Sugar is more difficult to grow in the US, I know this first-hand having grown-up in a sugar beet blighted town. IIRC, Brazil had ideal growing conditions for Sugar.
Yes, that's why it's dumb to grow it in the US.
I'm not sure whether "tariffs" raise the price, or allocate the negative externalities of trade deficients correctly.
Then you don't probably understand economics. We wouldn't be buying so many imports if it weren't beneficial. Eventually, the dollar will fall (like it's currently doing), the global savings glut will dry up, and we'll stop importing so much. If the market decides, prices will reach efficient levels. If government decides, prices will be whatever some politican or lobbyist thinks they should be.
Maybe tariffs will allow growth of a fledgling industry or protect industries where domestic production is a national security issue, but sugar fits neither of those cases. The tariff is nothing but a handout to sugar farmers. And don't give me any BS about job loss. Lowering trade barriers does not have any effect on long-term employment. We should eliminate the tariff and our inefficient sugar farmers should find something else to do. This would even help low-income families by reducing food costs.
The only externality you could argue for Brazilian sugar is the destruction of the rainforest, but a tariff is probably not the best way to internalize that issue.
Clearly, if Brazil were willing to accept products in exchange for Sugar, we might be more willing to import.
Huh? Barter systems were given up a couple thousand years ago.
When someone invents a fully-electric airplane, let me know so I can invest in their company.
Electric vehicles are just waiting on batteries which should be just a year or two away.
Agreed. This will probably shift quite a bit of gasonline consumption to grid power.
Cellulosic ethanol, wind power, and particular fuel cells, are pipe dreams.
Fuels cells, probably since it's been a few years off for the past 20. I'd give cellulosic ethanol a few more years before giving up on it. Wind power though, is ready here and now. It is quite economical and there is a very large build out currently going on.
My understanding was that the shielding made this impossible. You could barely get the thing off the ground, and since the shield was only enough to protect the passengers, it would irradiate everything else around it. This sentiment is echoed by the Wikipedia article.
It's damn hard to beat the energy-to-weight ratio of liquid fuels. In 30 years, we'll probably all be driving battery-electric vehicles. We may even take an electric train from New York to LA. But we'll still probably fly in a liquid-fuel jet to get to London.
Where do you get that figure from? Defense is about 20% of our Federal budget. Smaller the Medicare, bigger than Social Security. Defense is about 50% of "Discretionary" (ie, not Entitlement) spending, though.
The reason "high-fructose corn syrup" is used is because sugar cane is more difficult to grow.
No, the reason HFCS is in everything in the US is because our high sugar tariffs make the domestic sugar price double the global price. If it weren't for the tariff, we'd import cheap sugar from our friendly neighbors down south, and US Coke wouldn't taste so lousy.
No. "The Media" does not command our armed forces nor does it have veto power over our laws. It may strongly influence perceptions of candidates, but there are enough different outlets to somewhat dilute that effect, ie Slashdot vs. Fox News. Rupert Murdoch may be quite powerful, but he is by no means "Supreme Leader".
I think Iran is actually a democratic country so the people there have just as much opportunity to vote their leaders out of power when they don't agree with their actions as the US does.
Iran is an Islamic Republic, meaning its government is half democratic and half unelected asshats.
Or would you consider Singularity a single-tasking multi-threaded OS?
Well no. Based on a conversation with someone from MSR, Singularity can run other Unix-style processes on top of its kernel, though that loses its low-overhead of running everything in one address space. However, pure Singularity is a single process, multi-threaded OS, speaking using traditional definitions of process and thread. This makes it like a number of single-address space embedded OS's, though with the added benefit of verified task isolation.
This idea still seems iffy. It creates a rather strong disincentive for investment, and unless enacted universally, it will cause massive capital flight.
Kernel mode? I thought it is all run in user mode and inside a single process but in separate threads.
It all runs in kernel mode. If you're verifying that the "processes" don't do anything bad, why wouldn't you run them in kernel mode? That eliminates the context switch for any system calls.
And cut down that flaming part a bit or I'll tell you mom;)
If people wouldn't talk about things they don't understand, there won't be any need.
Physical network lines, like utilities, are a Natural Monopoly. It doesn't make sense to run two sets of lines to every house, but if you have a private, unaccountable, corporation running the show, the customers we'll get screwed, ie "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." This means it makes sense to have government involved. Now whether they've done a good job so far is an entirely different story.
