We cannot compete with them unless we drop our wages and join economic battle the old-fashioned way. There is nothing we can do they cannot do cheaper.
You are quire right. We either close our borders and re-erect toll barriers, or become equally miserable. That's why I'm against globalization.
The difference is that the cell splits into two that are of typical size for its species (or at least grow to typical size). The rock doesn't.
Actually, a rock does grow, given the right conditions. Specifically, a rock exposed to supercooled rock vapour will have said vapour condense and freeze on its surface, resulting in a bigger rock.
If you don't have the intellectual capacity to understand that I was talking about wikipedia as its community of editors then I can't wait for the rest of what you have to say..
It is not community who decides to delete a page or reverse an edit, it's an individual editor. The tendency of Wikipedia editors to take some article as their "own" and guard it jealously is infamous, and repeatedly referred in this very discussion.
We're really getting to it now. Obviously you had some pet page you created that was deleted for some reason.
Like I said: I've had my work deleted or reverted once too many times to bother anymore. It's not an issue of pet page but a general feeling of "fuck this shit, I'm outta here."
Things are not made better by endlessly adding to them. Do you think when a director shoots a movie that he includes every last take and scene he shot in the final product? No. In order to create a good body of written work things need to be taken out. This applies to articles and to the encyclopedia as a whole.
Actually, Hitchcock did just that. Not that it matters; we aren't talking about prose, we are talking about an encyclopaedia, a collection of information. An encyclopaedia is made better by adding information to it. You aren't supposed to read through it all, as you are in a novel, but only the bits that interest you.
Nope, but the average person who might be interested in him (for whatever reason) will likely find only an adequate amount of information about him and not an endless list of everything he had for breakfast throughout his entire life.
So now the criterion has changed from "not interested in the subject", as it was for WoW paladins, to "interested in the subject". Funny how that goes.
I was making a point about excessive detail in articles.
No, you said that someone who isn't a WoW player isn't interested in the abilities of WoW paladin class of certain level. Well, you're absolutely right: they won't be. I'm not, for example. However, using that as a criterion for deleting said details is foolish, since doing it consistently means deleting pretty much all information about anything; after all, few people are interested in the details of something which doesn't interest them even in general.
You're trying to compare that to an article about a minor historical figure. Two very different things.
No. Two things which might interest some people, but for most people couldn't care less. In fact I'd say that there are likely more people interested in the details of WoW gameplay than the details of the history of English church.
An article on World of Warcraft is quite appropriate. It is a notable subject. Delving into minutia with raiding strategies, item guides, etc isn't.
"Notable" is almost as ingenius as "interstate commerce" in that it can mean exactly what the editor wants it to mean. And just as the interstate commerce clause, it too is used to justify arbitrary abuse of authority. Or, as the saying goes: "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and petty power corrupts all out of proportion to actual power."
It's not really that much different to how it used to be in Europe, it's just that we had about 150 years to further develop ourselves. Sucks for current-generation Chinese, but their grandchildren can bask in luxury we won't be seeing in that age.
Nah. By then their wages are dropping and unemployment is rampant as their jobs are being shipped into the next hellhole, and its their turn to try to compete with slave labour.
Unless, of course, the Chinese are smarter than us and erect and keep toll barriers to protect their economy. But then again, I'd imagine that corporations will be in charge of that country too by then.
If only it was satire. But that's what all the crap about being "competitive" really means. When someone says that American companies can't compete because of unions... Well, it's because unions disallow the use of slave labour. In order to be competitive American companies need to get rid of unions, so American workers can also be treated like this.
Take a good, long look at those chinese: in a globalized world, that's your future prospects./p
Except wikipedia doesn't believe it belongs on wikipedia, it is why it is taken down.
Wikipedia, not being a living being, is utterly unable to believe anything. Some deletionist scum, on the other hand, can only get it up by exercising petty power by deciding what article stays and what goes. It's the closest the ever get to wielding power over life and death (I hope).
This is why I no longer contribute to Wikipedia and resist the impulse to correct any mistakes I notice: the reward is having my work deleted or reverted by some antisocial cretin who got kicked out from the Neo-Nazi party due to his excessive authoritarianism and has no other outlets for his resulting frustrations.
