Depends on your point of view. From the point of view of their (ex) development community, most of whom walked away when they fastened on to the Microsoft's teat, yup, they caved like a nun bluffing on a pair of nines.
I fail to see why this matters; the machines were not intended to give the "developer community" (whatever that is) the warm fuzzies; they were intended to help kids in underdeveloped countries get access to technology and education, and better their lives. If using Windows opens more doors for those kids (which is what some of the countries in question said), then going with Windows is the right thing to do. If that nets the OLPC project a few million from MS, so much the better: they'll be able to offer more machines to more children.
If your affirmation is right, I'll have to wonder at the values of some in the "developer community". They seem to care more about some irrelevant (and IMO stupid) political point than about helping poor kids. Not a very appealing behavior, I'd say.
But I believe having this "computer" in the living room defeats the purpose of these small, lightweight boxes that do media. Sure we can all invest in a 300-400 pc that will do all that but it's UI won't be as polished and it costs more than a PS3
But a real PC does so much more! And I think the Win 7 Media Center interface is quite good. I speak from experience here: about a year ago I added a small format PC to my media stack, and it replaced everything else: cable box, TIVO and DVD/Blu Ray player. The only other things still there are the amplifier and an older Oppo DVD player (for the occasional non US region DVDs). The PC came with a Hauppauge TV tuner card, but I added an external USB TV tuner, and the combo pretty much covers all my needs. I watch live and recorded TV, Netflix (Blu Ray/DVD) and streaming, Hulu, Amazon movies, play my high definition home movies, browse my photo collection, and also play music from my ripped CDs or from various net streams; I have not yet found anything it can't play. I use it with a Logitech Harmony remote which handles most of the functionality nicely.
For example if someone just took a promotion and is now making 201k with little accumulated wealth, I could see the argument that they are not "upper class".
OTOH, this someone will pay only 5% of $1000, or 50 bucks extra tax for the whole year. Not a back-breaker for somebody earning over 200000 bucks, whether they have any accumulated wealth or not
The fifth elephant wound up as treacle and mineral ores in Uberwald after falling off Great A'Tuin several millennia ago.
Actually, the elephant mostly wound up as fat strata, with mineral inclusions (former bones and nerves) [Headknock, Year of the Suspicious Moth]. Geologically speaking, the treacle deposits weren't part of the elephant at all; huge areas of Uberwald were at the time a marsh, where a wild ancestor of modern sugar cane grew [Hammersmith, Year of the Dizzy Anteater]. Demonochemical analysis [Ming Po-lu, Year of the Acrobatic Mussel] has shown that treacle is the end result of the slow baking process (or melbaization) of the cane biomass.
The force of the elephant's fall caused some of the muddy/sugary mixture to splash away. The splashes created the shallow treacle deposits that propelled economic development in previous centuries. Some splashes landed as far as Klatch (creating the sugary sands of Snikerstan, and the treacle glass drops known as nosebreakers) or even in the low seas bordering hubward areas of the Agathean continent (slowly dissolving treacle vents have created their own ecology, of which maybe the most interesting specimen is the Maraschino squid [Twoflower, Year of the Incontinent Water Buffalo]). The treacle mines of Ankh (now exhausted) were also created by such a minor splash.
In Uberwald most of the sugar cane was caught under the carcass of the elephant; as a result, Uberwaldian treacle deposits (whose size is estimated to be over 100 greater than all available treacle in the rest of the Discworld, [Lord Sweettooth the Lisper, Year of the Annoying Bullfrog, as revised by the Fifth Dentists' and Candymakers' Conference of Bonk, Year of the Emasculated Ant]) are deeply buried, and difficult to reach.
With a European language or something like Arabic, once you've learned the alphabet then when you learn the sound of a new word, it's usually pretty obvious how it's going to be written [...] vice versa - when you're reading a new word in a phonetic language you immediately have a good idea what it's going to sound like even if you don't yet know what it means.
