Usually I'd dismiss a post like that as obvious flamebait but as someone evidently modded you up,...
What has become of slashdot... There used to be an agreement to give mod points for quality, but they are more and more abused to encourage bullying and to support a political agenda. Rockoon's post is wrong in many ways, including facts and style, but people find it "Insightful". Unbelievable. The geeks have lost. The dork side has taken over.
And neither does Richard Dawkins, although your description probably covers him implicitly anyway.
OMG. You obviously never read any of his books. I'd recommend "The Selfish Gene", one of the finest example of sound reasoning I ever came across. A delight cover to cover.
What people get arrested for is negligence. Accidents, not so much.
[...]
Colliding with a motorcycle rider who was stupidly riding in your blind spot might be an accident.
As a motorcycle rider I can't leave this unanswered. If you collide with a motorcycle rider who happens to be in your blind spot it is not an accident but negligence on your side because you failed to look over your shoulder.
And, I admit, stupidity on the biker's part, because the first thing they tell you in motorcycle driving lessons is that cars are your enemies and they don't take prisoners.
This complaint is about the Chinese investing $30 billion in solar energy subsidies. How much have Germany and the U.S. invested in green energy subsidies
At least here in Germany we did it the wrong way. The government subsidizes those who feed green electricity into the grid regardless of where they buy their stuff. And German manufacturers can hardly compete with Chinese (in terms of price). In other words, a large part of our subsidies go to China, too.:-(
[...] - the Green Party gained 4.5% more votes than during the last election in 2006... but the Pirate Party gained about 6% over that result - reaching 9%. [...]
Actually the pirates gained 9% WRT the latest election, because they hadn't participated back then.
The funny thing is of course how the other parties reacted. When it became clear that the Pirate Party would likely get into the parliament (predicted to get 6.5% at most), they were already scandalized, how anybody could vote such loonies.
Actually, the representative of the pirate party just admitted on TV that they don't have a stance on many points yet, so it doesn't take much not to take them too seriously. But that's not a big issue IMHO. They'll be able to focus on their core issues first, then mature over time. OTOH, from my POV they don't seem to differ much from the green party (grassroots democracy, individual freedom, intellectual-ish and young-ish voters, etc.) so I fear these two might tear each other apart over details, like so many movements (e.g. Peoples' Front of Judea vs. Judean People's Front) before.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to tomorrow's Talk Like A Pirate Day. Arrrr!
So, you didn't even read the summary, much less the article?
You mean the part where BMW claims the light is "pleasant to the eye"? I'm sure they claim their xenon light is pleasant to the eye, too. The question is to whose eye.
This is a good move, but the fact that it was banned at all still tells me that the Germans have a problem with authoritarianism.
Yeah right. May I remind you that we (ze Germans) didn't ban The Life of Brian. And we don't collectively faint if Janet Jackson flashes her nipple for a split second.
I guess our fear of violence (and the negative effect it may have on minors) is sufficiently balanced by the US's fear of sex and blasphemy.
BTW, as others mentioned, Doom wasn't entirely banned, only not sold to minors. I played it a lot back then. I especially liked the Simpsons wad.
This looks all quite well and promising, but there are no numbers. I wonder how much more heat capacity this material has wrt, say, brick or water.
Yeah, I know, Infinite! It's a phase transition where the temperature doesn't rise at all with heat added. Or rather, close to infinite (sorry, my fingers ache as I write this, but I hope you get the idea). I remember measuring spikes in Cp and Cv for hours and hours in undergraduate physics lab, and plotting it out on millimeter grid paper with a pencil. Ah, those were the days...
Where was I? Yes. How much more heat can this material take without heating up? Does it keep the temperature at 20C instead of 35C? Or at 20C instead of 21C? I know it depends on various factors like amount of material, size of room etc., but an example would be great.
