your straw ban will give the outcry mob a boner it fixes nothing
How come I think you are actually a part of said outcry mob? Oh, perhaps because you are riding on one of their favorite themes: "This single measure won't fix all of the problem, so let's just do nothing." And in face, now you've brought the second measure into the discussion, and discarded it right away (like a used plastic straw).
Seriously: No the straw ban will not fix any more than a tiny part of the plastic problem (but actually, it will help reducing local pollution levels). Further, I am highly sceptical that this plastic trap thing will ever work.
But arguing not look into any partial solution, because it does not fix the whole mess, is a really sad excuse for inaction.
They're protesting the (anticipated) change in social norms.
For a long time, in America, you could count on any "green" idea to be laughed at by a solid majority, either for being totally unrealistic, or for being obviously un-American. Thus no sane American would ever be expected to adjust their personal lifestyle towards anything green.
Now, there is increasing evidence that some green ideas are not so unrealistic at all. (I hesitate a bit to call Tesla "green", but clearly they are riding that wave, and have a green reputation). Those pickup drivers are rightfully afraid that, in a decade or two, their own true American neighbors, too, will expected them to switch to EV vehicles, and possibly even to pick up other green ideas, as well. And they don't want to.
Of course, class issues do play a role, too, as Teslas are also relatively costly, but I think at the heart of the issue that is a plain and simple fear, that their personal lifestyle is going to have to change, eventually. (The list of fears is long, here, I'll just throw in "vegetarianism" to illustrate the scope of the threat.)
Bicyclists are even worse "traitors", for obvious reasons, but since those are still so few, and so "obviously" laughable, they are not a real threat, yet.
Well, duh, indeed. If resources are limited, overall, putting more focus on one thing, means taking it away from other things. Pretty bloody obivous. If increasing total resources is not an option, it quite simply comes down to allocating the resources, to setting priorities. So is it a good decision to focus more on the "problem" students?
Well, that's the core of the debate, of course, but personally, I think, yes, it makes sense to shift the focus of education more towards the lower end. The most important reason is that domestic demand for mindless drone workers has decreased over the past two or three decades, dramatically. Those jobs - to a large degree - have either been outsourced or automated. "Producing" lots of people with real low qualifications means "producing" people who will never have a true economic perspective, ever. It means producing people who are - as harsh as that sounds - quite simply useless in domestic economy. Go figure, whether and how that is a problem.
On the other side of the equation, you can't ever have too many top-notch academics. But: I think we're really doing very well in that playing field, already. In some areas of expertise, we're even over-producing highly qualified individuals (who will later take a job in an entirely different field). Cutting back in that area is going to hurt, no doubt about that. But, I think it's going to hurt less than neglecting the severe problem we're facing on the "low" end of education.
So, yes, I think it absolutely makes sense to shift resource allocation towards the low end a bit. The upper end will suffer, but it will still be doing fine enough, overall.
I'm confident that the parent was correct in his assessment of the usefulness of this study and results. Not necessarily because they did something wrong, but with the inherent flaws in the data collection itself. To me, road rage is aggressive driving but evidently, it can be a number of things depending on who writes it up and so on. And the question of some kids putting bumper stickers on a car verses the current owner willfully doing it is skewing things a bit too.
You don't need perfect data in order to reach perfectly sound scientific conclusions. Sure, you're story is unsettling. And true, this is a severe problem for (legal) road rage policy. For science it's just an everday nuisance that is routinely dealt with. It's an rare exeception that you can measure something absolutely correctly, without any form of error. That's all fine, as long as there is no systematic error (such as police particularily writing up people with bumper stickers for road rage - or kids systematically placing bumper stickers on the cars of reckless drivers). If there's still a correlation, that's not because of (non-systematic) errors, but despite of imperfect measures.
The hope is that after a while, companies that have been paying the stupid tax will say "this is stupid" and contribute their changes to the main project. But with a GPL fork this just won't happen.
Any time the BSD project releases an update, someone will merge the changes in to the GPL fork. And if you contribute changes to the GPL fork, of course they are in every release and you don't need to do anything. So there is no real pressure on features added to the GPL project.
And so what exactly is the difference between a company and a GPL project in this respect? When the BSD code is updated, you have the choice between merging the changes, or making sure your changes are already contained "upstream" in the BSD code. This is totally independent on whether the project is propietary or GPLed.
Whether or not something gets contributed back depends on entirely different, and unrelated reasons, like:
Are the changes appropriate for inclusion "upstream" at all (i.e. it's not about additions highly specific to the derived project)?
Is the "upstream"/BSD code reasonably modular in the context of the derived project? I.e. after a year of development, will you still be able to figure out, which code came from where, so you can easily contribute the relevant changes back? (Note that if so, chances are, that merging the upstream changes will never required too much effort in the first place, so the "stupid tax" is low. Otherwise, however - i.e. the code is highly entangled with your own code - the "clever tax" is rather high)
Do you have the resources to keep track of the upstream/BSD changes? Is there much need for your purposes to keep track of the upstream changes?
Are you too jealous over the particular changes you made to contribute them back?