Agreed; but I'll note that's also somewhat dependent on the actual language. While no European language's ortography is as bad as the Chinese one, there are differences between them. In many European languages the correspondence between the spoken and the written forms is strong - for example Italian, Spanish, or some less known ones, like Turkish, Romanian or Polish; this also applies to some non-European ones, such as Hindi. English and French are closer to the other extreme; the correspondence between spoken and written languages is much looser, with many ancient pronounciations grandfathered in, lots of exceptions, special cases, and artificial restrictions and rules. That leads to a lot of negative consequences, like increased illiteracy, significantly more time wasted in school learning ortography, language drift and spelling bees. Both languages could do with a spelling reform, dropping the accumulated dross and going phonetic.
With Mandarin it felt almost like I was learning two separate languages at the same time, spoken Mandarin and written Mandarin
FWIW, I heard the same complaint about English, from people whose native languages use phonetic writing.
And it just so happens to benefit transnational corporations tremendously
Of course, which is why they keep pushing for deregulation, reduction of vamal barriers and so on. And since they have the freedom of speech to give money to any candidate, and they have lots of money, they usually get their wishes
How do we, as citizens in the rich world, pull some benefit from this situation?
It's very easy: be a rich shareholder in one of the aforesaid corporations, and you'll benefit a lot. You can't, because you can't get a high enough paying job? Well, that's too bad, get used to it then.
If we can't, why would we allow it to continue?
Well, because if you don't vote the way the corporations need, the wrong lizard may get in!
How do you make the funny e character when typing?
If you know the code of the char, use Alt + the code typed on the numeric pad, like Alt+0233 (é)
If you don't, there is a little tool named charmap that will display the characters, and you can copy and paste individual characters (or find out what's the code)
This is not a new attack, nor is this naive suggestion a new (or good) one. It won't work, because the attacker will simply retry a number of times with the same parameters and average the random delay out.
My point is that it's another process that allows us not to pay attention to what we are doing. That lack of attention may dumb us down as we tend to be creatures of habit and laziness
Isaac Asimov had an interesting take on that - (can't find the essay, but I'll try to summarize from memory). He was reading a math textbook dating from the 18th century and he was amazed at the amount of space used for what he thought were not very relevant items in the study of mathematics. For example, a good percentage of the book consisted of laborious exercises in unit conversion between various units defined in different US states or similar calculations. The actual math was presented mostly as memorization exercises, with few demonstrations and little effort to generalize the concepts taught.
Asimov noted that a modern mathematics student wouldn't need or be expected to memorize the differences between different obscure measurennent units. He (Asimov) then built a parallel with modern-day discussions about the role of calculators in schools; his point was that the trend is towards simplification, and that this is a good thing. The sheer amount of knowledge produced by humanity grows apace. There is no reasonable way to learn all the details (be they how to convert Winchester bushels to US barrels, or how to extract a cubic root using pen and paper). While the complaint about young generations not learning the old ways is a recurring one, the new generations need to learn more than older ones, and need to simplify and externalize some details.
So it's more efficient to put up giant transmitters and blast out a signal that can be accessed clearly from the fricking moon, across a mindbogglingly wide swath of the spectrum, than it is to only send the data to the people who are requesting it?
Of course it's more efficient, for most reasonable definitions of efficient. That's why broadcast stations were developed first, long before cable systems. You don't need giant transmitters, nor do you need to broadcast to the moon (though you CAN, if you want - try doing it with cable!). Broadcast is vastly more efficient for certain ranges of applications: the infrastructure cost is fixed (the price of the broadcast stations) and doesn't change with the number of subscribers, the system scales perfectly (if your users count changes from 1000 to 1000000 overnight it JUST WORKS - you don't need to get new servers/routers/contracts with your bandwidth provider). It has theoretically infinite upper user limit. It can serve rural users even if they have no connection with the rest of the world, and it allows mobility easily.
The important thing is to understand the strengths and limitations of broadcast and point-to point systems and use each where it makes sense: broadcast is best when the same data needs to be sent to a relatively large number of users, at the same time. When you want customized data sent to many small sets of users, at different times, point to point connections are better.
To clarify, here's an example: traffic data for a city is tailor made for broadcast: it's of interest to many users, it needs to be consumed as soon as it's available (when you drive you want the most recent traffic data, not yesterday's traffic), and there is little space for customization (and whatever of it there is, it can be done client-side). On the other hand, e-mail is really bad for broadcast, since you'd use the whole tower bandwidth to send data to a single user.
