Size doesn't matter. Many of Einstein's papers were short, elegant, and used little math.
You'll forgive me, but given that people have observed things that appear in every measurable way to be black holes, I want a hell of a lot more convincing evidence than that to reject their existence.
I think your perception has been warped by SciFi movies. All we have really observed when it comes to black holes is that there are very dense masses that aren't neutron stars. Almost everything else is speculation.
The author makes the erroneous assumption that there is necessarily a shakeout among competing open source software packages as there is in the proprietary world. In fact, a big advantage of open source software is that it doesn't just disappear even if the sponsoring organization disappears. This is one of the ways in which open source reduces business risk.
The author also makes the erroneous assumption that the traditional big vendors will have an advantage with open source projects. Again, bad bet: big companies have donated lots of software to the open source community that ended up getting little or no traction. If IBM open sourced DB2, I doubt it would cause a lot of non-DB2 users to change (although it might give current DB2 users more confidence in the future of DB2).
Open source is not "just another licensing model", it's a licensing model that makes specific guarantees to users of the software, guarantees that reduce their risks and costs in choosing the software.
Overall, if open source is a way for big companies to screw users, then, yes, please screw us harder.
"Optimized" doesn't mean that it works better in every case. In fact, it is common for compiler changes to make some code run faster, not change the performance of a lot of code, and make some code run slower.
Compiler writers try to make optimizations that make the common cases work better and only cause slowdowns in unimportant or rare cases. They may also give you lots of options to control detailed optimization behavior (hence all those optimization flags on gcc). And, more recently, they have tried to select optimizations automatically based on profiling and benchmarking data (particularly useful with JITs, where it can be fully automated, but also possible with batch compilers).
In general, any widely used, complex browser add-on like Flash presents potential privacy problems. I wouldn't be surprised if Quicktime or the PDF plugin have similar issues.
Let's stick to open browser standards; those will be the best studied and best understood from a privacy and security point of view. Non-proprietary alternatives to Flash are around the corner.
People who support these types of laws must remember they are a double edge sword that can and will cut both ways. Your particular political opinions may be supported for the time being with such laws and those you disagree with suppressed.
That's a load of unfounded assumptions. Where is there any indication that this law "suppresses" any speech, let alone speech of any particular kind?
What this appears to attempt to do is to get people to disclose what amounts to political advertising in blogs. That seems perfectly reasonable: we have such disclosures for other kinds of political advertising as well. Requiring disclosure of astroturfing would be particularly important; it's too bad that this law probably won't have enough teeth to achieve that.
If you have any support for your assertion that this selectively restricts free speech, please share it with us. Otherwise, your rant is just unfounded.
It's unnecessary to spin things in order to blame Bush because Bush clearly is responsible for record deficits, thousands of deaths in unnecessary wars, and ruining our reputation abroad both as a diplomatic force and as a country respecting human rights, to name just a few. The chimp will go down as one of the worst presidents in US history.
This, however, is simply attempting to require disclosure about paid campaign advertising. It doesn't restrict free speech. That's something liberals will gladly take responsibility for because it's a good thing. If a blogger gets paid thousands of dollars for hyping up a candidate, I want to know about it, and so should you.
But now that we've addressed your particular points let's look into your apparent fetish of ""re-releasing" all fossil fuel as carbon into the atmosphere,"
That's not my "fetish", that's what we are discussing here. Current global warming trends, which is what you are focusing on, are a separate topic. You are uninformed and wrong on those, too, but that's a separate thread.
I think we can all agree here in the process that created these fossil fuels
In fact, the origins of coal, oil, and natural gas are not settled yet.
Carbon is constantly being sequestered underground, today's fertile plains and swamps are tomorrows oil fields.
Even if that simple cycle were the source of all oil, gas, and coal, by artificially releasing carbon at a much higher rate than occurred in the past, we are shifting the equillibrium.
But you obviously have a fear of more life giving carbon being put into the atmosphere.
Whether or not CO2 in the atmosphere produces lush forests, the resulting climate changes will be devastating to economies and species.
