- A people form a state through a social contract - The state takes ownership of raw materials - The state lets others take the raw materials in exchange for royalties
The materials are owned by everybody, and everybody benefits from them. Given this, who are they being stolen from?
The question of how a given piece of land came to be controlled by a state is irrelevant, so long as the people on that land are represented by that state.
Re:Why so much disbelief in aliens among scientist
on
Exoplanet Count Tops 700
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Why do well-educated scientists consider alien life, even if it's very simple or nothing like life here on earth, to be such an absurd idea? Why do they have so much trouble considering it with any seriousness?
The scientists in your family may not be representative of scientists in general.
I've always assumed that most people who know the numbers involved think that alien life must exist (with a hundred billion stars per galaxy and hundred billion galaxies, it seem like there are pretty good odds).
Whether we'll communicate with, travel to, or be visited by aliens is an entirely different question with a lot more scope for doubt.
Re:They should have trained 3 more soldiers.
on
The F-35 Story
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· Score: 1
I think I'm dyslexic. That, or I'm more 1334 than 1337.
Also, it's Bremer, not Bremner.
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
on
The F-35 Story
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I was first really shocked about military outsourcing when I saw a photo of L. Paul Bremner III, the proconsul for Iraq, being guarded by a group of Blackwater people.
How on earth is this justified - forget the question of allegiance and loyalty, outsourcing has got to cost more than using your own troops.
What happens now seems to be - USG invests hunderds of thousands or millions of dollars in training for 1334 soldiers and pays them a civil service salary - Mercenary corp hire them and pays them double their salary - USG contracts Mercenary corp, and gets its own soldiers back and four times the price and one quarter the loyalty.
I've always wondered how supercomputer time is rationed. How much does computer time on these things cost? How is the cost calculated? Is time divided up something like how it's done on a large telescope, where the controlling organization get proposals from scientists, then divvies up the computer's available time according to what's been accepted? Do they multi-task (run more than one scientists' program at one time)? Does the computer run at top power (10pf) at all times, or does the resource usage go up and down? And lastly, how hard is it to write programs to run on these things? Do the scientists do it themselves, and if so, do the people who run the supercomputer audit the code before it runs?
Do the programs that run on supercomputers ever crash the system?
But with version 2.1 they removed functionality that was working fine on version 2.0.x. Developers don't care and won't restore things.
What functionality?
I'm not completely happy, either, to be honest; I don't like the Find dialog in 2.3 (it's an extra toolbar rather than a dialog box, so both the tab bar & viewport move down vertically whenever you open it). Thinkpad trackpoint scrolling broke in 2.3. The prefs dialog could use some housekeeping, too, IMHO.
But overall, it's still my favourite browser. KaiRo stopped being the main developer recently; he's still on the team but no longer directing things. Here's hoping he stays active enough to keeping things going as well as they (generally) have been.
Seamonkey uses Gecko and is compatible with most Firefox extensions, but has a sane release schedule. 4 years from 1.0 to 2.0, 2 years from 2.0 to 2.3 (current version).
It gets new features more slowly than Firefox, but, currently at least, it is as good as Firefox (for my use, at least). Oh, and it has a menubar and statusbar.
The Imperial ships are much larger, but they have no shields. After a couple of dozen quantum torpedoes, they'd be burning wreckage. Heck, a runabout could just transport a torpedo into the bridge of a star destroyer and it'd be toast.
Their laser cannons might pack a punch, too, but all the federation ships would have to do is remodulate the shield frequencies, and they'd be useless.
You conflate what Jobs did - search for and demand things that were tasteful and well designed - with finding things that could be marketed.
Things that are well designed and things that can be marketed are not synonymous. A lot of tech companies sell things that can be marketed. DOS could be marketed.
Jobs was different, because made sure his company sold things that were well designed. That's what made him stand out, and that's why we'll miss him from Apple.
If Apple had invented the WWW, someone like you would dismiss it by saying they'd taking an existing technology (the internet) and just made it more user-friendly.
