Probably a lot of you know this, but for the benefit of those who don't, S. Korea is currently pursuing an aggressive build-out of new nuclear reactors. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration S. Korea already gets 34% of its power from nuclear, and plans to be generating 50% from nuclear by 2022 (and will likely keep pushing that percentage up to the 60-80% range longer term).
If the electricity to charge the batteries in the buses comes from nuclear, it should be very low-carbon emissions, low air pollution energy. The South Koreans are also building nuclear at something like 1/2 the cost of equivalent nuclear plants constructed in the U.S., so it should be pretty cheap energy too.
S. Korea is even starting to get into the business of exporting nuclear power plants to other countries - they recently inked a deal with the United Arab Emirates to build four 1.4 GW plants in UAE for a total of $20Bn(USD).
After reading the slashdot summary, I got to wondering - do Placebos actually "work" or is it simply that the patients would get better all by themselves (immune system and other self-healing mechanisms in the body)? So, I did a few seconds of googling "placebo vs no treatment", and came upon a paper online at the NIH website:
The author of that paper concludes, "There was no evidence that placebo interventions in general have clinically important effects."
If the healing happens a certain percentage of the time regardless of whether treatment is even administred, then it makes perfect sense that placebo would work that same percentage of the time, even if people didn't believe they were being treated - e.g. "belief" has nothing to do with recovery - that is, it's very possible, and that NIH paper appears to confirm the hypothesis, that with "placebo effect", the conscious mind plays no role in the improvements witnessed.
Most routers can be configured to allow you to connect remotely over the Internet, using https to 'protect' your admin session. In practice, I don' know why most people would need to do this - for the most part, once you get one of those configured, you basically leave it alone forever. I suppose if you had a need to turn on port forwarding on some port, remotely, perhaps you'd want this. Maybe someone administering the router for a relative, friend, or client might want to enable it.
In any case, in the scenario above, since you aren't connecting on the local WiFi network, the WiFi encryption is irrelevant - the only thing protecting your session as it traverses the 'public' Internet is the SSL encryption.
If I just took the money and run, I'd be less worried about extradition than about execution. People who break the law probably wouldn't hesitate to track you down wherever you went, kill you, and take the money. Or kidnap one of your relatives and demand a ransom.
Fact one: as of *right now* the total number of purchases is about 116,000. Fact two: as of *right now*, the *largest* contribution was only $2000 dollars. (The top ten contributions are listed, and they go down quickly from that $2000 figure - #10 is currently $500, so by definition, all the remaining contributions are less than $500, unless the statistics they are reporting are outright lies. It is very likely that the vast majority of users would be donating less than $100.) Fact three: as of *right now*, the total sales volume in dollars is $869,711
Put all the facts together, and you get a picture that the $869,000 was raised through a LOT of fairly small contributions. Or, at least, no ONE SINGLE donator made a large enough contribution to significantly throw off the averages. In order for one person to throw it off, they would need to make a donation many orders of magnitude larger (say $100,000-200,000), but that is *simply* not the case since we know the largest donation was only $2000.
It would really behoove you, when the GGP says to go look at the statistics on humblebundle.com, to actually GO LOOK AT THE STATISTICS, instead of making posts which show you obviously didn't bother to look over them at all, instead preferring to make specious arguments that are directly contradicted by the data HAD YOU BOTHERED TO LOOK FIRST.
The best value of the OpenID approach isn't even that you only need to trust one provider - it's that if you use one password for everything, it means you can change one password once and you have a new password on every site. I got a notification from Ars Technica about 6 months ago that there password database had been exposed, and recommending that if you re-used the password on multiple sites, you should change that password everywhere it's used. So, if you have one 'weak' password for 'unimportant' sites, as this Slashdot article suggests, and you also re-use that password you now have to remember to go change that password at every site you've used it - but you might forget to change it right away at a site you only occasionally use.
Of course, the flip side is, if your password is somehow compromized with OpenID and you *don't* know that, and thus don't change the password (because you think it's still safe), an attacker has access to everything. Which is why I'd never use OpenID for something like a bank site, online auction/retailer, etc.
Using OpenID for the types of sites where you might use a 'weak' password because they aren't "that important", and using a moderately strong password makes more sense than using weak passwords on lots of different sites. It's just too bad that more sites don't offer OpenID login.
Why Windows? Because there are a lot of Windows Servers in the world, and it might be hypothetically possible for an attacker to get a copy of the Windows User Account database for a server. If you use 'backwards compatibility' settings for Windows, it generates hashes the same way that Windows 95, 98, etc did, which had some serious weaknesses which make it particularly easy to use Rainbow Tables (according to the linked article, a 14 character password was stored as two separate 7 character hashes, effectively reducing password strength to finding 2 7-character passwords, which a rainbow table can easily and quickly do).
