Ehat is new is that this super-European search engine is announced the second time in two years, and we still have no glimpse of a search engine, not even the "alpha" version. Instead, we can see a list of important guys. I guess that now, having 120 million euro, it will take them two more years to design a logo, then in one more year the alpha version will be public, then France and Germany will start to bicker about who is going to hold the majority share etc. In the end, a retired British scientist will be hired to test the effect of search engines on rats. The rats will be fed only the search results from Google, and will die of starvation, so all search engines will be banned and a few Yahoo and Google offices will be vandalized by activists waving the biohazard sign, and the budget allocated to the project (already reaching a few hundred billions a year by that time) will be diverted to bio-search technology: Bruxelles bureaucrats recruited from all the member states according to a equitable algorithm will perform the searches manually using the printed version of only EU certified web sites.
Actually "all the bad effects of smoking come mostly from the smoke + chronic use" isn't really true... nicotine is very toxic.
Nicotine is secreted naturally by your brain. Nicotine is already prescribed for some heart diseases and it was known to work as a mild sedative and against depression for more than 20 years. TFA is old news.
Smoking is dangerous because of you breathe less oxygen while smoking (gets used for burning the tobaco), and the tar damages your lung tissue... not more dangerous than living in a big city, anyway.
I'm sure they will make lots of interesting finds. For example, they might stumble onto some interesting approaches to organizing shift rotation, team organization and job management.
no need for experiments: just ask the navies that have nuclear subs: they already have similar schedules, and living for 6 month near a full cargo of nuclear warheads and a nuclear generator can't be beaten as a simulation of a trip to Mars.
if we make learning English in school mandatory, would you convert to the metric system ? It's kind of difficult to know when to use "the" and when not to use is, and having to know when to multiply by 12, or by 14, or by 6 etc. to get to the next division is... well, dealing with the measuring system used in US and UK is like playing Dragon Poker.
Math is easy... communication and team work are very hard. I've spent 19 years in school and the only use I got from them was that I know where to look for information and that I have trained reasonably well my bulls*** detector.
Passing exams proves one thing: the ability to stand the pressure of preparation and actually taking the exam. This is no small matter, and is better than not testing at all, but as soon as you get out of the gates of your school, things change and you face situations for which there are no tests yet.
In multiple choice tests you have the freedom to find the right answer your own way... In exams where the path to the answer is evaluated too, you have the freedom to learn the "official" algorithm by rote, and if you expect it to be a difficult exam you won't even care to try to understand why the official way is better than any other ways since you'll be busy learning by heart the solutions to the thousands of problems you might be asked to solve.
Negative votes ? Heh, I have been casting those since about 1996... I mean: voting for the least reprehensible candidate; while it's not the best solution, I prefer this to power change through civil war. Voting for the best candidate might be more entertaining, but if one makes his or her mind to choose the least evil solution, choice is not that hard.
I guess what's called democracy it's just a mechanism to rotate the psychopaths that want to wear grand uniforms and to be called "Mr. President" without shooting too many bystanders. In this respect the "Western democracies" worked quite well: no civil war in England since the 1788, no civil war in US since the 1860s... western Europe fares less well, but, hey, 60 years of peace are not to be spurned.
Anybody who complains about how broken the Western democracies are should consider how deadly dysfunctional are most of the other regimes.
for the polar ice caps to melt some a local increase in temperature of about 30 degrees Celsius is needed. Please, tell me how this will happen, and who is predicting such an increase.
No, it's because education is a form of capital. A bachelor's degree is the same as bringing 40000USD with you (amount based on: four years in undergrad x 10000 USD per year in a non-US university).
For the people that bring money with them there are other ways to get a visa.
In more normal times United States encouraged immigration because the immigrants brought in, on average, more capital than what money they sent back home.
what about infrastructure costs? tracks, bridges, maintenance personnel etc.
I am not an engineer but shorter routes (don't have to use that pesky mountain pass, can just go over it), no railway maintenance, no bridges, no overpasses, no ground level noise look like a serious advantage. Getting higher speeds should be easier than with trains: only need a harder hull and stronger engines.
Dirigibles would be bulky, but I guess collapsible frames could be developed and the gas pumped out when parking, and the lost in weight on the road due to fuel consumption can be compensated. Dirigibles would find landing difficult in windy weather, but so do most of the planes.
Before the Hindenburg accident zeppelins were "the future" of long distance aerial transportation.
Dirigibles probably cannot supplant sea transportation, but for inland routes should work fine, I guess. The reason there is no strong interest is, I suppose, the fact that there is already a fine network of railways and sea lanes, and seeing people jump out of a flaming zeppelin did not help either.
