1,196 karma · joined November 14, 2012
Will Trump's America be able to overcome the deep seated American cultural attitude that being stupid is being superior?
She is busy dreaming up genetic experiments, mostly inserting features of one organism in another, and has a theory that there will be a future movement like the Amish that will have rules as to what technology they will use, and which they will forbid. Of course she thinks CRISPR will be one of the things allowed.
But when you look at the history of Russia who went from an agricultural peasant nation in 1917 to the WWII powerhouse that beat the Nazis in 1944, followed by an encore in rebuilding their country to the point where they had the first TV network in 1950, first space satellite, first man in space, detonated a hydrogen bomb only 10 months after the USA, you can see that these people are not dummies.
After decades of studying the Russians, I think the clearest way to explain who they are, is they are a nation of builders. Of course they are human and not perfect, but overall they know how to build all kinds of things and they fearlessly push forward with project after project all over their vast expanse of territory.
99% of what people say about Russia is wrong and rooted in ignorance because too few Westerners will learn Russian and get their info direct from the source. This means that Russia has not had to worry about keeping secrets from the USA because the USA does it for them. Electronic warfare capabilities are a case in point. And when you learn how the Soviets defeated American stealth aircraft capabilities even before they were deployed, you wonder why the USA spent the money to develop it.
So when we see so-called "bad decisions" resulting in useless aircraft, useless stealth ships, and a whole chain of military equipment fiascos (up to and including $10,000 hammers) you really have to wonder whether the KGB won the cold war after all. We now know that the USA ran a decades long campaign to subvert the Soviet Union by sowing corruption deep within the Soviet system. How could the KGB not have done the same? Also, the Soviet Union disbanded itself quite abruptly and unexpectedly. Students of the KYB and of Russian strategy seriously wonder whether this was done to prevent the ultimate endgame in the US plan which would see Russia balkanized into a dozen small squabbling countries. Watch the film "The Turkish Gambit" to get an idea of the kind of chess games that Russians are capable of playing.
True independence became extinct when people stopped living subsistence agricultural lives.
So the Catalan issue is more about how the EU is structured and whether nation states are the appropriate level of division for the different territories in the EU.
Even outside the EU, nation states like Ukraine cannot be independent because they have too much dependency on Russia, the USA, China, Turkey and so on.
Sovereignty is another question, but confusing it with independence is wrong.
If a Fedex or UPS would buildup a network of similar business partnerships in residential areas (or just rent some space in a shopping mall) then people would use then in preference to this expensive key gimmick.
Why hasn't anyone ever thought of that before? Delivering goods to people in their local shopping mall?
Maybe because Silicon Valley is hung up on disruption and replacement so they never noticed that simply taking over existing businesses could be a lucrative model.
Perhaps a whole bunch of electronic warfare devices like those used against AEGIS and the USS Donald Cook? And what about the fact that NASA and the US space program are so dependent on Russian rocket engines? Or the Russian jet that can hover or reverse in mid flight?
We know that the Russian system of higher education is very rigourous and places a lot of emphasis on mathematics Could this be the root of it? Or is it something else in the culture of Russia?
One of the biggest mistakes of the USA after the Cold War was to stop taking Russia seriously and to stop watching what Russians were doing. The west accepted the views put forward by Ukrainians about Russia, instead of going direct to the source. Now we know that neo-nazi forces within Ukraine were spreading misinformation about Russia in order to benefit Ukrainian oligarchs.
It is time to move beyond this. More of us need to learn Russian fluently and analyze Russia based on direct knowledge of the country and people. Russia isa powerful nation and it has a rich and vibrant culture. There is a lot to learn there, not just about technology but also about how to approach and solve impossible problems.
It is too bad that there are not more Soviet and Russian WWII movies overdubbed in English, because the NKVD and the KGB really mastered this stuff back in the 40s and 50s. Not in all departments of the organization but in enough of them to become the masters of the Cold War.
