Has anyone ever looked at what would be the *real* solution, which would be reverse-engineering how these plants take in Sun + Co2 + minerals, and produce the oil?
If this process could be reproduced in a lab, and then commercialized, maybe you'd be abl to generate lots of biodeisel without having to grow and harvest acres upon acres of land. If you do the math (lost trees, tractor fuel, time to harvest) many feel that biodeisel en-masse is actually more harmful to the planet than it is beneficial.
But if biodeisel could be produced atrificially, without requiring fields of soy...
At the core, they're basically the same (less some cultural differences) as Canadians...
You can't say that Canadians are "basically the same" as Americans simply because you drive your car on the right hand side of the road. That is like saying you are "basically the same" as a polar bear because you are both mammals.
Canadians and Americans are very different when it comes to politics. What is considered a liberal politician in the U.S. would normally be called a conservitive politican in Canada. Canadian citizens generally swing far more to the left than Americans on most issues.
There are also huge differences in economic policy ond diplomatic policies between the two contries. There are also huge culterual differences between them, mostly due to the fact that Canada was founded by people who *wanted* to remain loyal to the Crown, while Americanw as founded based on the idea of seperating from the Crown.
Say you have 500 customers, if they each have to get 512 MB of extram ram to run your software, the cost of that would run about 512 * $50 = $25,000, give or take.
Now, say instead, you get your development team to spend 3-4 weeks chasing down memory issues and optimizing the code to be lean and mean. Even if the team is very small (10 people), that just cost you $40,000 to $50,000 in salaries, not to mention the lost time they could be working on something else.
See the point? You could *buy the ram for the customers yourself* and it woudl still be cheaper than paying your developers to chase after leaks.
Konqueror - includes all of KDE (ugh)
Konqueror embedded - lacks maintenance
These are are both false statements.
For one, you don't need "all of KDE" to build and run Konqeuror. All you need is the kdecore libraries, all of which put together have a much smaller footprint both in memory and diskspace than Firefox. If you don't beleive me, 'apt-get install konqueror' in Debian or any other distro that segments up KDE packages.
For the second, Konqeuror embedded is built from the *exact same* cvs tree as Konqueror. Any commits to the rendering engine go to both browsers. So it does not 'lack maitenence', it is very actively developed, just like Konqueror.
Back in my day, we had vt100 and 9600 baud, and we ran long serial cables or keyboard extension cables if you needed to be able to compute while wandering around your dorm room or a lab. How much real progress has been made with the WWW and 802.11 ?
The difference is, I don't think my wife wants to have a giant cable following her around that she can trip over, while she is reading up on her Soap Opera Digest while watching TV in the living room.
The difference is, the Internet is not just for geeks anymore. It is for everyone. And "everyone" does not want cables all over the place, they want a nice, clean, liveable space, and wireless gives them that. They don't really give a flying rats ass if they only get 2.5 Mbps instead of 7Mbps, because they don't know any better, and they have no logical reason to anyways.
...sell straighforward features for sellers for higher price and I feel Ebay doesn't retain records of past auctions long enough.
Not that they couldn't do it, but Google (or anyone else) would have a harder time beating down eBay than that. Just look at how Yahoo! (a company with way more money that eBay at the time) tried and failed miserably.
The problem with beating eBay at their game, is that it is not simply a matter of making a better service. In order to sell your goods, you need lots of people searching the site. And in order to have lots of people searching the site, you need to have lots of goods. So, anyone who wants to be an up-and-comer in the online auction business has to conquer this chicken-and-the-egg problem, while simultaniously competing with eBays enormous brand (eBay has entered the popular culture almost as thouroughly as Google, it is in TV, movies, etc.).
Seriously, if companies think I have nothing better to do than sit on the phone all day, they are nuts. I will gladly pay a higher price at a competitor than waste hour sof my valuble time on the phone for a simple issue.
Example, I was getting a really good long distance rate at Primus canada, like 4 cents a minute or something. One day I wanted to change th credit card it was being billed to - I was on hold for ***2 hours*** waiting for someone. Luckily I had a speaker phone at work so it didn't bother me much. but guess what? That call to change credit card numbers quickly became a call to cancel my service altogether.
