There is no need to know if we're running out of oil or if we're not.... The market provides us with all the assumptions we need to know in ANY trade.
Your faith in free markets is quaint and misplaced. And anyway, just how free is that particular market?
These are families that have existed for 150 years drilling oil and want to make sure their grandchildren continue to be in the family business.
Sounds like more wishful thinking to me. History is rife with examples of short-sighted human greed killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, often with catastropic results, leaving the unborn grandchildren to die, so to speak. A few choice examples are here.
From TFA: "There will undoubtedly be gainsayers... but I put them in the same box as the flat-Earthers and the people who believe smoking doesn't cause cancer"
The world could be filled with oil, who knows?
Indeed, and the moon could be made of green cheese that solves world hunger. But I would not bet the future of civilisation on wishful thnking. Quite the reverse, we should plan to avert possible downside risks.
Yet almost all conflicts, from cavemen with sticks, to WW2, to the Palestinians in Gaza, are over natural resources - usually land.
Re:Doomsday can come only from governments
on
Forecasting Doomsday
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"There is so much land available in the entire globe that I don't see how warlords can use the strength of weapons to take over"
WTF? - that's a complete non-sequitur. How does there being lots of land stop weapons being useful. Here's a hint - it's hasn't up to now. Aside from that, so what if there's lots of land on earth? There are lots of people too. The density of people on the land is increasing, since the number of people is increasing, and the part of the land that is useful to us is decreasing (desertification, salination, erosion, pollution, etc)
You can't fight a global war with knives, and you can defend yourself much easier in communities against warlords if you take the machine guns and flamethrowers out of the equation.
Nobody said anything about a big "global war", just local war everywhere. Warlordism is implausible? Go look at the early history of... anywhere.
The environment continues to fix itself -- yesterday's doomsdayers are silent because they were wrong. Today's will be silent tomorrow -- they'll be wrong, too.
The ones who weren't wrong weren't silent - the chap who successfully predicted the USA's peak oil, and has predicted the world's peak oil soon now. Anyway, that's another non-sequitur. It's equivalent to saying "The candle didn't go out this minute. Those who predicted that it would go out were wrong. Therefore it will never go out."
First, I don't think it has been anywhere near "firmly established"
It's been discussed on Slashdot, and the opinion is mostly in favour and the reasons robust. So if you can't trust what you read on Slashdot, what can you trust?;)
I think it is somewhere near firmly established that good open source apps on windows drive adoption of the broader open-source platform rather than diluting it, for the two reasons given.
Doing so would be double hurtful: It'd ensure that any such application developed for Linux works perfectly under Windows
Why is this hurtful? I thought it had been firmly established that the availability of Free Open Source software on windows drives adoption of Open Source in two ways: it gets Windows users used to free, open source software; and when they move operating systems, their favorite apps like Firefox, Thunderbird, (and maybe even OpenOffice some day, and these c# programs) are still there.
Are you suggesting that Firefox on Win32 is a "hurtful, braindead waste of time"?
The newer interpreted APIs are just wrappers around.... the underlying Win32 system functions, DLLs, etc.
The Java class library is just wrappers around the OS system functions, DLLs, etc. How else could java work the filesystem, make sockets, get the current date and time, etc?
But this doesn't stop java from being portable, not in the slightest. In fact such a wrapper of the OS is the best way to do portability.
Paperback books are cheap. This ebook reader can't compete with real books so long as it will be priced $300 to $400.
The assumption that this reader costs more than paper books is a fatally flawed one. You can only buy so many paperbacks for $400. Sure it's lots, but it's a finite number. You can download and read an infinite number of documents on an electronic reader. And maybe you won't have to pay for them.
But not paying for books is probably not the intension. The intension is convenience - i.e. storing more pages in the reader than in the equivalent-sized paperback. And probably the price will come down
Rubbish. Nobody ever claimed that Java was the right tool for the same niche as C, ie OSs, device drivers and speed-critical apps. C++ is in this niche, Java isn't.
