A small local solar generator may be more reliable than a large distant coal plant if there's likely to be interruptions in the power grid or political/economic turmoil which shuts the coal plant down or topples power lines. It's not "run a huge factory and light your home at night" but it could run some small agricultural equipment (a small mill, perhaps) or provide power for some communications equipment (radio, television, charge a cell phone) and things like that.
I'm just reminded of the old security-oriented definition of Trust: the person you trust is the person who can break your security.
It's a perfectly healthy attitude to trust people (/businesses/nations) as little as possible when the security of your data is at risk.
In arena of IT security, we need less "trust" and more "verify".
"Does it matter?" I don't know, man, that depends on what sort of a moral world-view you're subscribing to, and what you mean by "matter".
Personally, I don't have a world-view where it's all fine and dandy for me to twist peoples' words and laugh at them for being hypocrites in one matter just because they've done something wrong in another matter, in any case at all. I consider this, first, as a responsibility towards myself. Slashdot-types, who might be thought to ostensibly value Science, ought to be those best able to appreciate some notion of "intellectual honesty". If you then move to the world in general, I don't think that spreading lies or half-truths and such is ever called for, if you think that the Catholic Church is such a villain that you should be able to tell whatever [lies|half-truths|exxagerations] that you can get away with that day (in order to spread to the world a better sense of its villainy, even if it doesn't rest on a foundation of truth) then that's another matter, but I don't think there's any real room for doing so and not being aware that you're rationally doing so and instead relying on blind instinctual hate for the organization.
So yeah, I'd say it does matter -- even if the Catholic Church is Hitler + Lenin + the child abuser of the week + the devil + [Al Gore|George W Bush] and worthy of nothing but hate, I don't see any way that ignorance improves the matter. In fact, it would be downright hypocritical to say that it does, in the light of talking about comments on openness, communication and transparency.
I appreciate this as the first well-reasoned, moderate opinion on the situation I've read that's not supporting Childs. If I had mod points I'd use them.
At the same time, we should all appreciate that unless we've gone to great lengths to become informed on the matter, our "everything you've read" (particularly in the newspapers) could easily have been the machinations of an administration which, as you put it, "acted like idiots once it all started" and were more interested in petty office-politics than anything else. (After all, they're the ones with the best access to the press).
Right. And by that, you mean that Slashdot said this other site said the Pope said. Did you ever consider looking at what he actually said, or are you just making another Regensburg lecture out of it?:)
Not because the law is good or anything like that, I just don't like that sort of an approach here. It's not like the businesses of Arizona are the ones passing the laws. I don't think there's enough blame to justify it.
(On the other hand, I don't have anything I really need from Arizona).
So you're saying this is just like the Regensburg lecture in that the pope said ABCXYZZYEIEIO about a topic, and then people proceeded to take a few pieces out of context and use them to paint a picture of the Pope as a jerk, or a monster, or at least an ignoramus, and then everyone congratulates themselves for hating the Catholic church because they "know" from reports like these just how backwards and repressive it is.
Right. Business as usual. Carry on then; we wouldn't want to interrupt your self-congratulation by exposing the ignorance which underlies its foundation. You might even get some cognitive dissonance that way.
Well, I dunno; I recall the time there was a big outburst about how the Pope was insulting Islam in some lecture to a bunch of university students. Turned out he was discussing Islam in general, and as part of the general discussion of the topic, identified and quoted some guy who said "Islam is horrible!" but neither actually confirming nor denying the accuracy of that particular assertion.
This is a typical example of decontextualization and mangling what the guy said by people with either an axe to grind or a vague prejudice against the man (and the position) which would predispose them to think that he's being malicious.
The Pope's insights fall into two categories:
ex cathedra leadership of the Catholic faith (applies to a subset of carefully researched and formally announced doctrine), meant to be infallible
general respect as an important and (ideally) a learned man who seeks to make the world a better place, and moreover is supposed to be keeping attainment of the "good" as a priority.
Of course, this being the Pope, and me not analyzing the matter in detail yet, I wouldn't be surprised if someone with a few ounces of anti-Papal prejudice were stretching this and leaving out (or missed) a few key pieces of context. He might just be saying "watch out, your ugliness towards each other can no longer be hidden". Or not. I haven't checked. That said, his recommendations on both economic policy (overly socialist) and Internet policy do not carry the weight of the former, because I'm pretty sure they're ineffective at achieving his stated goals in the long run.
Going after the big-time bootleggers churning out counterfeits and selling fake Photoshop and DVDs online = fine and good. Going after j. random filesharing = gaaak.