Mod me flamebait, it doesn't change the truth.
Articles are meant to provide all the information the average person would find useful about a subject.
Today's featured article is about Thomas Cranmer, a archbishop of Canterbury in the early 1500's. The average person is unlikely to find that information at all useful for any purpose.
Someone who is not a world of warcraft player, which is something 99.998% of the population of the world, doesn't remotely care what spells some paladin gets access to at level 27.
Someone who isn't a historian, which is something 99.998% of the population of the world, doesn't remotely care about who led a subset of English church half a millennium ago.
It isn't remotely useful to their understanding of the subject.
It's still high enough that it's unlikely that significant debris from the collision could de-orbit that quickly - which was the point.
If two satellites collide in orbit and turn into an expanding cloud of debris, then a significant part of that debris - a bit under half, actually - is going to hit the Earth soon, on the account of expanding into the atmosphere. The part of the cloud expanding backwards relative to the direction of the orbit is also going to at least lower its orbit if not fall outright, since it has essentially lost orbital speed. The part expanding upwards has entered a highly elliptical orbit which may or may not intersect the atmosphere at its lowest point (which is lower than the original orbit of the satellite(s)). The only parts of the cloud that are pretty much guaranteed to not hit the Earth anytime soon are the parts expanding forward and to the sides.
From a few tons of colliding satellite? Seriously?
Well, a passing truck causes the ground to vibrate, which is technically an earthquake, for some definitions of earthquake. For that matter, an ant crawling causes a tiny earthquake every time it lowers one of its legs.
Oh dear, someone doesn't have a well tuned sense of scale methinks.
Luckily, any mistake can be corrected by liberal use of pedantry and redefinition of words;).
Security is really just a defensive state. It represents safety from the outside "world". A gated community can only have an increase in security if it actually provides additional barriers to damage or loss from outside individuals or actions.
And that's the problem right there, the word "outside". A gated community large enough to be cost-effective is also large enough to contain its own set of villains. And of course, the bigger the community, the more traffic there's going to be between it and the outside, making it impractical to perform security checks on everyone and everything entering.
And let's not forget that the very existence of gates screams "rob me", both because it implies that the people living there are rich and because it reeks of elitism, which makes it easier to justify screwing them over. After all, it's always easier to do nasty things to someone who isn't one of us.
The fact that somebody said something that sounded wise and has a nice ring to it doesn't mean we all have to blindly live by it, or that it is "correct".
You mean that "a witty saying proves nothing" ?-)
However, in this case, the saying is correct. Giving power to an authority figure will usually result in that authority figure abusing said power to the detriment of the fool who gave it to him. In this particular case that's pretty much guaranteed. Mr. Markoff is talking about removing the very feature which makes the Internet so valuable: free communication of arbitrary data between any two participants. Remove that and you don't have the Internet anymore, you have a shopping mall.
What? I've heard Larmarck's evolutionary ideas ridiculed but villified?
He wasn't that unscientific. He was just wrong.
Actually he was right. You inherited your native language from your parents and will pass it on to your children, but don't have any English/Spanish/Mandarin/whatever genes. Language is an inheritable acquired trait, as is all culture.
Or are you thinking of Lysenko? Now that particular advocate of inherited-acquired-characteristics was indeed a villain, a lousy scientist and a political tool.
From what I've heard of him, it seems likely that he was simply insane in the sees-things way, and used as a tool by Stalin's regime.
It could be one day possible to create a kind of device that harmonizes human beings early on in childhood development, increasing their awareness and understandings.
Maybe, but this study doesn't indicate that. It's far more likely that the parent rodents, who's behaviour had been altered by their conditioning (how else could the scientists know their memory had been altered?) simply altered the childhood conditions their offspring. That is, of course, passing on an acquired trait, but so is culture.
You should be aware that acronyms must be capitalized in English.
The general rule seems to be that acronyms are capitalized if the individual words they are made up of would be capitalized. They can also be capitalized for effect. However, your assertion that they "must" be capitalized is clearly nonsensical: who would have the authority to make such a rule, the power to enforce it, and nothing better to do with either?
