Ah, whole paragraph fell out: Should have been: You'd be surprised about the result. In the research that has been done, lethality when comparing handguns and knifes rely only on the proximity to the attacker. You see hand guns are very difficult to shoot accurately at range when under stress (which is demonstrated by the abysmal performance of US police officers, and that's taking into account that the average engagement range is only seven yards). So running away from an attacker works about equally well when running from either a knife or a gun. If you get only a few yards away, you're about equally at risk from either a knife or a (hand gun). You see, even though Hollywood does its best to make you think that guns are really dangerous and knifes aren't, in reality at the ranges where both are effective a knife and a gun is about equally deadly.

You'd be surprised about the result. In the research that has been done, lethality when comparing handguns and knifes rely only on the proximity to the a

So, in the average case, running helps about equally well against either attacker. Funny how that works out.

Now, however, it wouldn't matter, because you wouldn't use the knife/axe etc. as your primary weapon anyway. China has some very strict gun laws and they still have mass killings. It's just that the attacker takes a galon (or so) of gasoline on a bus and sets fire to the whole thing (including himself). That has killed more than thirty people at a time on at least three separate occasions in the last years.

So, the knife/axe/club is only there to prevent you from being successfully rushed (much like the claymore in the army). It's there to make sure you have the opportunity to bring your main weapon to bear (flammable liquid would probably work very well for this).

So, until you bring your society in order, these things will continue to happen, gun control or no gun control (something which is much too late anyway, as there are simply too many guns to easily do away with, with a reasonable effort).

Remember, the statistics clearly show that: "Guns don't kill people. Americans with guns kill people."

Which ones are those? The biggest and most modern to date certainly has a gearbox: http://cleantechnica.com/2012/...

As a gearbox is something you'd really like to get rid of, and since Vestas is the largest manufacturer in the world, you'd think they'd know what they were doing.

That one is actually less clear, and I'd very much like to see that one in the courts (though granted, I'm not Assange, so I don't have quite as much riding on the result).

We have our share of feminist activist everything in Sweden, including prosecutors, so that could very well be the whole truth. While it is clear to me that there was American meddling in the Pirate Bay case, it's not nearly as clear here. (And if there was, the CIA must have had a bad day, as a covert OP this could have been handled a lot better). So again, not nearly as clear cut IMHO.

And even though we have "jails" in Sweden, Peter Sunde still wasn't in our version anyway, as he was incarcerated having been sentenced. The Pirate Bay trial and all that...

He was arrested in May to serve his prison sentence. Police claims he's been hiding himself abroad, he claims he's been quite open about his whereabouts and weren't even told there was an international warrant out for his arrest.

Given how the trial was handled, and given that Peter Sunde is the one of the Pirate Bay founders that have always kept his nose clean otherwise, I'm more inclined to believe his account than the official one.

Now, regarding food, that's not the only instance where the Swedish prison authority haven't followed their own rules. And as Peter Sunde didn't just roll over and take it, but lodged several formal complaints, he's been treated rather badly. Not only put in a high security prison when he was sentenced to 8 months imprisonment, has no history of violence, is a first time offender, and was most definitely not sentenced for a violent crime. It even got to the point where the prison authority threatened that he would have to carry his father's coffin wearing handcuffs! This for a prisoner that has no formal complaints lodged against him and that were given leave at least twice to visit his father in hospital under much less strict security.

No, it pains me to say it, but there's something rotten in the state of Sweden. This whole thing from beginning to end, smells badly.

I hear ya! However, our field is also one in flux. While the guys that studied mechanical engineering in my school in the eighties would still recognise the teaching today, many of the techniques for programming in the large, management etc. weren't even (I hesitate to say, because it's not really true, but bear with me) invented then.

So I think things will probably move in that direction, slowly but surely. However, even those engineers needed to know about Euler's four cases of buckling, or what strain is, etc. Likewise a programmer worth his/her salt need to know about and understand algorithmic complexity etc. (Something I know these "learn X in three months" schools don't necessarily teach to a sufficient degree), so it's not a simple question of throwing all the "old" stuff out, either.