Yes, you can blame the WTC and Clinton's cruise missile attacks and to some extent even the Afghanistan* War on bin Laden, but the article also blames him for the costs of Bush's Iraq War, which had nothing to do with him and which cost a lot more than Afghanistan.
It's even worse: the turmoil after the war in Iraq allowed Al-Qaida to gain a foothold there. So while pretending to fight them, the US strengthened Al-Qaida. I'm surprised that nobody anticipated that.
The US still use the imperial system because they are lazy (sorry if it sounds rude; I should have written "they appreciate convenience"). The US is the country of drive-in ATMs and easily digestible food (a.k.a. burgers). People don't want to change because they don't want to change.
The Britons did it, and it didn't lead to a major catastrophe. Except for the mile if I'm correctly informed, and that's understandable because it's not easy to have a smooth transition from mile to km as they are quite similar in magnitude, so using both in parallel for some time would probably cause confusion.
Funny, though, that the US still use "imperial" units after their independence from the British empire. And funny, too, that Liberia uses the same units even though it is the country whose reason to exist is freedom from US slavery.
It is worth noting in this context that there were a number of changes of government in Germany[...]
That's exactly what I thought. It's the political agenda, not a well-weighed decision based on usability or efficiency. In case some readers don't know the German political landscape, 'liberal' here stands for 'business-friendly' (as in 'we support the businesses of our friends'). They once even called themselves 'the party of the top earners' (until they realized it cost them a considerable amount of votes).
Why are people are so negative about this kind of thing? If you don't believe in it, that's fine, but just because people have different beliefs doesn't make them loons. God bless you all anyway.
lol
Don't do that! Every time someone writes lol, a tie fighter crashes. (Damn! I did it again.)
But seriously, I envy the people who believe in ghosts and stuff. It takes me serious amounts of (expensive) pot to consider the existence of monsters in my closet. They get it for free.
The code itself was not usually difficult, but writing it was.
Assembly coding for the VIC-20 went roughly like this: First you wrote the program on a piece of paper (what is a "text editor"?), then you tried to figure out what the instructions were in decimal, then you wrote a BASIC program which POKEd the values into memory and executed it with a SYS. Oh yes, and first you had to think of reducing the memory available to the BASIC interpreter with another two well-dosed POKEs, which I knew by heart but forgot over the past decades. Otherwise the basic interpreter would overwrite your assembly code and make it crash.
Better would be to say road operators had to remove reckless drivers. Which is arguable more sensible.
Yup, like in Austria, where they bury blades in the Autobahn exits that slice tires of cars which enter the wrong way. (These drivers are confused rather than reckless, which fits the virus analogy even better.)
Actually, the concern over CO2 does seem quite ignorant considering all the much nastier stuff we release into the atmosphere.
I disagree: First of all, we are releasing massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. No other (nastier) substance comes close by orders of magnitude. In huge amounts even a slightly bad substance can outweigh 'real' poisons.
Second, you seem to argue that fighting one kind of pollution is useless because there are so many others. But you could use this argument against any other environmental activity, effectively saying 'screw it'.
CO2 is a convenient target since it can be used as a justification for regulating practically everything, rather than choosing something that would only affect all those industrial lobbyists.
Au contraire: reducing CO2 emission can only be used as a justification for regulating exactly one thing, namely burning fossile fuel. And, BTW the industrial lobbyists complain a lot about CO2 regulations, because they want cheap energy, and fossile fuel is (still) cheap. The problem is, we can't afford relying on fossile fuel, because we don't have much left (at least here in Europe). I wouldn't want to kneel before those who still have some left in a few decades, just because we didn't try alternatives (including more economical lamps) in time.
This web site is run by people who claim that there is no greenhouse effect -- it's only a scam by those British scientists ("this is the biggest science scandal in modern times", "CO2 is not a poison, plants need it", "there have always been warm and cold ages" etc., see the link at the bottom of the page: "CO2 - cause or symptom?").