The purpose of health insurance, or any insurance, is to reduce risk. In the unlikely event that you get hit by a truck and need a new spleen (or whatever), the insurance will be there to cover this very expensive procedure. Insurance does not magically create money from somewhere. All payments for service come from the pooled premiums payed by every subscriber of the policy. The insurance company simply levels out the total risk among each subscriber.
Interestingly, buying insurance, from a purely economic viewpoint, is a losing move because the insurance company must charge more than your expected gain (risk * payout) to cover its operating overhead (and the CEO's Ferrari fund). However, insurance is still a good idea since you have a positive utility gain from the peace of mind that you are protected in case of catastrophe.
One of the problems with the current health insurance system is that the payer and the customer are different. Thus the customer has no incentive to find the lowest-cost/best-value provider. This is solved somewhat by insurance companies negotiating with providers, but obviously it isn't working very well.
At what rate? Since the rule of thumb is that you can only spend an investment by 4% a year without it eventually running dry, it seems like a wealth tax would be very bad for retirement savings.
If your programs are running the the same address space, they are the same process in the Unix and VMS/NT sense. Your IPC then is really just communication between threads, for which there are several different low-overhead options. Really though, synchronous communication or invoking a routine in the context of a separate "program" should be equivalent to a method invocation on another object with private fields. I don't think you'd gain anything but overhead by using another stack.
Could the LAN actually be nearing the end of its lifecycle?
Pending some fantastic breakthrough, it will always be cheaper and easier to send lots of data across a small distance than to send lots of data across a long distance. Thus LAN technology will be faster/cheaper and continue to exist.
Singularity avoids context switches by running everything in kernel mode. This works because it's all written in C# and can thus be verified before loading.
[flame]
You're own thoughts are wrong. Try using someone else's for a while, and stop talking our of your ass.
[/flame]
I suppose with singularity, there is some blurring between the kernel and compiler, but given that all the code is running in supervisor mode, it is still definitely the kernel doing the work. If you can figure out how to do IPC without a kernel, publish dammit.
Let compiler handle all the nasty IPC stuff at compile time to lower the performance penalty which comes from process context switches and such.
There's almost nothing a compiler can do about IPC. Since it involves a context switch and some kernel work, it's entirely dependent on the OS and hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but it will probably be hardest to eliminate liquid fuels from air travel because of weight issues.
No argument, and I fully expect that to happen.
Sounds like those folks are just another biofuels company. Maybe they'll push butanol instead of ethanol.
Yes, that's why it's dumb to grow it in the US.
Then you don't probably understand economics. We wouldn't be buying so many imports if it weren't beneficial. Eventually, the dollar will fall (like it's currently doing), the global savings glut will dry up, and we'll stop importing so much. If the market decides, prices will reach efficient levels. If government decides, prices will be whatever some politican or lobbyist thinks they should be.
Maybe tariffs will allow growth of a fledgling industry or protect industries where domestic production is a national security issue, but sugar fits neither of those cases. The tariff is nothing but a handout to sugar farmers. And don't give me any BS about job loss. Lowering trade barriers does not have any effect on long-term employment. We should eliminate the tariff and our inefficient sugar farmers should find something else to do. This would even help low-income families by reducing food costs.
The only externality you could argue for Brazilian sugar is the destruction of the rainforest, but a tariff is probably not the best way to internalize that issue.
Huh? Barter systems were given up a couple thousand years ago.
When someone invents a fully-electric airplane, let me know so I can invest in their company.
Agreed. This will probably shift quite a bit of gasonline consumption to grid power.
Fuels cells, probably since it's been a few years off for the past 20. I'd give cellulosic ethanol a few more years before giving up on it. Wind power though, is ready here and now. It is quite economical and there is a very large build out currently going on.
My understanding was that the shielding made this impossible. You could barely get the thing off the ground, and since the shield was only enough to protect the passengers, it would irradiate everything else around it. This sentiment is echoed by the Wikipedia article.
It's damn hard to beat the energy-to-weight ratio of liquid fuels. In 30 years, we'll probably all be driving battery-electric vehicles. We may even take an electric train from New York to LA. But we'll still probably fly in a liquid-fuel jet to get to London.
