The bit about points on your license applies here too, but you only get points on your drivers' license if you have one.
This gets even more absurd if you happen to be a cyclist because you don't drive; in that case, the authorities will issue you with a driver's licence (that you didn't want and can't use) just so they can put the points on it.
Are you sure about this? I simply ask because (a) I may go to the UK at some stage, and if I do I'll certainly drink beer and may borrow a bike, and (b) I seem to recall a neat trick about Australian police having to do insane amounts of paperwork (and hence letting you off with a warning) if you (i) have a British license, and (ii) are driving a car that's not registered in your name. I'm sure you can see where this is going.;)
Read my quote.:P That line was directly in response to the thing I quoted.
I don't see anything wrong with having a few more gauges and dials on the dashboard, so to speak. As a geek, I rather like the idea.:) What I do dislike is the idea of having yet another "idiot light" that'll tell me to go see my doctor just in case (and probably double my health insurance if I don't).
[T]hats why on Mac, Linux or Windows you stick with code that will just work on one core. No problems then.
That, and the much greater reason that (a) 99% of software these days would run just fine on a single core P4 3GHz, and (b) most programmers are really, really bad and it's much harder to screw up a single-threaded app badly enough that I can't fix it, than it is to screw up a multi-threaded app.
This is the sort of thing I like about Apple's 'Grand Central'.
What's this 'grand central' thing? From a few brief Google searches it appears to be a framework for using graphics shaders to offload number crunching to the video card. It'd be nice if they'd stick (at least for technical audiences) to slightly more descriptive and less grandiose labels.
<rant> That's always been my main peeve with Apple, they give opaque, grandiloquent names to standard technologies, make ridiculous performance claims, then set their foaming fanboys loose to harass those of us who just want to get the job done. Remember "AltiVEC" (which my friend swore could burn a picture of Jesus's toenails onto a piece of toast on the far side of the moon with a laser beam comprised purely of blindingly fast array calculations) which turned out to just be a slightly better MMX-like SIMD addon?
Or the G3/G4 processors which lead us to be breathlessly sprayed with superlatives for years until Apple ditched them for the next big thing - Intel processors! Us stupid, drone-like "windoze" users would never see the genius in using Intel proce... oh wait. No, no wait. We got the same "oooh the Intel Mac is 157 times faster than an Intel PC" for at least six months until 'homebrew' OSX finally proved that the hardware is exactly the friggin same now. For a while, thank God, they've been reduced to lavishing praise on the case design and elegant headphone plug placement. It looks like that's coming to an end, though.
</rant>
But two cars can't get one person to his destination any faster than one car would, in much the same manner that two women cannot between them have a baby in 4.5 months.
Also, show me a smartphone that has the battery life of a good old remote control that can last for months or more.
Most importantly, show me a smartphone that'll let me change channels in the 45 minutes after my mother's called my mobile and asked to talk to my wife.
Actually the analogy of a freeway isn't half bad. You have a certain number of commuters (tasks) that need to travel along the freeway (the computer system) for various amounts of time. You can only raise the speed limit so far before you need to make your cars out of exotic materials and it all gets too expensive. You can add extra lanes (processors) to speed things up. You can get the best speedups by either adding special lanes that don't allow lane changing (ie. tasks that parallelise without requiring cross-talk), or using larger vehicles such as busses or trains (SIMD instructions, but everyone has to be going at the same speed to the same place).
Yeah, I understand the principle.:) But there's a massive gulf between "It's not possible for me to read the thermometer inside a box without changing the temperature in the box, affecting the thermometer's next reading" and "The thermometer doesn't indicate any temperature at all until I look at it".
I like the way you tie it in with religion - faith requires unprovability (or unfalsifiability, at least) by definition, and where better to get it from than a physically provable source of uncertainty?:)
Voting is individually-irrational -- even if it is collectively the least-bad political option yet-devised (it beats dictatorship in its ability to deliver human freedom and modern societal outcomes).
This is purely psychological. The fact that the populous get to pick one of two potential dictators doesn't mean that they have any say in the running of the country. They just think they do because they had the option to vote, and so they don't feel entitled to muster up a coup when the government screws them over.
