Despite its popularity, few know that JavaScript is a very nice dynamic object-oriented general-purpose programming language. How can this be a secret? Why is this language so misunderstood?...
...JavaScript's C-like syntax, including curly braces and the clunky for statement, makes it appear to be an ordinary procedural language. This is misleading because JavaScript has more in common with functional languages like Lisp or Scheme than with C or Java. It has arrays instead of lists and objects instead of property lists. Functions are first class. It has closures. You get lambdas without having to balance all those parens.
(Later portions of the document comment on some of the issues, including but not limited to "Substandard Standard" and "Lousy Implementations" and "Bad Books" and "Amateurs".)
The term you're looking for but not actually using is Pigovian tax - making people pay for the true cost of their activities.
So rather than flaming me, tell me why this is not a proper anlaysis of the problem and a possible approach to solving it.
Of course, as Pigou observed, "we seldom know enough to decide in what fields and to what extent the State, on account of [the gaps between private and public costs] could interfere with individual choice." Is the marginal social cost of one Windows installation really $500? I think you're overstating things a bit. Furthermore, taxing new installations will prevent users from upgrading (and WinXP is AMAZING compared to, say, 98) while taxing existing installations is fraught with impracticality and would be asking for abuse and evasion.
I think if this were actually implemented on a widespread basis, sophisticated hackers using some form of remote access would be able to come up with some sort of remote client that randomizes or otherwise alters (uniformizes) the delays between sent keystrokes. As for physical access, now... well, once you have someone with physical access, you're doomed anyway. . .
And some of the best programmers like things such as Perl as well. (Perl's strength and weakness is that it's a lot like an erector set: you can build really neat, clean, awesomely elegant stuff, or you can bolt together garbage, and there's no one but yourself to blame.) Really, we should all leave Python and Perl and Ruby and other nice languages alone and focus our attacks on languages that really do intrinsically suck, like PHP and Visual Basic.:)
What the hell is a "minor attracted adult", if not a pedophile?
Medically, pedophiles are attracted to prepubescent or peripubescent children. An adult attracted to a minor who has passed puberty may be an 'ephebophile' (likes adolescents) or possibly engaging in 'pederasty' or something like that. but no one bothers to learn those terms in the general usage, so the meaning of the word 'pedophile' has become somewhat stretched.
Consider a moment if was 18 and I liked a 17-year-old girl, I could be considered a "minor attracted adult" - but pedophile? I think not.
Now, all that aside, I really have no idea what the site was about at all, and I decline to comment about Verizon's action at this time.
The National Academy of Sciences looked at a ton of geoengineering ideas several years back, and ultimately decided the solar shade method is NOT cost-effective at all. Instead, shooting inert particulate dust up into the stratosphere with big naval guns will reduce the amount sunlight getting to Earth for a lot fewer 0 figures on the price tag. (There's precedent, too - from naturally-occurring volcanoes and the like.)
I actually went looking for a new system a few weeks ago; my current desktop machine dates back to 2001 and is in dire need of replacement. The result? The only machines I found on the shelves were SLOW. Office Depot, Sam's, the best I could find was a dual core clocked a bit above 2 MHz,
Wow. That is slow. Tell ya what- I have an old 486 here that I'm willing to let go for a song, it runs about 33MHz...
One thing about 9/11 is that it's got a very handy mnemonic- 911 (and for those who are not aware, that's the standard emergency services telephone number in the United States and possibly elsewhere).
As for other fun attacks in US history... Remember the Maine!
SPF (and related technologies) are not designed to cut down on spam. They are designed to prevent Joe jobs and address forgery. (It just so happens that most Joe Jobs are spam).
On the contrary. I think he was banking on us all knowing exactly how much DRM sucks (doubly so when it doesn't even work right ): and highlighting it in such a manner was a bit of subtle irony.