Hopefully you can sleep better knowing that we are all not going to die tomorrow.
I don't lose any sleep over it--I'll be dead by the time the full consequences will be felt even under fairly pessimistic climate change models.
But in the hope that the world is not just populated by self-destructive morons like you, one can at least tell people about the consequences of their choices. If they still choose to continue doing what they are doing, well, then obviously our big brain was an evolutionary dead end.
Right. As if the US government never gives subsidies (tax breaks, sweet-deal contracts, research grants, etc.) to corporations and public/private partnerships. Without trillions of dollars of US government support for semiconductors, computers, telecommunications, airplanes, and networking, the US would not be a big player in any of those fields today.
It will happen about as often as compile-time errors happen in static programs, viz. constantly; [...] However, it turns out that expectation 1 is completely false. This is counterintuitive and surprising, but I have the experience to back it up. Runtime type errors are few and far between. In fact they are generally regressions resulting from changes in program semantics.
You're arguing a strawman here. The concern people have about dynamic typing is not those dynamic type errors that happen frequently, but those that happen very rarely. You won't see that "regression" before shipping your code unless you actually detect it during testing, but even careful testing is rarely complete. Static type checking, on the other hand, catches many of those errors.
Many traditional programmers like yourself are comforted by the compiler's ability to lexically cross-check your type declarations. Losing that ability is the biggest leap when moving to the dynamic style.
Many "traditional programmers" started out on dynamically typed languages and only later moved to statically typed languages, so your belief that people need to make "leaps" to move to a dynamic style simply isn't true.
The fact that static typing and dynamic typing have existed side-by-side for more than half a century should tell you that both of them have their uses.
The only real progress in typing has been with languages that offer programmers a choice. Java and C#, for example, offer both static and dynamic typing, and that has been a really useful practical feature of those languages. Dynamic typing features in those languages are somewhat cumbersome to use, but perhaps that's a good thing.
I have just been pointing out that I think the Gimp is OK for many people. In fact, you point out one of the reasons I don't like color management in Photoshop: people often use it inappropriately.
You wrote:
If they are command line, they are probably not interactive. And if they are not interactive, there is a chance they are not very useful for the GIMP.
Well, that sounded to me like you wanted some "interactive color management" for the Gimp. In any case, I think command line color management tools are very useful for the Gimp: you use them to convert out of camera spaces and into printer spaces when you need to; that's usually best done as a batch job.
Sorry, I made an understatement that apparently went over your head. It is completely predictable that a rise in atmospheric CO2 resulting from burning all biologically derived fossil fuel will cause temperatures to rise, will cause glaciers to melt, and will eventually cause sea levels to rise. Heavily populated areas will become uninhabitable and agriculture will be devastated. What is unpredictable is whether we will simply go back to the atmospheric conditions under which the plants that generated those deposits lived (which would be bad enough) or whether it will be even worse than that.
Current trends have shown a 100 year rise of 0.5 degrees C. Within the 30 degree C yearly cycle it's not exactly enough to make me crap my pants.
We aren't talking about "current trends" (wrong as your interpretation of current trends is anyway), we are talking about "re-releasing" all fossil fuel as carbon into the atmosphere.
Change is not neccearilly unpleasant.
That is roughly the same as saying "war is not necessarily unpleasant". Maybe (just maybe) the long-term outcome is a positive one, but the short-term consequences are always bad. But in the case of climate change of the scale we are talking about, climate change resulting from "re-releasing" all fossil fuel as carbon into the atmosphere, we can be nearly certain that even the long-term consequences would be devastating.
This issue hasn't been decided for half a century, what makes you think it will be "decided" within another several years?
However, it just may be that the problems solved by compile-time checking are not actually the problems that make programming-in-the-large difficult to do
Who said they were? Static type checking fulfills an important function in large programming projects. That function is not necessarily what you would understand as "programming in the large", it may well be "programming in the small". But when building large systems, you need to do both a little bit of "programming in the large" and a lot of "programming in the small".