This has actually happened (IIRC some 10 years ago in Germany, but I can't find a reference on the web). A GSM base station was put up somewhere, and people immediately began to get sick (headaches, insomnia etc.). When people started demanding to remove it, it turned out that only the tower had been erected, but the radio equipment hadn't even been installed yet. That's the power of the mind...
Where does it say the island itself is made of plastic?
From the article: "The island would be built where the trash is located and would convert the waste onsite".
Read on:
Cleaning it up is going to cost a lot of money and require a great deal of either scooping up the plastic and shipping it back to shore, or some sort of onsite recycling for building something like Recycled Island.
Small correction, we dried it out with pumps, powered by windmills
I I were an absolute pedant 'd point out that windmills grind corn, so the pumps were powered by wind turbines. In Norfolk they actually called them "wind pumps"
If I were an absolute pedant I'd point out that windmills used to grind corn. Nowadays they just stand around and creak and smell of old wood.
What is your point? You have identified a difference between copying and theft, as much as there is a difference between poisoning and decapitating.
In the end, the results are essentially the same: The victim loses money, as much as he (probably) dies in the simile. There is only a subtle difference between taking the money away right now, and preventing the copyright holder to earn it. When I copy music the artist (probably) doesn't sell a CD, and when some Chinese backyard firm makes counterfeit stuff, the original manufacturer (probably) doesn't sell their original stuff.
Of course, you could argue that some people wouldn't buy it anyway, so what's lost. But there are other people who would have bought it, if it were not so easy to just copy it. Opportunity makes the thief, as the saying goes.
So, IMHO copying IS theft, at least as far as the victim's property is concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
Usually I'd dismiss a post like that as obvious flamebait but as someone evidently modded you up, ...
What has become of slashdot... There used to be an agreement to give mod points for quality, but they are more and more abused to encourage bullying and to support a political agenda. Rockoon's post is wrong in many ways, including facts and style, but people find it "Insightful". Unbelievable. The geeks have lost. The dork side has taken over.
Religious types don't do reason.
And neither does Richard Dawkins, although your description probably covers him implicitly anyway.
OMG. You obviously never read any of his books. I'd recommend "The Selfish Gene", one of the finest example of sound reasoning I ever came across. A delight cover to cover.
What people get arrested for is negligence. Accidents, not so much.
[...]
Colliding with a motorcycle rider who was stupidly riding in your blind spot might be an accident.
As a motorcycle rider I can't leave this unanswered. If you collide with a motorcycle rider who happens to be in your blind spot it is not an accident but negligence on your side because you failed to look over your shoulder.
And, I admit, stupidity on the biker's part, because the first thing they tell you in motorcycle driving lessons is that cars are your enemies and they don't take prisoners.
AFAICT migratory beekeeping is unheard of in other parts of the world. Why does the US do it? Does it have any benefit over stationary bees?
This complaint is about the Chinese investing $30 billion in solar energy subsidies. How much have Germany and the U.S. invested in green energy subsidies
At least here in Germany we did it the wrong way. The government subsidizes those who feed green electricity into the grid regardless of where they buy their stuff. And German manufacturers can hardly compete with Chinese (in terms of price). In other words, a large part of our subsidies go to China, too. :-(
TFA links to "a technology called LogBox", a logging library for ColdFusion. That doesn't make sense. IMHO log4j would be much better.
Theirry != Thierry
[...] - the Green Party gained 4.5% more votes than during the last election in 2006 ... but the Pirate Party gained about 6% over that result - reaching 9%. [...]
Actually the pirates gained 9% WRT the latest election, because they hadn't participated back then.
The funny thing is of course how the other parties reacted. When it became clear that the Pirate Party would likely get into the parliament (predicted to get 6.5% at most), they were already scandalized, how anybody could vote such loonies.
