If you're like me, you've purchased over 100 of them, despite the fact that they cost >$10 each. I didn't buy them all at once, but if you look at the aggregate cost, it is pretty staggering.
Anyway, we have a 5G iPod from the first batch Apple released, and it's mostly full of dharma teachings, with a few albums, most of which I ripped from my CD collection. So it's actually pretty easy to fill these things up. I don't know how many people are using them to store Dharma teachings, but I can say that in my Dharma group there are a *ton* of iPods, despite the fact that most of us aren't exactly rolling in it.
..is that if I write a widget with it and want to share it, everybody with whom I want to share it has to buy a Konfabulator license. The license isn't unreasonably expensive, but it's not free, and that's sufficient friction that it's just not worth bothering with as far as I'm concerned--I think very few people would ever cough up for the license, so I'd have wasted my time.
So like it or not, Apple is actually doing something that works out really well for me. I'm sorry it doesn't work out well for the Konfabulator folks, but unfortunately I think their business model was unrealistic.
Actually, this isn't true. Hybrids take advantage of it. The reason that you think this is true is that it *is* true that your engine produces dirtier exhaust while it is *cold*, and only produces cleaner exhaust when it is warm. In fact, the main problem with turning your engine off at the stop light is that if it's a big engine, you may not get sufficient charge when moving to cover the cost of turning it over, and that in turn means that over time your battery will drain.
What's at stake here is not which president will do the best job. They both suck. Nobody expects either one to do a good job. The question is, which one will do the most damage? Based on his record, it's pretty obvious that this is Bush.
BTW, neither Kerry nor Bush argues in favor of abandoning Iraq, although Bush has already tried to do so and failed (and he _did_ pretty much abandon Afghanistan). The question is, how do you get out of Iraq. Kerry *seems* to have a more realistic attitude. But even if he screws it up, at least he's thinking strategically - Bush is apparently completely oblivious to the strategic implications of being in a quagmire in Iraq.
Unfortunately, there are always a few people in a protest crowd who are there not because they give a shit about what's going on, but because they want to pick a fight.
So it is always the case that if the police decide that they want to fire on you with non-lethal weapons, or arrest you, or whatever, they can do so, because they can claim that the rabble rousers were representative of you.
Courts generally don't uphold these arrests, but the hassle factor is pretty significant, and of course getting hit with pepper spray paintballs is pretty nasty too, so this functions to inhibit protest in an extra-legal manner.
By the way, this is not to say that the police are villians here. If you have a crowd of 500 people, half of whom are on one side of an issue and half of whom are on the other, there's a very good chance of violence erupting, and if there are no police there, there's a good chance someone will be killed. So an overreaction from the police in a case like this can legitimately be considered protective. When you have a one-sided protest, having police there increases the likelihood of violence, because the police have a legitimate fear of being overrun, but in the case being described here, it wasn't one-sided, and the police may have had legitimate reason to worry about physical violence between the protestors as well as toward themselves.
Usually people say "sources please" when they aren't happy with the point being made, and wish to discredit it. However, this isn't a particularly legitimate request - it's more of a rhetorical trick - the implication is that because the person, who thought he was having a conversation, not presenting a refereed paper, did not provide references, his point is not valid.
I lived downstream from Vermont Yankee for most of my childhood. They had unplanned releases so frequently that calling them unplanned was kind of like saying that stopping at the gas station to fill your tank after driving for a while is "unplanned."
Usually things like radioactive krypton gas or various other things that tend to pop up as a result of continual radioactive bombardment of water, but that really weren't planned for in the design of the reactor.
My source is the local newspaper (the Greenfield Recorder, if you want to go look it up).
You didn't annoy me. This is extremely off-topic, though. I will say just one thing about it. I too believe that many of the people around me will visit that lake of fire as a result of their misunderstanding of the world. But I can't prove it. So if I am to help them, just saying "you're going to burn in that lake of fire" isn't going to do it. I was turned off to religion for thirty years as a result of people who said things like that to me. All of them were very sincere, well-meaning Christians.
