Honestly, the work I've seen XML do well is as follows:
Document storage. Like HTML, only moreso. XML is great for storing documents that are intended to be human readable - both in their raw format and in their eventual display. Word processing, presentations, web pages, that lot.
Configuration and commands. It's nice to be able to have a single form of configuration, without having to guess which bizarre flavor of syntax is going on. Do spaces count? With most/etc files, who can say? (Hopefully man -S8, but sometimes you aren't so lucky.) With XML, you know the syntax rules, and if you can find the DTD (or XMLSchema), you at least know the words and the grammar, if if you have to guess what you're saying. (On the other hand, OpenNMS' "IPLIKE" tag gets several demerits for lazy coding and XML abuse.)
Serialized communication and object marshalling. My only solid example on this front is Jabber, but the theory is quite sound. There are plenty of serialize-to-XML packages running around, as well. Granted, a little application level compression would probably help. Hell, gzipping the packets before sending would probably make up in network time what it eats in overhead.
Further, XML is a poor way to store data unless you intend to read it all into RAM before doing anything to it.
Cue pedantry theme. Strictly speaking, SAX doesn't require XML to be loaded into RAM. But to do anything useful, it does require that you load it through RAM, so you're point about lacking of index is well made. SAX is great for the applications listed above. Document editing is better served by some variant of DOM, in which case, the difficulty of inserting records dissapears. Size issues could be easily corrected, if it were an issue, with simpel compresion, since XML naturally includes many repeating strings.
However, your point that XML and RDBs are seperate entities is well taken, and with that, I'll strongly agree. They have very different roles. Which doesn't stop the one being used in the other's place with alarming frequency.
I dunno. I've often felt those context-switch hits when I'm trying to get actual work done. Any time you're interrupted with a "do this now," there's a period where you need to assimilate the problem in order to solve it, and then reassimilate your previous task. If the main flow is anything actually involving (zB, coding), it does take a certain amount of time to pick up where you left off. At one job, the PHB would interrupt so often on some days that I spent all my time picking up where I'd left off.
There's also the inefficiency of leaving the computer to work, doing something else, and there being a lag time between the machine finishing and you're refocusing attention. There are some fixes to this (zB: "&& echo ^V^G" or even better "&& auplay succeed.au || auplay fail.au"), but nothing's really perfect. Those of us who've at least studied OS programming know that, while there are solutions to process scheduling, it'll hardly be a solved problem until we can bring a certain amount of prescience into the mix.
But oddly, not the way I'd expect. gcc's pp defines that as "'s *". Here's my solve, see what you think:
#define now char
#define that aChar=&
#define brave!! t'
Now the result is that aChar (I think) holds the address of the character constant 's* t', which if you've done any Mac programming, you know is legal, but very strange, and probably very unwise. Or maybe just brave, eh?
It isn't that I think that copyright should be abolished, but the holders need to understand that it's a special status extended to them because they've voluntarily stepped off the path of real scarcity. We help them because we like what they do, but I really like the analogy to handicapped access laws or affirmative action: they're established to help the disadvantaged, and screaming to loud about how they're not good enough ought to be met with a certain amount of righteous disdain, rather than fear, trembling and legislature.
Quite honestly, I hold a couple of copyrights, so I theoretically have an interest in those rights being protected. Even if, as is the case, those interests are mosly academic, since the actual properties don't have any proven value.
It's been nice meeting you. I hope I'll see you around. A pointer to a pointer to a pointer, indeed.
And forgetting to delimit your comments will prevent the whole thing from comipiling.
Ah, You might think so! but it does actually compile! I give you one hint:
the preprocessor... *grin*
You're smoking crack (or else your pp is...). Empirical study with gcc indicates that no such thing will happen. What do you think the pre-processor is going to do? gcc -E adds some newlines, and nicely closes the char constant, but still doesn't know what this now * type is. &;lt g>
Um, there is a line between brave and stupid. The limits of bravery is trusting another entity to format your memory (i.e. int type) or relying on funkass sizeof voodoo. Stupid is writing code that will fail with remarkable frequency.
now *that's* brave!!