But you should really RTFA, because this is exactly what happens. The interviewer asks them about government censorship, they say it does not really affect them so they don't really have a comment, then the interviewer goes on a crazy tangent where they keep probing about it and basically make the interviewee out to be either a liar or someone who is afraid for his life, neither of which is likely the case.
If the government does not censor my particular blog, then it has absolutely nothing to do with the interview. Whether or not it may be censoring other blogs is irrelevant, and my personal opnions on the matter (if I even have any, most likely don't care since they are simple plebs), pro or con, would likely not have any place in the original subject matter of the interview.
So, either the interviewer was working under false pretenses from the get go, or they are incompetant and have no other questions. Either way, I would want out of that interview ASAP, since it will do netiher me nor my blog any benefit to being in it.
If I write a blog about Chinese pop stars, and someone from the BBC contacts me about an interview, I naturally assume they want to talk about a) the blog, and/or b) Chinese pop stars. I do *not* assume they are going to start probing me about how the government censors my blog, which they may or may not do. So, if they ask me these kinds of questions, is it unheard of that I would want to redirect the interview to the original purpose ?
The whole reason these people even give these interviews is to promote themselves and their blog. It is not to act as a political messenger. If they are anywhere near as apethetic toward politics as 99.99% of the western world, they likely give two shits about government censorship, since they don't have any radical ideas worth censoring.
Despite what you may or may not believe, the majority of middle-class Chinese are not much different from you ("you" being the average westerner), your'e both happy little consumer monkeys, who swallow whatever the press and big money market toward you, and is too busy obessing about the latest Teen Idol(tm) episode to worry about AIDS pandemics in Africa or anything else worth worrying about. (Seriously - WTF is with all this bird flu paranoia about something that may or may not happen, when thousands are dying daily in Africa from preventable diseases just because they can't afford the few bucks a day for treatment?)
If you base your whole interview on the fact that the interviewee is unwilling to tell the "truth", then what happens if they are telling the truth, but it is just not what you think it was? Answer - you keep probing. Basically, your whole agenda is to try to slant the interview toward your bias you had going into the thing.
This is not good reporting. Good reporting, by definition should be reporting the facts, which in this case, are the interviewees responses. If they are not responding the way you would like, then you shouldn't be trying to force them to do so thorugh agressive bully tactics, just move on to the next question.
I do not have a hard time believing that censorship is the last thing on most of these guy's minds. Has anyone even looked at one of the blogs that was probed by the BBC? Does this blog look like it was being censored? (Hint - take a look about midway down the page at "The other side of China" post - not very flattering for the government)
I have no doubt that censorship in China is very troublesome. That does not mean it is troublesome to *everyone*. The guy was asked to give an interview about his blog, he probably wants to do just that, hopefully to promote it and get more page hits. Maybe he does not want to wax philisophical about the problems of his government. That's his right, so stop harassing him! You're supposed to be a member of a country who values freeodom of speech, give him a chance to exercise his.
Those are not public and private members, they are just ways of hackishly emulating them using closures.
And there are still things that this does not provide you with, you can't make real private member in Javascript. If you define it in a closure, then it is not the object's scope anymore, so it cannot access it's members natively using the 'this' object. If it can access it's members, then it is available to all external access too, so it is public.
You can't have an object do both, it is impossible. People get around this by passing in their own 'this' references to privately created functions in closures, and somehow think that this means Javascript supports private methods. This is insane.
Thats hackish and not a private member
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Closures do not create private members, they just ar ea way of scoping things. You can do the exact same thing in C or Java by wrapping things in { }.
But they do not create private members. The fact that you have to pass the object instance in as the 'self' argument illustrates this fact. All you have there are some generic private functions, they are not within the object scope of the object you constructed, so they aren't private methods.
All they are is privately scoped static utility methods that operate on objects that are passed into them. It's not the same thing.
Closures don't make a member private
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If you define a function in a closure, it is only available to objects within that closure, That is not the same thing as a private member of a data object. You can't use them in the same way, it is a totally different thing.