The facts in your post may be right, but the conclusion is wrong. Short term resources whose extraction can cause environmental damage should not be abandoned because of the risk, they should be extracted in a way that won't cause long-term damage: put your efforts into writing and enforcing effective regulations, and make those regulations the condition for any development. Yes, regulations can be poorly written and poorly enforced, but an effectively regulated resource industry is a much better objective than simply pretending the resource doesn't exist.
The resource for this extends beyond the obvious economic benefits. As consumers, we're partly responsible for the conditions under which the resources we consume are extracted: given this, consumers should encourage extraction in places with effective regulations. Otherwise we as a country are reaping the benefit of the resource while passing off the environmental damage to some poorer place.
I'd add that the long-term impact of short-term resources isn't just the environmental impact; assuming they did any kind of responsible investment, Pennsylvania today is probably richer than it would be if it hadn't had coal and timber industries. How many roads, universities, and towns were built with the money from those dead or dying industries?
To be sure, Republicans claim the Treasury can just "prioritise" interest payments to avoid a default. Read the meticulous analysis that Jay Powell of the Bipartisan Policy Center did of the Treasuryâ(TM)s cash flows in August for a sense of how risky that is. Among his findings:
For example, on Aug. 3, we project that the government will have about $12 billion in receipts and $32 billion in committed payments, including a $23 billion Social Security payment. And Aug. 15 presents a triple threat: a $19 billion daily deficit, a $29 billion interest payment and a quarterly refunding auction to pay off a maturing $27 billion bond.
Even assuming that Treasury manages to remain current on its debt, the firestorm that arises when vendors, pensioners and soldiers stop getting paid will be unprecedented. As the nonpartisan analysts at ISI Group note, the failure of TARP to pass on the first try in the fall of 2008 may not do justice. The main fallout then was the plunge in the stock market. This time, it will not be just financial market turmoil but âoevoter outrage associated with the prospect of an immediate 44% cut in federal spending that would instantaneously overwhelm the Capitol Hill switch boardâ. Both parties will be blamed, but Republicans more. After all, some, such as Michele Bachmann, have opposed raising the ceiling precisely to induce cuts on such a scale.
Given that every other reputable economist from the left to the right has said exactly the same thing.
I'm not an economist myself but my understanding is that US debt is used as a fundamental, secure collateral for many (most?) other financial transactions; reducing confidence in US debt reduces confidence in the underpinnings of huge swaths of the economy.
Add to that the fact that interest rates on new US debt will rise (including debt that is rolled over), raising borrowing costs for the us government considerably.
This put a smile on my face... I wanted to go but never got the time + money to do it. CmdrTaco being there and posting updates about it will have to do. Now, we all have a pair of eyes on the ground, our Nerd in Cape Canaveral.
I agree with most of what you said - modern north american liberal arts programs do have token science / math content. The only caveat I would give is that, in my experience, the reverse is true in science and engineering: such programs require a writing credit and a language credit, but don't expose BSc's and BEng's to a rigorous arts/social science curriculum.
Of course, there's only so much you can do in eight terms, but more balance could probably be achieved without too much difficulty, especially in the first two years.
For the most part, you're right, but give them credit: explosions like this do add a very very very very small amount of mass to planets without magnetic fields (at the cost of destroying all life by irradiating the surface and stripping away the atmosphere, IIRC)
There's been a tenancy to make the term 'hacker' as well as 'geek' so broad as to be useless. These days, anyone with more than a passing interest in any given hobby can call themselves a geek without being outside the common usage of the word. Listen to some of the talks at HOPE conferences and you'll hear people use word 'hacking' to describe involvement in politics, FFS.
