This is not what he is asking, he is asking for a quicksort *IMPLEMENTATION* in 5 lines of C++. Calling a library doesn't count.
Here's one in 4 lines in Python:
def qsort(L):
if len(L) <= 1: return L
return qsort( [ lt for lt in L[1:] if lt < L[0] ] ) + \
[ L[0] ] + qsort( [ ge for ge in L[1:] if ge >= L[0] ] )
Sorry for feeding the trolls. There are many issues with your posts. I'm sorry I'm making you sick, but you are reacting emotionally.
I know very well what colonialism is. To this day the US still have colonies. What are Hawaii and Puerto Rico? What about the number of islands in the Pacific under US controls where the US found it very convenient to detonate a few A dnd H bombs in the 50s? You think the US doesn't practice abuse? It does, because it can. Just read your geography and history books. Look on Google for "Lucky Dragon".
Just another example. Since the US supports Israel and finds it needs to support military bases in Saudi Arabia, it should come as no surprise to anyone that they are making ennemies in the area. Al Qaeda is one of them, by no means the only one. It's not a matter of finding excuses for the terrorists, it's just a matter of fact. No one can win against the US in a traditional land war, so they go for terrorism, because that's the only way they can strike. To their mind they've been in a war for a long time.
Bin Laden's terrorist group and his ilk are not flying planes into buildings because they are nuts. They have done it to try and change the US foreign policy in the Middle East. They are in it for the long haul, be prepared for it.
As for Israel, it wasn't always that bad. Remember Camp David? I am convinced that peace in the Middle East is possible to everyone's benefit, but the nuts in *both* the Arab and the Israeli camps will have to be silenced. It is obvious that there are Arabs who are not for peace at any price with Israel, but they are not the majority, numerous polls have shown that. What is perhaps less obvious is that there are also nuts in Israel who do not want peace with the Arab world. They are also in the minority but so far both minorities have managed to sidetrack the peace process, to the point where rational debate has become extremely difficult.
It seems to me that the US is doing the right thing as far as supporting Israel is concerned, given that they have a commitment to supporting it, but that they should do it with a more even hand. It is not productive when they always sideline with Israel even when Israel is not doing the right thing. The US would have the power to make the peace process happen by forcing both parties to the negociation table with stiff financial penalties for all. At the moment it is not happening.
I won't respond to more AC posting. Show your ID, be a man (or a woman).
Some problems are very hard to reproduce in a computer. No one knows how to solve a simple problem like the travelling salesman problem exactly and efficiently. I work in image analysis. Some problems have remain as hard and as elusive as 40 years ago. Artificial Intelligence is the same. There has been progress in the sense that we know which approach don't work, but you still don't see thinking machines, and frankly no one is sure of the way to go. Artificial neural networks don't really work any better than they did 10 years ago. At best they now train faster and we know which problems they don't solve.
It may be that simulating the brain in a computer is going to be very hard. For a start no one is sure of the fine structure of the brain, how large numbers of neurons interact, whether or not glial cells have role to play in the thought processes, etc. These problems are going to take a lot more than a couple of decades to solve.
Throwing more computing power at a problem may make it easier to solve. In 10 years time we'll have faster CPUs, more memory and better graphics, that much is virtually certain.
10 years ago I was solving exactly the same scientific problems as I do now, with very similar tools. Having 100 times the computing power hasn't made them very much easier to solve. Sure I have better tools but they don't solve the problem for me. What has changed is my better understanding of many underlying issues. Chances are in 10 years time I'll still be solving the same issues with yet better tools, but the machine won't be helping me all that much.
Regarding the Internet, sure it's great but somedays I pine for the days of infrequent emails, no spam, few security issues, fewer distractions (slashdot), less paperwork and fewer administrative tasks to fullfill that have become easier for administrators to push because they now have the computing power to write and distribute memos, directives, and what not.
In the scientific world it has become harder to survive as a productive scientist rather than easier. In the US you may have heard that there is now an oversupply of IT personel, and has been for a few years, and that now IT skills are being commoditized.
Meanwhile people still kill themselves with machetes, people still starve in large areas of th e world, governments continue to declare wars on real and imagined ennemies, copyright issues are still the same as in the eras of the book and then of the VCR and the magnetic tape, and people don't think history repeats itself.
