The team of individuals was indeed on standby to assess the impact of the atomic bomb. Remember, until the attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no one had seen an atomic weapon go off in a "real world" setting. The only tests had been in a laboratory envornment with very careful controls to ensure that bomb detonation occurred under optimal conditions. So, while the bomb demonstrated lots of potential as a military weapon, no one was sure of its actual impact in a battlefield environment.
Also, at the time, very little was known about the impact of high levels of radiation. Certainly we didn't know much about the impact of radioactive fallout, and the long term diseases caused by ionizing radiation.
Frankly, I view a lot of the post-Hiroshima analysis as a net benefit to mankind, since it highlighted the horror of nuclear weapons and gave those who would seek to use them in the future reason to pause.
It is arguable if nuclear weapons "won" World War 2. More likely, our saturation bombing of Japanese cities had broken the will of the Japanese people, and the Emperor would have ordered a surrender eventually. The presence of nuclear weapons simply put the situation in a very stark light and forced the Japanese to concede in a matter of days versus months.
Its not "practically impossible" to find the best solution. It is quite possible. The issue is that finding the optimal solution takes O(2^n), where n is the number of objects to be packed. So, for any large value of n, the calculation will take a prohibitively long time, but it will terminate.
This is in contrast to undecidable problems, which really are "practically impossible" to solve.
Problem is, you are talking about HUMAN RANGE. It is quite possible for other forms of life to live over much broader range of specs.
Given that we've yet to find life on Mars, I think that its pretty safe to say that the only life we know of exists in the range occupied by the Earth.
To be fair, though, for the tribes that were under Aztec domination, the arrival of the Spaniards was simply the exchange of one brutal enslaver for another.
If you could just configure it to be some kind of an advanced cache that constantly reads and writes to the hard disk and just takes the hit from the I/O spikes off it, I could see it being awesome.
And how would that be different from just a regular disk cache (as implemented by Linux or Windows)?
It seems that the developers of Tabula Rasa have at least attempted to script an end to the game. From the summary, it seems like they're basically using a archetypal end-of-the-world scenario where the forces of evil and chaos meet the forces of good and order in a final battle at the end of the world.
I'm of two minds about this. I'd like to be able to disagree with you; to say that by 2020 everyone will be used to people sharing things about their lives, so that revelations like your example will be a non-issue. At the same time, I'm afraid that nothing will change, that we'll be held to the same standards as today, with far more information available to the general public about how we've failed to meet those standards at some point in our lives.
Yes, you can create something, and, as long as you don't violate others' rights to life, liberty, or property in the process of doing so, you can give up ownership of that work.
Think about it - ownership includes the right to give up ownership. After all, if you can't give something away, do you really own it in the first place?
In that case, the school wouldn't be rejecting him because he violated your license, they'd be rejecting him because of his intellectual dishonesty. Just because you've made it legal for Joe to use your work as his own doesn't mean its right for him to do so in an attempt to gain entrance to a program for which he'd be otherwise unqualified.
Not necessarily. I posit that Linux would have even more traction on the desktop, since the patents on mathematical functions like MP3 compression or GIF image compression wouldn't exist. This would mean that Linux would be able to compete more equally with Windows, unlike the current situation, where Linux is crippled for desktop use due to its inability to include common multimedia software.
Also, in the absence of copyright, you'd see much more restrictive DRM on the part of Microsoft and other software vendors (since they wouldn't be able to rely on the legal system to seek recourse). This would also have the effect of driving more people to open-source software.
Finally, a looser intellectual property regime would make it easier for open source developers to reverse engineer closed binary formats, leading to improved cross compatibility between equivalent software.
As a sibling poster stated, if you're really sure you can get another job at a higher salary, you still have the option of starting your job search once you find out you're being hit by a pay cut. That way you still have a "backup" option should your job search go more badly than you've expected.
Well, if you're switching careers anyway, it can be quite cathartic to send off that final blistering e-mail you've always wanted to send telling everyone what you really think of them...
