Obviously you haven't kept up with the decline in status of patent clerks as corporations and others are allowed by politicians to patent rotary motion facilitators. The only patent clerk I've known personally had a PhD and a law degree, and was definitely not Bob from Accounting. OK, I know that was meant to be a joke, but it's based on a fundamental misunderstanding. And, BTW, the dark matter in the post is Mrs. Einstein who did at least half of his best work. She still doesn't get enough credit, whereas at least history (and Scientific American) is doing the right thing by Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
The description of the Josephson Junction is aimed at all the non-physicists out there. The "insulating layer" is a bandgap layer. The point is that cooper paired electrons can tunnel through it, i.e. it acts as a superconductor itself. It is an insulator for ordinary electrons only. And the definition of capacitor is nothing at all to do with physical conductors or insulators. It is a region of space where a potential gradient can be created, and the capacitance is the measure of how much energy has to be pumped into the region in order to create a given potential gradient. "Empty space" requires the lowest energy and has the lowest capacitance per unit volume, while certain ceramics with relatively mobile but limited electrons have very high values. If you cannot create a potential difference across your region of space, you have no capacitance - and at first sight, if that region is superconducting you cannot have a potential difference.
Talk about looking for grant funding! Problem is, scientific illiterates in Government etc. think they understand what a quantum computer can do (application a long way in the future if at all) but not what you can do with very low noise parametric amplifiers (which might be relatively near term applications.) In terms of exciting progress in studies of brain function, small scale biochemistry, remote sensing and signal processing, very low noise amplifiers are critical components, whereas quantum computers don't yet exist, and by the time they do conventional computers should be adequate to deal with a lot of the data processing.
Not to knock the discovery, which is very interesting, but it's a pity quantum computers have to be dragged into everything to justify research. I doubt that Tom's Hardware will be reviewing millikelvin coolers for your qubit box any time in the next 20 years (though I'd like to be proved wrong)
I have yet to meet an anti-evolution protestant who can read the Bible literally. There must be some...but anyone who can get through the first words of Bereshit is not likely to take it literally. A book that begins "In the beginning (plural form of a word for God) created..." (Bereshit bara elohim, in Slash),which starts with 3 different and inconsistent creation legends? Do me a favour. The English translations are mostly cleaned up a bit to make more narrative sense, but if you were to teach enough Intelligent Designers enough Hebrew, you might start to get some sense out of them. Since most of them can't tell their kethibh from their qu're, I doubt it will happen. Sorry about the rant, but the theological illiteracy of evangelicals annoys me even more than their scientific ignorance. At least the Catholics have a tradition of real scholarship- which is probably why, in the end, they have to come to terms with modern science, since it has its roots in the same traditional of earnest enquiry no matter where it may lead.
I had to check that this really was on mainland China, not Taiwan. It is. Does this mean that China is starting to evolve a civil society with a civil legal system? If so, disregarding all the comments about frivolous lawsuits, this is a very interesting development. The really newsworthy bit would come if an ordinary Chinese was allowed to sue a Chinese corporation rather than a foreign corporation or its local agent. But the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single footstep.
As for the lawsuit itself, if it succeeds, well there goes just about everything, from Calvin and Hobbes through the Narnia books to the Iliad. Perhaps tort reform should involve the Athenian idea that lawyers bringing frivolous lawsuits should be expelled from society for a period.
I'm not sure what you mean by "a (rather low-ranking) member of the ruling class". The point was that he ranked in it, was a "party member" and not a prole. I wonder if you are writing from first hand experience of the British class system?
Read the history of Renaissance Italy and you will see that one the two themes you mention in 1984 has a long history. (The condottieri raised the use of continuous war with shifting allegiances intended to obtain and keep power to a fine art. ) The use of language to shape thought patterns and so control the populace also has a long history, with the British ruling classes consciously doing this through their education system and media since the middle of the nineteenth century.
Personally, despite or perhaps because I come from a British middle class background, I think Pohl and Kornbluth's The space merchants is a much more prophetic dystopia than 1984. P&K foresaw ever more intrusive advertising, the oppressive role of corporations, the development of addictive products to maintain corporate income, running out of oil, and the privatisation of governments. They missed the Internet, though they did get dynamically targetted advertising. The reason that Orwell is so famous is basically because he _was_ part of the upper middle class coterie that controlled post-war Britain and benefited from his connections in getting published and gaining publicity. (And, I suspect, because 1984 is a short,memorable title.)
