Python has become my scripting language of choice over the last 2 years.
Does that mean I have a problem?
No, it just means you got tired of writing code that looks like line noise.;)
Seriously, scripting language holy wars are even sillier than other holy wars. I use Perl, Python, and PHP regularly (and both MySQL and PostgreSQL, on both Linux and BSD) choosing whichever seems best for the task at hand. (Yes, I know that I'm very lucky to have a job that allows me to do this.) And as a benefit, I've become pretty good at porting between various combinations of these languages, servers, and platforms. The underlying logic is a hell of a lot more important than the flavor-of-the-month.
Yes, exactly. I was just thinking that if I were the submitter's boss, my reaction would be, "Okay, here's a really funny joke for you: you're fired. Oh, wait... I'm not joking. Now, you have fifteen minutes to pack up your shit and get out of the building."
And sorry, "Don't get caught" doesn't cut it. Develop a taste for practical jokes, and sooner or later you will get caught -- and you'll deserve anything that happens to you.
OTOH, if it were my computer that got fucked with, I wouldn't go to the boss. I'd have another kind of practical joke handy: I'd kick the guy's teeth down his throat.
Biology does make testable predictions; to take your drug-resistance example, there are a lot of people spending a lot of time and money on predicting not only that resistance will evolve, but under what conditions, how quickly, how much resistance to one drug influences resistance to similar drugs... etc. But yes, it is quite true that there is a difference between explanatory science and predictive science, and both can reasonably be called "science."
However, simply collecting information is not science in and of itself; that information must be tied together in some way. The classic scientific method cycle of observation -> hypothesis -> experiment -> revision -> theory is one way to do this, but certain fields of study (paleontology, astronomy, climatology) have conditions that make the "experiment" step kind of hard. The usual response, and I think it's a valid one, is to substitute "more observation." And in the observational sciences, the theories that result, no matter how rigorous, tend to face a lot more controversy than those tested in the lab.
So is "socionomics" a science yet? I'm not saying it can't be, but I'm far from convinced that it already is. I'm willing to accept a lot of Prechter's observations as valid, but I also think that any theory of mass behavior has to be tested as rigorously as the assertions of those in the hard sciences before being accepted as valid. Generally, the performance of theory-above-all sorts (e.g. Marxists) in the world arena, vs. the historically-minded, intuitive pragmatists, isn't that great.
By that logic, we shouldn't develop any medications, because they're too expensive for poor people to buy. Again, silliness. Medicines, like every other technological product, start out expensive and get cheaper over time. (Yes, even with drug patents; they do expire, you know.) I'm not happy with the gap between the haves and the have-nots, at all; but that gap is not a reason to freeze progress.
Silliness. Nobody's talking about immortality in terms of keeping old people as such alive longer; it's about slowing down, stopping, or even reversing the aging process itself. I'll take any of those, please, and despited the grumblings one always hears when this subject comes up, I suspect the vast majority of people would do the same.
I've noticed that those who object most vehemently to the idea are usually the very young, because death isn't really real to them yet anyway, and because they're easily bored; and the very old, because they've pretty much adjusted to the idea that they're going to die soon. But for those of us in the vast middle -- old enough to understand mortality, but young enough that life is in most ways still a pleasure to live -- the idea of an anti-aging pill is incredibly seductive.
Look, if such a pill came on the market tomorrow, you could always refuse to take it; and if you took it, and later decided that you didn't want to go on forever, you could always kill yourself (which would probably, given the nature of medical treatment, be as simple as "stop taking the pill.") But I've always kind of suspected that most of the neo-Luddites who bleat about how terrible immortality would be will be the first in line at the pharmacy once Ageastatin(tm) goes on sale.
Re:*which* English Civil War?
on
Quicksilver
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Britain did in fact win that struggle in the long run.
Since Britain has gone from #1 global superpower to a third world shit hole, I'd say Britain lost in the long run.
You were rightly modded down as a troll, but your response brings up a couple of points worth addressing. First, Britain is a long way from a "third world shithole;" the standard of living there is roughly equivalent to that in the US (slightly better in some ways, slightly worse in others, but none of the differences are really all that significant.) Second, and more important: for a century and a half after losing the American Revolution, Britain ran an empire which was larger and more prosperous than any other in history, before or since; that's a pretty good run, and one which I doubt the US (I'm almost sure you're an American) will equal. The American empire has lasted sixty years, more or less, and now looks a whole lot like the British empire in its final days.
