Well, maybe it wouldn't have been offensive if it had been spelled correctly. or if it hadn't been in quotes. Or if there had been anything of substance in the OP other than 'China's pullution is AWFUL'.
At any rate, 'overtones', as I referred to them, are different from explicit racism.
It's pretty insensitive, though, to make jokes at the expense of someone else's culture (including food), particularly when you're trying to point out a flaw in said culture.
On a chemical level, how does this differ from growing coral?
Well, coral (and shellfish) can sequester carbon, but this only works as long as the water is sufficiently non-acidic. The problem is that as atmospheric CO2 is absorbed into the oceans, some of it becomes carbonic acid -- and the acidification of the water means that corals, and shellfish shells, dissolve.
One nice effect of adding lime is that it lowers the acidity of the water, thereby allowing coral and shellfish to continue sequestering carbon.
I agree with you in general regarding China's pollution problem, but the racist overtones (Egg Foo Young?) are unnecessary.
That said, maybe if you look back at the industrial revolution in "cleaner" countries, we were just as bad. Read accounts of Liverpool in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century. Or how about chemical pollution in the US until the 1970s?
China's position on pollution is no different than what other countries went through... the difference is just one of scale.
This does not mean that China's attitude towards pollution is any more tenable, but it helps if we consider the processes by which other countries cleaned up their acts. Of note, grassroots support for a cleaner environment is problematic in China, given their political system, and the ease by which laws can be overlooked.
But it doesn't reflect well on Americans (or other Westerners) to chastise China while ignoring our own sordid past.
What the parent to your post wrote was that Republicans would be surprised by this, since they have (by and large) been maintaining that complaints of any irregularities in the last couple election cycles are the whining of conspiracy theorists. If they honestly believed that to be true, then yes, in fact, they should be surprised by evidence of election tampering.
I don't know why you're do paranoid that everyone's out to get Republicans -- parent to your post makes a good point that's even sympathetic to the Republicans who have so far refused to believe (or, perhaps, admit) that there was widescale election fraud related to the use of electronic voting machines.
At any rate, you should probably relax your grip on your Republican persecution complex and realize that the parent to your post said nothing at all about the accusation benefiting Republicans...
Question for you -- are you trolling, or are you really that bad at reading comprehension?
So I'm reading the summary, and as I see that TFA is about a planned KOTOR MMO, I noice there's a blockquote (apparently from TFA).
Then I read the blockquote. It refers only to previously released games. WTF? Can't you at least give us something about the planned MMO in the summary?
I don't know who you are "Zafsk" (if that's your real name), but I resist your crude attempts to force me to RTFA.
Well, we used to call it the MAFIAA (Music and Film Industry Associations of America). I don't know about you, but "SMAFIAA" just doesn't have the same kick to it.
True, but it does make me think of them as small and blue, which helps.
and the way the BSA is presenting the data: the study only includes eight states, and it is making some questionable connections, including the claim that lost state and local tax revenue from piracy would have been enough to 'hire nearly 25,000 experienced police officers.'
Heh heh. I'd like to see what happens when the BSA members are told that online purchases of software will be taxed locally and by the states...
I'll bet their maths for calculating lost state and local tax revenue from pirated software would change.
The other factor being, if people couldn't get the 'free as in beer' copies of that software, they wouldn't pay for a legit copy. But that's been rehashed approximately 6.022 x 10^23 times on slashdot, so I won't go any further.
On a side note, why did the BSA have to break tradition and not use an acronym ending in AA? They've made it much more difficult to lump them into the bin with the MPAA and RIAA. Sigh... BSA/**AA is four too many characters.
And for those of us who couldn't remember which online enclycopedia is a good, free place to look up terms we aren't sure of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia.
Just in case.
You know, just in case somoene forgot.
Forgot about wikipedia, I mean.
Because, apparently, looking something up on wikipedia is esoteric enough that a post with a link to wikipedia (and nothin else!) is informative.:)
You do get to make a billion or so observations of the destination as you're travelling towards it, after all. It's not going to be a complete unknown or anything...
