While I think there is rampant abuse of the H1-B program I do think it is vital a U.S. dominance in all technological fields. Through-out the 30's and 40's we were not pulling just highly educated people from other countries, we were pulling in rockstars of science, people that could contribute the science we were trying to develop.
... which was fairly easy given that the German and Italian governments were practically tossing their rockstars out (with small exceptions given to those whose theories consistently conformed to the state Master Race theories and politics).
Seems like what we really need to return to our state of brilliance is for some major international superpower to decide that it no longer cares about science or technology except insofar as the science's theories support or can be twisted to support the state-sanctioned superstitions.
And yet, H1-B increases supply for engineers while increasing demand for lawyers. Funny, that.
(Really, I'm just jousting... I'm all for getting brilliant engineers over here to compete with me; makes competing much easier for me on a personal level than moving the entire operation to India and have me compete remotely with $100/day workers.)
With 5% of the world population, you simply can't expect to be the world leader at everything.
I think the truth is more glaring: With 5% of the world population, unless you lead in science you simply can't expect to be the world leader at much of anything.
I think the main argument against Thorium is that it isn't Uranium. While that may seem specious, the argument has some merit: we have a large body of knowledge in dealing with Uranium. We'll end up finding issues with large-scale Thorium reactors, just as we did when going from Uranium prototypes to large-scale Gen-2 reactors in the 1950s.
Of course, the other potential problem is the geographic dispersion of the mineral. Australia and India are the big winners there, although with the US coming in fourth (after Norway) so far as we know today, it's a bit better distribution than we have with oil (Uranium leaves the US as #8 in the world, but Canada is #1 by a long shot, and I think the US is more comfortable with that than with India in a similar position). Of course, the problem with this is that it's really a big unknown because we haven't really been looking for it.
Not to say we shouldn't do it, given all the benefits. But let's not fool ourselves into believing that it's a so-obvious-we-should-have-done-it-yesterday solution.
Hydrogen is a great way of storing energy but impossible to generate without electricity and the only natural available source is in oil/gas reserves.
Two corrections:
1. Hydrogen also exists in molecular form requiring extraction. Palladium membranes, if they ever become commercially feasible, can pull hydrogen out of atmospheric air with very little energy input. But, by and large, the only reliable way of getting hydrogen for mass fuel use is by electrolysis (splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen), which necessarily takes more energy than combining it back again (damned entropy!)
2. The natural sources of energy include coal, oil and gas reserves (tertiary sources), but also direct sources solar energy, wind, geothermal, and secondary sources - biofuels. Moving from tertiary to secondary or primary sources (wind is kinda a secondary source, but doesn't quite fit with the biofuels) reduces the impact of the use of the energy, increases the amount of energy available, and keeps us "within budget" because we can't use tomorrow's sunlight today (while we can obviously use all the oil in the earth).
Exactly. But, you see: lessons were learned from the second-gen nuclear power plants (or 1.5-gen as was the case with Chernobyl), and were both retrofitted into other Gen-2 plants and taken into account in Gen-3 or Gen-3+ designs (today's designs are 3+ or sometimes referred to as 4, although "true" gen-4 is still quite a way down the road).
Today's designs have a much greater appreciation of human failures and use passive (intrinsic) rather than active (human or machine intervention required when the light starts blinking) safety measures. Of course, given that the US has only ever experienced Gen-2 plants, we have a very poor view of nuclear plant state of the art.
The "uses more carbon to produce than it saves in its lifetime" charge is a persistent myth. It seems just "shocking" enough to be true, and happens to coincide with what many rich interests would like to be true. As a result, it comes up quite often in non-fact-centric talk shows and as a result is something that a lot of people just "know". Unfortunately, it's just not true.
I have researched this and haven't been able to find a time when it was EVER true, but it certainly isn't true of either modern solar cells (even in small-scale deployments) or wind turbines. Moreover, as the general power supply becomes "greener", the carbon footprint for manufacturing (a huge portion of which comes from the energy needed to produce, not raw materials) also declines.
- Calculates a carbon break-even point of 15 months, for a product expected to last for 25 years on the inside. - Obviously comes from the company making these, so take it with a grain of salt, but it's not likely to be off by the order of magnitude or more needed to make your statement true.
I can't find similar calculations for wind turbines fro a quick Google search, but the return on carbon "investment" there is shorter-term (assuming a windy area and fairly large-scale deployment of multiple wind turbines in a pass). If you have a citable reference stating otherwise, please share it with the class.
Ah, yes, the old "war for oil" idiocy again. Only in the mind of a blithering moron would it make more sense to spend trillions invading a foreign nation instead of investing a few billion in the development of domestic oil-sand and oil-shale extraction techniques.
I'm not sure if you're calling the OP a blithering moron for thinking Bush/Cheney Inc would do this, or if you're calling Bush a moron for doing it. One of the two is indubitably true.
(The likelihood of oil-shale extraction techniques to work is beside the point; we certainly could have been spending a whole lot more money on alternate fuels in the past decade than we did.)
Suddenly we find the USA sitting in Iraq, for what reason? The whole Bush administration's energy policy was essentially to get the dibs on the last remaining oil taps in the world, its own coastlines, interior, and in Iraq, essentially to buy time for its other plan of shoveling money at alternative energy projects would kick in.
Okay, so who forgot to flip the switch on the alternative-energy projects money-shovel? Or was that going to happen in Bush's third term?
It's funny, a lot of the examples you see on MSDN and similar are often not very commented. I'm not saying this always produces readable code, but as the examples are "at the correct level", it tends to be quite readable.
There are three factors at play there. First, more comments means more lines of code, which makes a "simple" example seem larger. Second, it's a lot easier to explain how an example works in the text surrounding that example (in the overview document for MSDN, or in the non-code portion of a tutorial, etc). Long-form text is much easier to read with a proportional font and paragraph structure. Also, it's often NOT the original developer of the code entrusted to writing the documentation. Third, and importantly, these are generally relatively trivial pieces of code.