I agree with some of that: the molecules in "petroleum" are way to difficult to duplicate to simply burn them when we could use them better.
How about: how much energy is needed to manufacture, maintain and recycle a solar panel or a wind mill compared to the energy they produce ? Solar and wind solutions are useful only in the same way gasoline is useful: to get energy without being connected to a power line.
There are two solutions I see: research and get more efficient engines and generators, or rationalize... though in the second case I do not want to get credit for proposing it, since in a short time the guy in charge with rationing will be arrested by the same angry crowd that now demands "green" power and will be shipped to Romania for execution.
With Debian you can roll your own distribution in about 30 minutes. That's why Debian will survive: because it is the commons upon which Ubuntu and the others build.
Unfortunately you should consult your high-school philosophy handbook before talking about causality. If you don't think that physics has demonstrated a causal link between anything, you're the one who needs to consult a textbook. hint: David Hume.
Fortunately we have laws of physics which provide a link between cause and effect, upon which climate models can be constructed. Unfortunately you should consult your high-school philosophy handbook before talking about causality.
Actually, we hit the warming peak about 10,000 years ago. We will eventually head toward another ice age, but it won't be for thousands of years.
Did we ? Hey, you should publish this and get a Nobel prize or something, because you must have discovered what caused the glaciations. Or we could just ignore the cause/effect fixation and go with the statistics and say that the average interglacial period seems to be about 12000 years and the last Ice Age ended about 12000 years ago, so it's quite probable we will see another one soon.
[being a troll]Only city boys believe global warming is happening, and that global warming is a bad thing.[/being a troll]
Really, every environmental problem we have goes back to overpopulation. We're trying to provide too much to too many, and not even bothering to be fair about it. As a result, we're stressing the system to the breaking point.
This is not quite exact. There was more pressure on the wildlife in Europe and US a hundred and fifty years ago, when the population was much smaller. The 1850s England was not able to grow all the food it needed and had to wage wars to open markets from which to import food, or to wage wars to protect markets already opened because much more acreage was required to feed and clothe one human than it is needed now.
or maybe Microsoft looks into becoming a service provider, instead of just selling software licences; for service providers it makes more money-sense to use free software/open source and "extend them" than to write their own apps.
I hear that Posgresql improved a lot in the last few years, and it is not GPL, as far as I remember, and if I am not wrong the license permits taking the code, packaging it under a different name and selling it under a more restrictive license. Maybe we'll see a "MS Postgresql".
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Ehat is new is that this super-European search engine is announced the second time in two years, and we still have no glimpse of a search engine, not even the "alpha" version. Instead, we can see a list of important guys. I guess that now, having 120 million euro, it will take them two more years to design a logo, then in one more year the alpha version will be public, then France and Germany will start to bicker about who is going to hold the majority share etc. In the end, a retired British scientist will be hired to test the effect of search engines on rats. The rats will be fed only the search results from Google, and will die of starvation, so all search engines will be banned and a few Yahoo and Google offices will be vandalized by activists waving the biohazard sign, and the budget allocated to the project (already reaching a few hundred billions a year by that time) will be diverted to bio-search technology: Bruxelles bureaucrats recruited from all the member states according to a equitable algorithm will perform the searches manually using the printed version of only EU certified web sites.
Nicotine is secreted naturally by your brain. Nicotine is already prescribed for some heart diseases and it was known to work as a mild sedative and against depression for more than 20 years. TFA is old news.
Smoking is dangerous because of you breathe less oxygen while smoking (gets used for burning the tobaco), and the tar damages your lung tissue ... not more dangerous than living in a big city, anyway.
Maybe the "massive amounts of philantropy" are to blame ... Check out "The Gift" of Marcel Mauss.
if we make learning English in school mandatory, would you convert to the metric system ? It's kind of difficult to know when to use "the" and when not to use is, and having to know when to multiply by 12, or by 14, or by 6 etc. to get to the next division is ... well, dealing with the measuring system used in US and UK is like playing Dragon Poker.
thank you. here a symbolic +1 Insightful
...
now I'll go back to letting myself be exploited by the capitalistic pigeons
maybe I got this wrong: situation 1: no job, no money: good situation 2: a job, some money: bad is this right ?
Math is easy ... communication and team work are very hard. I've spent 19 years in school and the only use I got from them was that I know where to look for information and that I have trained reasonably well my bulls*** detector.
... In exams where the path to the answer is evaluated too, you have the freedom to learn the "official" algorithm by rote, and if you expect it to be a difficult exam you won't even care to try to understand why the official way is better than any other ways since you'll be busy learning by heart the solutions to the thousands of problems you might be asked to solve.