But you have to admit that criminals are not normal people. They are in fact, insane, in a specific way that our laws will not give them diminished responsibility. It is dangerous to think that the criminal is not a sadist. You have to maintain control over the criminal and over the interview. And you must maintain full control over your own psyche and emotions. Never be bored or frustrated. Have infinite patience. Map out the criminal's psyche to learn what makes them tick. Listen to your own intuitions because as you learn more about criminal psychology, your subconcious becomes a more powerful tool.
Any police officer who wants to try this could get started by learning some basic psychology and watching a few episodes of these TV series. And also, you need to fix your own psychological issues because these techniques work best when you are not choked up with hate or other emotions. They require empathy for the criminal and to do that, you need to have firm control of your psyche otherwise it will break you to try it.
I am reminded of one of those Sales empowerment books of the 60s and 70s written by a luxury car salesman. He said that you could not be successful unless you genuinely liked your customer, and only then could you help him to spend his money on what you are selling. Part of the book was exercises on how to turn on that "genuine like" within your own psyche.
Let's face it, it takes years of daily practice to become a skilled musician, or a skilled skateboarder or a skilled parcour athlete or... Humans can do amazing things if only they apply themselves with a few years of daily practice. Stage magic is even more so because those folks never stop practicing the most impossible actions.
The point is that software development companies are missing an important element of diversity when they fail to hire older workers. Suret the younger ones can learn new tricks, but who is there to teach them?
Lots of the knowledge that older workers have is not taught in books or university programs. Knowing what not to do, what to do first, how to properly prioritize the work, and where to find bugs and eliminate them. This is stuff that you only learn from exp;erience unless you have an older guide to light the way.
Canadians would never tolerate sidewalks in such horrible condition. And governments in Canada (municipal, provincial, federal) are used to spending money on the wellbeing of citizens.
Let's face it, the USA is broken and even if Trump does manage to fix it, the repair work will take many years.
Start out by running RabbitMQ on the same server as PostgreSQL but do limit its use of cores and RAM. Then when your business grows you can easily scale to a separate RabbitMQ server, to a cluster of MQ servers and to a distributed RabbitMQ service using clusters in multiple data centers with global queues synchronized using a RabbitMQ plugin.
The benefit of using RabbitMQ is that you begin to learn how message queuing fits into a system architecture and that you will not run into corner cases and weird behaviors as long as you heed the advice of moving to a dedicated RabbitMQ server when your usage gets large enough.
An additionally benefit is that when you learn how to integrate functionality by using a message queue (actor model) rather than a link editor, you can avoid the monolithic big ball of mud problem entirely and easily integrate both monolithic functions and microservices in your app.
Background jobs are just one part of what a robust message queue gives you. In my opinion, the desire for background jobs is a design smell that indicates a flaw in your architecture which you can fix by adding a message queue system.
Two reasonable directions to choose are Python Three with a framework like Flask (lighweight) or Django (heavy duty). Or go to the JVM with something like Grails framework (heavy duty) on the Groovy language. Ratpack is a lightweight framework for Groovy and there is also an interesting option to use Vaadin 8 which lets you put your GUI code into the main app rather than writing separate Javascript code.
When making your decision, be sure to consider the huge JVM ecosystem that integrates quite easily with Groovy including development tools like Jenkins and SOAPUI that can be scripted with Groovy. And the Python side also has a fairly extensive ecosystem of libraries as well.
The skill level of Python and Java/Groovy developers tends to be higher than PHP which has always attracted people who would learn just enought to get by.
The software dev community has gone through an explosion of diversity in the past 2 decades and that has enabled a lot of experimentation with new ways of doing this. There is a lot of good in this. But now we are in a period of contraction. Some of this is manifested in the spread of functional capabilities via libraries such as reactive extensions and functional features being added to languages like Java and Javascript. Another manifestation is the fading of PERL from prominence, and this is now happening to PHP as well as Ruby.