Personally, I'm happy to keep the standard definition of Hacker (someone who's very good at and very active in computer technology or electrical engineering, to the exclusion of most or all other activities. Little social life, probably little bathing, mild to strong loner-ism, and mild to moderate social awkwardness), and the standard definition of Geek (someone who has extensive, arcane knowledge of a sub-field of technology with little to no practical benefit, coupled with at least mild social awkwardness) and shunt everyone else into the 'Maker' category or whatever.
In other words: soldering a few blinkenlights on the weekend does not make you a hacker, just as becoming proficient at your hobby doesn't make you a geek.
One category not yet defined, but very germane to this discussion, is the Nerd. The nerd is a special category, reserved for people with the traits of a geek, combined with a strong IQ (typically, with strong math skills as well), and a knowledge of the sub-field that extends beyond the arcane and into the novel: the nerd knows enough about the subject to advance the state of the art.
And you base that assertion on what? The liberal arts have a strong association with intellectualism, if by intellectual you mean knowledge for the sake of knowledge, or considering problems with no direct practical application, or novel understanding of social systems.
There are party colleges out there where people are like you describe, but anyone who's serious about liberal arts doesn't have to look hard to find intellectual stimulation, and the attitude you describe is a ticket to mediocrity (at best) at any decent college.
I've been looking for some kind of records management system, off and on, for a few months now. I'm in a small company (most of our work is in writing technical reports), but we regularly have shared projects that have dozens of static & versioned files associated with them. I don't really know what I'm looking for, but I expect it will track changes (keep multiple versions of the same file), allow for comments on changes, and be relatively painless to use on a day-to-day basis.
The review was good to see but a little hard to parse for a neophyte. Does anyone have advice re: software I should look at, or questions I should ask?
Slashdot Mirror
What a bizarre point of view.
The way it goes for raw materials is this:
- A people form a state through a social contract
- The state takes ownership of raw materials
- The state lets others take the raw materials in exchange for royalties
The materials are owned by everybody, and everybody benefits from them. Given this, who are they being stolen from?
The question of how a given piece of land came to be controlled by a state is irrelevant, so long as the people on that land are represented by that state.
Why do well-educated scientists consider alien life, even if it's very simple or nothing like life here on earth, to be such an absurd idea? Why do they have so much trouble considering it with any seriousness?
The scientists in your family may not be representative of scientists in general.
I've always assumed that most people who know the numbers involved think that alien life must exist (with a hundred billion stars per galaxy and hundred billion galaxies, it seem like there are pretty good odds).
Whether we'll communicate with, travel to, or be visited by aliens is an entirely different question with a lot more scope for doubt.
I think I'm dyslexic. That, or I'm more 1334 than 1337.
Also, it's Bremer, not Bremner.
I was first really shocked about military outsourcing when I saw a photo of L. Paul Bremner III, the proconsul for Iraq, being guarded by a group of Blackwater people.
How on earth is this justified - forget the question of allegiance and loyalty, outsourcing has got to cost more than using your own troops.
What happens now seems to be
- USG invests hunderds of thousands or millions of dollars in training for 1334 soldiers and pays them a civil service salary
- Mercenary corp hire them and pays them double their salary
- USG contracts Mercenary corp, and gets its own soldiers back and four times the price and one quarter the loyalty.
I've always wondered how supercomputer time is rationed. How much does computer time on these things cost? How is the cost calculated? Is time divided up something like how it's done on a large telescope, where the controlling organization get proposals from scientists, then divvies up the computer's available time according to what's been accepted? Do they multi-task (run more than one scientists' program at one time)? Does the computer run at top power (10pf) at all times, or does the resource usage go up and down? And lastly, how hard is it to write programs to run on these things? Do the scientists do it themselves, and if so, do the people who run the supercomputer audit the code before it runs?
Do the programs that run on supercomputers ever crash the system?
But with version 2.1 they removed functionality that was working fine on version 2.0.x. Developers don't care and won't restore things.
What functionality?
I'm not completely happy, either, to be honest; I don't like the Find dialog in 2.3 (it's an extra toolbar rather than a dialog box, so both the tab bar & viewport move down vertically whenever you open it). Thinkpad trackpoint scrolling broke in 2.3. The prefs dialog could use some housekeeping, too, IMHO.