Humankind has a lot more problems to solve than computing issues, and in the few decades I've been alive I have seen extremely little progress with most of these.
There are reasons to feel cautiously optimistic about some issues, but the progress that you mention mostly concern a tiny minuscule minority of the human race of which you are lucky to be part of.
Yes radio netlink and wearable computers will become more ubiquitous. As for voice interfaces, you should read some stories of people with RSI who have tried to replace keyboard entry with voice input. They go hoarse after a few days. I can talk with confidence about computer vision, it's making great strides in some area such as automated stereo vision and video analysis, but the major problems of the last decades are still almost exactly the same. Image understanding is as hard as ever. Nanotech is progressing but we are far from an easy production process, and it will be a while before we have self-replicating nanomachines, should we want that (according to Bill Joy we don't).
Anyway this is getting long. The point is most of what we've seen in the last few decades are evolutionary changes. The net existed 30 years ago, it now has expanded into every home. It's a big deal but nothing really major. Now we have wireless and so forth, it makes it easier than ever to stay connected, but again, no big deal. We have easier access to information, but libraries existed before. What has chan
Finger pointing is not going to help the world's problems. At the moment it is rather the US which seems to be interested in neo-colonialism and imperialism. For example the US defence budget represents 50% of the world's total expenditure on defense, see Figures for 2004.
If you agree that neo-colonialism and imperialism was wrong for the European countries, then why would it be any different for the US?
Bin laden and his gang have an issue with the US because it maintains military bases in Saudi Arabia and other neighbouring Arab countries. They saw it as desecrating their Holy Land. Militarily supporting Israel is not seen as a positive point either.
Regarding the Kyoto protocol, *all* of the countries in the EU have ratified the Kyoto protocol and are implementing it. In fact the Kyoto protocol has force of directive in the EU, and this means every member country must adopt it. Some countries have lowered their CO2 emission below 1990 levels already.
I don't see why the long-term goal of reducing emission would be detrimental to the economy. On the contrary. It seems that the US is spending a huge amount of resources (see above) to maintain access to the current way of producing energy (oil). If in 20 years time the Europeans and other nations have become good at using renewable energy sources but the US haven't and are still fighting in the Middle East, I'd say this wouldn't constitute a sound investment.
Finally it would be crazy of the Europeans to try and destroy the American economy. This is was drives the world. An ailing American economy is not good news anywhere around the world.
Less paranoia and more rational thinking would do a world of good.
Imaging how boring that would be. 4000 years on a ship, with nowhere to go and nothing much to do. I'd imagine the crew would start mini-wars and not many would be alive by the end of the trip.
I think if we achieved immortality society as a whole would quickly become extremely conservative, in the sense that people living now would have to think what to do in 300 years time, and that wrecking the planet is not such a good idea.
Right now people don't care because they think they'll be dead when all the accumulated environmental degradation really hit. All the messages about passing the buck to one's children really doesn't register with most people.
Also people living longer might become conservative in the general sense. It's hard to adapt to new ideas, etc.
Such a rate of change would have to be machine-driven. I don't believe 6-7 billion human beings can effect such a rate of change as you describe. That would mean each and every one of them come up with an invention, a new paradigm, a novel insight every single day. And if the exponential growth rate has to continue, then they would have to come up with something like that every few hours, then every minutes, etc.
This is simply not possible. In a world with finite resources exponential growth usually stops, often very quicly. Even more so with so-called super-exponential rates of change.
Actually it's not completely trivial what happens to common glass under heavy radiation. You have to dilute the radioactive stuff so that the glass doesn't melt or break down into reactive components.
If the radioactive stuff gets mixed up in the water it will make its way up the foodchain, by virtue of being composed of heavy metals that don't get excreted or metabolized. Instead the stuff concentrates eventually into seafood we might want to eat.
It is really not trivial what to do with the waste. Myself I think it should be sent under the magma. Find a location where tectonic plate subduction occurs and drop the deep sea waste cells there. By the time it comes out it won't be radioactive anymore.
I wouldn't get fixed up on the revenge thing. I've seen with my own eyes highly intelligent, technically literate people take up management positions and little by little move from a situation where they understood the technical matters and paid attention to the plebs to one where they didn't care about anything or anyone, just because they could.
