So that means no more Hitler...or anything remotely linked to WWII...
I do not like the German limits on freedom of speech, or the current initiative to censor search results. But it is not as bad as that. There is no problem with historical documents connected with Hitler or the Nazis. What is regulated is "Glorification of National Socialism". You can publish old copies of Stürmer (in fact, many high school history textbooks have at least excerpts), you cannot write "Heil Hitler! Lets go kill some Kanaken!".
Better yet - China is a bigger poluter than the US, yet excused from the protocols because it's a developing country (as is India.)
So why should the US participate when llarger poluters than ourselves aren't?
In absolute terms, China emits a little bit more than half the CO2 the US does. Per capita, it is about 10%. What was your argument again?
Moreover, China has signed and ratified Kyoto. It is not an Annex 1 country yet, but expected to become one soon if industrialization continues. Yes, China's industries are, on average, more dirty than modern Western industries in other pollutants. But these have mostly local effect (and any climatic effect of those would be short-term and rather cooling than warming).
Yes, it is a lot to ask to buy a smaller SUV as the third family car. Much better for 1000 Chinese peasants to have their rice uncooked on Mondays - they will still be allowed hot food the other 6 days of the week!
Maybe you need to do something about CO2, but shouldn't EVERYONE need to play? The protocol looks like another UN scheme to redistribute wealth is all to me.
...as the UN has done so successfully in the past? Those millions of Eritrean Moguls are surely driving up the prices for bespoke suits!
I have not seen any valid indication that moving to cleaner energy will have a negative medium or long term economic influence. In Germany, wind turbine makers and solar energy companies are some of the most profitable at the moment. Of course, the longer you wait, the more you will fall behind.
But that doesn't change the fact that the laws are in force in the interim, and that persons, corporations, and other entities within the system will use the law to their advantage.
Nice switch here. Yes, some probably will. That does not mean they should, and it does not mean they are justified. You do not have the moral right to own slaves, no matter what the law says.
There are a couple of questions here. First, should Apple pressure Think Secret et al. I say no. They should get their own act together.
Secondly, did Think Secret actually break the law? That is debatable. It will be hard to show that they knew that their sources are bound by confidentiality agreement. As far as I know, Think Secret operates an anonymous (electronic) drop box. They may have reason to believe that some of their sources do violate such agreements, but it could just as well be that they believed Apple uses these mechanisms to create buzz.
And thirdly, is the law as stated right? Again, I say no. The problem should be entirely between Apple and the leakers. Those are the people who do have a contractual relationship. It should not be my problem to check other peoples contractual constraints.
They needed to keep the line fresh while they attempt the Herculean task of getting a super hot, server-oriented G5 chip into a PowerBook.
The super hot, server-oriented version of the G5 is called POWER4 and is used by IBM for real servers. The G5 is the PPC970 (various subversions by now), and is a PC/workstation chip. In typical situations it consumes 42 Watt, and it probably consumes 80 at max load. But that would be at 2.5 GHz - underclock it some, and it would not be too bad. It is certainly not super hot compared to most Intel or AMD chips - they need between 100 and 230 Watt for desktop processors.
I'll stick to my 1 GHz TiBook for the moment, although the new machines (and the new prices!) are tempting.
Ya, because the distruction of the twin towers on 911 was just a hoax.
9/11 was bad, no doubt. But 3000 dead from a single event, while shocking, is not really a threat to our society. About 3 times as many people die every day from normal causes in both the US and the EU.
To put things into perspective, the earthquake and tsunami in eastern Asia is like 9/11 over and over again, every day, for two years.
We should indeed allocate our funds to deal with serious threats.
As stated in the article, there are very few details currently known. But if the contract was really arbitrarily terminated, I find that inacceptable. It does not matter who runs the website, or for what purpose. As long as they keep their part of the contract, so should the ISP.
Freedom of speech is there to protect unpopular speech - popular speech does not need extra protection.
