Don't be silly. Everyone knows LAMP stands for "Linux, Apache, Machine code, and PostgreSQL". You aren't going to tell me my hand-assembled Apache module is a bottleneck, are you?
In all likelihood, yes it is. Doing assembly by hand means that you're forced to use your time for dealing with low-level optimizations, and therefore don't as much time to perform high-level ones than you would if you'd use a higher level language.
Apart from this, a hand-assembled module myst be re-optimized for a new processor type manually, while a C one can simply be recompiled. This means that upgrading your machine doesn't neccessarily get you as much of a performance benefit than you'd get otherwise. There might be issues with upgrading Apache and PostgreSQL (and its libs) as well.
Finally, in a typical browser -> apache -> database -application the module doesn't do any heavy computing; the majority of the load is used by the database, interprocess communication between Apache and PostgreSQL, and HTTP parsing by Apache. Therefore, if you feel like doing low-level optimization, you might want to concentreate on the OS kernel - I/O scheduler is absolutely critical for database performance, after all. Also, PostgreSQL seems to be quite picky on which conditions it uses indexes or not, so checking your SQL (with the "explain" PSQL command) and optimizing it is likely to yield far greater performance benefits than hand-optimizing the middle module.
And yes, I understand that you were joking, but there's always people who think that using lower-level languages is the solution to all performance problems; just look at any story mentioning Java.
YOU GREEDY CAPITALIST PIG!!! How can you claim the safety net is being used as a hammock? You're just plain mean!
Nice strawman. As you may or may not know, there are conditions for getting social security. These conditions typically include that you:
Actively search for a job. At the minimum, you must contact your local employment office and let them know you're searching for it (so they know to offer you any jobs that come by).
Take a job when it's offered.
Not leave that job except for another job.
Of course all of this only includes jobs you're physically and mentally capable of doing; you don't lose unemployment benefits for not taking a job that includes handling substances you are allergic to.
So your idea of the social security as a hammock, as opposed to a safety net, is incorrect.
But even if it was correct, I'd still be for social security, simply because the benefits - the guarantee that I don't starve to death when I'm down on my luck - is more important to me than the downside - that I'll have to pay when I'm not down on my luck.
If you don't wnat to be shackled by it, you should try to have enough money to pay it off whenever you want, but that doesn't mean you should, pay it off.
If you do this, you can't use the money for anything (since then you can't pay back the loan), so you can as well pay it back. Unless, of course, you can get a better interest from the bank account where the money is in than the loan takes, but I'd propably still pay the debt off - the difference in interests is not going to be that much and I appreciate being debtless in principle. It's much too easy to get too clever and get a nasty surprise...
What happens when such an electric field intersects a conductor?
When an electromagnetic wave (which is what the parent described and I assume you meant) intersects a conducter, in induces a alternating current in it. This current corresponds to the wave, which in turn corresponds to the original electric disturbance which created it.
This is how radio and (air-wave) television work. And mobile phones, walkie-talkies, and some remote controls (the ones with an antenna sticking out of them; the ones with a diode use infrared, which is also electromagnetic radiation but is usually generated and received somewhat differently).
Look, Edison, the currents in the article have electric fields, as do all currents, DC included. As I noted, as I cited. I said there are fields, you said "no, just currents", which is wrong. Pack it in.
Actually, the current doesn't have an electric field. The individual charged particles who's movement the current is do (altought the fields propably end up cancelling each other out), but the fact that they're moving doesn't make the field any different than if they were staying still (but it does cause a magnetic field to appear).
Now, the reason these particles are moving is likely that there's an electric field (potential difference) in the area they happen to be located in, and it causes a force to act on them (but it could also be a changing magnetic field - that's why moving a magnet next to a wire inducts a current in the wire, and is how generators work); but that field is the cause and not a result of the current (and in fact the current flows in such a direction as to lessen the potential difference and therefore destroy the field), so saying that the current has an electric field is misleading at the very least.
The Mitochondria of the Cells (Energy Power house of the cells) are small DC motors and their efficiency goes up if their magnets are stronger.
You had me going up to this point. How about the rest of you ?
And shame on the people who moderated this "Interesting", apparently not even noticing anything odd with this passage:
. Since 1799 it has been known that transmutation (fusion for you physics types) is done in living things. Chickens in Wales were found putting out more Calcium than they were eating. This has since been validated extensively including 2 Nobel Prizes and work done by the US Army and by the French nuclear agency. The mitochondria of the cells does this transmutation. This means that they are small particle accelerators with microscopic "Wiggler" magnet sets.
You really didn't notice anything strange with this ?
Thank goodness for statutory damages. If people can't do the 'time', they shouldn't be doing the crime.
Have you ever broken any laws ? Such as, say, jaywalked, littered, called someone nasty names (libel) ? You haven't ? So you have every law of every place you've ever been to memorized, since you can't possibly know this otherwise ?