Google Earth is about the most innovative I can think of
Google Earth wasn't new technology either; it's just a more webified version of the old Terraserver project at Microsoft, which had been operating for close to 8 years before Google launched Google Earth.
It is incredible to me that offending a people's faith is seen as a glorious example of free speech. When did that happen?
When is it okay to make fun of the Holocast or deny so many lives lost? When is it okay to keep offending a people when you know that it is something they hold in high esteem?
Yes, that's precisely what freedom of speech really means. Isaac Asimov had an essay, ("Untouchable", in the June 1991 edition of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine) where he explains this much better than I could hope (he was referring to the issue of flag burning, but his arguments are universal). Unfortunately this essay hasn't been reprinted, and a quick search couldn't find it on the web, so I'll try to summarize it here.
Basically, Asimov's point was that the most important meaning of freedom of speech is protection of unpopular speech (be it unpopular to the government, to powerful people, or simply to the majority). There is no need to protect popular speech - there are no negative consequences to agreeing with the ones in power. In Soviet Russia, people could agree with Stalin as much as they liked, and as loudly as they felt like. And yet, you can't call this freedom of speech, because any deviation from whatever was approved took you to the gulags.
The whole point of freedom of speech is that the unpopular, the contrary, and yes, the despicable, the disgusting and the hateful speech must be protected. This can, and does cause offense at times, providing great moron-fodder to the likes of Fox News (which is just funny, since the very existence of Fox News relies on this principle). But the principle is so valuable, so useful, and, in the end so productive that it needs to be preserved carefully. Paraphrasing Asimov: he doesn't want the flag to be burned; he likes the flag, and what it stands for. But if there was a law forbidding the burning, the flag wouldn't stand for anything anymore and it wouldn't matter what happened to it.
To return to our discussion: offending a people's faith IS free speech. Making fun of the Holocaust IS free speech. The fact that some people are offended should not be a factor. Where do we stop otherwise? Lots of people are Catholic, or like the Catholic Church. Should the journalists that discovered priests abusing children be jailed (or at least muzzled) for lack of respect to Catholics? Criticising a public figure should be forbidden as well, because it annoys his or her fans and admirers? Heck, lots of people like Santa Claus, shall we make laws forbidding the portrayal or discussion of Santa?
I believe freedom of speech is one of the most impressive founding principles of Western civilisation. While there may be limits (insert fire theater example here), the judgement should almost always err on the side of more freedom, not less.
We shouldn't be pushed away from a viable form of energy because of an incident where stupidity and poor engineering combined to form a freak-accident.
You need to weigh both the the probability of a certain outcome and its cost. It's basic risk estimation. For example: suppose every year there is a chance in ten of an accident that causes the people on a mile radius to sneeze for a day, with no other consequences, that would probably be ok. If there is a one in a billion yearly chance of an accident that completely wipes life on Earth, I'd be against it, and I'd be against it even if proponents of the project assured me all possible safety measures would be taken: the potential cost would be just too much.
The nuclear plant building discussion is just another risk estimation calculation. On one side, the probability of an accident happening, on the other its cost. As far as I know, modern nuclear plants are quite reliable, certainly much more so than the Chernobyl one. This reduces one element of the calculation by a lot. But in order to decide whether worth building one, we need to get a reasonable estimate of the cost as well, and that's why I intervened in the discussion: the GP was trying to reduce the perceived cost by distorting the facts. This is not correct.
Those are some scary statistics you have. Fortunately for us, they are entirely without merit; we're not going to have another Chernobyl. That disaster was caused by morons working in a badly built reactor doing everything exactly wrong. As long as we don't do that again, we're fine; modern nuclear safety techniques will keep that sort of shit from happening, and even if a reactor ends up manned by a bunch of monkeys, it will be designed so that there are no Chernobyl-like failure modes.