I beg to differ. While it may have hurt relations a little, the fundamental problem between the US and the parts of the world filled with fundamentalist terrorist-happy Muslims is that the US is friends with Israel. That's the elephant in the room, the root cause of 9/11 (did you listen to a thing that those guys actually said?) and, honestly, I think the problem won't go away until someone nukes Israel (though I admit conventional warfare could do it too). And that's a tragedy, by the way.
We have a series of desks in a pinwheel arrangement. Peoples' monitors (we all have dual-monitor setups, or more) keep them from seeing too much of the guy the next desk over, but you're really close to each other. You can just toss a bunch of these clusters all over the place, too.
| o |o -----| |----- o| o |
We have a power/ethernet drop from the ceiling in the middle of each cluster, which works out nicely.
The two parties are, more or less, "RCN" and "a bunch of class-action lawsuit lawyers". Compare the latter parties to the parties who could be construed as injured by this action, "the customers of RCN", whose recompense is nonexistent, and whose input seems to have been minimal.
The first goal is code understanding so that you can create code without someone else having done it for you. Then you can worry about (effective patterns of) code-reuse. Copy-n-paste for your homework doesn't help anybody and doesn't really represent an effective paradigm for development in real world. You'll just end up being mocked on thedailywtf.com with your job outsourced to someone overseas with a lower cost of living, while the effective and intelligent developers are still pulling in six-figure incomes.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Speaking of the CS metaphor in your.sig, I've actually gone swimming in a pool full of sharks. It was part of the 8th-grade class field trip. They're pretty benign critters.
That said, you still need to be able to swim, and if the sharks scare people off, perhaps it's for their own good.:)
I was reading somewhere about the London Underground - how, when it opened, it was really nice and cool in the tunnels and everyone enjoyed a break from the summer heat... but a century of operations has heated the very bedrock, and now it's sweltering down there, and they're trying to figure out ways to effectively do air-conditioning in stations and on trains... which can be tricky, since some of the tubes are so tight that there's not really anywhere for the waste heat to go. (They were talking about having the trains make blocks of ice while in other segments, and letting those melt while they're in the narrow under-the-river tubes).
Slashdot Mirror
A small local solar generator may be more reliable than a large distant coal plant if there's likely to be interruptions in the power grid or political/economic turmoil which shuts the coal plant down or topples power lines. It's not "run a huge factory and light your home at night" but it could run some small agricultural equipment (a small mill, perhaps) or provide power for some communications equipment (radio, television, charge a cell phone) and things like that.
I'm just reminded of the old security-oriented definition of Trust: the person you trust is the person who can break your security. It's a perfectly healthy attitude to trust people (/businesses/nations) as little as possible when the security of your data is at risk. In arena of IT security, we need less "trust" and more "verify".
I have spelt in my breakfast pastry, you international clod!!
"Does it matter?" I don't know, man, that depends on what sort of a moral world-view you're subscribing to, and what you mean by "matter". Personally, I don't have a world-view where it's all fine and dandy for me to twist peoples' words and laugh at them for being hypocrites in one matter just because they've done something wrong in another matter, in any case at all. I consider this, first, as a responsibility towards myself. Slashdot-types, who might be thought to ostensibly value Science, ought to be those best able to appreciate some notion of "intellectual honesty". If you then move to the world in general, I don't think that spreading lies or half-truths and such is ever called for, if you think that the Catholic Church is such a villain that you should be able to tell whatever [lies|half-truths|exxagerations] that you can get away with that day (in order to spread to the world a better sense of its villainy, even if it doesn't rest on a foundation of truth) then that's another matter, but I don't think there's any real room for doing so and not being aware that you're rationally doing so and instead relying on blind instinctual hate for the organization.
So yeah, I'd say it does matter -- even if the Catholic Church is Hitler + Lenin + the child abuser of the week + the devil + [Al Gore|George W Bush] and worthy of nothing but hate, I don't see any way that ignorance improves the matter. In fact, it would be downright hypocritical to say that it does, in the light of talking about comments on openness, communication and transparency.
I appreciate this as the first well-reasoned, moderate opinion on the situation I've read that's not supporting Childs. If I had mod points I'd use them.
At the same time, we should all appreciate that unless we've gone to great lengths to become informed on the matter, our "everything you've read" (particularly in the newspapers) could easily have been the machinations of an administration which, as you put it, "acted like idiots once it all started" and were more interested in petty office-politics than anything else. (After all, they're the ones with the best access to the press).
Right. And by that, you mean that Slashdot said this other site said the Pope said. Did you ever consider looking at what he actually said, or are you just making another Regensburg lecture out of it? :)
(On the other hand, I don't have anything I really need from Arizona).