Nobody says we have to use the most pessimistic numbers, but with two primary scenarios looming (solvency vs insolvency), it makes far more sense to plan for the bad one, or at least formulate a plan that will cover 70% of the sub-scenarios, should the insolvency scenario be the true outcome.
Probably off-topic, but what is your opinion on global warming and Kyoto?
How will doing something like that hurt the system in the long run?
The problem is that the system is not isolated, but interacts with the rest of the economy. Increasing taxes is always unpopular, and so is lowering benefits. Either of those will shift money around, and thus have negative consequences for at least some people. Moreover, since the social security system uses surplus money to buy US gouvernment bonds, they artificially increase demand for those, and hence lower the interest the gouvernment has to pay. If they redeem those bonds in the future, the gouvernment will have more difficulty refinancing. The more money the SS service parks in gouvernment bonds, the bigger this disruption of the market. Thus, it makes sense to plan for the most likely, not the best case, especially as you can track the predictions and gradually adjust things if you miss targets.
No, I don't have a perfect solution (neither to SS nor to global warning) either.
You are right about Roosevelt's version. But he was allegedly quoting a West African proverb that can certainly be translated in many different ways. Google hits on "walk softly big stick" and "speak softly big stick" are about even (295,000 to 297,000).
I like the walking version a little bit better, but the message remains the same.
It's not pretty, but it's reality because the number one job of any government is to protect it's own citizens. In military terms, that means have plan ready for every scenario imaginable, no matter how terrible.
Nope, that is wrong thinking. There is a point of diminishing returns, where additional preparations are more risky then the remaining risk. For one, because the resources could be spend in a better way. For two, because the act of preparation might make a dangerous event more likely, because it alienates others. And for three, because it might make such an event more likely because it might make your own government take more risks (after all, they are ''prepared'').
It's "Walk softly and carry a big stick", not "Shout at everybody and wave your big stick threateningly".
Hey that would be great because I also hate Aque, although I'm verty fond of my little iMac. But if I install, for instance, fvwm, am I still able to use the Finder and other typical Mac-stuff?
Yes.
You can run X11 in two different modes on MacOS X - full-screen or rootless. If you run it full-screen, you can switch from X11 to Aqua and back with a simple keyboard or mouse command. I surf with Safari and use iTunes and the Apple DVD player, but all my work is done purely on the X11 side, which just looks like Linux unless you look quite deeply.
If you run X11 rootless, X11 and Aqua share a single sceen, and applications are running side by side. Apple even gives you a special window manager to make things look and integrate nicely (I'm using blackbox, though;-).
In my experience, XFree installed via the Fink is more stable and just as fast as X11 from the Panther CDs. But my usage pattern may be atypical.
BTW, when I got my Powerbook in late 2002, I fully planned to install Linux. I still did not get around to it - OS-X with X11 and Fink is UNIX enough for all my needs (and I've been a UNIX guy since SunOS 3.2).
let's just assume for the moment that there exists a crop that doesn't need fertilizer and that consumes as much CO2 when you grow it as it produces when you burn it.
Any plant consumes as much CO2 when it grows as it releases when you burn it (completely). All (except for possible traces) of the Carbon in the plant comes from atmospheric CO2. If you burn the plant matter, it is converted back to CO2 (with the help of athmospheric Oxygen). Life is a chemical process, the Carbon just passes through.
The problem with plants grown in intensive agriculture is that you need a lot of additional energy (i.e. to make fertilizer from atmospheric nitrogen, to run tractors,...) that your energy balance might be negative.
How can a survey of peer reviewed journals be a valid source of data when people are afraid to publish "the wrong results"?
"Yes, your honor, Bill Gates promissed my US$5,000,000,000 for thanksgiving. Well, no, I have not a single witness, but that's because they are all afraid Bill will revoke their minesweeper license. Really! And the invisible blue gnome also heard him!"