From my personal experience, such snippets of code tend to be pulled from larger works, and have a "simplification" process where both any hooks to the rest of the system are simplified (preferably entirely away) and all comments are removed (the tech writer working the tutorial might preserve these comments to make sure they cover the bases in the tutorial/etc). As such, it's no accident or coincidence that they have few if any comments left once published. It doesn't necessarily indicate that the original code was comment free (although that may have been the case).
In one system where I work there are hundreds of pages on deployment procedures. In ours we managed to automate 99% of the process. Which would you rather have?
I'd rather have the procedures automated with well-commented code. Because no matter how well your code is structured, the realm outside (the process that your deployment process fits into) is not so neatly structured.
I don't see how arguing for/against intellisense fits in here. I love to use intellisense (er, well, the non-Microsoft trademarked variety), AND I love to have comments in code I am scanning when looking for a bug or a way to fit a new needed feature in.
Ummm... comparing $900 over the course of 10 years to $50 per month per intersection of reduced energy costs... I think the prime motivator here is energy costs.
To get on an even playing field, assume $900/10 years is for a single bulb and there are 3 (R/Y/G) * 3 (1 turn, two straight) * 4 (directions) lights per intersection, for a grand total of $32,400 over those ten years, which turns out to be $270/month.
BUT, that is assuming you run out to replace the bulb when they burn out, not on a planned maintenance cycle. This is infeasible to start with, as the time between a bulb burning out and getting replaced renders the intersection inoperative; do you see your intersections go to "blinking red" three times a month? No, they come out and replace all 32 bulbs in the intersection in one trip, which brings the replacement savings down to $7.50 per month (again, assuming $100 trip cost) saved.
In the incandescent case, you replace the bulbs in an intersection once every year for $100 (I'd say both the interval and the cost are low by a factor of 2-3). In addition, though, you spend about $60 per month on electricity to power those lights, for a total of $720 per year.
In the incandescent case, you save $50 per month on electricity, and save on replacing the bulbs cost. However, if you have to send that same crew out to "spray down" the bulbs once a year, you eat the replacement costs (assuming the bulbs themselves are free for the moment), and perhaps even double it. The point is you'd have to send a crew out 6 times in the year to each intersection just to meet the cost savings due to electricity.
Remember: these are high-power devices. They draw a lot of power, necessitating high-power connections, etc. The primary costs at each intersection are installation (fixed) and ongoing electricity, not hardware maintenance.
In any case, the "spray it down with cooking oil" solution might make sense, but IMHO less so than a simple (relatively) low-wattage heater which can be turned on/off centrally or automatically.
Of course. You will obviously save more energy by using a heat-generating bulb 24/7/365 than adding a heat source which kicks on when needed (either by direct control or by a sensor).
This is why I took out all my light switches and just leave my lights and appliances running all the time. It saves me time and energy! Plus, with all those lights on, I run my heater less in the winter! Doubleplusgood savings!
The point is, it was fixed in later revs of Vista, and the "tried and tested" GUI was tried and tested on Vista.
IMHO, Vista when it came out deserved the panning it got. Vista by the time Win 7 came out was pretty decent, and Win 7 made it decent. Win 7, though, is still lacking sorely as an OS compared to the competition (the competition lacks in several departments too, though).
So far as drivers go, it's all anecdotal. If you have an unsupported bit of hardware, that hardware isn't going to have a Vista/7 driver still. On the other hand, if you have fairly common printers, scanners, etc, the drivers were available from day 1 (not necessarily on the Windows disk, but I can't remember the last time I trusted the Windows disk for a driver for anything; I always go to the manufacturer's web site to download their latest driver versions the moment I've installed Windows.
So, really, you believe the whole industry operates as a trade of cross-licensing without placing dollar values on any of it?
I have a hard time believing that Sony and Nokia and HTC and Palm all agree that these five patents and these seven patents and these thirteen patents each have equivalent values without at some point having said, "The cost for this license is $x; I'll waive it for this list of patents of yours".
If that's indeed how they operate, they have some very... creative accountants, and, frankly, getting reamed by the new guy on the block is what they deserve. I can't believe that the governments under which they operate and pay taxes would allow such loosey-goosey accounting to persist, and would love to get in on the reaming action themselves.
On the other hand, it's not likely that they really have no concept of a monetary value to their patent exchanges. As a result, "Fair/Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory" has a very specific and concrete meaning, and they either offered this to Apple or they did not.
So, yes, we have Apple's version of things. If they are correct, then Nokia hasn't a leg to stand on. Of course, you would expect this with Apple's side of the story, so we're better off waiting for both sides to have been aired before drawing any conclusions. For all we know, Apple might claim this as a non-F/RAND offer because the historical values of patents have been over-valued to keep out non-patent-rich competitors (which is not an outrageous claim, but hard to prove).
I would agree with Scratch as well. We ended up going with Alice for our 13-year-old, as the 3D interactions seemed more her style, but the social networking aspect of Scratch is a really powerful point in its favor.
For those too lazy to click the link, Scratch is a Smalltalk-style language wrapped in a graphical shell which makes it impossible to create syntax errors (you drag/drop code snippets and pick arguments from drop-down lists) and very easy to create simple 2D graphics and interactive apps. It also allows the programmer to post his creation on the Web for other Scratch users to download and improve on, and of course allows him to take someone else's fully-formed app and tweak it to his liking.
The only downside I see is that there isn't much of a "natural" next step once you hit the ceiling of its capabilities. But then, by that time there's a good chance your brother will have decided he likes this programming thing enough to invest some time and abstract thought in Python or whatever, or that it's not really worth all the fuss.
I never got into Logo myself (no computers at all until college, and then it was shell scripts to self-taught C to whatever else). However, I think that today the "turtle graphics" system is a bit too primitive to capture the interest of a middle-school-age kid. I mean, making a turtle draw a line on the screen is no longer something magical.
