VladRussian2

>You're essentially arguing against all free trade.

it is a stretch. Free trade just isn't always the best approach to every situation.

>A world that relies on trade is a world at peace.

again, big stretch. Just for example:

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21578978-world-...

"Rather, the world of 1913 was quite like that of 2013: modern, substantially urbanised and, even as Woodrow Wilson set about slashing import tariffs, thriving on global trade. "

Norway is in Europe where dairy is a staple food. So here you go:

"A country can do without uranium, it can't do without staple food".

that's the point - Egypt didn't take necessary measures for their food security.

I lived through food/gas shortages and high prices at the end of USSR so i think i know how Egypt people felt. Now living in the US i appreciate the US disregard for international free trade agreements when it comes to food and gas - i.e. farmers subsidies and prohibition for oil export - thus making sure that shortages and high-prices of 197x have much less chances of happening again. Free trade is a great idea, yet it works only when implemented by all participants to the same extent and it just doesn't make any sense when implemented unilaterally (or by minor number of participants and/or to different degree).

like between Universe in the beginning - hot meson-gluon soup and at the end - vast over-expanded vacuum with few super-super-super-large black holes

> Thus, we don't get paid in "golds".

in case of gold it is in "kilograms" - still plural, even though it is divisible.

Watson may start really outperform humans when his strength - the ability to ingest and process/correlate huge amounts of, probably with not completely understood relevance, information, like full DNA sequence of a patient, etc... - will be fully utilized, and some previously unknown to humans patterns start to emerge.

there are different levels of security. "Thanks God, children aren't going to bed hungry (and thus probably survive next few days)" vs. "children going to bed after glass of good milk and cookie (and thus probably grow healthy)". Norway [successfully] invests its national wealth in maintaining the latter level. Looks very smart to me.

To be able to give them meaningful advice to do things differently (like, for example, importing), one has to show an example of a country which does things differently (and at least as successful in achieving the goal as Norway).

Canada is the same (from the same link above):

"Past this amount, tariffs are exceptionally high, in the neighbourhood of 246% for cheese and over 300% for butter. "

>Understanding Ricardian/comparative advantage, recognising that dairy is not a matter of national security, and importing it.

A country can do without uranium, it can't do without dairy. As another example of food security being a matter of national security - look what happened to Egypt 2+ years ago once wheat prices rose - for years before that Egypt was geared ("international specialization") toward fruits/strawberries/etc... production for export while becoming world's biggest wheat importer.

>Still, in Norway, oil wealth may have made the state reluctant to make reforms or cut subsidies unthinkable elsewhere. Farm subsidies allow farmers, for instance, to keep dairy cows in heated barns in the Arctic.

and the alternative? Milking polar bears?

To compare, Canada has 1M dairy cows for 35M population, Norway - 300K for 5M population (Norway is self-sufficient milk producer and exporter of dairy products). Giving the health benefits of dairy (incl. in cold climate areas, for children and elderly) i'd say it is good investment, not "unthinkable subsidy".

More on the Canada's (usually one would think of it as a pretty reasonable country) "subsidy-less" approach - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dairy_farming_in_Canada#Supply_... :

"Dairy farming has been subject to the system of supply management since the 1970s. It restricts the supply of milk by limiting and controlling the amount produced domestically and starkly limiting imports with high tariffs. With a restricted supply, the prices increase, increasing profits for the farmers.[4] Though this system allows the federal and provincial governments to avoid subsidizing the farmers directly, consumers instead subsidize dairy farmers in through artificially high prices paid for groceries.

...

To keep supply low and prices high, it has been made deliberately difficult to become a new dairy farmer in Canada. Because the dairy industry is so lucrative, the right to own a single dairy cow is worth $28,000 (this does not include the actual price or value of the cow itself)

"

> That is bad for accuracy,

one of the main version around is AK-74, same mechanics, only 5.45mm caliber instead of 7.62mm of AK-47. While not a sharpshooter's, it is a very accurate gun.

yep, looking at the prototypes like e-Volo, one can try to imagine the Bay Area skies in 5 years.

after protests against ferry, the next mode of transportation will be a private plane i guess, something like Osprey. Or may be submarine.

nostalgia :) The simple logical simplicity of this

http://pastraiser.com/cpu/i8080/i8080_opcodes.html

allowed, after some short time without even looking at the table, to type the binary code directly in (our preferred way of the Forth words implementation back then, on Russian 8080 clone of course :).

it doesn't even come to close to the "cost of business".

"Fast and Furious 1X" will be starring self-driving cars i guess.

>You mean the era of J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO, which spied on every domestic activist group and potential subversive from Vietnam war protestors to Martin Luther King?

they were forced to prioritize their limited resources and abilities somehow. Thanks to technology advancements, today the NSA is spying on everybody who uses any technical means of communications.

>The same FBI that assassinated Fred Hampton?

try to gather a group of armed young black men in an appartment in a city today and see what happens. Or imagine if "Occupy" guys were armed.

>Or a CIA that operated with zero oversight, ran drugs, orchestrated coups, committed assassinations, and experimented on people to see whether LSD was a truth serum?

CIA black prisons around the world. Extra-judicial renditions and torture. Drones. The only change here is that the effects of LSD are well known today so no more experiments. I mean with LSD. The stuff they experiment with today is much more interesting.