When you connect deeply to a spiritual tradition, and what it teaches seems self-evident to you, then it's a natural reaction to want to tell everyone what you've seen. But the thing you've seen that you want to tell them isn't in the words you're going to say. You can't show someone the Eiffel Tower when they're standing in Peoria, IL. You first have to get them on a plane to Paris, and then once they're there you have to get them to a point where they can see the tower.
Just so, if you truly want to save someone from that lake of fire, the path down which you must lead them doesn't begin with telling them "OMG, you're going to burn in a lake of fire!" The path starts with you coming to understand precisely how to save them from that lake of fire. If you don't know, how can you explain it to them? I have met very few Christians who even try to find that out, even though it's written all over the New Testament in nice friendly red letters. Jesus was a really nice guy - he spelled it all out for us. But mostly we seem to argue and preach over esoterica that have nothing to do with the red letters, and won't get anyone out of that lake, or we loudly proclaim our beliefs in a way that is helpful to no-one.
(I mean we when I say we - when I first started to get what was going on with my path, I did the same thing, even though I should have known better. Sigh.)
I'd say you're right, because the lie you tell affects those who come after the one who has died, and also because lying is a bad habit that I think harms the one doing it as well, particularly when the lie is harmful, as in the case you've described.
When you say something in a public forum, putting an apology in your message to the effect that it's only intended for a certain part of that public does not mean that in fact your message only reaches that portion of that public, so yes, I would say that you need to think about every person who will read it, not just the people that you intend to have read it.
Every religion of which I am aware has as one of its basic tenets that we should speak gently unless there is some strong reason to do otherwise. Christianity is no exception. So considering what effect our words will have is one of our most basic obligations as practitioners.
I agree with the entomb in place part. Tragically, this is not what commercial plants do. If commercial plants were run the way Rickover's Navy runs nukes, I would feel a _lot_ better about nukes.
Unfortunately, I don't think the storage problem is as solved as you claim, and also unfortunately the mining problem doesn't seem to be solved in practice, even if there's a safe technique that exists in theory.
My point was not that we shouldn't generate energy, but that when comparing two competing forms of energy, we should put all the cards on the table, and not put all the bad cards for the one we don't like on the table while presenting none of the bad cards for the other.
I've never heard of a utility-run nuclear power plant that didn't have unplanned emissions of radioactive byproducts much more frequently than allowed by law. If nuclear plants followed the law, you're quite right that they would be a lot safer. And if horses could fly, my airline bill would be a lot lower, although I guess I'd be buying enough oats to make up for it.
I guess I can understand that, but it's actually pretty typical when writing about a topic to say what you think the reader needs to hear, and use references to back up what you've said, rather than just mentioning your references and asking the reader to go hunt through them...:'}
If a person's mindstream ceases when he or she dies, then anything you do after that moment has no relevance to that person - it can't offend them, because they no longer have the capacity to be offended. If it does not, then praying for that person may be beneficial, whether or not they would have approved of it in life.
The problem with exhorting people to prayer in a public forum like this is that (1) it's pointless, and (2) some people who are still alive here find it offensive. It's pointless because if we think that prayer will help, and we have the capacity to do a sincere prayer on behalf of Hans, then we will do it whether or not we are exhorted.
It's offensive to some people for a variety of reasons - I will say for myself that I used to be offended by overt mentions of Christianity because I felt very judged by people who had blind faith and felt that I was defective because I didn't have the capacity to have blind faith. It doesn't offend me anymore, because I understand the problem better, but I think it's worth being understanding toward those who do have this problem, and examining ones' own actions to see if one is doing anything that would tend to engender this sort of feeling.
The job of a religious practitioner is to succeed in his or her practice, and it is through this that they may help others - any activity that projects one's religious beliefs outward is very risky, and needs to be undertaken with great seriousness, and probably not on a forum as public as slashdot.
This is not to say that you should shut up entirely, but I do urge you to consider your audience!:')
I live in Tucson. We don't pay for parking at the movies. We usually don't get popcorn, but if we do it's not $8. Tickets are still under $10 - in fact, if you go in the afternoon, it's $5.