We have enough laws nowadays that everyone - yes, including you reading this - is guaranteed to have broken at least some of them. Consequently, the saying "don't do the crime if you can't do the time", which was originally just a particularly callous justification for unjustly hard punishments, is nowadays also plain stupid: you condemn yourself every time you say it.
The more unjust the most unjust law comes, the less respect all law holds. That is the real reason why crime rates are so high.
Dear Slashdot: if you want to be able to freely use others' intellectual properties that have not been released to the public, your target is the legislature, not the judiciary. You'll lose every time in court, and rightfully so.
It doesn't matter if what you're doing is legal, if you don't have the money to defend yourself in a court. The only hope we have is that the Mafia decides the MPAA is infringing on their business model of extorting "protection" money. Wouldn't particularly surprise me to find out that the latter is a branch of the former, thought, since the methods sure are similar.
It's definitely better to invest into a sane defense-system so the fucking US will not try to pull a "democratization" on them or suddenly decides that terrorists are hiding there.
Having nuclear missiles to deter other people who have nuclear missiles from attacking is known as the "MAD" defense. The "SANE" defense means using a Linux laptop / handheld scanner -combination to conduct industrial and military espionage. The laptops need to run Linux since the system must be able to conceal the scanned data from examination, and only an open source system gives enough flexibility to do that reliably.
Anyway, I quite agree that USA's talk about "Axis of Evil" and "War on Terror" as well as the Iraq war (when North Korea has not been attacked) certainly do make it clear that the only guarantee against American invasion is a strong missile system.
Write a message in clouds (yes, that's a big jump), for example? Think of the advertising opportunities!
AARRGGHH!!!
So, it isn't enough that every square centimeter of every wall is full of flashing, blinking, annoying crap that tries to make me buy something; now I can't even watch the sky without some moronic vitamin supplement ad getting in the way ?
Or, once script kiddies get to the wave generators, goatse clouds. Hmm... Now that I think of it, maybe they could put the goatse cloud somewhere it fits - like, say, mooning the House of Representatives, to give them a fitting reward for their work ?
Advertising. Google Earth + 80% of the world's surface being water == The One Quadzillion Droplet Homepage.
If my morning coffee starts showing advertizements to me, someone is going to get hurt. The damn ad pollution is already bad enough, we don't need any more.
This might be true, but I think you are preaching a dengerous message. Debt is not evil.
But it is very, very, very dangerous.
I would love to borrow money at 4.5% and stick it into a CD at 5.25% (obviously this is a somewhat contrived example, but using CDs with guaranteed return is really the only way to make my point clear -- but the point holds for expected value calculations).
No, it does not. It only holds for guaranteed return and guaranteed interest rate (both loan and return). If the return isn't guaranteed, or the interest rate of the loan is not guaranteed to not rise, you run the risk of bankrupty - assuming that you can't pay the loan back even after losing your investment, of course, but if you can, why not invest that money in the first place and get an even higher total return when you don't have to pay interest for the loan ?
If people listened to you, we'd have no millionaires because no one would ever invest in (new) businesses.
This is rubbish. A new business is typically started by selling stock to investors. The new company is not initially at dept - it got money by selling stock, which represents potential future earnings - and neither are the investors - they paid for the stock with their saved money. What part of this process breaks apart if no one takes debt ?
The big boys have been borrowing money, where it is around zero interest rates, then buying up bonds and other instruments at higher percentages, then selling them.
A wonderfull tactic which lead to the Great Depression (and indirectly to the Second World War, since the depression helped Hitler rise to power) and the suicides of the "big boys".
You see, when your invest borrowed money, if the value of that investment starts going down you'll have to sell it or risk losing the money - a risk you can't take if the money isn't really yours. If you your portfolio is diverse enough you can risk losing one or two investments, since the profits from the others will pay for that - but if the whole economy does badly...
No, borrowing money to invest is a risk. It might be neccessary to get a new company started, for example, but doing it continuously means that you will get burned sooner or later. It doesn't matter for banks and other such financial institutions (a bank pays interest to your account because you are basically borrowing money to the bank which will then invest it, usually by lending it out) since they are just tools for making money and a tool breaking is acceptable; but it sure will matter to you when it happens.
If the world doesnt end, you'll be broke but alive.
Only if you forgot the first rule of investing: Never invest more than you can afford to lose. If you follow that rule, you won't go broke from investing, no matter how badly your investment does.
Besides, I don't think that the booze sellers will go bankrupt even if the world doesn't end. Even if everyone else sobers up, the investors who ignored the First Rule will keep them afloat;)...
Just out of curiosity, do you ever post messages on wsj.com (Wall St Journal) or Yahoo Finance asking what CAS latency settings to use when overclocking your RAM???:-p
Here's another question: If you post a question "How should I invest my money" into a forum populated by businesspeople, are they likely to recommend what's best for you or what's best for them ? In other words, are they going to give you honest investing tips or are they going to try to simply get your money ? And how will you tell the two apart ?