My grandparents on my mother's side smoked when they were young, quit in their 30s (or 40s? not sure) and both died of Alzheimers in their 70s. My grandparents on my dad's side both smoked like chimneys. Grandma held out into her mid-70s before dying of lung cancer, my Opa had a stroke at 78 or so and occasionally pees in the flowerpot in his room in his nursing home, but leave him alone for 5 minutes and he's caught a bus and is down the pub with a beer.
I'm wondering if I should take up smoking to balance out my drinking for a healthier lifestyle...
I tried to get my university physics lecturers to explain how they got from "the formula breaks if we try to do anything infinitely precisely" to "everything exists in a magic state of maybe unless we look at it at which point it makes up its mind". I either got handwaving and a lot of ums and ahs or I got told "well that's just the way it is, and you couldn't possibly understand why" (me being just an engineer, I was obviously far below these physicist types). It seems to me that this is a prime example of mistaking the model for the system.
I think it's silly how people constantly try to eliminate every imaginable element of risk from their lives instead of just getting out there and living it.
I agree. I also think it's silly to say we have "absolutely no monitoring of our body's medical status" when we have our nervous system - a far more comprehensive, sensitive monitoring and fault detection system than covers most industrial plants.
My mantra on the matter is this: "I love life too much to let my fear of losing it stop me from living it."
In Australia (as I understand it) our drunk driving laws cover any vehicle. The canonical 'ad absurdum' example is that you can lose your drivers' license for rollerskating while drunk, and riding a push bike (or a horse) while drunk is likewise punishable.
I think the worst cases are where the cops can charge you for DUI if they find you in your car with the keys while drunk, even if it's 10am and you're fast asleep. Given the number of times I or my friends have stumbled out to a car and slept it off before driving home in the morning, that seems pretty unfair (compared to just driving home at 4am when there's negligible chance of being caught).
Learn C(++). Learn it good. Even if you most likely won't find many jobs using C++ these days, C++ is the grandaddy of 99% of languages out there. Think of C++ as being a wrench, and C+ / Java / PHP etc. as being balls.
I see where you're coming from, but I stand by my statement that none of the candidates were any different, or any more aligned with my views, on any issue I cared about.
I'd be very interested in seeing how it would work out if a candidate ran with no platform except democracy. Set up a secure website where people could (after confirming themselves as members of the electorate) log in and vote, personally, on every single issue that was being raised. Then the candidate would cast their vote according to their electorate's wishes, allowing the electorate to directly have their (aggregated) say on any issue. Hell, I'm tempted to do it myself, the only problem is whether the average Aussie would actually care enough and/or understand the difference. I suspect a key reason that democracy works reasonably well in general is that it results in the government not bothering the populace too much between elections.:(
Oh, sorry, I almost forgot (and please forgive me for replying to myself) but the worst thing of all was the stupid banter about the economy. "Vote Labor for WORKERS RIGHTS", one side said. "Vote Liberal for A STRONG ECONOMY, Labor stands for a WEAK ECONOMY and we stand for a STRONG ECONOMY so if you want a STRONG ECONOMY vote for US!!!", the other side said. Then they continued on to say "Yes, Labor will MAKE INTEREST RATES RISE, and if you VOTE for ME, we will MAKE THE RATES FALL!!!!!!!!".
Which is blatant bullcrap because as anyone who bothers to look it up can find out, the interest rates here are set by the reserve bank, and aren't under the control of the government regardless of the party that's currently in. That aside, saying that parties can make the economy strong or weak instantly at a whim is just disingenuous.
Well, last election I looked at both sides and said "I can't honestly vote for either of you because I don't want either in power". So I didn't. What really got me was the TV advertising, which was so truthy you could run a truth-fork through it and get a whole forkload of truthy truthiness... but no actual truth. They told me ALL about how the other guy's niece this one time pulled her top up at a party, and how the other guy was practially a terrorist himself because he didn't believe in workers' unions, and how they would save me from "those damn young larrikins" by being "tough on car hoons" or "drugs" or "alcohol" or "gangs" or "internet pornography" or "music pirates" or "ecstasy" or anyone of a hundred different things that I don't actually think are wrong. And most importantly, other than bragging about how "tough" they were on all this stuff, they never, ever said ANYTHING about how they'd run the fucking country.
Forgive me for thinking that might somehow be relevant.
