As the article mentions, half of Holland is below sea level - obviously they don't have the option of relocating, but they prove that adequate flood defences can be built. The cost really isn't that big, a tiny fraction of what Bush is spending in Iraq would provide adequate flood defences for the area. Seems to me like a perfectly reasonable way to spend money, compared to some things I could mention.
Right on! After the 1953 flooding of over 2000km2 of polders, planning of the Delta Works was started. Dikes (or levees) along hundreds of kilometers of shore were raised by as much as 5 meters. Several flood barriers were built, some of which can move in order to permit sea traffic to pass during normal conditions. The American Society of Civil engineers considers them one of the seven modern wonders of the world.
The delta works took over 40 years to complete and the costs were huge, but not more than the $100 billion one year of Iraqi war costs.
I live in Holland, which is built entirely on muck (and more than half of it is below sea level). There are ways to build in this kind of environment and we'e been doing it for hundreds of years.
These mammals were just too large and caused too much havok. [sic]
You are referring to dinosaurs, which were reptilian. Back then, the mammals all were pretty small, which is why they survivied.
Whatever decided that the distrubance was just too big and decided to start over.
There is no 'decision'. Dinosaurs were highly succesful for millions of years. Unfortunately, something (most likely a asteroid impact) changed the climate to such a degree that being a dinosaur no longer was a key to success. Since being a four inch rodent suddenly was a key to success, mammals became succesful.
Talking about France when you're actually talking about Europe is not quite unlike talking about California, when you're actually talking about th US. Except of course in the latter case the miscomparison comes out favourably for the US, where the former case certainly is not favourable for Europe.
Well first of all, when people are talking about solar cars, usually they are referring to a car with the solar panels used to power it. So technically, this wouldn't be a solar car.
Second of all, solar power isn't all that efficient, in most areas of the world more power could be generated using wind generators with the same amount of money (not to mention the fact that a fifth of an acre is quite costly in populated regions).
But the third problem is the same problem that's holding back electric cars right now; efficiently storing energy is pretty damn difficult. Petrol is not only a cheap source of energy, it's also a highly efficient and convenient container of energy.
Let's say a car has a surface area of around 8m2. The solar constant is about 1300W/m2, so the absolute maximum power that can be generated is about 10kW. Of course, a lot of the solar power is obscured by clouds and the sun almost never is at a right angle above the vehicle.
Typical solar cars generate about 700-1500W of power. That's already pretty close to being optimal. Unfortunately, ~1kW is not even close to the power modern cars have (~100kW). Furthermore, because of varying solar conditions such a car would require batteries, which are notoriously heavy.
I'm not too concerned though, it's going to be the same type of situation as it was with the chips in pinter ink cartridges.
1)DRM-like scheme locks out competitor
2)competitor reverse engineers said scheme
3)???
4)Profit!!
Funny thing; in a world without litigation your analysis would've made a lot of sense.
You might consider a pack of monkeys and typewriters. They can ultimately reproduce Shakespeare so maybe, maybe they might be ablt to properly reformat the HTML gibberish Word produces.
Of course, you could also outsource to India but that's unethical to both the monkeys and the Americon economy.
Why do you assume I have never contributed? I have submitted a couple of stories, of which two were accepted. However, given the fact that the time of landing was known beforehand and given the fact that most slashdot readers are interested in the topic I believe it's safe to assume that a submission already was underway.
But even if there was no submission at all, I'd say that the event was important enough to warrant an article entirely by the editors themselves *shudders*.
Frankly I don't think I was whining, I was just uttering criticism and criticism is something no community can thrive without.
The amount of articles on silent PCs is getting tedious - does someone on the ed. team have shares in a relevant company or something?
You'd almost think so... And it's even more annoying given the fact that the Discovery successfully touced down almost an hour ago. You'd think that's stuff that matters but somehow Slashdot is the only online news outlet outside the great firewall of China that missed it.
The two are totally unrelated. The money collected goes back to a related fund, in this case the artists (hopefully). If it were a tax, it'd go to the Canadian treasury, but it's not, that's why it's called a levy. So you'd have the exact same health care without the levy.
You're a German arguing about American morality in World War II? You don't think Japan or Germany or the USSR would have used the bomb if they had it first? Stalin would have made Germany a smoking crater.
I think it's pretty safe to assume that even although he's german, this guy was no wehrmacht officer/ss ubersturmfuhrer or concentration camp guard. So him being german should not be a factor in judging his post.
It so easily drops into a how much does it pay ? from it's cool, that's why I do it !. Speaking as someone who got paid a couple of thousand bucks to work on OSS, I just didn't feel like I was working for that rush anymore. The change was very shocking to me at first, then I realized WHY open source is popular - because it lets people work on what they like (want is ambigous because people might want a bounty job).