IMHO, something like Alice or Scratch would be a much more promising introduction to programming concepts, with more "interesting" results (making 3D characters interact with each other and the user on-screen is a bit more likely to draw the attention of an average mid-schooler than recreating Spirographs on the screen).
I have a 13-year-old daughter who has expressed an interest in learning how to program. I'm starting her off with Alice, which avoids the syntax problems and frustrations. Right now she's just playing around with it, but we have "Alice in Action with Java" to transition from Alice to Java as she hits the limits of that system.
We debated between the "Hello World" book and Python, and the Alice route, but decided that Alice would more likely keep her interested in the near term while exposing her to basic logical constructs (looping, event-driven programming, object orientation). From there, we'll either let her continue in Java or bring in the Hello World book and introduce Python.
Yes, you want to store the original data, not the edited and compressed MPEG2 copy on the DVD. This is obviously very true.
However, the article posed the question of digital storage as an unanswerable conundrum: magnetic media degrades over time, and optical disks lose accuracy over time, they state, therefore we can't store data digitally encoded. I'm not sure how factory-burned optical media would degrade (granted, up-front costs are higher, but I'm not seeing any problems with my oldest CDs, which are nearing 20 years now, and which have hardly gotten the saltmine treatment). Still, you'd think that the answer would be simple enough: pay more up-front to encode the bits on a medium which will withstand the test of time.
If "film" is really the most durable format we can come up with, then here you go: Encode all data onto "film" using bog-standard lossless modem technology. There's nothing saying that film has to be strictly analog: the digital bits can be encoded onto that as well, and likely encoded much more efficiently than the uber-redundant film format.
Proposal: Double your budget. Store the entire film as analog film, including at most the "chosen" shot of each scene and one "alternate" shot. Alongside this, use the second half of your film to store all the "well this might be useful to someone someday" actor/director discussions using a fairly high level of compression (not necessarily lossy, but not as redundant as in film), and a couple of distinct endodings of the digital materials.
And, here's a thought: if you believe that all the value of the movie is really in what you kept for film, then don't keep all the extra crap from digital either. Or, as has been suggested here: release all the "dubious value" bits to the public domain and let those who care about the movie care for the movie!
Digital offers more choices, and more choices require someone with taste and a spine to make a decision. I can see why the movie industry hates this situation. Still, the failback is "just as good as analog" for just about no extra cost. Having the ability to preserve more data doesn't seem like a bad thing!
How is the OS supposed to tell the difference between a legitimate registry change and a malicious one ?
Good question. Frankly, that's a primary reason why the Registry is a near-complete design failure.
Here's some guidelines:
Preference data that is specific to a particular application should be able to be changed by that application whenever it wants to. Sensible OSs tend to do this by having separate files which hold per-app data, but there's nothing inherently wrong with a database model which keeps Windows from using this type of model. Moreover, this should not EVER require "admin" privileges, although one might want a "kiosk" class of user which prohibits even this.
Preference data which modifies system behavior should require direct and specific user approval. Not many OSs get this right, although most do a better job than Windows.
Preference data which modifies OTHER apps should not be allowed, except with the "permission" of the other app (allowing for config utilities and plugins). Nice ideal, but generally I don't see that implemented anywhere. The failback SHOULD be to treat other apps just like system data, but generally OSs tend to treat other-app prefs the same as this-app prefs for convenience.
I agree. Blame the people who are writing software that does, it's their fault.
In my experience, the general reason apps require Administrator privileges to run is that they want to be able to modify the Registry. See above. Generally, these changes are of the first nature (remember what the user had set for preferences, etc). Many times, only a small subset of what an application does will require Admin privileges, but as there is no escalation procedure in the OS, they have to require Admin privileges from the outset, or not provide those utilities at all.
Which, yes, sucks for the user. But blaming it on the app writer instead of acknowledging that it stems from poor OS design is just plain silly. While programmers and designers do tend to be lazy, it's hard to believe that thousands of separate developers all chose to be lazy around the same central issue without an underlying problem there. It's like getting reports of all your users clicking the wrong button and determining that the button's not poorly designed; you just need smarter users.
Yeah, there has been a lot of "unauthorized" spying, but it looks to be pretty specific (e.g., Mosques... where large Muslim populations ostensibly would have privacy to worship). The United States was attacked and continues to be targeted for major future terror attacks. And, like it or not, the community most likely to cultivate, plan, and escalate this activity is Muslim. And, a country so viciously attacked would be naive, maybe even stupid to allow unfettered large gatherings where this planning could go on with no observation.
Okay, so your argument is that so long as he's a good guy a King ain't so bad?
Let's play make-believe here for a moment. Pretend I'm the President, a month after this attack. I know that those damned brown people are at it again. And this time it's more than just my innate bigotry talking. So, I need to authorize intelligence gathering in mosques and muslim communities. What are all my options:
1. I can seek specific warrants through FISA. Not only that, I can start spying on the places, then once I hit something "good", get to the FISA court within 72 hours and have them rubber-stamp a retroactive warrant for that spying. FISA hadn't denied a search warrant once since its inception in the late 1970s. Not one. The drawback here is that the warrant would have to be for a specific person or group of people, and general, "listen to the brown people" instructions just don't quite fit.
2. I can call an emergency, private session of Congress and seek legislation authorizing widespread wiretaps of Muslim haunts and dives. Heck, I own Congress, with solid majorities, and they've already proven to be my bitch with their authorization of military force. All it would take was a reasonably solid justification. The problem here, though, as Alberto Gonzales explained recently, we didn't even have enough of an argument to convince the Congress that passed the authorization of military force and the patriot act both with overwhelming majorities that this would make us any safer. So, strike that option.
