel source anymore than electricity is an energy source.
That depends on your point of view. From the point of view of the user of hydrogen it most certainly is an energy source, just as much as gasoline is. It is all relative. After all, in an absolute sense, nothing at all is an original energy source, as the law of preservation of energy tells us.
At best it is an inefficient way of storying energy generated by fossil fuels.
Or any other fuel; energy doesn't discriminate. Why exactly is it inefficient, in your mind?
Hydrogen isn't naturally found anywhere.
I assume you mean, not bonded to anything else. Try the sun.
It will never be commercially successful because it is inefficient and does not make economic sense. That is the sad fact. The future is in biological, organically created fuel oils. That's much more efficient if we can get a natural process (say algae) to turn carbon dioxide in the air into diesel fuel using the power of the sun. This is actually efficient and sustainable.
Ahem. Economy has a strange way of changing with things like scientific advancement and other factors. Right now, oil is vastly expensive and may in fact never come down in price ever again. Oil creation by algae of the heat/pressure simulation process developed at Shell recently is a possibility, but also expensive (in fact, viable only because natural oil is so expensive). Other technologies follow the same reasoning.
Actually, they've gone to some real trouble to make carbon-fiber-reinforced tanks that are *very* hard to bust.
That barely matters. The problem with storing hydrogen is gaseous form isn't how hard the tank is -- it's that no tank in the world can hold on to gaseous hydrogen indefinitely. Hydrogen is the smallest molecule around. Build a tank out of a material, you get a wall which consists of molecules arranged in a grid. A grid with holes, since molecules aren't exactly square. Fill the tank with hydrogen (under pressure or not, it really only matters for the speed) and some hydrogen will leak out through the holes in the grid. Not exactly a huge problem for a car (which will move around a good deal of the time), but the tank at the gas station is stationary.
As for explosion and fire, the one is the other but at higher speed. Hydrogen burns, hard and fast. That's what happened to the Hindenburg.
Of course, all of this assumes storage of gaseous hydrogen. And I don't think anybody is seriously looking at that, for a whole host of reasons.
But if someone does come up with something truly unique that is expressed in software, how can this be legally protected so someone else doesn't steal your work after one or one-half year?
That's what copyright does. For your entire lifetime, plus 70 years.
Ehrm... But the US has signed the Convention. The Convention mandates action by those that have signed -- you cannot very well mandate being-treated-upon by signatories.
For that matter, the US has also signed the European Convention on Human Rights. And the Universal Declaration.
But dear lord, look at how much trouble it is to kill this one stupid bill in the EU. How many times does a bill have to be rejected before it really dies over there?
Only once, which it hasn't been yet. It might look like that to the casual observer, but the status of this bill so far has almost always been "in negotiation between Parliament and Council". Somewhat like the American Congress, both "houses" of the EU's law-making apparatus are allowed to amend -- whih means bills can go back and forth while the two boedies try to work out a text that satisfies both.
Note that (as far as I can tell), even now the bill hasn't actually been rejected; the Parliament has simply demanded that the entire process start over from scratch. If this is refused, then it becomes likely the Parliament will reject outright and toss the entire bill on the heap.
Just to be clear about the difference:
If the process is started again, we will probably end up with a European patenting law (albeit probably one that will not allow anything like American-style software patenting).
If the Parliament rejects, there is no more proposal and therefore no law.
Given that this was an exercise, I'm somewhat tempted to ask whether you aren't counting the JVM startup time on top of a very short problem instance.
That, or whether the exercise involved lots of dynamic creation of objects (in which case your program was by definition not doing the same thing as the Java implementations). The exercise you mention sort of sounds like that.
In fact, the Haskell implementations from the previous year did too (and they were run interpreted, not ghc-compiled).
I am well aware of the forte of Haskell and its different interpreter implementations. To the degree that I wouldn't be surprised if the Haskell implementation did better than your C implementation.
One with an interface, one that does real work and spends most of its time interacting with a user rather than banging numbers. Run the test again and you'll find that C++ is significantly faster than Java in this situation because Swing is slower than arthritic snail carrying a small planet and Hotspot isn't good at optimising the sort of stuff a general program has to do.