To sum it up: Whether the code is used in a proprietary project or in a GPL project makes absolutely no difference in terms of the "stupid tax". It's just that the going ons may be more painfully visible to the BSD author. But the net effect is absolutely identical.
What do you mean, how do they plan on enforcing this? Since when do lawmakers around the world need to worry about this sort of praticalities when passing idiotic internet laws? How could they possibly be expected to? Next thing you'll want them to actually understand the technical issues before making a decision, eh?
Re:Emphasis on the light, please.
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Vertical Farming
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But the biggest factor is energy consumption. Is it cheaper to spend the energy to move crops from 100% natural light into the city or is it cheaper to spend the energy on artificial light and grow the crops inside the city?
Well they have taken the energy balance into consideration. And this does include artificial lighting. Surprisingly, they even expect more energy produced than consumed within the facility itself. The key to this is that they plan to recycle plant waste into energy.
I have not checked any of the calculations at all, but it's obvious that for this to work out even theoretically, the energy coming in via sunlight will need to be much more than the additional lighting required. For that precise reason, I'm rather sceptical, whether the calculations are sound at all. But at the very least, yes, they have thought about lighting requirements in some form.
Thanks for your concern. I'm still fairly successful at keeping my weight.
When it comes to programming, however, I have discovered, my worst enemy is always that guy pretending to be me from around two years past. Admittedly, he does some pretty clever things sometimes, but invariably in totally strange ways. He's been following me around since quite a long time, by now, but I've never quite figured out his ways. I found, giving him a least some constraints on how he can believably impersonate my past self is often rather helpful.
Yes, Perl is wonderfully easy to write - and devilishly hard to read. Which makes it great for the quick write-once 30 line hack. For anything else: scripts that need more than two hours of total development time, scripts that some stranger (like yourself in a few years) will have to maintain, scripts that will need to be modified at some later point of time, scripts that might ever evolve beyond their original limited purpose,..., - you better switch to some other language before it's too late.
"More than one way to do it" is a large part of the problem. If the language permits you to do something in 26 different ways, you'll use 4 in the first version of your script, 7 in the second, 11 in the third, and you'd better be prepared to understand all the 25 different ways to do it all do the same thing, when debugging the 13th version of your script a year later.
> Brand name drugs don't advertise after a drug goes off patent and all major costs have already been recouped.
So you've never seen an ad for Aspirin? Where I live, there's plenty.
> If you think there has not been a problem about generic quality control check out this statement from the Commissioner of Food and Drugs a few years back:
So, apparently, there is some external control outside of patents. And now, could you please restate, what additional incentive patents give to producers to ensure quality control? I seem to have missed that point.
The pharmacy sector may well be unique market, in that developing new products is incredibly expensive, mostly due to the testing needed. You are right about that (though in the particular case of gene patents, this statement often does not apply).
Patents are a solution to this problem, and in many instances the only one available at this time. So simply doing away with pharmacy patents without replacement probably isn't a good idea, either. You're right about this, too.
This still leaves the question, of whether patents are a *good* solution to the problem at hand. There are many reasons to believe they are not. Thoese includes ethical concerns, and concerns about the efficiency in ensuring innovation (for one interesting example, see http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/1 7/1913210 for a case where innovation is seriously hindered, because it simply doesn't fit into a patent concept). Realizing this does not immediately render pharmacy patents obsolete, but it's an important first step.
The follow up question is, what an alternative could look like, and that's not an easy one. It's one we should seriously consider, however, since there are *real* problems with pharmacy patents. Approaches to consider might include trying to set up a fund that will pay a "bounty" to whichever company first produces an approved effective medication for a certain disease. Something like this could even be implemented on top of the patent system for a start, e.g. by encouraging companies to jointly establish such a fund, patent the results, but agree to share all the patents stemming from this system without any further royalities. Governments could promise additional bounties for cases where new effective treatments can not be covered by patents. Then, if it seems to work out, the patent backing could eventually be removed.
Well, that's just one wild idea, and could well turn out to be entirely impractical on closer investigation. But again: Patents *are* bad. We should acknowledge that fact, and then move on to at least *trying* to come up with alternatives.
A patent holder may have better or worse quality control than a producer of generics.
Patent holders will often licence their patents to competitors in addition to producing the drug themselves. Those competitors will often have lower standards of quality control, as they need to pay up the licence fees and still sell at a competitive price. However the competitor could also try to offer better quality for a higher price, and try to conquer that niche of the market, however small or large it may be.
On the side of the patent holder, owning a patent - and hence controlling the market for that drug - may give the producer an opportunity to sell high quality at a high price or low quality at a low price, or of course low quality at a high price, or all of these at once (selling under different brand names owned by the same company or its subsidiaries).
The bottom line is: Patents and quality control are entirely unrelated. There are valid (but refutable, IMO) arguments about patents being needed in the pharmacy industry, but this simply isn't one of them.
While I tend to agree with the general idea of your post, it's important to realize there are different types of "content" and different types of students.