No, a newbie investor with money should not ask "How should I spend it" from other investors, he should sit back and watch there they spend theirs.
Eventually there will come a bacteria that we cannot kill, even with the strongs antibiotics. We'll be able to wash it off our hands, but once it is inside us it'll be between our immune system and the bacteria.
The question is, can the guarantine it ?
Lots of older folk and young kids will die. Suddenly that house investment will crash on you as the market will have dried up.
Actually, increased child mortality tends to increase, not decrease, the population growth rate. The reason is that people will make more of them to make sure that at least one survives until adulthood. This, in turn, means that there's going to be a huge housing boom in the future - the larger families need bigger houses, and once the children have grown, they too need homes.
And don't forget the inevitable flight to the countryside that starts when the superbug starts spreading.
As long as people insist that their doctor prescribe antibiotics for their virus,
IMHO giving in to such demands should be a capital offense, as should not taking the whole prescription of antibiotics, since both endanger every human in the planet.
And, just to clarify: I don't think people should be forced to take antibiotics, but if they begin taking an antibiotic prescription, they do have an obligation to take it to the finish, since doing otherwise endangers other people's lives. In other words, you can do it or don't, but you can't leave it half-finished.
Why pay rent when your morgtage and tax money are close to the same amount, except in the end you own the house and can sell it for at least a decent down payment on a better one.
Because you don't really own it if you have even a single cent of debt. Remember, the debtor's property rights trump yours. What's worse, you can't simply walk out from debt, while you can walk out from a rented apartment - which means that if you become unemployed, or need to move somewhere else (to get a new job, for example) you are in it deep.
Never take any debt if you can avoid it; always pay with cash; if you can't pay with cash, ask yourself if you really need the thing right now. Debt is a risk - you may not be able to pay it back - and a shackle - you must keep on paying it until it's all paid out. Paying with cash means that you have less opportunities for investments, since you don't have as much available cash; but it also means that you have much more freedom to act in unexpected circumstances.
Add to the above the concepts "interest" and "interest on interest" and it's clear that debt is not worth the risk. And if you still need further prove, consider this: Why did your debtor lend the money to you ? Surely, if you can invest the money in ways that exceed the interest of the debt, he could as well. This is an especially good question when the debtor is a bank or some other financial institution which can consult financial experts; you are not likely to know better than they do.
To GenKreton: Taking loan to save your own money was stupid. Loans must be paid back with interest. You'd been better off living out of your own money and only borrowing money if you actually needed it.
The downside is that if something goes wrong, the repairs come out of your own wallet, but remember that landlords are making a profit by renting to you, and they have mortgage, taxes, insurance and repairs to worry about as well.
The people who sell the houses are presumably making a profit as well, and a greater one than if they simply rented them out. Either that or they are doing it from the goodness of their hearts, which, since they are usually corporations and therefore have no heart, is not very likely.
National sovereignty is no match of the power of the globalized economy. And national governments of a lot of countries have already proved that they pass whatever legislation the US asks of them.
It would take the revival of nationalism to restore nation-states to their proper place as an instrument capable and willing of protecting their citizens from the predations of global corporations and foreign governments. But unfortunately nationalism lead to militariaism the last time, so now everyone is too scared to try it again.
And perhaps they are right to fear it, but all I know is that the US government passes bad laws that affect me without me being able to do anything about them, thanks to the spineless cretins who hold power here and use it to ensure they get a good retirement, even if no one else will...
So no, national sovereignty doesn't mean anything nowadays. There are no sovereign nations, just different markets.
what will they use to enforce this on a servers hosted outside the US ?? an ICBM ?
Why not ? Better that the child burns in nuclear fire than sees someones titties. And the surviving children will be too busy watching the fireworks on TV to think of sex either, the little deviants.
Show the hero shooting someone with a machine gun - PG. Show the hero fucking someone - AO. Show the hero's and hero's girlfriends kid walking in on them - DIE YOU PERVERT !!! This despite the latter two being far more common than the first in everyday life...
Every culture has topics that it has problems dealing with rationally, and sex happens to be that for the US.
Anyone who includes misleading "words" or "images" intended to confuse a minor into viewing a possibly harmful Web site...
I hilited the key word there, "intended".
I draw retouch with a computer and render with 3D-software erotic images as a hobby and because it provides sufficient motivation to scale the Himalaya-like learning curve of 3D programs. They aren't good enough yet to put up anywhere, but they'll likely be someday. So, I'll likely have an erotic website someday.
When I put the pics up, where can I get a list of what specific words I'll have to avoid, and how much time do I have to update my page when the word list changes (as it must, to keep up with the latest fads in youth culture) ? And if I happen to be on a vacation when the list changes and don't get back before the deadline, and get charged, is the difference between walking free and spending 20 years in the jail whether the judge happens to like my face or not - because I don't think he can read my intentions from my mind, even if he is honest and not drunk on power or on some kind of personal crusade against filthy porn ?