How desperate do you have to be to point to all those hypothetical papers nobody dares to write?
Either you're paid hourly or you're a salaried employee. If you're paid hourly, they have to obey state laws and pay you over time. Some states, that is over time for every hour over 8 worked in a day. For most states, it's every hour over 40 in a week. If you're salaried, then they can work you however much they want without additional compensation.
Possibly naive question: Are companies forbidden from paying overtime for salaried employees? Here in Germany, nearly every employee is salaried. But you still have a fixed number of hours per week, and unless your contract explicitely excludes it (only possible for high-paying jobs outside the normal pay scales subject to employer/union contracts), you get compensation either as comp time or as a bonus for hours worked above that limit. And if you have that excemption in you contract, you can certainly leave after your 35-40 hours of contractually agreed working hours - nobody can order you to work longer.
Indeed, I find that a very good thing. You can argue about overtime or long hours all you want. But if overtime is free for the employer, he has no financial incentive to avoid it by hiring enough people. Overtime should always cost the employer more than regular time.
Well, it depends on what you want to do with your life. Double-majoring in Business/CS probably is a very smart move if you want to move into management, and earn a lot of money, e.g. in the typical bank or insurance company with a huge IT department. Of course, you will probably oversee such amazingly fascinating projects as porting an accounting system from Cobol to Java.
I've decided early on that I want to do interesting stuff. I spend nearly 1/3rd of my time working (1/2 if you don't count sleep), so I want to do things I like while working. I did CS (major) and physics (Different university system - you choose one major and one minor subject over here. You earn a degree only in the major. Getting two degrees is extremely rare).
As it turns out, the physics stuff does not help me directly in my job (although it does help with developing models and abstract thought). But all that theoretical computer science I absolutely hated as an undergrad now helps me to be an excellent developer (and a decent research scientist). You can get a very different insight into programming if you have enough depth, and you need to reinvent the wheel less often.
While I'm not getting rich fast, I'm not starving either, and I've been to conferences or teaching/research visits on all continents but South America and Antarctica. I find it quite rewarding (although the PostDoc job mill also can get to your nerves).
Major in Business and take a lot of programming courses. What do others think of this route?
It depends on what you want. For a researcher or developer, I consider the knowledge that typically comes with a decent CS degree to be extremely valuable. I'd rather work with somebody who knows one programming language, but has some idea of data structures, automatons, and algorithmic complexity theory, than with guy who can write "Hello World" in 132 languages and a Fahrenheit to Celsius converter in 131 (note that for these people, HTML usually counts as one of their 132 programming languages).
Of course, basic programming skills are useful for nearly any job today. But computer science is not programming, just as handling a hammer does not make you into an architect.
Linus' comments in the kernel's CodingStyle document are relevant too -- try to keep your functions so that you can read most of them on one screen. Python allows you to do this more often (I find) without resorting to strange brace positions.
Good advice from Linus (and shared by a lot of other people). But the one-page limit is a rule of thumb about how much complexity to put into a single function, not how many lines. Having 80x25 full of white-noise Perl is not good (let alone the 96x62 I manage with my emacs).
Of course having a more compact syntax (and more powerful language constructs) helps keeping the nominal line count down. But unless you manage to keep the semantic complexity down, you only get a very small part of the benefit - seeing the whole function at once. The bigger part - breaking the design down to a managable level - comes from limiting complexity, not line count.
SMART's may roll over sideways when going too fast into a curve. So much for active safety.
Any non-anonymous source for this? Of course, any car can roll over if going sufficiently fast into a curve - it's plain physics. But I very much doubt that you can manage to roll over a SMART while it still has traction.
Citroen dispelled such a rumor about the 2CV in elder times by offering a replacement car to everyone who managed to overturn a 2CV. AFAIK, they never had to pony up.
Yeah, a direct redirection without any choice in the matter would be way over the top, but a redirection implemented this way [with an intermediate page] seems quite reasonable.