If there is anything like an answer emerging at all, it is that the Java and C# approach seems pretty good: those languages use static type checking by default, but they also give you dynamic type checking, reflection, and code generation when you explicitly ask for them. The existence of such a compromise won't shut up the people who are religiously in the static or dynamic camp, but it helps the rest of us get our work done faster and more safely.
The profusion of library modules with overlapping functionality is a real concern. The confusion over a standard window system (wxPython, Tk,...) is actually just another example of that.
The sys/os split, logical as it may seem to the experienced Python programmer, also confuses Python newbies, as does the fact that string needs to be imported and that re is yet another separate module.
I think Python would do well with a major library cleanup, removing rarely used and duplicated functionality, and improving the quality of the library code that is there.
Furthermore, I think it would help for common string, I/O, OS, and regular expression functionality to be importable either via a single import statement (without name conflicts), or to be simply present in the default namespace.
Soon as the qt windows free version starts shipping I think we will see alot of renewed development of gui stuff in python.
I don't think so. If you develop with Qt, you either have to pay big bucks to Troll Tech up front, or you have irrevocably committed to putting your software under an open source license. Since the latter is usually not acceptable to enterprises (even open-source friendly enterprises), this means paying a lot of money per developer up front.
Python is often adopted casually, on small projects, and people start to use it more and more from there. A tool that people have to pay thousands of dollars for just to use is not something that gets adopted casually.
It is a great language we use it for everything, web services, linux / win integration, nt services, automation etc.
I hope you are either distributing your Qt-based code under the GPL or paying Troll Tech. Which is it?
Currently wxwindows exists but it is a little funky to program in if you ask me.
wxWindows is similar to MFC; that may make it "a little funky" from your point of view, but it ought to make Windows programmers happier.
And, indeed, if only economics (and not governments) were in play, gasoline should be much cheaper than it is now---it's not as bad in U.S., but in Europe and Asia, more than half the gasoline price is tax.
Quite to the contrary. Drivers impose large costs on society. Current US gasoline taxes account for maybe 1/4-1/2 of those costs. The rest is subsidized out of other taxes.
Because you don't want to live in a world in which all fossil carbon is present in the atmosphere as CO2. In fact, we aren't even sure whether all coal and oil actually derives from plants in the first place or whether it was ever present in the atmosphere (see here). Or look at Titan--probably an entire planet covered in hydrocarbons and no plants.
Wouldn't the natural carbon cycle eventually fix enough carbon to effectively starve out photosynthesis?
No. Plants are eaten by animals, and animals turn plant matter back into CO2. It's a long-standing equillibrium that has led to the climate and environment we are experiencing today. By adding carbon into the system, we are changing the equillibrium, and the consequences of that are unpredictable, but probably unpleasant.
I'm sorry, I'm still not getting what you want from the Gimp that Photoshop color management supposedly has. If you work for the web, then pretty much all color management goes out the window because the devices you create images for are all over the place. The best you can do is calibrate your monitor to be kind of "average" (sRGB, if you believe that) and design for that.
So, what Photoshop color management feature do you feel is missing from the Gimp that actually affects your work?
If they are command line, they are probably not interactive. And if they are not interactive, there is a chance they are not very useful for the GIMP.
What do you want from color management other than converting reliably and predictably between different color spaces and devices? What kind of interactivity do you want?
RTFA. If a password is set, the drive cannot even be erased without it.
You RTFA. If a password is set, you can still erase the drive with the master password.
Furthermore, even if you lose the drive (and viruses can probably destroy drives by other means), that's just a cheap piece of hardware. The data is what counts.
False. Standard RFID readers work only at close range, but it is possible to construct long-range RFID readers. Furthermore, if it can be used for toolbooth enforcement, then it can be read in normal traffic situations.
similar to the way human eyes or a tollbooth camera might use visible light to view a license plate, another unique vehicle identifier.
The information stored on a license plate is human readable, the information stored in an RFID chip is not. Furthermore, automatic license plate readers are still sufficiently expensive that they aren't being deployed widely.