They're selling a "collectible card game". Each $20ish pack has cards, and '100 points' you can redeem for novelty WoW trinkets. Nothing is available for 100 points except for desktop wallpapers. Everything is worth like 10,000 points. That's just a little past ridiculous, and I think Blizzard is rightfully feeling some sort of backlash against this. Not OMG-the-online-world-is-over backlash, but still: it's a grand way to get some of your more devoted players (with greater fiscal resources) pissed off. I don't think that's quite good business - pissing people off for a few quick bucks.
Lucky for me, I'm not one of the affected parties.
...and make the problem much, much worse. Increased albedo is a huge problem, from the light-gray scars that mark the existence of cities
Are these worse than the dark black scars that mark them presently?
to the reduced dark green of the world's forests due to logging.
Well, this really has nothing to do with the proposed urban lightening.
Increasing the Earth's albedo leads to increased desertification--and the worst part is, this is a positive feedback cycle because increased desertification leads to increased albedo.
Increased desertification may be a problem in plant life applications, forests, grasslands, et cetera, but a city is not a grassland. It's already clobbering the environment around it, it's an urban heat island - an increased urban albedo is not going to cause desertification, but rather bring things back in line with the surrounding countryside.
The central problem with global warming is not the temperature in itself; it's the mechanism that is raising the temperature, which is primarily an increase in certain atmospheric gases.
This is ridiculous. The central problem with global warming is the the results of an increased temperature - glaciers melt, sea levels rise, ocean flows alter their direction wreaking havoc with weather patterns, et cetera et cetera. The mechanism responsible for it is relatively harmless: are there any problems inherent with an atmosphere with increased carbon dioxide levels aside from this warming? (Well, actually, there are a few secondary effects from this, but you're not identifying them, and they have to do with higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide allowing some sort of alternate version of carbon processing in plants to occur more efficiently, potentially rendering certain plant species more competitive relative to others, and aside from that, increased carbon concentrations generally leads to slightly lusher vegetation worldwide, which isn't a terrible thing). Moreover this scheme decreases carbon dioxide production, thus addressing the mechanism itself as well, because less electricity is used in air conditioning.
We don't need half-baked ideas
It's actually been fairly well baked. You can find a very large number of papers on geoengineering or climate change mitigation via albedo amplification, in a variety of forms.
involving producing millions of gallons of toxic paint
So use non-toxic paint, or use light colored shingles, or white vinyl siding, or use concrete pavement instead of asphalt where you can and mix in glass to make the asphalt more reflective when you can't (a measure already in reasonably common use). Besides, it's not like there isn't plenty of paint and such being produced to this and similar ends already.
Of course, if all else fails, there's always controlled stratospheric particulate matter injection, and the US and Russia certainly have enough devices for that...
Apparently the cheapest way to put dust in the upper atmosphere is to shoot it up with big naval guns. But aside from that, my favored techniques involve providing tax incentives in cities to paint rooftops white. This results in an increased albedo, reflecting more sunlight (and heat) - not only reducing global warming directly, but indirectly in the form of reduced energy consumption for air conditioning and the like (the urban "heat island" effect). It's a simple, low-impact way to Do Something.
White rooftops are only one thing to do, of course. Planting some pleasant shade trees helps as well, as does the use of recycled glass in asphalt (which roughly doubles its albedo). I understand that about 1% of the nation is covered with some sort of man-made construction, so this could make a decent difference.
The idea is generally referred to as a Pigouvian tax. Note one issue with such a tax:
Perhaps the biggest problem with the Pigovian tax is the "knowledge problem" suggested on page 6 of Pigou's essay "Some Aspects of the Welfare State" (1954) where he writes, "It must be confessed, however, that we seldom know enough to decide in what fields and to what extent the State, on account of [the gaps between private and public costs] could interfere with individual choice." In other words, the economist's blackboard "model" assumes knowledge we don't and we can never possess -- it's a model with assumed "givens" which are in fact not given to anyone.
It's an even better tactic to respond to someone saying 'Bye bye karma' or 'This won't please the mods' with analysis of and commentary upon their tactics.
Now, metacommentary is a bit sparser, and when it does occur it's less likely to be recognized. Bye bye karma.