Some different types of content:
stuff that is readily available in well written textbooks
stuff that is spread out across different textbooks and scientific articles, so it is useful to summarize it in one good lecture
stuff that is so advanced or difficult or controversial that it seems very important to debate it and its implications
finally learning to collaborate with different people on a project/task/subject is a very important part of a truely useful education
Some types of students (not mutually exclusive):
students who learn really well from textbooks
students who learn much better, if the very same text is read to them aloud by a living human being
students who learn from asking questions
students who learn form answering questions
students who learn from explaining something to other students
students who are able to motivate themselves efficiently, and learn on their own over long periods of time
students who need to be pushed every once in a while or even frequently in order to get something done (these may not make the top-notch employees later, but there's no reason to drop them altogether)
Many if not most students will be aware of some, but not all of the factors influencing their learning.
What it boils down to is: (Most) lectures really are an important service, even if many students don't actually need them at all. Some students would downright fail if they would not be forced to attend lectures, or at least take frequent tests. It's not easy to strike a balance, here, but here are some guidelines I just made up:
If the lecture has more than 50 students, regularily, there will never be meaningful interaction on a high level. Provide the podcasts right away, and don't force attendance. Rather provide voluntary weekly quizzes, and mandatory monthly (small) tests. This way you ensure some pressure on students who need it, but leave at least some freedom to the others
If the lecture has more than 20 but less than 50 students, ask yourself honestly, what type of content you're trying to teach. Is social interaction an important goal of teaching? If so, read below, else follow the instructions above
For small lectures, you'll probably want to encourage interaction as much as possible. Depending on the type of content this may be encouraging discussion, encouraging students to teach each other, or designing practical tasks the students can work on to solve (instead of just telling them the theory). You'll try not to guide too much, even let your students venture down dead ends sometimes, just to show them where that would lead, and teaching them to recognize it. Providing a podcast of such a lecture may be useful but probably isn't. Requiring attendance is probably useful.
Don't use mere size of the lecture as the only criterion, but consider your goals for the lecture, and what you know about your students. Judging a lecture by its size is a useful initial heuristic, however.
You are right in some ways, but in an important point you are wrong: Science in itself has to be atheistic, and theistic pre-suppositions can never be a part of science.
Scientists - as people - may entertain religious / theistic ideas, and there is nothing wrong with that. Science does not need to rule out the possibility of a god at all, and any scientist who decides on being an atheist doesn't do so out of genuine scientific reasoning, but out of personal "taste" (which may be influenced by scientific thought, but is not truely scientific). But introducing any theistic ideas into sience - quite simply - isn't science any more. It crap. Always.
Why is that so? Three important reasons (generalizable beyond Evolution vs. ID, but it's convenient to use that as an example):
1) Any thought of "someone made it be that way" is a crass violation of Ockham's razor. "Intelligent Design" may be just two small words, but it actually means establishing a highly complicated mechanism: A being not directly observable to us, having unknown extreme powers, creating - out of some unknown motivation - whatever we observe in just the way we observe it, by some unknown means.
2) Any thought of "someone made it be that way" is not falsifiable. That's in part due to the many unknowns mentionend in 1). Most importantly it's because whatever seemingly contradictory evidence you may find, whichever evidence supporting alternative hypotheses you may find, "well HE just made it be that way" is an excuse you can never get around. In contrast, while I think it's highly unlikely, the basic assumptions of Evolution theory will turn out to be wrong, these assumption can be challenged by evidence. If we were to find out, the eye really just popped out of nowhere, not being there at all in one generation, then suddenly there in the next, that would be a strong case against evolution. If we were to find out measured rates of mutation are too high or too low to support our model, that would be good falsifying evidence. If we were to find a human sceleton 100 million years old, that would seriously challenge everything evolutionist believe in. So evolution theory can be challenged scientifically, that's being tried constantly, and sometimes those criticism even lead to identification of weak spots in the current models, to subsequent small adjustments made here and there, just (so far) nothing important enough to prove all the basic assumptions wrong.
3) Any thought of "someone made it be that way" prevents deeper understanding. Science is all about trying to push back the borders of the unknown. So let's assume there is a god, and let's assume He created the universe and all life. But how did He do that? It's not just not good enough for science to say "well, it's alive". A scientist wants to know, how all the organs function to keep it alive. What all the organs do. How they are controlled by strands of DNA, how they are built up from DNA. How the DNA is passed on, and how it changes. How the DNA is structured, where the DNA came from. What conditions on earth allowed the first DNA to form. How those conditions were achieved on earth. How earth came into being. How planets form, how the universe was 5 billion years ago. How the universe is held together. What's inside an atom, what is a quark?... Much of this we already have a pretty good idea of, and many things are left to find out. But at any point of progress we could as well have stopped and said "well, He just created DNA", "He just keeps those atoms from disintegrating", "He just makes apples fall to the ground". Maybe He even does. But the only way to advance our understanding is to keep trying to spy yet another trick from Him / nature, try to understand how the great magician does his show. Assume there is no magic, and nothing that cannot be understood. So what if we never find out about the grand unified theory, or just why the sky is blue (ok, we've got that one figured out, already
I fail to see how this is a black mark against OpenOffice.org
I don't think that's (neccessarily) the point. Whatever MS does about their Office security flaws does not really concern me any longer. There's almost nothing that could ever make me use MS Office again. But so what. The point isn't which suite is better, the point is: OpenOffice.org still has flaws, and those should be fixed. In this context the statement "The [other flaws] are theoretical" does not make me feel good. I want even theoretical flaws to be taken serious, so they won't become real ones ever, if possible to avoid. I just hope the OO.o team does not concentrate too much on having the better PR, but also on having a good product.