>Mercurial is a DVCS

my bad. 5+ years since i worked with Mercurial. Digging deep into painful memories, my Mercurial PTSD from that time is absence of in-repo branching - need to clone which is a killer for very large repo we had and no partial commits - again a killer aggravated by the above mentioned absence of in-repo branches. Both issues made working with large repo unreasonably and unnecessary hard.

> If you are trying to run at a very large scale with a single repo, Perforce (or apparently Mercurial) is the way to go.

that is the problem - single logical repo in Perforce/Mercurial does mean single physical repo. Which obviously causes issues at very large scale. Even at normal enterprise scale :)

Git solves it through kind of distributed scaling where many operations can be performed on local physical repos without ever hitting the central. With centralized solutions, like Perforce, Mercurial, etc... most of the operations are performed on central server and your ability to scale vertically hits the ceiling pretty soon.

Compare the simplest case - each dev updating his local workspace/repo would hit the central server in Perforce where is with Git you can (and normally would have) a small set of downstream repos which the updates would be propagated/distributed through. You can branch left and right in Git in your local and team's repos without "master" repo and "central" server involved (while all your branch activity in Perforce is happening right on the central server in the central repo). The same happens for synchronizing your work inside the team - no need to hit the central. Etc...

>With perforce, you can reasonably expect to run into this brick wall somewhere in the neighborhood of terabytes of metadata and dozens of transactions per second. That changes depending on what sort of beastly hardware you are willing to throw at your version control team.

>Git of course hits a brick wall much sooner, somewhere around single-digit gigabytes of data (depending heavily on the average size of every object in the DAG), even ignoring throughput.

if you use Git the same way you'd use Perforce or Mercurial - one central server handling everything ... you'd better stay with Perforce or Mercurial. Corporate dev process is usually built around notion of "central" repo (and they equate it with "master") - just replacing Perforce server with Git server wouldn't change anything.

>My suspicion is that open source projects tend towards Git because of GitHub but I think a lot of companies who don't have the option of external code hosting lean towards Mercurial.

GitHub is a consequence not the cause (ponder for a moment why there is no MercurialHub...) It is about ability to choose best source control tool for multi-versioned distributed concurrent development. Open source devs have such choice while corporate ones - no. FB choosing Mercurial tells a lot about environment there.

>I'm stunned by how torture has became common in TV shows, at least since "24". But is it propaganda? to me, it was more a way to please the audience.

Violence in its ultimate form. A viewer who associates him/herself with the protagonist gets the feeling of being a righteous God exerting the punishment. An irresistible catnip for "good people with values".

>However, now that the U.S. government, and the NSA and its collaborators in particular, have been shown to explicitly not have this goal – in fact, their goal has been to strive for less secure systems and more difficult standards ­– what should be done? The logical thing to do is to exclude any person or organization revealed to have an agenda explicitly contrary to the group.”

it should be an obvious and routine matter for any organization/group that have a conflict of interests policy.

> He is probably a very nice, very earnest person.

Obviously. Being a pushy jerk explicitly forcing your employer's agenda wouldn't be very fruitful and thus would be a bad job performance by an NSA employee in such position.

> Igoe has been on the job for many years now, and, from my remove, that job seems pretty thankless.

Have you seen his NSA performance reviews? :)

have a dog and can say for sure that it is definitely nor random nor "simple preference" (and magnetic alignment falls under "simple" category)

>Remember that a smart phone contains many of the key components for a drone.

how about stealth supersonic self-landing on aircraft carrier satellite networked drones? Not that i doubt Chinese military or economical might, especially those of tomorrow, it is just they still have some distance to go.

>Who ever owns the islands ... has the rights to exploit the oil/gas fields in the ocean beds around them.

that is the current post-colonial (post-WWI) framework of "independent sovereign nations". This framework starts to show its limitations in dealing with a host of transnational/transcontinental/global issues. Global warming in particular comes to mind. As usually, either framework will get adapted or it will rupture into a new WW, and the new framework will result after it, like it happened after previous WWs.

With regard of mutually assured destruction - this would assure that the war will be fought outside of populated areas, i.e. nobody is going to nuke each others cities (Walmart will still be importing and selling Chinese manufactured goods as sinking the container ships isn't a necessary part of fighting of the modern war for either side :). WWI was new kind of war - trenches. WWII - motorized. WWIII - precision and automated weapons, drones fighting drones.

>Data is stored in the blockchain forever and can be retrieved using a transaction hash as an identifier.

so, if someone stores any piece of copyright material the MPAA/RIAA would need to destroy whole ecosystem of the given coin? bamboo roots come to mind.

buy freedom? from whom are you going to buy it? who has a freedom for sale? do they have excess supply of it? or would they build a one for you? or are they going to sale you their own one?

>The government needs to break projects down into smaller chunks, to mitigate the losses if a supplier doesn't deliver, you don't pay them, and they go bankrupt. Then they need to establish and enforce an incentive system where suppliers are punished, not rewarded, for failing to get the job done.

that means government getting an expertise (at least at the PM level) in that specific domain. While it wouldn't be a bad thing (and actually a very positive shift vs. current state of affairs), it would immediately hit the typical "government shouldn't be in the <insert specific domain> business".

Anyway, just to cheer you up - compare US Gov / DOD corruption & waste to the cost (i.e basically plunder) of Sochi Olympics in Russia. While making great strides, USG has still long way to go before making into top corruption league :)