However, we do surely need to leave/make room for (unfortunately very time consuming) projects large and small during college. Damned if you do...

And at Chalmers in Sweden (one of the top two engineering schools, "polytechnics") I had all those courses available in the late eighties, early nineties.

However, one problem is that in order to grasp those subjects you first have to grasp the basics. And those takes time to aquire. As I tell my students today; "Remember, it takes ten years, or ten thousand hours to become an expert. This is the first half of that" (our engineering degrees are five year programmes).

Now of course, you'll come across management issues as you mature (it's inevitable it seems), BUT if you didn't have the basics, you wouldn't get the junior position that would eventually lead to your current problems. So it's really a chicken-and-egg problem. We can't teach you everything at school, there comes a time when we just have to chuck you out and let you sink or swim, and learn on your own.

Or not doing too well, esp. the Ukraine.

They even got US and Russian promises that "nothing bad will happen, we promise. Cross our hearts and hope to die" and all that...

You mean they don't have to have types at all? That's even worse...

Or is it just one of those tedious semantic confusions that are so common when discussing programming languages and types. Do you mean something else by "dynamic language", if so what exactly?

You're welcome. The elephant in the room when it comes to maritime safety is really twofold, alcoholism and sleep deprivation. The 6-by-6 watch keeping that is common means watch personell build up a sleep deficit that isn't helped by the rampant alcoholism (fueled by boredom and tradition). So more often than not, the reason ships run aground, esp. at night, is that the one guy on the bridge falls asleep at the wheel. Of course, no amount of radar or other currently available electronic navigation aids will help in that situation.

Well, that's close, in that you need time, but not necessarily a chronometer. That was what Harrison had against him, the committee favoured a celestial approach to measuring time as well. And that did work, but the calculations were so onerous that they took literally hours to complete, for less accuracy than could be had by Harrison's chronometers.

If Harrison's chronometers were the only way to determine longitude, then the committee would probably have come around a lot sooner. That Newton himself, as the chair of the board, wasn't all that keen, certainly didn't help. In fact while he didn't object to chronometers per se he did object that if it became unreliable, only celestial timekeeping methods could even hope to put it right again. Something that was true until the advent of radio.

So the chronometer is an item of (practical) convenience, rather than theoretical necessity.

Wow, you're a land lubber then, despite living in Valdez... :-)

OK, where to begin. Disregarding the drunk captain (who I'm told taught navigation in NY to mariners after the incident...), historically first and foremost you don't use celestial navigation if you have land marks to navigate by. That is to say, when in coastal waters, the sextant stays in it's coffer. When you're in coastal waters you use "piloting" skills, hence the name of the specialist you take aboard your ship for extra sensitive tasks. (I.e. the pilot). Piloting uses bearings to visible land marks (rocks, houses, light houses etc), depth readings etc. to establish your position, and compass and log to update it by dead reconing. In the age of technology many of those bearings could be taken by radio direction finding (of radio beacons), manually and via radar. The radar can of course also be used to get bearings and range to other (radar) visible landmarks. That's how ships could pilot in poor visibility, by using so called "radar navigation".

Now, you don't use a depth gauge (whether a knotted line, or a sonar one) to avoid a shoal. By the time you've detected it you're already either on it, or much too close for comfort. Instead navigation by depth reading is done to keep you i.e. in the middle of a sound, or comfortably far away from a coast etc. (Very useful when you have gently sloping costs, that are common in sandy regions. If you sail outside a beach, you can often rely on depth for navigation. Rocky coasts, not so much.)