For example, take this object, which has some services I want public, and one I want private:
function myObject() { this.dataMember = 0;
this.somePublicService = new function() { //Call the private service this._somePrivateService(); }
this.somePublicService2 = new function() { //Call the private service this._somePrivateService(); }
this._somePrivateService = new function() { this.dataMember++; } }
Now, pray tell, how do I make that private method truely "private" using a closure, while maintaining it's scope within the object correctly? You can't. If you define it inside a closure, it is private to that closure only, and it's scope will no longer include the object, so you can't access the object's members.
I am not trying to troll here, but statements like this all over this article confuse me...
Slackware is simple, light and powerful
I have been using Linux for the past 10 years. I have used it all, from RedHat to Linux From Scratch to Slack to Debian to (my current) Gentoo.
No distro is any "faster" or "more powerful" than any other by itself. They are all running the same (or simmilar) kernels, they are all using the base software packages. They can all be configured to run or not run certain services at start up, and load or not load certain modules.
What is and is nto a distro boils down to four things:
Package Management (.deb,.rpm,.tgz,.ebuild), or lack thereof (Linux from scratch)
Configuration Tools, be they graphical or not
Process startup / shutdown control (init scripts, etc)
Window Dressing (themes, etc)
None of these things will make your system any faster or slower by themselves. It all depends on what you have configured. Personally, I find gentoo is by far the easiest distro ti install and configure software on.
Now, for my personal opinion - I have never had to do anything more than 'emerge ' to get a non-trivial piece of software downloaded,compiled,installed, and running. I have had issues with.deb and.rpm based distros with dependancies and not, and this soured me to them. Slackware, I just find requires too much manual jockying around to get things ina decent state - in Gentoo all that trivial crap is taken care of for me, and I can "just use it right now". If I want to configure it at a lower level, I can always do so. But I am not *required* to do so.
Javascript namespaces
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"Namespaces in Javascript are dead simple, because of function scoping:
window.MyNamespace = new Object() { function NamespaceMethodA() { // alert('hi'); }
function NamespaceMethodB() { // do b code... } }
NamespaceMethodA()// Causes exception
MyNamespace.NamespaceMethodA()// works.
Want to "import" a namespace? Include this function in one of your base.js files
function import( namespace ) { for( i in namespace ) window[i] = namespace[i]; }
You can now do import(MyNamespace) and all it's members will be locally scoped.
The problem in Javascript is not namespaces - it is the fact that there's no way to mark a method/variable as protected/private. So you need to resort to old C-style crap like appending _ to private members if you want to enforce your contracts.
So you're saving like 8 bytes, which would be totally irrelevant if the stream is compressed for transmission (which it usually is) at the expense of making it non-human readable, which is one of the whole reasons XML is plain-text based in the first place. If all you care about is data efficiency, then why the hell are you even useing XML?
I fail to see how Microsoft can take an open, XML-based, plain text format that is ratified in numerous RFCs, and somehow "corrupt it" amd make it unuseable by adding some extra extentions.
Hell, these extentions would not even break existing clients, the parser would just not do anything with the new nodes and attributes!
But on the other hand, you are Evolution and want to sync with Outlook, this would be *great*.
Honestly, with you guys Microsoft is damned if they to (try to create an open standard for synching datebooks via RSS) and damned if they don't (keep their systems proprietary and incompatable).
Scientific Atalnta is in1.6B in debit. Thus, when Cisco "swallows" them up, they are also "swallowing" 1.6B in debit.
It has absolutely nothing to do with the purchase price of $43 per share, or 5.3B, other than the fact that the transaction will essentially be a 6.9B red mark on Cisco's balence sheet (minus SA's revenues).
The whole point of making them so cheap and giving them out for free, is you are going to flood the market with them.
No one will pay for something every kid in in the country already has. Who would buy them? When there is no market *period*, the black market disappears.
The biggest problem I see with this plan is the garbage produced in 4 years when the new models come out and all the existing hundreds of millions are thrown away. Has anyone thought about that? Are these things recycleable?
He also pointed to statistics that show the United States graduating only 4,400 mathematics and science PhDs each year compared with 24,900 math and science PhDs for greater Asia."