Disclaimer: I don't have the slightest clue about OOo security in general, and the "theoretical" flaws in particular, so possible they may in fact be nothing to worry about. If you convince me this is the case, or I'm just mis-interpreting the quote, I'll happily shut up.
I suppose it's to be able to better feed it to one of the most powerful processors for pattern recognition on linear data, available at this time. That would happen to be the human ear. Which in fact is so surprisingly capable that certain competing systems seem pretty laughable in comparison. It remains to be seen, whether this conversion will truely turn out to be helpful, but it's quite definitely worth a try.
Sure, I could write an application using QT, but I wouldn't know how to handle failures simply because QT doesn't document the behavior in those cases.
I assume you're not writing too many applications at all, then? You can say a lot about Qt, and the example you give (of bad design, not bad documentation) is certainly valid. But documentation? I dare say Qt is among the top few libraries in terms of both quality and completeness of documentation.
This is buggy. It is a race condition. If the underlying file is deleted or renamed or is replaced by a named pipe in between those two calls the return from both calls is inconsistent.
Oh, come on, now. Yes, this particular function could have easily been improved so you get status and size in a single call. Yes, having two calls is a potential race condition. But no, this race condition is not something you could trivially avoid, here. Hey, whenever you have any information about a file, retrieved by whichever means, it's entirely possible that this information is outdated due to a race condition - before it has even been returned to your code. If you do manage to get status and size of a file at the same time - so what, both pieces of info must be assumed to be outdated in the very next step, either way.
Qt does the best possible to deal with this: It does not crash just because a file that existed a split-second ago was removed by some other process. Not if you try to read beyond the filesize, not if you try to remove a non-existent file, etc. Apart from not crashing, there's fairly little to be done in the absence of file locks.
A place, I once worked at, had a dozen or so entirely unpatched Win98 boxes connected directly to the net - for years. And guess what? Of course I wouldn't have trusted those boxes one inch, but I've never heard of any hacking troubles with those boxes, either (ok, neither IE nor Outlook were used on those computers, but other than that, no protection at all).
Yes, Win98 may be seriously vulnerable in hundreds of ways (even though it has hardly any networking functionality), but it just isn't targetted nowadays, in my experience. Try the same thing with WinXP, and you're compromised in less than a minute.
> I think we're going in circles, even in violent agreement on most of what we're talking about. Whatever conflict we've got seems to have escalated pretty "meta" in order to find an actual direct disagreement.
Yes, I can agree on this conclusion (violently, if needed), and we should probably leave it at that. Thanks for your reply, which did in fact help me putting your style into perspective. Looking forward to our next clash/encounter.
I believe kwrite/kate is still missing from the already long list of editors which have that feature. Usage instructions: Ctrl+I indents the current line/selection. To extend to a full loop / section, either select the section manually, or use the code folding feature and select just that one line before pressing Ctrl+I. Ctrl+Shift+I to unindent.
I had meant to call it quits in that other thread of ours, thinking "well, he might be overreacting, but he does have some arguments, and while I disagree on the evaluation of those arguments, both sides have made their point, no need to carry this on for ever". But sorry, your summary is unfair, and I can't resist commenting on it yet again.
> The original paper would be interesting to read for such bias. I'd like to read some peer reviews which critique its statistical premise. But the article linked to neither.
>
> None of the people disagreeing with me in this thread have, either.
Well guess what? It's not open access. Here's the link to the abstract (and full text, if you have a subscription) of the original study http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v431/n7008/ab s/nature02842.html. The comment by Hein, also cited in the article does not even have a freely viewable abstract. It's in the same issue, however, so go visit your local library. In case you have access: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v431/n7008/fu ll/431518a.html. Further it may not be common knowledge that Nature is a peer-reviewed journal, indeed, but no, peer reviews are not typically made public at all in any journal I know. Likely there will be follow up articles in Nature or other journals, some very likely containing the critisicms you would like to see, but research them yourself, if you really want to read them.
> Most have just argued with me without logic, just defensively against the idea that theocrats have gotten so far in the media.
I have read most posts in that thread, and don't agree. Further, if you happen to count me in to the "most", please tell me, where exactly I have argued against, or even just implicitly denied "the idea that theocrats have gotten so far in the media". I'm curious, where exactly I worded bad enough to give you that impression. What I have argued, is that I do not think this particular article is an example of one written by a theocrat or someone pursuing a Creationist agenda.
I understand you disagree with me on the evaluation of the article, and - yes - I can live with that, comfortably even, and don't think any less of you for it. Hey, I might even be wrong, after all. However, what I don't like at all is people misrepresenting my comments. I hope this wasn't your intention, and I just got you wrong.