Of course, the design and operation of the Chernobyl reactor was handled by a bunch of underqualified Russians. When the designers and operators are major western companies like Transoceanic, BP or Halliburton, any worries are entirely without merit; we're not going to have another catastrophe. We know their equipment is well designed, modern oil drilling safety techniques will keep this sort of shit from happening, and even if a drilling platform ends up manned by a bunch of monkeys, it will be designed so that there are no failure modes:)
Nice use of sarcasm, BTW, almost had me going for a moment there:)
If you then show these people that (a) Zero people died because of Three Mile Island, (b) 46 firefighters died in the Cherynobyl accident, and (c) nobody died in Japan you will be branded a liar and some kind of anti-environmental kook
Well, here's what the World Health Organization says. Some significant quotes, for people who don't want to bother reading:
A large increase in the incidence of thyroid cancer has occurred among people who were young children and adolescents at the time of the accident and lived in the most contaminated areas of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine. This was due to the high levels of radioactive iodine released from the Chernobyl reactor in the early days after the accident.
In Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine nearly 5 000 cases of thyroid cancer have now been diagnosed to date among children who were aged up to 18 years at the time of the accident.
It is expected that the increased incidence of thyroid cancer from Chernobyl will continue for many years, although the long-term magnitude of the risk is difficult to quantify.
The Expert Group concluded that there may be up to 4 000 additional cancer deaths among the three highest exposed groups over their lifetime (240 000 liquidators; 116 000 evacuees and the 270 000 residents of the SCZs).
Predictions, generally based on the LNT model, suggest that up to 5000 additional cancer deaths may occur in this population [ Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine] from radiation exposure
The numbers in this report are contested by a Greenpeace study (available here). Greenpeace estimates the number of cancers attributable to the Chernobyl accident to 270000, out of which 93000 fatal.
Even ignoring the Greenpeace numbers, if you'll say only 46 people died at Chernobyl, but omit the fact that thousands more have contracted cancer as a direct consequence of the Chernobyl accident and 4000 more are expected to die of it, then you're indeed a liar and a kind of anti-environmentalist kook.
That sounds like an argument FOR learning C. How are you supposed to write efficient code if you don't understand what the computer is doing?
The real issue, at least for me, is that people don't seem to be concerned about efficiency anymore. The premium is now on fast and cheap development, and if it's wasteful, so what? Computers are cheap, let's just throw more CPU or more storage at the problem and be done. See for an egregious example the pervasiveness of XML, which must be one of the most horrible efficiency sinks ever invented.
Panspermia doesn't really answer where life comes from. It just sort of shifts the question off of Earth.
It's true, it doesn't answer where life comes from, but it's more than turtles all the way down. Shifting the question off Earth changes the question, because off Earth the conditions are different! Panspermia removes all objections related to the specific conditions of primeval Earth. If you postulate that life has appeared on Earth, your theory has to explain it given a lot of constraints: a certain chemical composition, a certain gravity, certain temperature ranges and so on. With panspermia that's not the case any more - it vastly expands the range of environments, processes, time frames and resources available for life to arise.
The BSD license allows you to take whatever *open* source that is bound by the license an make it closed.
Total bullshit. Suppose somebody downloads some source from a BSD repository. How exactly is it making the code closed? It's still available, on the same repository it was downloaded from! Or is there some magical way whereby downloading some code nukes the said repository, removes the code from public access and also deletes all the previously downloaded copies of it?
What you should have said, had you been a honest advocate, is that a downloader can choose not to distribute further the NEW code HE writes on top of the existing one, or the NEW modifications HE makes to the existing one. That choice is denied to him by the GPL, which is why the BSD license is more freedom-friendly. By formulating the issue the way you did you're intentionally confusing the new code with the one we talk about, the BSD licensed one, and just spreading FUD.
On a lot of systems smaller than a PC or a smartphone, environments like Java and.NET introduce too much system overhead. If you have 4 MB of RAM, you usually don't want to devote 3 MB of it to the runtime.
While I generally agree with you, I'd like to note that runtimes for.NET can fit in space an order of magnitude smaller than your 3 MB limit: the.NET microframework (which is open sourced under the Apache license), only needs about 300k.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on your point of view. From the point of view of their (ex) development community, most of whom walked away when they fastened on to the Microsoft's teat, yup, they caved like a nun bluffing on a pair of nines.
I fail to see why this matters; the machines were not intended to give the "developer community" (whatever that is) the warm fuzzies; they were intended to help kids in underdeveloped countries get access to technology and education, and better their lives. If using Windows opens more doors for those kids (which is what some of the countries in question said), then going with Windows is the right thing to do. If that nets the OLPC project a few million from MS, so much the better: they'll be able to offer more machines to more children.