In the long long run, everybody loses. But London's turn at running the world was the most successful since Rome's.
Re:*which* English Civil War?
on
Quicksilver
·
· Score: 1
Pretty much every nation with any degree of history has had several conflicts that could be called civil wars. But when you say "the English Civil War," or "the American Civil War," or "the Spanish Civil War," everyone knows which particular one you're talking about.
And the American Revolution was a long, long way from a civil war by English standards. Americans, understandably, tend to estimate its importance quite highly; but from the British point of view, it was just one dirty little colonial war in a long struggle for global power -- and much as the US lost Vietnam but won the Cold War, Britain did in fact win that struggle in the long run.
Why would you want someone fighting on your side with his record?
To put it bluntly: for the same reason the Allies wanted Stalin on their side while fighting Hitler. The enemy of my enemy may not be my friend, but that has no bearing on whether or not he's a useful ally.
3. They know that being rich is pretty meaningless if you don't have anyone to buy from -- IOW, they appreciate the hard work that many people do to make their lives comfortable, and are willing to pay a portion of their wealth to help those people out.
As far as we know, H. sap. is unique in that we're the only species that is aware of the evolutionary wheel of fortune, and therefore has a chance to do something about it. (Er, creationists excluded, but I don't suppose it will be any great loss to the gene pool when they go extinct.) That gives us a much better chance than any previous life form of still being around in a billion years, and hopefully being able to come up with a solution to natural disasters, even those as enormous as solar expansion.
Extinction doesn't happen in a vacuum; it happens when the environment changes to the point that existing species can't adapt. Humans are really remarkably good at adaptation; we live in a wider range of environments than any other complex species (by "complex" I mean here basically animals and plants.) And again, the major reason for this is because we know what's going on. I'd say our descendants -- or maybe even we personally! -- have a pretty decent shot at wondering what brand of sunblock to buy in the year 1,000,002,003.
Hush! You're suggesting that maybe the US* won't always be able to go anywhere in the world and do anything it wants with its mighty military force? But clearly God himself has chosen us to have dominion over the Earth! How dare you? Blasphemer!
*Substitute "Rome," "Spain," "France," or "Britain" for "US" above, depending on historical period.
Ditto. When I worked in the ER at Minot AFB, we had an emergency phone that was linked to the base 911 system, but also to a regular number. And we did get telemarketing and other nuisance calls on that line. So yes, one of those telemarketing calls could potentially have killed someone.
That being said, a nuisance call doesn't have to kill someone to interfere with someone's life or livelihood. The fact of being bugged is itself enough to make life difficult. There is no Constitutionally protected right to harass people.
The fastest way for any information to travel (again, as far as we know) is as light. Period. So if the event that's happening is a propagating wavefront of light, nothing is going to get to us before the light itself. ("Light" here including other parts of the EM spectrum: radio, X-rays, whatever.)
Let's suppose that at the halfway point, ~22,500 LY away, the wavefront had some effect -- say, it hit a cloud of interstellar gas and caused that gas to fluoresce. Would we see that fluorescence? Maybe -- except while the light from that fluorescence is traveling toward us, so is the light from the original event. The light from the secondary events can't move any faster.
Okay, here's a terrestrial analogy. Let's suppose someone telephones me and says, "By the way, while I've got you on the line, I'm also calling Trigun on another phone." Now let's suppose I want to call you and warn you about this incoming call. (Maybe it's a bill collector.) No matter how quickly I try to call you, it doesn't matter, because the other guy has already placed the call. Does that make sense?
Because if you vote for a third-party candidate in the US (don't know about Australia, but it sounds like it might be the same way) you might as well not vote at all. Look, in the entire 200+-year history of American politics, it has never happened that a small third party has grown to become one of the Big Two; on the rare occasions when the Big Two have changed their names and fundamental political philosophies, it's happened because one of the existing Big Two fell apart and re-coalesced, usually taking large chunks of the Other Party with them. This is how the Democrats formed in the (very) late 18th c., the Republicans formed in the mid 19th c., and how the Democrats and Republicans essentially traded ideologies (without the name change) in the early-to-mid 20th c. On that timeline, BTW, we're overdue for another big shift, and that's something I'd profoundly like to see -- but voting Libertarian or Green or Reform or Socialist ain't gonna make it happen.