Again, that depends mightily on exactly HOW you write that Swing interface. I'll grant you, it's a lot easier to get it wrong in Java than it is to do so in many other languages -- the native-library-versus-drawn-internally aspect can start to weigh, as can the internal translation aspect. However, it is far from impossible to write a Swing application that is as snappy in response as any equivalent program that was natively compiled (from C++ or another language). Or, of course, faster than the native code if you have a "native programmer" dumb enough to rely on "C++ being so fast" to compensate for his producing slop instead of code.
I'll even give you two examples. One a "large" application, one from a small piece of software I developed myself.
The first example is my experiences in using the Rational Rose UML modeling tool versus the 100% Java MagicDraw modeling tool. Both allow full modeling using all UML diagrams, provide full standards support and a host of related development tools (two-way engineering, etc.). The version of RR I used was written by the "native programmer" idiot type I described above. It started rapidly, brought up a nice empty screen and turned into molasses going uphill in January through a funnel the moment I put a single class entity in my diagram. By comparison, I have never seen any verson of MD behave as anything less than a highly responsive, native-speed look-alike tool even when handling larger models with several diagrams and lots of entities.
The second example is a small program I wrote to accompany my master's thesis. It included a speciality parser and a graph component (not written by me) that I used to display the resulting tree during my defense. I was struck at the time that the interface responded to commands with very nearly the same speed as I would expect from a native application, the difference being no more than a fraction of a second each time -- a lag that I contributed wholly to the fact that I was running the program remotely over the Internet, the interface being pumped in through the X Windows protocol (or possibly through a VNC connection, I don't recall). No local client for the program was involved, in case you're wondering.
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And which heritage is that? The heritage of having invented democracy, perhaps? Or the republic? Rule of law and the independent court? The heritage that settlers took with them to the colonies and which ultimately went into founding countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, etc.? Or the heritage of blathering about something you see somewhere far, far away without really knowing how it works?
How many EU countries still have monarchs?Six. Do you know which countries they are?
How many more EU countries right up until approximately 200 years ago had autocratic monarchies?How do you want me to adjust for coutries that don't exist anymore (or countries that didn't exist then)?
They have been bred for 1000 years to let other people tell them what is good for them or not.Well, given that our breeding went into the group of people nowadays called Americans, that would explain why they have naturally progressed into a society ruled from the White House with only token counterweight from the elected body and a court handpicked by the autocratic ruler to do his bidding.
Oh no, wait, that doesn't work. The ideas of republic and elected representation also come from here.
The Commission doesn't determine economic policy. Insofar as economic policy is decided at the EU level, it is decided by Council and the EP. The Commission suggests policy, much like a government suggests laws to a parliament.
What a revolutionary point of view/complaint this article gives! In the sense that "revolutionary" means that history goes through a loop and comes back to where it was before...
It is interesting to see though, how every so many years the same ideas pop up in new guises. Edger Dijkstra for instance said more or less the same thing about Software Engineering and its mantra of process phases and planned testing. And the same argument can (and has) been brought against Kent Beck's Extreme Programming methodology.
Oh well, just goes to show you: the only lesson ever learned from history is that nobody ever learns from history.
You haven't actually read it, have you? You should.
They didn't say "game over". They requested a restart of the procedure. That's not like the military a-request-is-an-order -- that's really a request.
From here on, the Council has to get together to come up with a common position. That goes to the EP and we go to the second reading of the Commission's proposal by the EP (i.e. the common position of the Council). As a result of that, the EP can approve (the proposal is passed), reject (the proposal is scrap metal) or amend (there is a Dutch MEP who is going to shoot for bringing the EP's previous amendments back).
In case of amendment, the commission delivers an opinion on the amendments by the EP. We can assume that this will be negative at this point. The ball is then in the Council's court. The Council can approve the amendments unanimously (to override the objecting opinion of the Commission; the proposal as amended by the EP is then passed). Or the Council can reject the amendments. We then go into the Concilliation phase.
The concilliation phase is a last-ditch attempt to reach agreement between Council and EP. It consists of a meeting between represenatives of the Council and the EP and the relevant Commissioner. They try to work out a text everybody can agree upon. If they can't reach a joint text, the proposal is dead. If they reach a joint text, the Council and EP both take a vote on that text. Both approve, the joint text is law. Either rejects, the proposal is dead.
In other words, the EP still has plenty of ways to shove software patenting up the Commission's ass. Also, don't forget, the Council has yet to reach a joint position -- and the national parliaments of several countries are also working to get their ministers (representatives of nations in the Council) to change their vote, plus the new members get a first say and we don't know what that will be either.