What you say is true if the attacker is attacking your server directly. The Gawker Media situation is one where, through some means or other, crackers managed to secure the password database file with the account names and password hashes for EVERY Gawker user account.
Once they have a copy of the file, they can then proceed to do an OFFLINE Rainbow Tables attack against all the user accounts, and find the password for every username with a sufficiently weak password. With an offline attack, there's no way you can prevent them from trying something like this attack. Any system could be to some level vulnerable to an offline attack if the attacker gets a copy of the account data - even Linux or Apache.
The article summary doesn't make one thing very clear - if you buy an item from the manufacturer, or an authorized agent, *inside* the United States, you can resell it or give it away, whatever. This ruling is about reselling items in the United States which A) contain any sort of copyrighted material, and B) where manufactured and sold outside of the United States.
Nobody is going to go after the person who travelled to some other country, bought only one or two items, then at some later point in their life, decideds to sell those items used - although, because of this ruling, they *technically could* - one more of the many laws which make 'technical criminals' out of just about everybody. What this case is really about is big import companies, like Walmart, Costco, or even smaller retail chains, websites, etc going abroad, buying goods which manufacturers have priced more cheaply in third-world nations, then importing the cheaper item and competing directly with the more highly-priced versions of the items being sold directly by the manufacturer or their distributors.
I'm not saying I think this is a good ruling - I'm not sure why enforcing U.S. Copyright Laws inside of the jurisidictional territory of the U.S.A. with regards to first sale would 'extend' our copyright laws extraterritorially.
Ham radio is fine for people who don't need any sort of privacy whatsoever, don't need reliability (ham radio can allow you to someone on the other side of the world, but not necessarily a *particular* someone that you want to reach), and don't need it for any business use.
So, that rules out a LOT of use cases. Don't get me wrong, I'm a licensed ham, and I would encourage more people to get licensed (it's really not hard to get the entry-level "Technician" license), but I also recognize that Ham radio has some pretty severe restrictions, so that it can't really be used as a general-purpose communications system. Satellite phones can.
It comes down to: not a lot of people NEED satellite phones. But those who do *really* need satellite phones. Basically, you've got to pay to play. If you need to go somewhere that you need satellite phone service, you're just going to have to figure out how to pay. Government/military people, business people (oil company employees, journalists, etc), and 'adventurers' out sailing across the pacific ocean, or trekking in some remote mountain range or jungle, and so forth usually can afford to pay 800 or 1000 for a SatPhone, and high service fees.
I have to ask: what are the odds that somewhere in the PostgreSQL-XC development cycle, the pg devs will unknowingly implement the same technique(s) that Oracle used and patented, opening pgsql-xc to oracle lawsuits?
Whenever Free/Open-Source software tries to do something that some proprietary vendor has already done, seems to me there's a relatively high probability that *something* will end up being done the same way, because it's the obvious (or only) solution to the problem at hand.
I was wondering about the smoke two. My guess is it's some combination of the following:
* When the slug is fired by the railgun, their is surface friction between the slug and the rail. With that much kinetic energy, the friction, even if they have used very high-step tech to minimize the friction, will probably super heat some of the material of the slug, the rail, or both, so that might be some material which broke free and started to burn?
* Effect of air resistance on the slug, moving at mach 8+, might cause some of the slug material to super heat, and burn off?
Yeah, Except why would Google want to keep Dalvik if it infringes Java patents? If you're replacing one VM with another, why not the Python VM? If they can do Python to Java Bytecodes, why not the other way round? Then people who hate Python's syntax could keep developing in the Java language with the Python VM, and you probably could also get a pretty big level of backwards compatibility.
"Yes, whitespace should never be syntactically significant."
Well, ok, I can buy that argument. I've not programmed much in Python, yet. It looked like an OK language, but I have often wondered how many hard-to-debug errors might arise because of improper indenting.
Well, for Dalvik (and thus Android), there's a legal dispute between Google and Oracle about whether Dalvik infringes Java patents. As far as I know, copyrights are not in dispute. Google says Dalvik is not Java. If Dalvik is not Java, then the issues surrounding the JCP and TCK are completely irrelevant to Google, because Dalvisk is not Java. There's one other bit of important trivia: "Desktop" Java is nominally open-source. "Mobile" Java is a proprietary product which Sun/Oracle licensed to handset makers with somewhat traditional licensing fees.
