Not only that, but according to the article, Chen is not actually challenging the Chinese Communist Party. He's alleging that lower-level government officials are not adhering to the official policies of the CCP.
If you've ever looked at the official policies of many regimes that are totalitarian in practice (such as, say, the Constitution of the USSR), you'll see that challenging government officials to adhere to the official policies of the government/party very often is challenging the ruling party.
"Official policies" are quite often nothing more than another form of propaganda.
I don't know why you suggest that looking up his coherent response to what appears to be you (or at least, someone in the Perl community who uses the same handle you do here) on the topic, which is focussed on external DSLs here. And, of course, the posts you pointed to earlier discussing Cosine's view of Ruby's superiority are further developments of that post focussing more on internal ("Language-powered") DSLs.
So, apparently, you are a Perl-fan upset because a Rubyist has said that Ruby has better than Perl for DSLs, and has blown that up into a fantasy that the entire Ruby community is obsessed with claiming that Ruby invented everything.
I mean, seriously, you've so far posted three examples of this supposed trend in the Ruby community, and all three are posts from one blogger that aren't about Ruby inventing anything (in fact, in the post you point to in the parent, he specifically credits the feature going back to Lisp), but simply about that one particular blogger's view of Ruby's utility in that domain vs. Perl's.
In the first, he discussed his view of Ruby's superiority to Perl in the area of "language-powered" (i.e., internal) DSLs, and some discussion of the advantages of internal DSLs and when using internal DSLs is appropriate vs. external DSLs that (except for the specific examples of the author's experience) isn't particularly Ruby-centric but fairly broadly applicable to most languages where both internal and external DSLs are practical options.
The second (which you claim is a "better" of implicit claims of Ruby's inventing things) is kind of a wandering discussion of things the author didn't realize that Ruby allowed, and whether or not the author really knows Perl better than Ruby. Again, it doesn't even implicitly make any reference to Ruby inventing or innovating compared to the whole palette of other languages available, or even make comparisons, explicitly or implicitly, between Ruby and any language other than Perl (or, I suppose, if you squint at it right, C).
my claim is that there is a very vocal coterie in the Ruby community that seems to pride itself on slapping new names on old, old practices and parading them around as if they were new.
Maybe there is such a "very vocal coterie", but if the two examples you point to are the best examples you can present, I don't think you have a very good basis for that claim. Now, certainly, I've seen lots of examples (with any new language) of people who don't have lots of experience with its antecedents seeing something for the first time in the new language that exist in its inspirations and pointing to that as something the new language brought to them and, less often, to programming in general. I've seen it with Ruby, with Python, with Java, with C++ (which, back when it was trendy and relatively new rather than stodgy and old, I saw people credit with OOP as if it was a C++ innovation), etc. So I'm hardly surprised that users of a language mistake the things it revealed to them with innovations. But, really, so what? Is it a bad thing that a language provides and introduces useful techniques to people who for one reason or another missed the preceding language that provided support for the technique, or were turned off by some other feature of that language before they discovered the technique?
Why do you need to learn 4 completely different syntaxes (<<, ", ', and %w) in order to *read* a string constant in Ruby?
The string literal types in Ruby, then they are single-quoted (', %q), double-quoted (", %Q, %), non-indentable here document with double-quoting rules (<<), non-indentable here document with single-quoting rules (<<'), indentable here document with double-quoting rules (<<-), and indentable here document with single-quoting rules(<<-'). That's either 6 or 4, depending on whether you consider the difference between indentable and non-indentable here documents significant, but not the 4 you refer to.
%w and %W are two (different exactly as single- and double-quoted string literal syntaxes are) array literal syntaxes.
Ask any newbie Rubyist to tell the difference between these. In my experience, they're clueless about %w (and there's not even really an easy place to look it up!)
What is that parenthetical supposed to mean? I mean, look in the index of the pickaxe under "%w". What's the problem?
You can still spot what they are running on Netcraft
Yes, I can. And when I do, I find that contrary to your claims, neither the Ruby language site (which is www.ruby-lang.org, not www.ruby.com) nor 43things.com is running PHP. Rubyonrails.(org/com) is. www.ruby.com doesn't show PHP on Netcraft either, but isn't really relevant to the Ruby programming language in the first place.
and ask them why they are running PHP and they will tell you; they have responded in the past to such inquiries with what I am telling you.