You didn't vote for it, but that guy you DID vote for (cuz he said he'd save the children and prevent forest fires) voted for it 6 months later. Sorry, you no longer have the right to bitch about anything including the right to bitch and your lack thereof.
Easy: If you don't vote, you have no right to bitch about the people you didn't vote for screwing things up:)
If I don't vote (and I didn't, which in Australia is actually punishable, but so be it - I didn't see a candidate I could conscionably vote for) then no-one can blame me for 'choosing' the candidate who's currently fucking our country. And that's the main purpose of democracy; to say to the common man: "You voted for him so it's your fault that he's making fucktarded decisions", or "You voted against him but most people voted for him, so you're wrong".
OK, I oopsed and said democratic republic when I should have said constitutional monarchy. Now pretend that the Queen hasn't had jack to say about Australia except "oh, I say, those rabbits are rather large" for the last god knows how many years, and you'll see that the result is very, very similar to a democratic republic.
Basically we're a country that's governed by a bunch of punks who were the least worst option for their little patch of.au. Us plebs don't get any say in the matter in between elections, and even then we only get to choose between carbon copies that all promise the same things. ("Tough on crime", "tough on drugs", "we'll keep your creaking geriatric bones safe from those damnable 'young people'"). There's no real choice since our population is so uniform that everyone stands for the same things.
Very good points, I'd amend my post if I could to mention that as you said, this holds true for any home-assembled product made out of parts that are sold in sufficient numbers to warrant high volume production in their own right.
Also the part about a registered electrician is a very good point - as with connecting deep-cycle 12v batteries up to form a battery pack for an electric vehicle, it's very possible to rapidly get into lethal voltage territory with just a few off-the-shelf parts. If you're dealing with something that can potentially boil a kettle, you're dealing with something that most probably could kill you.:P
I guess the best thing to do is think of your flash disk as being at the end of a very fast ADSL modem. It's a lot slower to "upload" data to it than it is to "download" from it.
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This gets even more absurd if you happen to be a cyclist because you don't drive; in that case, the authorities will issue you with a driver's licence (that you didn't want and can't use) just so they can put the points on it.
Are you sure about this? I simply ask because (a) I may go to the UK at some stage, and if I do I'll certainly drink beer and may borrow a bike, and (b) I seem to recall a neat trick about Australian police having to do insane amounts of paperwork (and hence letting you off with a warning) if you (i) have a British license, and (ii) are driving a car that's not registered in your name. I'm sure you can see where this is going. ;)
Read my quote. :P That line was directly in response to the thing I quoted.
:) What I do dislike is the idea of having yet another "idiot light" that'll tell me to go see my doctor just in case (and probably double my health insurance if I don't).
I don't see anything wrong with having a few more gauges and dials on the dashboard, so to speak. As a geek, I rather like the idea.
[T]hats why on Mac, Linux or Windows you stick with code that will just work on one core. No problems then.
That, and the much greater reason that (a) 99% of software these days would run just fine on a single core P4 3GHz, and (b) most programmers are really, really bad and it's much harder to screw up a single-threaded app badly enough that I can't fix it, than it is to screw up a multi-threaded app.
This is the sort of thing I like about Apple's 'Grand Central'.
What's this 'grand central' thing? From a few brief Google searches it appears to be a framework for using graphics shaders to offload number crunching to the video card. It'd be nice if they'd stick (at least for technical audiences) to slightly more descriptive and less grandiose labels.
<rant>
That's always been my main peeve with Apple, they give opaque, grandiloquent names to standard technologies, make ridiculous performance claims, then set their foaming fanboys loose to harass those of us who just want to get the job done. Remember "AltiVEC" (which my friend swore could burn a picture of Jesus's toenails onto a piece of toast on the far side of the moon with a laser beam comprised purely of blindingly fast array calculations) which turned out to just be a slightly better MMX-like SIMD addon?
Or the G3/G4 processors which lead us to be breathlessly sprayed with superlatives for years until Apple ditched them for the next big thing - Intel processors! Us stupid, drone-like "windoze" users would never see the genius in using Intel proce... oh wait. No, no wait. We got the same "oooh the Intel Mac is 157 times faster than an Intel PC" for at least six months until 'homebrew' OSX finally proved that the hardware is exactly the friggin same now. For a while, thank God, they've been reduced to lavishing praise on the case design and elegant headphone plug placement. It looks like that's coming to an end, though.