Though, to be fair, I think that sort of thing should be saved until retirement.
Well now the tech knows that he can always threaten to pull another "tantrum" whenever management decides against him. Keeping your friends close and your enemies closer is only a good idea when you're not beholden to your enemies.
In every application development project, there is a tradeoff between making the application secure and releasing the application in a timely manner. Yes, Microsoft could release totally secure software. But, the consequence would be that applications would take much longer to develop.
That restriction doesn't apply as much in the open-source world, since time restrictions are somewhat looser.
Why is it so hard to see that a secure browser could be done using existing operating systems?
That is exactly what Microsoft is calling for here. They are saying, rather than implementing security between browser tabs via application level hacks, why not branch off each browser tab into a separate process (like Chrome or IE8) and use the operating system to enforce the proper security permissions for you? Moreover, since you're creating new processes anyway, why do you need to create them with the same permissions as the user? Why not new less-privileged processes? This way the browser can't even be used to hijack the user's own home directory, much less the system as a whole.
Which country has more problems with illegal immigration from less developed countries? Perhaps this is the true measure of general quality of life.
How does that work? Illegal immigration doesn't measure absolute quality of life, it measures the difference in quality of life between two (usually adjacent) countries, after the factors of legal trouble and geographic barriers have been accounted for.
The US has a large immigration problem because we share a long, largely unpatrolled land border with Mexico, while maintaining a quality of life that is significantly higher. Therefore, a case can be made that the benefits of higher income and better standard of living outweigh the risks of legal trouble and the physical dangers of crossing that border.
The border between the US and Canada, while being equally long and equally unpatrolled, does not have nearly as large of a standard of living difference across it. Therefore, it is not worth the risk of legal trouble and physical endangerment to cross the border.
Canada is relatively safe from illegal immigration for the reason above - the only land border it shares is with another prosperous country, and wide oceans separate it from all other nations. However, there are European countries, like France, Spain, and Italy that do not have this luxury. All of them are relatively close to North Africa, which has a significantly lower standard of living than that of Europe. Not surprisingly, these countries are also dealing with a significant illegal immigration problem.
There are some poverty indicators on the graph that you can play with as well, but income per person is a fairly reasonable way to assess how well the citizens are doing financially in developed nations.
The problem with the raw "income per person" statistic is that it completely ignores how that income is distributed. You could have two countries, one in which all of the income goes to a tiny elite, while the rest live in crushing poverty, and a second more equitable country, where everyone has a middle-class life, and the income per person statistic for both would be roughly equal. Yet, I would be hard pressed to find anyone saying that the standard of living in the two countries was equivalent for the average person.
A better index of standard of living (in terms of income) is the Gini Index which does take into account income distribution. On that index, the US ranks below Canada and Western Europe, with a Gini Index of.4, whereas those countries have a Gini Index ranging from.24 to.36. Combined with other measures (as stated by the grandparent), I do believe that there is a case to be made that Western Europe has a higher standard of living (for the average person) than the USA.
Yes, private homes may have been better built before building codes, because the occupants had a direct interest in making the home safe. However, commercial buildings (like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory) are not subject to the same restrictions. There are numerous examples (U.S. in the 1800s, third world countries today) where the lack of adequate building codes allows builders to get away with murder (quite literally, since their buildings often kill people when they collapse).
Yes, I agree that the phenomenon of building "to code and not a whit more" isn't ideal. However, I'd argue that its better than the preceding practice of building as cheaply as possible, safety of the occupants be damned.
More likely, we'd see more computers going to the landfills, as users realize that its almost as cheap to purchase a new computer as to have the one you own serviced.
Well, the precedent would last until some retailer sued the state in federal court on the exact grounds you've brought up - regulation of interstate commerce is a matter explicitly reserved by the federal government.
Slashdot Mirror
The team of individuals was indeed on standby to assess the impact of the atomic bomb. Remember, until the attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no one had seen an atomic weapon go off in a "real world" setting. The only tests had been in a laboratory envornment with very careful controls to ensure that bomb detonation occurred under optimal conditions. So, while the bomb demonstrated lots of potential as a military weapon, no one was sure of its actual impact in a battlefield environment.