But, yes, automatic optical license plate reading is another serious privacy concern. The fact that we have kind of fallen into that possibility is no justification for compounding the problem by also deploying RFID.
I think it is a far better solution than the PSP: it plays arbitrary MPEG4 movies, there are far more games for it than for the PSP (both native and emulated), and you can use it as a super-light laptop and USB disk as well.
Viruses and spyware can simply erase your disk, in addition to changing the password. The solution? The same solution as for hardware failures, cats walking across the keyboard, or babies drooling on the disk: restore from a recent backup. If you don't have a recent backup, a virus that sets the ATA HDD password is the least of your problems.
Bush may be a moron, but his administration isn't stupid. When they appoint people like Wolfowitz or Bolton to participate in international organizations, they know full well what the consequences are inevitably going to be.
If people acquiesce like the WP suggests, then you just let these people get away with murder. If you speak up and expose these people for what they are, then you do indeed risk of damaging those organizations, but if people like those can come to power in those organizations, then maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with the way those organizations are set up, and maybe those organizations should be replaced.
She would be infinitely more productive with Automator than with Bash-programming;).
I wasn't responding to a claim by your wife, I was responding to the claim of an expert bash programmer that it would make him more effective.
But let's look at your example:
Again, you are arguing a straw man. I gave an example an expert bash programmer, not your wife, would use.
Which will be faster? Which of them will he rather use? If you answer "Bash", you are deluding yourself.
You are just shooting down a straw man. I wasn't arguing that bash is the scripting language for your wife.
I was simply stating that there are lots of traditional scripting languages novices apparently have no problems with if they need scripting at all, in particular if they are supported by a good scripting IDE. Furthermore, I was simply stating that there have been lots of Automator-like systems before and they don't seem to make programming magically easy.
What is it with you anyway? Are you deliberately quoting out of context, or are you simply too lazy to understand the posting you are respond to?
Slashdot Mirror
Four fucking pages?!?
Size doesn't matter. Many of Einstein's papers were short, elegant, and used little math.
You'll forgive me, but given that people have observed things that appear in every measurable way to be black holes, I want a hell of a lot more convincing evidence than that to reject their existence.
I think your perception has been warped by SciFi movies. All we have really observed when it comes to black holes is that there are very dense masses that aren't neutron stars. Almost everything else is speculation.
The author makes the erroneous assumption that there is necessarily a shakeout among competing open source software packages as there is in the proprietary world. In fact, a big advantage of open source software is that it doesn't just disappear even if the sponsoring organization disappears. This is one of the ways in which open source reduces business risk.
The author also makes the erroneous assumption that the traditional big vendors will have an advantage with open source projects. Again, bad bet: big companies have donated lots of software to the open source community that ended up getting little or no traction. If IBM open sourced DB2, I doubt it would cause a lot of non-DB2 users to change (although it might give current DB2 users more confidence in the future of DB2).
Open source is not "just another licensing model", it's a licensing model that makes specific guarantees to users of the software, guarantees that reduce their risks and costs in choosing the software.
Overall, if open source is a way for big companies to screw users, then, yes, please screw us harder.
"Optimized" doesn't mean that it works better in every case. In fact, it is common for compiler changes to make some code run faster, not change the performance of a lot of code, and make some code run slower.
Compiler writers try to make optimizations that make the common cases work better and only cause slowdowns in unimportant or rare cases. They may also give you lots of options to control detailed optimization behavior (hence all those optimization flags on gcc). And, more recently, they have tried to select optimizations automatically based on profiling and benchmarking data (particularly useful with JITs, where it can be fully automated, but also possible with batch compilers).
In general, any widely used, complex browser add-on like Flash presents potential privacy problems. I wouldn't be surprised if Quicktime or the PDF plugin have similar issues.
Let's stick to open browser standards; those will be the best studied and best understood from a privacy and security point of view. Non-proprietary alternatives to Flash are around the corner.
People who support these types of laws must remember they are a double edge sword that can and will cut both ways. Your particular political opinions may be supported for the time being with such laws and those you disagree with suppressed.