Disclaimer: I don't live in the USA, but you know as well as I do that the rest of the world is going to copy this bad law, just like they did the US-style copyright laws.
That said, this is one of those laws that can really lead to problems as you can imagine all sorts of "legit" uses of various words (Barbie, Ken, toys, dream house) on a porn site. But again, I think if the webmasters make a reasonable attempt to make it clear that the 12" action figure you are about to see refers to all of Ken, or just a specific part, then the site should be ok.
No, this leads to problems for everyone who's website acknowledges the existence of human sexuality. Ironically, it has the potential of increasing the profits of for-pay porn sites, since they can afford to hire people to keep watching the wordlist for changes, and are at least somewhat shielded from personal responsibility by incorporation; it's the free sites that are going to be hit by this.
This is an extraordinarily stupid idea for a law, even for the US congress.
Saying that techs should make all the decisions is of course unrealistic, but in a sane company the management lets them evaluate the solutions before deciding.
Why ? Think about it from the management's point of view. The choices they face are:
Listen to the your tech department and make a decision based on their (hopefully realistic) estimate. The company continues steadily onward and you get fired since you didn't manage to improve it, and therefore the stock doesn't rise enough to meet the stockholder's demands.
Listen to claims you know full well are sweet lies and make estimates based on them. The company gets a hopelessly overoptimistic estimate on its future fortunes, the stock price goes up, and you get a fat bonus. When the lie is found out, you can claim that you were lied to and can't be blamed for anything.
Which one should a sane manager choose ? Getting fired or getting a bonus ?
Actually I think they'll be both trumped by the project affiliated with the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Of course in some circles he is venerated as the Buoyant Spaghetti Deity; hence, OpenBSD.
Hah ! The true form of the BSD mascot is well known. This proves that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is an evil plot ! Just look at the sauce for further evidence - it's clearly the color of blood, so eating spaghetti is equivalent to cannibalism !
But the meatballs... The meatballs... That means that they are made of...
Do realize though that this "mostly clean" waste it produces is stored underground, and is highly radioactive.
Since I stated that the waste is buried beneath the bedrock, I think it's safe to assume that I understand that it's stored underground;).
What happens when the shielding on its casing decays, or a seismic shift ruptures the storage facility?
The shielding is a few hundred meters of rock, so it will take a while to decay. And there is plenty of stable rock around the world - don't put the darn thing near a geologically active area. Finally, while bad things can happen with nuclear power, bad things are happening with coal and oil constantly, killing at the very least thousands of people each year - that's just from emissions, not from accidents.
Besides, even if some catastrophe tore open the burial place, we are still talking about heavy solid or liquid substances on the bottom of a hundred-meter chasm. They aren't going to fly out of there on their own, so you can simply reseal the chasm. Naturally you don't want to place a nuclear dumping ground underneath a habitated area, but neither do you want to place any other kind of dumping ground or power plant there.
What happens to the ground water around the facility, which feeds the local plant and animal life, which we may eat and we do drink water?
A hundred meters of solid granite is surprisingly good at keeping water from getting to the surface. Especially if you make the walls of the burial chamber from rustproof steel or some other suitable matter.
As for nuclear-powered rockets, ARE YOU MAD? Imagine for an instant Colombia was nuclear-powered.
Well, since a nuclear-powered rocket has enough raw power to make a powered landing, as opposed to dropping from the orbit like a meteor, and doesn't need to save weight everywhere it can, meaning that it can be built with lots of safety margins everywhere, I'd say that if the shuttle was nuclear-powered, Colombia would have landed safely and been carted to receive repairs - assuming it had been damaged in the first place, since, like I said, a nuclear-powered rocket could have a lot stronger structure - while the crew went to their homes.
Instead, Colombia was chemically-powered, and operating with almost no safety margin, so it blew up as soon as something went wrong, killing everyone onboard and spewing dangerous chemicals over the whole area.
Now imagine the radioactive material being spread over much of the US, also being carried world-wide by air currents.
Hmm... A few tens of kilograms of radiactive material, spread over millions of square kilometers. Not healthy, of course, but hardly something to get worried about either. And propably a lot less radiactivity than is released as a byproduct of mining each year, or created in the upper atmosphere by solar radiation, or simply background radiation.
Radiactivity is a natural occurence. Your body also has natural defenses against it. It is only when there's sufficient concentration to overwhelm those defenses when it becomes dangerous. It is good to take precautions if you have a reason to, for example if you are working in a nuclear power plant or using an x-ray machine in a continuous basis; but thinking that a single nuclear reactor is going to cause a significant amount of damage to either the US or the whole world is simply ludicrous.
Or you could simply use some of that increased weight envelope of a nuclear-powered spaceship to put a proper steel casing around the radiactive materials of the engine, keeping them from spreading anywhere. Colombia was broken, not powdered, in the accident.