Where? Here's DHH's explanation for Rubyonrails.org's use of PHP (from the rubyonrails.org blog:
PHP, because its a great language for small degrees of dynamic elements. Like, say, including a static footer and header, which is what we use it for here. Firing up Rails to do something so simple just because you think it'll impress people with a single track of all or nothing would have been the nut case way to go.
Just because we love and build Rails, doesn't mean we don't appreciate or use other technologies when they're appropriate. Apart from the performance problems with Trac, we love that too. Even though its, gulp, built in Python! Yeah, I know, I can barely contain the drama either.
Strangely, no mention of using PHP for "scaling", which you claim is the motivation and the explanation that "they" give. So, out of the three Ruby-related sites you claim say they are using PHP for scaling that somehow prove that Ruby can't scale, one isn't the site you seem to think it is, 2 aren't (whether you check the site you give the address for or the actual site you seem to think that address refers to) using PHP based on the source you claim confirms that they are, and the one that is using PHP doesn't explain that use with the explanation you say they give.
It would be hard for you to be more wrong about this.
Okay-- the linux PC SOLD OUT. How can you argue with a product selling out?
A product selling out means perhaps nothing more than that it had a really good marketing campaign. It certainly doesn't prove that it was, even in the short term, worthwhile to those who bought it, or that it would be worthwhile to anyone else.
Now, if a product sells out based on heavy repeat sales after users have had a chance to evaluate it in use, that might say more about its utility. But that's not the issue here.
... except for languages such as Perl, Smalltalk, PHP, Lisp, Scheme, and I believe Python and Tcl.
Yes, almost all, perhaps all, of the things (including with regard to DSLs) that Ruby is noted for being good for, one or more of those languages is also good at. So what?
It's amusing and a little disturbing to see all of the fervor in some parts of the Ruby community as if they'd invented something that the rest of us haven't been doing in several other languages for
As far as I can tell, no one in the Ruby community is claiming that Ruby or the Ruby community invented most of the things it is known for doing well, only that it does that particular set of things well. Yes, its strengths overlap those of certain other languages. Naturally, Smalltalk, Lisp, and Perl -- which are Ruby's primary inspirations -- will have considerable overlap with Ruby's strengths, and in many cases be stronger in the specific areas from which Ruby borrows from each. And similarly naturally, other dynamic scripting languages which draw inspiration from some of the same sources will also overlap in strengths.
You seem to be irrationally infuriated by claims that no one outside of your imagination is making.
Tell it to the ruby.com or rubyonrails.com websites.
Are you perhaps thinking of ruby-lang.org? Ruby.com has nothing to do with the Ruby language.
They all rely upon PHP to scale their sites. This is a well known fact stated over and over again and that the RUBY maintainers are aware of but that the RUBY community calls a flame or FUD.
IIRC, ruby-lang.org used PHP before Radiant CMS was developed, and rubyonrails.(org/com) uses, or used, PHP for some peripheral roles, but is mostly (maybe entirely now) Rails.
But, if you've got actual evidence that they currently use PHP for scaling, as you claim, on either of those sites, please, present it. But I'm not going to take claims about the main ruby or rails websites on faith, especially from someone who doesn't know where one of those sites is located.
By your standard, it would seem that only what I've heard referred to as an "external DSL" is a real DSL. You can do them in Ruby quite easily, but "internal DSLs" are more useful because then there isn't a firm line between conventional Ruby code and the DSL.
Hygenic macros or manipulating the AST directly is closer to the line, but when you can change the actual semantics of the host language, you have something different.
Anytime you define a new function you are changing the semantics. Are you talking about changing the syntax of the host language? If macros and manipulating the AST directly are only "close to the line", you seem to be really eliminating the idea of internal DSLs (as I suggest above). That's certainly a not-unreasonable way to think of what "Domain Specific Language" might mean to you, but when you define it that way you are well on your way to speaking your own private language.
I haven't ever seen a so-called Ruby DSL that actually did anything other than slap meaningful names on method calls and classes.