It's not revenge over the nerds, it's just plain, unadulterated power and human nature.
To help you understand, do you care about what the cleaners at your place of work do? What about the homeless people on your way home? do you care why people in Sudan are dying in drove right now? No, because you don't have to.
I don't understand your point. It seems that if X were more resilient than Y, then there would be more XX fertilized eggs (girls) than XY (boys). But the reverse is true: 106 boys are born for 100 girls.
At birth nature favours more boys than girls. Women seem to live longer than men in western societies, but is that because they have tended to live more sedentary lives than men? Studies show that if women start to live like men do (careers, booze, fast cars, etc) then they die just as easily.
When Bush Senior decided not to go for Baghdad during Desert Storm, he did this in consultation with the locals, i.e Saudi Arabia and the other powerful Arab nations around Iraq. The reasoning was that Saddam would not last long under internal pressure and that it would be by far the best way to go rather than be drawn into a long and painful pacification mission.
Anyway, the mission of liberating Kuwait had been accomplished, Bush senior didn't have a mandate from the UN to go any further.
In the 10 years that followed SH survived, was a right pain in the butt for everybody but, as it turns out, he had been effectively declawed. In hindsight it would have probably been better to wait a few more years and let the Iraqi solve their own internal problems themselves. Now the US has to pick up a lot of broken pieces and it looks like it is going to be there for a long time, lest Iraq became a theocracy and a breeding ground for more terrorism.
Some time ago GWB was interviewed and asked if he had consulted with his dad regarding the invasion of Iraq, he effectively said no, that instead he had consulted with a "higher dad above". Very scary if you ask me.
Again: invading a country for regime change is NOT ALLOWED in international law. Had the US gone ahead with invading for the express purpose of toppling Saddam Hussein, it would have found itself in violation of international law, this means Bush and its whole cabinet could have been indicted for war crimes. Great, eh? Now at least they can say "oh, but we did it because SH was in violation of such and such UN resolution". Much more defensible.
The US had to find another excuse. This means the public had to be deceived. There was no other way. The wonder is that it worked so well. To me the public is just as culpable as their leader. "We was deceived, I swear", yeah, right.
They found ONE shell with Sarin in it. Hardly a weapon of mass destruction. In the article they suggest it was a stray that was scavenged.
We know Iraq *had* large stockpile of WMDs, I believe the UN inspectors got rid of most of them, maybe some went to Syria, obviously some got scavenged and are now in the hand of unstable elements. Also I believe that the CIA accounting was simply wrong. In other words the situation is worse than it was before the war.
When GWB attacked Iraq was complying, opening up all the facilities that the inspectors wanted. the inspectors were asking for more time, which was not granted because GWB was getting impatient.
Regime change in Iraq might have been US policy but in case you don't know, invading a country for the express purpose of changing the regime is illegal in international law, and a good thing it is too (think about it).
Finally Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and as you are seeing around the world only today (hostages killed in Saudi Arabia), invading Iraq has done very little to quench international terrorism and has done a great deal to discredit the US with a lot of countries.
They are indeed running out of power, the RDU on the Voyager probes have a half-life of a few years only. Voyager 2 doesn't have enough power to run all of its intruments anymore.
Red Hat do have a quality distribution, it's called Red Hat Entreprise Linux, and they want you to pay for it if you need it. Alternatively you can try WhiteBox Linux or Fermi Linux which are built from the RHEL 3 SRPMS and work exactly the same, they are even free, but come with no official support.
The Fedora stuff behaves exactly as you would expect for a complex distribution with new and shiny pieces of software which haven't had much testing yet, such as the 2.6 kernel and Gnome 2.6. The only way these things are going to become stable is if people try them and report bugs. That's how you can contribute to Free Software.
If you are not willing to do that this is fine, but don't use the Fedora distribution.
Your idea is not feasible with current technology.
Just so you know, dropping something into the Sun is really really hard to do. To give you an idea, sending something in low Earth orbit implies a change of speed of about 8km/s, i.e if you can bring something initially at rest on the surface of the Earth sufficiently far away from the surface not to be bothered by the atmosphere and then accelerate it to that speed then it will orbit the Earth.
