"From what I've read about Juptier particularly - and I've read/studied a bit - I doubt Jupiter could get denser, not to far beneath its seathing cloud mass, Jupiter is all metalic Hydrogen at enormously high temperatures and progressively higher."
Metallic hydrogen core in Jupiter is fairly small. It certainly can (and will) grow with more mass, until it's large enough to ignite fusion.
That depends on country. For example, in Russia by law texts of all legal contracts and notices are out of copyright.
The only exception is contracts which are not yet used, which can be treated as literary works. I.e. if you ask a lawyer to write a contract then it'll be protected by copyright. But once you use this contract in a deal with a customer, this contract falls out of copyright. Your counterparty can freely post it, shamelessly plagiarize it and so on.
"I am a scientist and philosopher (degrees in both Religion and Neurobiology), and this is a valid question. Where did the law of gravity come from? Yes, the Big Bang and pockets of density that turn into galaxies would spontaneously form based on the laws of gravity and entropy, but why do those laws exist to begin with?"
For example, we can exist in the Multiverse, with a lot of Universes. Each one with arbitrary laws.
"That is a question to which an answer will never be found. Never. I'm not being pessimistic, it's simply that to discover the answer, one has to be able to manipulate the system from outside of it. The known universe is 8.79829142 x10^26 meters in diameter. We're about 1.5 x10^0 meters."
And top quark is about 10^-24 meters in width. Yet we can detect and make experiments on it.
"Actually, it's exactly the same thing to say that gravity was always there."
No.
"I've never understood why hardcore atheists believe that scientific explanations preclude God as a valid concept."
Definition of 'God' usually requires it to be conscious. And a lot of religions believe in personal God. These concepts do not bring in anything new or worthwhile.
"Latin America is a great example of this: tons of dirt-poor people, with no jobs, who keep having children because their Church tells them that birth control is a sin."
Not really. Overpopulation is not a problem on LA, you're confusing cause and effect.
Take China for example, they don't have problems with 6-12 children per family (and never had, in fact). But somehow that haven't made them the richest people.
Or Russia - it's depopulating fast, but somehow is not becoming the richest nation on the planet.
I'm not impervious to facts - that our society is inherently unfair. And any attempts at playing completely 'fair' result in a total economic mess (also known as the USSR). However, that doesn't mean we should embrace the unfairness completely and foment its growth beyond any reasonable limit.
"In today's society, money and assets. Muscle power is a cheap commodity, as there's no shortage of unskilled people."
So, your money is valuable because few people earn a lot of them? What makes you think people one day won't get tired of this situation?
It has happened, more than once in the history. Unfortunately, results are invariably are a total fail. But it doesn't stop people from trying.
"Smart people manage their resources well: they have savings accounts, retirement accounts, they spend within their means, etc."
Nah. Most of rich people in the USA are reach because they work in high-paying jobs and/or inherited the wealth.
For example in the current recession, foreclosure rates are actually somewhat higher for high-priced houses.
"Not-so-smart people manage their resources poorly: they have no savings, no bank accounts, they cash their paycheck at a check-cashing store for a 10% fee instead of putting it in the bank for free, they spend what little money they have on cigarettes and booze, they talk about having more children (beyond their current 6) even though they're flat broke, etc."
Nonsense and stupidity. You've probably never lived as a poor person. Your picture is about as statistically sound as a notion that all of the US population are reach and play golf on weekends.
There are certainly 'welfare queens' and other leeches in the USA. But they are statistically insignificant.
By the same token - you're a Nazi (Godwined myself! Yay!). After all, distinctions between libertarianism and Nazism are just a play on words.
"All of the above. I'm a firm believer that almost everyone is capable (having the capacity) of archiving great things. It's all a matter of motivation and perseverance."
Yeah, sure.
"Eventually, you stand out from the crowd and become more marketable than others as a human resource to society. It's society that determines what is valuable based on demand and scarcity."
Yeah, sure.
