What would happen if someone were to ram a plane into the cable?
What would happen if somebody rammed a plane into cape canaveral or the space shuttle?
Cape Canaveral is easy to defend. It's on the ground. This is a vertical structure that goes all the way up into space. To be completely safe, we'd have to enforce a very wide no-fly zone around it.
Which is what you'd have to do around cape canaveral anyway. The upside of the space elevator is that it'd have to be on the equator, probably in the middle of the ocean. They'd probably enforce a wide no-fly zone around it anyway to avoid accidents and since it would need to be moved periodically.
And what happens when they change those tables? Sounds like you're asking for a world of business hurt down the road with the costs to update the code and cover the changed price.
The availability of different libraries on different platforms is universal for basically all languages.
Of course there will be, because the platform has different underlying features. The problem this presents is that you're adding another layer on top of it. That statement wasn't like saying that a certain perl program will only run on windows (which would still be considered bad practice btw), but on top of that you'd have to have the right version of the three available interpreters for windows to run it. What happens when someone distributes one program that requires jruby and someone else distributes a program that requires the canonical interpreter? The point of being cross platform is to try to make it so that the code will run on as many platforms as it can; Rich Kilmer wants to fragment it even more. It seems kind of counter productive.
just imagine the damage it might cause if the thing were to collapse and land over a populated area.
Depends on how you build it. If you're using carbon nano-tubes, then not much at all. Basically, much of it would go into space, a lot would get burned up on the way down, and the rest would be light enough that it's be more like a bunch of paper floating to the ground instead of a giant steel structure falling down. If it's heavy enough to cause damage, it's probably not going to be a good material to make the elevator out of in the first place.
Just the opposite, actually. The jet pack is closer to what we're doing with space right now, which is strapping huge rockets on a much smaller payload. The space elevator would allow us to use whatever energy source we want to use to get the payload into space (still a significant amount of energy). In addition, it would provide a possible electrical line for electricity to go from space to the earth.
Arguing about protecting it from terrorists is, in a word, retarded. There's no reason that it will be any harder to defend than Cape Canaveral; in fact, it'll probably be easier if it's in the middle of the ocean.
Finally, once we've got one space elevator in place, putting more up will be much easier because of the refined design and the greater ability to send things to space.
What would you call it? The Ron Paul Revolution isn't named after the issues, it's named after the man. It's based on a real desire that people have to see more conservative/libertarian principles in place, but that doesn't stop it from being a cult of personality. That same fervor didn't translate into the libertarian candidate.
I found those in my history books and my history teacher made sure to mention it specifically. I even grew up in one of the most conservative counties in the US.
In fact, look at Obama's rise and the fervor people have for him. If you'd prefer, look at Ron Paul. These examples obviously don't have the maliciousness of Hitler, but it does show how stars and cults of personality can form rather quickly. If anything, I'd think that it would have helped him overall.
Depends on your tastes. If you like minimalism, try Chrome. If you like tons of features and don't mind a heavy footprint, get firefox + plugins. If you like apple, try Safari. If you like leather and ball gags, try IE.
Competition is almost invariably a good thing for users, but in the case of web browsers, all it does is force the developers to add countless new "features" to "stay ahead of the competition" instead of spending that time making it do the things it already does the way it should.
Like passing the ACID test? Like giving you a start page that's ridiculously useful? Like making tabbed browsing work? Like making sure that everything runs in its own process?
What exactly would you like to see the browser do better? It seems to me that they're refining things faster than they're adding features.
Okay, how does it detect something that's unknown?
If the program doesn't know about the virus beforehand, saying that the virus was unknown to it makes complete sense.
I think it would be better phrasing to say "this scanning engine has the best heuristic pattern matching algorithms amongst those products tested."
That's just a rewrite of the current headline. Heuristic algorithms are there to match the viruses that aren't specifically known about and scanned for.
Or another legal department, or a friend or family member, or he can join a church and ask one of the members (this would take longer than the other ones). He's in research at a university, it's a good case for someone to take pro bono.
The best teachers I had were many times more effective than the worst ones. In physics, I practically had to teach myself the material. In math one year, my teacher taught me more than I learned in the three before it combined. In the five years since I left, half of the good teachers retired because if they didn't, they were going to lose 1/3 of their benefits.
Putting aside teachers who teach to the willing, there were also teachers that excelled at motivating students. My English teacher had a way of making poor students at least try, and I've had a few math teachers that inspired the less willing students to do better. There's no doubt that some students will always be more motivated and better able to learn than others, but pretending that teachers don't have a role in motivating students is wrong.