The assumptions may or may not be valid. However it's important to note that genetic inheritance != ancestry, and this does not necessarily have to match up with genetic data at all.
Consider two fully isolated populations A and B. At T(100 generations ago) a single individual M migrates from A to B, and causes offspring with someone from B. No further migration takes place ever until the present day. Would you expect to be able to show this genetically? Hardly. Only 1/1^100 of M's DNA would have been passed on to any single individual living in B today(*). That's absolutely nothing at all. The genetic heritage would be entirely dissolved for all purpuses of measuring much earlier than that.
In contrast, ancestry is defined to always be handed down 1:1. M would almost certainly be 100% ancestor to each an every individual living in B today. M's parents would almost certainly be 100% ancestors to the entirety of both A and B (assuming they had at least one more child that stayed in A).
Genetic models reaching this far back are not concerned about individuals at all. Using genetic data, you may be able to show there was a substantial amount of migration between two populations. Single individuals just don't give an impact, genetically. The article uses an entirely different approach, and - importantly - an entirely different concept of inheritance: family trees, not genetics.
Note the article does not just look out for the one common person. It says, every single person living in that timeframe (unless their family tree died out) would be an ancestor to every single person living today. Mind-boggling, but not entirely unreasonable once you realize it's not genetics they are talking about.
(*) Unless of course that person carried some particular gene, which happened to be extremely valuable for living in B, and got an evolutionary advantage. But that's an entirely different story.
Slashdot Mirror
your straw ban will give the outcry mob a boner it fixes nothing
How come I think you are actually a part of said outcry mob? Oh, perhaps because you are riding on one of their favorite themes: "This single measure won't fix all of the problem, so let's just do nothing." And in face, now you've brought the second measure into the discussion, and discarded it right away (like a used plastic straw).
Seriously: No the straw ban will not fix any more than a tiny part of the plastic problem (but actually, it will help reducing local pollution levels). Further, I am highly sceptical that this plastic trap thing will ever work.
But arguing not look into any partial solution, because it does not fix the whole mess, is a really sad excuse for inaction.
They're protesting the (anticipated) change in social norms.
For a long time, in America, you could count on any "green" idea to be laughed at by a solid majority, either for being totally unrealistic, or for being obviously un-American. Thus no sane American would ever be expected to adjust their personal lifestyle towards anything green.
Now, there is increasing evidence that some green ideas are not so unrealistic at all. (I hesitate a bit to call Tesla "green", but clearly they are riding that wave, and have a green reputation). Those pickup drivers are rightfully afraid that, in a decade or two, their own true American neighbors, too, will expected them to switch to EV vehicles, and possibly even to pick up other green ideas, as well. And they don't want to.
Of course, class issues do play a role, too, as Teslas are also relatively costly, but I think at the heart of the issue that is a plain and simple fear, that their personal lifestyle is going to have to change, eventually. (The list of fears is long, here, I'll just throw in "vegetarianism" to illustrate the scope of the threat.)
Bicyclists are even worse "traitors", for obvious reasons, but since those are still so few, and so "obviously" laughable, they are not a real threat, yet.
Well, duh, indeed. If resources are limited, overall, putting more focus on one thing, means taking it away from other things. Pretty bloody obivous. If increasing total resources is not an option, it quite simply comes down to allocating the resources, to setting priorities. So is it a good decision to focus more on the "problem" students?
Well, that's the core of the debate, of course, but personally, I think, yes, it makes sense to shift the focus of education more towards the lower end. The most important reason is that domestic demand for mindless drone workers has decreased over the past two or three decades, dramatically. Those jobs - to a large degree - have either been outsourced or automated. "Producing" lots of people with real low qualifications means "producing" people who will never have a true economic perspective, ever. It means producing people who are - as harsh as that sounds - quite simply useless in domestic economy. Go figure, whether and how that is a problem.
On the other side of the equation, you can't ever have too many top-notch academics. But: I think we're really doing very well in that playing field, already. In some areas of expertise, we're even over-producing highly qualified individuals (who will later take a job in an entirely different field). Cutting back in that area is going to hurt, no doubt about that. But, I think it's going to hurt less than neglecting the severe problem we're facing on the "low" end of education.
So, yes, I think it absolutely makes sense to shift resource allocation towards the low end a bit. The upper end will suffer, but it will still be doing fine enough, overall.
You don't need perfect data in order to reach perfectly sound scientific conclusions. Sure, you're story is unsettling. And true, this is a severe problem for (legal) road rage policy. For science it's just an everday nuisance that is routinely dealt with. It's an rare exeception that you can measure something absolutely correctly, without any form of error. That's all fine, as long as there is no systematic error (such as police particularily writing up people with bumper stickers for road rage - or kids systematically placing bumper stickers on the cars of reckless drivers). If there's still a correlation, that's not because of (non-systematic) errors, but despite of imperfect measures.
And so what exactly is the difference between a company and a GPL project in this respect? When the BSD code is updated, you have the choice between merging the changes, or making sure your changes are already contained "upstream" in the BSD code. This is totally independent on whether the project is propietary or GPLed.