"The outcome of that scenario is obvious. First, it would get unsanitary very quickly. Second, the demand for said services would far outstrip the supply (which would be none in this case). Ergo, salary to pay for these services would skyrocket at which point this void would be quickly filled until the salary drops again."
Nope, it wouldn't. You would live in excreta blaming the lazy asshole rednecks who can't do their work properly on their generous minimal wage. Happens all the time.
Until enough of 'high-class' folks become desperate enough to pick up ANY job.
"You should also understand that these types of labor you mentioned can be rendered by far.. far more people than say an engineer or doctor. Because of this, it's low hanging fruit in the job market which naturally trends a lower payout. Or put it this way. If everyone was a doctor and engineer, they would all get paid minimum wage because the supply outstrips the demand."
Which is why supply and demand is mostly quite a meaningless characteristic for the 'worth' of a job.
For example, I know several scientists who live on a wage barely more than minimal wage. They produce interesting papers in their own field. Are they more valuable than a bunch of Wall Street leeches? Or maybe patent lawyers? Clearly, scientists are inferior - they earn much less money.
Let me re-iterate my point: you live in society and thus have an obligation to support the whole structure of society. Which does include poor people who need help. And most often poor people are poor not because of their own actions.
Besides, there is a certain point in income distribution when the 'middle class' (actually, 'high-class') stops being 'the engine of progress' and becomes 'bourgeois oppressors'. Sorry, but there's no way 0.1% of people can be generating most of the wealth and growth.
Or invoking your 'free market' argument, such distributions are a sign that market is not healthy. What would you say about a company with 5000% profit margin? Given such a great incentive there should be tons of new investment bankers and oil field owners, right?
Of course, I'm not advocating expropriation of wealth from the rich and giving money to the poor, because that _would_ be Marxist. Instead, poor people should be helped by providing free education (including higher education), free medical services and better access to basic infrastructure (public transportation, etc.)
Invoking the already overstrained 'job market' analogy again, these measures are akin anti-trust laws. Monopolies can be legally required to work with fair margins.
No, I'm not a Marxist. I considered myself a mild socialist.
"No, they've benefited by having parents that taught them how to better manage their own resources"
Again, what are the 'resources' you speak of? Is it muscle power or knowledge of argiculture?
What are you going to do if all the illegal immigrants in the fields, garbage collectors on the street and all other low-earning professions suddenly quit and move to another planet?
Answer: a famine when you suddenly find out that your C++ skills are not useful for bread baking.
More realistic answer: a redistribution of income, so some of the 'better' folks lose their income and are forced to fill the low-paying jobs.
"You seem to think that the poor people somehow contributed to the middle classes, and helped raise their children. They didn't, except perhaps by cleaning their toilets sometimes. The poor people aren't the ones who built society, it was the people with education who managed resources better who did."
Then you are an idiot.
Significant parts of US society were formed by poor immigrants. Who later formed your precious magical middle class.
"First, CAP is Consistency (which is different than the Consistency in ACID, incidentally, its consistency across nodes, not consistency with integrity constraints), Availability, and Partition Tolerance."
Sorry, a typo.
"Second, quorum-based systems sacrifice availability, not partition tolerance; they are typical of distributed, strongly-consistent, databases. Sacrificing partition tolerance essentially means that the system cannot be implemented on top of a network that can lose messages (this is typical of non-distributed RDBMSs.)"
That depends on your definition of 'partition tolerance'.
Quorum systems clearly fail the: "No set of failures less than total network failure is allowed to cause the system to respond incorrectly" criterion since one only needs to destroy quorum to stop the system from working.
"But today, the government basically forces people with more resources to give some of those resources to families that have less"
What does it mean? Why do some people 'have' more resources? Are they stronger? Do they plow larger fields? Or maybe they have better-bred cows?
Some people have more resources because they live in a fucking society, which is supported by people with less resources. So stop whining and go to live on an uninhabited island. Where no-one will take away your precious resources.
Yes, I'd like to be able to work with RDMBS data in REAL languages, not in ugly SQL or even more uglier DB internal languages.