From there, to drop something into the Sun you have to slow them down from their orbit around the Sun by approximately 30km/s. It takes as much energy to accelerate something as to slow it down. So if need energy E so send something into orbit around the Earth, you need approximately 4xE to drop it into the Sun! You can improve on that number somewhat by using gravity-assisted planet flybys, such as around Venus for example, but this is tricky business and we've only managed it for tiny little probes like the Venera and Mariner series.
Sending something up in orbit is not even half of the problem. No one really knows how to send up thousands of tonnes of material without using vastly unproven and experimental technology, and we wouldn't want to do that with spent nuclear fuel, at least not initially...
In would be far far cheaper and safer to drop the fuel into the deepest underwater trenches, in the regions where subduction occurs between techtonic plates. The fuel would get buried for good under the Earth's crust, never to come up again.
The parent asked if the technique can be patented, not whether it should.
The technique is not obvious. It's obvious to you because you've read about it in a book. In hindsight most things are obvious, even Relativity.
Now it was obviously novel at some point. Will the USPTO look into books for reference to prior art? I don't think so, what matters is whether the technique has been patented before. In all likelihood the patent will be granted unless someone has patented it before.
Now in court, if you want to challenge it you can use books and papers and prior art and in this case maybe the evidence is compelling.
In one fell swoop you've described what's wrong with the patent system today. The USPTO and other patent offices in Europe and elsewhere don't have the resources or the skills or the patience to look for prior art in depth.
Of course you are perfectly correct regarding the fast pace of life, in the same sense that now a double-income family is considered standard. You don't have to follow the trend though.
It's the same with computers. We used to have secretaries and communicating with the rest of the world used to take weeks, not hours. This is not a trend that can continue forever, though.
The issues of cars is charged with emotions, it is difficult to be rational. One of my co-workers has bought a huge car fit for 6 people because (she says) once a year she drives 3,000km to go back to her folk with her sister and her two teenage kids (that's only 4 people, if I can count correctly). The rest of the year she drives the car in the city with just herself in it. With the difference in purchase price alone with a smaller, more nimble car fit for a city, not counting higher running costs, she could rent a luxury car for the trip for 10 years running.
Of course in reality the car is nice and she could afford it and she wanted the status symbol, so there you go. However none of these reasons are rational from the economic point of view.
Having an SUV is convenient but not indispensable. My parents had 3 kids and we had a minuscule car. Most Americans would not even label this thing a car, let alone drive it or consider it for any sort of family car, yet that's the one we had. I remember one of my parent's friends carting us around for music lessons in a Mini. That is one adult, 3 teenagers + instruments in a car you had to lower yourself in. That was fine, and fun in fact.
I regularly see standard 2 adults, 2 kids families in their vast empty SUV. Usually only one adult in fact.
I'm not blaming anybody for buying SUVs, here in Australia they make perfect sense to buy because gas/petrol is still cheap, and they carry tax concessions, under the misguided assumption that only people in the bush (in the country) would buy them. Of course that created a tax loophole where manufacturers jumped in, and now the damn vehicles are so popular that the loophole can't be closed off. Compared with normal large family cars they are actually cheaper to buy. I'd imagine something similar is true in the US.
Of course they also feel safer to drive due to bulk and better vision. However if petrol prices continue to rise I can't see much of a bright future for 4 litres+ engines.
It would be very likely to put up a good fight in court, because it is novel, useful and non-trivial. What you are complaining about is equivalent to saying that a piece of software written in the C language cannot be patented because the C language is an ISO standard.
I've never seen blind trust in any form of government anywhere, it's more a question of degree of paranoia. In Europe a number of government services are actually well run, such as the education system in some countries, goverment funded research labs, universities, or utility distribution. In some countries a government job is actually prestigious and competent people compete for them in nationwide exams. It does make a difference to the end product.
On the other hand many goverment branches are distrusted such as the police, the army and the tax services, typically. You'll find that similar safeguards are in place in every western democracies that make sure none of these services outstep their bounds. I remember one instance of a police officer bashing a student during a demonstration against rising fees, and that was enough to have the interior minister dismissed and to topple the whole goverment.
In the US everything run by government is assumed corrupt, untrustworthy and inefficient, even such things as the postal service. Maybe there are some reason for it but maybe it's just badly run and it doesn't have to be that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's one in 4 lines in Python:Let's see the corresponding C++ code.