</rant>
But two cars can't get one person to his destination any faster than one car would, in much the same manner that two women cannot between them have a baby in 4.5 months.
Also, show me a smartphone that has the battery life of a good old remote control that can last for months or more.
Most importantly, show me a smartphone that'll let me change channels in the 45 minutes after my mother's called my mobile and asked to talk to my wife.
Actually the analogy of a freeway isn't half bad. You have a certain number of commuters (tasks) that need to travel along the freeway (the computer system) for various amounts of time. You can only raise the speed limit so far before you need to make your cars out of exotic materials and it all gets too expensive. You can add extra lanes (processors) to speed things up. You can get the best speedups by either adding special lanes that don't allow lane changing (ie. tasks that parallelise without requiring cross-talk), or using larger vehicles such as busses or trains (SIMD instructions, but everyone has to be going at the same speed to the same place).
Yeah, I understand the principle. :) But there's a massive gulf between "It's not possible for me to read the thermometer inside a box without changing the temperature in the box, affecting the thermometer's next reading" and "The thermometer doesn't indicate any temperature at all until I look at it".
:)
I like the way you tie it in with religion - faith requires unprovability (or unfalsifiability, at least) by definition, and where better to get it from than a physically provable source of uncertainty?
Voting is individually-irrational -- even if it is collectively the least-bad political option yet-devised (it beats dictatorship in its ability to deliver human freedom and modern societal outcomes).
This is purely psychological. The fact that the populous get to pick one of two potential dictators doesn't mean that they have any say in the running of the country. They just think they do because they had the option to vote, and so they don't feel entitled to muster up a coup when the government screws them over.
My grandparents on my mother's side smoked when they were young, quit in their 30s (or 40s? not sure) and both died of Alzheimers in their 70s. My grandparents on my dad's side both smoked like chimneys. Grandma held out into her mid-70s before dying of lung cancer, my Opa had a stroke at 78 or so and occasionally pees in the flowerpot in his room in his nursing home, but leave him alone for 5 minutes and he's caught a bus and is down the pub with a beer.
I'm wondering if I should take up smoking to balance out my drinking for a healthier lifestyle...
I tried to get my university physics lecturers to explain how they got from "the formula breaks if we try to do anything infinitely precisely" to "everything exists in a magic state of maybe unless we look at it at which point it makes up its mind". I either got handwaving and a lot of ums and ahs or I got told "well that's just the way it is, and you couldn't possibly understand why" (me being just an engineer, I was obviously far below these physicist types). It seems to me that this is a prime example of mistaking the model for the system.
I hate it when people quote Heisenberg out of context.
He might, or might not, have quoted Heisenberg out of context. Until I look it up, though, his post exists in a state of superposition, doesn't it? :)
I think it's silly how people constantly try to eliminate every imaginable element of risk from their lives instead of just getting out there and living it.
I agree. I also think it's silly to say we have "absolutely no monitoring of our body's medical status" when we have our nervous system - a far more comprehensive, sensitive monitoring and fault detection system than covers most industrial plants.
My mantra on the matter is this: "I love life too much to let my fear of losing it stop me from living it."
In Australia (as I understand it) our drunk driving laws cover any vehicle. The canonical 'ad absurdum' example is that you can lose your drivers' license for rollerskating while drunk, and riding a push bike (or a horse) while drunk is likewise punishable.
I think the worst cases are where the cops can charge you for DUI if they find you in your car with the keys while drunk, even if it's 10am and you're fast asleep. Given the number of times I or my friends have stumbled out to a car and slept it off before driving home in the morning, that seems pretty unfair (compared to just driving home at 4am when there's negligible chance of being caught).
Try "a poster-sized print of the judge's wife undressing, that was taken by an anonymous perv with a telephoto lens".
+1.
Learn C(++). Learn it good. Even if you most likely won't find many jobs using C++ these days, C++ is the grandaddy of 99% of languages out there. Think of C++ as being a wrench, and C+ / Java / PHP etc. as being balls.