Whether or not something gets contributed back depends on entirely different, and unrelated reasons, like:
To sum it up: Whether the code is used in a proprietary project or in a GPL project makes absolutely no difference in terms of the "stupid tax". It's just that the going ons may be more painfully visible to the BSD author. But the net effect is absolutely identical.
What do you mean, how do they plan on enforcing this? Since when do lawmakers around the world need to worry about this sort of praticalities when passing idiotic internet laws? How could they possibly be expected to? Next thing you'll want them to actually understand the technical issues before making a decision, eh?
Well they have taken the energy balance into consideration. And this does include artificial lighting. Surprisingly, they even expect more energy produced than consumed within the facility itself. The key to this is that they plan to recycle plant waste into energy.
I have not checked any of the calculations at all, but it's obvious that for this to work out even theoretically, the energy coming in via sunlight will need to be much more than the additional lighting required. For that precise reason, I'm rather sceptical, whether the calculations are sound at all. But at the very least, yes, they have thought about lighting requirements in some form.
Thanks for your concern. I'm still fairly successful at keeping my weight.
When it comes to programming, however, I have discovered, my worst enemy is always that guy pretending to be me from around two years past. Admittedly, he does some pretty clever things sometimes, but invariably in totally strange ways. He's been following me around since quite a long time, by now, but I've never quite figured out his ways. I found, giving him a least some constraints on how he can believably impersonate my past self is often rather helpful.
Yes, Perl is wonderfully easy to write - and devilishly hard to read. Which makes it great for the quick write-once 30 line hack. For anything else: scripts that need more than two hours of total development time, scripts that some stranger (like yourself in a few years) will have to maintain, scripts that will need to be modified at some later point of time, scripts that might ever evolve beyond their original limited purpose, ..., - you better switch to some other language before it's too late.
"More than one way to do it" is a large part of the problem. If the language permits you to do something in 26 different ways, you'll use 4 in the first version of your script, 7 in the second, 11 in the third, and you'd better be prepared to understand all the 25 different ways to do it all do the same thing, when debugging the 13th version of your script a year later.
> Brand name drugs don't advertise after a drug goes off patent and all major costs have already been recouped.
So you've never seen an ad for Aspirin? Where I live, there's plenty.
> If you think there has not been a problem about generic quality control check out this statement from the Commissioner of Food and Drugs a few years back:
So, apparently, there is some external control outside of patents. And now, could you please restate, what additional incentive patents give to producers to ensure quality control? I seem to have missed that point.
The pharmacy sector may well be unique market, in that developing new products is incredibly expensive, mostly due to the testing needed. You are right about that (though in the particular case of gene patents, this statement often does not apply).
1 7/1913210 for a case where innovation is seriously hindered, because it simply doesn't fit into a patent concept). Realizing this does not immediately render pharmacy patents obsolete, but it's an important first step.
Patents are a solution to this problem, and in many instances the only one available at this time. So simply doing away with pharmacy patents without replacement probably isn't a good idea, either. You're right about this, too.
This still leaves the question, of whether patents are a *good* solution to the problem at hand. There are many reasons to believe they are not. Thoese includes ethical concerns, and concerns about the efficiency in ensuring innovation (for one interesting example, see http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/
The follow up question is, what an alternative could look like, and that's not an easy one. It's one we should seriously consider, however, since there are *real* problems with pharmacy patents. Approaches to consider might include trying to set up a fund that will pay a "bounty" to whichever company first produces an approved effective medication for a certain disease. Something like this could even be implemented on top of the patent system for a start, e.g. by encouraging companies to jointly establish such a fund, patent the results, but agree to share all the patents stemming from this system without any further royalities. Governments could promise additional bounties for cases where new effective treatments can not be covered by patents. Then, if it seems to work out, the patent backing could eventually be removed.
Well, that's just one wild idea, and could well turn out to be entirely impractical on closer investigation. But again: Patents *are* bad. We should acknowledge that fact, and then move on to at least *trying* to come up with alternatives.
Patents have nothing to do with quality control.
A patent holder may have better or worse quality control than a producer of generics.
Patent holders will often licence their patents to competitors in addition to producing the drug themselves. Those competitors will often have lower standards of quality control, as they need to pay up the licence fees and still sell at a competitive price. However the competitor could also try to offer better quality for a higher price, and try to conquer that niche of the market, however small or large it may be.
On the side of the patent holder, owning a patent - and hence controlling the market for that drug - may give the producer an opportunity to sell high quality at a high price or low quality at a low price, or of course low quality at a high price, or all of these at once (selling under different brand names owned by the same company or its subsidiaries).
The bottom line is: Patents and quality control are entirely unrelated. There are valid (but refutable, IMO) arguments about patents being needed in the pharmacy industry, but this simply isn't one of them.
Make students sign off on a list. Signatures can be forged, of course, but then what can't?
While I tend to agree with the general idea of your post, it's important to realize there are different types of "content" and different types of students.
Some different types of content:
Some types of students (not mutually exclusive):
Many if not most students will be aware of some, but not all of the factors influencing their learning.