Ubuntu 5.10 works on PPC hardware, thank you very much. As for creating an unbootable machine, I have wiped more than one Mac HDD, installed Ubuntu, uninstalled Ubuntu and reinstalled OS X with no more trouble than restoring the OS to a Windows laptop. (Because, in the end, I decided that I preferred OS X for what I wanted to do.) However, I disagree fundamentally with your post. Apple are in the business of supplying boxes to run OS X, not vice versa. And Dell does not lock you into an OS unless you want them to support it - which, much as I dislike Dell, seems quite reasonable to me.
People who never read and do not understand Orwell keep using his novel 1984 as a kind of synonym for oppressive societies. Can we get this straight? Orwell was a member of the British ruling classes - went to Eton - and 1984 is a satire on British upper middle class life in 1948 (reversal of last two digits.) The "Proles" are all the people who did not go to public (=private) school. The "Ministry of Truth" is the BBC, churning out propaganda for the Government. Members of the upper classes (the Party) led privileged lives provided they did not step out of line. Orwell was living under a Labour government and didn't like it, and worked for the BBC where he disliked his socialist fellow workers, so he represented it as some kind of brutal dictatorship.
Well, Orwell was no prophet. He was totally wrong. We live in a society in which governments have to go abroad to be militaristic and repressive, in which information about any kind of government abuse is splashed all over the Internet in minutes. Before the Internet, someone who shouted at Harold Wilson during a party conference could be sent to prison and nothing was said about it. Now, someone shouts at a minister, bouncers and police overreact, and damage is inflicted on the Labour Party within a few days. The risk to freedom is not so much from government as large corporations, and Orwell gets a score there because, as I noted above, 1984 is a satire on a corporation.
Can we add "or who mentions 1984" to the Internet law that the first side to mention the Nazis loses?
I've been indebted for years to an Italian supplier to a company I used to work for who had a simple economic theory. There are producers, and there are mafiosi. A producer is someone whose business produces a real product. A mafiosi is someone who seeks to get in the way and steal some of the income, by creating a climate in which, through fear, legislation or other access control, you have to go to the mafia to get the product. Morally, all mafiosi are equally reprehensible. They steal value on the way from producer to user. In the long term, they depreciate the currency and destroy economies.
Apply this simple idea and you divide up economies pretty quickly.
Oil wells: producers. Oil distribution: Mafiosi
Coca farmers: producers. Drug dealers and legislators who create a shortage and push up prices: Mafiosi.
Musicians: producers. Recording industry, and the legislators who give them what they want: Mafiosi.
Physicians: Producers. Insurance companies and malpractice lawyers - you get it
The interesting thing about mafias is that they are all the same and work in the same way, and that though many of them commit illegal acts, they are rarely prosecuted (and as noted above benefit financially from the laws that make their activities illegal, by pushing up prices.) I'm sure a record exec could move smoothly from handing out brown envelopes to "opinion formers" in the interest of persuading the gullible to buy the latest Mrs. Ritchie, to handing out brown envelopes to bent policement to ignore the foot soldiers on the street corners.
The moral? The job of government is to create fair competition laws that oppose monopolies and trusts, and jail people who break them. Not, as seems to be the case at the moment, to be part of the problem and to pass laws at the behest of de facto cartels like industry trade associations.
I've seen implementations that do just about everything in stored procedures. Best not to comment on them. Some people will do anything to avoid learning another language.
In fact, though, I prefer to keep database work as portable as possible. The exact thing that db suppliers don't want you to do...
Microsoft (SQL Express) and Oracle have now produced free-ish low end versions of their databases to try and kill MySQL. Which gives a cheap Windows platform with a reasonable database for no incremental cost (MySQL is an incremental cost to deploy on Windows, and getting progressively more expensive.). Sun retaliates with PostgreSQL. There is clearly a big battle shaping up at the low end, and hopefully the winner will be the end user. The loser? Well, currently it looks like it might be MySQL. When we've finished digesting all the recent announcements, I suspect we may well be porting our application from MySQL to either Oracle or PostgreSQL on Solaris, for sound commercial and support reasons.