And finally, you could simply locate the launch site farther from the densely populated areas. Si
When the next step depends on the success of the previous step, you must check the return value of that previous step. Otherwise your code will behave erraneously and possibly even make the end user switch providers.
C)Nuclear is dangerous, and has far more dangerous (though more manageable) pollution.
I'm going to make a wild guess and state that, in all likelihood, nuclear power has killed or seriously or otherwise harmed far less people than fossil fuel per megawatt produced, even if you count the direct and indirect victims of nuclear weapons and weapon tests against nuclear power.
In terms of pollution, the very thought of comparing constant smog in every major city against a few tons of solid or liquid nuclear waste, buried beneath bedrock for the next few thousands of years at least, is ridiculous.
Uranium is dangerous. Breathing oil fumes is dangerous. Coal dust is not healthy either. Which is easiest to contain and handle, a solid metal, a highly flammable liquid, or a highly flammable powder ?
I'm really starting to hate the various enviromental groups that want to keep me from sucking up carsinogens and other poisons from coal- and oil-burning power plants, when there's a nearly completely clean alternative. All this because of the Chernobyl accident (the worst accident in the history of nuclear power (the kind of which is impossible with modern reactor designs) killed a whopping 47 people and is estimated to kill 4000 from increased cancer rates - compare this to the 100 000 who are estimated to die in Europe from power plant micro-particle emissions alone (sorry, don't have reference for that)), the apparent inability to understand the difference between a nuclear power plant and a nuclear bomb, and the strange believe that "God created the atoms and they weren't meant to be broken" (which is clearly nonsense since they uranium is a radiactive material and decays on its own without any human intervention - and yes, this is an argument that I've actually heard being used seriously).
Or, to be more exact: I support enviromentalism as in "Let's make sure we don't have to start wearing gas masks when we go out and can see plants and animals besides museums and zoos". The "enviromentalists" who are against nuclear power (and windmils, since they are "unnatural" and "spoil the view") are the biggest obstacle for meeting that goal, since it is not only illogical to simultaneously demand lessening pollution and demand that non-polluting power plants aren't built, and because such illogical demands make all enviromentalists seem like a bunch of hysterical idiots without capacity for clear thought.
Oh, and we need nuclear rockets to make cheap space travel a reality. Chemical rockets can't do that, the amount of impulse needed to reach orbit makes that certain.
Slashdot Mirror
In all likelihood, yes it is. Doing assembly by hand means that you're forced to use your time for dealing with low-level optimizations, and therefore don't as much time to perform high-level ones than you would if you'd use a higher level language.
Apart from this, a hand-assembled module myst be re-optimized for a new processor type manually, while a C one can simply be recompiled. This means that upgrading your machine doesn't neccessarily get you as much of a performance benefit than you'd get otherwise. There might be issues with upgrading Apache and PostgreSQL (and its libs) as well.
Finally, in a typical browser -> apache -> database -application the module doesn't do any heavy computing; the majority of the load is used by the database, interprocess communication between Apache and PostgreSQL, and HTTP parsing by Apache. Therefore, if you feel like doing low-level optimization, you might want to concentreate on the OS kernel - I/O scheduler is absolutely critical for database performance, after all. Also, PostgreSQL seems to be quite picky on which conditions it uses indexes or not, so checking your SQL (with the "explain" PSQL command) and optimizing it is likely to yield far greater performance benefits than hand-optimizing the middle module.
And yes, I understand that you were joking, but there's always people who think that using lower-level languages is the solution to all performance problems; just look at any story mentioning Java.
Nice strawman. As you may or may not know, there are conditions for getting social security. These conditions typically include that you:
Of course all of this only includes jobs you're physically and mentally capable of doing; you don't lose unemployment benefits for not taking a job that includes handling substances you are allergic to.
So your idea of the social security as a hammock, as opposed to a safety net, is incorrect.
But even if it was correct, I'd still be for social security, simply because the benefits - the guarantee that I don't starve to death when I'm down on my luck - is more important to me than the downside - that I'll have to pay when I'm not down on my luck.
If you do this, you can't use the money for anything (since then you can't pay back the loan), so you can as well pay it back. Unless, of course, you can get a better interest from the bank account where the money is in than the loan takes, but I'd propably still pay the debt off - the difference in interests is not going to be that much and I appreciate being debtless in principle. It's much too easy to get too clever and get a nasty surprise...
When an electromagnetic wave (which is what the parent described and I assume you meant) intersects a conducter, in induces a alternating current in it. This current corresponds to the wave, which in turn corresponds to the original electric disturbance which created it.
This is how radio and (air-wave) television work. And mobile phones, walkie-talkies, and some remote controls (the ones with an antenna sticking out of them; the ones with a diode use infrared, which is also electromagnetic radiation but is usually generated and received somewhat differently).