But overall, it's still my favourite browser. KaiRo stopped being the main developer recently; he's still on the team but no longer directing things. Here's hoping he stays active enough to keeping things going as well as they (generally) have been.
Seamonkey uses Gecko and is compatible with most Firefox extensions, but has a sane release schedule. 4 years from 1.0 to 2.0, 2 years from 2.0 to 2.3 (current version).
It gets new features more slowly than Firefox, but, currently at least, it is as good as Firefox (for my use, at least). Oh, and it has a menubar and statusbar.
The Imperial ships are much larger, but they have no shields. After a couple of dozen quantum torpedoes, they'd be burning wreckage. Heck, a runabout could just transport a torpedo into the bridge of a star destroyer and it'd be toast.
Their laser cannons might pack a punch, too, but all the federation ships would have to do is remodulate the shield frequencies, and they'd be useless.
You conflate what Jobs did - search for and demand things that were tasteful and well designed - with finding things that could be marketed.
Things that are well designed and things that can be marketed are not synonymous. A lot of tech companies sell things that can be marketed. DOS could be marketed.
Jobs was different, because made sure his company sold things that were well designed. That's what made him stand out, and that's why we'll miss him from Apple.
troll
If Apple had invented the WWW, someone like you would dismiss it by saying they'd taking an existing technology (the internet) and just made it more user-friendly.
This isn't so much 'too good to be true' as it is 'too weird to be true'.
Remember the 4853th rule of the internet: find out where they get their money.
At first blush I'm guessing they're scamming for access to people's facebook data. What other angle they have, I don't see.
The facts in your post may be right, but the conclusion is wrong. Short term resources whose extraction can cause environmental damage should not be abandoned because of the risk, they should be extracted in a way that won't cause long-term damage: put your efforts into writing and enforcing effective regulations, and make those regulations the condition for any development. Yes, regulations can be poorly written and poorly enforced, but an effectively regulated resource industry is a much better objective than simply pretending the resource doesn't exist.
The resource for this extends beyond the obvious economic benefits. As consumers, we're partly responsible for the conditions under which the resources we consume are extracted: given this, consumers should encourage extraction in places with effective regulations. Otherwise we as a country are reaping the benefit of the resource while passing off the environmental damage to some poorer place.
I'd add that the long-term impact of short-term resources isn't just the environmental impact; assuming they did any kind of responsible investment, Pennsylvania today is probably richer than it would be if it hadn't had coal and timber industries. How many roads, universities, and towns were built with the money from those dead or dying industries?
To be sure, Republicans claim the Treasury can just "prioritise" interest payments to avoid a default. Read the meticulous analysis that Jay Powell of the Bipartisan Policy Center did of the Treasuryâ(TM)s cash flows in August for a sense of how risky that is. Among his findings:
For example, on Aug. 3, we project that the government will have about $12 billion in receipts and $32 billion in committed payments, including a $23 billion Social Security payment. And Aug. 15 presents a triple threat: a $19 billion daily deficit, a $29 billion interest payment and a quarterly refunding auction to pay off a maturing $27 billion bond.
Even assuming that Treasury manages to remain current on its debt, the firestorm that arises when vendors, pensioners and soldiers stop getting paid will be unprecedented. As the nonpartisan analysts at ISI Group note, the failure of TARP to pass on the first try in the fall of 2008 may not do justice. The main fallout then was the plunge in the stock market. This time, it will not be just financial market turmoil but âoevoter outrage associated with the prospect of an immediate 44% cut in federal spending that would instantaneously overwhelm the Capitol Hill switch boardâ. Both parties will be blamed, but Republicans more. After all, some, such as Michele Bachmann, have opposed raising the ceiling precisely to induce cuts on such a scale.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/06/republicans-and-debt-ceiling
So just stopping spending isn't that simple, and if you do manage to do it without defaulting on debt payments, you'll disrupt many lives.