What I find interesting about this post is the assumption that there has to be a single vendor for anything. This mindset seems to me to be the product of the Microsoft era; I don't know how many comments I've seen, in many different contexts, of the "Well, replacing Microsoft with ___ would be just as bad." ("___" is usually Apple, although I've seen Sun and, lately, Red Hat.) In fact, of course, "Microsoft or ___" is a false dichotomy. Buyers -- especially government buyers, although I'd argue that large business acquisitions should follow this policy too -- should insist on interoperability standards which all vendors will follow, and then pick and choose systems that meet these standards, making a deliberate effort to avoid vendor lock-in and the "monoculture crop" security problems that inevitably follow. There's no good reason that a single organization can't have machines running Windows, OS X, Solaris, Linux, and God knows what else sitting side-by-side and working with each other, as long as buyers insist on it.
Well, when the staplers start randomly putting staples through people's hands, the photocopiers suck people in and spit them out in neatly collated slices, and the filing cabinets show an alarming tendency to decapitate the temps... it might be time to start looking for alternative brands.
There are indeed times when "pre-emptive self defense" is justified; e.g., the European powers could have prevented a great deal of bloodshed and suffering by invading Germany the instant Hitler started seriously violating the Treaty of Versailles. There are two problems with taking this idea too far, thought. The first is that this example is so thoroughly burned in people's brains that it's used as a justification for military actions in situations that don't resemble it in the slightest. The second is that battlefield military force is the wrong way to attack people who don't fight on the battlefield. The current US doctrine of pre-emption, and its consequences, is proof of this.
The only way I can think of that anyone got that idea is that Tori Amos is a huge fan of his work and has given Sandman glowing (some might say "gushing") reviews. But there's no reason to believe they ever had an affair.
OTOH, it is kind of cool to see celebrity gossip about geek icons like Neil Gaiman instead of the usual Hollywood crowd.;)
On the one hand, you link to a (very accurate) anti-Bush site in your sig. On the other, you've bought into the anti-French propaganda pushed by the same right-wing idiots that site criticizes. The fact is that the French military record overall is no better or worse than the record of most of the other great powers. Win a few, lose a few; that's the way it goes.
Problem with the incremental approach being, by offering a half-assed system that will only appeal to people with a fair amount of confidence in their ability to set the system up from scratch, they're limiting the market drastically -- and in six months, they get to say, "Well, see, people don't really want to buy Linux boxes, so let's just go back to selling Windows only." I rather suspect that corporate politics are at work:
Bright Boy: You know, sir, we really should be selling at least one PC with Linux. It'll be a big hit!
Windows-drone PHB: Heh, heh. Sure, we can do that. [pats BB on the head] Here you go, sonny.
This is a looong way from actually selling and supporting Linux PC's. I'd love to have that option from a major manufacturer (and I'd love a good laptop from a major manufacturer with Linux only even more) but for now I think it's best to stick with the small specialty manufacturers, or build your own, if you want a Linux-only box without paying Microsoft tax.
On a related note, from the article:
As far as the preload situation goes, it appears we will have to wait a little longer for a preloaded Linux desktop from a major vendor. Following a conference call with HP about the d220, HP spokesperson Tim Constance commented in a follow-up email that "Because of the many flavors and geographical preferences for Linux, HP offers the customer a choice of installing the included Mandrake Linux operating system, or a system of their choice at first boot-up..."
Weenie. Windows doesn't have geographical preferences? This is a cop-out, and again, IMO, reflects a lack of real commitment to the idea.
I think you're confusing asteroids and comets. Asteroids are mostly rocky, occasionally metallic; it's comets that are "dirty snowballs," lots of ice wrapped around bits of rock. BTW, a big metallic asteroid would be very much like ball bearings fired at your head -- and the heads of everyone else on Earth.
It amuses me to think that the old Asteroids game may have been pretty accurate when it comes to the problems of trying to dispose of asteroids by shooting at them..