That's a load of unfounded assumptions. Where is there any indication that this law "suppresses" any speech, let alone speech of any particular kind?
What this appears to attempt to do is to get people to disclose what amounts to political advertising in blogs. That seems perfectly reasonable: we have such disclosures for other kinds of political advertising as well. Requiring disclosure of astroturfing would be particularly important; it's too bad that this law probably won't have enough teeth to achieve that.
If you have any support for your assertion that this selectively restricts free speech, please share it with us. Otherwise, your rant is just unfounded.
It's unnecessary to spin things in order to blame Bush because Bush clearly is responsible for record deficits, thousands of deaths in unnecessary wars, and ruining our reputation abroad both as a diplomatic force and as a country respecting human rights, to name just a few. The chimp will go down as one of the worst presidents in US history.
This, however, is simply attempting to require disclosure about paid campaign advertising. It doesn't restrict free speech. That's something liberals will gladly take responsibility for because it's a good thing. If a blogger gets paid thousands of dollars for hyping up a candidate, I want to know about it, and so should you.
But now that we've addressed your particular points let's look into your apparent fetish of ""re-releasing" all fossil fuel as carbon into the atmosphere,"
That's not my "fetish", that's what we are discussing here. Current global warming trends, which is what you are focusing on, are a separate topic. You are uninformed and wrong on those, too, but that's a separate thread.
I think we can all agree here in the process that created these fossil fuels
In fact, the origins of coal, oil, and natural gas are not settled yet.
Carbon is constantly being sequestered underground, today's fertile plains and swamps are tomorrows oil fields.
Even if that simple cycle were the source of all oil, gas, and coal, by artificially releasing carbon at a much higher rate than occurred in the past, we are shifting the equillibrium.
But you obviously have a fear of more life giving carbon being put into the atmosphere.
Whether or not CO2 in the atmosphere produces lush forests, the resulting climate changes will be devastating to economies and species.
Hopefully you can sleep better knowing that we are all not going to die tomorrow.
I don't lose any sleep over it--I'll be dead by the time the full consequences will be felt even under fairly pessimistic climate change models.
But in the hope that the world is not just populated by self-destructive morons like you, one can at least tell people about the consequences of their choices. If they still choose to continue doing what they are doing, well, then obviously our big brain was an evolutionary dead end.
Right. As if the US government never gives subsidies (tax breaks, sweet-deal contracts, research grants, etc.) to corporations and public/private partnerships. Without trillions of dollars of US government support for semiconductors, computers, telecommunications, airplanes, and networking, the US would not be a big player in any of those fields today.
It will happen about as often as compile-time errors happen in static programs, viz. constantly; [...] However, it turns out that expectation 1 is completely false. This is counterintuitive and surprising, but I have the experience to back it up. Runtime type errors are few and far between. In fact they are generally regressions resulting from changes in program semantics.
You're arguing a strawman here. The concern people have about dynamic typing is not those dynamic type errors that happen frequently, but those that happen very rarely. You won't see that "regression" before shipping your code unless you actually detect it during testing, but even careful testing is rarely complete. Static type checking, on the other hand, catches many of those errors.
Many traditional programmers like yourself are comforted by the compiler's ability to lexically cross-check your type declarations. Losing that ability is the biggest leap when moving to the dynamic style.
Many "traditional programmers" started out on dynamically typed languages and only later moved to statically typed languages, so your belief that people need to make "leaps" to move to a dynamic style simply isn't true.
The fact that static typing and dynamic typing have existed side-by-side for more than half a century should tell you that both of them have their uses.
The only real progress in typing has been with languages that offer programmers a choice. Java and C#, for example, offer both static and dynamic typing, and that has been a really useful practical feature of those languages. Dynamic typing features in those languages are somewhat cumbersome to use, but perhaps that's a good thing.
Nothing! I thought you wanted something. :-)
I have just been pointing out that I think the Gimp is OK for many people. In fact, you point out one of the reasons I don't like color management in Photoshop: people often use it inappropriately.