The entire reason Ruby is hailed as being good for writing DSLs is that you can do things within Ruby with little more than well-chosen method names, classes, and a few minor hacks (often involve method_missing) that would take writing a parser and doing more complex work in other languages, allowing you to do in internal DSLs what would take an external DSL in many other host languages. Admittedly, you can do more with internal DSLs in some homoiconic languages like Rebol or various Lisps, but the former isn't F/OSS and the latter are (perhaps unfairly) unpopular for other reasons.
I can't help but notice that there's nothing mentioned about unicode. I don't see how a major web development language, especially one made by Japanese designers, can go so long without adding comprehensive unicode support.
Ruby's slow adoption of Unicode is largely because it was developed by a Japanese developer. See, for an overview of the issues, here. And, indeed, that's probably why, while Ruby is gaining more Unicode support, Ruby will probably not be as Unicode-centric as some languages are in the forseeable future.
Since when did "free trade" translate into an abandonment of sovereignty in favor of having an unelected global organization dictate national policy? If the people of the United States (or any country) want to ban online gambling then what business of the WTO is it?
Its the business of the WTO specifically because the US made it the WTO's business by negotiating, signing, and ratifying the treaty giving the WTO authority.
If the US didn't like the idea, the US shouldn't have done that.
Can the Netherlands file a WTO complaint because some of their products (cannabis coffee shops) illegal in the United States?
Cannabis coffee shops are not a product exported by the Netherlands which the US treats differently than domestically-produced cannabis coffee shops, so, no.
Can the United States file a complaint because some of our exports (pornography) are illegal in Saudi Arabia?
The math isn't very hard. It may not be an answer you want to hear, but it seems like a legit estimate to me.
The math is easy, the premises are wrong. Its possible to get much lower than $1/song (or equivalent number of bytes of content) just buying from the iTunes Store (not counting other legal sources of content that might fill up an iPod.)
For instance, albums typically cost $9.99 an album for ~12-16 songs, often much lower for classical, etc. And while video is more expensive per item, it is, IIRC, far less expensive per byte for typical commercial content than music on the iPod.
But given that the going rate is $.99/song
Only if you are buying content the most expensive way possible: single songs one-at-a-time.
and given that most of the most commercial bands want to make money and given that people seem to like the more commercial bands, I think it's a fair estimate.
Using the most expensive possible method is not a way to get a "fair" estimate, even with those assumptions.
I mean honestly, how different is this to dialing ahead with your order from a cell phone? That uses wireless technology to skip queues & waiting too.
Its not much different in outline, its different only in the mechanics of implementation. Of course, patents don't cover outlines, they cover mechanics of implementation, so noticing that this is similar but in the mechanics of implementation is not really a good argument against patentability. The broad outline is fairly obvious, but without reading the actual patent (rather than a popular media report that provides no useful information) I don't have much opinion on whether the specific claims and method patented is obvious.
I would guess that its either so obvious that it should be unpatentable or, if its non-obvious, there are so many ways to implement the same user experience as to make the patent mostly useless except for defensive purposes. But which one of those, I can't guess.
Perhaps instead of blindly siding with what the biased media tells you, you can do this research yourself next time.
Perhaps next time you want to discuss doing research for yourself, you will link to actual science and not political posturing from a politician's office. You'll note that the quotes they highlight in several cases don't even to disagree with the IPCC position (the consensus that the report supposedly "busts"), they disagree with things that the quotes themselves present as exaggerations that go beyond the IPCC position.
Taking desperate political spin as truth without even reading it thoroughly isn't doing research for yourself. Its being just as gullible as someone who sides with the "biased media", perhaps moreso given that the bias of politicians doesn't even have the superficial concealment that most media outlets try to layer over whatever biases they might have.
However, even the present NTSC resolution is enough for most TV watching.
In a "640K should be enough for anyone sense", perhaps.
It seems doubtful that displays with more resolution than HD DVD will become common.
Why?
Also, HD displays are far more expensive.
Eh. Moderate sized 1080p displays can be had for ~$1000 and falling. 720p displays and 1080i seem to be beginning to get squeezed out. because of the lack of room for intermediate resolutions in the prices in the market.
Would people actually want to pay more again, for resolution that is so great they cannot see it unless they are very close to the display?
You don't have to be any closer to see the detail on a higher resolution display if it simply takes up more of your visual field. "What we have no is all anyone will ever want" is almost always wrong.