Furthermore, it is quite ironic that you failed to capitalize your first sentence in a post complaining about capitalization in another person's post. So stfu.
It's called "The Pirate Bay". That is a clear expression of an intent to index material related to piracy.
Of course, just like the Pirate Party is fighting to reduce the scope of copyright.
It is positively mind-boggling that you can take such a clear statement of intent to aid and abet copyright infringement, and somehow conclude that they had a noble goal of protecting freedom of speech or some such.
Aiding people to circumvent unjust laws is a noble goal.
TPB is about piracy. It's nothing to do with avoiding censorship; the sole purpose of the site is to help people infringe copyright.
Copyright is about censorship. The MPAA's campaign to keep the so-called "illegal integer", 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0, off the Net is a clear example of that. The whole DeCSS mess was even better.
There may well be a loophole in Swedish law that makes this activity legal there, but that's a separate question, and will shortly be answered by the court hearing this case.
Not all features of law which benefit the people rather than the corporations are loopholes. Some of them might actually exist because of the quaint notion that governments exist to serve all of their living, breathing citizens, rather than the few billionaires and their companies. I know, I know, it's unthinkably idealistic, and will undoubtedly be fixed as part of the inevitable slide towards another Dark Age and World War III we are currently experiencing, but for now, it exists.
Biodegradable is a scam. You will still find meat on the bone of a chicken 50 years if you pack it in an anaerobic environment.
And if you toss it to the roadside, it'll be gone in a few days.
The point of biodegradable materials isn't that they'll rot in a landfill. The point of biodegradable materials is that when some cretin litters, the garbage won't accumulate to the point of turning the forest/roadside/ocean into another landfill.
I mean, really: you can just burn the current crop of plastics. They're basically solid forms of oil. And it's just a matter of time before some bacteria appear which can eat them. There are plants which can eat solid granite, plastics aren't that much harder.
Well its more like digital showing flawless quality where analogue would show some fuzz, but too much fuzz and digital dies completely where as analogue still shows something.
In my experience, it's more like digital showing perfect where analogue shows perfect, and having huge artefacts where analogue would show a single wrong pixel.
Its better than analogue if you dont have a strong signal, but you still have enough.
Actually, given a strong signal, analogue is better. Digital TV is compressed with a lossy algorithm, which always leads to some deterioration in picture quality.
I'm all for total contractual freedom. If I can do something, why can't I contract to do it?
However, we shouldn't see contracts, and legal obligations, as anything "special". Certainly not something we are morally obliged to follow into certain personal ruin over an unseen loophole.
You can already sign any kind of contracts you wish. However, only some of them are legally binding. Total contractual freedom means that all of them, including those which are clearly abusive, are legally binding.
Under total contractual freedom, if a contract you've signed has an unseen loophole, you're out of luck; it is legally binding nonetheless and you are forced by law and the legal system to follow it to the letter, even into certain personal ruin. So you need to either rethink either of your positions here, or clarify what you mean.
So why would you do otherwise if I came to you with a sheet of paper, with a bunch of semi-latin text on it, claiming to own your child because of your failure to promptly pay your parking ticket?
It's not a question of what I believe, it's a question of what the judge believes. However, in this particular case, I couldn't sell my child even under total contractual freedom, since I don't own my children in the first place, I'm merely their guardian. It might be possible to sign a contract on a child's behalf selling itself to slavery, thought.
An abusive relationship is such, regardless of how it's justified. There's only one good end for slavers - death. Properly applied this is the other branch of libertarian government- the personal realization of the right to proactive self-defense. It balances the rabid capitalism aspect you're familiar with.
Problem is that the rabid capitalist aspect doesn't really leave you any chance to defend yourself against those who are better at it than you are. The main problem with unregulated capitalism is that it is far easier to earn capital once you already have it, which results in magnification of any wealth differences to huge levels; and since wealth is a form of power, that too is concentrated. When this is coupled with hands-off social policy from the government, allowing those with power to wield it with minimal oversight, the end result is feudalism.