Good to hear that it was not as bad as an absolute redirection. But it still breaks DNS. The Internet is not the Web. Breaking the Internet to accomodate Web users is still wrong.
What if Verisign decided that people really wanted all typo domains to go to their special search page...oh wait, they already did -- it was called Sitefinder. How is that any different from BigPond's redirection?
It's not different. Sitefinder is also a violation of core internet protocols (DNS in that case), and anybody reasonably aware of the technical background shouted against it. And thus it went away.
It's a clear case where the opinion of the unwashed masses should not count. They can make their own net ('DummyNet') if they want. Probably it will be indistinguishable from Cable TV.
The complaint is one thing (I don't presume to tell Australians how their laws and enforcement thereof should work) but the redirection strikes me as an entirely sensible compromise favoring usability over cybergeezer purity.
The complaint is indeed one thing. But the redirection is not a sensible compromise, but a violation of core internet protocols. They messed up once with the wrong ad, and once again with the reaction. On the "three strikes" theory, they've got one to go before their pipe should be cut (no double meaning intended;-)
One problem is that legitimite visitors from BigPond cannot reach www.caseydonovan.com at all.
BTW, the original link points to a rather mild entry page with an legal age disclaimer - whoever clicks through this either knows what he does, or needs a medium shock to reactivate comatose parts of the brain anyways.
On the other hand, following the article link, I ended up at the Australian Idol site, but mistook it for a gay porn site anyways, until I noticed the address.
Tidal power is the interesting one. Tidal power takes energy from the moons rotation around the world, so taking energy from it will eventually change the moons orbit by reducing its angular velocity, at which point it would start to decend and eventually crash into the earth.
Some quick calulations show that if we were to derive all our energy (estimated to be 5*10^19 J per year) from tidal power, the moon, which has gravitational potential energy of roughly 2* 10^20 jm-1, would lose altitude at roughly 25cm per year and crash into the earth in roughly 1 billion years.
Good basic thinking, wrong assumptions. Tidal power comes from the Earth rotation with respect to the moon, and slows it done (many moons and the planet Mercury are already "tidally locked" to their respective primary, as is the Moon to the Earth). Surprisingly, in order to maintain angular momentum, the moon is actually pushed out as Earth rotation slows down. Tidal forces convert rotational kinetic energy into gravitational potential energy
However, all this occurs wether we extract usable energy from the tides or not. We might speed it up very very slowly.
Google deserves to lose since it prefers H-1B workers and other foreign workers over American citizens. More than 30% of Google's workforce is current or former H-1B holders.
Is that the same 30% of Google's workforce that olds PhDs? Google is hiring the best - good for them. And it is employing them in the US (or in Switzerland, another low income country), so the money is not actually leaving the economy.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it is a lot to ask to buy a smaller SUV as the third family car. Much better for 1000 Chinese peasants to have their rice uncooked on Mondays - they will still be allowed hot food the other 6 days of the week!
I have not seen any valid indication that moving to cleaner energy will have a negative medium or long term economic influence. In Germany, wind turbine makers and solar energy companies are some of the most profitable at the moment. Of course, the longer you wait, the more you will fall behind.
There are a couple of questions here. First, should Apple pressure Think Secret et al. I say no. They should get their own act together.
Secondly, did Think Secret actually break the law? That is debatable. It will be hard to show that they knew that their sources are bound by confidentiality agreement. As far as I know, Think Secret operates an anonymous (electronic) drop box. They may have reason to believe that some of their sources do violate such agreements, but it could just as well be that they believed Apple uses these mechanisms to create buzz.
And thirdly, is the law as stated right? Again, I say no. The problem should be entirely between Apple and the leakers. Those are the people who do have a contractual relationship. It should not be my problem to check other peoples contractual constraints.
I'll stick to my 1 GHz TiBook for the moment, although the new machines (and the new prices!) are tempting.