Actually, the representative of the pirate party just admitted on TV that they don't have a stance on many points yet, so it doesn't take much not to take them too seriously. But that's not a big issue IMHO. They'll be able to focus on their core issues first, then mature over time. OTOH, from my POV they don't seem to differ much from the green party (grassroots democracy, individual freedom, intellectual-ish and young-ish voters, etc.) so I fear these two might tear each other apart over details, like so many movements (e.g. Peoples' Front of Judea vs. Judean People's Front) before.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to tomorrow's Talk Like A Pirate Day. Arrrr!
So, you didn't even read the summary, much less the article?
You mean the part where BMW claims the light is "pleasant to the eye"? I'm sure they claim their xenon light is pleasant to the eye, too. The question is to whose eye.
This is a good move, but the fact that it was banned at all still tells me that the Germans have a problem with authoritarianism.
Yeah right. May I remind you that we (ze Germans) didn't ban The Life of Brian. And we don't collectively faint if Janet Jackson flashes her nipple for a split second.
I guess our fear of violence (and the negative effect it may have on minors) is sufficiently balanced by the US's fear of sex and blasphemy.
BTW, as others mentioned, Doom wasn't entirely banned, only not sold to minors. I played it a lot back then. I especially liked the Simpsons wad.
This looks all quite well and promising, but there are no numbers. I wonder how much more heat capacity this material has wrt, say, brick or water.
Yeah, I know, Infinite! It's a phase transition where the temperature doesn't rise at all with heat added. Or rather, close to infinite (sorry, my fingers ache as I write this, but I hope you get the idea). I remember measuring spikes in Cp and Cv for hours and hours in undergraduate physics lab, and plotting it out on millimeter grid paper with a pencil. Ah, those were the days...
Where was I? Yes. How much more heat can this material take without heating up? Does it keep the temperature at 20C instead of 35C? Or at 20C instead of 21C? I know it depends on various factors like amount of material, size of room etc., but an example would be great.
Yes, you can blame the WTC and Clinton's cruise missile attacks and to some extent even the Afghanistan* War on bin Laden, but the article also blames him for the costs of Bush's Iraq War, which had nothing to do with him and which cost a lot more than Afghanistan.
It's even worse: the turmoil after the war in Iraq allowed Al-Qaida to gain a foothold there. So while pretending to fight them, the US strengthened Al-Qaida. I'm surprised that nobody anticipated that.
The US still use the imperial system because they are lazy (sorry if it sounds rude; I should have written "they appreciate convenience"). The US is the country of drive-in ATMs and easily digestible food (a.k.a. burgers). People don't want to change because they don't want to change.
The Britons did it, and it didn't lead to a major catastrophe. Except for the mile if I'm correctly informed, and that's understandable because it's not easy to have a smooth transition from mile to km as they are quite similar in magnitude, so using both in parallel for some time would probably cause confusion.
Funny, though, that the US still use "imperial" units after their independence from the British empire. And funny, too, that Liberia uses the same units even though it is the country whose reason to exist is freedom from US slavery.
It is worth noting in this context that there were a number of changes of government in Germany[...]
That's exactly what I thought. It's the political agenda, not a well-weighed decision based on usability or efficiency. In case some readers don't know the German political landscape, 'liberal' here stands for 'business-friendly' (as in 'we support the businesses of our friends'). They once even called themselves 'the party of the top earners' (until they realized it cost them a considerable amount of votes).
Why are people are so negative about this kind of thing? If you don't believe in it, that's fine, but just because people have different beliefs doesn't make them loons. God bless you all anyway.
lol
Don't do that! Every time someone writes lol, a tie fighter crashes. (Damn! I did it again.)
But seriously, I envy the people who believe in ghosts and stuff. It takes me serious amounts of (expensive) pot to consider the existence of monsters in my closet. They get it for free.
The code itself was not usually difficult, but writing it was.