And forgetting to delimit your comments will prevent the whole thing from comipiling.
Oh, but the whole trope was high-larious. Pity I'd already posted or I'd sling you some karma.
The question shouldn't be "how do we get the RIAA outlawed?" Ultimately, the answer to that is to settle the legal issues finally so that some or all of the P2P, digital backup, personal control of data processing devices and digital storage issues are resolved in a way that makes sense for consumers (by which I mean actually makes sense for consumers, not makes sense in fantasy land.) And that involves, at the moment, having our interests valiantly defended by a small number of little known and unfocused charitable organizations (EFF, FSF, once in a month of Sundays the ACLU) (plus the inimitable Lawrence Lessig) from the ravages of a organization of some of the best financed, most motivated legal monopolies in the US. (And, the way things are looking, if you think I mean Americans by "our" think again.)
The question should be, how can this become a public fight? Because, really, the government should be serving the public good - what the American citizens want is what ought to go, and the courts at least are pretty good at making that happen. But the RIAA's biggest asset is the apathy (or the uninformed agreement) of the populace in general. So, is this a point of academia above the head of Joe Sixpack, or is this something that's been skewed and discarded by the broadcast press for so long that JS no longer cares or understands?
I can donwload realisticaly at 300KB/s. From time to time I found ftp/http servers where there is a hard hard limit at 50KB/s, but if I open multiples connections I could get my full 300KB/s.
Perhaps the administrators of those servers configured a per-connection bandwidth cap for a reason. I mean, just maybe they have an interest in providing their free service to as many people as possible over their limited bandwidth. As a consumer of a free service, doesn't it seem kind of shortsighted and thuggish to circumvent their attempt to make their service as widely available as possible?
I don't mean to bug you. P'raps I'm just to civic minded.
On the flipside, my check out Richard Powers for tech and CS stuff worked subtly into really good fiction. Especially good was a scene in Plowing the Dark (which is a novel about real life virtual reality) in which Adventure suddenly comes up on all the coder's terminals, and they all play through it and recollect how they'd all played it as kids or in college, and compare notes. Really nice.
(meaning, everybody who actually knows something about cryptography (i.e., not you))
Before you get extraordinately elitist and conceited about your encyclopaedic knowledge of cryptography, you might want to reassess how inclusive it is. Let me pose an example:
The security chain is very modular, almost to the point where you can just drop in whichever algorithm you want to use into the [symmetric_encryption_algorithm] slot.
See, this isn't so. It's a fairly well known problem that the interactions between different crypto algos is difficult to predict. Most famously, consider the uselessness of 2DES (and the meet-in-the-middle attack against 3DES), which is by no means the exception to the rule.
If you'd sugested, maybe, that the security chain into which the cryptopgraphy fit was modular, I don't think I could fault you, but, of course, that chain is dictated more by situation, and most crypto is better for some apps than others. What I object to is the "RTFM, luser" attitude, plus an error of fact. It's as if you'd written a "You're spelling and grammer suck." flame.
That's extreme programming? Good thing I didn't spend time reading up on this new methodology since I've been doing that for 10+ years.
You'd probably love XP then. A lot of the XP methodologies (with the possible exception of Pair Programming) make heaps of sense, and it's extremely nice to have them all in one tidy package that you can sell to management.
Actually, the single biggest difference between the various "super-user" accounts in Windows and in Unix and progeny is that the super-users aren't trusted to act as other accounts without knowing their passwords under Windows.
I think the philosophy is that this limits the impact of Administrator or LocalSystem attacks on a Windows machine, since in order to become another user, you need to change their password. I for one think that that rationale is pants, but then I cut my teeth on Irix and Solaris. Ultimately, a super-user attack is a super-user attack, whether you call it Administrator privledges or a root login; demanding a password to change accounts just makes life difficult for legitimate sysadmins.