C# - Like Java, but worse
I'd be interested to see why you think everyone else is wrong, and C# is worse then Java.
Re:Balkanization
on
Demise of C++?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
hybrids like C++ are being edged out; the ultimate trend: C where speed counts, and, for everything else, Java.
And just a few days ago I was reading on slashdot about Java/C# falling in between C/C++ for low-level systems programming and the "dynamic and/or scripting" languages for highest productivity (e.g Perl, JavaScript, Python, PHP, Ruby, Haskell).
a property like in C# and the rest of.Net is the stupids thing I ever saw.... But: what comes then? Some ( and ) as in a method? Or nothing as in a property?
And you're too wrapped up in C-style semantics to realise that this is a distinction without a difference. In Delphi/Object-Pascal, for all it's faults, one good thing is that a function call with no arguments can omit the brackets, so if "foo.BarValue" returns an int, you do not need to know or care if "BarValue" is public data, function or property. So then it can be changed from one to the other without affecting client code - which must be a good thing.
After stepping back and taking a better look, requiring () after a method name looks like the stupid thing.
Properties in c# are not perfect, due to the wart that you have pointed out, but it is simply not sensible to think they are "useless" and "stupid" because of this.
my superiors wouldn't allow any sort of bugtracking or versioning software
Gah. A version control system, even if it is a weenie one like MS VSS, is one of the basic things separates amateur coding for fun from professional software development.
"Source control is like flossing - you don't have to floss *all* your teeth - just the ones you want to keep." - Dave Scofield, Borland
I had to write my own system
You shouldn't need to write anything - you just need to get the hardware and time to install subversion and bugzilla
That James Poniewozik dude is also responsible for Hitler being the "Time - Man of the Year '39"
And Hitler wasn't? Did he or did he not influence what was going on in 1939?
Every single Episode of "Andromeda" wipes the floor with the whole Battlestar Craptica crap.
You have got to be joking. Andromeda is weak, deriviative stuff starring a second-string hunk as your standard rebel hero in cliche-land. I can hardly finish an episode even when I'm bored. Galactica breaks ground in so many ways it's not funny. the space flight is more realistic than anything else out there. The ensemble acting is superb. The plot arc raises interesting questions...
If downloading isn't time sensitive, I don't know what is.
I agree totally. The web may be primarily text, but google video of the day is nice, not to mention streaming video clips from the BBC, video tutorials on new programming tools, etc. And just listening to the radio while you surf. Anyone who thinks that this stuff is the same if you wait half an hour for it to download has never used it. Heck, a minute's wait really breaks the experience of it.
For reference, I'm on a UK ISP with a 4Mb uncapped account. I could use a little more bandwidth once in a while for GVOD.
The video web is waking up, and it's hungry for bandwidth.
Where in my post did I say that Java and C# weren't popular? Also, just because something is popular does not make it right, or even something nice to use
Of course, Java and C# are popular, ins pite of being not nice or right, they are "Nasty code resulting in memory problems, garbage collections freezing an application, and numerous bugs." (unlike C, which is perfect, no buffer overflows etc here, nope), and the developers who use them are all clueless: "use memory like its candy... Not knowing that every one of their objects in a list uses 2 megs of memory."
That's just a troll.
"don't give me the excuse that you can write your code faster"
Well, why not? You can, and it matters that you can.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure it would be as bad at the other extreme - if you never met anyone, hwo well would you do your job then?
There is no need to know if we're running out of oil or if we're not.
Your faith in free markets is quaint and misplaced. And anyway, just how free is that particular market?
These are families that have existed for 150 years drilling oil and want to make sure their grandchildren continue to be in the family business.
Sounds like more wishful thinking to me. History is rife with examples of short-sighted human greed killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, often with catastropic results, leaving the unborn grandchildren to die, so to speak. A few choice examples are here.
For every 10 "the sky is falling" articles I read, I see 10 "everything is OK" articles.
... but I put them in the same box as the flat-Earthers and the people who believe smoking doesn't cause cancer"
That's because you just aren't listening.