$30 for 700gb may be fairly good cost-per-gigabyte, but it's only write once. An external hard drive would probably be a batter backup method.
For archiving, including archival backups, a write-once solution isn't less good than a rewritable one, it may even be better, all other things being equal, than a rewritable one.
Actually, you cross over a LOT sooner in convenience.
That's a good point, but its squishy and subjective; the pure price crossover is harder (now, of course, in a business setting when you have a concrete costs with labor-hours, the "convenience" crossover is a hard cost issue, too.)
I'm with you on the burner, but last I checked I spent ~$30 for 15 duel-layer DVDs (8 gigs each, 120gigs total) - so, around 10x the cost/size ratio of this new hologram-DVD. Eventually, the burner will pay for itself.
Assuming DVDs are $30 for 120 GB with a $100 reader/writer, and the new disks are $30 per 700 GB with a $3,000 reader/writer, you crossover with a mass-archive need of ~14 TB.
Which isn't all that astronomical (though enough that its probably not worth it for most personal users yet), and I would presume that as a new technology, both the media and reader/writer costs are going to come down more quickly than with the more established DVDs.
Yes, the temperature readings are facts; but the theory of global warming is not.
There is no "theory of global warming". There are various related theories explaining particular aspects of global warming, and many of them are fairly well-tested in outline, though precise parameters have some uncertainty.
Indeed, over the past 50 years, it has been shown a gentle warming of.5C. That is not statistically significant, and you know that.
I don't think you know what "statistically significant" means. Its not term that applies to the magnitude of the change.
But you are making the leap that since temperature readings are facts, then so must be global warming.
Long-term increase in temperatures around the globe is global warming.
Looking at only 50 years of temperatures
We're not looking at 50 years of temperatures. We're looking at more than 50 years of direct readings, we're looking at other events which have well-established links to those readings but which are available farther back in time, providing indirect readings back centuries.
True, you might possibly push the temperature aggregately -- assuming there were no other natural environmental factors (direct sun flares, enormous crashing asteroids, Yellowstone exploding, etc.).
Since those natural events would, presumably, with or without the human intervention (if that's not the case, they are actually anthropogenic effects), they don't negate any influence humane effort can have over the the course of climate. They change the baseline around which human effects center, of course, but that's a different issue.
But speaking of aggregately, that only works if you get everyone to lower emissions.
No, it works if you lower overall emissions, which is not the same as "getting everyone to lower emissions". And even if you merely reduce the growth in overall emissions, you reduce the rate at which the existing problem is made worse.
There are. They are mostly, in the US, trucks and busses, though there has been some talk of them for cars in the US now that the US is switching (in 2009, IIRC) to clean diesel. With the existing US diesel fuel, diesel cars don't meet emissions standards (greenhouse gases aren't the only pollutants in the world) in some parts of the US to start with, so they aren't an ideal platform to make a car that is going to have a premium cost for technology where an important selling point (fuel prices not being high enough to make them a cost winner for most people) is reduced environmental impact.
In europe they have cars like the citroen that can get 60+ mpg. If the prius is a corolla with 20% improved milage, if we apply that here we're talking nearly 80 mpg in a hybrid version.
A Prius isn't a Corolla, and diesel hybrids don't get as much of an efficiency boost as gasoline hybrids because diesels don't have as much inefficiency of the type that hybrids correct in gasoline engines. They are cleaner and more efficient than non-hybrid diesels, but the improvement isn't as great.
But what difference does it make if you're sticking your hand or of an "average car" or not? Shouldn't the drag caused by your hand be the same?
I would thinkthe drag caused by sticking your hand out of the window of a car would depend on the aerodynamics of the car: you have to account for the additional drag from opening the window in the first place, which depends on the aerodynamics of the car, and the drag caused by your hand will depend on the airflow in the immediate region around the car, which also depends on the aerodynamics of the car.
Hmmm? Since when was "global warming" a solid fact?
Since it was shown by measurements temperature measurements. Measurements are observations, and observations are (the only things which, in scientific terms, are properly labelled as) facts.
Technically, the degree to which that warming is anthropogenic and, a fortiori, the degree to which it is associated with particular causes will always be a matter of theory, rather than fact, just as, e.g., evolution and gravitation are theories.