Lost in the mountains (Colorado). Wandering around on what turned out to be a ranch. Felt the ground shaking, saw a big cloud of dust coming toward me; as the cloud came closer, I saw that it was a herd of cattle kicking up the dust. Holy fucking shit, I thought, and fortunately found a rather large rock to climb up on. I don't know what had the cattle so spooked and/or pissed off, but they were moving damn fast; they detoured around the rock (it was a big rock) but I suspect that they would have run me over without a second thought crossing their tiny little brains. And there were a lot of them. I was up on that rock for, oh, a good fifteen minutes while they went past me, and I probably waited the same amount of time afterwards to make sure they weren't coming back. Eventually I got down off the rock and wandered along until I found the ranch house.
This was after I'd been lost for several hours, and had already dealt with all kinds of other scary situations, though probably none as immediately life-threatening as the cattle. It was one of those things that seems like a grand adventure when you're fifteen. Now, almost twenty years older and wiser, I look back on the whole experience and shudder.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, scripting language holy wars are even sillier than other holy wars. I use Perl, Python, and PHP regularly (and both MySQL and PostgreSQL, on both Linux and BSD) choosing whichever seems best for the task at hand. (Yes, I know that I'm very lucky to have a job that allows me to do this.) And as a benefit, I've become pretty good at porting between various combinations of these languages, servers, and platforms. The underlying logic is a hell of a lot more important than the flavor-of-the-month.
Yes, exactly. I was just thinking that if I were the submitter's boss, my reaction would be, "Okay, here's a really funny joke for you: you're fired. Oh, wait ... I'm not joking. Now, you have fifteen minutes to pack up your shit and get out of the building."
And sorry, "Don't get caught" doesn't cut it. Develop a taste for practical jokes, and sooner or later you will get caught -- and you'll deserve anything that happens to you.
OTOH, if it were my computer that got fucked with, I wouldn't go to the boss. I'd have another kind of practical joke handy: I'd kick the guy's teeth down his throat.
And if you live in the US now, the way things are going, pretty soon you'll be able to relive all your warm'n'fuzzy childhood memories.
Biology does make testable predictions; to take your drug-resistance example, there are a lot of people spending a lot of time and money on predicting not only that resistance will evolve, but under what conditions, how quickly, how much resistance to one drug influences resistance to similar drugs ... etc. But yes, it is quite true that there is a difference between explanatory science and predictive science, and both can reasonably be called "science."
However, simply collecting information is not science in and of itself; that information must be tied together in some way. The classic scientific method cycle of observation -> hypothesis -> experiment -> revision -> theory is one way to do this, but certain fields of study (paleontology, astronomy, climatology) have conditions that make the "experiment" step kind of hard. The usual response, and I think it's a valid one, is to substitute "more observation." And in the observational sciences, the theories that result, no matter how rigorous, tend to face a lot more controversy than those tested in the lab.
So is "socionomics" a science yet? I'm not saying it can't be, but I'm far from convinced that it already is. I'm willing to accept a lot of Prechter's observations as valid, but I also think that any theory of mass behavior has to be tested as rigorously as the assertions of those in the hard sciences before being accepted as valid. Generally, the performance of theory-above-all sorts (e.g. Marxists) in the world arena, vs. the historically-minded, intuitive pragmatists, isn't that great.
By that logic, we shouldn't develop any medications, because they're too expensive for poor people to buy. Again, silliness. Medicines, like every other technological product, start out expensive and get cheaper over time. (Yes, even with drug patents; they do expire, you know.) I'm not happy with the gap between the haves and the have-nots, at all; but that gap is not a reason to freeze progress.
Silliness. Nobody's talking about immortality in terms of keeping old people as such alive longer; it's about slowing down, stopping, or even reversing the aging process itself. I'll take any of those, please, and despited the grumblings one always hears when this subject comes up, I suspect the vast majority of people would do the same.
I've noticed that those who object most vehemently to the idea are usually the very young, because death isn't really real to them yet anyway, and because they're easily bored; and the very old, because they've pretty much adjusted to the idea that they're going to die soon. But for those of us in the vast middle -- old enough to understand mortality, but young enough that life is in most ways still a pleasure to live -- the idea of an anti-aging pill is incredibly seductive.