I didn't write this, look up the Python cookbook
Sorry for feeding the trolls. There are many issues with your posts. I'm sorry I'm making you sick, but you are reacting emotionally.
I know very well what colonialism is. To this day the US still have colonies. What are Hawaii and Puerto Rico? What about the number of islands in the Pacific under US controls where the US found it very convenient to detonate a few A dnd H bombs in the 50s? You think the US doesn't practice abuse? It does, because it can. Just read your geography and history books. Look on Google for "Lucky Dragon".
Just another example. Since the US supports Israel and finds it needs to support military bases in Saudi Arabia, it should come as no surprise to anyone that they are making ennemies in the area. Al Qaeda is one of them, by no means the only one. It's not a matter of finding excuses for the terrorists, it's just a matter of fact. No one can win against the US in a traditional land war, so they go for terrorism, because that's the only way they can strike. To their mind they've been in a war for a long time.
Bin Laden's terrorist group and his ilk are not flying planes into buildings because they are nuts. They have done it to try and change the US foreign policy in the Middle East. They are in it for the long haul, be prepared for it.
As for Israel, it wasn't always that bad. Remember Camp David? I am convinced that peace in the Middle East is possible to everyone's benefit, but the nuts in *both* the Arab and the Israeli camps will have to be silenced. It is obvious that there are Arabs who are not for peace at any price with Israel, but they are not the majority, numerous polls have shown that. What is perhaps less obvious is that there are also nuts in Israel who do not want peace with the Arab world. They are also in the minority but so far both minorities have managed to sidetrack the peace process, to the point where rational debate has become extremely difficult.
It seems to me that the US is doing the right thing as far as supporting Israel is concerned, given that they have a commitment to supporting it, but that they should do it with a more even hand. It is not productive when they always sideline with Israel even when Israel is not doing the right thing. The US would have the power to make the peace process happen by forcing both parties to the negociation table with stiff financial penalties for all. At the moment it is not happening.
I won't respond to more AC posting. Show your ID, be a man (or a woman).
I don't know,
Some problems are very hard to reproduce in a computer. No one knows how to solve a simple problem like the travelling salesman problem exactly and efficiently. I work in image analysis. Some problems have remain as hard and as elusive as 40 years ago. Artificial Intelligence is the same. There has been progress in the sense that we know which approach don't work, but you still don't see thinking machines, and frankly no one is sure of the way to go. Artificial neural networks don't really work any better than they did 10 years ago. At best they now train faster and we know which problems they don't solve.
It may be that simulating the brain in a computer is going to be very hard. For a start no one is sure of the fine structure of the brain, how large numbers of neurons interact, whether or not glial cells have role to play in the thought processes, etc. These problems are going to take a lot more than a couple of decades to solve.
Throwing more computing power at a problem may make it easier to solve. In 10 years time we'll have faster CPUs, more memory and better graphics, that much is virtually certain.
10 years ago I was solving exactly the same scientific problems as I do now, with very similar tools. Having 100 times the computing power hasn't made them very much easier to solve. Sure I have better tools but they don't solve the problem for me. What has changed is my better understanding of many underlying issues. Chances are in 10 years time I'll still be solving the same issues with yet better tools, but the machine won't be helping me all that much.
Regarding the Internet, sure it's great but somedays I pine for the days of infrequent emails, no spam, few security issues, fewer distractions (slashdot), less paperwork and fewer administrative tasks to fullfill that have become easier for administrators to push because they now have the computing power to write and distribute memos, directives, and what not.
In the scientific world it has become harder to survive as a productive scientist rather than easier. In the US you may have heard that there is now an oversupply of IT personel, and has been for a few years, and that now IT skills are being commoditized.
Meanwhile people still kill themselves with machetes, people still starve in large areas of th e world, governments continue to declare wars on real and imagined ennemies, copyright issues are still the same as in the eras of the book and then of the VCR and the magnetic tape, and people don't think history repeats itself.
Humankind has a lot more problems to solve than computing issues, and in the few decades I've been alive I have seen extremely little progress with most of these.
There are reasons to feel cautiously optimistic about some issues, but the progress that you mention mostly concern a tiny minuscule minority of the human race of which you are lucky to be part of.