Also, by not buying a $20k home theatre system, I have saved enough money to go to 200 movies, which is about as many as I'm likely to see in the next dozen years, plus all that space that would be wasted is free for useful things like my wife's marimba and my computer.
BTW, in case anybody's following this, the link referred to above provides some good information on this problem, which for some reason Mr. Trophy didn't quote in his message. In fact, the number of bird strikes at most wind sites is really small - on the order of 1.5 birds per tower per year. As Mr. Trophy alludes, Altamont pass has an unusually high bird kill rate, partially because the turbines there are ancient, and partly because of where it is.
This doesn't contradict what I was saying. When building wind projects, this information indicates that bird kills are a factor that needs to be considered, precisely because the kind of wind generation technology used and the siting of the towers can make a dramatic difference in how many birds are killed.
The scandal is that in many energy generation projects, factors like these aren't considered at all. For example, every commercial nuclear power plant build in the U.S. has been a control-rod plant, which fails by melting down, and for which containment breaches are routine. This is true despite the fact that some very notable minds in the nuclear club (e.g., Edward Teller, who I don't normally think of as a voice of reason) knew about and argued in favor of pebble bed reactors long before the first commercial nuclear power plant was built. Pebble bed reactors fail safe. Pebble bed reactors aren't harmless, but they do mitigate that particular kind of harm - they do not go out of control and melt down. And yet for some reason we built all of these incredibly expensive control rod-oriented plants that do not fail safe.
This is my point. Whatever kind of power generation systems we build, we should not ignore the problems that that form of generation has because our favorite form of power generation is ideologically preferable to the bad kinds of power that those crazy other people are promoting.
By accepting and even encouraging this kind of thinking in ourselves, we create an environment where what is actually known to be true is unimportant, and getting the politically correct outcome is all that matters. This weakens us when we debate, and reduces the equation to a question of who has the most economic power, rather than which cost/benefit tradeoff is best, which I think is why we seem to get such counterintuitive results.
No, it doesn't. Buildings, cars and cats kill more than wind turbines. The unfortunate case of Altamont is not representative of the industry.
Statement: activity X does a lot of Y. Valid response: no, it doesn't - here's the amount of Y it does - see, it's small! Invalid response: Activities A, B and C do more Y than activity X.
This is the same as the nuclear industry saying "look, concrete is radioactive, so you don't need to worry about the additional background radation added to the environment because percentagewise it's about the same as the radioactivity of concrete." Even if this is true, it implies a doubling of the background level of radiation, so it's a misleading argument.
Of course more birds are killed by cars and cats, and for that matter other predators. My point is not "don't use wind power because it kills birds." It's "here's an example of a negative impact of this supposedly completely safe and clean energy source." I think wind power is a great idea, but we should also be aware of how it works and what its impact is.
Cell phones probably kill more birds than wind power right now, and I think people ought to be aware of that as well when they tout cell phones as the best thing since sliced bread.
I'm arguing in favor of doing things with an understanding of their impact, rather than doing them ignorantly and pretending they have no impact. I am not arguing that we shouldn't have wind power, or cell phones. Nothing we do has _no_ impact.
Eating a completely vegetarian diet kills a lot of bugs. I'm not going to starve myself to death to prevent that from happening.
Hydro is not environmentally friendly. It dams up rivers and destroys ecosystems. Making solar panels takes energy, and produces pollution. Wind energy kills birds in large numbers.
The big unsolved problems of nuclear power include - how do you mine fuel without killing people? If you think coal dust is bad to breathe, try breathing uranium ore dust sometime.
Okay, now you have to enrich it. Now you have to use the fuel without meltdowns. Pebble beds solve that problem - it's really not the big problem with nuclear power plants.
Now you've got spent fuel that you have to get rid of. Where do you put it? And what about the plant itself? Once a nuclear plant is worn out, you have a giant heap of highly radioactive stuff, and you can't just haul it off and dump it in a salt mine because in order to haul it off, you have to cut it up, and cutting it up releases a giant plume of radioactive dust into the environment.