Okay, see, here your first problem. Coding is the practical aspect of CS, which is a discipline that's pretty much exclusively a conscious production of rational thought. Computer science is the ideal universe for engineering: it's designed so that almost any problem is orthagonal to any other, so reductionism is nearly omnipotent. (Actually, that's a particularly filthy lie, but true relative to what I'm about to say.)
On the other hand, finance is the practical aspect of economics, which is almost a black an art as sociology. I mean, really; where else can the proponents of a discipline redefine terms so as to get nicer results (q.v. "unemployment".)
"A CD costs $1 to burn and the majors charge 20 bucks. They are overpricing!!!"
I think we can all agree that that argument is specious. The members of the RIAA ought to charge what the market will bear. The correct argument is that with the advent of P2P and psychoacoustic compression techonologies, the market probably won't bear those prices any more, and that the RIAA is being impolite to try to compell it to do so. If their profit is so small, perhaps they need to change their business.
Which language, which platform, which IDE, which compiler, which database?... Should I write the whole thing or use an existing GUI?
I suspect a fraud. I'm very dubious of a non-developer conceiving those questions. Because they do make sense. Admittedly, some of them less than others - "which IDE?" is like asking "which spreadsheet?" (Whichever you prefer - doesn't really matter) and "which database?" is like "which tax-defered fund?" (An essential question, sometimes. Other times, it's nonsensical.)
I will agree with the notion of defering to expertise. I'm positive I could manage my own finances effectively, but who has time to tweak the systems out? Or pilot a plane, or replace my own carburator, but I'd rather do the whole abstracted goods and services exchange deal. Let's me do more of what I like to do.
There are two biggish problems with the otherwise amazing Snow Crash:
The Exposition Chapter: in which the entire implausible premise of the snow crash virus is explained in a lengthy and mostly one sided expository conversation. The stronger version of the book would have found a way to spread the deep background around, or at least foreshadow it a little. Instead, the action grinds to an absolute halt while Profession Explainitory Tells All. It think this a grudge akin to my dislike of the 30 second static medium shot in the first 15 minutes of Reservoir Dogs - no one else seems to care, even though they'll rip you a new one if you misuse aprostrophe's.
Like most of Stephenson's books, the ending of Snow Crash is abrupt and unsatisfying. Cryptonomicon has, perhaps, the best ending, but I suspect that my opinion was influenced by my expection of an hollow conclusion, but also that Stephenson wraps everything up before the last page, so the quick end doesn't equate to a letdown of the story.
See, that's tweny minutes, or thirty-three percent crap.
See, that's only if you count commercials as crap. My own feeling is that only the merest fraction of what's broadcast is not crap. I'd argue that the entire 60 minutes during which Birds of Prey airs is crap. Actually, WB probably provides 3 minutes of useful news a day, and the rest is decorated formula pap. Other stations aren't much better.
I mean, what's wrong with a society where the broadcasters are pandering to such a low common demoninator? Doesn't anyone have standards anymore? Or is it that people with standards stop watching broadcast television?
And if they can't fit you no matter how hard they try, I'm sure they can figure out a way to make your father fit, or your roommate in college, or a co-worker, or the boyfriend of a girl you once dated...
Oh ho! So much work for the little government processors to do! Let's make it easier: add positive profiles, whitelists if you will, and then execrate anyone who fails to match Patriot, Homemaker, Republican or Consumer. I mean, it's bad enough if we can match you to 65% with Terrorist, Radical, Anarchist, Nihilist, Atheist, Abortionist, or Outspoken, but how much worse is it to match to None Of The Above? Obviously anyone who evades our comprehensive pigeonholing is doing so intentionally. And as everyone knows, if you didn't have anything to hide, you would fight so hard for your privacy.
Let's not have half measures! Rather than have a computer pick the twenty best fits to a terrorist profile, why not reverse the process. When there's someone who troubles you, (perhaps by questioning your commitment to TIA, or its societal benefit), search the databases for matches against profiles until you can demonstrate enough reasonable doubt to conduct your raid.