Moving forward, we need to pay teachers more to attract better talent. Right now there are horrible teachers that have jobs because there aren't any replacements that will do better. My math teacher could have gotten a job where he would have made 6 figures a year; instead he was a high school teacher earning less after a decade than I made after 1 year programming. How is that right?
The AC above you was absolutely correct in saying that we need to use our resources better, but all the improvement in the world won't give us better teachers with smaller classes unless we put more money into the system. We need to pay teachers more so that we have good teachers so that they can motivate the students and teach more to the ones who are serious about it.
Agreed and most definitely NOT off-topic. More money needs to be funneled into the school system. I'm surprised we're not seeing things along the lines of IBM or Google paying to sponsor school districts' computer programs, from elementary through high school. If "while" loops and simple boolean mathematics were taught alongside algebra, there'd be a lot more people who were capable programmers and engineers. Even if it were as simple as some information in the welcome packet letting students and parents know that it was a sponsored course and a few reminders through the year, the increased public perception alone would be enough to make up for the cost. Add in the higher number of quality engineers that would come out of the program and it's a net positive for a company that only hires highly qualified candidates.
At the very least, they should be paying to get their top engineers teaching courses in high school and junior high.
The C-first approach leads to an early focus
on low-level details. It also obscures programming style and design issues by forces the student to face
many technical difficulties to express anything interesting.
Expressing interesting things doesn't happen in a CS course, at least the ones where you're learning the language. It takes new CS students hours to implement the most simple linked list because it's not familiar to them. I learned low level first and I'm finding that it's the best way to teach my sister-in-law who's a beginning CS student. They're trying to teach object oriented features before they teach arrays or loops. Objects are constructs on top of the other programming concepts and should be taught as such. It was only after showing her how to use low-level features that she was able to start doing any semblance of OO programming.
People get so caught up trying to teach the "right" way to program that they don't teach how to program first, which is a mistake. Students need to learn the power and wonder of while, for, and regular functions before you can teach them the power of object oriented programming. Computer science is unfamiliar and strange, let students learn the simple things before throwing the advanced concepts at them.
I guess what I'm saying is that a good course would teach functional programming before teaching object oriented programming later in the same course.
That's because you know MySQL, so of course something that works differently is going to be more work for you to figure out.
I spent much of last night doing my third Postgres install. It took me roughly one and a half hours to get it to where I wanted it, with a user that can access it over the local network and an empty database from which to build my app. My third mysql install took roughly 20 minutes to get to that point, and that was a few years ago when I didn't know half as much about databases as I do today.
I don't know what the general trends in the population are, but for me and the people that I've dealt with, MySQL has always been vastly easier to use than Postgres, and that was the sticking point. From everything I've read and seen, people tend to share my opinion. Postgres is the better tool (by far) if you're willing to give up some user friendliness; however, for newbs, user friendliness is the difference between using something and throwing up your hands and giving up.
Maybe when you're out of training you'll see the difference.
But seriously, if the quality of the programs is the same, then the openness alone should make the decision. As someone else pointed out, sometimes it takes a lot of work to find out there's a bug in a proprietary program, and then you're at the mercy of the corporation that made the program. When something's wrong in an open source program, the backers of the program are usually more open about it and you can go into the source and fix it yourself if you want to. I would consider those technical advantages.
Experience. I've used MySQL for years and didn't have any problems with configuration. It worked out of the box for everything I needed. Just last night I was configuring Postgres and had some issues with the configuration that I had to look up in their manual. The same thing in MySQL would have taken me thirty seconds now, and no more than 15 minutes when I was starting out. With Postgres, it took me upwards of 20 minutes when it should have taken much less time. MySQL is more willing to hold new users hands and has a lot of easy shortcuts built into it. Postgres does things well and gives you a lot of options, but it's not as forgiving to new users. Things like "SHOW TABLES" are either considerably more difficult in Postgres or harder to find out.
I would prefer if the programs were written so that you could use the RDBMS you already have installed. For me this is a small hint that the developers might have a thought when it comes to design.
When you're using MySQL for applications that aren't being distributed and installed by your customers, but are running on servers you control, there's no real need to make it work with any database other than the one that you're using.
Slashdot Mirror
What would happen if someone were to ram a plane into the cable?
What would happen if somebody rammed a plane into cape canaveral or the space shuttle?