Now, what to do when you can't navigate by landmarks. That's where celestial navigation comes in. If you have the proper knowledge (tables) a way to measure the apparent height of a celestial object (sun, moon, star) and an accurate clock (which ships have had since the late 1700-hundreds), then you can determine your position on the globe. Now, for reasons of simplicity most ships that still bother with celestial anything resort to a single noonday sun reading, as that's a simple thing to do, and doesn't require you to be as precise with your timing (and working out the position is simplified). Since you're in the middle of the ocean anyway, you don't need to a fix more often than that. You can safely use dead reckoning until next noon. However, should you want to (and have the correct tables) there's nothing stopping you from using the sun as long as it is visible at any given time of day (back in the day, sightings were often taken at least once a watch, i.e. every six or four hours), or the stars at any time they are visible. The moon is also usable, but since it moves so quickly over the sky in relation to the stars, taking a moon height requires skill and dedication, and hence navigational stars are preferred.

All this is historical of course. The merchant navy doesn't even carry the equipment to navigate celestially anymore, and they're not skilled in its use. Today it's GPS and everything else a distant second. Radar navigation skills are still practice however, as it can come in very handy.

So, when it comes to the Exxon Valdes, having your radar turned off if radar navigation thorough that sound was warranted, would indeed be a court martial offence. "Sonar" would have probably been of very little use, as a depth reading will only tell you that you're seriously off course (soundings on charts are only so accurate) and with a ship that size, you should already be well aware of that fact if you're to have any chance of saving the day. Even thinking about using celestial navigation in narrow coastal waters should have you forcibly removed from the bridge, as that couldn't tell you anything you needed to know in time to do anything worthwhile with a ship that size, moving that fast. Celestial navigation is for the open water, period.

P.S. We got the double hulls now and they're not all they're cranked up to be. You see, they don't actually use more steel in the construction of a double hull tanker. So it's the same amount of steel now divided into two thinner hulls, with an empty space you can't get to. Rust, however, can. So you now have a rusting time bomb that you can't inspect and that isn't that much sturdier than what you started with. Many believe the double hulls that are sailing since the Valdez spill are nothing less than ticking time bombs that will starts to go off any day now...

Well, history is funny that way. I'm not well read on Hearst and hemp, but it is a plausible scenario given that economic factors are not fixed but varies.

Say that you have two competing technologies that could potentially come to dominate the market. Even if they're not that different, say one is 10% "better" than the other, that doesn't mean that the better one will dominate the market, or that they will take market share according to their relative "goodness", or even that the "better" one will win. There are many other externalities as play, such as did one get a head start? Does it have a lot of backing? Etc. Look at the many format wars for entertainment over the years (VHS/Betamax, "HD-DVD/Blueray, etc. etc.) the first to market, with some small advantage will typically, due to network effects, come to completely dominate the market over time. So if I were Hearst, and I had just bet a pretty penny on wood pulp based paper I would certainly try to put as many obstacles in the way of the competition as I could. If I could just pull ahead a bit, I'd have time on my side to eventually guarantee complete market domination.

So why don't we make industrial hemp based paper even where we have industrial hemp? Because there isn't enough of it in places where access to wood pulp based paper is difficult enough. The wood pulp train continues on its own momentum, and derailing/dethroning that, at this time, with something that's only maybe 10% (or 20% or 50%) better isn't going to happen. There's simply not enough money in it to make the switch and write off the sunk cost (not just plants and distribution facilities, but all the knowledge, training/teaching etc. etc. that we have of the wood pulp based process). If you want to beat out an entrenched competitor you have to be 10 times as good, not 10% better.

Of course, there are a lot of "ifs" and "buts" when it comes to any specific market, but the overall economic theme is difficult to get away from. As soon as society starts to do something one way, it takes a lot of effort to change that. The rewards have to be substantial for it even to be considered. Which relegates hemp to the status of "also ran" when it comes to paper.

Well duh! Emacs is written with Emacs, so that's trivially true.

Only with the old style "straight jacket" static typing. With a modern Hindley-Miller type type system, effort is a wash at worst, and in most cases static typing is a clear win as you're not nearly as dependent on testing to find the simple, common brain farts or typos. (And if you're using tools to find those, then guess what? Then you're using static typing, only poorly implemented static typing.) Also, those types, when you've taken the complete step towards typeful programming, serve as wonderful documentation etc.