To put things into perspective, the earthquake and tsunami in eastern Asia is like 9/11 over and over again, every day, for two years.
We should indeed allocate our funds to deal with serious threats.
Freedom of speech is there to protect unpopular speech - popular speech does not need extra protection.
No, I don't have a perfect solution (neither to SS nor to global warning) either.
I like the walking version a little bit better, but the message remains the same.
It's "Walk softly and carry a big stick", not "Shout at everybody and wave your big stick threateningly".
You can run X11 in two different modes on MacOS X - full-screen or rootless. If you run it full-screen, you can switch from X11 to Aqua and back with a simple keyboard or mouse command. I surf with Safari and use iTunes and the Apple DVD player, but all my work is done purely on the X11 side, which just looks like Linux unless you look quite deeply.
If you run X11 rootless, X11 and Aqua share a single sceen, and applications are running side by side. Apple even gives you a special window manager to make things look and integrate nicely (I'm using blackbox, though ;-).
In my experience, XFree installed via the Fink is more stable and just as fast as X11 from the Panther CDs. But my usage pattern may be atypical.
BTW, when I got my Powerbook in late 2002, I fully planned to install Linux. I still did not get around to it - OS-X with X11 and Fink is UNIX enough for all my needs (and I've been a UNIX guy since SunOS 3.2).
The problem with plants grown in intensive agriculture is that you need a lot of additional energy (i.e. to make fertilizer from atmospheric nitrogen, to run tractors, ...) that your energy balance might be negative.
How desperate do you have to be to point to all those hypothetical papers nobody dares to write?
Indeed, I find that a very good thing. You can argue about overtime or long hours all you want. But if overtime is free for the employer, he has no financial incentive to avoid it by hiring enough people. Overtime should always cost the employer more than regular time.
Of course I'd rather base my decisions on real science, as summarized in the IPCC reports and validated by the US National Assesment on Climate Change.
I've decided early on that I want to do interesting stuff. I spend nearly 1/3rd of my time working (1/2 if you don't count sleep), so I want to do things I like while working. I did CS (major) and physics (Different university system - you choose one major and one minor subject over here. You earn a degree only in the major. Getting two degrees is extremely rare).
As it turns out, the physics stuff does not help me directly in my job (although it does help with developing models and abstract thought). But all that theoretical computer science I absolutely hated as an undergrad now helps me to be an excellent developer (and a decent research scientist). You can get a very different insight into programming if you have enough depth, and you need to reinvent the wheel less often.
While I'm not getting rich fast, I'm not starving either, and I've been to conferences or teaching/research visits on all continents but South America and Antarctica. I find it quite rewarding (although the PostDoc job mill also can get to your nerves).
Of course, basic programming skills are useful for nearly any job today. But computer science is not programming, just as handling a hammer does not make you into an architect.
Of course having a more compact syntax (and more powerful language constructs) helps keeping the nominal line count down. But unless you manage to keep the semantic complexity down, you only get a very small part of the benefit - seeing the whole function at once. The bigger part - breaking the design down to a managable level - comes from limiting complexity, not line count.
(Use html format character entities - yes, I was to lazy to do it in my original reply).
Citroen dispelled such a rumor about the 2CV in elder times by offering a replacement car to everyone who managed to overturn a 2CV. AFAIK, they never had to pony up.
It's a clear case where the opinion of the unwashed masses should not count. They can make their own net ('DummyNet') if they want. Probably it will be indistinguishable from Cable TV.
One problem is that legitimite visitors from BigPond cannot reach www.caseydonovan.com at all.
BTW, the original link points to a rather mild entry page with an legal age disclaimer - whoever clicks through this either knows what he does, or needs a medium shock to reactivate comatose parts of the brain anyways.
On the other hand, following the article link, I ended up at the Australian Idol site, but mistook it for a gay porn site anyways, until I noticed the address.
However, all this occurs wether we extract usable energy from the tides or not. We might speed it up very very slowly.