Yes radio netlink and wearable computers will become more ubiquitous. As for voice interfaces, you should read some stories of people with RSI who have tried to replace keyboard entry with voice input. They go hoarse after a few days. I can talk with confidence about computer vision, it's making great strides in some area such as automated stereo vision and video analysis, but the major problems of the last decades are still almost exactly the same. Image understanding is as hard as ever. Nanotech is progressing but we are far from an easy production process, and it will be a while before we have self-replicating nanomachines, should we want that (according to Bill Joy we don't).
Anyway this is getting long. The point is most of what we've seen in the last few decades are evolutionary changes. The net existed 30 years ago, it now has expanded into every home. It's a big deal but nothing really major. Now we have wireless and so forth, it makes it easier than ever to stay connected, but again, no big deal. We have easier access to information, but libraries existed before. What has chan
Finger pointing is not going to help the world's problems. At the moment it is rather the US which seems to be interested in neo-colonialism and imperialism. For example the US defence budget represents 50% of the world's total expenditure on defense, see Figures for 2004.
If you agree that neo-colonialism and imperialism was wrong for the European countries, then why would it be any different for the US?
Bin laden and his gang have an issue with the US because it maintains military bases in Saudi Arabia and other neighbouring Arab countries. They saw it as desecrating their Holy Land. Militarily supporting Israel is not seen as a positive point either.
Regarding the Kyoto protocol, *all* of the countries in the EU have ratified the Kyoto protocol and are implementing it. In fact the Kyoto protocol has force of directive in the EU, and this means every member country must adopt it. Some countries have lowered their CO2 emission below 1990 levels already.
I don't see why the long-term goal of reducing emission would be detrimental to the economy. On the contrary. It seems that the US is spending a huge amount of resources (see above) to maintain access to the current way of producing energy (oil). If in 20 years time the Europeans and other nations have become good at using renewable energy sources but the US haven't and are still fighting in the Middle East, I'd say this wouldn't constitute a sound investment.
Finally it would be crazy of the Europeans to try and destroy the American economy. This is was drives the world. An ailing American economy is not good news anywhere around the world.
Less paranoia and more rational thinking would do a world of good.
Imaging how boring that would be. 4000 years on a ship, with nowhere to go and nothing much to do. I'd imagine the crew would start mini-wars and not many would be alive by the end of the trip.
I think if we achieved immortality society as a whole would quickly become extremely conservative, in the sense that people living now would have to think what to do in 300 years time, and that wrecking the planet is not such a good idea.
Right now people don't care because they think they'll be dead when all the accumulated environmental degradation really hit. All the messages about passing the buck to one's children really doesn't register with most people.
Also people living longer might become conservative in the general sense. It's hard to adapt to new ideas, etc.
If we achieve immortality the population will never peak.
> Sure I'll die eventually, but not with my permission.
That's what you say now.
Such a rate of change would have to be machine-driven. I don't believe 6-7 billion human beings can effect such a rate of change as you describe. That would mean each and every one of them come up with an invention, a new paradigm, a novel insight every single day. And if the exponential growth rate has to continue, then they would have to come up with something like that every few hours, then every minutes, etc.
This is simply not possible. In a world with finite resources exponential growth usually stops, often very quicly. Even more so with so-called super-exponential rates of change.
What is a positive void coefficient?
Actually it's not completely trivial what happens to common glass under heavy radiation. You have to dilute the radioactive stuff so that the glass doesn't melt or break down into reactive components.
If the radioactive stuff gets mixed up in the water it will make its way up the foodchain, by virtue of being composed of heavy metals that don't get excreted or metabolized. Instead the stuff concentrates eventually into seafood we might want to eat.
It is really not trivial what to do with the waste. Myself I think it should be sent under the magma. Find a location where tectonic plate subduction occurs and drop the deep sea waste cells there. By the time it comes out it won't be radioactive anymore.
I wouldn't get fixed up on the revenge thing. I've seen with my own eyes highly intelligent, technically literate people take up management positions and little by little move from a situation where they understood the technical matters and paid attention to the plebs to one where they didn't care about anything or anyone, just because they could.
It's not revenge over the nerds, it's just plain, unadulterated power and human nature.