Also, at the time, very little was known about the impact of high levels of radiation. Certainly we didn't know much about the impact of radioactive fallout, and the long term diseases caused by ionizing radiation.
Frankly, I view a lot of the post-Hiroshima analysis as a net benefit to mankind, since it highlighted the horror of nuclear weapons and gave those who would seek to use them in the future reason to pause.
It is arguable if nuclear weapons "won" World War 2. More likely, our saturation bombing of Japanese cities had broken the will of the Japanese people, and the Emperor would have ordered a surrender eventually. The presence of nuclear weapons simply put the situation in a very stark light and forced the Japanese to concede in a matter of days versus months.
The issue with "practically impossible" is that the definition of such changes every year, as computers grow more and more powerful.
Its not "practically impossible" to find the best solution. It is quite possible. The issue is that finding the optimal solution takes O(2^n), where n is the number of objects to be packed. So, for any large value of n, the calculation will take a prohibitively long time, but it will terminate.
This is in contrast to undecidable problems, which really are "practically impossible" to solve.
Problem is, you are talking about HUMAN RANGE. It is quite possible for other forms of life to live over much broader range of specs.
Given that we've yet to find life on Mars, I think that its pretty safe to say that the only life we know of exists in the range occupied by the Earth.
To be fair, though, for the tribes that were under Aztec domination, the arrival of the Spaniards was simply the exchange of one brutal enslaver for another.
If you could just configure it to be some kind of an advanced cache that constantly reads and writes to the hard disk and just takes the hit from the I/O spikes off it, I could see it being awesome.
And how would that be different from just a regular disk cache (as implemented by Linux or Windows)?
It seems that the developers of Tabula Rasa have at least attempted to script an end to the game. From the summary, it seems like they're basically using a archetypal end-of-the-world scenario where the forces of evil and chaos meet the forces of good and order in a final battle at the end of the world.
I'm of two minds about this. I'd like to be able to disagree with you; to say that by 2020 everyone will be used to people sharing things about their lives, so that revelations like your example will be a non-issue. At the same time, I'm afraid that nothing will change, that we'll be held to the same standards as today, with far more information available to the general public about how we've failed to meet those standards at some point in our lives.
Still, I hope for the best.
I'm not normally one to quibble about misspellings, but seeing two different ones in a row gets my goat.
Its Smoot-Hawley folks. Smoot-Hawley.
Yes, you can create something, and, as long as you don't violate others' rights to life, liberty, or property in the process of doing so, you can give up ownership of that work.
Think about it - ownership includes the right to give up ownership. After all, if you can't give something away, do you really own it in the first place?
In that case, the school wouldn't be rejecting him because he violated your license, they'd be rejecting him because of his intellectual dishonesty. Just because you've made it legal for Joe to use your work as his own doesn't mean its right for him to do so in an attempt to gain entrance to a program for which he'd be otherwise unqualified.
Not necessarily. I posit that Linux would have even more traction on the desktop, since the patents on mathematical functions like MP3 compression or GIF image compression wouldn't exist. This would mean that Linux would be able to compete more equally with Windows, unlike the current situation, where Linux is crippled for desktop use due to its inability to include common multimedia software.
Also, in the absence of copyright, you'd see much more restrictive DRM on the part of Microsoft and other software vendors (since they wouldn't be able to rely on the legal system to seek recourse). This would also have the effect of driving more people to open-source software.
Finally, a looser intellectual property regime would make it easier for open source developers to reverse engineer closed binary formats, leading to improved cross compatibility between equivalent software.
File->Print...
That's the advantage of paper - management has to be physically present to delete that stuff.
As a sibling poster stated, if you're really sure you can get another job at a higher salary, you still have the option of starting your job search once you find out you're being hit by a pay cut. That way you still have a "backup" option should your job search go more badly than you've expected.