What it boils down to is: (Most) lectures really are an important service, even if many students don't actually need them at all. Some students would downright fail if they would not be forced to attend lectures, or at least take frequent tests. It's not easy to strike a balance, here, but here are some guidelines I just made up:
You are right in some ways, but in an important point you are wrong: Science in itself has to be atheistic, and theistic pre-suppositions can never be a part of science.
Scientists - as people - may entertain religious / theistic ideas, and there is nothing wrong with that. Science does not need to rule out the possibility of a god at all, and any scientist who decides on being an atheist doesn't do so out of genuine scientific reasoning, but out of personal "taste" (which may be influenced by scientific thought, but is not truely scientific). But introducing any theistic ideas into sience - quite simply - isn't science any more. It crap. Always.
Why is that so? Three important reasons (generalizable beyond Evolution vs. ID, but it's convenient to use that as an example):
1) Any thought of "someone made it be that way" is a crass violation of Ockham's razor. "Intelligent Design" may be just two small words, but it actually means establishing a highly complicated mechanism: A being not directly observable to us, having unknown extreme powers, creating - out of some unknown motivation - whatever we observe in just the way we observe it, by some unknown means.
2) Any thought of "someone made it be that way" is not falsifiable. That's in part due to the many unknowns mentionend in 1). Most importantly it's because whatever seemingly contradictory evidence you may find, whichever evidence supporting alternative hypotheses you may find, "well HE just made it be that way" is an excuse you can never get around. In contrast, while I think it's highly unlikely, the basic assumptions of Evolution theory will turn out to be wrong, these assumption can be challenged by evidence. If we were to find out, the eye really just popped out of nowhere, not being there at all in one generation, then suddenly there in the next, that would be a strong case against evolution. If we were to find out measured rates of mutation are too high or too low to support our model, that would be good falsifying evidence. If we were to find a human sceleton 100 million years old, that would seriously challenge everything evolutionist believe in. So evolution theory can be challenged scientifically, that's being tried constantly, and sometimes those criticism even lead to identification of weak spots in the current models, to subsequent small adjustments made here and there, just (so far) nothing important enough to prove all the basic assumptions wrong.
3) Any thought of "someone made it be that way" prevents deeper understanding. Science is all about trying to push back the borders of the unknown. So let's assume there is a god, and let's assume He created the universe and all life. But how did He do that? It's not just not good enough for science to say "well, it's alive". A scientist wants to know, how all the organs function to keep it alive. What all the organs do. How they are controlled by strands of DNA, how they are built up from DNA. How the DNA is passed on, and how it changes. How the DNA is structured, where the DNA came from. What conditions on earth allowed the first DNA to form. How those conditions were achieved on earth. How earth came into being. How planets form, how the universe was 5 billion years ago. How the universe is held together. What's inside an atom, what is a quark?... Much of this we already have a pretty good idea of, and many things are left to find out. But at any point of progress we could as well have stopped and said "well, He just created DNA", "He just keeps those atoms from disintegrating", "He just makes apples fall to the ground". Maybe He even does. But the only way to advance our understanding is to keep trying to spy yet another trick from Him / nature, try to understand how the great magician does his show. Assume there is no magic, and nothing that cannot be understood. So what if we never find out about the grand unified theory, or just why the sky is blue (ok, we've got that one figured out, already
I fail to see how this is a black mark against OpenOffice.org
I don't think that's (neccessarily) the point. Whatever MS does about their Office security flaws does not really concern me any longer. There's almost nothing that could ever make me use MS Office again. But so what. The point isn't which suite is better, the point is: OpenOffice.org still has flaws, and those should be fixed. In this context the statement "The [other flaws] are theoretical" does not make me feel good. I want even theoretical flaws to be taken serious, so they won't become real ones ever, if possible to avoid. I just hope the OO.o team does not concentrate too much on having the better PR, but also on having a good product.
Disclaimer: I don't have the slightest clue about OOo security in general, and the "theoretical" flaws in particular, so possible they may in fact be nothing to worry about. If you convince me this is the case, or I'm just mis-interpreting the quote, I'll happily shut up.
What in the world is the point?
I suppose it's to be able to better feed it to one of the most powerful processors for pattern recognition on linear data, available at this time. That would happen to be the human ear. Which in fact is so surprisingly capable that certain competing systems seem pretty laughable in comparison. It remains to be seen, whether this conversion will truely turn out to be helpful, but it's quite definitely worth a try.
Sure, I could write an application using QT, but I wouldn't know how to handle failures simply because QT doesn't document the behavior in those cases.
I assume you're not writing too many applications at all, then? You can say a lot about Qt, and the example you give (of bad design, not bad documentation) is certainly valid. But documentation? I dare say Qt is among the top few libraries in terms of both quality and completeness of documentation.
This is buggy. It is a race condition. If the underlying file is deleted or renamed or is replaced by a named pipe in between those two calls the return from both calls is inconsistent.