The TCK is a conformance test that a JVM which wants to call itself "Java" and be officially 'blessed' by Oracle (and thus, immune from patent and copyright lawsuits) has to pass, and I believe that Sun and now Oracle charge developers a LOT of money to get and use the TCK. Thus, to have an official "Java" implementation, even though you don't have to pay for a license from Sun/Oracle because it's nominally open-source, really isn't free, because you can't be "Java" unless you pay up for the conformance test and then pass it. (Which, in my mind, means that Java fails the basic criteria for being open source - it's not really freely licensed, it's only licensed contingent upon passing the TCK which you must pay for).
If Oracle prevails in the Google lawsuit, it may be able to force Google to declare that Dalvik is Java, pay for the TCK, pass the conformance test, and additionally pay for Java "Mobile" licenses (or perhaps, that burden will be passed on to the handset makers, since the handset makers are more the 'point of sale' - e.g. I don't believe Google gets per-handset licensing revenue for Android, they make their money off of the tight integration of built-in apps with Google's advertising supported search and web services). Or, Oracle might settle for allowing Dalvik to be "Not Java", but demand a patent licensing fee from Google or handset makers for use of their patents, but acknowledge Dalvik as a seperate, derivative technology.
If Google prevails, and the courts don't find that they've violated any patents, then this Apache/Oracle JCP thing means absolutely nothing to Google, Dalvik, or Android. Dalvik will continue to be "Not Java".
I would add to the above, that people have a legitimate need to keep some secrets, and so do governments. International diplomacy is essential, and the need for intergovernmental 'confidence' is a necessary part of diplomacy.
While I can see leaking things like U.S. government efforts to spy on U.N. officials, other government officials, etc, or leaking information about U.S. government corruption, lies they've made to their citizens, illegal military actions, etc - things which are merely 'embarrassing' to the government - it's another thing to be leaking a lot of private communications between governments. If governments cannot communicate candidly and privately with other government leaders, do you really think that will lead to a *safer*, more *peaceful* world? I don't.
When leaking any information, the first question which must be asked is, "Will leaking this do more harm than good"? I can condone limited leaks when their is obvious corruption, government leaders lieing to the public to cover up illegal actions, etc. I just don't see how doing a mass release of 10 years' or so worth of diplomatic communications comes close to that standard.
The one thing I do have a bit of a problem with is that Assange is not a U.S. citizen, and not subject to U.S. laws when he is not on our soil, and neither is WikiLeaks. However, Assange is a citizen of *some* nation, and subject to its laws. WikiLeaks is hosted in some nation(s) and subject to their laws. I would suppose there is some sort of international treaty covering situations like this, where under most nations laws, it would be illegal to publish illegally obtain, classified information for allies of that nation. I believe Assange is an Australian citizen, so I could see him, if Australia has such a law to protect their allies confidentiality, prosecuting him under their laws.
If there is no such international treaty, perhaps the time has come.
Ss for whoever leaked the documents, who was a trusted member of the U.S. government, if the Private who is alleged to have leaked the documents really did, and is justly convicted, he should absolutely be executed for treason - if he did do this, he's made the world a less safe place, and violated the oaths and laws of his position.
"But, courts and government are essentially mob justice."
No. Most people are pretty stupid. I include myself in this. Most people can be easily misled by misleading 'evidence'.
Courts provide a structure of 'rules' of evidence that attempt to filter out the most egregious bad evidence. Will lawyers and prosecutors still attempt to enter into evidence any BS they think can mislead the jury in their favor? Yes, but the judge doesn't always allow all 'evidence'. Mobs, like in this case with EasyDNS, often listen to 'hearsay' - second or third hand witnesses. Courts long ago determined that in most cases, anyone who is not a first-hand witness is worthless, and so deny hearsay testimony.
If the people who attacked EasyDNS hadn't listened to 'hearsay' (e.g. inaccurate reports from people who screwed up the name in the process of reporting), they wouldn't have attacked the wrong party.
Courts benefit from the accumulated experience of thousands of years of jurisprudence. Mistakes are still made - we should continue to refine and reform our court systems (for example, I've lost faith in the 'jury of peers' model - most people are too stupid and too uneducated to be good jurors; I'd personally rather see a pool of professional jurors with education not in law, but in logic, in various scientific and engineering backgrounds (the better to evaluate evidence and arguments), in criminal forensics, accounting/financial, etc - the courts could then make sure that an appropriate set of jurors expert in fields being investigated by the case at hand were selected - so a securities fraud case could have at least a couple or three jurors who are *experts* in financial and securities fraud on the jury to evaluate the cases presented, etc).