This is evolution. Embrace it or face your personal extinction as a software developer.
There has been some writing on how it used wave guide effects to transmit, but not so much on the microphone part. Some of you may know that many speakers can be wired up as microphones. One wonders whether a device intended to be a microphone, might in some circumstances act as a speaker as well.
If the Cubans are following an evolutionary path from the device concealed in the Great Seal in the 50's then one could easily imagine something built into the structure of the building itself that is accidentally generating sound energy.
As a thought experiment, imagine that you could build a window frame that would pick up sound from inside a room, shift it to an inaudible frequency and then emit that sound. Furthermore, what if a double pane window intended to block sound from leaving the room, had a pickup attached to the inner glass pane and emitted the high frequency sound from the outer pane so that an external laser could pick it up. Then further imagine that the window was installed wrong way around so that the constant street noise was broadcasting high frequency sounds into the building.
I expect that the Russians don't do this stuff anymore because they get better results from HUMINT, especially deep cover agents.
The USA and Japan (and China and Russia) likely knew within seconds that it would land in the sea and they even knew how high it would fly over a low population area in Japan.
It's like a car full of young punks stopped at a red light beside a police cruiser and when the light goes green they burn rubber and peel away from the intersection first, but never exceed the speed limit. Very provocative, but the police have real crime to deal with, so they ignore it.
By updating the build script in the Github repo, you could update this to a newer version of Python 3.
To make a Windows binary doing the same thing would require a reasonable amount of knowledge about object files, linking, and Windows DLLs. It might be easier to use the MINGW GCC compiler rather than Microsoft, so consider that possibility. First thing to do is to understand how the CPython binary on Windows works and loads DLLs before actually executing Python code. The key is to intercept this process so that you have total control over all object files and do not rely on anything else being preinstalled on the target system.
And ZFS works just fine on Linux. If people want to use it, then the distros should not put roadblocks in their way and that means, ZFS should also be supported as a first class choice for servers.
Note that "support" is different from licensing and from "included in our install repo". It is OK to have different licensing for things like this and to install it from a non-distro repo. Look at PostgreSQL for an example of how you can install a mission critical tool from a distro-compatible repo that is run by the upstream project, in this case, PostgreSQL.
But even though it comes from a different repo, it should be "supported" by the distro to the extent that they make a best effort to help people resolve problems. It doesn't mean that you need to be experts in every nuance of the tool and the best way to do that is to maintain a good working relationship with these upstream projects.
Something like ZFS or PostgreSQL are mission critical tools that use Linux as the interface to the hardware, My comments do not apply to any random app or utility that someone wrote for Linux. Perhaps btrfs belongs in this class but I personally don't know since I have not used it.
The web is ephemeral unless somebody archives it. Many companies offer an archive service for your sites for a fee, and archive.org does it to provide a historical record,
At this stage in Python's evolution, I view the GIL removal as a computer science project that some people will implement again, and again, just to learn or to exercise their chops. Great idea! Just don't demand that the entire community of Python developers goes down your road.
If CPython never gets rid of the GIL that suits me just fine. GIL free programming can be done on other implementations of Python like Jython and IronPython. As far as PyPy is concerned, as long as it does not disrupt the use of PyPy as a means of speeding up a CPython app from time to time, then have fun.
Maybe it is like politics, rather than attacking your opponents you should offer something that they do not. Then you will build your own constituency and gain influence. It will take a long time, but if you keep on providing benefits to users, then attrition might take you to the top. When someone attacks your camp, ignore them. You do not need a better way to attack them, you just need to stick to the knitting and make your offer provide benefits to users. External forces will likely decide whether or not you overwhelm your opponents.
Compare them to the political cartoons of the same era.
ZeroMQ is the thing to use to roll your own queuing service, not a database server whether SQL or NoSQL. Databases are not queueus and database servers are not designed with queues as any kind of important priority when features are implemented.