3. I can subvert the Constitution, both in its description of the separations of powers and checks and balances, and in its overriding description of my office (to enforce the laws), and engage the NSA to do this despite the above two failures. I'm obviously a religious fanatic, and God wanted me to be President, so if I want to do it, damned it, God wants it too. You don't fuck with God. So let's have us a little look-see on what those heathen brown folks are mumbling about, shall we?
What makes this even more terrifying is that the neocons have been masturbating over expanding the executive power for years, alongside asserting US force worldwide and "democratizing the Middle East". It's hard to see this as coincidence. It's almost like they were waiting for a chance to do this. When Bush came to office, I predicted that he'd use Iraq as a demon to achieve his long-term aims. Bin Laden made it a whole lot easier for him, but I don't doubt we would have been exactly right here right now had September 11, 2001 been nothing but a bright, sunny day on the east coast.
It's generally accepted that to avoid warrants, they'd have a "we spy on you, you spy on us" thing
Correct. Now, can you see the difference between that and just skipping the middle man?
No? Well, let me spell it out for you: US law forbids us from gathering foreign intelligence about US citizens NOT engaging in acts of subterfuge or crime. The Echelon program as described always included this filter.
In other words, some guy in MI6 might know that Bobby Joe Snickles likes to surf internet porn and enjoys a little S&M, but his Democratic opponent in Utah does not.
When "we" spy on "ourselves", it is a very thin line to cross for confidential, non-criminal data to pass into the "wrong" hands.
That is true no matter who is in power at the moment.
Sometimes we have to make a choice when you are attacked by a group of terrorists. Unlike terrorists groups that want money or people released these people want to destroy our way of life.
Unfortunately, we voted for them, and short of dual impeachments (Bush and Cheney), we're stuck with them for a few more years.
Oh, you meant Al Quaeda. Yeah, I guess they do want to destroy our way of life, take away our freedoms, and make us live in a constant state of fear. Looks like they succeeded!
We have two options sit and wait for another attack to happen or we can be proactive.
Very good. Now, for the next strawman...
No one is saying just wait for another attack. People are, however, saying that we should not dispose of the very liberties which make us great - as Bush would say, the freedoms that they hate - to a somewhat quixotic attempt at "safety".
The Constitution does allow for "emergency" actions (although Bush's actions exceed even that allowance). It also demands a swift return to a non-emergency state. Four years later it appears that Bush Inc is determined that this "emergency" will last indefinitely. That's not a fucking emergency. That's fucking life.
This leak of how the Government is tracking Terrorist is a bigger problem then the president calling for NSA to collect this data. Look at what happened when the Clinton administration was tracking Bin Laden, it leaked they could track him by his cell phone usage. He stopped using a cell phone and we lost a good way to track him and maybe could have stopped 9/11. Now they know we are looking at all communications, and will modify how they send information to different cells.
Wow. Okay, maybe you should get your news from someone besides Rush Limbaugh. That is a myth. The article in question was not the first mention of Bin Laden using a satellite phone (not a cell phone), it listed satellite phone amongst several other potential methods of contact available to someone living out in the wilderness where there are no cell phone towers, and did not at all ascribe any of those common-sense "details" to an intelligence source, just to plain old fashioned common sense. It also said nothing of the US "tracking" Bin Laden through surveillance of such transmissions. There were mentions in the press of Bin Laden using satellite phones half a decade before Bin Laden reportedly ceased using his satellite phone.
Back to present: if I were a terrorist, I think my #1 assumption would be that any public communications are being monitored. That just seems like a simple starting point. Why should I assume this? Well, for starters, because the FISA court has allowed the US government to seek wire taps (meaning phone as well as email, etc) for cause, even for 72-hour retroactive cause since the late 1990s. If I'm plotting against the US and sending plain-text emails to do so, I'm not a very intelligent plotter, am I?
Thus, since the only people whose assumptions of privacy have been destroyed by this leak are law-abiding citizens your argument is just a bunch of bullshit.
There is always a chance of this information being used for political reasons, similar to what happened in the Clinton administration.
Hoo boy. Okay, I missed that Limbaugh conspiracy theory. What the blazes are you spouting off about here?
If Bush used it against political opponents then that would be a problem, and he would be held accountable
First, you'd never know if Bush used it against his political opponents. Second, given Karl Rove's bag of dirty tricks going back several decades, I think it is safe to assume that any compromising information Bush Inc got about a political opponent would be used to its fullest. Granted, they do just fine making shit up, but it's always easier to start from something minorly embarrassing instead of thin air.
Love to have an investigation that lead to the leaks on this. After all, Plame was important, right?
Hmm. Let's see.
In one case, the "whistleblower" (Official A, etc) was describing the status of a CIA agent using their cover name. Purportedly, because said CIA agent had undue influence in sending her husband to Niger, which was both irrelevant to the facts that he discovered and brought back from said mission and, as has been since proven, patently untrue (and they knew it). But we'll pretend that their "reason" was true.
In the other case, the "whistleblower" was describing a massive unconstitutional surveillance program which trampled on the liberties of pretty much American citizen and which essentially turned the US into Britain circa 1774 with relation to its colonies.
Which one of these "whistleblower"s belongs outside quotes, and which should be turned into "political assassin"?
The only people pissed off are the Ney York Times and the Democratic Underground and it's little trolls.
Interesting that Barron's has suddenly joined the "Democratic Underground".
They just called for impeachment hearings on their editorial page.
To correct your statement: the only people pissed off are those who care about the Constitution and are unwilling to live under a dictatorship in exchange for a little "safety".
You cannot tell me, that it is legitimate for a teacher to literally spy on these interests while trying to educate children to respect the privacy and opinion of others.
Because the district will be held legally and politically responsible for anything that happens on the computers they so provide, yes, it is not only their right but their responsibility to monitor user activities.
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While I think there is rampant abuse of the H1-B program I do think it is vital a U.S. dominance in all technological fields. Through-out the 30's and 40's we were not pulling just highly educated people from other countries, we were pulling in rockstars of science, people that could contribute the science we were trying to develop.