Because they aren't interested. Solar-powered vehicles bring together research from all sorts of different fields of physics and chemistry, from fluid- and gas dynamics to materials research to energy-efficient engineering to, indeed, development of more efficient photovoltaic elements. There is a lot of real science involved in that, despite your best efforts too pooh-pooh it. More than enough science in fact that it fascinates those people working on it and many more waiting in the wings for their turn to work on the problems in these fields. And you cannot simply tell them to go work on rockets -- to them, rocket technology is boring.
We might actually see some groundbreaking work.Your outsider's idea of "groundbreaking work" does not coincide with the ideas on groundbreaking work held by those who actually have an overview of what is being done at the different universities working on advancing these fields.
It's certainly possible. With Delft's NUNA not competing, the field is wide open again. ;-)
Yeah, but they do that to increase the pressure in the field to force the oil out -- not to store the CO2.
Eh? Germany has over twice the population of California!
Ahem. The exact same thing is true of oil.
folks will pay more for more complicated vehicles which cost more to operateActually, the examples of hydrogen-driven vehicles that I have seen so far have all been considerably simpler in design than any oil or gas combustion engine design -- which are typically so complex that any real engineer's first reaction on seeing one is "How can this monster possibly work?" In most cases the reason lies in the dropping of a central engine and the switch to individual engines for each wheel, but even GM's concept car with a central power supply for a central electromotor is a simpler design than any "normal" car you could care to mention.
No, if you want to to talk about really complex you want to talk about Toyota's Prius. but then, that's a combustion/electric hybrid and has nothing to do with hydrogen.
and there will likely be about the same, if not more pollution than now when factoring in the production of the hydrogen fuelPossibly. That will have to be worked on. Surely the American "hydrogen" solution will have to go.
the way to truly reduce pollution from energy production/use is less consumption and/or more efficient energy production methods.That is not entirely true. Depending on what you count as pollution, there are better methods available. Nuclear, for instance, if you look only at CO2. Hydro, wind and solar are even better in the long run, the "pollution" they create is in materials that can be reused. However, their major drawback right now is cost.
Which is a totally insane method from an environmental point of view. Pumping the CO2 into the field takes energy -- i.e., at the current time, it produces more CO2. And far more than is being pumped under.
Methinks you don't quite get the EU.
Highly doubtful. At least, if the past is any indication (and I'm thinking of Spain, Greece and Portugal here).
No, Turkey will be fine. All it takes is time and patience. And those are things the EU has in abundance.
This is a nice thread. Not so much because of the content (which is slightly inane) but since it sort of embodies the underlying idea of open source (software, science, knowledge, etc.) that involving many voluntarily in the process of bringing about a thing will gradually lead to improvement of that thing and in fact movement towards an optimal form of that same thing. The constant wonderment at seeing this process in action is one of the things that so attracts me to initiatives like the Wikipedia.
At this point, let me offer one final revision: in 1955 the European Community had no members. It was founded in 1957. In 1955, the European Coal and Steel Community has six members.
That depends on your point of view. From the point of view of the user of hydrogen it most certainly is an energy source, just as much as gasoline is. It is all relative. After all, in an absolute sense, nothing at all is an original energy source, as the law of preservation of energy tells us.
At best it is an inefficient way of storying energy generated by fossil fuels.Or any other fuel; energy doesn't discriminate. Why exactly is it inefficient, in your mind?
Hydrogen isn't naturally found anywhere.I assume you mean, not bonded to anything else. Try the sun.
It will never be commercially successful because it is inefficient and does not make economic sense. That is the sad fact. The future is in biological, organically created fuel oils. That's much more efficient if we can get a natural process (say algae) to turn carbon dioxide in the air into diesel fuel using the power of the sun. This is actually efficient and sustainable.Ahem. Economy has a strange way of changing with things like scientific advancement and other factors. Right now, oil is vastly expensive and may in fact never come down in price ever again. Oil creation by algae of the heat/pressure simulation process developed at Shell recently is a possibility, but also expensive (in fact, viable only because natural oil is so expensive). Other technologies follow the same reasoning.