Pretty much any energy generation system has costs associated with it. I think the cost/benefit analysis for nuclear really sucks, and the story for some other forms of energy is much better, but let's take off our rose-colored glasses and look at all the costs, not just the costs of the energy generation systems we don't like.
Am I the only one who remembers...?
on
Ballmer on Linux
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Wasn't it something like two years ago when Microsoft got tagged for patent infringement over their SQL server, and they did not indemnify their users? What does the EULA say? Where's this indeminification Mr. Ballmer is talking about?
(1) I'm pretty sure the previous poster was being sarcastic.
(2) There is no open source JVM of which I'm aware.
(3) Even if there were, there is no complete open source Java API implementation, where complete means you can write a useful app with it.
So for all intents and purposes, despite the presence of several good open source compilers, Java is not open source. This is in fact one of my biggest objections to using it - because Swing is so buggy, and I can't fix the bugs, I can't use it.
You could probably go in without feeling uncomfortable, and they actually sell pretty good stuff. Plus, in giving them business you're paying them back for not throwing the book at you way back when.
I had some similar encounters with authority figures when I was a kid. Most of them weren't even intentional authority figures - just people who noticed I was out of line and stopped me from doing things I would have really regretted when I grew up and got a clue. It was embarrassing as hell at the time, but in retrospect I'm very grateful for what they did. Even mentioned one of them in the dedication to my book.
That _is_ pretty funny. Of course, have you seen how cabbies drive in Bankok? This flashing light gig has probably significantly lowered the death rate from accidents caused by insane cab drivers.
You're right - 8 character tabs aren't a standard. They are, however, what most devices do unless you program them to do something else. Including the VT100, may it rest in peace.
Personal experience - if you set the tab stops to every 8 characters, you win. If you set them to anything else, you or one of your cow orkers lose. You can play dominance games and pee on each other's source code, or you can get work done. Given that in all likelihood someone's giving you money because you agreed to get work done, if you have any integrity at all you don't have battles like this at work, because you're wasting someone else's money.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, let's hear it for air-cooled engines! :')
If you're like me, you've purchased over 100 of them, despite the fact that they cost >$10 each. I didn't buy them all at once, but if you look at the aggregate cost, it is pretty staggering.
Anyway, we have a 5G iPod from the first batch Apple released, and it's mostly full of dharma teachings, with a few albums, most of which I ripped from my CD collection. So it's actually pretty easy to fill these things up. I don't know how many people are using them to store Dharma teachings, but I can say that in my Dharma group there are a *ton* of iPods, despite the fact that most of us aren't exactly rolling in it.
..is that if I write a widget with it and want to share it, everybody with whom I want to share it has to buy a Konfabulator license. The license isn't unreasonably expensive, but it's not free, and that's sufficient friction that it's just not worth bothering with as far as I'm concerned--I think very few people would ever cough up for the license, so I'd have wasted my time.
So like it or not, Apple is actually doing something that works out really well for me. I'm sorry it doesn't work out well for the Konfabulator folks, but unfortunately I think their business model was unrealistic.
Actually, this isn't true. Hybrids take advantage of it. The reason that you think this is true is that it *is* true that your engine produces dirtier exhaust while it is *cold*, and only produces cleaner exhaust when it is warm. In fact, the main problem with turning your engine off at the stop light is that if it's a big engine, you may not get sufficient charge when moving to cover the cost of turning it over, and that in turn means that over time your battery will drain.
What's at stake here is not which president will do the best job. They both suck. Nobody expects either one to do a good job. The question is, which one will do the most damage? Based on his record, it's pretty obvious that this is Bush.
BTW, neither Kerry nor Bush argues in favor of abandoning Iraq, although Bush has already tried to do so and failed (and he _did_ pretty much abandon Afghanistan). The question is, how do you get out of Iraq. Kerry *seems* to have a more realistic attitude. But even if he screws it up, at least he's thinking strategically - Bush is apparently completely oblivious to the strategic implications of being in a quagmire in Iraq.