... which was fairly easy given that the German and Italian governments were practically tossing their rockstars out (with small exceptions given to those whose theories consistently conformed to the state Master Race theories and politics).
Seems like what we really need to return to our state of brilliance is for some major international superpower to decide that it no longer cares about science or technology except insofar as the science's theories support or can be twisted to support the state-sanctioned superstitions.
Oh yeah. That was us last decade. Oops.
And yet, H1-B increases supply for engineers while increasing demand for lawyers. Funny, that.
(Really, I'm just jousting ... I'm all for getting brilliant engineers over here to compete with me; makes competing much easier for me on a personal level than moving the entire operation to India and have me compete remotely with $100/day workers.)
With 5% of the world population, you simply can't expect to be the world leader at everything.
I think the truth is more glaring: With 5% of the world population, unless you lead in science you simply can't expect to be the world leader at much of anything.
I think the main argument against Thorium is that it isn't Uranium. While that may seem specious, the argument has some merit: we have a large body of knowledge in dealing with Uranium. We'll end up finding issues with large-scale Thorium reactors, just as we did when going from Uranium prototypes to large-scale Gen-2 reactors in the 1950s.
Of course, the other potential problem is the geographic dispersion of the mineral. Australia and India are the big winners there, although with the US coming in fourth (after Norway) so far as we know today, it's a bit better distribution than we have with oil (Uranium leaves the US as #8 in the world, but Canada is #1 by a long shot, and I think the US is more comfortable with that than with India in a similar position). Of course, the problem with this is that it's really a big unknown because we haven't really been looking for it.
Not to say we shouldn't do it, given all the benefits. But let's not fool ourselves into believing that it's a so-obvious-we-should-have-done-it-yesterday solution.
Hydrogen is a great way of storing energy but impossible to generate without electricity and the only natural available source is in oil/gas reserves.
Two corrections:
1. Hydrogen also exists in molecular form requiring extraction. Palladium membranes, if they ever become commercially feasible, can pull hydrogen out of atmospheric air with very little energy input. But, by and large, the only reliable way of getting hydrogen for mass fuel use is by electrolysis (splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen), which necessarily takes more energy than combining it back again (damned entropy!)
2. The natural sources of energy include coal, oil and gas reserves (tertiary sources), but also direct sources solar energy, wind, geothermal, and secondary sources - biofuels. Moving from tertiary to secondary or primary sources (wind is kinda a secondary source, but doesn't quite fit with the biofuels) reduces the impact of the use of the energy, increases the amount of energy available, and keeps us "within budget" because we can't use tomorrow's sunlight today (while we can obviously use all the oil in the earth).
Exactly. But, you see: lessons were learned from the second-gen nuclear power plants (or 1.5-gen as was the case with Chernobyl), and were both retrofitted into other Gen-2 plants and taken into account in Gen-3 or Gen-3+ designs (today's designs are 3+ or sometimes referred to as 4, although "true" gen-4 is still quite a way down the road).
http://www.our-energy.com/videos/third_generation_nuclear_power_station.html
Today's designs have a much greater appreciation of human failures and use passive (intrinsic) rather than active (human or machine intervention required when the light starts blinking) safety measures. Of course, given that the US has only ever experienced Gen-2 plants, we have a very poor view of nuclear plant state of the art.
The "uses more carbon to produce than it saves in its lifetime" charge is a persistent myth. It seems just "shocking" enough to be true, and happens to coincide with what many rich interests would like to be true. As a result, it comes up quite often in non-fact-centric talk shows and as a result is something that a lot of people just "know". Unfortunately, it's just not true.
I have researched this and haven't been able to find a time when it was EVER true, but it certainly isn't true of either modern solar cells (even in small-scale deployments) or wind turbines. Moreover, as the general power supply becomes "greener", the carbon footprint for manufacturing (a huge portion of which comes from the energy needed to produce, not raw materials) also declines.
Example calculation for mid-size (office building) solar deployment: http://greenestofthegreen.wordpress.com/2008/09/08/solar-panels-the-smallest-footprint/
- Calculates a carbon break-even point of 15 months, for a product expected to last for 25 years on the inside.
- Obviously comes from the company making these, so take it with a grain of salt, but it's not likely to be off by the order of magnitude or more needed to make your statement true.
I can't find similar calculations for wind turbines fro a quick Google search, but the return on carbon "investment" there is shorter-term (assuming a windy area and fairly large-scale deployment of multiple wind turbines in a pass). If you have a citable reference stating otherwise, please share it with the class.
Ah, yes, the old "war for oil" idiocy again. Only in the mind of a blithering moron would it make more sense to spend trillions invading a foreign nation instead of investing a few billion in the development of domestic oil-sand and oil-shale extraction techniques.
I'm not sure if you're calling the OP a blithering moron for thinking Bush/Cheney Inc would do this, or if you're calling Bush a moron for doing it. One of the two is indubitably true.
(The likelihood of oil-shale extraction techniques to work is beside the point; we certainly could have been spending a whole lot more money on alternate fuels in the past decade than we did.)
Suddenly we find the USA sitting in Iraq, for what reason? The whole Bush administration's energy policy was essentially to get the dibs on the last remaining oil taps in the world, its own coastlines, interior, and in Iraq, essentially to buy time for its other plan of shoveling money at alternative energy projects would kick in.
Okay, so who forgot to flip the switch on the alternative-energy projects money-shovel? Or was that going to happen in Bush's third term?
It's funny, a lot of the examples you see on MSDN and similar are often not very commented. I'm not saying this always produces readable code, but as the examples are "at the correct level", it tends to be quite readable.
There are three factors at play there. First, more comments means more lines of code, which makes a "simple" example seem larger. Second, it's a lot easier to explain how an example works in the text surrounding that example (in the overview document for MSDN, or in the non-code portion of a tutorial, etc). Long-form text is much easier to read with a proportional font and paragraph structure. Also, it's often NOT the original developer of the code entrusted to writing the documentation. Third, and importantly, these are generally relatively trivial pieces of code.
