Calling CO2 a pollutant is unhelpful. In sufficient quantities it will disturb the environment, but so would too much molecular oxygen, ozone, and even water.
There are specific air pollutants that are created and released only by certain processes like hydrocarbon combustion which there is no natural balance for, and which have specific and sometimes immediate health effects. CO2 is harmless by itself as a component of air, and actually necessary for plant life. It's just that we're dumping too much of it into the atmosphere as a result of industry and the excess is causing problems.
It is not helpful to be that general about the issue. The problem of air pollution has different causes and different effects than the problem of greenhouse gas emissions.
A pollutant is a substance or energy introduced into the environment that has undesired effects, or adversely affects the usefulness of a resource. Too much CO2 has undesired effects, but is already part of the environment. That's like saying water is a pollutant if there is so much of it introduced that you get an overflow. Sure, it's a problem, but that doesn't make water an environmental pollutant.
No one is underestimating the problem of CO2 by not labeling it as a "pollutant". Let's resist the urge to associate separate issues with words that have more specific meanings just because we want to use the negative connotation of the term to affirm our estimation of the seriousness of the problem.
Would you like to be filmed going about your job? Of course some cops don't want to be the stars of their own reality shows. That implies nothing other than it feels intrusive to them.
That said, they have the power to arrest and to use deadly force. They need to be held to the highest standard. If body cams will do that, then they should be wearing them.
They're not perfect, however. There will still be some incidents where the camera footage is misleading or inconclusive about what may have happened due to odd camera angles or malfunctions. We still need to be able to accept the word of a cop when there is no camera footage, which means we need to ensure that we're getting the best trained and professional officers in the field.
Part of this is, frankly, the need to go back to constituents and show that they're "done something".
While there are certainly politicians who like and desire the exercise of power, the others find themselves asked by constituents, "what have you done for me lately?"
A good candidate for a libertarian would be likely working on repealing legislation right and left, but also resisting the passage of new legislation unless it was carefully circumscribed to a set of very specific topics that the government at that level would be limited to.
That doesn't play well in our democracy. That's why you find people trying to simply stop legislation in place of fixing it or reforming it. Once you get a program in place that seems to benefit some constituency, no one can touch it without making themselves unelectable. Sadly, that looks like being "obstructionist" and desperate. Granted it is actually desperate, because everyone wants free stuff, but everyone wants everyone else to pay for it and they don't see the connection.
True, but that's almost by definition. A skilled coder is one who does those things.
However, even a skilled coder has limits. I'm constantly aware of scenarios where the deadlines shift, or more frequently, the amount of time that the coders have is smaller than expected, because they are called in to do support work on a previous version. You still have the same deadline, but someone just took up a significant portion of your development time doing something unrelated.
In those scenarios, even a highly skilled individual needs actual time to get things done. And I find that the top level coders are the ones most likely to be brought in to fix things, unless it can be helped.
It's probably less about sour grapes than it is about the image of a certain kind of coder which makes for a good story.
People like their assholes. They don't like being too close to them, but they like assholes who cut through the "bullshit" and make things happen.
News outlets tend to pick up on those stories and people who are assholes tend to encourage that, because some star coders are just assholes and like the idea that their particular dysfunction makes them seem hip and employable, as opposed to being relegated to a closet somewhere.
The reality is that there are excellent coders of both the nice and the asshole variety. It's just that you don't hear about the nice ones because they're not grandstanders. The assholes tend to be.
If given a limited budget and resources, I'd probably pick the star coder, even if an asshole. I think the real issue with a 10x coder, as opposed to a team of average coders is the overhead of managing a team of coders. If you have one guy, he has one vision and it doesn't have to be transmitted to and adopted by the team. This is useful for certain projects.
For other projects, where you are not going to be able to get any one person to be able to finish it, then team dynamics become much more important, and it becomes much more important to not have assholes on your team. If you're forced to have an asshole star developer, then you need to find people who will execute that vision without complaint. At that point, you're going to tend toward worker bees instead of highly skilled individuals because you don't want a religious war between the the two assholes writing your code.