You are completely right, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Most of the fun in programming is in the first half of the work. Devising an architecture, thinking of smart ways to solve difficult problems and implementing all kinds of cool features are the things that can make programming a lot of fun. But unfortunately, the second half of the work is not as enjoyable. Thorough testing, hunting down bugs and polishing your creation can be tedious or even downright annoying work. There are many promising Open Source projects that are halfway done. They have good features and great technology, but still buggy and unreliable, because the developers preferred to start another cool project instead of properly finishing the first one.
This is one of the problems of Open Source development and this problem can be alleviated by companies paying for the work. If sheer enjoyment is not enough motivation to properly finish a project, possibly some cash might do the trick.
That's a pretty neat idea, first time I've heard of it. And you are right, you can't do that with C#. Still, C# has a lot of other features I really like.
One can not try, which precludes either successs or failure, and then "use", which implies success, at the same time. When did this mind bending use of the language become acceptable? Professional journalists use it these days too. Man, this shit sux
It's British English, so I guess it became fashionable around the 1300s. When did 'sux' become an acceptable spelling of 'sucks', by the way?
Except for the fact that the idea is horribly wrong from an ethical viewpoint, it also simply won't work. The efficacy of a punishment is more related to the chance of being caught than to the severity of the punishment.
Despite the risk of huge fines, almost everyone downloads movies at a regular basis, because the chances of being caught are near zero.
Ìt's good to see businesses actually try and use the advantages of the internet for content distribution, instead of trying to litigate to preserve an ancient business model.
...wouldn't the money be for these operations have been better spend closing down phishing sites?
I'm just thinking it would be better going after the real criminals.
Of course not, **AA are the *real* victims here. If the interests of those phishing victims were so important, they'd surely have more lobbying power.
I wholeheartedly agree that software piracy is like the legendary Hydra: Chop off one head and three new ones will pop up. Therefore I don't believe prosecution of these individuals is particularly effective. However - at least in the Netherlands - the people arrested were selling the pirated software at huge profits.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly what was in that impactor that could create a city-sized crater?
An awful lot of kinetic energy
What do you do when your product already does everything a sensible user wants to do?
If you're M$ you release a new version incompatible with old versions to force the upgrade
If you're Logitech you just keep on adding features. I can't see any reason to upgrade here.
So, from a business standpoint Microsoft isn't doing very bad, are they?
As the article mentions, half of Holland is below sea level - obviously they don't have the option of relocating, but they prove that adequate flood defences can be built. The cost really isn't that big, a tiny fraction of what Bush is spending in Iraq would provide adequate flood defences for the area. Seems to me like a perfectly reasonable way to spend money, compared to some things I could mention.
Right on! After the 1953 flooding of over 2000km2 of polders, planning of the Delta Works was started. Dikes (or levees) along hundreds of kilometers of shore were raised by as much as 5 meters. Several flood barriers were built, some of which can move in order to permit sea traffic to pass during normal conditions. The American Society of Civil engineers considers them one of the seven modern wonders of the world.
The delta works took over 40 years to complete and the costs were huge, but not more than the $100 billion one year of Iraqi war costs.
I live in Holland, which is built entirely on muck (and more than half of it is below sea level). There are ways to build in this kind of environment and we'e been doing it for hundreds of years.
These mammals were just too large and caused too much havok. [sic]
You are referring to dinosaurs, which were reptilian. Back then, the mammals all were pretty small, which is why they survivied.
Whatever decided that the distrubance was just too big and decided to start over.
There is no 'decision'. Dinosaurs were highly succesful for millions of years. Unfortunately, something (most likely a asteroid impact) changed the climate to such a degree that being a dinosaur no longer was a key to success. Since being a four inch rodent suddenly was a key to success, mammals became succesful.
Talking about France when you're actually talking about Europe is not quite unlike talking about California, when you're actually talking about th US. Except of course in the latter case the miscomparison comes out favourably for the US, where the former case certainly is not favourable for Europe.
Qantas == Australian Airline Company != Yankee Arline Company
Well first of all, when people are talking about solar cars, usually they are referring to a car with the solar panels used to power it. So technically, this wouldn't be a solar car.
Second of all, solar power isn't all that efficient, in most areas of the world more power could be generated using wind generators with the same amount of money (not to mention the fact that a fifth of an acre is quite costly in populated regions).
But the third problem is the same problem that's holding back electric cars right now; efficiently storing energy is pretty damn difficult. Petrol is not only a cheap source of energy, it's also a highly efficient and convenient container of energy.