Assembly coding for the VIC-20 went roughly like this: First you wrote the program on a piece of paper (what is a "text editor"?), then you tried to figure out what the instructions were in decimal, then you wrote a BASIC program which POKEd the values into memory and executed it with a SYS. Oh yes, and first you had to think of reducing the memory available to the BASIC interpreter with another two well-dosed POKEs, which I knew by heart but forgot over the past decades. Otherwise the basic interpreter would overwrite your assembly code and make it crash.
10 POKE 3657,123
20 POKE 3568,67
[...]
4500 SYS 3567
At least that was how I wrote machine code until I found out there is some software called "assembler" with some kind of editor.
Better would be to say road operators had to remove reckless drivers. Which is arguable more sensible.
Yup, like in Austria, where they bury blades in the Autobahn exits that slice tires of cars which enter the wrong way. (These drivers are confused rather than reckless, which fits the virus analogy even better.)
Actually, the concern over CO2 does seem quite ignorant considering all the much nastier stuff we release into the atmosphere.
I disagree: First of all, we are releasing massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. No other (nastier) substance comes close by orders of magnitude. In huge amounts even a slightly bad substance can outweigh 'real' poisons.
Second, you seem to argue that fighting one kind of pollution is useless because there are so many others. But you could use this argument against any other environmental activity, effectively saying 'screw it'.
CO2 is a convenient target since it can be used as a justification for regulating practically everything, rather than choosing something that would only affect all those industrial lobbyists.
Au contraire: reducing CO2 emission can only be used as a justification for regulating exactly one thing, namely burning fossile fuel. And, BTW the industrial lobbyists complain a lot about CO2 regulations, because they want cheap energy, and fossile fuel is (still) cheap. The problem is, we can't afford relying on fossile fuel, because we don't have much left (at least here in Europe). I wouldn't want to kneel before those who still have some left in a few decades, just because we didn't try alternatives (including more economical lamps) in time.
This web site is run by people who claim that there is no greenhouse effect -- it's only a scam by those British scientists ("this is the biggest science scandal in modern times", "CO2 is not a poison, plants need it", "there have always been warm and cold ages" etc., see the link at the bottom of the page: "CO2 - cause or symptom?").
These documents are "Dissemination: Public" and can be downloaded from INDECT's web site. GIYF.
Big conspiracy. Big deal. *Yawn*
wait till we turn the equipment on!
This has actually happened (IIRC some 10 years ago in Germany, but I can't find a reference on the web). A GSM base station was put up somewhere, and people immediately began to get sick (headaches, insomnia etc.). When people started demanding to remove it, it turned out that only the tower had been erected, but the radio equipment hadn't even been installed yet. That's the power of the mind...
This looks like a good opportunity to create Utopia.
Where does it say the island itself is made of plastic?
From the article: "The island would be built where the trash is located and would convert the waste onsite".
Read on:
Cleaning it up is going to cost a lot of money and require a great deal of either scooping up the plastic and shipping it back to shore, or some sort of onsite recycling for building something like Recycled Island.
Small correction, we dried it out with pumps, powered by windmills
I I were an absolute pedant 'd point out that windmills grind corn, so the pumps were powered by wind turbines. In Norfolk they actually called them "wind pumps"
If I were an absolute pedant I'd point out that windmills used to grind corn. Nowadays they just stand around and creak and smell of old wood.
What is your point? You have identified a difference between copying and theft, as much as there is a difference between poisoning and decapitating.
In the end, the results are essentially the same: The victim loses money, as much as he (probably) dies in the simile. There is only a subtle difference between taking the money away right now, and preventing the copyright holder to earn it. When I copy music the artist (probably) doesn't sell a CD, and when some Chinese backyard firm makes counterfeit stuff, the original manufacturer (probably) doesn't sell their original stuff.
Of course, you could argue that some people wouldn't buy it anyway, so what's lost. But there are other people who would have bought it, if it were not so easy to just copy it. Opportunity makes the thief, as the saying goes.
So, IMHO copying IS theft, at least as far as the victim's property is concerned.