From my personal experience, such snippets of code tend to be pulled from larger works, and have a "simplification" process where both any hooks to the rest of the system are simplified (preferably entirely away) and all comments are removed (the tech writer working the tutorial might preserve these comments to make sure they cover the bases in the tutorial/etc). As such, it's no accident or coincidence that they have few if any comments left once published. It doesn't necessarily indicate that the original code was comment free (although that may have been the case).
In one system where I work there are hundreds of pages on deployment procedures. In ours we managed to automate 99% of the process. Which would you rather have?
I'd rather have the procedures automated with well-commented code. Because no matter how well your code is structured, the realm outside (the process that your deployment process fits into) is not so neatly structured.
I don't see how arguing for/against intellisense fits in here. I love to use intellisense (er, well, the non-Microsoft trademarked variety), AND I love to have comments in code I am scanning when looking for a bug or a way to fit a new needed feature in.
Ummm ... comparing $900 over the course of 10 years to $50 per month per intersection of reduced energy costs ... I think the prime motivator here is energy costs.
To get on an even playing field, assume $900/10 years is for a single bulb and there are 3 (R/Y/G) * 3 (1 turn, two straight) * 4 (directions) lights per intersection, for a grand total of $32,400 over those ten years, which turns out to be $270/month.
BUT, that is assuming you run out to replace the bulb when they burn out, not on a planned maintenance cycle. This is infeasible to start with, as the time between a bulb burning out and getting replaced renders the intersection inoperative; do you see your intersections go to "blinking red" three times a month? No, they come out and replace all 32 bulbs in the intersection in one trip, which brings the replacement savings down to $7.50 per month (again, assuming $100 trip cost) saved.
In the incandescent case, you replace the bulbs in an intersection once every year for $100 (I'd say both the interval and the cost are low by a factor of 2-3). In addition, though, you spend about $60 per month on electricity to power those lights, for a total of $720 per year.
In the incandescent case, you save $50 per month on electricity, and save on replacing the bulbs cost. However, if you have to send that same crew out to "spray down" the bulbs once a year, you eat the replacement costs (assuming the bulbs themselves are free for the moment), and perhaps even double it. The point is you'd have to send a crew out 6 times in the year to each intersection just to meet the cost savings due to electricity.
Remember: these are high-power devices. They draw a lot of power, necessitating high-power connections, etc. The primary costs at each intersection are installation (fixed) and ongoing electricity, not hardware maintenance.
In any case, the "spray it down with cooking oil" solution might make sense, but IMHO less so than a simple (relatively) low-wattage heater which can be turned on/off centrally or automatically.
Of course. You will obviously save more energy by using a heat-generating bulb 24/7/365 than adding a heat source which kicks on when needed (either by direct control or by a sensor).
This is why I took out all my light switches and just leave my lights and appliances running all the time. It saves me time and energy! Plus, with all those lights on, I run my heater less in the winter! Doubleplusgood savings!
The point is, it was fixed in later revs of Vista, and the "tried and tested" GUI was tried and tested on Vista.
IMHO, Vista when it came out deserved the panning it got. Vista by the time Win 7 came out was pretty decent, and Win 7 made it decent. Win 7, though, is still lacking sorely as an OS compared to the competition (the competition lacks in several departments too, though).
So far as drivers go, it's all anecdotal. If you have an unsupported bit of hardware, that hardware isn't going to have a Vista/7 driver still. On the other hand, if you have fairly common printers, scanners, etc, the drivers were available from day 1 (not necessarily on the Windows disk, but I can't remember the last time I trusted the Windows disk for a driver for anything; I always go to the manufacturer's web site to download their latest driver versions the moment I've installed Windows.
So, really, you believe the whole industry operates as a trade of cross-licensing without placing dollar values on any of it?
I have a hard time believing that Sony and Nokia and HTC and Palm all agree that these five patents and these seven patents and these thirteen patents each have equivalent values without at some point having said, "The cost for this license is $x; I'll waive it for this list of patents of yours".
If that's indeed how they operate, they have some very ... creative accountants, and, frankly, getting reamed by the new guy on the block is what they deserve. I can't believe that the governments under which they operate and pay taxes would allow such loosey-goosey accounting to persist, and would love to get in on the reaming action themselves.
On the other hand, it's not likely that they really have no concept of a monetary value to their patent exchanges. As a result, "Fair/Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory" has a very specific and concrete meaning, and they either offered this to Apple or they did not.
So, yes, we have Apple's version of things. If they are correct, then Nokia hasn't a leg to stand on. Of course, you would expect this with Apple's side of the story, so we're better off waiting for both sides to have been aired before drawing any conclusions. For all we know, Apple might claim this as a non-F/RAND offer because the historical values of patents have been over-valued to keep out non-patent-rich competitors (which is not an outrageous claim, but hard to prove).
I would agree with Scratch as well. We ended up going with Alice for our 13-year-old, as the 3D interactions seemed more her style, but the social networking aspect of Scratch is a really powerful point in its favor.
For those too lazy to click the link, Scratch is a Smalltalk-style language wrapped in a graphical shell which makes it impossible to create syntax errors (you drag/drop code snippets and pick arguments from drop-down lists) and very easy to create simple 2D graphics and interactive apps. It also allows the programmer to post his creation on the Web for other Scratch users to download and improve on, and of course allows him to take someone else's fully-formed app and tweak it to his liking.
The only downside I see is that there isn't much of a "natural" next step once you hit the ceiling of its capabilities. But then, by that time there's a good chance your brother will have decided he likes this programming thing enough to invest some time and abstract thought in Python or whatever, or that it's not really worth all the fuss.