How will MySQL respond? I'd be sad to lose our investment over the last five years, but commercially the words "Oracle" or "Sun" just radiate comfort factor to less well informed customers.
I'm sure you get something out of being so angry and aggressive, but what? OK, I should have said "modern languages", not "English". But I notice you avoid answering my core point, which is that few Protestants have any knowledge of either Hebrew or NT Greek, despite claiming that their religion is Biblically based. Muslims are required to learn Arabic so they can properly understand the Qu'ran, and I appreciate this. My own NT Greek is just about good enough to enable me to read NT translations critically with the original alongside, and I wish I had time to improve it. You seem to think that rational argument involves trying to pick holes in odd words rather than concentrating on content. Of course I had to write "totalitarian" in order to say that I regard it as a non-term which I would not use in discussion. That isn't being self-contradictory. And it is not being authoritarian to refer to the work of scholars, which are open to challenge and are peer-reviewed when published. I was replying to your ad hominem attack which accused me of flamebaiting, and pointing out that I was merely expressing what I consider to be quite mainstream views, at least outside the US. You are completely at liberty to disregard anything I post, but perhaps you should ask yourself why you are generating such anger? Why do you put "first degree" in inverted commas? Most professional people nowadays have two or more degrees, and I was just explaining in a few words that I was not totally unqualified to make my point. My subsequent qualifications, like most older people writing on Slashdot, are in computing. Are you just one of those people who cannot bear to have their beliefs challenged? If so, the Internet is not a good place for you.
But it isn't flaming. My first degree was in psychology and sociology of religion. I was a member of the Church of England for many years, though I am now a member of the Society of Friends. I have considerable experience from serving on church councils of how far democracy really goes in churches, and even in the SoF I am aware that there is considerable covert authoritarianism (the disproportionate influence of "weighty Friends"). Far from being a cheap shot, I am just reflecting what is said quite openly by scholars. If you really want to investigate, you should look up the study (carried out by the Roman Catholic Church, no less) which showed that in France, good Catholics who moved into Communist neighbourhoods were more likely to become communists than non-Catholics.
Also, where did I say "totalitarian"? I didn't, you made that up. In fact, I regard the word "totalitarian" as nonsense and never use it. I said "authoritarian." Authoritarians look to an outside source of authority for their behaviour. Protestants tend to use English translations of the Bible (I have found very few who can even read as far as the first word of the Bible in the original, but that's beside the point.), Catholics rely on the Church, communists on the authority of the Party,Marx and Lenin, and fascists rely on the authority of a human leader. Did I say that fascism was morally equivalent to Christianity? No, I didn't. I would say that all authoritarian cultures contain a mix of good guys and bad guys and things in between. There were brave and moral Italian fascists, like the officer who refused to hand the Jews in his area over to the Germans. There have been evil Catholics and Protestants, like Cotton Mather and a number of Renaissance popes.
I suggest before flying off the handle you try actually reading a post next time. I was commenting on addictions, not seeking to write an essay on the similarities and differences between authoritarian cultures.
And for anybody reading this who puts two and two together - yes, I probably am who you think I am.
Personal experience suggests that the tendency to become addicted to things varies from person to person, and is presumably related to individual variations in brain chemistry. Just as there are certain personality types that will with equal ease make good Catholics, Protestants, communists or fascists - they just need to be part of an authoritarian culture - so there are clearly people who get a bigger reaction from certain repeated activities than the rest of us. I have a very low addictive tendency, but I'm aware the downside is that I don't get the high from these activities that some people do.
However, if this is right, there may be a very positive side. Does being a game addict mean that you aren't going to become a crack addict and become a huge nuisance to society stealing things to pay for your addiction? Or is there an "intelligence" factor in this, i.e. people who become addicted to drugs do it because they are too stupid to become addicted to something less socially harmful, like chess, computer games, share dealing or politics?
It would be interesting to know. The traditional solution to heroin addiction was to wean addicts off on methadone - which is not terribly effective. Is the answer to provide some of them with wall to wall games until they find one that makes an addiction substitute?