Passing exams proves one thing: the ability to stand the pressure of preparation and actually taking the exam. This is no small matter, and is better than not testing at all, but as soon as you get out of the gates of your school, things change and you face situations for which there are no tests yet.
In multiple choice tests you have the freedom to find the right answer your own way
Negative votes ? Heh, I have been casting those since about 1996 ... I mean: voting for the least reprehensible candidate; while it's not the best solution, I prefer this to power change through civil war. Voting for the best candidate might be more entertaining, but if one makes his or her mind to choose the least evil solution, choice is not that hard.
... western Europe fares less well, but, hey, 60 years of peace are not to be spurned.
I guess what's called democracy it's just a mechanism to rotate the psychopaths that want to wear grand uniforms and to be called "Mr. President" without shooting too many bystanders. In this respect the "Western democracies" worked quite well: no civil war in England since the 1788, no civil war in US since the 1860s
Anybody who complains about how broken the Western democracies are should consider how deadly dysfunctional are most of the other regimes.
for the polar ice caps to melt some a local increase in temperature of about 30 degrees Celsius is needed. Please, tell me how this will happen, and who is predicting such an increase.
ljaguar, you've been plagiarized by the famous Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. You made it to eweek.com, too.
No, it's because education is a form of capital. A bachelor's degree is the same as bringing 40000USD with you (amount based on: four years in undergrad x 10000 USD per year in a non-US university).
For the people that bring money with them there are other ways to get a visa.
In more normal times United States encouraged immigration because the immigrants brought in, on average, more capital than what money they sent back home.
they had regular transatlantic zeppelin lines ... did those follow the wind ?
what about infrastructure costs? tracks, bridges, maintenance personnel etc.
I am not an engineer but shorter routes (don't have to use that pesky mountain pass, can just go over it), no railway maintenance, no bridges, no overpasses, no ground level noise look like a serious advantage. Getting higher speeds should be easier than with trains: only need a harder hull and stronger engines.
Dirigibles would be bulky, but I guess collapsible frames could be developed and the gas pumped out when parking, and the lost in weight on the road due to fuel consumption can be compensated. Dirigibles would find landing difficult in windy weather, but so do most of the planes.
Before the Hindenburg accident zeppelins were "the future" of long distance aerial transportation.
Dirigibles probably cannot supplant sea transportation, but for inland routes should work fine, I guess. The reason there is no strong interest is, I suppose, the fact that there is already a fine network of railways and sea lanes, and seeing people jump out of a flaming zeppelin did not help either.
I agree with some of that: the molecules in "petroleum" are way to difficult to duplicate to simply burn them when we could use them better.
... though in the second case I do not want to get credit for proposing it, since in a short time the guy in charge with rationing will be arrested by the same angry crowd that now demands "green" power and will be shipped to Romania for execution.
How about: how much energy is needed to manufacture, maintain and recycle a solar panel or a wind mill compared to the energy they produce ? Solar and wind solutions are useful only in the same way gasoline is useful: to get energy without being connected to a power line.
There are two solutions I see: research and get more efficient engines and generators, or rationalize
and who is going to compress the air ? Will they use organic slaves, or diesel motors ?
they used GMT : 11GMT
With Debian you can roll your own distribution in about 30 minutes. That's why Debian will survive: because it is the commons upon which Ubuntu and the others build.
yes, thank you for providing the quote.
A pity they use argumentum ad hominem way too much: this is what made me have doubts about AGW in the first place.
Did we ? Hey, you should publish this and get a Nobel prize or something, because you must have discovered what caused the glaciations. Or we could just ignore the cause/effect fixation and go with the statistics and say that the average interglacial period seems to be about 12000 years and the last Ice Age ended about 12000 years ago, so it's quite probable we will see another one soon.
[being a troll]Only city boys believe global warming is happening, and that global warming is a bad thing.[/being a troll]
This is not quite exact. There was more pressure on the wildlife in Europe and US a hundred and fifty years ago, when the population was much smaller. The 1850s England was not able to grow all the food it needed and had to wage wars to open markets from which to import food, or to wage wars to protect markets already opened because much more acreage was required to feed and clothe one human than it is needed now.
DeSmog Blog is run by a PR company.
or maybe Microsoft looks into becoming a service provider, instead of just selling software licences; for service providers it makes more money-sense to use free software/open source and "extend them" than to write their own apps.
I hear that Posgresql improved a lot in the last few years, and it is not GPL, as far as I remember, and if I am not wrong the license permits taking the code, packaging it under a different name and selling it under a more restrictive license. Maybe we'll see a "MS Postgresql".