The ironic thing here is that I actually agree with libertarians about the goal: maximum personal freedom. I simply don't think that it can be achieved without sufficient economic controls to ensure that the rich don't abuse their power, and that the poor don't need to fear starvation.
And the good end for slavers is to force them to apologize on their knees, then have them make restitutions to the best of their abilities, and finally allow them to build another business while being kept an eye on.
Strangely, potential muggers and the usual feral crazies don't even seem to notice me when I'm riding my bike through the city. They gaze through you like you're transparent, I don't know why. I just assume because you're not looking like their usual victims their hunting reflexes aren't activated. Or they just know that they cannot catch you neither at the stoplight nor anywhere else.
Speaking of crazy, you're either just that - paranoid, to be exact - or trolling. Just where do you live? No place in Western Europe I've ever been to has been anything like what you describe, so go on: where is this hellhole you speak of?
i've only used postgresql in production on one project, but have seen no production hangs.
I use PostgreSQL on desktop machine to store two databases with the total size of about 60 gigabytes, and have never seen hangs or other problems. However, vacuuming (a PostgreSQL-specific database maintenance operation) causes some slowdown for the rest of the machine due to heavy IO combined with the fact that I'm typically using over a gigabyte of swap.
If "key/value" databases do become more popular, they certainly might eat in to relational database mindshare.
A "key/value" database is simply a relational database with a single table and two columns. It doesn't make any sense to build a separate server program for what current database servers can already easily do.
90% of web applications use RDMSs merely as persistent data storage--the fact that they are "relational" doesn't matter at all; the fact that a separate SQL language is needed to get the data (rather than using language-native data structures as an interface) is even a negative for RDMs.
I'm a bit uncertain what you're saying here. Surely the fact that the server can do more than what you need doesn't hinder your program? The same goes for SQL language; surely the fact that commands sent to the database are text strings isn't a negative? In any case, you can (and probably should) separate database access into a module of its own, offering whatever API you desire for the rest of the program.
As a web app developer, I'm excited that something other than SQL is getting attention. RDMSs won't go away because they have properties data miners, for example, need. But they aren't ideal for the simple persistent data stores most apps call for.
However, they can handle such data stores in a very simple fashion. A pair of "setvalue(key, value) / getvalue(key)" is trivially easy to implement on top of SQL language. It just doesn't make sense to pour resources into developing a less capable database server.
Slashdot Mirror
But they are flowing, straight down the sewer. That's capitalism for you.
You are quire right. We either close our borders and re-erect toll barriers, or become equally miserable. That's why I'm against globalization.
Actually, a rock does grow, given the right conditions. Specifically, a rock exposed to supercooled rock vapour will have said vapour condense and freeze on its surface, resulting in a bigger rock.
It is not community who decides to delete a page or reverse an edit, it's an individual editor. The tendency of Wikipedia editors to take some article as their "own" and guard it jealously is infamous, and repeatedly referred in this very discussion.
Like I said: I've had my work deleted or reverted once too many times to bother anymore. It's not an issue of pet page but a general feeling of "fuck this shit, I'm outta here."
Actually, Hitchcock did just that. Not that it matters; we aren't talking about prose, we are talking about an encyclopaedia, a collection of information. An encyclopaedia is made better by adding information to it. You aren't supposed to read through it all, as you are in a novel, but only the bits that interest you.
So now the criterion has changed from "not interested in the subject", as it was for WoW paladins, to "interested in the subject". Funny how that goes.
No, you said that someone who isn't a WoW player isn't interested in the abilities of WoW paladin class of certain level. Well, you're absolutely right: they won't be. I'm not, for example. However, using that as a criterion for deleting said details is foolish, since doing it consistently means deleting pretty much all information about anything; after all, few people are interested in the details of something which doesn't interest them even in general.
No. Two things which might interest some people, but for most people couldn't care less. In fact I'd say that there are likely more people interested in the details of WoW gameplay than the details of the history of English church.
"Notable" is almost as ingenius as "interstate commerce" in that it can mean exactly what the editor wants it to mean. And just as the interstate commerce clause, it too is used to justify arbitrary abuse of authority. Or, as the saying goes: "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and petty power corrupts all out of proportion to actual power."