If your affirmation is right, I'll have to wonder at the values of some in the "developer community". They seem to care more about some irrelevant (and IMO stupid) political point than about helping poor kids. Not a very appealing behavior, I'd say.
But I believe having this "computer" in the living room defeats the purpose of these small, lightweight boxes that do media. Sure we can all invest in a 300-400 pc that will do all that but it's UI won't be as polished and it costs more than a PS3
But a real PC does so much more! And I think the Win 7 Media Center interface is quite good. I speak from experience here: about a year ago I added a small format PC to my media stack, and it replaced everything else: cable box, TIVO and DVD/Blu Ray player. The only other things still there are the amplifier and an older Oppo DVD player (for the occasional non US region DVDs). The PC came with a Hauppauge TV tuner card, but I added an external USB TV tuner, and the combo pretty much covers all my needs. I watch live and recorded TV, Netflix (Blu Ray/DVD) and streaming, Hulu, Amazon movies, play my high definition home movies, browse my photo collection, and also play music from my ripped CDs or from various net streams; I have not yet found anything it can't play. I use it with a Logitech Harmony remote which handles most of the functionality nicely.
For example if someone just took a promotion and is now making 201k with little accumulated wealth, I could see the argument that they are not "upper class".
OTOH, this someone will pay only 5% of $1000, or 50 bucks extra tax for the whole year. Not a back-breaker for somebody earning over 200000 bucks, whether they have any accumulated wealth or not
Ooh, thanks... that's a sweet map of the neighborhood!
Try here for a really cool representation of the universe
The fifth elephant wound up as treacle and mineral ores in Uberwald after falling off Great A'Tuin several millennia ago.
Actually, the elephant mostly wound up as fat strata, with mineral inclusions (former bones and nerves) [Headknock, Year of the Suspicious Moth]. Geologically speaking, the treacle deposits weren't part of the elephant at all; huge areas of Uberwald were at the time a marsh, where a wild ancestor of modern sugar cane grew [Hammersmith, Year of the Dizzy Anteater]. Demonochemical analysis [Ming Po-lu, Year of the Acrobatic Mussel] has shown that treacle is the end result of the slow baking process (or melbaization) of the cane biomass.
The force of the elephant's fall caused some of the muddy/sugary mixture to splash away. The splashes created the shallow treacle deposits that propelled economic development in previous centuries. Some splashes landed as far as Klatch (creating the sugary sands of Snikerstan, and the treacle glass drops known as nosebreakers) or even in the low seas bordering hubward areas of the Agathean continent (slowly dissolving treacle vents have created their own ecology, of which maybe the most interesting specimen is the Maraschino squid [Twoflower, Year of the Incontinent Water Buffalo]). The treacle mines of Ankh (now exhausted) were also created by such a minor splash.
In Uberwald most of the sugar cane was caught under the carcass of the elephant; as a result, Uberwaldian treacle deposits (whose size is estimated to be over 100 greater than all available treacle in the rest of the Discworld, [Lord Sweettooth the Lisper, Year of the Annoying Bullfrog, as revised by the Fifth Dentists' and Candymakers' Conference of Bonk, Year of the Emasculated Ant]) are deeply buried, and difficult to reach.
With a European language or something like Arabic, once you've learned the alphabet then when you learn the sound of a new word, it's usually pretty obvious how it's going to be written [...] vice versa - when you're reading a new word in a phonetic language you immediately have a good idea what it's going to sound like even if you don't yet know what it means.
Agreed; but I'll note that's also somewhat dependent on the actual language. While no European language's ortography is as bad as the Chinese one, there are differences between them. In many European languages the correspondence between the spoken and the written forms is strong - for example Italian, Spanish, or some less known ones, like Turkish, Romanian or Polish; this also applies to some non-European ones, such as Hindi. English and French are closer to the other extreme; the correspondence between spoken and written languages is much looser, with many ancient pronounciations grandfathered in, lots of exceptions, special cases, and artificial restrictions and rules. That leads to a lot of negative consequences, like increased illiteracy, significantly more time wasted in school learning ortography, language drift and spelling bees. Both languages could do with a spelling reform, dropping the accumulated dross and going phonetic.