But your craft was designed and launched without the benefit of those billion (relatively close-up) observations. So any adjustments based on them need to be possible based what you already packed for your trip.
Let's say I want to go on a pic-a-nic and do not pack a gun because it is too heavy. Then, as I get closer to my most favorite pic-a-nic spot, I see a large animal at the picnic table. I want to know what kind of animal it is, but my eyesight is not so good. What do I do? Do I approach, not knowing if it's an angry bear? Or do I maintain my distance and try to make better observations of the animal? What happens if I get too close and the bear notices me? I didn't pack my gun, so I'd rather try to determine whether it's a bear or a really hairy guy in a brown coat *before* I get closer.
At any rate, I think it's a fallacy to assume that a race technologically advanced enough to get here would *want* to get close to a potenitally inhabited planet on a first pass... and I also think it's a fallacy to assume that they would have the capability to do so. For all we know, their propulsion technology may depend on maintaining a certain velocity with respect to the closest star... we just don't know, and so cannot make blanket assumptions about their capabilities and, more importantly, their desires for such a long trip.
My pet definition is resources that can be allocated to different departments, divisions, and users as needed rather than the "box-per-department" model that is common now. In other words, as-needed allocation.
I think you're looking at it from the wrong perspective -- one needs to look at it from the application's perspective, not the system's perspective. The "cloud" represents the resources needed to perform a task -- it's an abstraction used to represent resource acquisition, not resource allocation.
In practice, though, you're pretty close to the truth. Instead of having an allocated set of computers for processing a group's tasks, they can draw from the cloud, which is available to multiple groups. As your computing needs grow, you can have the Cloud take over another computer, which reduces the number of computing resources, but increases the power of the Cloud. This has the advantage of reducing single points of failure, and more efficiently allocating computing resources. Say you start with 100 Macs... as each Mac is subsumed by the MacCloud, the MacCloud grows in strength. Eventually, there can be only one.
Surely editors should at least make sure the submission is troll/flame free before posting it?
Not to rehash the old "you must be new here" canard[1], but really, YMBNH. One of the jobs of the editors seems to be ensuring that the submission has some kind of troll/flame in it. That pretty much guarantees a lot of posts in the comments.
No, it's not too bad, but it's going to get a lot worse soon. USPS and freight carriers are bellwethers for a crappy economy, and UPS, Fedex, etc, are feeling the burn already. We won't know until sometime next fall how bad the USPS is hurting this year, but it's gonna be a doozy, I think. I think we'll have to go back to 2000/2001 when there were revenue shortfalls of 2-3 billion for the USPS (originally estimated to be 400 million before the books were closed, and excluding speacial measure expenses post-9/11).
The post office is, roughly, a crown corporation. It operates under a government mandate and follows some special rules regarding taxes, but it has been self funded for quite a long time now.
You should check the figures on that... it stopped being true some time ago. Email has killed the ability of the USPS to fund itself. It's really hard to track the USPS budget, for lots of reasons (for example, their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd quarters are 84 days long, and their 4th quarter is 112 days), but the Federal budget includes payments to the USPS for security and anti-terrorism, to make up for reduced revenue from Congressionally capped rates, and for other reasons.
Suffice it to say that the USPS is no longer self-sufficient.
If you know of a solution, don't write it in this discussion!
Please be aware that not everyone who browses slashdot has our best interests at heart. Any commercial method to circumvent DRM will be jumped upon by our broadcast content overlords. Any non-commercial method will be legislated out of existence... the longer the media cartels remain in the dark, the longer we have to enjoy our right to timeshift content.
Like usenet... the first rule of usenet is that you don't talk about usenet.
Sorry for the pessimism and tinfoilhattery, but this entire ask slashdot question just screams "honeypot" to me, even if that wasn't its intent.
Well... the height of the wave is proportional to the depth of the water below
Not so. It is inversely proportional to depth of the water, but it's not a direct relationship. There's plenty of reading out there on wave mechanics as they relate to tsunamis, but the key concept is that the volume of displaced water and the velocity of the wave as the front edge hits shallower (slower) water are the primary determinants of tsunami height.