Nevertheless, many components of the relevant theory are rather well-tested.
fact, it is quite hotly debated among scientific circles: 1)whether it even exists
No, in fact, whether there is an increase over the history of measurements in global temperatures is not hotly debated.
2)what man does to influence it,
There is little serious scientific debate over whether or not the current warming trend is substantially influenced by anthropogenic factors, especially greenhouse gas emissions. There is some debate over the precise degree, and whether other, non-anthropogenic, factors in net reinforce the warming trend or run counter to it (IIRC, the best current evidence is that the net of non-anthropogenic factors favors cooling for the last several decades despite observed continued warming, and that anthropogenic factors are, therefore, responsible for more than all of the observed warming. But there is certainly some debate about that, and some reasonably believe that anthropogenic factors explain less than all of the observed warming.)
(3)what natural phenomenon(s) influence(s) it,
We have a pretty good idea of which natural phenomena have major influences, though there are some gaps and some legitimate dispute about the exact contribution of each.
4)what we can do to reverse its effects.
We can't even change the course of a single thunderstorm yet, so reversing change to the climate globally seems like an exercise in futility, doesn't it?)
Its often easier to control an aggregate than the individual events that make it up. That's how (e.g.) casinos manage to operate at a profit: they don't have to control the outcome of a single spin of the roulette wheel to control the long-term payoff. Similarly, the ability to control individual weather events and the ability to influence climate are two completely different things, and the inability to do the former says nothing about ability to do the latter.
We don't even know if the sun might cause more "global warming" effects than any pollution man can make.
Actually, we have a pretty good idea of the degree of influence of "solar forcing" over the recent portion of the warming trend.
Or volcano eruptions.
We actually have a pretty good idea, here, too, that they mostly contribute to cooling in the short term, and global activity isn't overall enough to do much for long-term warming, barring a major eruption of either a giant caldera volcano (like Yellowstone) or flood basalt volcano (like the Columbia River Basalt group), none of which have occurred in (several times longer than the length of) recorded history.
Now, even if "global warming" does not exist, does this lessen the reason to reduce pollution any? Certainly not.
If it didn't, it would certainly change what constitutes pollution. Lots of greenhouse gases aren't really "pollutants" in any other sense (they don't have negative effects other than their contribution to warming at the levels they are likely to be found without controls.) "Pollution" is defined by harmful effects.
Slashdot Mirror
If you've ever looked at the official policies of many regimes that are totalitarian in practice (such as, say, the Constitution of the USSR), you'll see that challenging government officials to adhere to the official policies of the government
"Official policies" are quite often nothing more than another form of propaganda.
I don't know why you suggest that looking up his coherent response to what appears to be you (or at least, someone in the Perl community who uses the same handle you do here) on the topic, which is focussed on external DSLs here. And, of course, the posts you pointed to earlier discussing Cosine's view of Ruby's superiority are further developments of that post focussing more on internal ("Language-powered") DSLs.
So, apparently, you are a Perl-fan upset because a Rubyist has said that Ruby has better than Perl for DSLs, and has blown that up into a fantasy that the entire Ruby community is obsessed with claiming that Ruby invented everything.
I mean, seriously, you've so far posted three examples of this supposed trend in the Ruby community, and all three are posts from one blogger that aren't about Ruby inventing anything (in fact, in the post you point to in the parent, he specifically credits the feature going back to Lisp), but simply about that one particular blogger's view of Ruby's utility in that domain vs. Perl's.
In fact, he doesn't even imply "invented".
In the first, he discussed his view of Ruby's superiority to Perl in the area of "language-powered" (i.e., internal) DSLs, and some discussion of the advantages of internal DSLs and when using internal DSLs is appropriate vs. external DSLs that (except for the specific examples of the author's experience) isn't particularly Ruby-centric but fairly broadly applicable to most languages where both internal and external DSLs are practical options.
The second (which you claim is a "better" of implicit claims of Ruby's inventing things) is kind of a wandering discussion of things the author didn't realize that Ruby allowed, and whether or not the author really knows Perl better than Ruby. Again, it doesn't even implicitly make any reference to Ruby inventing or innovating compared to the whole palette of other languages available, or even make comparisons, explicitly or implicitly, between Ruby and any language other than Perl (or, I suppose, if you squint at it right, C).