I never got into Logo myself (no computers at all until college, and then it was shell scripts to self-taught C to whatever else). However, I think that today the "turtle graphics" system is a bit too primitive to capture the interest of a middle-school-age kid. I mean, making a turtle draw a line on the screen is no longer something magical.
IMHO, something like Alice or Scratch would be a much more promising introduction to programming concepts, with more "interesting" results (making 3D characters interact with each other and the user on-screen is a bit more likely to draw the attention of an average mid-schooler than recreating Spirographs on the screen).
What do you think?
I have a 13-year-old daughter who has expressed an interest in learning how to program. I'm starting her off with Alice, which avoids the syntax problems and frustrations. Right now she's just playing around with it, but we have "Alice in Action with Java" to transition from Alice to Java as she hits the limits of that system.
We debated between the "Hello World" book and Python, and the Alice route, but decided that Alice would more likely keep her interested in the near term while exposing her to basic logical constructs (looping, event-driven programming, object orientation). From there, we'll either let her continue in Java or bring in the Hello World book and introduce Python.
That's our plan, anyways.
Yes, you want to store the original data, not the edited and compressed MPEG2 copy on the DVD. This is obviously very true.
However, the article posed the question of digital storage as an unanswerable conundrum: magnetic media degrades over time, and optical disks lose accuracy over time, they state, therefore we can't store data digitally encoded. I'm not sure how factory-burned optical media would degrade (granted, up-front costs are higher, but I'm not seeing any problems with my oldest CDs, which are nearing 20 years now, and which have hardly gotten the saltmine treatment). Still, you'd think that the answer would be simple enough: pay more up-front to encode the bits on a medium which will withstand the test of time.
If "film" is really the most durable format we can come up with, then here you go: Encode all data onto "film" using bog-standard lossless modem technology. There's nothing saying that film has to be strictly analog: the digital bits can be encoded onto that as well, and likely encoded much more efficiently than the uber-redundant film format.
Proposal: Double your budget. Store the entire film as analog film, including at most the "chosen" shot of each scene and one "alternate" shot. Alongside this, use the second half of your film to store all the "well this might be useful to someone someday" actor/director discussions using a fairly high level of compression (not necessarily lossy, but not as redundant as in film), and a couple of distinct endodings of the digital materials.
And, here's a thought: if you believe that all the value of the movie is really in what you kept for film, then don't keep all the extra crap from digital either. Or, as has been suggested here: release all the "dubious value" bits to the public domain and let those who care about the movie care for the movie!
Digital offers more choices, and more choices require someone with taste and a spine to make a decision. I can see why the movie industry hates this situation. Still, the failback is "just as good as analog" for just about no extra cost. Having the ability to preserve more data doesn't seem like a bad thing!
How is the OS supposed to tell the difference between a legitimate registry change and a malicious one ?
Good question. Frankly, that's a primary reason why the Registry is a near-complete design failure.
Here's some guidelines:
Preference data that is specific to a particular application should be able to be changed by that application whenever it wants to. Sensible OSs tend to do this by having separate files which hold per-app data, but there's nothing inherently wrong with a database model which keeps Windows from using this type of model. Moreover, this should not EVER require "admin" privileges, although one might want a "kiosk" class of user which prohibits even this.
Preference data which modifies system behavior should require direct and specific user approval. Not many OSs get this right, although most do a better job than Windows.
Preference data which modifies OTHER apps should not be allowed, except with the "permission" of the other app (allowing for config utilities and plugins). Nice ideal, but generally I don't see that implemented anywhere. The failback SHOULD be to treat other apps just like system data, but generally OSs tend to treat other-app prefs the same as this-app prefs for convenience.
I agree. Blame the people who are writing software that does, it's their fault.
In my experience, the general reason apps require Administrator privileges to run is that they want to be able to modify the Registry. See above. Generally, these changes are of the first nature (remember what the user had set for preferences, etc). Many times, only a small subset of what an application does will require Admin privileges, but as there is no escalation procedure in the OS, they have to require Admin privileges from the outset, or not provide those utilities at all.
Which, yes, sucks for the user. But blaming it on the app writer instead of acknowledging that it stems from poor OS design is just plain silly. While programmers and designers do tend to be lazy, it's hard to believe that thousands of separate developers all chose to be lazy around the same central issue without an underlying problem there. It's like getting reports of all your users clicking the wrong button and determining that the button's not poorly designed; you just need smarter users.
Yeah, there has been a lot of "unauthorized" spying, but it looks to be pretty specific (e.g., Mosques... where large Muslim populations ostensibly would have privacy to worship). The United States was attacked and continues to be targeted for major future terror attacks. And, like it or not, the community most likely to cultivate, plan, and escalate this activity is Muslim. And, a country so viciously attacked would be naive, maybe even stupid to allow unfettered large gatherings where this planning could go on with no observation.
Okay, so your argument is that so long as he's a good guy a King ain't so bad?
Let's play make-believe here for a moment. Pretend I'm the President, a month after this attack. I know that those damned brown people are at it again. And this time it's more than just my innate bigotry talking. So, I need to authorize intelligence gathering in mosques and muslim communities. What are all my options:
1. I can seek specific warrants through FISA. Not only that, I can start spying on the places, then once I hit something "good", get to the FISA court within 72 hours and have them rubber-stamp a retroactive warrant for that spying. FISA hadn't denied a search warrant once since its inception in the late 1970s. Not one. The drawback here is that the warrant would have to be for a specific person or group of people, and general, "listen to the brown people" instructions just don't quite fit.
2. I can call an emergency, private session of Congress and seek legislation authorizing widespread wiretaps of Muslim haunts and dives. Heck, I own Congress, with solid majorities, and they've already proven to be my bitch with their authorization of military force. All it would take was a reasonably solid justification. The problem here, though, as Alberto Gonzales explained recently, we didn't even have enough of an argument to convince the Congress that passed the authorization of military force and the patriot act both with overwhelming majorities that this would make us any safer. So, strike that option.