However, if you lose the assholes, you're much more likely to find a team of above average coders because they can actually work together without trying to backstab or snipe at each other constantly. You don't need to limit yourself to coders who are just puppets of the asshole senior coder.
Don't get me wrong, puppet coding can certainly work, but is probably something you only really want in a short term startup where you can have that vision, without having to deal with larger teams.
That bloat has more to do with poor project management and deadlines, not to mention the lack of interest in returning to bloated code and refactoring it after the fact. Skill can affect this, but if you're relying on individual skill to reduce bloat, you're doing it wrong.
There are few more useful tools than a code review. After all, another opinion is useful in just about any field and a team needs to make sure they keep up with how other people are doing things in their modules. You find a lot of things to fix when someone is looking over your shoulder.
However, people can be dickish about how they do them. I'm not a big fan of going through elaborate rituals to make people feel better about their code, but at the same time, when you're a dick to someone in a CR, you're making them feel defensive when you want them to be more open to accept constructive criticism.
If people are being defensive about criticism of their code, then they need to change that, but let's not pretend that it's all on the person whose code is being reviewed.
Actually, yes, this is something like the impulse drive.
"Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual indicates that the impulse engines are nuclear fusion engines where the plasma from the fusion reactor powers a massive magnetic coil to propel the ship. It is a form of magnetohydrodynamic or magnetoplasmadynamic thruster. "
If the Trek impulse drive uses reaction mass, it is very, very efficient at it.
The drive being suggested here does not use reaction mass at all, it pushes against space itself, which shouldn't be possible as we understand it. It's a very big deal, because it means we don't need to carry around the stuff we push against, we can carry around a compact (relatively) power source, like a nuclear reactor, and it can just directly apply power to pushing the ship through space.
Here you're going from the concept of a lowest energy state vacuum where there is nothing to push against, to space almost being something you can just put a propeller out the back and turn it like you do in the water. A very special propeller that looks nothing like a propeller, mind you, but the concept is similar in that it is orders of magnitude easier to engineer a serious deep space ship without having to effectively carry onboard and lay your road behind you.
On the other hand, the fortunate part is that people willing to make a suicide attack, actually attacked people who could defend themselves and were expecting them.
This is rather unusual for your garden variety jihadi. They tend to prefer to have innocent bystanders "martyr" them via their own self-triggered bomb vest.
A provocatively dressed woman isn't coming to shoot people who they disagree with.
Actually, I'm quite all right with provocatively dressed women. Although I'd suggest that they stay safe given the number of animals out there who believe that gives them a license to attack said women.
However, people who are intending to do harm to another person over a cartoon, even if the cartoon was specifically drawn to offend them, are fair game for entertainment in my book. All they need to do is not show up and nothing happens to them. In fact, all they need to do is not show up with a gun to be used with criminal intent, and they'd be fine.
I'm not sure I'd actually encourage entertainment where people are expecting to fire live rounds on a regular basis, but I'm not against a well-defended exercise of First Amendment rights against those who would use violence to try and oppress and silence them.
Do these natives actually own the land? Legally, I would assume not, or they'd just shut down the project for trespassing.
So, property rights doesn't really come into play here. This is all about use of land which is NOT owned by the protesters. OHA did not change the legal basis for the telescope to continue to be built. It is still legal to build it, it is just on voluntary hiatus while the managers of the project try to work something out so everyone is happy.
You're not required to believe anything. He's presented an alternative viewpoint, which clearly has a specific perspective, but this is just a comments page and he has merely alerted you to that perspective. Even if he provided footnotes, which would be overkill, you'd still have a responsibility to fact check if you wanted to derive an informed opinion on the situation.
However, unless you're actually involved in the dispute, or plan to involve yourself, then you can just decide to believe him or not, and not have to worry about it all that much.
If I walk up to someone on the street and give them a thousand dollars out of my pocket, there is the presumption that this would help them. Even putting aside obvious extreme cases like gamblers and drug addicts, that thousand dollars can very easily be burned up on things that will actually do little to remove people from poverty.
If my thousand dollars was used to help pay for a car, they can drive to work, that's better but they still have a depreciating asset that they have to maintain. If it was used to buy Christmas presents, then you have some happy kids, but you've bought something that does nothing for you in the long run.