Unfortunately, there are always a few people in a protest crowd who are there not because they give a shit about what's going on, but because they want to pick a fight.
So it is always the case that if the police decide that they want to fire on you with non-lethal weapons, or arrest you, or whatever, they can do so, because they can claim that the rabble rousers were representative of you.
Courts generally don't uphold these arrests, but the hassle factor is pretty significant, and of course getting hit with pepper spray paintballs is pretty nasty too, so this functions to inhibit protest in an extra-legal manner.
By the way, this is not to say that the police are villians here. If you have a crowd of 500 people, half of whom are on one side of an issue and half of whom are on the other, there's a very good chance of violence erupting, and if there are no police there, there's a good chance someone will be killed. So an overreaction from the police in a case like this can legitimately be considered protective. When you have a one-sided protest, having police there increases the likelihood of violence, because the police have a legitimate fear of being overrun, but in the case being described here, it wasn't one-sided, and the police may have had legitimate reason to worry about physical violence between the protestors as well as toward themselves.
Usually people say "sources please" when they aren't happy with the point being made, and wish to discredit it. However, this isn't a particularly legitimate request - it's more of a rhetorical trick - the implication is that because the person, who thought he was having a conversation, not presenting a refereed paper, did not provide references, his point is not valid.
I lived downstream from Vermont Yankee for most of my childhood. They had unplanned releases so frequently that calling them unplanned was kind of like saying that stopping at the gas station to fill your tank after driving for a while is "unplanned."
Usually things like radioactive krypton gas or various other things that tend to pop up as a result of continual radioactive bombardment of water, but that really weren't planned for in the design of the reactor.
My source is the local newspaper (the Greenfield Recorder, if you want to go look it up).
You didn't annoy me. This is extremely off-topic, though. I will say just one thing about it. I too believe that many of the people around me will visit that lake of fire as a result of their misunderstanding of the world. But I can't prove it. So if I am to help them, just saying "you're going to burn in that lake of fire" isn't going to do it. I was turned off to religion for thirty years as a result of people who said things like that to me. All of them were very sincere, well-meaning Christians.
When you connect deeply to a spiritual tradition, and what it teaches seems self-evident to you, then it's a natural reaction to want to tell everyone what you've seen. But the thing you've seen that you want to tell them isn't in the words you're going to say. You can't show someone the Eiffel Tower when they're standing in Peoria, IL. You first have to get them on a plane to Paris, and then once they're there you have to get them to a point where they can see the tower.
Just so, if you truly want to save someone from that lake of fire, the path down which you must lead them doesn't begin with telling them "OMG, you're going to burn in a lake of fire!" The path starts with you coming to understand precisely how to save them from that lake of fire. If you don't know, how can you explain it to them? I have met very few Christians who even try to find that out, even though it's written all over the New Testament in nice friendly red letters. Jesus was a really nice guy - he spelled it all out for us. But mostly we seem to argue and preach over esoterica that have nothing to do with the red letters, and won't get anyone out of that lake, or we loudly proclaim our beliefs in a way that is helpful to no-one.
(I mean we when I say we - when I first started to get what was going on with my path, I did the same thing, even though I should have known better. Sigh.)
I'd say you're right, because the lie you tell affects those who come after the one who has died, and also because lying is a bad habit that I think harms the one doing it as well, particularly when the lie is harmful, as in the case you've described.
When you say something in a public forum, putting an apology in your message to the effect that it's only intended for a certain part of that public does not mean that in fact your message only reaches that portion of that public, so yes, I would say that you need to think about every person who will read it, not just the people that you intend to have read it.
Every religion of which I am aware has as one of its basic tenets that we should speak gently unless there is some strong reason to do otherwise. Christianity is no exception. So considering what effect our words will have is one of our most basic obligations as practitioners.
I agree with the entomb in place part. Tragically, this is not what commercial plants do. If commercial plants were run the way Rickover's Navy runs nukes, I would feel a _lot_ better about nukes.
Unfortunately, I don't think the storage problem is as solved as you claim, and also unfortunately the mining problem doesn't seem to be solved in practice, even if there's a safe technique that exists in theory.