As long as we're risking offtopic mods, I'll consider your "obvious rebuttal". The aforementioned widening gap between the rich and poor which has been going on since, oh, around the 50s or so, is due to a variety of things. One of the most important of these is the rise of technology. With technology, skilled workers can be a lot more productive - more so than unskilled workers.
Another source of this inequality is immigration. Here's a surprise: when poor Mexicans (and other immigrants from various countries) come into the country, that makes for a greater degree of wealth inequality in the nation. Yet little has changed save for the location of these immigrants. Perhaps this says something about global inequalities of some sort...
Either way, go find a copy of Money Income in the United States by the Census bureau and look it through it and other data on inequality. I find the upward trend a little unimpressive, and certainly doesn't scream anything incriminating at Bush.
But we're drifting waaaay offtopic. ("I'll probably get modded down for this!")
You joke about the end of prosperity, but despite what you hear on the news, the local economics department US economy is doing fairly well. The world economy is doing spectacularly well. My economics professor was just introducing Macroeconomics in my Econ class, and he was sharing some statistics with from The Economist about the current and forecast economic growth rates around the world. They were all uniformly positive, across the board. Some of them were quite large, too - India, and China. He informed the class that in the 20 years that he's been teaching, this was unprecedented. The main group of nations which are not so lucky and were not charted were mostly those in sub-Saharan Africa.
In the meantime, unemployment is 4.6% (that's low!), inflation just about 2.5%, and real GDP is growing at 2.6%. There are some well-founded concerns regarding the future of the economy due to housing; Alan Greenspan has some commentary on those. But proclaiming that the Onion is quasi-psychic at predicting an imminent end to peace and prosperity in the near future? That's just so much bullshit.
The other thing to consider is that in medicine, there are very few easy cures to disease. Too many people think that the world is like Star Trek or something where if you give Bones 15 minutes in MedLab, he can cure anything. But this is not really in sync with reality. One thing to consider is viral diseases. So far as I'm aware, there does not exist a cure to any viral disease known to Man. Things like smallpox? We got rid of those with vaccination, before the fact. Take other things besides disease - say, depression. That's a chemical imbalance in the brain. You can take some drugs to treat it - but what would you need to do a cure? Is there some magical surgery they could do to make your brain start producing more of the right neurotransmitters in a few million cells?
Just keep this sort of stuff in mind, and be realistic... and don't go off about the eeeeevil drug companies trying to enslave us to their treatments.
There's economics on both sides. In the worst cases, intellectual property turns into a form of what economists term rent seeking - people trying to get an uncompensated transfer of wealth from others in society to themselves, using the government. Around Slashdot, people will often refer to some of these as "patent trolls". The other thing to consider is this. There are positive externalities to the production of intellectual material (technical, knowledge, cultural, whatever)- and this is why we attempt to install a structure which will enable a company or other entity to profit from the creation of this material: copyrights, patents. However, while that structure remains in place, the positive externalities associated with this knowledge are largely unrealized.
There is value to a fully digital cracking technique. If you have a large collection of songs, it is a royal pain to set things up to re-record them, re-label them with titles and artists and such... it's good for one or two songs at a time, but for a big collection? Ick. With a digital cracking procedure, you can write an automatic tool that runs at well above standard playback speed and which you can walk away from (or leave running while you browse the Web...)
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who feels like sending a message to Flickr, join my new down with the interestingness patent protest group.
(Not that anyone will listen, really, but...)
I think if this were actually implemented on a widespread basis, sophisticated hackers using some form of remote access would be able to come up with some sort of remote client that randomizes or otherwise alters (uniformizes) the delays between sent keystrokes. As for physical access, now... well, once you have someone with physical access, you're doomed anyway. . .