Maybe there is such a "very vocal coterie", but if the two examples you point to are the best examples you can present, I don't think you have a very good basis for that claim. Now, certainly, I've seen lots of examples (with any new language) of people who don't have lots of experience with its antecedents seeing something for the first time in the new language that exist in its inspirations and pointing to that as something the new language brought to them and, less often, to programming in general. I've seen it with Ruby, with Python, with Java, with C++ (which, back when it was trendy and relatively new rather than stodgy and old, I saw people credit with OOP as if it was a C++ innovation), etc. So I'm hardly surprised that users of a language mistake the things it revealed to them with innovations. But, really, so what? Is it a bad thing that a language provides and introduces useful techniques to people who for one reason or another missed the preceding language that provided support for the technique, or were turned off by some other feature of that language before they discovered the technique?
The string literal types in Ruby, then they are single-quoted (', %q), double-quoted (", %Q, %), non-indentable here document with double-quoting rules (<<), non-indentable here document with single-quoting rules (<<'), indentable here document with double-quoting rules (<<-), and indentable here document with single-quoting rules(<<-'). That's either 6 or 4, depending on whether you consider the difference between indentable and non-indentable here documents significant, but not the 4 you refer to.
%w and %W are two (different exactly as single- and double-quoted string literal syntaxes are) array literal syntaxes.
What is that parenthetical supposed to mean? I mean, look in the index of the pickaxe under "%w". What's the problem?
Yes, I can. And when I do, I find that contrary to your claims, neither the Ruby language site (which is www.ruby-lang.org, not www.ruby.com) nor 43things.com is running PHP. Rubyonrails.(org/com) is. www.ruby.com doesn't show PHP on Netcraft either, but isn't really relevant to the Ruby programming language in the first place.
Where? Here's DHH's explanation for Rubyonrails.org's use of PHP (from the rubyonrails.org blog:
Strangely, no mention of using PHP for "scaling", which you claim is the motivation and the explanation that "they" give. So, out of the three Ruby-related sites you claim say they are using PHP for scaling that somehow prove that Ruby can't scale, one isn't the site you seem to think it is, 2 aren't (whether you check the site you give the address for or the actual site you seem to think that address refers to) using PHP based on the source you claim confirms that they are, and the one that is using PHP doesn't explain that use with the explanation you say they give.
It would be hard for you to be more wrong about this.
A product selling out means perhaps nothing more than that it had a really good marketing campaign. It certainly doesn't prove that it was, even in the short term, worthwhile to those who bought it, or that it would be worthwhile to anyone else.
Now, if a product sells out based on heavy repeat sales after users have had a chance to evaluate it in use, that might say more about its utility. But that's not the issue here.
Yes, almost all, perhaps all, of the things (including with regard to DSLs) that Ruby is noted for being good for, one or more of those languages is also good at. So what?
As far as I can tell, no one in the Ruby community is claiming that Ruby or the Ruby community invented most of the things it is known for doing well, only that it does that particular set of things well. Yes, its strengths overlap those of certain other languages. Naturally, Smalltalk, Lisp, and Perl -- which are Ruby's primary inspirations -- will have considerable overlap with Ruby's strengths, and in many cases be stronger in the specific areas from which Ruby borrows from each. And similarly naturally, other dynamic scripting languages which draw inspiration from some of the same sources will also overlap in strengths.
You seem to be irrationally infuriated by claims that no one outside of your imagination is making.
Are you perhaps thinking of ruby-lang.org? Ruby.com has nothing to do with the Ruby language.
IIRC, ruby-lang.org used PHP before Radiant CMS was developed, and rubyonrails.(org/com) uses, or used, PHP for some peripheral roles, but is mostly (maybe entirely now) Rails.
But, if you've got actual evidence that they currently use PHP for scaling, as you claim, on either of those sites, please, present it. But I'm not going to take claims about the main ruby or rails websites on faith, especially from someone who doesn't know where one of those sites is located.
Anytime you define a new function you are changing the semantics. Are you talking about changing the syntax of the host language? If macros and manipulating the AST directly are only "close to the line", you seem to be really eliminating the idea of internal DSLs (as I suggest above). That's certainly a not-unreasonable way to think of what "Domain Specific Language" might mean to you, but when you define it that way you are well on your way to speaking your own private language.