So you're saying this is just like the Regensburg lecture in that the pope said ABCXYZZYEIEIO about a topic, and then people proceeded to take a few pieces out of context and use them to paint a picture of the Pope as a jerk, or a monster, or at least an ignoramus, and then everyone congratulates themselves for hating the Catholic church because they "know" from reports like these just how backwards and repressive it is.
Right. Business as usual. Carry on then; we wouldn't want to interrupt your self-congratulation by exposing the ignorance which underlies its foundation. You might even get some cognitive dissonance that way.
Well, I dunno; I recall the time there was a big outburst about how the Pope was insulting Islam in some lecture to a bunch of university students. Turned out he was discussing Islam in general, and as part of the general discussion of the topic, identified and quoted some guy who said "Islam is horrible!" but neither actually confirming nor denying the accuracy of that particular assertion.
Oh, look, a Wikipedia article. You can read the exact text.
This is a typical example of decontextualization and mangling what the guy said by people with either an axe to grind or a vague prejudice against the man (and the position) which would predispose them to think that he's being malicious.
The Pope's insights fall into two categories:
ex cathedra leadership of the Catholic faith (applies to a subset of carefully researched and formally announced doctrine), meant to be infallible
general respect as an important and (ideally) a learned man who seeks to make the world a better place, and moreover is supposed to be keeping attainment of the "good" as a priority.
Of course, this being the Pope, and me not analyzing the matter in detail yet, I wouldn't be surprised if someone with a few ounces of anti-Papal prejudice were stretching this and leaving out (or missed) a few key pieces of context. He might just be saying "watch out, your ugliness towards each other can no longer be hidden". Or not. I haven't checked. That said, his recommendations on both economic policy (overly socialist) and Internet policy do not carry the weight of the former, because I'm pretty sure they're ineffective at achieving his stated goals in the long run.
The key point here, as usual, is "putative".
A lot of the bootleg/counterfeit stuff that's sold in the US is imported from overseas, hence "international".
Going after the big-time bootleggers churning out counterfeits and selling fake Photoshop and DVDs online = fine and good. Going after j. random filesharing = gaaak.
I beg to differ. While it may have hurt relations a little, the fundamental problem between the US and the parts of the world filled with fundamentalist terrorist-happy Muslims is that the US is friends with Israel. That's the elephant in the room, the root cause of 9/11 (did you listen to a thing that those guys actually said?) and, honestly, I think the problem won't go away until someone nukes Israel (though I admit conventional warfare could do it too). And that's a tragedy, by the way.
Only if it's a minor chord.
We have a series of desks in a pinwheel arrangement. Peoples' monitors (we all have dual-monitor setups, or more) keep them from seeing too much of the guy the next desk over, but you're really close to each other. You can just toss a bunch of these clusters all over the place, too.
|
o |o
-----|
|-----
o| o
|
We have a power/ethernet drop from the ceiling in the middle of each cluster, which works out nicely.
Bah! Whipper-snappers, the lot of ye! My monitor has one tiny pixel. And it's hardwired to black.
The two parties are, more or less, "RCN" and "a bunch of class-action lawsuit lawyers". Compare the latter parties to the parties who could be construed as injured by this action, "the customers of RCN", whose recompense is nonexistent, and whose input seems to have been minimal.
Did they do any studying to tell whether the effect was more pronounced among people who regularly had fast food?
The first goal is code understanding so that you can create code without someone else having done it for you. Then you can worry about (effective patterns of) code-reuse. Copy-n-paste for your homework doesn't help anybody and doesn't really represent an effective paradigm for development in real world. You'll just end up being mocked on thedailywtf.com with your job outsourced to someone overseas with a lower cost of living, while the effective and intelligent developers are still pulling in six-figure incomes.
Speaking of the CS metaphor in your .sig, I've actually gone swimming in a pool full of sharks. It was part of the 8th-grade class field trip. They're pretty benign critters.
That said, you still need to be able to swim, and if the sharks scare people off, perhaps it's for their own good. :)
Google Voice or a similar phone-call forwarding service?
We have an updated version for this day and age. Now, it goes on the poor/Hispanic side of town.
See, this is government work. The "free market" doesn't operate very effectively here.
(I've used it. Blackboard isn't total crap, but it is pretty bad.)
I was reading somewhere about the London Underground - how, when it opened, it was really nice and cool in the tunnels and everyone enjoyed a break from the summer heat... but a century of operations has heated the very bedrock, and now it's sweltering down there, and they're trying to figure out ways to effectively do air-conditioning in stations and on trains ... which can be tricky, since some of the tubes are so tight that there's not really anywhere for the waste heat to go. (They were talking about having the trains make blocks of ice while in other segments, and letting those melt while they're in the narrow under-the-river tubes).