I see where you're coming from, but I stand by my statement that none of the candidates were any different, or any more aligned with my views, on any issue I cared about.
:(
I'd be very interested in seeing how it would work out if a candidate ran with no platform except democracy. Set up a secure website where people could (after confirming themselves as members of the electorate) log in and vote, personally, on every single issue that was being raised. Then the candidate would cast their vote according to their electorate's wishes, allowing the electorate to directly have their (aggregated) say on any issue. Hell, I'm tempted to do it myself, the only problem is whether the average Aussie would actually care enough and/or understand the difference. I suspect a key reason that democracy works reasonably well in general is that it results in the government not bothering the populace too much between elections.
Oh, sorry, I almost forgot (and please forgive me for replying to myself) but the worst thing of all was the stupid banter about the economy. "Vote Labor for WORKERS RIGHTS", one side said. "Vote Liberal for A STRONG ECONOMY, Labor stands for a WEAK ECONOMY and we stand for a STRONG ECONOMY so if you want a STRONG ECONOMY vote for US!!!", the other side said. Then they continued on to say "Yes, Labor will MAKE INTEREST RATES RISE, and if you VOTE for ME, we will MAKE THE RATES FALL!!!!!!!!".
Which is blatant bullcrap because as anyone who bothers to look it up can find out, the interest rates here are set by the reserve bank, and aren't under the control of the government regardless of the party that's currently in. That aside, saying that parties can make the economy strong or weak instantly at a whim is just disingenuous.
Well, last election I looked at both sides and said "I can't honestly vote for either of you because I don't want either in power". So I didn't. What really got me was the TV advertising, which was so truthy you could run a truth-fork through it and get a whole forkload of truthy truthiness... but no actual truth. They told me ALL about how the other guy's niece this one time pulled her top up at a party, and how the other guy was practially a terrorist himself because he didn't believe in workers' unions, and how they would save me from "those damn young larrikins" by being "tough on car hoons" or "drugs" or "alcohol" or "gangs" or "internet pornography" or "music pirates" or "ecstasy" or anyone of a hundred different things that I don't actually think are wrong. And most importantly, other than bragging about how "tough" they were on all this stuff, they never, ever said ANYTHING about how they'd run the fucking country.
Forgive me for thinking that might somehow be relevant.
You didn't vote for it, but that guy you DID vote for (cuz he said he'd save the children and prevent forest fires) voted for it 6 months later. Sorry, you no longer have the right to bitch about anything including the right to bitch and your lack thereof.
Easy: If you don't vote, you have no right to bitch about the people you didn't vote for screwing things up :)
If I don't vote (and I didn't, which in Australia is actually punishable, but so be it - I didn't see a candidate I could conscionably vote for) then no-one can blame me for 'choosing' the candidate who's currently fucking our country. And that's the main purpose of democracy; to say to the common man: "You voted for him so it's your fault that he's making fucktarded decisions", or "You voted against him but most people voted for him, so you're wrong".
OK, I oopsed and said democratic republic when I should have said constitutional monarchy. Now pretend that the Queen hasn't had jack to say about Australia except "oh, I say, those rabbits are rather large" for the last god knows how many years, and you'll see that the result is very, very similar to a democratic republic.
.au. Us plebs don't get any say in the matter in between elections, and even then we only get to choose between carbon copies that all promise the same things. ("Tough on crime", "tough on drugs", "we'll keep your creaking geriatric bones safe from those damnable 'young people'"). There's no real choice since our population is so uniform that everyone stands for the same things.
Basically we're a country that's governed by a bunch of punks who were the least worst option for their little patch of
Very good points, I'd amend my post if I could to mention that as you said, this holds true for any home-assembled product made out of parts that are sold in sufficient numbers to warrant high volume production in their own right.
:P
Also the part about a registered electrician is a very good point - as with connecting deep-cycle 12v batteries up to form a battery pack for an electric vehicle, it's very possible to rapidly get into lethal voltage territory with just a few off-the-shelf parts. If you're dealing with something that can potentially boil a kettle, you're dealing with something that most probably could kill you.
I guess the best thing to do is think of your flash disk as being at the end of a very fast ADSL modem. It's a lot slower to "upload" data to it than it is to "download" from it.
Leave a comment on his website linking to CP, then report him to the feds.