Look, if such a pill came on the market tomorrow, you could always refuse to take it; and if you took it, and later decided that you didn't want to go on forever, you could always kill yourself (which would probably, given the nature of medical treatment, be as simple as "stop taking the pill.") But I've always kind of suspected that most of the neo-Luddites who bleat about how terrible immortality would be will be the first in line at the pharmacy once Ageastatin(tm) goes on sale.
In the long long run, everybody loses. But London's turn at running the world was the most successful since Rome's.
Pretty much every nation with any degree of history has had several conflicts that could be called civil wars. But when you say "the English Civil War," or "the American Civil War," or "the Spanish Civil War," everyone knows which particular one you're talking about.
And the American Revolution was a long, long way from a civil war by English standards. Americans, understandably, tend to estimate its importance quite highly; but from the British point of view, it was just one dirty little colonial war in a long struggle for global power -- and much as the US lost Vietnam but won the Cold War, Britain did in fact win that struggle in the long run.
If IBM has it, it will run Linux.
3. They know that being rich is pretty meaningless if you don't have anyone to buy from -- IOW, they appreciate the hard work that many people do to make their lives comfortable, and are willing to pay a portion of their wealth to help those people out.
I don't suppose that ever occurred to you?
As far as we know, H. sap. is unique in that we're the only species that is aware of the evolutionary wheel of fortune, and therefore has a chance to do something about it. (Er, creationists excluded, but I don't suppose it will be any great loss to the gene pool when they go extinct.) That gives us a much better chance than any previous life form of still being around in a billion years, and hopefully being able to come up with a solution to natural disasters, even those as enormous as solar expansion.
Extinction doesn't happen in a vacuum; it happens when the environment changes to the point that existing species can't adapt. Humans are really remarkably good at adaptation; we live in a wider range of environments than any other complex species (by "complex" I mean here basically animals and plants.) And again, the major reason for this is because we know what's going on. I'd say our descendants -- or maybe even we personally! -- have a pretty decent shot at wondering what brand of sunblock to buy in the year 1,000,002,003.
Hush! You're suggesting that maybe the US* won't always be able to go anywhere in the world and do anything it wants with its mighty military force? But clearly God himself has chosen us to have dominion over the Earth! How dare you? Blasphemer!
*Substitute "Rome," "Spain," "France," or "Britain" for "US" above, depending on historical period.
Ditto. When I worked in the ER at Minot AFB, we had an emergency phone that was linked to the base 911 system, but also to a regular number. And we did get telemarketing and other nuisance calls on that line. So yes, one of those telemarketing calls could potentially have killed someone.
That being said, a nuisance call doesn't have to kill someone to interfere with someone's life or livelihood. The fact of being bugged is itself enough to make life difficult. There is no Constitutionally protected right to harass people.
It can't.
The fastest way for any information to travel (again, as far as we know) is as light. Period. So if the event that's happening is a propagating wavefront of light, nothing is going to get to us before the light itself. ("Light" here including other parts of the EM spectrum: radio, X-rays, whatever.)
Let's suppose that at the halfway point, ~22,500 LY away, the wavefront had some effect -- say, it hit a cloud of interstellar gas and caused that gas to fluoresce. Would we see that fluorescence? Maybe -- except while the light from that fluorescence is traveling toward us, so is the light from the original event. The light from the secondary events can't move any faster.
Okay, here's a terrestrial analogy. Let's suppose someone telephones me and says, "By the way, while I've got you on the line, I'm also calling Trigun on another phone." Now let's suppose I want to call you and warn you about this incoming call. (Maybe it's a bill collector.) No matter how quickly I try to call you, it doesn't matter, because the other guy has already placed the call. Does that make sense?
Because if you vote for a third-party candidate in the US (don't know about Australia, but it sounds like it might be the same way) you might as well not vote at all. Look, in the entire 200+-year history of American politics, it has never happened that a small third party has grown to become one of the Big Two; on the rare occasions when the Big Two have changed their names and fundamental political philosophies, it's happened because one of the existing Big Two fell apart and re-coalesced, usually taking large chunks of the Other Party with them. This is how the Democrats formed in the (very) late 18th c., the Republicans formed in the mid 19th c., and how the Democrats and Republicans essentially traded ideologies (without the name change) in the early-to-mid 20th c. On that timeline, BTW, we're overdue for another big shift, and that's something I'd profoundly like to see -- but voting Libertarian or Green or Reform or Socialist ain't gonna make it happen.