Oh, come on, now. Yes, this particular function could have easily been improved so you get status and size in a single call. Yes, having two calls is a potential race condition. But no, this race condition is not something you could trivially avoid, here. Hey, whenever you have any information about a file, retrieved by whichever means, it's entirely possible that this information is outdated due to a race condition - before it has even been returned to your code. If you do manage to get status and size of a file at the same time - so what, both pieces of info must be assumed to be outdated in the very next step, either way.
Qt does the best possible to deal with this: It does not crash just because a file that existed a split-second ago was removed by some other process. Not if you try to read beyond the filesize, not if you try to remove a non-existent file, etc. Apart from not crashing, there's fairly little to be done in the absence of file locks.
A place, I once worked at, had a dozen or so entirely unpatched Win98 boxes connected directly to the net - for years. And guess what? Of course I wouldn't have trusted those boxes one inch, but I've never heard of any hacking troubles with those boxes, either (ok, neither IE nor Outlook were used on those computers, but other than that, no protection at all).
Yes, Win98 may be seriously vulnerable in hundreds of ways (even though it has hardly any networking functionality), but it just isn't targetted nowadays, in my experience. Try the same thing with WinXP, and you're compromised in less than a minute.
> I think we're going in circles, even in violent agreement on most of what we're talking about. Whatever conflict we've got seems to have escalated pretty "meta" in order to find an actual direct disagreement.
Yes, I can agree on this conclusion (violently, if needed), and we should probably leave it at that. Thanks for your reply, which did in fact help me putting your style into perspective. Looking forward to our next clash/encounter.
> Anyone know of an editor that has this?
I believe kwrite/kate is still missing from the already long list of editors which have that feature. Usage instructions: Ctrl+I indents the current line/selection. To extend to a full loop / section, either select the section manually, or use the code folding feature and select just that one line before pressing Ctrl+I. Ctrl+Shift+I to unindent.
The "Eve" you're talking about was not discovered but hypothized, and I don't know, where from you got the 9000 years figure. Care to provide a link? Meanwhile here are two easily googlable updates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Eve, http://www.archaeology.org/9609/abstracts/dna.html .
I had meant to call it quits in that other thread of ours, thinking "well, he might be overreacting, but he does have some arguments, and while I disagree on the evaluation of those arguments, both sides have made their point, no need to carry this on for ever". But sorry, your summary is unfair, and I can't resist commenting on it yet again.
> The original paper would be interesting to read for such bias. I'd like to read some peer reviews which critique its statistical premise. But the article linked to neither.
>
> None of the people disagreeing with me in this thread have, either.
Well guess what? It's not open access. Here's the link to the abstract (and full text, if you have a subscription) of the original study http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v431/n7008/ab s/nature02842.html. The comment by Hein, also cited in the article does not even have a freely viewable abstract. It's in the same issue, however, so go visit your local library. In case you have access: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v431/n7008/fu ll/431518a.html. Further it may not be common knowledge that Nature is a peer-reviewed journal, indeed, but no, peer reviews are not typically made public at all in any journal I know. Likely there will be follow up articles in Nature or other journals, some very likely containing the critisicms you would like to see, but research them yourself, if you really want to read them.
> Most have just argued with me without logic, just defensively against the idea that theocrats have gotten so far in the media.
I have read most posts in that thread, and don't agree. Further, if you happen to count me in to the "most", please tell me, where exactly I have argued against, or even just implicitly denied "the idea that theocrats have gotten so far in the media". I'm curious, where exactly I worded bad enough to give you that impression. What I have argued, is that I do not think this particular article is an example of one written by a theocrat or someone pursuing a Creationist agenda.
I understand you disagree with me on the evaluation of the article, and - yes - I can live with that, comfortably even, and don't think any less of you for it. Hey, I might even be wrong, after all. However, what I don't like at all is people misrepresenting my comments. I hope this wasn't your intention, and I just got you wrong.
The assumptions may or may not be valid. However it's important to note that genetic inheritance != ancestry, and this does not necessarily have to match up with genetic data at all.
Consider two fully isolated populations A and B. At T(100 generations ago) a single individual M migrates from A to B, and causes offspring with someone from B. No further migration takes place ever until the present day. Would you expect to be able to show this genetically? Hardly. Only 1/1^100 of M's DNA would have been passed on to any single individual living in B today(*). That's absolutely nothing at all. The genetic heritage would be entirely dissolved for all purpuses of measuring much earlier than that.
In contrast, ancestry is defined to always be handed down 1:1. M would almost certainly be 100% ancestor to each an every individual living in B today. M's parents would almost certainly be 100% ancestors to the entirety of both A and B (assuming they had at least one more child that stayed in A).
Genetic models reaching this far back are not concerned about individuals at all. Using genetic data, you may be able to show there was a substantial amount of migration between two populations. Single individuals just don't give an impact, genetically. The article uses an entirely different approach, and - importantly - an entirely different concept of inheritance: family trees, not genetics.
Note the article does not just look out for the one common person. It says, every single person living in that timeframe (unless their family tree died out) would be an ancestor to every single person living today. Mind-boggling, but not entirely unreasonable once you realize it's not genetics they are talking about.
(*) Unless of course that person carried some particular gene, which happened to be extremely valuable for living in B, and got an evolutionary advantage. But that's an entirely different story.