Great, then you have a situation where only large companies with lots of capital can file patent applications, ensuring that small startups are locked out, or are forced to partner with a huge company in order to ever get a product to market.
USPTO generates a healthy profit for Uncle Sam too. USPTO makes the same on a low quality or a high quality patent. All that matters is volume. Therefore the system favors cranking out many low quality paptents.
What the hell is a paptent? Is it related to a puptent? Or is it more like a papsmear?:)
Seriously, though, the USPTO is not a profit generator. We spend around 1.7 Billion a year to fund the USPTO... although patent (and trademark especially) fees help offset some of the cost of running the USPTO, it is in no way profitable. The USPTO cannot make up for it with volume, to rehash the old joke. This doesn't touch on the purpose of cureacracy, which seems to be to perpetuate itself and make itself grow, but this is separate from the profit motive.
You make a good point about lawyers' profits, but the thing to keep in mind is that the lawyers wouldn't be getting paid if the service they provided didn't result in high profits for the patent-holding companies. In other words, the patent system generates a lot of revenue for patent holders, who then find it worthwhile to dspend a fortune on lawyers to protect their patents or dispute others' patents.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it's erroneous to say that the system is set up to provide revenue for the USPTO or lawyers... the system is set up to maximize revenue for people who hold patents... who happen to need the USPTO and lawyers to keep the cash rolling in.
a 100' wave in 30' of water does not become a 130' wave in 0' of water. This would be equivalent to saying that a 1' wave in 1000' of water becomes a 1001' wave at landfall.
What happens is that as the water becomes more shallow, the leading edge of the wave slows down, while the deeper water at the back of the wave continues to move quickly. As a result, the wave compresses horizontally, and grows vertically.
This is similar to what you're saying about the 130' feet of wave being pushed up the valley -- but it's important to note that the wave "being pushed up the valley" to 1725' is the same thing as saying the wave was 1725' high.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, maybe it wouldn't have been offensive if it had been spelled correctly. or if it hadn't been in quotes. Or if there had been anything of substance in the OP other than 'China's pullution is AWFUL'.
At any rate, 'overtones', as I referred to them, are different from explicit racism.
It's pretty insensitive, though, to make jokes at the expense of someone else's culture (including food), particularly when you're trying to point out a flaw in said culture.
Well, coral (and shellfish) can sequester carbon, but this only works as long as the water is sufficiently non-acidic. The problem is that as atmospheric CO2 is absorbed into the oceans, some of it becomes carbonic acid -- and the acidification of the water means that corals, and shellfish shells, dissolve.
One nice effect of adding lime is that it lowers the acidity of the water, thereby allowing coral and shellfish to continue sequestering carbon.
Says you.
We don't know what it's composed of, and it *could* be solid gold. It *could be* heavy metal.
I personally believe it's composed entirely of soft rock. Chances are very slim that it's composed of top-40 pop or country&western.
I agree with you in general regarding China's pollution problem, but the racist overtones (Egg Foo Young?) are unnecessary.
That said, maybe if you look back at the industrial revolution in "cleaner" countries, we were just as bad. Read accounts of Liverpool in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century. Or how about chemical pollution in the US until the 1970s?
China's position on pollution is no different than what other countries went through... the difference is just one of scale.
This does not mean that China's attitude towards pollution is any more tenable, but it helps if we consider the processes by which other countries cleaned up their acts. Of note, grassroots support for a cleaner environment is problematic in China, given their political system, and the ease by which laws can be overlooked.
But it doesn't reflect well on Americans (or other Westerners) to chastise China while ignoring our own sordid past.
What the parent to your post wrote was that Republicans would be surprised by this, since they have (by and large) been maintaining that complaints of any irregularities in the last couple election cycles are the whining of conspiracy theorists. If they honestly believed that to be true, then yes, in fact, they should be surprised by evidence of election tampering.