Correct me if I am wrong, but since greater Asia has a population of 4 billion, as opposed to the US's 297 million, that is a pretty favourable ratio in favour of the US ( about 2.5 times as many graduates per capita ).
Even if he only means "Asia" as in "China and India and Japan", the US still has more graduates per capita.
Slashdot Mirror
Has anyone ever looked at what would be the *real* solution, which would be reverse-engineering how these plants take in Sun + Co2 + minerals, and produce the oil?
If this process could be reproduced in a lab, and then commercialized, maybe you'd be abl to generate lots of biodeisel without having to grow and harvest acres upon acres of land. If you do the math (lost trees, tractor fuel, time to harvest) many feel that biodeisel en-masse is actually more harmful to the planet than it is beneficial.
But if biodeisel could be produced atrificially, without requiring fields of soy...
At the core, they're basically the same (less some cultural differences) as Canadians...
You can't say that Canadians are "basically the same" as Americans simply because you drive your car on the right hand side of the road. That is like saying you are "basically the same" as a polar bear because you are both mammals.
Canadians and Americans are very different when it comes to politics. What is considered a liberal politician in the U.S. would normally be called a conservitive politican in Canada. Canadian citizens generally swing far more to the left than Americans on most issues.
There are also huge differences in economic policy ond diplomatic policies between the two contries. There are also huge culterual differences between them, mostly due to the fact that Canada was founded by people who *wanted* to remain loyal to the Crown, while Americanw as founded based on the idea of seperating from the Crown.
Oh, and Canada has less fat people per capita :)
Time is expensive. Ram is cheap. do the math.
Say you have 500 customers, if they each have to get 512 MB of extram ram to run your software, the cost of that would run about 512 * $50 = $25,000, give or take.
Now, say instead, you get your development team to spend 3-4 weeks chasing down memory issues and optimizing the code to be lean and mean. Even if the team is very small (10 people), that just cost you $40,000 to $50,000 in salaries, not to mention the lost time they could be working on something else.
See the point? You could *buy the ram for the customers yourself* and it woudl still be cheaper than paying your developers to chase after leaks.
Konqueror - includes all of KDE (ugh)
Konqueror embedded - lacks maintenance
These are are both false statements.
For one, you don't need "all of KDE" to build and run Konqeuror. All you need is the kdecore libraries, all of which put together have a much smaller footprint both in memory and diskspace than Firefox. If you don't beleive me, 'apt-get install konqueror' in Debian or any other distro that segments up KDE packages.
For the second, Konqeuror embedded is built from the *exact same* cvs tree as Konqueror. Any commits to the rendering engine go to both browsers. So it does not 'lack maitenence', it is very actively developed, just like Konqueror.
Back in my day, we had vt100 and 9600 baud, and we ran long serial cables or keyboard extension cables if you needed to be able to compute while wandering around your dorm room or a lab. How much real progress has been made with the WWW and 802.11 ?
The difference is, I don't think my wife wants to have a giant cable following her around that she can trip over, while she is reading up on her Soap Opera Digest while watching TV in the living room.
The difference is, the Internet is not just for geeks anymore. It is for everyone. And "everyone" does not want cables all over the place, they want a nice, clean, liveable space, and wireless gives them that. They don't really give a flying rats ass if they only get 2.5 Mbps instead of 7Mbps, because they don't know any better, and they have no logical reason to anyways.
Not that they couldn't do it, but Google (or anyone else) would have a harder time beating down eBay than that. Just look at how Yahoo! (a company with way more money that eBay at the time) tried and failed miserably.
The problem with beating eBay at their game, is that it is not simply a matter of making a better service. In order to sell your goods, you need lots of people searching the site. And in order to have lots of people searching the site, you need to have lots of goods. So, anyone who wants to be an up-and-comer in the online auction business has to conquer this chicken-and-the-egg problem, while simultaniously competing with eBays enormous brand (eBay has entered the popular culture almost as thouroughly as Google, it is in TV, movies, etc.).
... and cancelling the service.
Seriously, if companies think I have nothing better to do than sit on the phone all day, they are nuts. I will gladly pay a higher price at a competitor than waste hour sof my valuble time on the phone for a simple issue.