From TFA: "There will undoubtedly be gainsayers
The world could be filled with oil, who knows?
Indeed, and the moon could be made of green cheese that solves world hunger. But I would not bet the future of civilisation on wishful thnking. Quite the reverse, we should plan to avert possible downside risks.
Yet almost all conflicts, from cavemen with sticks, to WW2, to the Palestinians in Gaza, are over natural resources - usually land.
"There is so much land available in the entire globe that I don't see how warlords can use the strength of weapons to take over"
... anywhere.
WTF? - that's a complete non-sequitur. How does there being lots of land stop weapons being useful. Here's a hint - it's hasn't up to now.
Aside from that, so what if there's lots of land on earth? There are lots of people too. The density of people on the land is increasing, since the number of people is increasing, and the part of the land that is useful to us is decreasing (desertification, salination, erosion, pollution, etc)
Humans are a minor part of the balance
Not true anymore. Welcome to the anthropocene era.
You can't fight a global war with knives, and you can defend yourself much easier in communities against warlords if you take the machine guns and flamethrowers out of the equation.
Nobody said anything about a big "global war", just local war everywhere. Warlordism is implausible? Go look at the early history of
The environment continues to fix itself -- yesterday's doomsdayers are silent because they were wrong. Today's will be silent tomorrow -- they'll be wrong, too.
The ones who weren't wrong weren't silent - the chap who successfully predicted the USA's peak oil, and has predicted the world's peak oil soon now. Anyway, that's another non-sequitur. It's equivalent to saying "The candle didn't go out this minute. Those who predicted that it would go out were wrong. Therefore it will never go out."
There is a rather large african bird that runs and pack hunts on the African plains even now. ... habit of killing and eating members of our species.
No, there isn't. Ostrich eat plants and bugs
Why is this bogus post modded up?
I think that Apple can produce a winner in any tech area if it set its collective mind and resources to it.
Or rather, they don't set thier collective minds and resources to it unless they think they can come up with a winner.
First, I don't think it has been anywhere near "firmly established"
;)
It's been discussed on Slashdot, and the opinion is mostly in favour and the reasons robust. So if you can't trust what you read on Slashdot, what can you trust?
I think it is somewhere near firmly established that good open source apps on windows drive adoption of the broader open-source platform rather than diluting it, for the two reasons given.
Other Linky here.
Mac OS X maybe - but both Fireox/Mozilla/Thunderbird and Mono run on OS X.
Why wouldn't you have to pay for your e-books?
Here's a good one Also any web page is a HTML document, and is thus content for a e-book reader. And then there's P2Piracy.
Mono aims at source compatibility
I thought so too, but I've seen "hello world" compiled to bytecode, then run on Win32/net and Linux/mono, so there is bytecode compatibility.
Doing so would be double hurtful: It'd ensure that any such application developed for Linux works perfectly under Windows
Why is this hurtful? I thought it had been firmly established that the availability of Free Open Source software on windows drives adoption of Open Source in two ways: it gets Windows users used to free, open source software; and when they move operating systems, their favorite apps like Firefox, Thunderbird, (and maybe even OpenOffice some day, and these c# programs) are still there.
Are you suggesting that Firefox on Win32 is a "hurtful, braindead waste of time"?
The newer interpreted APIs are just wrappers around .... the underlying Win32 system functions, DLLs, etc.
The Java class library is just wrappers around the OS system functions, DLLs, etc. How else could java work the filesystem, make sockets, get the current date and time, etc?
But this doesn't stop java from being portable, not in the slightest. In fact such a wrapper of the OS is the best way to do portability.
Paperback books are cheap. This ebook reader can't compete with real books so long as it will be priced $300 to $400.
The assumption that this reader costs more than paper books is a fatally flawed one. You can only buy so many paperbacks for $400. Sure it's lots, but it's a finite number. You can download and read an infinite number of documents on an electronic reader. And maybe you won't have to pay for them.
But not paying for books is probably not the intension. The intension is convenience - i.e. storing more pages in the reader than in the equivalent-sized paperback. And probably the price will come down
My mistake - it should fall into the "functional, highly productive if you can code like that" area.