Still, I'd rather be tried by a U.S., Canadian, or U.K. court than an angry mob just looking to punish *someone*.
If they carry the cable, Walmart usually is cheap
on
Goodbye, VGA
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· Score: 1
Walmart doesn't have the most comprehensive collection of cables, but the cables they do carry are almost always pretty reasonably priced (might be a lower quality, but for the most part, cables I've bought from them have done the job I needed them to do; ymmv).
I'm not sure how much weight I'd give to that Press Freedom Index. As the Wiki page itself says, "Due to the nature of the survey's methodology based on individual perceptions, there are often wide contrasts in a country's ranking from year to year. (Emphasis added)"
I also noticed that in the rankings, The U.S. comes out ahead of such countries as France, Spain, Portugal, Canada, and South Korea.
The U.S. might not be completely perfect, but you know what, our freedom of the press is pretty strong, and I'd much rather be a reporter here in the U.S. than in about 2/3 of the rest of the nations of the world.
For those who immediately thought of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks upon reading the article headline, as I admit I did, I will also point out that it's not the U.S. who has put out a warrant for Assange, it's Sweden (though I'm sure people are convinced Sweden is just acting at the U.S.'s behest), and you know what? You can't entirely rule out the possibility that either A) he really did rape that woman, or B) politics has nothing to do with the case, and it's just an angry ex-lover looking for some revenge and 15 minutes of fame.
Yes, I get that, but you're missing my point, I think.
In math and science classes, you might talk about the relationship between frequency and period. For example, with an oscillation like an A/C electric current, or radio/light wave, period is how much time it takes to complete a single cycle, frequency is how many cycles occur in a fixed time period (usually, 1 second). Mathematically, period = 1/frequency, and vice versa.
What I'm saying is that going from 1.25s to 0.625s, even though it doesn't sound like a big deal because it looks like a really small change in time, really is a big deal, because it means that JavaScript engine or browser is (nominally) doing twice as much stuff per unit-time. It's like the difference between period and frequency.
There is, of course, one flaw in this analogy - with computer programming systems, often time speedups are achieved through efficiency gains - using improved algorithms so you can get the same final result with much less work. Working smarter, not harder, so to speak. But, even with optimizations like that, at some point, you've got to reach an absolute minimum - where you cannot possibly reduce the workload any further and still get the correct, expected result.
I don't think Columbia, and the other three you mentioned are particularly bad countries, I suspect mostly they are too small and dependent on China to risk reprisals. But I agree, most of the rest in the list seem a bit like a brotherhood of dictators. Good to see all the autocrats standing together.
It's a good point. A prize/medal/honor of any sort, is only as good as the people who've won it. When you start giving out prizes not based upon what someone has actually *done* but what you think they will do in the future, the prize becomes meaningless. Obama was president for what, a month(?) when he was awarded the prize, and had done nothing other than get elected.
The Al Gore prize, I could *somewhat* understand - whether you (the reader) agree that Anthropogenic Global Warming (or whatever they call it this week), at least you could look and say that A) The Committee believes that AGW is a threat to world peace, and B) Al Gore had made a huge impact in getting more people around the world to be more aware of the issue, thinking and talking about it, to move towards change. Gore had done *something* (and, also, the prize was shared with the IPCC, which had done a lot of scientific work). Obama didn't even have that much.
However, it did still seem too early even for the Gore/IPCC award, because even though they had gotten people talking about the issue, it seemed like you would need the perspective of a decade or two of history (maybe even longer), to really evaluate whether Gore and the IPCC actually did have a meaningful impact on World Peace.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's important to try to provide everyone in your society with access to some form of reasonably high speed Internet, but not because it's a 'basic human right'.
What I've always been taught about the basic definition of what a "basic human right" is, is something you are born with, and can only be *taken away* from you by governments, not given to you. E.g. freedom of speech is what you have by default, only to be taken away. Freedom of thought/conscience/religion. Life, liberty, pursuit of hapiness. The air. That sort of thing. You have it till someone takes it away. Internet totally fails that test.
It's like saying 'having food to eat is a basic human right'. Through most of history, most people have had to work for their food. They *need* food, but it doesn't just get handed to you (unless you happen to be born to rich parents). Clothing, shelter - all fundamentally important things, but don't seem to fit the definition *I've* been taught of what a human right is.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably a lot of you know this, but for the benefit of those who don't, S. Korea is currently pursuing an aggressive build-out of new nuclear reactors. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration S. Korea already gets 34% of its power from nuclear, and plans to be generating 50% from nuclear by 2022 (and will likely keep pushing that percentage up to the 60-80% range longer term).