What I find interesting about this post is the assumption that there has to be a single vendor for anything. This mindset seems to me to be the product of the Microsoft era; I don't know how many comments I've seen, in many different contexts, of the "Well, replacing Microsoft with ___ would be just as bad." ("___" is usually Apple, although I've seen Sun and, lately, Red Hat.) In fact, of course, "Microsoft or ___" is a false dichotomy. Buyers -- especially government buyers, although I'd argue that large business acquisitions should follow this policy too -- should insist on interoperability standards which all vendors will follow, and then pick and choose systems that meet these standards, making a deliberate effort to avoid vendor lock-in and the "monoculture crop" security problems that inevitably follow. There's no good reason that a single organization can't have machines running Windows, OS X, Solaris, Linux, and God knows what else sitting side-by-side and working with each other, as long as buyers insist on it.
Well, when the staplers start randomly putting staples through people's hands, the photocopiers suck people in and spit them out in neatly collated slices, and the filing cabinets show an alarming tendency to decapitate the temps ... it might be time to start looking for alternative brands.
There are indeed times when "pre-emptive self defense" is justified; e.g., the European powers could have prevented a great deal of bloodshed and suffering by invading Germany the instant Hitler started seriously violating the Treaty of Versailles. There are two problems with taking this idea too far, thought. The first is that this example is so thoroughly burned in people's brains that it's used as a justification for military actions in situations that don't resemble it in the slightest. The second is that battlefield military force is the wrong way to attack people who don't fight on the battlefield. The current US doctrine of pre-emption, and its consequences, is proof of this.
The only way I can think of that anyone got that idea is that Tori Amos is a huge fan of his work and has given Sandman glowing (some might say "gushing") reviews. But there's no reason to believe they ever had an affair.
;)
OTOH, it is kind of cool to see celebrity gossip about geek icons like Neil Gaiman instead of the usual Hollywood crowd.
Um ... they've got nukes, actually.
On the one hand, you link to a (very accurate) anti-Bush site in your sig. On the other, you've bought into the anti-French propaganda pushed by the same right-wing idiots that site criticizes. The fact is that the French military record overall is no better or worse than the record of most of the other great powers. Win a few, lose a few; that's the way it goes.
Bright Boy: You know, sir, we really should be selling at least one PC with Linux. It'll be a big hit!
Windows-drone PHB: Heh, heh. Sure, we can do that. [pats BB on the head] Here you go, sonny.
This is a looong way from actually selling and supporting Linux PC's. I'd love to have that option from a major manufacturer (and I'd love a good laptop from a major manufacturer with Linux only even more) but for now I think it's best to stick with the small specialty manufacturers, or build your own, if you want a Linux-only box without paying Microsoft tax.
On a related note, from the article:
Weenie. Windows doesn't have geographical preferences? This is a cop-out, and again, IMO, reflects a lack of real commitment to the idea.
I think you're confusing asteroids and comets. Asteroids are mostly rocky, occasionally metallic; it's comets that are "dirty snowballs," lots of ice wrapped around bits of rock. BTW, a big metallic asteroid would be very much like ball bearings fired at your head -- and the heads of everyone else on Earth.
..
It amuses me to think that the old Asteroids game may have been pretty accurate when it comes to the problems of trying to dispose of asteroids by shooting at them
Lost in the mountains (Colorado). Wandering around on what turned out to be a ranch. Felt the ground shaking, saw a big cloud of dust coming toward me; as the cloud came closer, I saw that it was a herd of cattle kicking up the dust. Holy fucking shit, I thought, and fortunately found a rather large rock to climb up on. I don't know what had the cattle so spooked and/or pissed off, but they were moving damn fast; they detoured around the rock (it was a big rock) but I suspect that they would have run me over without a second thought crossing their tiny little brains. And there were a lot of them. I was up on that rock for, oh, a good fifteen minutes while they went past me, and I probably waited the same amount of time afterwards to make sure they weren't coming back. Eventually I got down off the rock and wandered along until I found the ranch house.
This was after I'd been lost for several hours, and had already dealt with all kinds of other scary situations, though probably none as immediately life-threatening as the cattle. It was one of those things that seems like a grand adventure when you're fifteen. Now, almost twenty years older and wiser, I look back on the whole experience and shudder.