Actually, the current doesn't have an electric field. The individual charged particles who's movement the current is do (altought the fields propably end up cancelling each other out), but the fact that they're moving doesn't make the field any different than if they were staying still (but it does cause a magnetic field to appear).
Now, the reason these particles are moving is likely that there's an electric field (potential difference) in the area they happen to be located in, and it causes a force to act on them (but it could also be a changing magnetic field - that's why moving a magnet next to a wire inducts a current in the wire, and is how generators work); but that field is the cause and not a result of the current (and in fact the current flows in such a direction as to lessen the potential difference and therefore destroy the field), so saying that the current has an electric field is misleading at the very least.
Anonymous Edison is right and you are wrong.
You had me going up to this point. How about the rest of you ?
And shame on the people who moderated this "Interesting", apparently not even noticing anything odd with this passage:
You really didn't notice anything strange with this ?
Have you ever broken any laws ? Such as, say, jaywalked, littered, called someone nasty names (libel) ? You haven't ? So you have every law of every place you've ever been to memorized, since you can't possibly know this otherwise ?
We have enough laws nowadays that everyone - yes, including you reading this - is guaranteed to have broken at least some of them. Consequently, the saying "don't do the crime if you can't do the time", which was originally just a particularly callous justification for unjustly hard punishments, is nowadays also plain stupid: you condemn yourself every time you say it.
The more unjust the most unjust law comes, the less respect all law holds. That is the real reason why crime rates are so high.
It doesn't matter if what you're doing is legal, if you don't have the money to defend yourself in a court. The only hope we have is that the Mafia decides the MPAA is infringing on their business model of extorting "protection" money. Wouldn't particularly surprise me to find out that the latter is a branch of the former, thought, since the methods sure are similar.
Having nuclear missiles to deter other people who have nuclear missiles from attacking is known as the "MAD" defense. The "SANE" defense means using a Linux laptop / handheld scanner -combination to conduct industrial and military espionage. The laptops need to run Linux since the system must be able to conceal the scanned data from examination, and only an open source system gives enough flexibility to do that reliably.
Anyway, I quite agree that USA's talk about "Axis of Evil" and "War on Terror" as well as the Iraq war (when North Korea has not been attacked) certainly do make it clear that the only guarantee against American invasion is a strong missile system.
AARRGGHH!!!
So, it isn't enough that every square centimeter of every wall is full of flashing, blinking, annoying crap that tries to make me buy something; now I can't even watch the sky without some moronic vitamin supplement ad getting in the way ?
Or, once script kiddies get to the wave generators, goatse clouds. Hmm... Now that I think of it, maybe they could put the goatse cloud somewhere it fits - like, say, mooning the House of Representatives, to give them a fitting reward for their work ?
If my morning coffee starts showing advertizements to me, someone is going to get hurt. The damn ad pollution is already bad enough, we don't need any more.
But it is very, very, very dangerous.
No, it does not. It only holds for guaranteed return and guaranteed interest rate (both loan and return). If the return isn't guaranteed, or the interest rate of the loan is not guaranteed to not rise, you run the risk of bankrupty - assuming that you can't pay the loan back even after losing your investment, of course, but if you can, why not invest that money in the first place and get an even higher total return when you don't have to pay interest for the loan ?
This is rubbish. A new business is typically started by selling stock to investors. The new company is not initially at dept - it got money by selling stock, which represents potential future earnings - and neither are the investors - they paid for the stock with their saved money. What part of this process breaks apart if no one takes debt ?
A wonderfull tactic which lead to the Great Depression (and indirectly to the Second World War, since the depression helped Hitler rise to power) and the suicides of the "big boys".
You see, when your invest borrowed money, if the value of that investment starts going down you'll have to sell it or risk losing the money - a risk you can't take if the money isn't really yours. If you your portfolio is diverse enough you can risk losing one or two investments, since the profits from the others will pay for that - but if the whole economy does badly...
No, borrowing money to invest is a risk. It might be neccessary to get a new company started, for example, but doing it continuously means that you will get burned sooner or later. It doesn't matter for banks and other such financial institutions (a bank pays interest to your account because you are basically borrowing money to the bank which will then invest it, usually by lending it out) since they are just tools for making money and a tool breaking is acceptable; but it sure will matter to you when it happens.
Only if you forgot the first rule of investing: Never invest more than you can afford to lose. If you follow that rule, you won't go broke from investing, no matter how badly your investment does.
Besides, I don't think that the booze sellers will go bankrupt even if the world doesn't end. Even if everyone else sobers up, the investors who ignored the First Rule will keep them afloat ;)...
Here's another question: If you post a question "How should I invest my money" into a forum populated by businesspeople, are they likely to recommend what's best for you or what's best for them ? In other words, are they going to give you honest investing tips or are they going to try to simply get your money ? And how will you tell the two apart ?
No, a newbie investor with money should not ask "How should I spend it" from other investors, he should sit back and watch there they spend theirs.
The question is, can the guarantine it ?