Put that way, TIA looks like the ultimate out-of-conext box.
That's not exactly fair. MFC may be a cluttered mess of a class library, but it's not nearly typical. Granted, I don't any class library I'm entirely satisfied with, but MFC is a pure mess. If it weren't the VC++ way to interact with Windows, I sincerely doubt it would have much acceptance. My biggest gripe is that their collection objects blow goats; you can't iterate them in a for loop! I mean, c'mon.
You know, I was tempted to moderate this overrated, but this is smoking so much crack it's ridiculous.
The point is that alpha particles are helium nuclei. That's a gas, folks.
Helium nuclei are not a gas. Helium is a gas, but minus the electrons, you just have particles. Alpha particles interact with other nuclei, altering their elemental position. Minus an electron shell, there's nothing to prevent the particles from traveling though any substance, except the likelyhood of collision with a nucleus.
the decay product of tritium is helium 3
Um, tritium is hydrogen-3, and it decays into plain old helium. My understanding is that it's difficult enough to produce tritide compounds, so the fact that they'll produce gas during reaction isn't really the concern.
Enron is an excellent example of why that is false. I would hardly call that a successful strategy, considering how much more money could have been made in the long term by operating in a sane manner, with the added bonus of avoiding the angry mobs.
See, the Enron execs missed the "and get out" part of the strategy. Seriously, though, Enron is actually an excellent example of what I'm on about. The Enron management was acting in the short sighted way that the reward structure dictated. There's a large risk-taking component to capitalism. Enron execs miscalculated the risk and got caught. I'm dubious about whether there's only one Enron, as it were. We just haven't heard from the rest of them.
I'm not an environmental scientist, and I have no desire to be one, so it's not my place to make the actual detailed arguments.
Except there a thousands of industries where it isn't profitable to be environmental. "It's not my place" is kind of disingenious, when there are a lot of industries where profitable environmentalism isn't a problem anyone has an answer to.
If you think about it, though, it makes sense. Producing waste costs money. Waste represents inefficiency, which increases overhead, which reduces margins.
While this may be true for some manufacturing, like die-cutting, waste doesn't always represent inefficiency. Petroleum distilation, or aluminum production, for example, both produce wastes that have no value. And it isn't like it's excess, that it's stuff that could be used; it's just there are parts of petroleum, for instance, that nobody has a use for and that are amazingly toxic. So, you can either store them forever (with the associated costs), do more work to break them down (or bind them up) into other wastes that aren't as toxic (with the associated costs), or just quitely tip them into a river, and let them dilute, which is cheap. Yes, someday there may be a technological solution, but who'll invest in the research to find it?
I think it's likely that as we examine things more closely we will find that the idea that it is more profitable to ignore the environment is just as flawed as the outsourcing example I gave in my earlier post.
Suggesting that we just need to look closer at the environmentalism issue without actually being able to address the problems it raises is so much handwaving.
As far as how flawed your outsource example is - when the best route to personal gain is increase in stock price, spending 50% more on tech support to make yoour stockholders happy is an excellent decision, in the context it appears to have been made. But I think we both agree that it was dumb as far as the company itself was concerned.
Capitalism isn't short-sighted, Capitalists are. Capitalism is no worse than any other system, and certainly better than most.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with this. I think Capitalism is no worse than any other economic system, and its chief virtue is that it doesn't aspire to be anything more than it is. As a system, it's too simple to be short or long sighted, but the successful strategies do tend to be short-sighted - maximize your profit and get out. There's a lot to say for capitalism, though, when compared to communism, where the ideals are so high, and the result is so disappointing.
I tend to see the stock market as a natural and inevitable product of a capitalism, and that the fact that once a stock market arises, the greatest source of profit is stock price variance, means that "stock price before people" is in no substantial way different from profits before people. The benefit cycles in a capitalistic system work so hard againsts the general benefit, it's kind of scary.