To help you understand, do you care about what the cleaners at your place of work do? What about the homeless people on your way home? do you care why people in Sudan are dying in drove right now? No, because you don't have to.
Everybody sucks.
I don't understand your point. It seems that if X were more resilient than Y, then there would be more XX fertilized eggs (girls) than XY (boys). But the reverse is true: 106 boys are born for 100 girls.
At birth nature favours more boys than girls. Women seem to live longer than men in western societies, but is that because they have tended to live more sedentary lives than men? Studies show that if women start to live like men do (careers, booze, fast cars, etc) then they die just as easily.
When Bush Senior decided not to go for Baghdad during Desert Storm, he did this in consultation with the locals, i.e Saudi Arabia and the other powerful Arab nations around Iraq. The reasoning was that Saddam would not last long under internal pressure and that it would be by far the best way to go rather than be drawn into a long and painful pacification mission.
Anyway, the mission of liberating Kuwait had been accomplished, Bush senior didn't have a mandate from the UN to go any further.
In the 10 years that followed SH survived, was a right pain in the butt for everybody but, as it turns out, he had been effectively declawed. In hindsight it would have probably been better to wait a few more years and let the Iraqi solve their own internal problems themselves. Now the US has to pick up a lot of broken pieces and it looks like it is going to be there for a long time, lest Iraq became a theocracy and a breeding ground for more terrorism.
Some time ago GWB was interviewed and asked if he had consulted with his dad regarding the invasion of Iraq, he effectively said no, that instead he had consulted with a "higher dad above". Very scary if you ask me.
Again: invading a country for regime change is NOT ALLOWED in international law. Had the US gone ahead with invading for the express purpose of toppling Saddam Hussein, it would have found itself in violation of international law, this means Bush and its whole cabinet could have been indicted for war crimes. Great, eh? Now at least they can say "oh, but we did it because SH was in violation of such and such UN resolution". Much more defensible.
The US had to find another excuse. This means the public had to be deceived. There was no other way. The wonder is that it worked so well. To me the public is just as culpable as their leader. "We was deceived, I swear", yeah, right.
They found ONE shell with Sarin in it. Hardly a weapon of mass destruction. In the article they suggest it was a stray that was scavenged.
We know Iraq *had* large stockpile of WMDs, I believe the UN inspectors got rid of most of them, maybe some went to Syria, obviously some got scavenged and are now in the hand of unstable elements. Also I believe that the CIA accounting was simply wrong. In other words the situation is worse than it was before the war.
When GWB attacked Iraq was complying, opening up all the facilities that the inspectors wanted. the inspectors were asking for more time, which was not granted because GWB was getting impatient.
Regime change in Iraq might have been US policy but in case you don't know, invading a country for the express purpose of changing the regime is illegal in international law, and a good thing it is too (think about it).
Finally Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and as you are seeing around the world only today (hostages killed in Saudi Arabia), invading Iraq has done very little to quench international terrorism and has done a great deal to discredit the US with a lot of countries.
Don't rewrite history.
They are indeed running out of power, the RDU on the Voyager probes have a half-life of a few years only. Voyager 2 doesn't have enough power to run all of its intruments anymore.
Red Hat do have a quality distribution, it's called Red Hat Entreprise Linux, and they want you to pay for it if you need it. Alternatively you can try WhiteBox Linux or Fermi Linux which are built from the RHEL 3 SRPMS and work exactly the same, they are even free, but come with no official support.
The Fedora stuff behaves exactly as you would expect for a complex distribution with new and shiny pieces of software which haven't had much testing yet, such as the 2.6 kernel and Gnome 2.6. The only way these things are going to become stable is if people try them and report bugs. That's how you can contribute to Free Software.
If you are not willing to do that this is fine, but don't use the Fedora distribution.
Your idea is not feasible with current technology.
Just so you know, dropping something into the Sun is really really hard to do. To give you an idea, sending something in low Earth orbit implies a change of speed of about 8km/s, i.e if you can bring something initially at rest on the surface of the Earth sufficiently far away from the surface not to be bothered by the atmosphere and then accelerate it to that speed then it will orbit the Earth.