The entire reason Ruby is hailed as being good for writing DSLs is that you can do things within Ruby with little more than well-chosen method names, classes, and a few minor hacks (often involve method_missing) that would take writing a parser and doing more complex work in other languages, allowing you to do in internal DSLs what would take an external DSL in many other host languages. Admittedly, you can do more with internal DSLs in some homoiconic languages like Rebol or various Lisps, but the former isn't F/OSS and the latter are (perhaps unfairly) unpopular for other reasons.
Ruby's slow adoption of Unicode is largely because it was developed by a Japanese developer. See, for an overview of the issues, here. And, indeed, that's probably why, while Ruby is gaining more Unicode support, Ruby will probably not be as Unicode-centric as some languages are in the forseeable future.
I don't know about LWN or Freshmeat, but for Slashdot the "good", "news", and "that people want to read" features all seem optional.
Its the business of the WTO specifically because the US made it the WTO's business by negotiating, signing, and ratifying the treaty giving the WTO authority.
If the US didn't like the idea, the US shouldn't have done that.
Cannabis coffee shops are not a product exported by the Netherlands which the US treats differently than domestically-produced cannabis coffee shops, so, no.
No, again, for the same reason.
The math is easy, the premises are wrong. Its possible to get much lower than $1/song (or equivalent number of bytes of content) just buying from the iTunes Store (not counting other legal sources of content that might fill up an iPod.)
For instance, albums typically cost $9.99 an album for ~12-16 songs, often much lower for classical, etc. And while video is more expensive per item, it is, IIRC, far less expensive per byte for typical commercial content than music on the iPod.
Only if you are buying content the most expensive way possible: single songs one-at-a-time.
Using the most expensive possible method is not a way to get a "fair" estimate, even with those assumptions.
Its not much different in outline, its different only in the mechanics of implementation. Of course, patents don't cover outlines, they cover mechanics of implementation, so noticing that this is similar but in the mechanics of implementation is not really a good argument against patentability. The broad outline is fairly obvious, but without reading the actual patent (rather than a popular media report that provides no useful information) I don't have much opinion on whether the specific claims and method patented is obvious.
I would guess that its either so obvious that it should be unpatentable or, if its non-obvious, there are so many ways to implement the same user experience as to make the patent mostly useless except for defensive purposes. But which one of those, I can't guess.
Perhaps next time you want to discuss doing research for yourself, you will link to actual science and not political posturing from a politician's office. You'll note that the quotes they highlight in several cases don't even to disagree with the IPCC position (the consensus that the report supposedly "busts"), they disagree with things that the quotes themselves present as exaggerations that go beyond the IPCC position.
Taking desperate political spin as truth without even reading it thoroughly isn't doing research for yourself. Its being just as gullible as someone who sides with the "biased media", perhaps moreso given that the bias of politicians doesn't even have the superficial concealment that most media outlets try to layer over whatever biases they might have.
Usenet is, as I recall, "google-able" through Google Groups, back pretty far into what is, in internet time, the ancient history.
In a "640K should be enough for anyone sense", perhaps.
Why?
Eh. Moderate sized 1080p displays can be had for ~$1000 and falling. 720p displays and 1080i seem to be beginning to get squeezed out. because of the lack of room for intermediate resolutions in the prices in the market.
You don't have to be any closer to see the detail on a higher resolution display if it simply takes up more of your visual field. "What we have no is all anyone will ever want" is almost always wrong.
For archiving, including archival backups, a write-once solution isn't less good than a rewritable one, it may even be better, all other things being equal, than a rewritable one.
That's a good point, but its squishy and subjective; the pure price crossover is harder (now, of course, in a business setting when you have a concrete costs with labor-hours, the "convenience" crossover is a hard cost issue, too.)
Assuming DVDs are $30 for 120 GB with a $100 reader/writer, and the new disks are $30 per 700 GB with a $3,000 reader/writer, you crossover with a mass-archive need of ~14 TB.
Which isn't all that astronomical (though enough that its probably not worth it for most personal users yet), and I would presume that as a new technology, both the media and reader/writer costs are going to come down more quickly than with the more established DVDs.
There is no "theory of global warming". There are various related theories explaining particular aspects of global warming, and many of them are fairly well-tested in outline, though precise parameters have some uncertainty.
