I worked a while next to a statistics department of a university. Given the wealth of the people in that building - or even the smell, on bad days, I'd say you can probably do better with your time - anywhere else.
Another obvious consequence: millions of very poor people henceforth having access to the internet, financial tools, etc. All of these millions of people have nothing to lose and only need to make pennies a day to live a life of luxury.
I'm a sysadmin, and I fear for what this will do to spam. All of the the mail, blog, forum, ... kinds.
Weird that nobody realizes that the constitution does say that the government not only has the right to violate any (other) law to violate the constitution, but actually has the duty to do so.
To protect the constitution (and it's application within it's jurisdiction), the president (ie. the government) has the right AND the duty to violate ANY American law except clause 1 and 2 of the constitution. To put it plainly : the ONLY thing the president cannot do to defend the constitution is to mess with elections. That's it. It also states that the president is the person making the assessment if an action is necessary (and thus, not the courts, though of course, the president can be removed from office for making a decision that either congress or the courts think was not reasonable. That does not change the fact that the president cannot be punished for implementing that action. The maximum penalty for any crime for the president is impeachment, unless this is specifically extended by congress).
This is because article 2 of the constitution overrides every other law in the US, except article 1, including all following articles and amendments.
If you think this sequence is by accident, you should talk to a lawyer about things like this. Sequence in laws, and the principle that earlier rules override later ones is extremely well established technique of law.
What everybody seems to think these laws state, that you have extensive rights without any qualifications whatsoever, is just plainly not true. If you are a danger to the application of the US constitution within US borders, the president is not bound to any standard, nor does he have to respect any form of human rights in his attempts to stop you from doing so.
If you think it is better in European states, think again. Specifically, read what the Dutch monarch is allowed to do (e.g. she can have someone killed - both her and the actual murderer go free, she can confiscate any amount of property - with no legal recourse for anyone, etc.). Similar things are true for other Euro countries.
I would argue that C++ is a language that effectively encompasses all other (imperative) languages. Where other languages have a few options, C++ has all of them.
If you know C++ you know everything a cpu is capable of. In practice all ther other languages JS/ObjC/Java/... essentially take C++ and take out parts of the language.
This makes it very easy and very fast to get a good understanding of any (imperative) language for a C++ engineer.
There's also, when it comes to hirability, the other end of the equation. When you know Java, PHP or even Ruby and Python, you've got craploads of competition. There's loads and loads of acceptably capable programmers in those languages.
I think the amount of good enough C/C++ programmers is relatively tiny. Certainly compared to the amount of code in these languages.
This thread is working on a false premise. The article claims that all photosynthesis-based energy production is inherently massively inefficient and thus, a bad idea. This includes everything from corn ethanol to algae.
He claims leaving trees in place and just burning regular oil instead is better for the CO2 fixation, both in the short and long term.
I take offence at your blanket use of "religion". It is not "religion" at all. It is doubly hypocritical since the biggest atheist state of the 20th century has sponsored plenty of terrorist bombings itself.
It's not religion that's causing this. Don't throw the good religions in with the bad.
How about we take the declaration of human rights solution. As soon as one side in the conflict uses non-clearly marked military bases and/or forces, the other side gains the right to fire on civilians if they suspect (not: can prove) that there are disguised combatants and/or military equipment near them.
Does that sound reasonable ?
If Israel stops fighting today, tomorrow the holocaust restarts. If Palestine stops fighting today, tomorrow we have peace.
Except that will not accomplish Palestinian goals at all : if Palestinians show restraint, that will be followed immediately by Israeli restraint, and there will be peace.
Palestinians (well, Hamas, but they do have a lot of popular support, probably close to 50%) want to conquer Israel, so obviously they attack. They inspire their life on their islamic prophet, who amongst other things was a person that personally started over 13 wars and had over 1000 people executed on a whim.
I don't understand how anyone can reasonably expect non-violence from them and be taken seriously.
I don't think you can have it both ways. Either we can predict the effect of things on the environment (co2, and other things we could use for geoengineering), or we cannot.
If you believe we cannot predict and prevent cascading problems or adapt to them then you're the same thing as a climate change denier, since who's to say that we got the cascading effect of co2 increase right ?
If you believe we can predict those consequences, then geoengineering will allow the human race to take control of the climate. So the problem of climate change becomes the problem of finding the set of consequences we like best. Climate change becomes a problem similar to animals digging holes in a dam : an inconvenience to be monitored, but nothing more.