DB tables can be represented with lists, on which composable pure (side-effect free) functions could operate. So JOINs can be expressed as list comprehensions. 'where' naturally is expressed as filters, etc. Care should be taken to maintain purity of functions used in queries, so they can be optimized efficiently.
LINQ in C# has beginnings of something similar.
PS: Am I describing Haskell, by any chance?:) PPS: If your query requires complex complex and non-trivial optimizations by the RDBMS engine, then it's a bad query.
To achieve 'nonconcurrency' one needs to introduce a global ordering of transactions. Which WILL require a shared resource among ALL of the transactions. No way around it, sorry.
And what's funny, this resource some of the problems of ACID systems. However, there should be advantages (no need for rollbacks, etc.).
Besides, all of this doesn't tackle another advantage of NoSQL systems: working with HUGE amounts of data. There'll still be problems in ACID systems if data access requires communication between several storage nodes.
And don't forget the CAP theorem. You can't get Consistency, Atomicity and Partition Tolerance at the same time. RDBMS typically 'solve' it by dropping the requirement for the partition tolerance. Usually by using quorum sensing schemas, etc.
"* RAID is handled at the block device level, not the filesystem level (and many, many people believe putting RAID into the "filesystem" is an architecturally bad thing, so that's hardly something it can be plainly criticised for)."
However, filesystem-level RAIDs have a lot more functionality than block-level RAIDs. Look at ZFS or BTRFS.
"* Do you have a source for up-to-date benchmarks ?"
I have my own set of benchmarks. Well, NTFS on Windows is almost always slower (and quite often like 100 _times_ slower) than Linux filesystems.
I regularly re-run these tests. So far, Windows is only getting slower compared to Linux.
I've recently created a multithreaded version of this test. Well, let's say that NTFS sucks so badly, that it's hard to understand how MS has managed to achieve this.
"*symbolic links to files, incorrect NTFS has supported reparse points since Windows 2000"
Incorrect. Reparse points apply only to directories, not files.
"*no support for RAIDs, incorrect Server versions support RAID 0, 1, and 5"
On block level. No filesystem support, like in BTRFS or ZFS.
"*no support for dynamic resizing, incorrect Windows 2003 added support for dynamic growth for non-system/non-boot volumes, 2008 added dynamic grow and shrink for all volumes."
Only for 'dynamic' disks which are undocumented and shrinking also doesn't always work.
"It also supports compression, encryption, ACL's, Metadata, and ridiculously large volumes and files."
Linux filesystems support compression (btrfs), ACLs (POSIX, SELinux), metadata (extended attributes) and ridiculously large volumes.
Slashdot Mirror
"Which feature of Flash is impossible to re-implement?"
1) High-quality fast vector graphics with morphing and keyframe animation. Nothing in HTML5 is even close (sorry, Canvas is just a toy).
2) Video overlays and compositing.
3) Audio (nope, HTML5 doesn't have enough support).
4) Language with optional typing and fast VM. JS is not yet there.
"Heck, they've even ported Quake to HTML5 [techcrunch.com]. That is quite a bit more advanced program than most Flash apps."
Nope, they haven't. They ported it to WebGL which is NOT a part of HTML5 draft standard.
Absolutely none of them are on par with the real flash. It's not possible to re-implement it in HTML5.
It's true that Nazis didn't kill the Jews. They just put them into a chamber filled with poison gas. That's just a detail, right?
PS: I love to Godwin myself.
Interesting. Do they have direct 64-bit addressing or do they use page mapping tricks?
"From what I've read about Juptier particularly - and I've read/studied a bit - I doubt Jupiter could get denser, not to far beneath its seathing cloud mass, Jupiter is all metalic Hydrogen at enormously high temperatures and progressively higher."
Metallic hydrogen core in Jupiter is fairly small. It certainly can (and will) grow with more mass, until it's large enough to ignite fusion.
That depends on country. For example, in Russia by law texts of all legal contracts and notices are out of copyright.