Actually, increased child mortality tends to increase, not decrease, the population growth rate. The reason is that people will make more of them to make sure that at least one survives until adulthood. This, in turn, means that there's going to be a huge housing boom in the future - the larger families need bigger houses, and once the children have grown, they too need homes.
And don't forget the inevitable flight to the countryside that starts when the superbug starts spreading.
IMHO giving in to such demands should be a capital offense, as should not taking the whole prescription of antibiotics, since both endanger every human in the planet.
And, just to clarify: I don't think people should be forced to take antibiotics, but if they begin taking an antibiotic prescription, they do have an obligation to take it to the finish, since doing otherwise endangers other people's lives. In other words, you can do it or don't, but you can't leave it half-finished.
Because you don't really own it if you have even a single cent of debt. Remember, the debtor's property rights trump yours. What's worse, you can't simply walk out from debt, while you can walk out from a rented apartment - which means that if you become unemployed, or need to move somewhere else (to get a new job, for example) you are in it deep.
Never take any debt if you can avoid it; always pay with cash; if you can't pay with cash, ask yourself if you really need the thing right now. Debt is a risk - you may not be able to pay it back - and a shackle - you must keep on paying it until it's all paid out. Paying with cash means that you have less opportunities for investments, since you don't have as much available cash; but it also means that you have much more freedom to act in unexpected circumstances.
Add to the above the concepts "interest" and "interest on interest" and it's clear that debt is not worth the risk. And if you still need further prove, consider this: Why did your debtor lend the money to you ? Surely, if you can invest the money in ways that exceed the interest of the debt, he could as well. This is an especially good question when the debtor is a bank or some other financial institution which can consult financial experts; you are not likely to know better than they do.
To GenKreton: Taking loan to save your own money was stupid. Loans must be paid back with interest. You'd been better off living out of your own money and only borrowing money if you actually needed it.
The people who sell the houses are presumably making a profit as well, and a greater one than if they simply rented them out. Either that or they are doing it from the goodness of their hearts, which, since they are usually corporations and therefore have no heart, is not very likely.
AFAIK the PCI bus is only 133 MB/second, so no, it can't. And of course the hard drive is even slower, a few tens of megabytes per second.
That said, some of us have more than one computer in our home network :).
National sovereignty is no match of the power of the globalized economy. And national governments of a lot of countries have already proved that they pass whatever legislation the US asks of them.
It would take the revival of nationalism to restore nation-states to their proper place as an instrument capable and willing of protecting their citizens from the predations of global corporations and foreign governments. But unfortunately nationalism lead to militariaism the last time, so now everyone is too scared to try it again.
And perhaps they are right to fear it, but all I know is that the US government passes bad laws that affect me without me being able to do anything about them, thanks to the spineless cretins who hold power here and use it to ensure they get a good retirement, even if no one else will...
So no, national sovereignty doesn't mean anything nowadays. There are no sovereign nations, just different markets.
Why not ? Better that the child burns in nuclear fire than sees someones titties. And the surviving children will be too busy watching the fireworks on TV to think of sex either, the little deviants.
Show the hero shooting someone with a machine gun - PG. Show the hero fucking someone - AO. Show the hero's and hero's girlfriends kid walking in on them - DIE YOU PERVERT !!! This despite the latter two being far more common than the first in everyday life...
Every culture has topics that it has problems dealing with rationally, and sex happens to be that for the US.
I draw retouch with a computer and render with 3D-software erotic images as a hobby and because it provides sufficient motivation to scale the Himalaya-like learning curve of 3D programs. They aren't good enough yet to put up anywhere, but they'll likely be someday. So, I'll likely have an erotic website someday.
When I put the pics up, where can I get a list of what specific words I'll have to avoid, and how much time do I have to update my page when the word list changes (as it must, to keep up with the latest fads in youth culture) ? And if I happen to be on a vacation when the list changes and don't get back before the deadline, and get charged, is the difference between walking free and spending 20 years in the jail whether the judge happens to like my face or not - because I don't think he can read my intentions from my mind, even if he is honest and not drunk on power or on some kind of personal crusade against filthy porn ?
Disclaimer: I don't live in the USA, but you know as well as I do that the rest of the world is going to copy this bad law, just like they did the US-style copyright laws.
No, this leads to problems for everyone who's website acknowledges the existence of human sexuality. Ironically, it has the potential of increasing the profits of for-pay porn sites, since they can afford to hire people to keep watching the wordlist for changes, and are at least somewhat shielded from personal responsibility by incorporation; it's the free sites that are going to be hit by this.
This is an extraordinarily stupid idea for a law, even for the US congress.
Why ? Think about it from the management's point of view. The choices they face are:
Which one should a sane manager choose ? Getting fired or getting a bonus ?
Hah ! The true form of the BSD mascot is well known. This proves that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is an evil plot ! Just look at the sauce for further evidence - it's clearly the color of blood, so eating spaghetti is equivalent to cannibalism !