You wrote:
If they are command line, they are probably not interactive. And if they are not interactive, there is a chance they are not very useful for the GIMP.
Well, that sounded to me like you wanted some "interactive color management" for the Gimp. In any case, I think command line color management tools are very useful for the Gimp: you use them to convert out of camera spaces and into printer spaces when you need to; that's usually best done as a batch job.
And the information to back this up is?
Sorry, I made an understatement that apparently went over your head. It is completely predictable that a rise in atmospheric CO2 resulting from burning all biologically derived fossil fuel will cause temperatures to rise, will cause glaciers to melt, and will eventually cause sea levels to rise. Heavily populated areas will become uninhabitable and agriculture will be devastated. What is unpredictable is whether we will simply go back to the atmospheric conditions under which the plants that generated those deposits lived (which would be bad enough) or whether it will be even worse than that.
Current trends have shown a 100 year rise of 0.5 degrees C. Within the 30 degree C yearly cycle it's not exactly enough to make me crap my pants.
We aren't talking about "current trends" (wrong as your interpretation of current trends is anyway), we are talking about "re-releasing" all fossil fuel as carbon into the atmosphere.
Change is not neccearilly unpleasant.
That is roughly the same as saying "war is not necessarily unpleasant". Maybe (just maybe) the long-term outcome is a positive one, but the short-term consequences are always bad. But in the case of climate change of the scale we are talking about, climate change resulting from "re-releasing" all fossil fuel as carbon into the atmosphere, we can be nearly certain that even the long-term consequences would be devastating.
It will take several years to decide the issue.
This issue hasn't been decided for half a century, what makes you think it will be "decided" within another several years?
However, it just may be that the problems solved by compile-time checking are not actually the problems that make programming-in-the-large difficult to do
Who said they were? Static type checking fulfills an important function in large programming projects. That function is not necessarily what you would understand as "programming in the large", it may well be "programming in the small". But when building large systems, you need to do both a little bit of "programming in the large" and a lot of "programming in the small".
If there is anything like an answer emerging at all, it is that the Java and C# approach seems pretty good: those languages use static type checking by default, but they also give you dynamic type checking, reflection, and code generation when you explicitly ask for them. The existence of such a compromise won't shut up the people who are religiously in the static or dynamic camp, but it helps the rest of us get our work done faster and more safely.
The profusion of library modules with overlapping functionality is a real concern. The confusion over a standard window system (wxPython, Tk, ...) is actually just another example of that.
The sys/os split, logical as it may seem to the experienced Python programmer, also confuses Python newbies, as does the fact that string needs to be imported and that re is yet another separate module.
I think Python would do well with a major library cleanup, removing rarely used and duplicated functionality, and improving the quality of the library code that is there.
Furthermore, I think it would help for common string, I/O, OS, and regular expression functionality to be importable either via a single import statement (without name conflicts), or to be simply present in the default namespace.
Soon as the qt windows free version starts shipping I think we will see alot of renewed development of gui stuff in python.
I don't think so. If you develop with Qt, you either have to pay big bucks to Troll Tech up front, or you have irrevocably committed to putting your software under an open source license. Since the latter is usually not acceptable to enterprises (even open-source friendly enterprises), this means paying a lot of money per developer up front.
Python is often adopted casually, on small projects, and people start to use it more and more from there. A tool that people have to pay thousands of dollars for just to use is not something that gets adopted casually.
It is a great language we use it for everything, web services, linux / win integration, nt services, automation etc.
I hope you are either distributing your Qt-based code under the GPL or paying Troll Tech. Which is it?
Currently wxwindows exists but it is a little funky to program in if you ask me.
wxWindows is similar to MFC; that may make it "a little funky" from your point of view, but it ought to make Windows programmers happier.
And, indeed, if only economics (and not governments) were in play, gasoline should be much cheaper than it is now---it's not as bad in U.S., but in Europe and Asia, more than half the gasoline price is tax.
Quite to the contrary. Drivers impose large costs on society. Current US gasoline taxes account for maybe 1/4-1/2 of those costs. The rest is subsidized out of other taxes.