Given that every other reputable economist from the left to the right has said exactly the same thing.
I'm not an economist myself but my understanding is that US debt is used as a fundamental, secure collateral for many (most?) other financial transactions; reducing confidence in US debt reduces confidence in the underpinnings of huge swaths of the economy.
Add to that the fact that interest rates on new US debt will rise (including debt that is rolled over), raising borrowing costs for the us government considerably.
http://www.economist.com/node/18866851
http://www.economist.com/node/18928600
This put a smile on my face... I wanted to go but never got the time + money to do it. CmdrTaco being there and posting updates about it will have to do. Now, we all have a pair of eyes on the ground, our Nerd in Cape Canaveral.
I agree with most of what you said - modern north american liberal arts programs do have token science / math content. The only caveat I would give is that, in my experience, the reverse is true in science and engineering: such programs require a writing credit and a language credit, but don't expose BSc's and BEng's to a rigorous arts/social science curriculum.
Of course, there's only so much you can do in eight terms, but more balance could probably be achieved without too much difficulty, especially in the first two years.
For the most part, you're right, but give them credit: explosions like this do add a very very very very small amount of mass to planets without magnetic fields (at the cost of destroying all life by irradiating the surface and stripping away the atmosphere, IIRC)
You need to see both to get a fuller appreciation of the scale, but the 2nd video in the article is more impressive, IMHO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpkXhlPIINQ
There's been a tenancy to make the term 'hacker' as well as 'geek' so broad as to be useless. These days, anyone with more than a passing interest in any given hobby can call themselves a geek without being outside the common usage of the word. Listen to some of the talks at HOPE conferences and you'll hear people use word 'hacking' to describe involvement in politics, FFS.
Personally, I'm happy to keep the standard definition of Hacker (someone who's very good at and very active in computer technology or electrical engineering, to the exclusion of most or all other activities. Little social life, probably little bathing, mild to strong loner-ism, and mild to moderate social awkwardness), and the standard definition of Geek (someone who has extensive, arcane knowledge of a sub-field of technology with little to no practical benefit, coupled with at least mild social awkwardness) and shunt everyone else into the 'Maker' category or whatever.
In other words: soldering a few blinkenlights on the weekend does not make you a hacker, just as becoming proficient at your hobby doesn't make you a geek.
One category not yet defined, but very germane to this discussion, is the Nerd. The nerd is a special category, reserved for people with the traits of a geek, combined with a strong IQ (typically, with strong math skills as well), and a knowledge of the sub-field that extends beyond the arcane and into the novel: the nerd knows enough about the subject to advance the state of the art.
And you base that assertion on what? The liberal arts have a strong association with intellectualism, if by intellectual you mean knowledge for the sake of knowledge, or considering problems with no direct practical application, or novel understanding of social systems.
There are party colleges out there where people are like you describe, but anyone who's serious about liberal arts doesn't have to look hard to find intellectual stimulation, and the attitude you describe is a ticket to mediocrity (at best) at any decent college.
Moneta was the Roman goddess of memory.
It was also the name I gave to an set of in-house backup scripts I wrote a few years ago. If only I'd trademarked it!
This time, no size limits, and screw the limit.
It should be made clear that this isn't just the work of two brothers - there are ~150 people who work there.
Which isn't to diminish the accomplishment at all - what they've created really is worthy of wonder.
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN_oDdGmKyA, you won't regret it.
I've been looking for some kind of records management system, off and on, for a few months now. I'm in a small company (most of our work is in writing technical reports), but we regularly have shared projects that have dozens of static & versioned files associated with them. I don't really know what I'm looking for, but I expect it will track changes (keep multiple versions of the same file), allow for comments on changes, and be relatively painless to use on a day-to-day basis.
The review was good to see but a little hard to parse for a neophyte. Does anyone have advice re: software I should look at, or questions I should ask?