Let's say a car has a surface area of around 8m2. The solar constant is about 1300W/m2, so the absolute maximum power that can be generated is about 10kW. Of course, a lot of the solar power is obscured by clouds and the sun almost never is at a right angle above the vehicle.
Typical solar cars generate about 700-1500W of power. That's already pretty close to being optimal. Unfortunately, ~1kW is not even close to the power modern cars have (~100kW). Furthermore, because of varying solar conditions such a car would require batteries, which are notoriously heavy.
I'm not too concerned though, it's going to be the same type of situation as it was with the chips in pinter ink cartridges.
1)DRM-like scheme locks out competitor
2)competitor reverse engineers said scheme
3)???
4)Profit!!
Funny thing; in a world without litigation your analysis would've made a lot of sense.
You might consider a pack of monkeys and typewriters. They can ultimately reproduce Shakespeare so maybe, maybe they might be ablt to properly reformat the HTML gibberish Word produces.
Of course, you could also outsource to India but that's unethical to both the monkeys and the Americon economy.
Why do you assume I have never contributed? I have submitted a couple of stories, of which two were accepted. However, given the fact that the time of landing was known beforehand and given the fact that most slashdot readers are interested in the topic I believe it's safe to assume that a submission already was underway.
But even if there was no submission at all, I'd say that the event was important enough to warrant an article entirely by the editors themselves *shudders*.
Frankly I don't think I was whining, I was just uttering criticism and criticism is something no community can thrive without.
The amount of articles on silent PCs is getting tedious - does someone on the ed. team have shares in a relevant company or something?
You'd almost think so... And it's even more annoying given the fact that the Discovery successfully touced down almost an hour ago. You'd think that's stuff that matters but somehow Slashdot is the only online news outlet outside the great firewall of China that missed it.
They changed the name to Urectum in 2620 to get rid of that stupid joke.
The two are totally unrelated. The money collected goes back to a related fund, in this case the artists (hopefully). If it were a tax, it'd go to the Canadian treasury, but it's not, that's why it's called a levy. So you'd have the exact same health care without the levy.
So, what's the son of iPod going to be called?
e-Sus?
You're a German arguing about American morality in World War II? You don't think Japan or Germany or the USSR would have used the bomb if they had it first? Stalin would have made Germany a smoking crater.
I think it's pretty safe to assume that even although he's german, this guy was no wehrmacht officer/ss ubersturmfuhrer or concentration camp guard. So him being german should not be a factor in judging his post.
It so easily drops into a how much does it pay ? from it's cool, that's why I do it !. Speaking as someone who got paid a couple of thousand bucks to work on OSS, I just didn't feel like I was working for that rush anymore. The change was very shocking to me at first, then I realized WHY open source is popular - because it lets people work on what they like (want is ambigous because people might want a bounty job).
You are completely right, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Most of the fun in programming is in the first half of the work. Devising an architecture, thinking of smart ways to solve difficult problems and implementing all kinds of cool features are the things that can make programming a lot of fun. But unfortunately, the second half of the work is not as enjoyable. Thorough testing, hunting down bugs and polishing your creation can be tedious or even downright annoying work. There are many promising Open Source projects that are halfway done. They have good features and great technology, but still buggy and unreliable, because the developers preferred to start another cool project instead of properly finishing the first one.
This is one of the problems of Open Source development and this problem can be alleviated by companies paying for the work. If sheer enjoyment is not enough motivation to properly finish a project, possibly some cash might do the trick.
That's a pretty neat idea, first time I've heard of it. And you are right, you can't do that with C#. Still, C# has a lot of other features I really like.
Please forgive my ignorance, but how can a template system be Turing-complete?
One can not try, which precludes either successs or failure, and then "use", which implies success, at the same time. When did this mind bending use of the language become acceptable? Professional journalists use it these days too. Man, this shit sux
It's British English, so I guess it became fashionable around the 1300s. When did 'sux' become an acceptable spelling of 'sucks', by the way?
Except for the fact that the idea is horribly wrong from an ethical viewpoint, it also simply won't work. The efficacy of a punishment is more related to the chance of being caught than to the severity of the punishment.
Despite the risk of huge fines, almost everyone downloads movies at a regular basis, because the chances of being caught are near zero.
Ìt's good to see businesses actually try and use the advantages of the internet for content distribution, instead of trying to litigate to preserve an ancient business model.
I'm just thinking it would be better going after the real criminals.
Of course not, **AA are the *real* victims here. If the interests of those phishing victims were so important, they'd surely have more lobbying power.
I wholeheartedly agree that software piracy is like the legendary Hydra: Chop off one head and three new ones will pop up. Therefore I don't believe prosecution of these individuals is particularly effective. However - at least in the Netherlands - the people arrested were selling the pirated software at huge profits.