Example, I was getting a really good long distance rate at Primus canada, like 4 cents a minute or something. One day I wanted to change th credit card it was being billed to - I was on hold for ***2 hours*** waiting for someone. Luckily I had a speaker phone at work so it didn't bother me much. but guess what? That call to change credit card numbers quickly became a call to cancel my service altogether.
Sure, that is fine.
But you should really RTFA, because this is exactly what happens. The interviewer asks them about government censorship, they say it does not really affect them so they don't really have a comment, then the interviewer goes on a crazy tangent where they keep probing about it and basically make the interviewee out to be either a liar or someone who is afraid for his life, neither of which is likely the case.
It is *totally* slanted and bad journalism.
If the government does not censor my particular blog, then it has absolutely nothing to do with the interview. Whether or not it may be censoring other blogs is irrelevant, and my personal opnions on the matter (if I even have any, most likely don't care since they are simple plebs), pro or con, would likely not have any place in the original subject matter of the interview.
So, either the interviewer was working under false pretenses from the get go, or they are incompetant and have no other questions. Either way, I would want out of that interview ASAP, since it will do netiher me nor my blog any benefit to being in it.
If I write a blog about Chinese pop stars, and someone from the BBC contacts me about an interview, I naturally assume they want to talk about a) the blog, and/or b) Chinese pop stars. I do *not* assume they are going to start probing me about how the government censors my blog, which they may or may not do. So, if they ask me these kinds of questions, is it unheard of that I would want to redirect the interview to the original purpose ?
The whole reason these people even give these interviews is to promote themselves and their blog. It is not to act as a political messenger. If they are anywhere near as apethetic toward politics as 99.99% of the western world, they likely give two shits about government censorship, since they don't have any radical ideas worth censoring.
Despite what you may or may not believe, the majority of middle-class Chinese are not much different from you ("you" being the average westerner), your'e both happy little consumer monkeys, who swallow whatever the press and big money market toward you, and is too busy obessing about the latest Teen Idol(tm) episode to worry about AIDS pandemics in Africa or anything else worth worrying about. (Seriously - WTF is with all this bird flu paranoia about something that may or may not happen, when thousands are dying daily in Africa from preventable diseases just because they can't afford the few bucks a day for treatment?)
This is not good reporting. Good reporting, by definition should be reporting the facts, which in this case, are the interviewees responses. If they are not responding the way you would like, then you shouldn't be trying to force them to do so thorugh agressive bully tactics, just move on to the next question.
I do not have a hard time believing that censorship is the last thing on most of these guy's minds. Has anyone even looked at one of the blogs that was probed by the BBC? Does this blog look like it was being censored? (Hint - take a look about midway down the page at "The other side of China" post - not very flattering for the government)
I have no doubt that censorship in China is very troublesome. That does not mean it is troublesome to *everyone*. The guy was asked to give an interview about his blog, he probably wants to do just that, hopefully to promote it and get more page hits. Maybe he does not want to wax philisophical about the problems of his government. That's his right, so stop harassing him! You're supposed to be a member of a country who values freeodom of speech, give him a chance to exercise his.
Those are not public and private members, they are just ways of hackishly emulating them using closures.
And there are still things that this does not provide you with, you can't make real private member in Javascript. If you define it in a closure, then it is not the object's scope anymore, so it cannot access it's members natively using the 'this' object. If it can access it's members, then it is available to all external access too, so it is public.
You can't have an object do both, it is impossible. People get around this by passing in their own 'this' references to privately created functions in closures, and somehow think that this means Javascript supports private methods. This is insane.
Closures do not create private members, they just ar ea way of scoping things. You can do the exact same thing in C or Java by wrapping things in { }.
But they do not create private members. The fact that you have to pass the object instance in as the 'self' argument illustrates this fact. All you have there are some generic private functions, they are not within the object scope of the object you constructed, so they aren't private methods.
All they are is privately scoped static utility methods that operate on objects that are passed into them. It's not the same thing.
For example, take this object, which has some services I want public, and one I want private:
Now, pray tell, how do I make that private method truely "private" using a closure, while maintaining it's scope within the object correctly? You can't. If you define it inside a closure, it is private to that closure only, and it's scope will no longer include the object, so you can't access the object's members.