Not to mention possibly career ending.
Well, if you're switching careers anyway, it can be quite cathartic to send off that final blistering e-mail you've always wanted to send telling everyone what you really think of them...
Though, to be fair, I think that sort of thing should be saved until retirement.
Well now the tech knows that he can always threaten to pull another "tantrum" whenever management decides against him. Keeping your friends close and your enemies closer is only a good idea when you're not beholden to your enemies.
In every application development project, there is a tradeoff between making the application secure and releasing the application in a timely manner. Yes, Microsoft could release totally secure software. But, the consequence would be that applications would take much longer to develop.
That restriction doesn't apply as much in the open-source world, since time restrictions are somewhat looser.
Does that mean that Funny is the new Troll?
Why is it so hard to see that a secure browser could be done using existing operating systems?
That is exactly what Microsoft is calling for here. They are saying, rather than implementing security between browser tabs via application level hacks, why not branch off each browser tab into a separate process (like Chrome or IE8) and use the operating system to enforce the proper security permissions for you? Moreover, since you're creating new processes anyway, why do you need to create them with the same permissions as the user? Why not new less-privileged processes? This way the browser can't even be used to hijack the user's own home directory, much less the system as a whole.
Which country has more problems with illegal immigration from less developed countries? Perhaps this is the true measure of general quality of life.
How does that work? Illegal immigration doesn't measure absolute quality of life, it measures the difference in quality of life between two (usually adjacent) countries, after the factors of legal trouble and geographic barriers have been accounted for.
The US has a large immigration problem because we share a long, largely unpatrolled land border with Mexico, while maintaining a quality of life that is significantly higher. Therefore, a case can be made that the benefits of higher income and better standard of living outweigh the risks of legal trouble and the physical dangers of crossing that border.
The border between the US and Canada, while being equally long and equally unpatrolled, does not have nearly as large of a standard of living difference across it. Therefore, it is not worth the risk of legal trouble and physical endangerment to cross the border.
Canada is relatively safe from illegal immigration for the reason above - the only land border it shares is with another prosperous country, and wide oceans separate it from all other nations. However, there are European countries, like France, Spain, and Italy that do not have this luxury. All of them are relatively close to North Africa, which has a significantly lower standard of living than that of Europe. Not surprisingly, these countries are also dealing with a significant illegal immigration problem.
There are some poverty indicators on the graph that you can play with as well, but income per person is a fairly reasonable way to assess how well the citizens are doing financially in developed nations.
The problem with the raw "income per person" statistic is that it completely ignores how that income is distributed. You could have two countries, one in which all of the income goes to a tiny elite, while the rest live in crushing poverty, and a second more equitable country, where everyone has a middle-class life, and the income per person statistic for both would be roughly equal. Yet, I would be hard pressed to find anyone saying that the standard of living in the two countries was equivalent for the average person.
A better index of standard of living (in terms of income) is the Gini Index which does take into account income distribution. On that index, the US ranks below Canada and Western Europe, with a Gini Index of .4, whereas those countries have a Gini Index ranging from .24 to .36. Combined with other measures (as stated by the grandparent), I do believe that there is a case to be made that Western Europe has a higher standard of living (for the average person) than the USA.
Yes, private homes may have been better built before building codes, because the occupants had a direct interest in making the home safe. However, commercial buildings (like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory) are not subject to the same restrictions. There are numerous examples (U.S. in the 1800s, third world countries today) where the lack of adequate building codes allows builders to get away with murder (quite literally, since their buildings often kill people when they collapse).
Yes, I agree that the phenomenon of building "to code and not a whit more" isn't ideal. However, I'd argue that its better than the preceding practice of building as cheaply as possible, safety of the occupants be damned.
More likely, we'd see more computers going to the landfills, as users realize that its almost as cheap to purchase a new computer as to have the one you own serviced.
Well, the precedent would last until some retailer sued the state in federal court on the exact grounds you've brought up - regulation of interstate commerce is a matter explicitly reserved by the federal government.