If the electricity to charge the batteries in the buses comes from nuclear, it should be very low-carbon emissions, low air pollution energy. The South Koreans are also building nuclear at something like 1/2 the cost of equivalent nuclear plants constructed in the U.S., so it should be pretty cheap energy too.
S. Korea is even starting to get into the business of exporting nuclear power plants to other countries - they recently inked a deal with the United Arab Emirates to build four 1.4 GW plants in UAE for a total of $20Bn(USD).
I'm pretty sure I'm already getting 200 emails a day offering to sell me discount placebo. . .
After reading the slashdot summary, I got to wondering - do Placebos actually "work" or is it simply that the patients would get better all by themselves (immune system and other self-healing mechanisms in the body)? So, I did a few seconds of googling "placebo vs no treatment", and came upon a paper online at the NIH website:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12535498
The author of that paper concludes, "There was no evidence that placebo interventions in general have clinically important effects."
If the healing happens a certain percentage of the time regardless of whether treatment is even administred, then it makes perfect sense that placebo would work that same percentage of the time, even if people didn't believe they were being treated - e.g. "belief" has nothing to do with recovery - that is, it's very possible, and that NIH paper appears to confirm the hypothesis, that with "placebo effect", the conscious mind plays no role in the improvements witnessed.
Most routers can be configured to allow you to connect remotely over the Internet, using https to 'protect' your admin session. In practice, I don' know why most people would need to do this - for the most part, once you get one of those configured, you basically leave it alone forever. I suppose if you had a need to turn on port forwarding on some port, remotely, perhaps you'd want this. Maybe someone administering the router for a relative, friend, or client might want to enable it.
In any case, in the scenario above, since you aren't connecting on the local WiFi network, the WiFi encryption is irrelevant - the only thing protecting your session as it traverses the 'public' Internet is the SSL encryption.
If I just took the money and run, I'd be less worried about extradition than about execution. People who break the law probably wouldn't hesitate to track you down wherever you went, kill you, and take the money. Or kidnap one of your relatives and demand a ransom.
"One buyer can throw off the chart completely."
No they can't:
Fact one: as of *right now* the total number of purchases is about 116,000.
Fact two: as of *right now*, the *largest* contribution was only $2000 dollars. (The top ten contributions are listed, and they go down quickly from that $2000 figure - #10 is currently $500, so by definition, all the remaining contributions are less than $500, unless the statistics they are reporting are outright lies. It is very likely that the vast majority of users would be donating less than $100.)
Fact three: as of *right now*, the total sales volume in dollars is $869,711
Put all the facts together, and you get a picture that the $869,000 was raised through a LOT of fairly small contributions. Or, at least, no ONE SINGLE donator made a large enough contribution to significantly throw off the averages. In order for one person to throw it off, they would need to make a donation many orders of magnitude larger (say $100,000-200,000), but that is *simply* not the case since we know the largest donation was only $2000.
It would really behoove you, when the GGP says to go look at the statistics on humblebundle.com, to actually GO LOOK AT THE STATISTICS, instead of making posts which show you obviously didn't bother to look over them at all, instead preferring to make specious arguments that are directly contradicted by the data HAD YOU BOTHERED TO LOOK FIRST.
The best value of the OpenID approach isn't even that you only need to trust one provider - it's that if you use one password for everything, it means you can change one password once and you have a new password on every site. I got a notification from Ars Technica about 6 months ago that there password database had been exposed, and recommending that if you re-used the password on multiple sites, you should change that password everywhere it's used. So, if you have one 'weak' password for 'unimportant' sites, as this Slashdot article suggests, and you also re-use that password you now have to remember to go change that password at every site you've used it - but you might forget to change it right away at a site you only occasionally use.
Of course, the flip side is, if your password is somehow compromized with OpenID and you *don't* know that, and thus don't change the password (because you think it's still safe), an attacker has access to everything. Which is why I'd never use OpenID for something like a bank site, online auction/retailer, etc.
Using OpenID for the types of sites where you might use a 'weak' password because they aren't "that important", and using a moderately strong password makes more sense than using weak passwords on lots of different sites. It's just too bad that more sites don't offer OpenID login.
Why Windows? Because there are a lot of Windows Servers in the world, and it might be hypothetically possible for an attacker to get a copy of the Windows User Account database for a server. If you use 'backwards compatibility' settings for Windows, it generates hashes the same way that Windows 95, 98, etc did, which had some serious weaknesses which make it particularly easy to use Rainbow Tables (according to the linked article, a 14 character password was stored as two separate 7 character hashes, effectively reducing password strength to finding 2 7-character passwords, which a rainbow table can easily and quickly do).