I don't know why you're do paranoid that everyone's out to get Republicans -- parent to your post makes a good point that's even sympathetic to the Republicans who have so far refused to believe (or, perhaps, admit) that there was widescale election fraud related to the use of electronic voting machines.
At any rate, you should probably relax your grip on your Republican persecution complex and realize that the parent to your post said nothing at all about the accusation benefiting Republicans...
Question for you -- are you trolling, or are you really that bad at reading comprehension?
So I'm reading the summary, and as I see that TFA is about a planned KOTOR MMO, I noice there's a blockquote (apparently from TFA).
Then I read the blockquote. It refers only to previously released games. WTF? Can't you at least give us something about the planned MMO in the summary?
I don't know who you are "Zafsk" (if that's your real name), but I resist your crude attempts to force me to RTFA.
Bad search terms. Did you look through the results? Even the top few?
Most of those results are references to the BSA lodging a complaint against an infringer, not the other way around.
This doesn't mean your point isn't valid... but it does mean that you need some better evidence.
True, but it does make me think of them as small and blue, which helps.
Heh heh. I'd like to see what happens when the BSA members are told that online purchases of software will be taxed locally and by the states...
I'll bet their maths for calculating lost state and local tax revenue from pirated software would change.
The other factor being, if people couldn't get the 'free as in beer' copies of that software, they wouldn't pay for a legit copy. But that's been rehashed approximately 6.022 x 10^23 times on slashdot, so I won't go any further.
On a side note, why did the BSA have to break tradition and not use an acronym ending in AA? They've made it much more difficult to lump them into the bin with the MPAA and RIAA. Sigh... BSA/**AA is four too many characters.
And for those of us who couldn't remember which online enclycopedia is a good, free place to look up terms we aren't sure of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia.
:)
Just in case.
You know, just in case somoene forgot.
Forgot about wikipedia, I mean.
Because, apparently, looking something up on wikipedia is esoteric enough that a post with a link to wikipedia (and nothin else!) is informative.
But your craft was designed and launched without the benefit of those billion (relatively close-up) observations. So any adjustments based on them need to be possible based what you already packed for your trip.
Let's say I want to go on a pic-a-nic and do not pack a gun because it is too heavy. Then, as I get closer to my most favorite pic-a-nic spot, I see a large animal at the picnic table. I want to know what kind of animal it is, but my eyesight is not so good. What do I do? Do I approach, not knowing if it's an angry bear? Or do I maintain my distance and try to make better observations of the animal? What happens if I get too close and the bear notices me? I didn't pack my gun, so I'd rather try to determine whether it's a bear or a really hairy guy in a brown coat *before* I get closer.
At any rate, I think it's a fallacy to assume that a race technologically advanced enough to get here would *want* to get close to a potenitally inhabited planet on a first pass... and I also think it's a fallacy to assume that they would have the capability to do so. For all we know, their propulsion technology may depend on maintaining a certain velocity with respect to the closest star... we just don't know, and so cannot make blanket assumptions about their capabilities and, more importantly, their desires for such a long trip.
I think you're looking at it from the wrong perspective -- one needs to look at it from the application's perspective, not the system's perspective. The "cloud" represents the resources needed to perform a task -- it's an abstraction used to represent resource acquisition, not resource allocation.
In practice, though, you're pretty close to the truth. Instead of having an allocated set of computers for processing a group's tasks, they can draw from the cloud, which is available to multiple groups. As your computing needs grow, you can have the Cloud take over another computer, which reduces the number of computing resources, but increases the power of the Cloud. This has the advantage of reducing single points of failure, and more efficiently allocating computing resources. Say you start with 100 Macs... as each Mac is subsumed by the MacCloud, the MacCloud grows in strength. Eventually, there can be only one.
Sorry.
That's Unisex...
I think you may want to reconsider your enthusiasm for HotSex 08.
Or maybe not. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Not to rehash the old "you must be new here" canard[1], but really, YMBNH. One of the jobs of the editors seems to be ensuring that the submission has some kind of troll/flame in it. That pretty much guarantees a lot of posts in the comments.