The only exception is contracts which are not yet used, which can be treated as literary works. I.e. if you ask a lawyer to write a contract then it'll be protected by copyright. But once you use this contract in a deal with a customer, this contract falls out of copyright. Your counterparty can freely post it, shamelessly plagiarize it and so on.
However, adding more mass to Jupiter won't significantly increase its size. It'll be increasing its density instead.
Why not use objective standards, like number of 'registered downloads' or randomized popularity polls?
OK. Another example: we started to study our Solar System looooooooong before we were able to detect planets around other stars.
We studied it well enough to discover Neptune first by _predicting_ its existence based on observations.
You can isolate influences of various variables by modeling their influence. Which certainly is possible.
Besides, maybe it'll be possible to look at _other_ Universes somehow.
Skype is notoriously difficult to block. It uses all kinds of evasion tactics (culminating in HTTPS tunneling).
OK. Earth is larger than us, but we were able to learn quite a bit about it long before we even discovered all the continents.
There's no hard requirement 'to be outside' of something.
<blockquote>Also, learn to use blockquote. </blockquote>
I hate the formatting language here.
"I am a scientist and philosopher (degrees in both Religion and Neurobiology), and this is a valid question. Where did the law of gravity come from? Yes, the Big Bang and pockets of density that turn into galaxies would spontaneously form based on the laws of gravity and entropy, but why do those laws exist to begin with?"
For example, we can exist in the Multiverse, with a lot of Universes. Each one with arbitrary laws.
"That is a question to which an answer will never be found. Never. I'm not being pessimistic, it's simply that to discover the answer, one has to be able to manipulate the system from outside of it. The known universe is 8.79829142 x10^26 meters in diameter. We're about 1.5 x10^0 meters."
And top quark is about 10^-24 meters in width. Yet we can detect and make experiments on it.
"Actually, it's exactly the same thing to say that gravity was always there."
No.
"I've never understood why hardcore atheists believe that scientific explanations preclude God as a valid concept."
Definition of 'God' usually requires it to be conscious. And a lot of religions believe in personal God. These concepts do not bring in anything new or worthwhile.
"Latin America is a great example of this: tons of dirt-poor people, with no jobs, who keep having children because their Church tells them that birth control is a sin."
Not really. Overpopulation is not a problem on LA, you're confusing cause and effect.
Take China for example, they don't have problems with 6-12 children per family (and never had, in fact). But somehow that haven't made them the richest people.
Or Russia - it's depopulating fast, but somehow is not becoming the richest nation on the planet.
"You sound like the more extreme type to me."
Nope. I checked that, actually.
I'm not impervious to facts - that our society is inherently unfair. And any attempts at playing completely 'fair' result in a total economic mess (also known as the USSR). However, that doesn't mean we should embrace the unfairness completely and foment its growth beyond any reasonable limit.
"In today's society, money and assets. Muscle power is a cheap commodity, as there's no shortage of unskilled people."
So, your money is valuable because few people earn a lot of them? What makes you think people one day won't get tired of this situation?
It has happened, more than once in the history. Unfortunately, results are invariably are a total fail. But it doesn't stop people from trying.
"Smart people manage their resources well: they have savings accounts, retirement accounts, they
spend within their means, etc."
Nah. Most of rich people in the USA are reach because they work in high-paying jobs and/or inherited the wealth.
For example in the current recession, foreclosure rates are actually somewhat higher for high-priced houses.
"Not-so-smart people manage their resources poorly: they have no savings, no bank accounts, they cash their paycheck at a check-cashing store for a 10% fee instead of putting it in the bank for free, they spend what little money they have on cigarettes and booze, they talk about having more children (beyond their current 6) even though they're flat broke, etc."
Nonsense and stupidity. You've probably never lived as a poor person. Your picture is about as statistically sound as a notion that all of the US population are reach and play golf on weekends.
There are certainly 'welfare queens' and other leeches in the USA. But they are statistically insignificant.
"Same thing. You're just playing on words."
Nope, it is not.
By the same token - you're a Nazi (Godwined myself! Yay!). After all, distinctions between libertarianism and Nazism are just a play on words.