What you say is true if the attacker is attacking your server directly. The Gawker Media situation is one where, through some means or other, crackers managed to secure the password database file with the account names and password hashes for EVERY Gawker user account.
Once they have a copy of the file, they can then proceed to do an OFFLINE Rainbow Tables attack against all the user accounts, and find the password for every username with a sufficiently weak password. With an offline attack, there's no way you can prevent them from trying something like this attack. Any system could be to some level vulnerable to an offline attack if the attacker gets a copy of the account data - even Linux or Apache.
The article summary doesn't make one thing very clear - if you buy an item from the manufacturer, or an authorized agent, *inside* the United States, you can resell it or give it away, whatever. This ruling is about reselling items in the United States which A) contain any sort of copyrighted material, and B) where manufactured and sold outside of the United States.
Nobody is going to go after the person who travelled to some other country, bought only one or two items, then at some later point in their life, decideds to sell those items used - although, because of this ruling, they *technically could* - one more of the many laws which make 'technical criminals' out of just about everybody. What this case is really about is big import companies, like Walmart, Costco, or even smaller retail chains, websites, etc going abroad, buying goods which manufacturers have priced more cheaply in third-world nations, then importing the cheaper item and competing directly with the more highly-priced versions of the items being sold directly by the manufacturer or their distributors.
I'm not saying I think this is a good ruling - I'm not sure why enforcing U.S. Copyright Laws inside of the jurisidictional territory of the U.S.A. with regards to first sale would 'extend' our copyright laws extraterritorially.
Ham radio is fine for people who don't need any sort of privacy whatsoever, don't need reliability (ham radio can allow you to someone on the other side of the world, but not necessarily a *particular* someone that you want to reach), and don't need it for any business use.
So, that rules out a LOT of use cases. Don't get me wrong, I'm a licensed ham, and I would encourage more people to get licensed (it's really not hard to get the entry-level "Technician" license), but I also recognize that Ham radio has some pretty severe restrictions, so that it can't really be used as a general-purpose communications system. Satellite phones can.
It comes down to: not a lot of people NEED satellite phones. But those who do *really* need satellite phones. Basically, you've got to pay to play. If you need to go somewhere that you need satellite phone service, you're just going to have to figure out how to pay. Government/military people, business people (oil company employees, journalists, etc), and 'adventurers' out sailing across the pacific ocean, or trekking in some remote mountain range or jungle, and so forth usually can afford to pay 800 or 1000 for a SatPhone, and high service fees.
I have to ask: what are the odds that somewhere in the PostgreSQL-XC development cycle, the pg devs will unknowingly implement the same technique(s) that Oracle used and patented, opening pgsql-xc to oracle lawsuits?
Whenever Free/Open-Source software tries to do something that some proprietary vendor has already done, seems to me there's a relatively high probability that *something* will end up being done the same way, because it's the obvious (or only) solution to the problem at hand.
Err, s/two/too, in first sentence. Brain hiccup.
I was wondering about the smoke two. My guess is it's some combination of the following:
* When the slug is fired by the railgun, their is surface friction between the slug and the rail. With that much kinetic energy, the friction, even if they have used very high-step tech to minimize the friction, will probably super heat some of the material of the slug, the rail, or both, so that might be some material which broke free and started to burn?
* Effect of air resistance on the slug, moving at mach 8+, might cause some of the slug material to super heat, and burn off?
Yeah, Except why would Google want to keep Dalvik if it infringes Java patents? If you're replacing one VM with another, why not the Python VM? If they can do Python to Java Bytecodes, why not the other way round? Then people who hate Python's syntax could keep developing in the Java language with the Python VM, and you probably could also get a pretty big level of backwards compatibility.
"Yes, whitespace should never be syntactically significant."
Well, ok, I can buy that argument. I've not programmed much in Python, yet. It looked like an OK language, but I have often wondered how many hard-to-debug errors might arise because of improper indenting.
Why not Python?
Portable Bytecodes? Check
Open-Source? Check
Open-governance? Check
Easy to learn? Check
Good performance? Check
Is there something wrong with Python that a new language is necessary?