Anecdotally, it's interesting how some "reformed" alcoholics seem to go into politics (G W Bush, Alastair Campbell in the UK) suggesting that there is indeed some sort of crossover compensating mechanism.
I think too we need to make a distinction between the things people do in young adulthood - often very stupid and subsequently embarrassing behaviour - and what they do in later life. Young men in particular may pursue an activity obsessively, but as they grow older it takes a more balanced place in life - whether it be drinking, fishing, or the pursuit of women. Perhaps it's a "normal" addictive phase, in which case again, the less anti-social the effects, the better.
To know this problem has been solved. Worrying about the effects of lunar dust getting into lunar colonists' suit seals has been keeping me awake at night for years, not mention worrying about the effects of lunar dust getting into bodily crevices if they need to take a leak during a dust storm. But why not just damp it down with water?
Oh, apparently I just failed planetary geography 101 there.
As everybody knows, the "geological anomalies" are actually fossilised time travelling wizards, and the Luggage. Are you sure you want to go disturbing that stuff?
Disclaimer: Yes, Perth does exist. I have family there. And if I had had more sense when I was younger, I'd be there too. (sigh) It's Sydney and its tribe of Hyde Park bushmen that is unnecessary.
The nice thing about lead/acid is that it is highly recyclable. It also uses a dirt cheap electrolyte (sulphuric acid), and most lead acid batteries now have recyclable plastic cases rather than vulcanised rubber. In fact the oldest and simplest technology - open cells - are the most efficient on almost all counts, including charge speed. (And yes, I do have a lot of experience with these things, I'm not just repeating things I've read.)
The problem is with modern battery technologies which _are_ hard to recycle and dangerous to dispose of. The more efficient they get in energy density, the nastier they seem to get.
Or even positive because the emissions from the tractors used in planting all those trees. Trees don't reduce emissions, people do. They might reduce the environmental effects a bit...but they definitely don't deliberately fall on SUVs or jump out in front of trucks to cause a real reduction in emissions.
Time to look up the McLibel case in which two British activists were sued by McDonalds, following allegations of dubious corporate practices. The company incurred vast legal fees, were awarded derisory damages for the part of the comment on them shown to be libellous, and a telling-off from the judge, and the European Court has handed down criticism of the British Government for not providing the defendants with legal aid (summary here). The defendants are still about and campaigning, and I suspect would be only too happy to provide help and advice.
Of course, if these developers had nothing to worry about, they would have doubtless been able to convince everybody of the truth of their case without recourse to litigation. Any environmental scientists in Canada with soil sampling equipment who might be prepared to volunteer to go and do some soil analysis to help the defence prepare its case?
The publicity from all of this could have one benefit: CIOs and suits suddenly starting to get the whole thing about Open Source. The links need to be made, as publicly as possible, between what Sony has tried to do and what certain enterprise software companies might like to do.
What follows of course has no legal standing and is only the absurd ranting of a completely unimportant and unidentified person who has no power to influence, in any way, anybody who might affect Sony financially.
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This is a clear case where a large company has deliberately attempted to get people to install software on their computers which reduces, however trivially, their control over their computers. They have attempted to back this up with a licence agreement which places absurd restrictions on the end user, such as appearing to transfer the right to use of CD content to a thief. And they have done this in an effort to prevent the normal flow of technological progress. This is the smoking gun for FOSS advocates: evidence to support the idea that a large corporation may not be merely clumsy and incompetent in its relations with its customers but actually malicious in its desire to gain control over them. A thoughtful CIO might see this as making the case for adopting solutions that involve a real degree of mutuality between supplier and customer.
Libertarian economics is a "hard science"? A flawed logical statement that would be spotted immediately? Yet people are replying to you as if you meant it. Clearly some people are irony deficient.
It's always amused me how rags like "The Economist" pretend that economics is a science, while following this procedure:
1. We know that Adam Smith type economics is God-given truth, even though Smith lived in a completely different world.
2. Therefore we already know in advance the answer to every economic question, which is, totally free markets
3. Now what was the question?
4. Well, economists have studied your question carefully using our rigorous methodologies and the answer is (drumroll) introduce free markets!