3. I can subvert the Constitution, both in its description of the separations of powers and checks and balances, and in its overriding description of my office (to enforce the laws), and engage the NSA to do this despite the above two failures. I'm obviously a religious fanatic, and God wanted me to be President, so if I want to do it, damned it, God wants it too. You don't fuck with God. So let's have us a little look-see on what those heathen brown folks are mumbling about, shall we?
What makes this even more terrifying is that the neocons have been masturbating over expanding the executive power for years, alongside asserting US force worldwide and "democratizing the Middle East". It's hard to see this as coincidence. It's almost like they were waiting for a chance to do this. When Bush came to office, I predicted that he'd use Iraq as a demon to achieve his long-term aims. Bin Laden made it a whole lot easier for him, but I don't doubt we would have been exactly right here right now had September 11, 2001 been nothing but a bright, sunny day on the east coast.
It's generally accepted that to avoid warrants, they'd have a "we spy on you, you spy on us" thing
Correct. Now, can you see the difference between that and just skipping the middle man?
No? Well, let me spell it out for you: US law forbids us from gathering foreign intelligence about US citizens NOT engaging in acts of subterfuge or crime. The Echelon program as described always included this filter.
In other words, some guy in MI6 might know that Bobby Joe Snickles likes to surf internet porn and enjoys a little S&M, but his Democratic opponent in Utah does not.
When "we" spy on "ourselves", it is a very thin line to cross for confidential, non-criminal data to pass into the "wrong" hands.
That is true no matter who is in power at the moment.
Sometimes we have to make a choice when you are attacked by a group of terrorists.
...
Unlike terrorists groups that want money or people released these people want to destroy our way of life.
Unfortunately, we voted for them, and short of dual impeachments (Bush and Cheney), we're stuck with them for a few more years.
Oh, you meant Al Quaeda. Yeah, I guess they do want to destroy our way of life, take away our freedoms, and make us live in a constant state of fear. Looks like they succeeded!
We have two options sit and wait for another attack to happen or we can be proactive.
Very good. Now, for the next strawman
No one is saying just wait for another attack. People are, however, saying that we should not dispose of the very liberties which make us great - as Bush would say, the freedoms that they hate - to a somewhat quixotic attempt at "safety".
The Constitution does allow for "emergency" actions (although Bush's actions exceed even that allowance). It also demands a swift return to a non-emergency state. Four years later it appears that Bush Inc is determined that this "emergency" will last indefinitely. That's not a fucking emergency. That's fucking life.
This leak of how the Government is tracking Terrorist is a bigger problem then the president calling for NSA to collect this data. Look at what happened when the Clinton administration was tracking Bin Laden, it leaked they could track him by his cell phone usage. He stopped using a cell phone and we lost a good way to track him and maybe could have stopped 9/11. Now they know we are looking at all communications, and will modify how they send information to different cells.
Wow. Okay, maybe you should get your news from someone besides Rush Limbaugh. That is a myth. The article in question was not the first mention of Bin Laden using a satellite phone (not a cell phone), it listed satellite phone amongst several other potential methods of contact available to someone living out in the wilderness where there are no cell phone towers, and did not at all ascribe any of those common-sense "details" to an intelligence source, just to plain old fashioned common sense. It also said nothing of the US "tracking" Bin Laden through surveillance of such transmissions. There were mentions in the press of Bin Laden using satellite phones half a decade before Bin Laden reportedly ceased using his satellite phone.
Back to present: if I were a terrorist, I think my #1 assumption would be that any public communications are being monitored. That just seems like a simple starting point. Why should I assume this? Well, for starters, because the FISA court has allowed the US government to seek wire taps (meaning phone as well as email, etc) for cause, even for 72-hour retroactive cause since the late 1990s. If I'm plotting against the US and sending plain-text emails to do so, I'm not a very intelligent plotter, am I?
Thus, since the only people whose assumptions of privacy have been destroyed by this leak are law-abiding citizens your argument is just a bunch of bullshit.
There is always a chance of this information being used for political reasons, similar to what happened in the Clinton administration.
Hoo boy. Okay, I missed that Limbaugh conspiracy theory. What the blazes are you spouting off about here?
If Bush used it against political opponents then that would be a problem, and he would be held accountable
First, you'd never know if Bush used it against his political opponents. Second, given Karl Rove's bag of dirty tricks going back several decades, I think it is safe to assume that any compromising information Bush Inc got about a political opponent would be used to its fullest. Granted, they do just fine making shit up, but it's always easier to start from something minorly embarrassing instead of thin air.
Love to have an investigation that lead to the leaks on this. After all, Plame was important, right?
Hmm. Let's see.
In one case, the "whistleblower" (Official A, etc) was describing the status of a CIA agent using their cover name. Purportedly, because said CIA agent had undue influence in sending her husband to Niger, which was both irrelevant to the facts that he discovered and brought back from said mission and, as has been since proven, patently untrue (and they knew it). But we'll pretend that their "reason" was true.
In the other case, the "whistleblower" was describing a massive unconstitutional surveillance program which trampled on the liberties of pretty much American citizen and which essentially turned the US into Britain circa 1774 with relation to its colonies.
Which one of these "whistleblower"s belongs outside quotes, and which should be turned into "political assassin"?
The only people pissed off are the Ney York Times and the Democratic Underground and it's little trolls.
Interesting that Barron's has suddenly joined the "Democratic Underground".
They just called for impeachment hearings on their editorial page.
To correct your statement: the only people pissed off are those who care about the Constitution and are unwilling to live under a dictatorship in exchange for a little "safety".
You cannot tell me, that it is legitimate for a teacher to literally spy on these interests while trying to educate children to respect the privacy and opinion of others.
Because the district will be held legally and politically responsible for anything that happens on the computers they so provide, yes, it is not only their right but their responsibility to monitor user activities.
Sorry, that's the world we live in.