Now what if you do something smart like invest it? Then you're likely to see some real value from it. In about thirty years. If and only if an emergency does not force you to withdraw it. In the meantime, you're still poor and you have to resist the urge to use that money for anything but as an investment or a payment that helps you on a continuing and increasing basis.
You don't want to give people money and expect that to end poverty. You want to remove incidences of bad decision-making and you have to buffer them from bad luck. Money can be a buffer, but if you continue to make bad decisions with the money you have, you're going to keep being poor.
There are anecdotes of people who make millions, either being rock stars, sports stars, or lottery ticket winners, and they lose it all. How do they end up that way? They would have been (temporarily) rich one-percenters just as surely as Bill Gates or the Koch Brothers are. The catch is that they have terrible decision making skills when it comes to money. They may spend it lavishly. They get bad advice and fail to learn how to invest. They may simply have weak personalities and are taken advantage of. They don't understand what you do with money, and then they lose it.
Although those are anecdotes, the same thing happens to tens of millions of people everyday in smaller, but more crucial situations. Poverty isn't always about helpless people being taken advantage of. It's more about the fact that it is more important to know how not to be poor than it is to actually have money thrown at you.
The point is that the solution to Poverty is *not* money. The solution to Poverty is *doing the right things* with money.
How does this work with checked luggage? Presumably your stuff won't be pulled from baggage if you aren't expected to get off in Chicago, but instead in LA.
Obviously, if you only have carry on luggage, that works fine.
I've always felt that using 64 whole bits has been a waste of good address space. I'm glad HURD agrees. I'm actually contributing a patch to get them back down to 16-bit mode with the holy grail of finally returning to 8-bit. I have always felt that if you're running on a microkernel you should run with a micro address space too.
Persecution fantasy mostly. Still, there are examples of places that men, in general, don't get a fair shake based on gender. I won't bother listing them all because you've probably heard the Father's Right's schtick before. The reality is that while this is a case of blatant sexism, the reality is that men do also have issues with sexism too.
That said, I have heard some feminists state that they believe that gender bias hurts both men and women. I can get behind that, but I don't think we should trundle that out every time that an instance of a woman clearly being discriminated against comes up. What we have here is a case of clear irrational bias. It should be dealt with on that level as a clear case of bias and not have it minimized with counter examples of how bad men have it.
Similarly, if there are examples of men having biases play out against them, then we should discuss those examples as well, without trying to minimize them by pointing out how bad women have it. Irrational bias should be spoken out against because it is wrong, not made into a tool for one-upping the other sex.
Well, you could eradicate systematic gender bias and you will still get people who act that way. There are people out there who act like assholes for no explicable reason, and sometimes, you're not even sure that they know why they act like an asshole.
We're probably always going to have gender bias and racism at the anecdotal level. If you're expecting to totally eradicate it, you're going to be disappointed.
Right now, there are white males who are being referred to negatively in a racial and gender biased way. However, for the most part, no fucks are given. The reason for that is that we don't perceive that as being a problem for us. The world we should be going for is a world when you can make stupid comments like that about anyone, and they are in a good enough position to laugh it off. If the almighty white members of the all-powerful Patriarchy can't avoid being referred to in that way, then I just don't think that its realistic to assume that anyone will ever succeed in not having some irrational bias directed at them.
Of course, I am speaking of the reason for patents to be authorized, at least under the US Constitution, not the actual functioning of patents, which definitely has a debatable effect on the ability of an inventor to profit reasonably from their invention.
Personally, I'd be fine with them doing away patents at this point. A scenario that punishes an implementer to the benefit of someone who buys a regulatory fiction like a patent, is counter productive.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're responding to a typo.
"Nut", should probably be "But"
Calling CO2 a pollutant is unhelpful. In sufficient quantities it will disturb the environment, but so would too much molecular oxygen, ozone, and even water.