I don't think you know what "statistically significant" means. Its not term that applies to the magnitude of the change.
Long-term increase in temperatures around the globe is global warming.
We're not looking at 50 years of temperatures. We're looking at more than 50 years of direct readings, we're looking at other events which have well-established links to those readings but which are available farther back in time, providing indirect readings back centuries.
Since those natural events would, presumably, with or without the human intervention (if that's not the case, they are actually anthropogenic effects), they don't negate any influence humane effort can have over the the course of climate. They change the baseline around which human effects center, of course, but that's a different issue.
No, it works if you lower overall emissions, which is not the same as "getting everyone to lower emissions". And even if you merely reduce the growth in overall emissions, you reduce the rate at which the existing problem is made worse.
There are. They are mostly, in the US, trucks and busses, though there has been some talk of them for cars in the US now that the US is switching (in 2009, IIRC) to clean diesel. With the existing US diesel fuel, diesel cars don't meet emissions standards (greenhouse gases aren't the only pollutants in the world) in some parts of the US to start with, so they aren't an ideal platform to make a car that is going to have a premium cost for technology where an important selling point (fuel prices not being high enough to make them a cost winner for most people) is reduced environmental impact.
A Prius isn't a Corolla, and diesel hybrids don't get as much of an efficiency boost as gasoline hybrids because diesels don't have as much inefficiency of the type that hybrids correct in gasoline engines. They are cleaner and more efficient than non-hybrid diesels, but the improvement isn't as great.
I would thinkthe drag caused by sticking your hand out of the window of a car would depend on the aerodynamics of the car: you have to account for the additional drag from opening the window in the first place, which depends on the aerodynamics of the car, and the drag caused by your hand will depend on the airflow in the immediate region around the car, which also depends on the aerodynamics of the car.
This is only true for extraordinarily large values of "1".
What do you mean by Aptera's "brethren"? Electric cars from non-major manufacturers like the ZAP Xebra?
Since it was shown by measurements temperature measurements. Measurements are observations, and observations are (the only things which, in scientific terms, are properly labelled as) facts.
Technically, the degree to which that warming is anthropogenic and, a fortiori, the degree to which it is associated with particular causes will always be a matter of theory, rather than fact, just as, e.g., evolution and gravitation are theories.
Nevertheless, many components of the relevant theory are rather well-tested.
No, in fact, whether there is an increase over the history of measurements in global temperatures is not hotly debated.
There is little serious scientific debate over whether or not the current warming trend is substantially influenced by anthropogenic factors, especially greenhouse gas emissions. There is some debate over the precise degree, and whether other, non-anthropogenic, factors in net reinforce the warming trend or run counter to it (IIRC, the best current evidence is that the net of non-anthropogenic factors favors cooling for the last several decades despite observed continued warming, and that anthropogenic factors are, therefore, responsible for more than all of the observed warming. But there is certainly some debate about that, and some reasonably believe that anthropogenic factors explain less than all of the observed warming.)
We have a pretty good idea of which natural phenomena have major influences, though there are some gaps and some legitimate dispute about the exact contribution of each.We can't even change the course of a single thunderstorm yet, so reversing change to the climate globally seems like an exercise in futility, doesn't it?)
Its often easier to control an aggregate than the individual events that make it up. That's how (e.g.) casinos manage to operate at a profit: they don't have to control the outcome of a single spin of the roulette wheel to control the long-term payoff. Similarly, the ability to control individual weather events and the ability to influence climate are two completely different things, and the inability to do the former says nothing about ability to do the latter.
Actually, we have a pretty good idea of the degree of influence of "solar forcing" over the recent portion of the warming trend.
We actually have a pretty good idea, here, too, that they mostly contribute to cooling in the short term, and global activity isn't overall enough to do much for long-term warming, barring a major eruption of either a giant caldera volcano (like Yellowstone) or flood basalt volcano (like the Columbia River Basalt group), none of which have occurred in (several times longer than the length of) recorded history.
If it didn't, it would certainly change what constitutes pollution. Lots of greenhouse gases aren't really "pollutants" in any other sense (they don't have negative effects other than their contribution to warming at the levels they are likely to be found without controls.) "Pollution" is defined by harmful effects.