With Mandarin it felt almost like I was learning two separate languages at the same time, spoken Mandarin and written Mandarin
FWIW, I heard the same complaint about English, from people whose native languages use phonetic writing.
And it just so happens to benefit transnational corporations tremendously
Of course, which is why they keep pushing for deregulation, reduction of vamal barriers and so on. And since they have the freedom of speech to give money to any candidate, and they have lots of money, they usually get their wishes
How do we, as citizens in the rich world, pull some benefit from this situation?
It's very easy: be a rich shareholder in one of the aforesaid corporations, and you'll benefit a lot. You can't, because you can't get a high enough paying job? Well, that's too bad, get used to it then.
If we can't, why would we allow it to continue?
Well, because if you don't vote the way the corporations need, the wrong lizard may get in!
How do you make the funny e character when typing?
If you know the code of the char, use Alt + the code typed on the numeric pad, like Alt+0233 (é)
If you don't, there is a little tool named charmap that will display the characters, and you can copy and paste individual characters (or find out what's the code)
There were at least half a dozen people on the internet with the same name as me over ten years ago, ther'e probably a couple hundred by now
Should be interesting to see what happens to you if one of them gets added to the no-fly list, or any similar database.
At least we respect freedom of religion in this country
But not freedom from religion.
This is not a new attack, nor is this naive suggestion a new (or good) one. It won't work, because the attacker will simply retry a number of times with the same parameters and average the random delay out.
a well trained expert system running on a modern phone aught to out-diagnose any doctor,
Agreed: if you have an iPhone, you won't need a proctologist anymore!
My point is that it's another process that allows us not to pay attention to what we are doing. That lack of attention may dumb us down as we tend to be creatures of habit and laziness
Isaac Asimov had an interesting take on that - (can't find the essay, but I'll try to summarize from memory). He was reading a math textbook dating from the 18th century and he was amazed at the amount of space used for what he thought were not very relevant items in the study of mathematics. For example, a good percentage of the book consisted of laborious exercises in unit conversion between various units defined in different US states or similar calculations. The actual math was presented mostly as memorization exercises, with few demonstrations and little effort to generalize the concepts taught.
Asimov noted that a modern mathematics student wouldn't need or be expected to memorize the differences between different obscure measurennent units. He (Asimov) then built a parallel with modern-day discussions about the role of calculators in schools; his point was that the trend is towards simplification, and that this is a good thing. The sheer amount of knowledge produced by humanity grows apace. There is no reasonable way to learn all the details (be they how to convert Winchester bushels to US barrels, or how to extract a cubic root using pen and paper). While the complaint about young generations not learning the old ways is a recurring one, the new generations need to learn more than older ones, and need to simplify and externalize some details.
So it's more efficient to put up giant transmitters and blast out a signal that can be accessed clearly from the fricking moon, across a mindbogglingly wide swath of the spectrum, than it is to only send the data to the people who are requesting it?
Of course it's more efficient, for most reasonable definitions of efficient. That's why broadcast stations were developed first, long before cable systems. You don't need giant transmitters, nor do you need to broadcast to the moon (though you CAN, if you want - try doing it with cable!). Broadcast is vastly more efficient for certain ranges of applications: the infrastructure cost is fixed (the price of the broadcast stations) and doesn't change with the number of subscribers, the system scales perfectly (if your users count changes from 1000 to 1000000 overnight it JUST WORKS - you don't need to get new servers/routers/contracts with your bandwidth provider). It has theoretically infinite upper user limit. It can serve rural users even if they have no connection with the rest of the world, and it allows mobility easily.
The important thing is to understand the strengths and limitations of broadcast and point-to point systems and use each where it makes sense: broadcast is best when the same data needs to be sent to a relatively large number of users, at the same time. When you want customized data sent to many small sets of users, at different times, point to point connections are better.
To clarify, here's an example: traffic data for a city is tailor made for broadcast: it's of interest to many users, it needs to be consumed as soon as it's available (when you drive you want the most recent traffic data, not yesterday's traffic), and there is little space for customization (and whatever of it there is, it can be done client-side). On the other hand, e-mail is really bad for broadcast, since you'd use the whole tower bandwidth to send data to a single user.