Why limit yourself to melee? Just get the proper software.
Nah. By then their wages are dropping and unemployment is rampant as their jobs are being shipped into the next hellhole, and its their turn to try to compete with slave labour.
Unless, of course, the Chinese are smarter than us and erect and keep toll barriers to protect their economy. But then again, I'd imagine that corporations will be in charge of that country too by then.
In global capitalism, if you aren't a millionaire you are an indentured servant. A white-collar one if you're lucky, but no less of a slave.
If only it was satire. But that's what all the crap about being "competitive" really means. When someone says that American companies can't compete because of unions... Well, it's because unions disallow the use of slave labour. In order to be competitive American companies need to get rid of unions, so American workers can also be treated like this.
Take a good, long look at those chinese: in a globalized world, that's your future prospects./p
Wikipedia, not being a living being, is utterly unable to believe anything. Some deletionist scum, on the other hand, can only get it up by exercising petty power by deciding what article stays and what goes. It's the closest the ever get to wielding power over life and death (I hope).
This is why I no longer contribute to Wikipedia and resist the impulse to correct any mistakes I notice: the reward is having my work deleted or reverted by some antisocial cretin who got kicked out from the Neo-Nazi party due to his excessive authoritarianism and has no other outlets for his resulting frustrations.
Mod me flamebait, it doesn't change the truth.
Today's featured article is about Thomas Cranmer, a archbishop of Canterbury in the early 1500's. The average person is unlikely to find that information at all useful for any purpose.
Someone who isn't a historian, which is something 99.998% of the population of the world, doesn't remotely care about who led a subset of English church half a millennium ago.
It isn't remotely useful, period.
If two satellites collide in orbit and turn into an expanding cloud of debris, then a significant part of that debris - a bit under half, actually - is going to hit the Earth soon, on the account of expanding into the atmosphere. The part of the cloud expanding backwards relative to the direction of the orbit is also going to at least lower its orbit if not fall outright, since it has essentially lost orbital speed. The part expanding upwards has entered a highly elliptical orbit which may or may not intersect the atmosphere at its lowest point (which is lower than the original orbit of the satellite(s)). The only parts of the cloud that are pretty much guaranteed to not hit the Earth anytime soon are the parts expanding forward and to the sides.
Well, a passing truck causes the ground to vibrate, which is technically an earthquake, for some definitions of earthquake. For that matter, an ant crawling causes a tiny earthquake every time it lowers one of its legs.
Luckily, any mistake can be corrected by liberal use of pedantry and redefinition of words ;).
Vista.
And that's the problem right there, the word "outside". A gated community large enough to be cost-effective is also large enough to contain its own set of villains. And of course, the bigger the community, the more traffic there's going to be between it and the outside, making it impractical to perform security checks on everyone and everything entering.
And let's not forget that the very existence of gates screams "rob me", both because it implies that the people living there are rich and because it reeks of elitism, which makes it easier to justify screwing them over. After all, it's always easier to do nasty things to someone who isn't one of us.
You mean that "a witty saying proves nothing" ?-)
However, in this case, the saying is correct. Giving power to an authority figure will usually result in that authority figure abusing said power to the detriment of the fool who gave it to him. In this particular case that's pretty much guaranteed. Mr. Markoff is talking about removing the very feature which makes the Internet so valuable: free communication of arbitrary data between any two participants. Remove that and you don't have the Internet anymore, you have a shopping mall.
Maybe, but this study doesn't indicate that. It's far more likely that the parent rodents, who's behaviour had been altered by their conditioning (how else could the scientists know their memory had been altered?) simply altered the childhood conditions their offspring. That is, of course, passing on an acquired trait, but so is culture.
The general rule seems to be that acronyms are capitalized if the individual words they are made up of would be capitalized. They can also be capitalized for effect. However, your assertion that they "must" be capitalized is clearly nonsensical: who would have the authority to make such a rule, the power to enforce it, and nothing better to do with either?