But the meatballs... The meatballs... That means that they are made of...
Since I stated that the waste is buried beneath the bedrock, I think it's safe to assume that I understand that it's stored underground ;).
The shielding is a few hundred meters of rock, so it will take a while to decay. And there is plenty of stable rock around the world - don't put the darn thing near a geologically active area. Finally, while bad things can happen with nuclear power, bad things are happening with coal and oil constantly, killing at the very least thousands of people each year - that's just from emissions, not from accidents.
Besides, even if some catastrophe tore open the burial place, we are still talking about heavy solid or liquid substances on the bottom of a hundred-meter chasm. They aren't going to fly out of there on their own, so you can simply reseal the chasm. Naturally you don't want to place a nuclear dumping ground underneath a habitated area, but neither do you want to place any other kind of dumping ground or power plant there.
A hundred meters of solid granite is surprisingly good at keeping water from getting to the surface. Especially if you make the walls of the burial chamber from rustproof steel or some other suitable matter.
Well, since a nuclear-powered rocket has enough raw power to make a powered landing, as opposed to dropping from the orbit like a meteor, and doesn't need to save weight everywhere it can, meaning that it can be built with lots of safety margins everywhere, I'd say that if the shuttle was nuclear-powered, Colombia would have landed safely and been carted to receive repairs - assuming it had been damaged in the first place, since, like I said, a nuclear-powered rocket could have a lot stronger structure - while the crew went to their homes.
Instead, Colombia was chemically-powered, and operating with almost no safety margin, so it blew up as soon as something went wrong, killing everyone onboard and spewing dangerous chemicals over the whole area.
Hmm... A few tens of kilograms of radiactive material, spread over millions of square kilometers. Not healthy, of course, but hardly something to get worried about either. And propably a lot less radiactivity than is released as a byproduct of mining each year, or created in the upper atmosphere by solar radiation, or simply background radiation.
Radiactivity is a natural occurence. Your body also has natural defenses against it. It is only when there's sufficient concentration to overwhelm those defenses when it becomes dangerous. It is good to take precautions if you have a reason to, for example if you are working in a nuclear power plant or using an x-ray machine in a continuous basis; but thinking that a single nuclear reactor is going to cause a significant amount of damage to either the US or the whole world is simply ludicrous.
Or you could simply use some of that increased weight envelope of a nuclear-powered spaceship to put a proper steel casing around the radiactive materials of the engine, keeping them from spreading anywhere. Colombia was broken, not powdered, in the accident.
And finally, you could simply locate the launch site farther from the densely populated areas. Si
This should be:
unzip && strip && touch && finger & mount && ( ( fsck && more && yes ) ; umount ) ; sleep
When the next step depends on the success of the previous step, you must check the return value of that previous step. Otherwise your code will behave erraneously and possibly even make the end user switch providers.
I'm going to make a wild guess and state that, in all likelihood, nuclear power has killed or seriously or otherwise harmed far less people than fossil fuel per megawatt produced, even if you count the direct and indirect victims of nuclear weapons and weapon tests against nuclear power.
In terms of pollution, the very thought of comparing constant smog in every major city against a few tons of solid or liquid nuclear waste, buried beneath bedrock for the next few thousands of years at least, is ridiculous.
Uranium is dangerous. Breathing oil fumes is dangerous. Coal dust is not healthy either. Which is easiest to contain and handle, a solid metal, a highly flammable liquid, or a highly flammable powder ?
I'm really starting to hate the various enviromental groups that want to keep me from sucking up carsinogens and other poisons from coal- and oil-burning power plants, when there's a nearly completely clean alternative. All this because of the Chernobyl accident (the worst accident in the history of nuclear power (the kind of which is impossible with modern reactor designs) killed a whopping 47 people and is estimated to kill 4000 from increased cancer rates - compare this to the 100 000 who are estimated to die in Europe from power plant micro-particle emissions alone (sorry, don't have reference for that)), the apparent inability to understand the difference between a nuclear power plant and a nuclear bomb, and the strange believe that "God created the atoms and they weren't meant to be broken" (which is clearly nonsense since they uranium is a radiactive material and decays on its own without any human intervention - and yes, this is an argument that I've actually heard being used seriously).
Or, to be more exact: I support enviromentalism as in "Let's make sure we don't have to start wearing gas masks when we go out and can see plants and animals besides museums and zoos". The "enviromentalists" who are against nuclear power (and windmils, since they are "unnatural" and "spoil the view") are the biggest obstacle for meeting that goal, since it is not only illogical to simultaneously demand lessening pollution and demand that non-polluting power plants aren't built, and because such illogical demands make all enviromentalists seem like a bunch of hysterical idiots without capacity for clear thought.
Oh, and we need nuclear rockets to make cheap space travel a reality. Chemical rockets can't do that, the amount of impulse needed to reach orbit makes that certain.