Any moment now, people will start saying that Google is the New Apple, which is the New Microsoft, which is the New...what? Commodore?
IBM, grasshopper, Microsoft used to be the new IBM. Learn your history!
Google Earth is about the most innovative I can think of
Google Earth wasn't new technology either; it's just a more webified version of the old Terraserver project at Microsoft, which had been operating for close to 8 years before Google launched Google Earth.
It is incredible to me that offending a people's faith is seen as a glorious example of free speech. When did that happen?
When is it okay to make fun of the Holocast or deny so many lives lost? When is it okay to keep offending a people when you know that it is something they hold in high esteem?
Yes, that's precisely what freedom of speech really means. Isaac Asimov had an essay, ("Untouchable", in the June 1991 edition of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine) where he explains this much better than I could hope (he was referring to the issue of flag burning, but his arguments are universal). Unfortunately this essay hasn't been reprinted, and a quick search couldn't find it on the web, so I'll try to summarize it here.
Basically, Asimov's point was that the most important meaning of freedom of speech is protection of unpopular speech (be it unpopular to the government, to powerful people, or simply to the majority). There is no need to protect popular speech - there are no negative consequences to agreeing with the ones in power. In Soviet Russia, people could agree with Stalin as much as they liked, and as loudly as they felt like. And yet, you can't call this freedom of speech, because any deviation from whatever was approved took you to the gulags.
The whole point of freedom of speech is that the unpopular, the contrary, and yes, the despicable, the disgusting and the hateful speech must be protected. This can, and does cause offense at times, providing great moron-fodder to the likes of Fox News (which is just funny, since the very existence of Fox News relies on this principle). But the principle is so valuable, so useful, and, in the end so productive that it needs to be preserved carefully. Paraphrasing Asimov: he doesn't want the flag to be burned; he likes the flag, and what it stands for. But if there was a law forbidding the burning, the flag wouldn't stand for anything anymore and it wouldn't matter what happened to it.
To return to our discussion: offending a people's faith IS free speech. Making fun of the Holocaust IS free speech. The fact that some people are offended should not be a factor. Where do we stop otherwise? Lots of people are Catholic, or like the Catholic Church. Should the journalists that discovered priests abusing children be jailed (or at least muzzled) for lack of respect to Catholics? Criticising a public figure should be forbidden as well, because it annoys his or her fans and admirers? Heck, lots of people like Santa Claus, shall we make laws forbidding the portrayal or discussion of Santa?
I believe freedom of speech is one of the most impressive founding principles of Western civilisation. While there may be limits (insert fire theater example here), the judgement should almost always err on the side of more freedom, not less.
We shouldn't be pushed away from a viable form of energy because of an incident where stupidity and poor engineering combined to form a freak-accident.
You need to weigh both the the probability of a certain outcome and its cost. It's basic risk estimation. For example: suppose every year there is a chance in ten of an accident that causes the people on a mile radius to sneeze for a day, with no other consequences, that would probably be ok. If there is a one in a billion yearly chance of an accident that completely wipes life on Earth, I'd be against it, and I'd be against it even if proponents of the project assured me all possible safety measures would be taken: the potential cost would be just too much.
The nuclear plant building discussion is just another risk estimation calculation. On one side, the probability of an accident happening, on the other its cost. As far as I know, modern nuclear plants are quite reliable, certainly much more so than the Chernobyl one. This reduces one element of the calculation by a lot. But in order to decide whether worth building one, we need to get a reasonable estimate of the cost as well, and that's why I intervened in the discussion: the GP was trying to reduce the perceived cost by distorting the facts. This is not correct.
Those are some scary statistics you have. Fortunately for us, they are entirely without merit; we're not going to have another Chernobyl. That disaster was caused by morons working in a badly built reactor doing everything exactly wrong. As long as we don't do that again, we're fine; modern nuclear safety techniques will keep that sort of shit from happening, and even if a reactor ends up manned by a bunch of monkeys, it will be designed so that there are no Chernobyl-like failure modes.