There are specific air pollutants that are created and released only by certain processes like hydrocarbon combustion which there is no natural balance for, and which have specific and sometimes immediate health effects. CO2 is harmless by itself as a component of air, and actually necessary for plant life. It's just that we're dumping too much of it into the atmosphere as a result of industry and the excess is causing problems.
It is not helpful to be that general about the issue. The problem of air pollution has different causes and different effects than the problem of greenhouse gas emissions.
A pollutant is a substance or energy introduced into the environment that has undesired effects, or adversely affects the usefulness of a resource. Too much CO2 has undesired effects, but is already part of the environment. That's like saying water is a pollutant if there is so much of it introduced that you get an overflow. Sure, it's a problem, but that doesn't make water an environmental pollutant.
No one is underestimating the problem of CO2 by not labeling it as a "pollutant". Let's resist the urge to associate separate issues with words that have more specific meanings just because we want to use the negative connotation of the term to affirm our estimation of the seriousness of the problem.
Would you like to be filmed going about your job? Of course some cops don't want to be the stars of their own reality shows. That implies nothing other than it feels intrusive to them.
That said, they have the power to arrest and to use deadly force. They need to be held to the highest standard. If body cams will do that, then they should be wearing them.
They're not perfect, however. There will still be some incidents where the camera footage is misleading or inconclusive about what may have happened due to odd camera angles or malfunctions. We still need to be able to accept the word of a cop when there is no camera footage, which means we need to ensure that we're getting the best trained and professional officers in the field.
Part of this is, frankly, the need to go back to constituents and show that they're "done something".
While there are certainly politicians who like and desire the exercise of power, the others find themselves asked by constituents, "what have you done for me lately?"
A good candidate for a libertarian would be likely working on repealing legislation right and left, but also resisting the passage of new legislation unless it was carefully circumscribed to a set of very specific topics that the government at that level would be limited to.
That doesn't play well in our democracy. That's why you find people trying to simply stop legislation in place of fixing it or reforming it. Once you get a program in place that seems to benefit some constituency, no one can touch it without making themselves unelectable. Sadly, that looks like being "obstructionist" and desperate. Granted it is actually desperate, because everyone wants free stuff, but everyone wants everyone else to pay for it and they don't see the connection.
True, but that's almost by definition. A skilled coder is one who does those things.
However, even a skilled coder has limits. I'm constantly aware of scenarios where the deadlines shift, or more frequently, the amount of time that the coders have is smaller than expected, because they are called in to do support work on a previous version. You still have the same deadline, but someone just took up a significant portion of your development time doing something unrelated.
In those scenarios, even a highly skilled individual needs actual time to get things done. And I find that the top level coders are the ones most likely to be brought in to fix things, unless it can be helped.
It's probably less about sour grapes than it is about the image of a certain kind of coder which makes for a good story.
People like their assholes. They don't like being too close to them, but they like assholes who cut through the "bullshit" and make things happen.
News outlets tend to pick up on those stories and people who are assholes tend to encourage that, because some star coders are just assholes and like the idea that their particular dysfunction makes them seem hip and employable, as opposed to being relegated to a closet somewhere.
The reality is that there are excellent coders of both the nice and the asshole variety. It's just that you don't hear about the nice ones because they're not grandstanders. The assholes tend to be.
If given a limited budget and resources, I'd probably pick the star coder, even if an asshole. I think the real issue with a 10x coder, as opposed to a team of average coders is the overhead of managing a team of coders. If you have one guy, he has one vision and it doesn't have to be transmitted to and adopted by the team. This is useful for certain projects.
For other projects, where you are not going to be able to get any one person to be able to finish it, then team dynamics become much more important, and it becomes much more important to not have assholes on your team. If you're forced to have an asshole star developer, then you need to find people who will execute that vision without complaint. At that point, you're going to tend toward worker bees instead of highly skilled individuals because you don't want a religious war between the the two assholes writing your code.
However, if you lose the assholes, you're much more likely to find a team of above average coders because they can actually work together without trying to backstab or snipe at each other constantly. You don't need to limit yourself to coders who are just puppets of the asshole senior coder.
Don't get me wrong, puppet coding can certainly work, but is probably something you only really want in a short term startup where you can have that vision, without having to deal with larger teams.