In fact, "libertarian economics" is exactly as much a hard science as Creationism, Intelligent Design, etc., whereas climatology is a very hard science indeed studying immensely complicated things and using extremely clever people and enormous computer power to do it. The difference between climatologists and economists is that economists have cleverly made up rules like "let markets decide everything" and "there is no limit on natural resources" which are hugely attractive to neocon politicians - whereas climatologists are coming up with increased pessimism which equally hugely pisses off said politicians, who are afraid that they will be expected to DO SOMETHING which might harm their short term popularity. Faced with someone who tells politicians what they want to hear, and someone who doesn't, I'm afraid I know who I am more likely to listen to.
I had the misfortune to visit Saltillo at election time, some years ago. I was amazed at how jumpy the atmosphere was, knowing as I did nothing about the country. There was the episode when we had lunch in a restaurant where it turned out three opposition politicians were having lunch, and the people with me were debating whether we should leave in case the goons waiting outside thought they might be talking to the opposition, or stay and pretend not to notice them (we stayed). The most paranoid moment was when I was leaving and saying goodbye to my hosts. We were standing under one of the twenty foot high posters of the "progressive party" which were all over town (the opposition wrote on the walls and the goons came out every morning and removed the writing. Without thinking I said "..adios (name of PP politician)", ironically saluting the poster. There was immediately a discussion as to whether it was now too dangerous for me to take a taxi to the airport and whether I would have an "accident" on the way. In fact I just had the usual accident- the taxi was two hours late but the plane was the normal five hours late and I had to spend the night in Houston. And my company was advised politely never to send me back to Mexico, which was no hardship.
Conclusion? Mexico seems to have been slowly and steadily improving as some adjacent parts of the US seem to have been steadily going downhill, electorally.
Have you between you got the expertise to start your own company? Are there any competitors in the area who might be interested in acquiring the entire staff of a data center?
Unless you know for a fact that you are in an area with a skills shortage, never stay to the end. It will always say on your CV "lacked the imagination and skills to do something else", and if a future employer is looking for people with a highly developed sense of loyalty - is that really your kind of employer?
Confession - I have only once failed to jump ship BEFORE the announcement, and I kicked myself for months afterwards because in truth I had known that the writing was on the wall. Wherever you work, you should try and build up the necessary internal networking to get tipped off before anything affecting you is decided. And when someone you trust tells you something, listen. VPs and managers have to preserve confidentiality, but there are ways, and a lot of them are uncomfortable as individuals about what they have to do.
Oh, and another gratuitous piece of advice that will be ignored. One of the smartest things you can do when younger is not to spend up to your income, and certainly not get into debt if you can avoid it. When layoffs and closures happen, you have just got so much more slack than the people who are in debt and desperate, and this will come over at interviews. As a potential employer, would you hire the guy who is clearly in deep shit and desperate, or the one who is clearly in control and managing? Depends on the company, but which kind of company would you want to work for?
To make Sony's DRM illegal? I believe (IANAL and someone correct me if I am wrong) that a click through EULA might be illegal under the law of England and Wales if it results in the installation of a rootkit, because that violates the Computer Misuse Act and a contract to perform an illegal action by one party is void. (If my computer has been interfered with in such a way that files are installed on it without my permission, and I cannot access or remove those files, it looks to me like an offence under the Act.) Whether the English company responsible for this piece of crap could be held liable in any way I do not know (though I charitably hope they go bust and their children have to beg for a living on the streets of Liverpool.) If I knowingly provide a burglar with the tools for breaking and entering, I con be convicted as an accessory. Perhaps this is why Sony claim not to have released the rootkit in the UK.
Is there no federal or State legislation in the US with similar effect?
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously you haven't kept up with the decline in status of patent clerks as corporations and others are allowed by politicians to patent rotary motion facilitators. The only patent clerk I've known personally had a PhD and a law degree, and was definitely not Bob from Accounting. OK, I know that was meant to be a joke, but it's based on a fundamental misunderstanding. And, BTW, the dark matter in the post is Mrs. Einstein who did at least half of his best work. She still doesn't get enough credit, whereas at least history (and Scientific American) is doing the right thing by Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
The description of the Josephson Junction is aimed at all the non-physicists out there. The "insulating layer" is a bandgap layer. The point is that cooper paired electrons can tunnel through it, i.e. it acts as a superconductor itself. It is an insulator for ordinary electrons only. And the definition of capacitor is nothing at all to do with physical conductors or insulators. It is a region of space where a potential gradient can be created, and the capacitance is the measure of how much energy has to be pumped into the region in order to create a given potential gradient. "Empty space" requires the lowest energy and has the lowest capacitance per unit volume, while certain ceramics with relatively mobile but limited electrons have very high values. If you cannot create a potential difference across your region of space, you have no capacitance - and at first sight, if that region is superconducting you cannot have a potential difference.