Of course, the design and operation of the Chernobyl reactor was handled by a bunch of underqualified Russians. When the designers and operators are major western companies like Transoceanic, BP or Halliburton, any worries are entirely without merit; we're not going to have another catastrophe. We know their equipment is well designed, modern oil drilling safety techniques will keep this sort of shit from happening, and even if a drilling platform ends up manned by a bunch of monkeys, it will be designed so that there are no failure modes :)
Nice use of sarcasm, BTW, almost had me going for a moment there :)
If you then show these people that (a) Zero people died because of Three Mile Island, (b) 46 firefighters died in the Cherynobyl accident, and (c) nobody died in Japan you will be branded a liar and some kind of anti-environmental kook
Well, here's what the World Health Organization says. Some significant quotes, for people who don't want to bother reading:
A large increase in the incidence of thyroid cancer has occurred among people who were young children and adolescents at the time of the accident and lived in the most contaminated areas of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine. This was due to the high levels of radioactive iodine released from the Chernobyl reactor in the early days after the accident.
In Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine nearly 5 000 cases of thyroid cancer have now been diagnosed to date among children who were aged up to 18 years at the time of the accident.
It is expected that the increased incidence of thyroid cancer from Chernobyl will continue for many years, although the long-term magnitude of the risk is difficult to quantify.
The Expert Group concluded that there may be up to 4 000 additional cancer deaths among the three highest exposed groups over their lifetime (240 000 liquidators; 116 000 evacuees and the 270 000 residents of the SCZs).
Predictions, generally based on the LNT model, suggest that up to 5000 additional cancer deaths may occur in this population [ Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine] from radiation exposure
The numbers in this report are contested by a Greenpeace study (available here). Greenpeace estimates the number of cancers attributable to the Chernobyl accident to 270000, out of which 93000 fatal.
Even ignoring the Greenpeace numbers, if you'll say only 46 people died at Chernobyl, but omit the fact that thousands more have contracted cancer as a direct consequence of the Chernobyl accident and 4000 more are expected to die of it, then you're indeed a liar and a kind of anti-environmentalist kook.
As Stephen King once claimed
Just to maintain the high standards of Slashdot pedantry, it was Robert Bloch. Wonderful horror author, too bad people are starting to forget him.
That sounds like an argument FOR learning C. How are you supposed to write efficient code if you don't understand what the computer is doing?
The real issue, at least for me, is that people don't seem to be concerned about efficiency anymore. The premium is now on fast and cheap development, and if it's wasteful, so what? Computers are cheap, let's just throw more CPU or more storage at the problem and be done. See for an egregious example the pervasiveness of XML, which must be one of the most horrible efficiency sinks ever invented.
Panspermia doesn't really answer where life comes from. It just sort of shifts the question off of Earth.
It's true, it doesn't answer where life comes from, but it's more than turtles all the way down. Shifting the question off Earth changes the question, because off Earth the conditions are different! Panspermia removes all objections related to the specific conditions of primeval Earth. If you postulate that life has appeared on Earth, your theory has to explain it given a lot of constraints: a certain chemical composition, a certain gravity, certain temperature ranges and so on. With panspermia that's not the case any more - it vastly expands the range of environments, processes, time frames and resources available for life to arise.
The BSD license allows you to take whatever *open* source that is bound by the license an make it closed.
Total bullshit. Suppose somebody downloads some source from a BSD repository. How exactly is it making the code closed? It's still available, on the same repository it was downloaded from! Or is there some magical way whereby downloading some code nukes the said repository, removes the code from public access and also deletes all the previously downloaded copies of it?
What you should have said, had you been a honest advocate, is that a downloader can choose not to distribute further the NEW code HE writes on top of the existing one, or the NEW modifications HE makes to the existing one. That choice is denied to him by the GPL, which is why the BSD license is more freedom-friendly. By formulating the issue the way you did you're intentionally confusing the new code with the one we talk about, the BSD licensed one, and just spreading FUD.
On a lot of systems smaller than a PC or a smartphone, environments like Java and .NET introduce too much system overhead. If you have 4 MB of RAM, you usually don't want to devote 3 MB of it to the runtime.
While I generally agree with you, I'd like to note that runtimes for .NET can fit in space an order of magnitude smaller than your 3 MB limit: the .NET microframework (which is open sourced under the Apache license), only needs about 300k.