My point was not that we shouldn't generate energy, but that when comparing two competing forms of energy, we should put all the cards on the table, and not put all the bad cards for the one we don't like on the table while presenting none of the bad cards for the other.
I've never heard of a utility-run nuclear power plant that didn't have unplanned emissions of radioactive byproducts much more frequently than allowed by law. If nuclear plants followed the law, you're quite right that they would be a lot safer. And if horses could fly, my airline bill would be a lot lower, although I guess I'd be buying enough oats to make up for it.
I guess I can understand that, but it's actually pretty typical when writing about a topic to say what you think the reader needs to hear, and use references to back up what you've said, rather than just mentioning your references and asking the reader to go hunt through them... :'}
If a person's mindstream ceases when he or she dies, then anything you do after that moment has no relevance to that person - it can't offend them, because they no longer have the capacity to be offended. If it does not, then praying for that person may be beneficial, whether or not they would have approved of it in life.
:')
The problem with exhorting people to prayer in a public forum like this is that (1) it's pointless, and (2) some people who are still alive here find it offensive. It's pointless because if we think that prayer will help, and we have the capacity to do a sincere prayer on behalf of Hans, then we will do it whether or not we are exhorted.
It's offensive to some people for a variety of reasons - I will say for myself that I used to be offended by overt mentions of Christianity because I felt very judged by people who had blind faith and felt that I was defective because I didn't have the capacity to have blind faith. It doesn't offend me anymore, because I understand the problem better, but I think it's worth being understanding toward those who do have this problem, and examining ones' own actions to see if one is doing anything that would tend to engender this sort of feeling.
The job of a religious practitioner is to succeed in his or her practice, and it is through this that they may help others - any activity that projects one's religious beliefs outward is very risky, and needs to be undertaken with great seriousness, and probably not on a forum as public as slashdot.
This is not to say that you should shut up entirely, but I do urge you to consider your audience!
I live in Tucson. We don't pay for parking at the movies. We usually don't get popcorn, but if we do it's not $8. Tickets are still under $10 - in fact, if you go in the afternoon, it's $5.
Also, by not buying a $20k home theatre system, I have saved enough money to go to 200 movies, which is about as many as I'm likely to see in the next dozen years, plus all that space that would be wasted is free for useful things like my wife's marimba and my computer.
Some people just can't do acronyms.
BTW, in case anybody's following this, the link referred to above provides some good information on this problem, which for some reason Mr. Trophy didn't quote in his message. In fact, the number of bird strikes at most wind sites is really small - on the order of 1.5 birds per tower per year. As Mr. Trophy alludes, Altamont pass has an unusually high bird kill rate, partially because the turbines there are ancient, and partly because of where it is.
This doesn't contradict what I was saying. When building wind projects, this information indicates that bird kills are a factor that needs to be considered, precisely because the kind of wind generation technology used and the siting of the towers can make a dramatic difference in how many birds are killed.
The scandal is that in many energy generation projects, factors like these aren't considered at all. For example, every commercial nuclear power plant build in the U.S. has been a control-rod plant, which fails by melting down, and for which containment breaches are routine. This is true despite the fact that some very notable minds in the nuclear club (e.g., Edward Teller, who I don't normally think of as a voice of reason) knew about and argued in favor of pebble bed reactors long before the first commercial nuclear power plant was built. Pebble bed reactors fail safe. Pebble bed reactors aren't harmless, but they do mitigate that particular kind of harm - they do not go out of control and melt down. And yet for some reason we built all of these incredibly expensive control rod-oriented plants that do not fail safe.
This is my point. Whatever kind of power generation systems we build, we should not ignore the problems that that form of generation has because our favorite form of power generation is ideologically preferable to the bad kinds of power that those crazy other people are promoting.
By accepting and even encouraging this kind of thinking in ourselves, we create an environment where what is actually known to be true is unimportant, and getting the politically correct outcome is all that matters. This weakens us when we debate, and reduces the equation to a question of who has the most economic power, rather than which cost/benefit tradeoff is best, which I think is why we seem to get such counterintuitive results.