Well, for Dalvik (and thus Android), there's a legal dispute between Google and Oracle about whether Dalvik infringes Java patents. As far as I know, copyrights are not in dispute. Google says Dalvik is not Java. If Dalvik is not Java, then the issues surrounding the JCP and TCK are completely irrelevant to Google, because Dalvisk is not Java. There's one other bit of important trivia: "Desktop" Java is nominally open-source. "Mobile" Java is a proprietary product which Sun/Oracle licensed to handset makers with somewhat traditional licensing fees.
The TCK is a conformance test that a JVM which wants to call itself "Java" and be officially 'blessed' by Oracle (and thus, immune from patent and copyright lawsuits) has to pass, and I believe that Sun and now Oracle charge developers a LOT of money to get and use the TCK. Thus, to have an official "Java" implementation, even though you don't have to pay for a license from Sun/Oracle because it's nominally open-source, really isn't free, because you can't be "Java" unless you pay up for the conformance test and then pass it. (Which, in my mind, means that Java fails the basic criteria for being open source - it's not really freely licensed, it's only licensed contingent upon passing the TCK which you must pay for).
If Oracle prevails in the Google lawsuit, it may be able to force Google to declare that Dalvik is Java, pay for the TCK, pass the conformance test, and additionally pay for Java "Mobile" licenses (or perhaps, that burden will be passed on to the handset makers, since the handset makers are more the 'point of sale' - e.g. I don't believe Google gets per-handset licensing revenue for Android, they make their money off of the tight integration of built-in apps with Google's advertising supported search and web services). Or, Oracle might settle for allowing Dalvik to be "Not Java", but demand a patent licensing fee from Google or handset makers for use of their patents, but acknowledge Dalvik as a seperate, derivative technology.
If Google prevails, and the courts don't find that they've violated any patents, then this Apache/Oracle JCP thing means absolutely nothing to Google, Dalvik, or Android. Dalvik will continue to be "Not Java".
I would add to the above, that people have a legitimate need to keep some secrets, and so do governments. International diplomacy is essential, and the need for intergovernmental 'confidence' is a necessary part of diplomacy.
While I can see leaking things like U.S. government efforts to spy on U.N. officials, other government officials, etc, or leaking information about U.S. government corruption, lies they've made to their citizens, illegal military actions, etc - things which are merely 'embarrassing' to the government - it's another thing to be leaking a lot of private communications between governments. If governments cannot communicate candidly and privately with other government leaders, do you really think that will lead to a *safer*, more *peaceful* world? I don't.
When leaking any information, the first question which must be asked is, "Will leaking this do more harm than good"? I can condone limited leaks when their is obvious corruption, government leaders lieing to the public to cover up illegal actions, etc. I just don't see how doing a mass release of 10 years' or so worth of diplomatic communications comes close to that standard.
The one thing I do have a bit of a problem with is that Assange is not a U.S. citizen, and not subject to U.S. laws when he is not on our soil, and neither is WikiLeaks. However, Assange is a citizen of *some* nation, and subject to its laws. WikiLeaks is hosted in some nation(s) and subject to their laws. I would suppose there is some sort of international treaty covering situations like this, where under most nations laws, it would be illegal to publish illegally obtain, classified information for allies of that nation. I believe Assange is an Australian citizen, so I could see him, if Australia has such a law to protect their allies confidentiality, prosecuting him under their laws.
If there is no such international treaty, perhaps the time has come.
Ss for whoever leaked the documents, who was a trusted member of the U.S. government, if the Private who is alleged to have leaked the documents really did, and is justly convicted, he should absolutely be executed for treason - if he did do this, he's made the world a less safe place, and violated the oaths and laws of his position.
"But, courts and government are essentially mob justice."
No. Most people are pretty stupid. I include myself in this. Most people can be easily misled by misleading 'evidence'.
Courts provide a structure of 'rules' of evidence that attempt to filter out the most egregious bad evidence. Will lawyers and prosecutors still attempt to enter into evidence any BS they think can mislead the jury in their favor? Yes, but the judge doesn't always allow all 'evidence'. Mobs, like in this case with EasyDNS, often listen to 'hearsay' - second or third hand witnesses. Courts long ago determined that in most cases, anyone who is not a first-hand witness is worthless, and so deny hearsay testimony.
If the people who attacked EasyDNS hadn't listened to 'hearsay' (e.g. inaccurate reports from people who screwed up the name in the process of reporting), they wouldn't have attacked the wrong party.