That bloat has more to do with poor project management and deadlines, not to mention the lack of interest in returning to bloated code and refactoring it after the fact. Skill can affect this, but if you're relying on individual skill to reduce bloat, you're doing it wrong.
There are few more useful tools than a code review. After all, another opinion is useful in just about any field and a team needs to make sure they keep up with how other people are doing things in their modules. You find a lot of things to fix when someone is looking over your shoulder.
However, people can be dickish about how they do them. I'm not a big fan of going through elaborate rituals to make people feel better about their code, but at the same time, when you're a dick to someone in a CR, you're making them feel defensive when you want them to be more open to accept constructive criticism.
If people are being defensive about criticism of their code, then they need to change that, but let's not pretend that it's all on the person whose code is being reviewed.
Actually, yes, this is something like the impulse drive.
"Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual indicates that the impulse engines are nuclear fusion engines where the plasma from the fusion reactor powers a massive magnetic coil to propel the ship. It is a form of magnetohydrodynamic or magnetoplasmadynamic thruster. "
If the Trek impulse drive uses reaction mass, it is very, very efficient at it.
The drive being suggested here does not use reaction mass at all, it pushes against space itself, which shouldn't be possible as we understand it. It's a very big deal, because it means we don't need to carry around the stuff we push against, we can carry around a compact (relatively) power source, like a nuclear reactor, and it can just directly apply power to pushing the ship through space.
Here you're going from the concept of a lowest energy state vacuum where there is nothing to push against, to space almost being something you can just put a propeller out the back and turn it like you do in the water. A very special propeller that looks nothing like a propeller, mind you, but the concept is similar in that it is orders of magnitude easier to engineer a serious deep space ship without having to effectively carry onboard and lay your road behind you.
Or Yik Yak cooperated with an investigation of a credible anonymous threat based on a message posted on their service.
Well, yes and no. Yes, there has been disagreement on the depiction taboo. And yes, some Muslims have depicted Muhammad.
However, it's a very real theological debate in Islam and there is a very strong strain of thinking against it.
Of course, none of that justifies killing someone else over it.
Somehow, I can't quite admire their dedication.
whoosh
On the other hand, the fortunate part is that people willing to make a suicide attack, actually attacked people who could defend themselves and were expecting them.
This is rather unusual for your garden variety jihadi. They tend to prefer to have innocent bystanders "martyr" them via their own self-triggered bomb vest.
Being smacked in the face with a spent shell casing is actually quite therapeutic. It also makes each bullet more killy, which increases dakka.
A provocatively dressed woman isn't coming to shoot people who they disagree with.
Actually, I'm quite all right with provocatively dressed women. Although I'd suggest that they stay safe given the number of animals out there who believe that gives them a license to attack said women.
However, people who are intending to do harm to another person over a cartoon, even if the cartoon was specifically drawn to offend them, are fair game for entertainment in my book. All they need to do is not show up and nothing happens to them. In fact, all they need to do is not show up with a gun to be used with criminal intent, and they'd be fine.
I'm not sure I'd actually encourage entertainment where people are expecting to fire live rounds on a regular basis, but I'm not against a well-defended exercise of First Amendment rights against those who would use violence to try and oppress and silence them.
Do these natives actually own the land? Legally, I would assume not, or they'd just shut down the project for trespassing.
So, property rights doesn't really come into play here. This is all about use of land which is NOT owned by the protesters. OHA did not change the legal basis for the telescope to continue to be built. It is still legal to build it, it is just on voluntary hiatus while the managers of the project try to work something out so everyone is happy.
You're not required to believe anything. He's presented an alternative viewpoint, which clearly has a specific perspective, but this is just a comments page and he has merely alerted you to that perspective. Even if he provided footnotes, which would be overkill, you'd still have a responsibility to fact check if you wanted to derive an informed opinion on the situation.
However, unless you're actually involved in the dispute, or plan to involve yourself, then you can just decide to believe him or not, and not have to worry about it all that much.
That depends on what the money is used for.