And this is a problem why?
Because you don't want to live in a world in which all fossil carbon is present in the atmosphere as CO2. In fact, we aren't even sure whether all coal and oil actually derives from plants in the first place or whether it was ever present in the atmosphere (see here). Or look at Titan--probably an entire planet covered in hydrocarbons and no plants.
Wouldn't the natural carbon cycle eventually fix enough carbon to effectively starve out photosynthesis?
No. Plants are eaten by animals, and animals turn plant matter back into CO2. It's a long-standing equillibrium that has led to the climate and environment we are experiencing today. By adding carbon into the system, we are changing the equillibrium, and the consequences of that are unpredictable, but probably unpleasant.
I'm sorry, I'm still not getting what you want from the Gimp that Photoshop color management supposedly has. If you work for the web, then pretty much all color management goes out the window because the devices you create images for are all over the place. The best you can do is calibrate your monitor to be kind of "average" (sRGB, if you believe that) and design for that.
So, what Photoshop color management feature do you feel is missing from the Gimp that actually affects your work?
If they are command line, they are probably not interactive. And if they are not interactive, there is a chance they are not very useful for the GIMP.
What do you want from color management other than converting reliably and predictably between different color spaces and devices? What kind of interactivity do you want?
RTFA. If a password is set, the drive cannot even be erased without it.
You RTFA. If a password is set, you can still erase the drive with the master password.
Furthermore, even if you lose the drive (and viruses can probably destroy drives by other means), that's just a cheap piece of hardware. The data is what counts.
RFID works only at a very close range
False. Standard RFID readers work only at close range, but it is possible to construct long-range RFID readers. Furthermore, if it can be used for toolbooth enforcement, then it can be read in normal traffic situations.
similar to the way human eyes or a tollbooth camera might use visible light to view a license plate, another unique vehicle identifier.
The information stored on a license plate is human readable, the information stored in an RFID chip is not. Furthermore, automatic license plate readers are still sufficiently expensive that they aren't being deployed widely.
But, yes, automatic optical license plate reading is another serious privacy concern. The fact that we have kind of fallen into that possibility is no justification for compounding the problem by also deploying RFID.
I think it is a far better solution than the PSP: it plays arbitrary MPEG4 movies, there are far more games for it than for the PSP (both native and emulated), and you can use it as a super-light laptop and USB disk as well.
Viruses and spyware can simply erase your disk, in addition to changing the password. The solution? The same solution as for hardware failures, cats walking across the keyboard, or babies drooling on the disk: restore from a recent backup. If you don't have a recent backup, a virus that sets the ATA HDD password is the least of your problems.
Get an Archos PMA-400; similarly gorgeous screen, it runs Linux out of the box, and it doesn't use any proprietary disks.
Bush may be a moron, but his administration isn't stupid. When they appoint people like Wolfowitz or Bolton to participate in international organizations, they know full well what the consequences are inevitably going to be.
If people acquiesce like the WP suggests, then you just let these people get away with murder. If you speak up and expose these people for what they are, then you do indeed risk of damaging those organizations, but if people like those can come to power in those organizations, then maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with the way those organizations are set up, and maybe those organizations should be replaced.
She would be infinitely more productive with Automator than with Bash-programming ;).
I wasn't responding to a claim by your wife, I was responding to the claim of an expert bash programmer that it would make him more effective.
But let's look at your example:
Again, you are arguing a straw man. I gave an example an expert bash programmer, not your wife, would use.
Which will be faster? Which of them will he rather use? If you answer "Bash", you are deluding yourself.
You are just shooting down a straw man. I wasn't arguing that bash is the scripting language for your wife.
I was simply stating that there are lots of traditional scripting languages novices apparently have no problems with if they need scripting at all, in particular if they are supported by a good scripting IDE. Furthermore, I was simply stating that there have been lots of Automator-like systems before and they don't seem to make programming magically easy.
What is it with you anyway? Are you deliberately quoting out of context, or are you simply too lazy to understand the posting you are respond to?