Not to knock the discovery, which is very interesting, but it's a pity quantum computers have to be dragged into everything to justify research. I doubt that Tom's Hardware will be reviewing millikelvin coolers for your qubit box any time in the next 20 years (though I'd like to be proved wrong)
I have yet to meet an anti-evolution protestant who can read the Bible literally. There must be some...but anyone who can get through the first words of Bereshit is not likely to take it literally. A book that begins "In the beginning (plural form of a word for God) created..." (Bereshit bara elohim, in Slash),which starts with 3 different and inconsistent creation legends? Do me a favour. The English translations are mostly cleaned up a bit to make more narrative sense, but if you were to teach enough Intelligent Designers enough Hebrew, you might start to get some sense out of them. Since most of them can't tell their kethibh from their qu're, I doubt it will happen. Sorry about the rant, but the theological illiteracy of evangelicals annoys me even more than their scientific ignorance. At least the Catholics have a tradition of real scholarship- which is probably why, in the end, they have to come to terms with modern science, since it has its roots in the same traditional of earnest enquiry no matter where it may lead.
No, I didn't say you wanted it, but you do get it.
As for the lawsuit itself, if it succeeds, well there goes just about everything, from Calvin and Hobbes through the Narnia books to the Iliad. Perhaps tort reform should involve the Athenian idea that lawyers bringing frivolous lawsuits should be expelled from society for a period.
Read the history of Renaissance Italy and you will see that one the two themes you mention in 1984 has a long history. (The condottieri raised the use of continuous war with shifting allegiances intended to obtain and keep power to a fine art. ) The use of language to shape thought patterns and so control the populace also has a long history, with the British ruling classes consciously doing this through their education system and media since the middle of the nineteenth century.
Personally, despite or perhaps because I come from a British middle class background, I think Pohl and Kornbluth's The space merchants is a much more prophetic dystopia than 1984. P&K foresaw ever more intrusive advertising, the oppressive role of corporations, the development of addictive products to maintain corporate income, running out of oil, and the privatisation of governments. They missed the Internet, though they did get dynamically targetted advertising. The reason that Orwell is so famous is basically because he _was_ part of the upper middle class coterie that controlled post-war Britain and benefited from his connections in getting published and gaining publicity. (And, I suspect, because 1984 is a short,memorable title.)
Ubuntu 5.10 works on PPC hardware, thank you very much. As for creating an unbootable machine, I have wiped more than one Mac HDD, installed Ubuntu, uninstalled Ubuntu and reinstalled OS X with no more trouble than restoring the OS to a Windows laptop. (Because, in the end, I decided that I preferred OS X for what I wanted to do.) However, I disagree fundamentally with your post. Apple are in the business of supplying boxes to run OS X, not vice versa. And Dell does not lock you into an OS unless you want them to support it - which, much as I dislike Dell, seems quite reasonable to me.
Well, Orwell was no prophet. He was totally wrong. We live in a society in which governments have to go abroad to be militaristic and repressive, in which information about any kind of government abuse is splashed all over the Internet in minutes. Before the Internet, someone who shouted at Harold Wilson during a party conference could be sent to prison and nothing was said about it. Now, someone shouts at a minister, bouncers and police overreact, and damage is inflicted on the Labour Party within a few days. The risk to freedom is not so much from government as large corporations, and Orwell gets a score there because, as I noted above, 1984 is a satire on a corporation.
Can we add "or who mentions 1984" to the Internet law that the first side to mention the Nazis loses?
Apply this simple idea and you divide up economies pretty quickly.
Oil wells: producers. Oil distribution: Mafiosi
Coca farmers: producers. Drug dealers and legislators who create a shortage and push up prices: Mafiosi.