And some of the best programmers like things such as Perl as well. (Perl's strength and weakness is that it's a lot like an erector set: you can build really neat, clean, awesomely elegant stuff, or you can bolt together garbage, and there's no one but yourself to blame.) Really, we should all leave Python and Perl and Ruby and other nice languages alone and focus our attacks on languages that really do intrinsically suck, like PHP and Visual Basic. :)
I was actually poking fun at your Mhz/Ghz typo. :P
Consider a moment if was 18 and I liked a 17-year-old girl, I could be considered a "minor attracted adult" - but pedophile? I think not.
Now, all that aside, I really have no idea what the site was about at all, and I decline to comment about Verizon's action at this time.
The National Academy of Sciences looked at a ton of geoengineering ideas several years back, and ultimately decided the solar shade method is NOT cost-effective at all. Instead, shooting inert particulate dust up into the stratosphere with big naval guns will reduce the amount sunlight getting to Earth for a lot fewer 0 figures on the price tag. (There's precedent, too - from naturally-occurring volcanoes and the like.)
As for other fun attacks in US history... Remember the Maine!
What, no Sokoban? No Astral Plane? I'd like to see this guy even make it halfway to the castle!
SPF (and related technologies) are not designed to cut down on spam. They are designed to prevent Joe jobs and address forgery. (It just so happens that most Joe Jobs are spam).
Weep with me now for the funeral of subtlety.
That's a lot of modders, but it's not really that big compared to their entire subscriber base. Wonder why they bothered.
Lucky for me, I'm not one of the affected parties.
Apparently the cheapest way to put dust in the upper atmosphere is to shoot it up with big naval guns. But aside from that, my favored techniques involve providing tax incentives in cities to paint rooftops white. This results in an increased albedo, reflecting more sunlight (and heat) - not only reducing global warming directly, but indirectly in the form of reduced energy consumption for air conditioning and the like (the urban "heat island" effect). It's a simple, low-impact way to Do Something.
White rooftops are only one thing to do, of course. Planting some pleasant shade trees helps as well, as does the use of recycled glass in asphalt (which roughly doubles its albedo). I understand that about 1% of the nation is covered with some sort of man-made construction, so this could make a decent difference.
Now, metacommentary is a bit sparser, and when it does occur it's less likely to be recognized. Bye bye karma.
Another source of this inequality is immigration. Here's a surprise: when poor Mexicans (and other immigrants from various countries) come into the country, that makes for a greater degree of wealth inequality in the nation. Yet little has changed save for the location of these immigrants. Perhaps this says something about global inequalities of some sort...
Either way, go find a copy of Money Income in the United States by the Census bureau and look it through it and other data on inequality. I find the upward trend a little unimpressive, and certainly doesn't scream anything incriminating at Bush.
But we're drifting waaaay offtopic. ("I'll probably get modded down for this!")
In the meantime, unemployment is 4.6% (that's low!), inflation just about 2.5%, and real GDP is growing at 2.6%. There are some well-founded concerns regarding the future of the economy due to housing; Alan Greenspan has some commentary on those. But proclaiming that the Onion is quasi-psychic at predicting an imminent end to peace and prosperity in the near future? That's just so much bullshit.
Just keep this sort of stuff in mind, and be realistic... and don't go off about the eeeeevil drug companies trying to enslave us to their treatments.
There's economics on both sides. In the worst cases, intellectual property turns into a form of what economists term rent seeking - people trying to get an uncompensated transfer of wealth from others in society to themselves, using the government. Around Slashdot, people will often refer to some of these as "patent trolls". The other thing to consider is this. There are positive externalities to the production of intellectual material (technical, knowledge, cultural, whatever)- and this is why we attempt to install a structure which will enable a company or other entity to profit from the creation of this material: copyrights, patents. However, while that structure remains in place, the positive externalities associated with this knowledge are largely unrealized.
There is value to a fully digital cracking technique. If you have a large collection of songs, it is a royal pain to set things up to re-record them, re-label them with titles and artists and such... it's good for one or two songs at a time, but for a big collection? Ick. With a digital cracking procedure, you can write an automatic tool that runs at well above standard playback speed and which you can walk away from (or leave running while you browse the Web...)