And as far as environmentalism being profitible, "Conducting your business in an environmentally responsible way could be worth big money to you, here's how..." How? "Here's how..." without a follow up is a pretty weak argument, in my opinion. The environmentalist urge is by nature a faithful and long-view one, and one which runs very counter to the mindset that adopts the capitolism-rewarded strategies, which are pragmatic and immediate. Honestly, there's less cost involved with ignoring the environment (without government intervention) and there's no immediately appreciable benefit to attending to it. So, why bother? Why care? Aren't the dollars that might go to cleaning wastes before dumping, or into extra tankers to allow for greater margins of error better invested into a "People Do." ad campaign to convince the public that you really are environmentally responsible? Maybe if the penalties were derived from the same risk equations that get used to make those decisions, then there might be changes. But that's hardly the capitalistic ideal of "Lassie Fair," eh?
No, there really isn't anything better, that I know of. But what we've blows goats anyway. Better to be clear on that, for everyone to agree that, yes, our current economic system is rotten, and maybe some brilliance will find something better, than to defend the way things are.
So the only hard word here is compact. In my opinion the most readily understood definition of compact is that every convergent sequence of points in the space ends in a point in the space. In other words, there are no points that you can get arbitrarily close to but never reach quite reach.
Yeah, I found an excellent explaination of compactness in sci.physics.research about 10 minutes after I posted. However, the sequence of points thing only works for manifolds, not all topological spaces. So it's cogent here but not always.
"Is it possible that the fundamental group of V could be trivial". This means simply that any loop you could draw in this space can be contracted to a single point.
Actually, this isn't necessarily so - or if it is, I don't know of the theorem that demonstrates it. I certainly can't produce a 2-dimensional counter example. My understanding was that a trivial fundamental group essentially contained only one equivalence class on homotopy. So, can you define a manifold such that there's only one homotopic equivalence class of loops, but which doesn't include a single point?
Oh, duh. Of course not - the manifold necessarily must include points in order for there to be loops at all (unless you consider the null manifold to vacuously satisfy the conditions of a trivial fundamental group), and any basepoint is itself sufficient to be a loop. So, since at least one set in the fundamental group includes the single-point loop, all loops have to be homotopic to the point. Okay.
Honestly, I'm only posting this in the hopes that others may be enlightened by my own folly. If anyone cares.
Now if I can just wrap my head around why the n-sphere isn't contractable...something about neighboring paths.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who thinks you can't count slimes hasn't played enough Nethack.
Further, XML is a poor way to store data unless you intend to read it all into RAM before doing anything to it.
Cue pedantry theme. Strictly speaking, SAX doesn't require XML to be loaded into RAM. But to do anything useful, it does require that you load it through RAM, so you're point about lacking of index is well made. SAX is great for the applications listed above. Document editing is better served by some variant of DOM, in which case, the difficulty of inserting records dissapears. Size issues could be easily corrected, if it were an issue, with simpel compresion, since XML naturally includes many repeating strings.
However, your point that XML and RDBs are seperate entities is well taken, and with that, I'll strongly agree. They have very different roles. Which doesn't stop the one being used in the other's place with alarming frequency.
There's also the inefficiency of leaving the computer to work, doing something else, and there being a lag time between the machine finishing and you're refocusing attention. There are some fixes to this (zB: "&& echo ^V^G" or even better "&& auplay succeed.au || auplay fail.au"), but nothing's really perfect. Those of us who've at least studied OS programming know that, while there are solutions to process scheduling, it'll hardly be a solved problem until we can bring a certain amount of prescience into the mix.
#define that's *
But oddly, not the way I'd expect. gcc's pp defines that as "'s *". Here's my solve, see what you think:
#define now char
#define that aChar=&
#define brave!! t'
Now the result is that aChar (I think) holds the address of the character constant 's* t', which if you've done any Mac programming, you know is legal, but very strange, and probably very unwise. Or maybe just brave, eh?
Quite honestly, I hold a couple of copyrights, so I theoretically have an interest in those rights being protected. Even if, as is the case, those interests are mosly academic, since the actual properties don't have any proven value.