Where do you get that figure from? Defense is about 20% of our Federal budget. Smaller the Medicare, bigger than Social Security. Defense is about 50% of "Discretionary" (ie, not Entitlement) spending, though.
So what's more a feasible way to power a trans-atlantic airliner?
No, the reason HFCS is in everything in the US is because our high sugar tariffs make the domestic sugar price double the global price. If it weren't for the tariff, we'd import cheap sugar from our friendly neighbors down south, and US Coke wouldn't taste so lousy.
No. "The Media" does not command our armed forces nor does it have veto power over our laws. It may strongly influence perceptions of candidates, but there are enough different outlets to somewhat dilute that effect, ie Slashdot vs. Fox News. Rupert Murdoch may be quite powerful, but he is by no means "Supreme Leader".
Iran is an Islamic Republic, meaning its government is half democratic and half unelected asshats.
Some states let motorcycle riders run red lights after waiting for a while.
Well no. Based on a conversation with someone from MSR, Singularity can run other Unix-style processes on top of its kernel, though that loses its low-overhead of running everything in one address space. However, pure Singularity is a single process, multi-threaded OS, speaking using traditional definitions of process and thread. This makes it like a number of single-address space embedded OS's, though with the added benefit of verified task isolation.
This idea still seems iffy. It creates a rather strong disincentive for investment, and unless enacted universally, it will cause massive capital flight.
How big is google's data center? Tell me that's not a barrier.
It all runs in kernel mode. If you're verifying that the "processes" don't do anything bad, why wouldn't you run them in kernel mode? That eliminates the context switch for any system calls.
If people wouldn't talk about things they don't understand, there won't be any need.
Physical network lines, like utilities, are a Natural Monopoly. It doesn't make sense to run two sets of lines to every house, but if you have a private, unaccountable, corporation running the show, the customers we'll get screwed, ie "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." This means it makes sense to have government involved. Now whether they've done a good job so far is an entirely different story.
The purpose of health insurance, or any insurance, is to reduce risk. In the unlikely event that you get hit by a truck and need a new spleen (or whatever), the insurance will be there to cover this very expensive procedure. Insurance does not magically create money from somewhere. All payments for service come from the pooled premiums payed by every subscriber of the policy. The insurance company simply levels out the total risk among each subscriber.
Interestingly, buying insurance, from a purely economic viewpoint, is a losing move because the insurance company must charge more than your expected gain (risk * payout) to cover its operating overhead (and the CEO's Ferrari fund). However, insurance is still a good idea since you have a positive utility gain from the peace of mind that you are protected in case of catastrophe.
One of the problems with the current health insurance system is that the payer and the customer are different. Thus the customer has no incentive to find the lowest-cost/best-value provider. This is solved somewhat by insurance companies negotiating with providers, but obviously it isn't working very well.
You seem to think economics is a zero-sum game. This is dead wrong.
At what rate? Since the rule of thumb is that you can only spend an investment by 4% a year without it eventually running dry, it seems like a wealth tax would be very bad for retirement savings.
If your programs are running the the same address space, they are the same process in the Unix and VMS/NT sense. Your IPC then is really just communication between threads, for which there are several different low-overhead options. Really though, synchronous communication or invoking a routine in the context of a separate "program" should be equivalent to a method invocation on another object with private fields. I don't think you'd gain anything but overhead by using another stack.
Pending some fantastic breakthrough, it will always be cheaper and easier to send lots of data across a small distance than to send lots of data across a long distance. Thus LAN technology will be faster/cheaper and continue to exist.
Singularity avoids context switches by running everything in kernel mode. This works because it's all written in C# and can thus be verified before loading.
[flame] You're own thoughts are wrong. Try using someone else's for a while, and stop talking our of your ass. [/flame]
I suppose with singularity, there is some blurring between the kernel and compiler, but given that all the code is running in supervisor mode, it is still definitely the kernel doing the work. If you can figure out how to do IPC without a kernel, publish dammit.There's almost nothing a compiler can do about IPC. Since it involves a context switch and some kernel work, it's entirely dependent on the OS and hardware.
Humans treat tools as an extension of ourselves? Amazing. How much grant money did they spend on that gem?
Charles Darwin thinks that this idea is probably dumb.
Unless they manage to release some critical number of mosquitoes, the faulty ones will die and the normal ones will pass on their undamaged genes.