No, it's not too bad, but it's going to get a lot worse soon. USPS and freight carriers are bellwethers for a crappy economy, and UPS, Fedex, etc, are feeling the burn already. We won't know until sometime next fall how bad the USPS is hurting this year, but it's gonna be a doozy, I think. I think we'll have to go back to 2000/2001 when there were revenue shortfalls of 2-3 billion for the USPS (originally estimated to be 400 million before the books were closed, and excluding speacial measure expenses post-9/11).
Flame war == more comments == more page hits == more ad impressions.
:)
Besides, instigating an MS-bashing comment flood is like firing up your favorite game and playing through it in 'easy' mode.
So once in a while, even though it's been done before, we get to have an anti-MS free for all, because it's easy. And fun.
My favorite part are the people who complain about trollish summaries, because I get to imagine how their panties got in such a tight knot.
You should check the figures on that... it stopped being true some time ago. Email has killed the ability of the USPS to fund itself. It's really hard to track the USPS budget, for lots of reasons (for example, their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd quarters are 84 days long, and their 4th quarter is 112 days), but the Federal budget includes payments to the USPS for security and anti-terrorism, to make up for reduced revenue from Congressionally capped rates, and for other reasons.
Suffice it to say that the USPS is no longer self-sufficient.
Obviously that's because everyone was reading TFA.
If you know of a solution, don't write it in this discussion!
Please be aware that not everyone who browses slashdot has our best interests at heart. Any commercial method to circumvent DRM will be jumped upon by our broadcast content overlords. Any non-commercial method will be legislated out of existence... the longer the media cartels remain in the dark, the longer we have to enjoy our right to timeshift content.
Like usenet... the first rule of usenet is that you don't talk about usenet.
Sorry for the pessimism and tinfoilhattery, but this entire ask slashdot question just screams "honeypot" to me, even if that wasn't its intent.
Not so. It is inversely proportional to depth of the water, but it's not a direct relationship. There's plenty of reading out there on wave mechanics as they relate to tsunamis, but the key concept is that the volume of displaced water and the velocity of the wave as the front edge hits shallower (slower) water are the primary determinants of tsunami height.
That's mooosecrap. Launch costs alone are over 30k.
What?
Great, then you have a situation where only large companies with lots of capital can file patent applications, ensuring that small startups are locked out, or are forced to partner with a huge company in order to ever get a product to market.
Talk about stifling innovation...
What the hell is a paptent? Is it related to a puptent? Or is it more like a papsmear? :)
Seriously, though, the USPTO is not a profit generator. We spend around 1.7 Billion a year to fund the USPTO... although patent (and trademark especially) fees help offset some of the cost of running the USPTO, it is in no way profitable. The USPTO cannot make up for it with volume, to rehash the old joke. This doesn't touch on the purpose of cureacracy, which seems to be to perpetuate itself and make itself grow, but this is separate from the profit motive.
You make a good point about lawyers' profits, but the thing to keep in mind is that the lawyers wouldn't be getting paid if the service they provided didn't result in high profits for the patent-holding companies. In other words, the patent system generates a lot of revenue for patent holders, who then find it worthwhile to dspend a fortune on lawyers to protect their patents or dispute others' patents.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it's erroneous to say that the system is set up to provide revenue for the USPTO or lawyers... the system is set up to maximize revenue for people who hold patents... who happen to need the USPTO and lawyers to keep the cash rolling in.
Have you ever seen models of tsunami?
a 100' wave in 30' of water does not become a 130' wave in 0' of water. This would be equivalent to saying that a 1' wave in 1000' of water becomes a 1001' wave at landfall.
What happens is that as the water becomes more shallow, the leading edge of the wave slows down, while the deeper water at the back of the wave continues to move quickly. As a result, the wave compresses horizontally, and grows vertically.
This is similar to what you're saying about the 130' feet of wave being pushed up the valley -- but it's important to note that the wave "being pushed up the valley" to 1725' is the same thing as saying the wave was 1725' high.
Whoosh!