From there, to drop something into the Sun you have to slow them down from their orbit around the Sun by approximately 30km/s. It takes as much energy to accelerate something as to slow it down. So if need energy E so send something into orbit around the Earth, you need approximately 4xE to drop it into the Sun! You can improve on that number somewhat by using gravity-assisted planet flybys, such as around Venus for example, but this is tricky business and we've only managed it for tiny little probes like the Venera and Mariner series.
Sending something up in orbit is not even half of the problem. No one really knows how to send up thousands of tonnes of material without using vastly unproven and experimental technology, and we wouldn't want to do that with spent nuclear fuel, at least not initially...
In would be far far cheaper and safer to drop the fuel into the deepest underwater trenches, in the regions where subduction occurs between techtonic plates. The fuel would get buried for good under the Earth's crust, never to come up again.
The parent asked if the technique can be patented, not whether it should.
The technique is not obvious. It's obvious to you because you've read about it in a book. In hindsight most things are obvious, even Relativity.
Now it was obviously novel at some point. Will the USPTO look into books for reference to prior art? I don't think so, what matters is whether the technique has been patented before. In all likelihood the patent will be granted unless someone has patented it before.
Now in court, if you want to challenge it you can use books and papers and prior art and in this case maybe the evidence is compelling.
In one fell swoop you've described what's wrong with the patent system today. The USPTO and other patent offices in Europe and elsewhere don't have the resources or the skills or the patience to look for prior art in depth.
Of course you are perfectly correct regarding the fast pace of life, in the same sense that now a double-income family is considered standard. You don't have to follow the trend though.
It's the same with computers. We used to have secretaries and communicating with the rest of the world used to take weeks, not hours. This is not a trend that can continue forever, though.
Sorry to nitpick, but that's herd mentality.
The issues of cars is charged with emotions, it is difficult to be rational. One of my co-workers has bought a huge car fit for 6 people because (she says) once a year she drives 3,000km to go back to her folk with her sister and her two teenage kids (that's only 4 people, if I can count correctly). The rest of the year she drives the car in the city with just herself in it. With the difference in purchase price alone with a smaller, more nimble car fit for a city, not counting higher running costs, she could rent a luxury car for the trip for 10 years running.
Of course in reality the car is nice and she could afford it and she wanted the status symbol, so there you go. However none of these reasons are rational from the economic point of view.
Having an SUV is convenient but not indispensable. My parents had 3 kids and we had a minuscule car. Most Americans would not even label this thing a car, let alone drive it or consider it for any sort of family car, yet that's the one we had. I remember one of my parent's friends carting us around for music lessons in a Mini. That is one adult, 3 teenagers + instruments in a car you had to lower yourself in. That was fine, and fun in fact.
I regularly see standard 2 adults, 2 kids families in their vast empty SUV. Usually only one adult in fact.
I'm not blaming anybody for buying SUVs, here in Australia they make perfect sense to buy because gas/petrol is still cheap, and they carry tax concessions, under the misguided assumption that only people in the bush (in the country) would buy them. Of course that created a tax loophole where manufacturers jumped in, and now the damn vehicles are so popular that the loophole can't be closed off. Compared with normal large family cars they are actually cheaper to buy. I'd imagine something similar is true in the US.
Of course they also feel safer to drive due to bulk and better vision. However if petrol prices continue to rise I can't see much of a bright future for 4 litres+ engines.
It would be very likely to put up a good fight in court, because it is novel, useful and non-trivial. What you are complaining about is equivalent to saying that a piece of software written in the C language cannot be patented because the C language is an ISO standard.
I've never seen blind trust in any form of government anywhere, it's more a question of degree of paranoia. In Europe a number of government services are actually well run, such as the education system in some countries, goverment funded research labs, universities, or utility distribution. In some countries a government job is actually prestigious and competent people compete for them in nationwide exams. It does make a difference to the end product.
On the other hand many goverment branches are distrusted such as the police, the army and the tax services, typically. You'll find that similar safeguards are in place in every western democracies that make sure none of these services outstep their bounds. I remember one instance of a police officer bashing a student during a demonstration against rising fees, and that was enough to have the interior minister dismissed and to topple the whole goverment.
In the US everything run by government is assumed corrupt, untrustworthy and inefficient, even such things as the postal service. Maybe there are some reason for it but maybe it's just badly run and it doesn't have to be that way.