"All of the above. I'm a firm believer that almost everyone is capable (having the capacity) of archiving great things. It's all a matter of motivation and perseverance."
Yeah, sure.
"Eventually, you stand out from the crowd and become more marketable than others as a human resource to society. It's society that determines what is valuable based on demand and scarcity."
Yeah, sure.
"The outcome of that scenario is obvious. First, it would get unsanitary very quickly. Second, the demand for said services would far outstrip the supply (which would be none in this case). Ergo, salary to pay for these services would skyrocket at which point this void would be quickly filled until the salary drops again."
Nope, it wouldn't. You would live in excreta blaming the lazy asshole rednecks who can't do their work properly on their generous minimal wage. Happens all the time.
Until enough of 'high-class' folks become desperate enough to pick up ANY job.
"You should also understand that these types of labor you mentioned can be rendered by far.. far more people than say an engineer or doctor. Because of this, it's low hanging fruit in the job market which naturally trends a lower payout. Or put it this way. If everyone was a doctor and engineer, they would all get paid minimum wage because the supply outstrips the demand."
Which is why supply and demand is mostly quite a meaningless characteristic for the 'worth' of a job.
For example, I know several scientists who live on a wage barely more than minimal wage. They produce interesting papers in their own field. Are they more valuable than a bunch of Wall Street leeches? Or maybe patent lawyers? Clearly, scientists are inferior - they earn much less money.
Let me re-iterate my point: you live in society and thus have an obligation to support the whole structure of society. Which does include poor people who need help. And most often poor people are poor not because of their own actions.
Besides, there is a certain point in income distribution when the 'middle class' (actually, 'high-class') stops being 'the engine of progress' and becomes 'bourgeois oppressors'. Sorry, but there's no way 0.1% of people can be generating most of the wealth and growth.
Or invoking your 'free market' argument, such distributions are a sign that market is not healthy. What would you say about a company with 5000% profit margin? Given such a great incentive there should be tons of new investment bankers and oil field owners, right?
Of course, I'm not advocating expropriation of wealth from the rich and giving money to the poor, because that _would_ be Marxist. Instead, poor people should be helped by providing free education (including higher education), free medical services and better access to basic infrastructure (public transportation, etc.)
Invoking the already overstrained 'job market' analogy again, these measures are akin anti-trust laws. Monopolies can be legally required to work with fair margins.
"You sound like a Marxist."
No, I'm not a Marxist. I considered myself a mild socialist.
"No, they've benefited by having parents that taught them how to better manage their own resources"
Again, what are the 'resources' you speak of? Is it muscle power or knowledge of argiculture?
What are you going to do if all the illegal immigrants in the fields, garbage collectors on the street and all other low-earning professions suddenly quit and move to another planet?
Answer: a famine when you suddenly find out that your C++ skills are not useful for bread baking.
More realistic answer: a redistribution of income, so some of the 'better' folks lose their income and are forced to fill the low-paying jobs.
"You seem to think that the poor people somehow contributed to the middle classes, and helped raise their children. They didn't, except perhaps by cleaning their toilets sometimes. The poor people aren't the ones who built society, it was the people with education who managed resources better who did."
Then you are an idiot.
Significant parts of US society were formed by poor immigrants. Who later formed your precious magical middle class.
The part where this happen in our modern society.
I quite often see that the poorest people work the hardest jobs.
"First, CAP is Consistency (which is different than the Consistency in ACID, incidentally, its consistency across nodes, not consistency with integrity constraints), Availability, and Partition Tolerance."
Sorry, a typo.
"Second, quorum-based systems sacrifice availability, not partition tolerance; they are typical of distributed, strongly-consistent, databases. Sacrificing partition tolerance essentially means that the system cannot be implemented on top of a network that can lose messages (this is typical of non-distributed RDBMSs.)"
That depends on your definition of 'partition tolerance'.
Quorum systems clearly fail the: "No set of failures less than total network failure is allowed to cause the system to respond incorrectly" criterion since one only needs to destroy quorum to stop the system from working.