It's been nice meeting you. I hope I'll see you around. A pointer to a pointer to a pointer, indeed.
You're smoking crack (or else your pp is...). Empirical study with gcc indicates that no such thing will happen. What do you think the pre-processor is going to do? gcc -E adds some newlines, and nicely closes the char constant, but still doesn't know what this now * type is. &;lt g>
now *that's* brave!!
And forgetting to delimit your comments will prevent the whole thing from comipiling.
Oh, but the whole trope was high-larious. Pity I'd already posted or I'd sling you some karma.
You know, when I read "amazingly fucked up atrocities," the first thing that came to mind was
foo(void *data, int type)
The question should be, how can this become a public fight? Because, really, the government should be serving the public good - what the American citizens want is what ought to go, and the courts at least are pretty good at making that happen. But the RIAA's biggest asset is the apathy (or the uninformed agreement) of the populace in general. So, is this a point of academia above the head of Joe Sixpack, or is this something that's been skewed and discarded by the broadcast press for so long that JS no longer cares or understands?
I can donwload realisticaly at 300KB/s. From time to time I found ftp/http servers where there is a hard hard limit at 50KB/s, but if I open multiples connections I could get my full 300KB/s.
Perhaps the administrators of those servers configured a per-connection bandwidth cap for a reason. I mean, just maybe they have an interest in providing their free service to as many people as possible over their limited bandwidth. As a consumer of a free service, doesn't it seem kind of shortsighted and thuggish to circumvent their attempt to make their service as widely available as possible?
I don't mean to bug you. P'raps I'm just to civic minded.
TUNEFS(8)
tunefs - tune up an existing file system
[snip]
BUGS:
You can tune a hard drive but you can't tune a fish.
Hey, it always made me grin.
On the flipside, my check out Richard Powers for tech and CS stuff worked subtly into really good fiction. Especially good was a scene in Plowing the Dark (which is a novel about real life virtual reality) in which Adventure suddenly comes up on all the coder's terminals, and they all play through it and recollect how they'd all played it as kids or in college, and compare notes. Really nice.
Before you get extraordinately elitist and conceited about your encyclopaedic knowledge of cryptography, you might want to reassess how inclusive it is. Let me pose an example:
The security chain is very modular, almost to the point where you can just drop in whichever algorithm you want to use into the [symmetric_encryption_algorithm] slot.
See, this isn't so. It's a fairly well known problem that the interactions between different crypto algos is difficult to predict. Most famously, consider the uselessness of 2DES (and the meet-in-the-middle attack against 3DES), which is by no means the exception to the rule.
If you'd sugested, maybe, that the security chain into which the cryptopgraphy fit was modular, I don't think I could fault you, but, of course, that chain is dictated more by situation, and most crypto is better for some apps than others. What I object to is the "RTFM, luser" attitude, plus an error of fact. It's as if you'd written a "You're spelling and grammer suck." flame.
You'd probably love XP then. A lot of the XP methodologies (with the possible exception of Pair Programming) make heaps of sense, and it's extremely nice to have them all in one tidy package that you can sell to management.
I think the philosophy is that this limits the impact of Administrator or LocalSystem attacks on a Windows machine, since in order to become another user, you need to change their password. I for one think that that rationale is pants, but then I cut my teeth on Irix and Solaris. Ultimately, a super-user attack is a super-user attack, whether you call it Administrator privledges or a root login; demanding a password to change accounts just makes life difficult for legitimate sysadmins.
This has been your 30 seconds of pedantry.
Okay, see, here your first problem. Coding is the practical aspect of CS, which is a discipline that's pretty much exclusively a conscious production of rational thought. Computer science is the ideal universe for engineering: it's designed so that almost any problem is orthagonal to any other, so reductionism is nearly omnipotent. (Actually, that's a particularly filthy lie, but true relative to what I'm about to say.)