If I walk up to someone on the street and give them a thousand dollars out of my pocket, there is the presumption that this would help them. Even putting aside obvious extreme cases like gamblers and drug addicts, that thousand dollars can very easily be burned up on things that will actually do little to remove people from poverty.
If my thousand dollars was used to help pay for a car, they can drive to work, that's better but they still have a depreciating asset that they have to maintain. If it was used to buy Christmas presents, then you have some happy kids, but you've bought something that does nothing for you in the long run.
Now what if you do something smart like invest it? Then you're likely to see some real value from it. In about thirty years. If and only if an emergency does not force you to withdraw it. In the meantime, you're still poor and you have to resist the urge to use that money for anything but as an investment or a payment that helps you on a continuing and increasing basis.
You don't want to give people money and expect that to end poverty. You want to remove incidences of bad decision-making and you have to buffer them from bad luck. Money can be a buffer, but if you continue to make bad decisions with the money you have, you're going to keep being poor.
There are anecdotes of people who make millions, either being rock stars, sports stars, or lottery ticket winners, and they lose it all. How do they end up that way? They would have been (temporarily) rich one-percenters just as surely as Bill Gates or the Koch Brothers are. The catch is that they have terrible decision making skills when it comes to money. They may spend it lavishly. They get bad advice and fail to learn how to invest. They may simply have weak personalities and are taken advantage of. They don't understand what you do with money, and then they lose it.
Although those are anecdotes, the same thing happens to tens of millions of people everyday in smaller, but more crucial situations. Poverty isn't always about helpless people being taken advantage of. It's more about the fact that it is more important to know how not to be poor than it is to actually have money thrown at you.
The point is that the solution to Poverty is *not* money. The solution to Poverty is *doing the right things* with money.
How does this work with checked luggage? Presumably your stuff won't be pulled from baggage if you aren't expected to get off in Chicago, but instead in LA.
Obviously, if you only have carry on luggage, that works fine.
I've always felt that using 64 whole bits has been a waste of good address space. I'm glad HURD agrees. I'm actually contributing a patch to get them back down to 16-bit mode with the holy grail of finally returning to 8-bit. I have always felt that if you're running on a microkernel you should run with a micro address space too.
I think they announced that back in 1977 as part of the celebrations for the 20th anniversary of the start of the HURD project.
Persecution fantasy mostly. Still, there are examples of places that men, in general, don't get a fair shake based on gender. I won't bother listing them all because you've probably heard the Father's Right's schtick before. The reality is that while this is a case of blatant sexism, the reality is that men do also have issues with sexism too.
That said, I have heard some feminists state that they believe that gender bias hurts both men and women. I can get behind that, but I don't think we should trundle that out every time that an instance of a woman clearly being discriminated against comes up. What we have here is a case of clear irrational bias. It should be dealt with on that level as a clear case of bias and not have it minimized with counter examples of how bad men have it.
Similarly, if there are examples of men having biases play out against them, then we should discuss those examples as well, without trying to minimize them by pointing out how bad women have it. Irrational bias should be spoken out against because it is wrong, not made into a tool for one-upping the other sex.
Well, you could eradicate systematic gender bias and you will still get people who act that way. There are people out there who act like assholes for no explicable reason, and sometimes, you're not even sure that they know why they act like an asshole.
We're probably always going to have gender bias and racism at the anecdotal level. If you're expecting to totally eradicate it, you're going to be disappointed.
Right now, there are white males who are being referred to negatively in a racial and gender biased way. However, for the most part, no fucks are given. The reason for that is that we don't perceive that as being a problem for us. The world we should be going for is a world when you can make stupid comments like that about anyone, and they are in a good enough position to laugh it off. If the almighty white members of the all-powerful Patriarchy can't avoid being referred to in that way, then I just don't think that its realistic to assume that anyone will ever succeed in not having some irrational bias directed at them.
Of course, I am speaking of the reason for patents to be authorized, at least under the US Constitution, not the actual functioning of patents, which definitely has a debatable effect on the ability of an inventor to profit reasonably from their invention.
Personally, I'd be fine with them doing away patents at this point. A scenario that punishes an implementer to the benefit of someone who buys a regulatory fiction like a patent, is counter productive.