Musicians: producers. Recording industry, and the legislators who give them what they want: Mafiosi.
Physicians: Producers. Insurance companies and malpractice lawyers - you get it
The interesting thing about mafias is that they are all the same and work in the same way, and that though many of them commit illegal acts, they are rarely prosecuted (and as noted above benefit financially from the laws that make their activities illegal, by pushing up prices.) I'm sure a record exec could move smoothly from handing out brown envelopes to "opinion formers" in the interest of persuading the gullible to buy the latest Mrs. Ritchie, to handing out brown envelopes to bent policement to ignore the foot soldiers on the street corners.
The moral? The job of government is to create fair competition laws that oppose monopolies and trusts, and jail people who break them. Not, as seems to be the case at the moment, to be part of the problem and to pass laws at the behest of de facto cartels like industry trade associations.
In fact, though, I prefer to keep database work as portable as possible. The exact thing that db suppliers don't want you to do...
How will MySQL respond? I'd be sad to lose our investment over the last five years, but commercially the words "Oracle" or "Sun" just radiate comfort factor to less well informed customers.
I'm sure you get something out of being so angry and aggressive, but what?
OK, I should have said "modern languages", not "English". But I notice you avoid answering my core point, which is that few Protestants have any knowledge of either Hebrew or NT Greek, despite claiming that their religion is Biblically based. Muslims are required to learn Arabic so they can properly understand the Qu'ran, and I appreciate this. My own NT Greek is just about good enough to enable me to read NT translations critically with the original alongside, and I wish I had time to improve it.
You seem to think that rational argument involves trying to pick holes in odd words rather than concentrating on content. Of course I had to write "totalitarian" in order to say that I regard it as a non-term which I would not use in discussion. That isn't being self-contradictory. And it is not being authoritarian to refer to the work of scholars, which are open to challenge and are peer-reviewed when published. I was replying to your ad hominem attack which accused me of flamebaiting, and pointing out that I was merely expressing what I consider to be quite mainstream views, at least outside the US. You are completely at liberty to disregard anything I post, but perhaps you should ask yourself why you are generating such anger? Why do you put "first degree" in inverted commas? Most professional people nowadays have two or more degrees, and I was just explaining in a few words that I was not totally unqualified to make my point. My subsequent qualifications, like most older people writing on Slashdot, are in computing. Are you just one of those people who cannot bear to have their beliefs challenged? If so, the Internet is not a good place for you.
Also, where did I say "totalitarian"? I didn't, you made that up. In fact, I regard the word "totalitarian" as nonsense and never use it. I said "authoritarian." Authoritarians look to an outside source of authority for their behaviour. Protestants tend to use English translations of the Bible (I have found very few who can even read as far as the first word of the Bible in the original, but that's beside the point.), Catholics rely on the Church, communists on the authority of the Party,Marx and Lenin, and fascists rely on the authority of a human leader. Did I say that fascism was morally equivalent to Christianity? No, I didn't. I would say that all authoritarian cultures contain a mix of good guys and bad guys and things in between. There were brave and moral Italian fascists, like the officer who refused to hand the Jews in his area over to the Germans. There have been evil Catholics and Protestants, like Cotton Mather and a number of Renaissance popes.
I suggest before flying off the handle you try actually reading a post next time. I was commenting on addictions, not seeking to write an essay on the similarities and differences between authoritarian cultures.
And for anybody reading this who puts two and two together - yes, I probably am who you think I am.
However, if this is right, there may be a very positive side. Does being a game addict mean that you aren't going to become a crack addict and become a huge nuisance to society stealing things to pay for your addiction? Or is there an "intelligence" factor in this, i.e. people who become addicted to drugs do it because they are too stupid to become addicted to something less socially harmful, like chess, computer games, share dealing or politics?
It would be interesting to know. The traditional solution to heroin addiction was to wean addicts off on methadone - which is not terribly effective. Is the answer to provide some of them with wall to wall games until they find one that makes an addiction substitute?
Anecdotally, it's interesting how some "reformed" alcoholics seem to go into politics (G W Bush, Alastair Campbell in the UK) suggesting that there is indeed some sort of crossover compensating mechanism.