That barely matters. The problem with storing hydrogen is gaseous form isn't how hard the tank is -- it's that no tank in the world can hold on to gaseous hydrogen indefinitely. Hydrogen is the smallest molecule around. Build a tank out of a material, you get a wall which consists of molecules arranged in a grid. A grid with holes, since molecules aren't exactly square. Fill the tank with hydrogen (under pressure or not, it really only matters for the speed) and some hydrogen will leak out through the holes in the grid. Not exactly a huge problem for a car (which will move around a good deal of the time), but the tank at the gas station is stationary.
As for explosion and fire, the one is the other but at higher speed. Hydrogen burns, hard and fast. That's what happened to the Hindenburg.
Of course, all of this assumes storage of gaseous hydrogen. And I don't think anybody is seriously looking at that, for a whole host of reasons.
Oh come now, how hard can it be? Just a little blue block with twelve shiny, yellow stars...?
That's what copyright does. For your entire lifetime, plus 70 years.
Ehrm... But the US has signed the Convention. The Convention mandates action by those that have signed -- you cannot very well mandate being-treated-upon by signatories.
For that matter, the US has also signed the European Convention on Human Rights. And the Universal Declaration.
Actually, no. They were both around eleven trillion before the EU expanded to 25 nations. Now the EU is a good deal larger.
That is for those who want to measure against GDP, rather than one of the other indices.
Only once, which it hasn't been yet. It might look like that to the casual observer, but the status of this bill so far has almost always been "in negotiation between Parliament and Council". Somewhat like the American Congress, both "houses" of the EU's law-making apparatus are allowed to amend -- whih means bills can go back and forth while the two boedies try to work out a text that satisfies both.
Note that (as far as I can tell), even now the bill hasn't actually been rejected; the Parliament has simply demanded that the entire process start over from scratch. If this is refused, then it becomes likely the Parliament will reject outright and toss the entire bill on the heap.
Just to be clear about the difference:
Sorry.
Same algorithm, same data structures.
Given that this was an exercise, I'm somewhat tempted to ask whether you aren't counting the JVM startup time on top of a very short problem instance.
That, or whether the exercise involved lots of dynamic creation of objects (in which case your program was by definition not doing the same thing as the Java implementations). The exercise you mention sort of sounds like that.
In fact, the Haskell implementations from the previous year did too (and they were run interpreted, not ghc-compiled).
I am well aware of the forte of Haskell and its different interpreter implementations. To the degree that I wouldn't be surprised if the Haskell implementation did better than your C implementation.
I attribute most Java slowness to poor programming techniques. Its got to be, [...]
You can stop wondering, it is. Be it Java or be it not, you wouldn't believe some of the crap that is produced and passed off as "code" nowadays.
One with an interface, one that does real work and spends most of its time interacting with a user rather than banging numbers. Run the test again and you'll find that C++ is significantly faster than Java in this situation because Swing is slower than arthritic snail carrying a small planet and Hotspot isn't good at optimising the sort of stuff a general program has to do.
Again, that depends mightily on exactly HOW you write that Swing interface. I'll grant you, it's a lot easier to get it wrong in Java than it is to do so in many other languages -- the native-library-versus-drawn-internally aspect can start to weigh, as can the internal translation aspect. However, it is far from impossible to write a Swing application that is as snappy in response as any equivalent program that was natively compiled (from C++ or another language). Or, of course, faster than the native code if you have a "native programmer" dumb enough to rely on "C++ being so fast" to compensate for his producing slop instead of code.
I'll even give you two examples. One a "large" application, one from a small piece of software I developed myself.
The first example is my experiences in using the Rational Rose UML modeling tool versus the 100% Java MagicDraw modeling tool. Both allow full modeling using all UML diagrams, provide full standards support and a host of related development tools (two-way engineering, etc.). The version of RR I used was written by the "native programmer" idiot type I described above. It started rapidly, brought up a nice empty screen and turned into molasses going uphill in January through a funnel the moment I put a single class entity in my diagram. By comparison, I have never seen any verson of MD behave as anything less than a highly responsive, native-speed look-alike tool even when handling larger models with several diagrams and lots of entities.
The second example is a small program I wrote to accompany my master's thesis. It included a speciality parser and a graph component (not written by me) that I used to display the resulting tree during my defense. I was struck at the time that the interface responded to commands with very nearly the same speed as I would expect from a native application, the difference being no more than a fraction of a second each time -- a lag that I contributed wholly to the fact that I was running the program remotely over the Internet, the interface being pumped in through the X Windows protocol (or possibly through a VNC connection, I don't recall). No local client for the program was involved, in case you're wondering.