Slackware is simple, light and powerful
I have been using Linux for the past 10 years. I have used it all, from RedHat to Linux From Scratch to Slack to Debian to (my current) Gentoo.
No distro is any "faster" or "more powerful" than any other by itself. They are all running the same (or simmilar) kernels, they are all using the base software packages. They can all be configured to run or not run certain services at start up, and load or not load certain modules.
What is and is nto a distro boils down to four things:
None of these things will make your system any faster or slower by themselves. It all depends on what you have configured. Personally, I find gentoo is by far the easiest distro ti install and configure software on.
Now, for my personal opinion - I have never had to do anything more than 'emerge ' to get a non-trivial piece of software downloaded,compiled,installed, and running. I have had issues with .deb and .rpm based distros with dependancies and not, and this soured me to them. Slackware, I just find requires too much manual jockying around to get things ina decent state - in Gentoo all that trivial crap is taken care of for me, and I can "just use it right now". If I want to configure it at a lower level, I can always do so. But I am not *required* to do so.
Want to "import" a namespace? Include this function in one of your base .js files
You can now do import(MyNamespace) and all it's members will be locally scoped.
The problem in Javascript is not namespaces - it is the fact that there's no way to mark a method/variable as protected/private. So you need to resort to old C-style crap like appending _ to private members if you want to enforce your contracts.
So you're saving like 8 bytes, which would be totally irrelevant if the stream is compressed for transmission (which it usually is) at the expense of making it non-human readable, which is one of the whole reasons XML is plain-text based in the first place. If all you care about is data efficiency, then why the hell are you even useing XML?
Sql support has been on the most wanted list for most companies for quite some time now.
Indeed, SQL support is often the first thing I look for when shopping for a database.
I fail to see how Microsoft can take an open, XML-based, plain text format that is ratified in numerous RFCs, and somehow "corrupt it" amd make it unuseable by adding some extra extentions.
Hell, these extentions would not even break existing clients, the parser would just not do anything with the new nodes and attributes!
But on the other hand, you are Evolution and want to sync with Outlook, this would be *great*.
Honestly, with you guys Microsoft is damned if they to (try to create an open standard for synching datebooks via RSS) and damned if they don't (keep their systems proprietary and incompatable).
For starters, anyone could ad this code in an in their blog and achieve the same exploit.
.html and when you open it have the same exploit.
For that matter,someone could email you a
So, be wary. Disable Javascript or (preferably) upgrade to Firefox.
The plates are perfectly legible. They are just invisible to radar and cameras.
I highly doubt the legislation you refer to actually says that plates must be visible to electronic devices.
It has absolutely nothing to do with the purchase price of $43 per share, or 5.3B, other than the fact that the transaction will essentially be a 6.9B red mark on Cisco's balence sheet (minus SA's revenues).
AJAX is a joke to code if you have any idea what you are doing.
1. Use an existing RPC library, like JSON-RPC for java, to translate your objects and methods. Don't re-invent the wheel.
2. Use an existing AJAX library to wrap the XMLHttpRequest object, like Sarissa.
3. Sprinkle wherever it fits.
It is quie simple actually. I was able to AJAX-ify a few pages of an exisiting app in under a day, giving them quite a more responsive feel.
The whole point of making them so cheap and giving them out for free, is you are going to flood the market with them.
No one will pay for something every kid in in the country already has. Who would buy them? When there is no market *period*, the black market disappears.
The biggest problem I see with this plan is the garbage produced in 4 years when the new models come out and all the existing hundreds of millions are thrown away. Has anyone thought about that? Are these things recycleable?
He also pointed to statistics that show the United States graduating only 4,400 mathematics and science PhDs each year compared with 24,900 math and science PhDs for greater Asia."
Correct me if I am wrong, but since greater Asia has a population of 4 billion , as opposed to the US's 297 million , that is a pretty favourable ratio in favour of the US ( about 2.5 times as many graduates per capita ).
Even if he only means "Asia" as in "China and India and Japan", the US still has more graduates per capita.