Java ... a C++ killer!
Rubbish. Nobody ever claimed that Java was the right tool for the same niche as C, ie OSs, device drivers and speed-critical apps. C++ is in this niche, Java isn't.
C# - Like Java, but worse
I'd be interested to see why you think everyone else is wrong, and C# is worse then Java.
hybrids like C++ are being edged out; the ultimate trend: C where speed counts, and, for everything else, Java.
And just a few days ago I was reading on slashdot about Java/C# falling in between C/C++ for low-level systems programming and the "dynamic and/or scripting" languages for highest productivity (e.g Perl, JavaScript, Python, PHP, Ruby, Haskell).
Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created
Yet another application of the well-known dimension-slipping properties of magnetic fields!
The craft would slip into a different dimension
Then it would be what, a one-dimensional craft?
where the speed of light is faster
And they know this how? Why wouldn't the speed of light be slower? Why would it be different?
Hah.
a property like in C# and the rest of .Net is the stupids thing I ever saw. ... But: what comes then? Some ( and ) as in a method? Or nothing as in a property?
And you're too wrapped up in C-style semantics to realise that this is a distinction without a difference. In Delphi/Object-Pascal, for all it's faults, one good thing is that a function call with no arguments can omit the brackets, so if "foo.BarValue" returns an int, you do not need to know or care if "BarValue" is public data, function or property. So then it can be changed from one to the other without affecting client code - which must be a good thing.
After stepping back and taking a better look, requiring () after a method name looks like the stupid thing.
Properties in c# are not perfect, due to the wart that you have pointed out, but it is simply not sensible to think they are "useless" and "stupid" because of this.
my superiors wouldn't allow any sort of bugtracking or versioning software
Gah. A version control system, even if it is a weenie one like MS VSS, is one of the basic things separates amateur coding for fun from professional software development.
"Source control is like flossing - you don't have to floss *all* your teeth - just the ones you want to keep." - Dave Scofield, Borland
I had to write my own system
You shouldn't need to write anything - you just need to get the hardware and time to install subversion and bugzilla
That James Poniewozik dude is also responsible for Hitler being the "Time - Man of the Year '39"
And Hitler wasn't? Did he or did he not influence what was going on in 1939?
Every single Episode of "Andromeda" wipes the floor with the whole Battlestar Craptica crap.
You have got to be joking. Andromeda is weak, deriviative stuff starring a second-string hunk as your standard rebel hero in cliche-land. I can hardly finish an episode even when I'm bored. Galactica breaks ground in so many ways it's not funny. the space flight is more realistic than anything else out there. The ensemble acting is superb. The plot arc raises interesting questions...
If downloading isn't time sensitive, I don't know what is.
I agree totally. The web may be primarily text, but google video of the day is nice, not to mention streaming video clips from the BBC, video tutorials on new programming tools, etc. And just listening to the radio while you surf. Anyone who thinks that this stuff is the same if you wait half an hour for it to download has never used it. Heck, a minute's wait really breaks the experience of it.
For reference, I'm on a UK ISP with a 4Mb uncapped account. I could use a little more bandwidth once in a while for GVOD.
The video web is waking up, and it's hungry for bandwidth.
Where in my post did I say that Java and C# weren't popular? Also, just because something is popular does not make it right, or even something nice to use
Of course, Java and C# are popular, ins pite of being not nice or right, they are "Nasty code resulting in memory problems, garbage collections freezing an application, and numerous bugs." (unlike C, which is perfect, no buffer overflows etc here, nope), and the developers who use them are all clueless: "use memory like its candy... Not knowing that every one of their objects in a list uses 2 megs of memory."
That's just a troll.
"don't give me the excuse that you can write your code faster"
Well, why not? You can, and it matters that you can.
So stop trolling.
Nice strawman. ... you obviously can't read.
And speaking of such.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Garbage Collection==excuse for not writing better code and don't give me the excuse that you can write your code faster
Yeah, that's why Java and C# will never catch on. Troll.