On the other hand, finance is the practical aspect of economics, which is almost a black an art as sociology. I mean, really; where else can the proponents of a discipline redefine terms so as to get nicer results (q.v. "unemployment".)
"A CD costs $1 to burn and the majors charge 20 bucks. They are overpricing!!!"
I think we can all agree that that argument is specious. The members of the RIAA ought to charge what the market will bear. The correct argument is that with the advent of P2P and psychoacoustic compression techonologies, the market probably won't bear those prices any more, and that the RIAA is being impolite to try to compell it to do so. If their profit is so small, perhaps they need to change their business.
Which language, which platform, which IDE, which compiler, which database? ... Should I write the whole thing or use an existing GUI?
I suspect a fraud. I'm very dubious of a non-developer conceiving those questions. Because they do make sense. Admittedly, some of them less than others - "which IDE?" is like asking "which spreadsheet?" (Whichever you prefer - doesn't really matter) and "which database?" is like "which tax-defered fund?" (An essential question, sometimes. Other times, it's nonsensical.)
I will agree with the notion of defering to expertise. I'm positive I could manage my own finances effectively, but who has time to tweak the systems out? Or pilot a plane, or replace my own carburator, but I'd rather do the whole abstracted goods and services exchange deal. Let's me do more of what I like to do.
See, that's only if you count commercials as crap. My own feeling is that only the merest fraction of what's broadcast is not crap. I'd argue that the entire 60 minutes during which Birds of Prey airs is crap. Actually, WB probably provides 3 minutes of useful news a day, and the rest is decorated formula pap. Other stations aren't much better.
I mean, what's wrong with a society where the broadcasters are pandering to such a low common demoninator? Doesn't anyone have standards anymore? Or is it that people with standards stop watching broadcast television?
Oh ho! So much work for the little government processors to do! Let's make it easier: add positive profiles, whitelists if you will, and then execrate anyone who fails to match Patriot, Homemaker, Republican or Consumer. I mean, it's bad enough if we can match you to 65% with Terrorist, Radical, Anarchist, Nihilist, Atheist, Abortionist, or Outspoken, but how much worse is it to match to None Of The Above? Obviously anyone who evades our comprehensive pigeonholing is doing so intentionally. And as everyone knows, if you didn't have anything to hide, you would fight so hard for your privacy.
Put that way, TIA looks like the ultimate out-of-conext box.
That's not exactly fair. MFC may be a cluttered mess of a class library, but it's not nearly typical. Granted, I don't any class library I'm entirely satisfied with, but MFC is a pure mess. If it weren't the VC++ way to interact with Windows, I sincerely doubt it would have much acceptance. My biggest gripe is that their collection objects blow goats; you can't iterate them in a for loop! I mean, c'mon.
The point is that alpha particles are helium nuclei. That's a gas, folks.
Helium nuclei are not a gas. Helium is a gas, but minus the electrons, you just have particles. Alpha particles interact with other nuclei, altering their elemental position. Minus an electron shell, there's nothing to prevent the particles from traveling though any substance, except the likelyhood of collision with a nucleus.
the decay product of tritium is helium 3
Um, tritium is hydrogen-3, and it decays into plain old helium. My understanding is that it's difficult enough to produce tritide compounds, so the fact that they'll produce gas during reaction isn't really the concern.
See, the Enron execs missed the "and get out" part of the strategy. Seriously, though, Enron is actually an excellent example of what I'm on about. The Enron management was acting in the short sighted way that the reward structure dictated. There's a large risk-taking component to capitalism. Enron execs miscalculated the risk and got caught. I'm dubious about whether there's only one Enron, as it were. We just haven't heard from the rest of them.
I'm not an environmental scientist, and I have no desire to be one, so it's not my place to make the actual detailed arguments.
Except there a thousands of industries where it isn't profitable to be environmental. "It's not my place" is kind of disingenious, when there are a lot of industries where profitable environmentalism isn't a problem anyone has an answer to.
If you think about it, though, it makes sense. Producing waste costs money. Waste represents inefficiency, which increases overhead, which reduces margins.