No, it doesn't. Buildings, cars and cats kill more than wind turbines. The unfortunate case of Altamont is not representative of the industry.
Statement: activity X does a lot of Y.
Valid response: no, it doesn't - here's the amount of Y it does - see, it's small!
Invalid response: Activities A, B and C do more Y than activity X.
This is the same as the nuclear industry saying "look, concrete is radioactive, so you don't need to worry about the additional background radation added to the environment because percentagewise it's about the same as the radioactivity of concrete." Even if this is true, it implies a doubling of the background level of radiation, so it's a misleading argument.
Of course more birds are killed by cars and cats, and for that matter other predators. My point is not "don't use wind power because it kills birds." It's "here's an example of a negative impact of this supposedly completely safe and clean energy source." I think wind power is a great idea, but we should also be aware of how it works and what its impact is.
Cell phones probably kill more birds than wind power right now, and I think people ought to be aware of that as well when they tout cell phones as the best thing since sliced bread.
I'm arguing in favor of doing things with an understanding of their impact, rather than doing them ignorantly and pretending they have no impact. I am not arguing that we shouldn't have wind power, or cell phones. Nothing we do has _no_ impact.
Eating a completely vegetarian diet kills a lot of bugs. I'm not going to starve myself to death to prevent that from happening.
Hydro is not environmentally friendly. It dams up rivers and destroys ecosystems. Making solar panels takes energy, and produces pollution. Wind energy kills birds in large numbers.
The big unsolved problems of nuclear power include - how do you mine fuel without killing people? If you think coal dust is bad to breathe, try breathing uranium ore dust sometime.
Okay, now you have to enrich it. Now you have to use the fuel without meltdowns. Pebble beds solve that problem - it's really not the big problem with nuclear power plants.
Now you've got spent fuel that you have to get rid of. Where do you put it? And what about the plant itself? Once a nuclear plant is worn out, you have a giant heap of highly radioactive stuff, and you can't just haul it off and dump it in a salt mine because in order to haul it off, you have to cut it up, and cutting it up releases a giant plume of radioactive dust into the environment.
Pretty much any energy generation system has costs associated with it. I think the cost/benefit analysis for nuclear really sucks, and the story for some other forms of energy is much better, but let's take off our rose-colored glasses and look at all the costs, not just the costs of the energy generation systems we don't like.
Wasn't it something like two years ago when Microsoft got tagged for patent infringement over their SQL server, and they did not indemnify their users? What does the EULA say? Where's this indeminification Mr. Ballmer is talking about?
(1) I'm pretty sure the previous poster was being sarcastic.
(2) There is no open source JVM of which I'm aware.
(3) Even if there were, there is no complete open source Java API implementation, where complete means you can write a useful app with it.
So for all intents and purposes, despite the presence of several good open source compilers, Java is not open source. This is in fact one of my biggest objections to using it - because Swing is so buggy, and I can't fix the bugs, I can't use it.
You could probably go in without feeling uncomfortable, and they actually sell pretty good stuff. Plus, in giving them business you're paying them back for not throwing the book at you way back when.
I had some similar encounters with authority figures when I was a kid. Most of them weren't even intentional authority figures - just people who noticed I was out of line and stopped me from doing things I would have really regretted when I grew up and got a clue. It was embarrassing as hell at the time, but in retrospect I'm very grateful for what they did. Even mentioned one of them in the dedication to my book.
That _is_ pretty funny. Of course, have you seen how cabbies drive in Bankok? This flashing light gig has probably significantly lowered the death rate from accidents caused by insane cab drivers.
You're right - 8 character tabs aren't a standard. They are, however, what most devices do unless you program them to do something else. Including the VT100, may it rest in peace.
Personal experience - if you set the tab stops to every 8 characters, you win. If you set them to anything else, you or one of your cow orkers lose. You can play dominance games and pee on each other's source code, or you can get work done. Given that in all likelihood someone's giving you money because you agreed to get work done, if you have any integrity at all you don't have battles like this at work, because you're wasting someone else's money.