Furthermore, it is quite ironic that you failed to capitalize your first sentence in a post complaining about capitalization in another person's post. So stfu.
Of course, just like the Pirate Party is fighting to reduce the scope of copyright.
Aiding people to circumvent unjust laws is a noble goal.
Copyright is about censorship. The MPAA's campaign to keep the so-called "illegal integer", 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0, off the Net is a clear example of that. The whole DeCSS mess was even better.
Not all features of law which benefit the people rather than the corporations are loopholes. Some of them might actually exist because of the quaint notion that governments exist to serve all of their living, breathing citizens, rather than the few billionaires and their companies. I know, I know, it's unthinkably idealistic, and will undoubtedly be fixed as part of the inevitable slide towards another Dark Age and World War III we are currently experiencing, but for now, it exists.
And if you toss it to the roadside, it'll be gone in a few days.
The point of biodegradable materials isn't that they'll rot in a landfill. The point of biodegradable materials is that when some cretin litters, the garbage won't accumulate to the point of turning the forest/roadside/ocean into another landfill.
I mean, really: you can just burn the current crop of plastics. They're basically solid forms of oil. And it's just a matter of time before some bacteria appear which can eat them. There are plants which can eat solid granite, plastics aren't that much harder.
In my experience, it's more like digital showing perfect where analogue shows perfect, and having huge artefacts where analogue would show a single wrong pixel.
Actually, given a strong signal, analogue is better. Digital TV is compressed with a lossy algorithm, which always leads to some deterioration in picture quality.
You can already sign any kind of contracts you wish. However, only some of them are legally binding. Total contractual freedom means that all of them, including those which are clearly abusive, are legally binding.
Under total contractual freedom, if a contract you've signed has an unseen loophole, you're out of luck; it is legally binding nonetheless and you are forced by law and the legal system to follow it to the letter, even into certain personal ruin. So you need to either rethink either of your positions here, or clarify what you mean.
It's not a question of what I believe, it's a question of what the judge believes. However, in this particular case, I couldn't sell my child even under total contractual freedom, since I don't own my children in the first place, I'm merely their guardian. It might be possible to sign a contract on a child's behalf selling itself to slavery, thought.
Problem is that the rabid capitalist aspect doesn't really leave you any chance to defend yourself against those who are better at it than you are. The main problem with unregulated capitalism is that it is far easier to earn capital once you already have it, which results in magnification of any wealth differences to huge levels; and since wealth is a form of power, that too is concentrated. When this is coupled with hands-off social policy from the government, allowing those with power to wield it with minimal oversight, the end result is feudalism.
The ironic thing here is that I actually agree with libertarians about the goal: maximum personal freedom. I simply don't think that it can be achieved without sufficient economic controls to ensure that the rich don't abuse their power, and that the poor don't need to fear starvation.
And the good end for slavers is to force them to apologize on their knees, then have them make restitutions to the best of their abilities, and finally allow them to build another business while being kept an eye on.
Speaking of crazy, you're either just that - paranoid, to be exact - or trolling. Just where do you live? No place in Western Europe I've ever been to has been anything like what you describe, so go on: where is this hellhole you speak of?
"PokemonDB - keeps your operators lean and mean!" ;)
I use PostgreSQL on desktop machine to store two databases with the total size of about 60 gigabytes, and have never seen hangs or other problems. However, vacuuming (a PostgreSQL-specific database maintenance operation) causes some slowdown for the rest of the machine due to heavy IO combined with the fact that I'm typically using over a gigabyte of swap.
A "key/value" database is simply a relational database with a single table and two columns. It doesn't make any sense to build a separate server program for what current database servers can already easily do.
I'm a bit uncertain what you're saying here. Surely the fact that the server can do more than what you need doesn't hinder your program? The same goes for SQL language; surely the fact that commands sent to the database are text strings isn't a negative? In any case, you can (and probably should) separate database access into a module of its own, offering whatever API you desire for the rest of the program.
However, they can handle such data stores in a very simple fashion. A pair of "setvalue(key, value) / getvalue(key)" is trivially easy to implement on top of SQL language. It just doesn't make sense to pour resources into developing a less capable database server.