I think too we need to make a distinction between the things people do in young adulthood - often very stupid and subsequently embarrassing behaviour - and what they do in later life. Young men in particular may pursue an activity obsessively, but as they grow older it takes a more balanced place in life - whether it be drinking, fishing, or the pursuit of women. Perhaps it's a "normal" addictive phase, in which case again, the less anti-social the effects, the better.
Oh, apparently I just failed planetary geography 101 there.
Disclaimer: Yes, Perth does exist. I have family there. And if I had had more sense when I was younger, I'd be there too. (sigh) It's Sydney and its tribe of Hyde Park bushmen that is unnecessary.
The problem is with modern battery technologies which _are_ hard to recycle and dangerous to dispose of. The more efficient they get in energy density, the nastier they seem to get.
Or even positive because the emissions from the tractors used in planting all those trees. Trees don't reduce emissions, people do. They might reduce the environmental effects a bit...but they definitely don't deliberately fall on SUVs or jump out in front of trucks to cause a real reduction in emissions.
Of course, if these developers had nothing to worry about, they would have doubtless been able to convince everybody of the truth of their case without recourse to litigation.
Any environmental scientists in Canada with soil sampling equipment who might be prepared to volunteer to go and do some soil analysis to help the defence prepare its case?
What follows of course has no legal standing and is only the absurd ranting of a completely unimportant and unidentified person who has no power to influence, in any way, anybody who might affect Sony financially.
. This is a clear case where a large company has deliberately attempted to get people to install software on their computers which reduces, however trivially, their control over their computers. They have attempted to back this up with a licence agreement which places absurd restrictions on the end user, such as appearing to transfer the right to use of CD content to a thief. And they have done this in an effort to prevent the normal flow of technological progress. This is the smoking gun for FOSS advocates: evidence to support the idea that a large corporation may not be merely clumsy and incompetent in its relations with its customers but actually malicious in its desire to gain control over them. A thoughtful CIO might see this as making the case for adopting solutions that involve a real degree of mutuality between supplier and customer.
It's always amused me how rags like "The Economist" pretend that economics is a science, while following this procedure:
1. We know that Adam Smith type economics is God-given truth, even though Smith lived in a completely different world.
2. Therefore we already know in advance the answer to every economic question, which is, totally free markets
3. Now what was the question?
4. Well, economists have studied your question carefully using our rigorous methodologies and the answer is (drumroll) introduce free markets!
In fact, "libertarian economics" is exactly as much a hard science as Creationism, Intelligent Design, etc., whereas climatology is a very hard science indeed studying immensely complicated things and using extremely clever people and enormous computer power to do it. The difference between climatologists and economists is that economists have cleverly made up rules like "let markets decide everything" and "there is no limit on natural resources" which are hugely attractive to neocon politicians - whereas climatologists are coming up with increased pessimism which equally hugely pisses off said politicians, who are afraid that they will be expected to DO SOMETHING which might harm their short term popularity. Faced with someone who tells politicians what they want to hear, and someone who doesn't, I'm afraid I know who I am more likely to listen to.
Conclusion? Mexico seems to have been slowly and steadily improving as some adjacent parts of the US seem to have been steadily going downhill, electorally.
Unless you know for a fact that you are in an area with a skills shortage, never stay to the end. It will always say on your CV "lacked the imagination and skills to do something else", and if a future employer is looking for people with a highly developed sense of loyalty - is that really your kind of employer?
Confession - I have only once failed to jump ship BEFORE the announcement, and I kicked myself for months afterwards because in truth I had known that the writing was on the wall. Wherever you work, you should try and build up the necessary internal networking to get tipped off before anything affecting you is decided. And when someone you trust tells you something, listen. VPs and managers have to preserve confidentiality, but there are ways, and a lot of them are uncomfortable as individuals about what they have to do.
Oh, and another gratuitous piece of advice that will be ignored. One of the smartest things you can do when younger is not to spend up to your income, and certainly not get into debt if you can avoid it. When layoffs and closures happen, you have just got so much more slack than the people who are in debt and desperate, and this will come over at interviews. As a potential employer, would you hire the guy who is clearly in deep shit and desperate, or the one who is clearly in control and managing? Depends on the company, but which kind of company would you want to work for?
Is there no federal or State legislation in the US with similar effect?