While this may be true for some manufacturing, like die-cutting, waste doesn't always represent inefficiency. Petroleum distilation, or aluminum production, for example, both produce wastes that have no value. And it isn't like it's excess, that it's stuff that could be used; it's just there are parts of petroleum, for instance, that nobody has a use for and that are amazingly toxic. So, you can either store them forever (with the associated costs), do more work to break them down (or bind them up) into other wastes that aren't as toxic (with the associated costs), or just quitely tip them into a river, and let them dilute, which is cheap. Yes, someday there may be a technological solution, but who'll invest in the research to find it?
I think it's likely that as we examine things more closely we will find that the idea that it is more profitable to ignore the environment is just as flawed as the outsourcing example I gave in my earlier post.
Suggesting that we just need to look closer at the environmentalism issue without actually being able to address the problems it raises is so much handwaving. As far as how flawed your outsource example is - when the best route to personal gain is increase in stock price, spending 50% more on tech support to make yoour stockholders happy is an excellent decision, in the context it appears to have been made. But I think we both agree that it was dumb as far as the company itself was concerned.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with this. I think Capitalism is no worse than any other economic system, and its chief virtue is that it doesn't aspire to be anything more than it is. As a system, it's too simple to be short or long sighted, but the successful strategies do tend to be short-sighted - maximize your profit and get out. There's a lot to say for capitalism, though, when compared to communism, where the ideals are so high, and the result is so disappointing.
I tend to see the stock market as a natural and inevitable product of a capitalism, and that the fact that once a stock market arises, the greatest source of profit is stock price variance, means that "stock price before people" is in no substantial way different from profits before people. The benefit cycles in a capitalistic system work so hard againsts the general benefit, it's kind of scary.
And as far as environmentalism being profitible, "Conducting your business in an environmentally responsible way could be worth big money to you, here's how..." How? "Here's how..." without a follow up is a pretty weak argument, in my opinion. The environmentalist urge is by nature a faithful and long-view one, and one which runs very counter to the mindset that adopts the capitolism-rewarded strategies, which are pragmatic and immediate. Honestly, there's less cost involved with ignoring the environment (without government intervention) and there's no immediately appreciable benefit to attending to it. So, why bother? Why care? Aren't the dollars that might go to cleaning wastes before dumping, or into extra tankers to allow for greater margins of error better invested into a "People Do." ad campaign to convince the public that you really are environmentally responsible? Maybe if the penalties were derived from the same risk equations that get used to make those decisions, then there might be changes. But that's hardly the capitalistic ideal of "Lassie Fair," eh?
No, there really isn't anything better, that I know of. But what we've blows goats anyway. Better to be clear on that, for everyone to agree that, yes, our current economic system is rotten, and maybe some brilliance will find something better, than to defend the way things are.
Yeah, I found an excellent explaination of compactness in sci.physics.research about 10 minutes after I posted. However, the sequence of points thing only works for manifolds, not all topological spaces. So it's cogent here but not always.
"Is it possible that the fundamental group of V could be trivial". This means simply that any loop you could draw in this space can be contracted to a single point.
Actually, this isn't necessarily so - or if it is, I don't know of the theorem that demonstrates it. I certainly can't produce a 2-dimensional counter example. My understanding was that a trivial fundamental group essentially contained only one equivalence class on homotopy. So, can you define a manifold such that there's only one homotopic equivalence class of loops, but which doesn't include a single point?
Oh, duh. Of course not - the manifold necessarily must include points in order for there to be loops at all (unless you consider the null manifold to vacuously satisfy the conditions of a trivial fundamental group), and any basepoint is itself sufficient to be a loop. So, since at least one set in the fundamental group includes the single-point loop, all loops have to be homotopic to the point. Okay.
Honestly, I'm only posting this in the hopes that others may be enlightened by my own folly. If anyone cares.
Now if I can just wrap my head around why the n-sphere isn't contractable...something about neighboring paths.