This ignores political problems of course. Geoengineering would make one hell of a weapon of war, for example. China, given it's coastline, might choose to raise the sea level by 5 meters with little consequence for them, but major US population centers would become unliveable (New York, San Francisco), as would many European cities. Geoengineering, used like that, can do far more damage than 5000 nukes could.
Does this even matter ? "Average" income hasn't been growing now in America for about a decade. If you look closely there are 2 factors at play :
1) increase in population
2) stagnant (not decreasing) wages (even inflation adjusted it's a tossup at this point)
Combined these lead to decreasing average wages. Not all that many people have really lost income, but there are more people for the same jobs, so many people have lost jobs entirely. There are more people with essentially zero income.
The easy solution, stopping 1) from happening (immigration controls, population controls, ...) won't work due to massive state obligations (some inflation-adjusted to make matters worse) to the soon-to-be-pensioned. It's even impossible to stop immigration and replace it by increased fertility because increased fertility is a net-cost to society until 20 years pass.
Even putting aside the morality questions, (almost) stopping immigration might have worked 10-15 years ago, but today, it seems it will make matters worse, not better.
Worldwide the situation is even more striking :
1) massive rise in average incomes (factors, 2,3,4 depending on how far you go back)
2) more massive rise in population (let's say about 1.5*income rise)
For close to the last 4 decades, 2 has outstripped 1 to the point that a lot of people are claiming that we are within 10% of the planet's carrying capacity with abundant energy sources (read : cheap oil).
Jee, I sure hope nothing happens to that cheap oil ... Oops.
Unfortunately renewable energy suffers from the reverse problem of immigration : right now, we have renewable energy with a EROI factors of 2-3 over a period of 2-3 decades. That means that for the first 10 years renewable energy INCREASES our dependance on fossil fuels. The only energy type that doesn't suffer this problem is nuclear energy, and it has other problems.
The problem with all the stupid "this is not islam" posts is simple :
Did "the prophet" kill people (cruelly) just for disagreeing with him according to muslim scripture ?
And the answer is a blatant and simple yes. Nor did he even look for the facts, he had an entire village executed because some random woman came to him and claimed they laughed at him. Somehow allah failed to inform the prophet of what later turned out to be the case : that she had been passed over for marriage and wanted a mad mob to attack that village. Of course the prophet ordered his followers to do exactly that.
Is this the only case of muslims killing for idiotic reasons "on orders from allah" in muslim scripture ? Not at all.
How exactly can you hope to claim those random mob attacks are not part of your religion, given these simple facts ? The answer is you can't, but you do it anyway, knowing full well that there are about as many muslims who know what their religion is, and have read the core texts as Christians, or even atheists for that matter : barely any at all, and most of those are silent because the institutions their part of have ulterior motives.
The problem is that while I agree with your intent, you are a fraud, and that offends my scientific education. No matter how horrible or disgusting the truth is, it's better than lies.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but the Higgs Boson does not have anything to do with gravity, with one curious exception.
But it's "main" job is inertia. The Higgs Boson get us one step closer to explaining why it takes more energy to start a proton moving than to start an electron moving. It does not explain them attracting eachother.
The one curious problem with Higgs' Boson not being related to gravity is that for some unknown and currently unexplained reason, inertial mass is equal (except for a constant factor) to gravitic mass.
That's true to a degree. But when you think about it, there does not exist any physical quantity that can be specified as an irrational number (because every measurement is quantized, so you could argue even a whole number. Rational numbers and whole numbers are models of eachother however, so there is arguably no "fundamental" difference).
As to why people can calculate better/easier with relatively low numbers compared to irrational fractions ... does that really need explaining ?
How much is 1+1 vs how much is 1/7 tau + 1/3 tau. Degrees are very useful and quick indeed.
This is a cloud filesystem with synchronization we're talking about. Yeah, sure Google is working on one (slowly).
Also:
- Amazon
- Shelfspace (rackspace's real name)
- Telstra
- Microsoft
- Apple
- Box.net
- Live mesh
- Oosah
- JungleDisk
- VMWare
- blackblaze
- ...
If google is more dangerous than normal competitors it's because they usually know what they're doing. But this niche is drowning in competition with or without google.