"But today, the government basically forces people with more resources to give some of those resources to families that have less"
What does it mean? Why do some people 'have' more resources? Are they stronger? Do they plow larger fields? Or maybe they have better-bred cows?
Some people have more resources because they live in a fucking society, which is supported by people with less resources. So stop whining and go to live on an uninhabited island. Where no-one will take away your precious resources.
Yes, I'd like to be able to work with RDMBS data in REAL languages, not in ugly SQL or even more uglier DB internal languages.
DB tables can be represented with lists, on which composable pure (side-effect free) functions could operate. So JOINs can be expressed as list comprehensions. 'where' naturally is expressed as filters, etc. Care should be taken to maintain purity of functions used in queries, so they can be optimized efficiently.
LINQ in C# has beginnings of something similar.
PS: Am I describing Haskell, by any chance? :)
PPS: If your query requires complex complex and non-trivial optimizations by the RDBMS engine, then it's a bad query.
To achieve 'nonconcurrency' one needs to introduce a global ordering of transactions. Which WILL require a shared resource among ALL of the transactions. No way around it, sorry.
And what's funny, this resource some of the problems of ACID systems. However, there should be advantages (no need for rollbacks, etc.).
Besides, all of this doesn't tackle another advantage of NoSQL systems: working with HUGE amounts of data. There'll still be problems in ACID systems if data access requires communication between several storage nodes.
And don't forget the CAP theorem. You can't get Consistency, Atomicity and Partition Tolerance at the same time. RDBMS typically 'solve' it by dropping the requirement for the partition tolerance. Usually by using quorum sensing schemas, etc.
"Like what?"
States hiring private companies to use spy vans? Cause government surely can't interfere with States. And after all, market will sort out anything.
"* *Actual* performance problems due to fragmentation - outside of a few corner cases - are basically nonexistant. "
Yep. That's why I have to run defragmenter on our build server every week...
Also, Windows is notoriously slow with file operations. It's not directly related to NTFS, but more to extremely inefficient VFS stack.
"* Can you explain what you mean by "it's done above the VFS layer" ? Surely you're not trying to argue symlinks and shortcuts are the same thing ? "
http://neosmart.net/blog/2006/vista-symlinks-revisited/
"* RAID is handled at the block device level, not the filesystem level (and many, many people believe putting RAID into the "filesystem" is an architecturally bad thing, so that's hardly something it can be plainly criticised for)."
However, filesystem-level RAIDs have a lot more functionality than block-level RAIDs. Look at ZFS or BTRFS.
"* Do you have a source for up-to-date benchmarks ?"
I have my own set of benchmarks. Well, NTFS on Windows is almost always slower (and quite often like 100 _times_ slower) than Linux filesystems.
http://rsdn.ru/File/37054/benchmark.zip - this is the source.
http://rsdn.ru/forum/philosophy/1710544.1.aspx - this is a post with benchmark results (in Russian, sorry - I can translate if you have any questions)
http://rsdn.ru/forum/philosophy/1712431.aspx - this post contains this benchmark, slightly adapted.
I regularly re-run these tests. So far, Windows is only getting slower compared to Linux.
I've recently created a multithreaded version of this test. Well, let's say that NTFS sucks so badly, that it's hard to understand how MS has managed to achieve this.
"*symbolic links to files, incorrect NTFS has supported reparse points since Windows 2000"
Incorrect. Reparse points apply only to directories, not files.
"*no support for RAIDs, incorrect Server versions support RAID 0, 1, and 5"
On block level. No filesystem support, like in BTRFS or ZFS.
"*no support for dynamic resizing, incorrect Windows 2003 added support for dynamic growth for non-system/non-boot volumes, 2008 added dynamic grow and shrink for all volumes."
Only for 'dynamic' disks which are undocumented and shrinking also doesn't always work.
"It also supports compression, encryption, ACL's, Metadata, and ridiculously large volumes and files."
Linux filesystems support compression (btrfs), ACLs (POSIX, SELinux), metadata (extended attributes) and ridiculously large volumes.