Courts benefit from the accumulated experience of thousands of years of jurisprudence. Mistakes are still made - we should continue to refine and reform our court systems (for example, I've lost faith in the 'jury of peers' model - most people are too stupid and too uneducated to be good jurors; I'd personally rather see a pool of professional jurors with education not in law, but in logic, in various scientific and engineering backgrounds (the better to evaluate evidence and arguments), in criminal forensics, accounting/financial, etc - the courts could then make sure that an appropriate set of jurors expert in fields being investigated by the case at hand were selected - so a securities fraud case could have at least a couple or three jurors who are *experts* in financial and securities fraud on the jury to evaluate the cases presented, etc).
Still, I'd rather be tried by a U.S., Canadian, or U.K. court than an angry mob just looking to punish *someone*.
Walmart doesn't have the most comprehensive collection of cables, but the cables they do carry are almost always pretty reasonably priced (might be a lower quality, but for the most part, cables I've bought from them have done the job I needed them to do; ymmv).
I'm not sure how much weight I'd give to that Press Freedom Index. As the Wiki page itself says, "Due to the nature of the survey's methodology based on individual perceptions, there are often wide contrasts in a country's ranking from year to year. (Emphasis added)"
I also noticed that in the rankings, The U.S. comes out ahead of such countries as France, Spain, Portugal, Canada, and South Korea.
The U.S. might not be completely perfect, but you know what, our freedom of the press is pretty strong, and I'd much rather be a reporter here in the U.S. than in about 2/3 of the rest of the nations of the world.
For those who immediately thought of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks upon reading the article headline, as I admit I did, I will also point out that it's not the U.S. who has put out a warrant for Assange, it's Sweden (though I'm sure people are convinced Sweden is just acting at the U.S.'s behest), and you know what? You can't entirely rule out the possibility that either A) he really did rape that woman, or B) politics has nothing to do with the case, and it's just an angry ex-lover looking for some revenge and 15 minutes of fame.
Yes, I get that, but you're missing my point, I think.
In math and science classes, you might talk about the relationship between frequency and period. For example, with an oscillation like an A/C electric current, or radio/light wave, period is how much time it takes to complete a single cycle, frequency is how many cycles occur in a fixed time period (usually, 1 second). Mathematically, period = 1/frequency, and vice versa.
What I'm saying is that going from 1.25s to 0.625s, even though it doesn't sound like a big deal because it looks like a really small change in time, really is a big deal, because it means that JavaScript engine or browser is (nominally) doing twice as much stuff per unit-time. It's like the difference between period and frequency.
There is, of course, one flaw in this analogy - with computer programming systems, often time speedups are achieved through efficiency gains - using improved algorithms so you can get the same final result with much less work. Working smarter, not harder, so to speak. But, even with optimizations like that, at some point, you've got to reach an absolute minimum - where you cannot possibly reduce the workload any further and still get the correct, expected result.
I don't think Columbia, and the other three you mentioned are particularly bad countries, I suspect mostly they are too small and dependent on China to risk reprisals. But I agree, most of the rest in the list seem a bit like a brotherhood of dictators. Good to see all the autocrats standing together.
It's a good point. A prize/medal/honor of any sort, is only as good as the people who've won it. When you start giving out prizes not based upon what someone has actually *done* but what you think they will do in the future, the prize becomes meaningless. Obama was president for what, a month(?) when he was awarded the prize, and had done nothing other than get elected.
The Al Gore prize, I could *somewhat* understand - whether you (the reader) agree that Anthropogenic Global Warming (or whatever they call it this week), at least you could look and say that A) The Committee believes that AGW is a threat to world peace, and B) Al Gore had made a huge impact in getting more people around the world to be more aware of the issue, thinking and talking about it, to move towards change. Gore had done *something* (and, also, the prize was shared with the IPCC, which had done a lot of scientific work). Obama didn't even have that much.
However, it did still seem too early even for the Gore/IPCC award, because even though they had gotten people talking about the issue, it seemed like you would need the perspective of a decade or two of history (maybe even longer), to really evaluate whether Gore and the IPCC actually did have a meaningful impact on World Peace.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's important to try to provide everyone in your society with access to some form of reasonably high speed Internet, but not because it's a 'basic human right'.
What I've always been taught about the basic definition of what a "basic human right" is, is something you are born with, and can only be *taken away* from you by governments, not given to you. E.g. freedom of speech is what you have by default, only to be taken away. Freedom of thought/conscience/religion. Life, liberty, pursuit of hapiness. The air. That sort of thing. You have it till someone takes it away. Internet totally fails that test.
It's like saying 'having food to eat is a basic human right'. Through most of history, most people have had to work for their food. They *need* food, but it doesn't just get handed to you (unless you happen to be born to rich parents). Clothing, shelter - all fundamentally important things, but don't seem to fit the definition *I've* been taught of what a human right is.