Cape Canaveral is easy to defend. It's on the ground. This is a vertical structure that goes all the way up into space. To be completely safe, we'd have to enforce a very wide no-fly zone around it.
Which is what you'd have to do around cape canaveral anyway. The upside of the space elevator is that it'd have to be on the equator, probably in the middle of the ocean. They'd probably enforce a wide no-fly zone around it anyway to avoid accidents and since it would need to be moved periodically.
And what happens when they change those tables? Sounds like you're asking for a world of business hurt down the road with the costs to update the code and cover the changed price.
The availability of different libraries on different platforms is universal for basically all languages.
Of course there will be, because the platform has different underlying features. The problem this presents is that you're adding another layer on top of it. That statement wasn't like saying that a certain perl program will only run on windows (which would still be considered bad practice btw), but on top of that you'd have to have the right version of the three available interpreters for windows to run it. What happens when someone distributes one program that requires jruby and someone else distributes a program that requires the canonical interpreter? The point of being cross platform is to try to make it so that the code will run on as many platforms as it can; Rich Kilmer wants to fragment it even more. It seems kind of counter productive.
If you put it on the BCC line, they'll never know how many people it was sent to.
Civil disobedience is fine, IMO. Have at it, but don't come blubbering when Mr. Consequence arrives to the party.
I thought that was the point of civil disobedience, that you showed the world the injustice by suffering through the situation in a more public way.
just imagine the damage it might cause if the thing were to collapse and land over a populated area.
Depends on how you build it. If you're using carbon nano-tubes, then not much at all. Basically, much of it would go into space, a lot would get burned up on the way down, and the rest would be light enough that it's be more like a bunch of paper floating to the ground instead of a giant steel structure falling down. If it's heavy enough to cause damage, it's probably not going to be a good material to make the elevator out of in the first place.
Just the opposite, actually. The jet pack is closer to what we're doing with space right now, which is strapping huge rockets on a much smaller payload. The space elevator would allow us to use whatever energy source we want to use to get the payload into space (still a significant amount of energy). In addition, it would provide a possible electrical line for electricity to go from space to the earth.
Arguing about protecting it from terrorists is, in a word, retarded. There's no reason that it will be any harder to defend than Cape Canaveral; in fact, it'll probably be easier if it's in the middle of the ocean.
Finally, once we've got one space elevator in place, putting more up will be much easier because of the refined design and the greater ability to send things to space.
What would you call it? The Ron Paul Revolution isn't named after the issues, it's named after the man. It's based on a real desire that people have to see more conservative/libertarian principles in place, but that doesn't stop it from being a cult of personality. That same fervor didn't translate into the libertarian candidate.
iSQL
50% more pretentious, runs all the coolest sites in the world.
You won't find that in the history books
I found those in my history books and my history teacher made sure to mention it specifically. I even grew up in one of the most conservative counties in the US.
I thought it was because the US was too wrapped up in two other wars and no other western powers really give a shit.
In fact, look at Obama's rise and the fervor people have for him. If you'd prefer, look at Ron Paul. These examples obviously don't have the maliciousness of Hitler, but it does show how stars and cults of personality can form rather quickly. If anything, I'd think that it would have helped him overall.
I don't think that method has much of a future. Give it a generation or two at most.
Depends on your tastes. If you like minimalism, try Chrome. If you like tons of features and don't mind a heavy footprint, get firefox + plugins. If you like apple, try Safari. If you like leather and ball gags, try IE.
That was actually one of the things that attracted me to this site in the first place. It's a good old fashioned site that stuck to the fundamentals.
Competition is almost invariably a good thing for users, but in the case of web browsers, all it does is force the developers to add countless new "features" to "stay ahead of the competition" instead of spending that time making it do the things it already does the way it should.
Like passing the ACID test? Like giving you a start page that's ridiculously useful? Like making tabbed browsing work? Like making sure that everything runs in its own process?
What exactly would you like to see the browser do better? It seems to me that they're refining things faster than they're adding features.
Okay, how does it detect something that's unknown?
If the program doesn't know about the virus beforehand, saying that the virus was unknown to it makes complete sense.
I think it would be better phrasing to say "this scanning engine has the best heuristic pattern matching algorithms amongst those products tested."
That's just a rewrite of the current headline. Heuristic algorithms are there to match the viruses that aren't specifically known about and scanned for.
Or another legal department, or a friend or family member, or he can join a church and ask one of the members (this would take longer than the other ones). He's in research at a university, it's a good case for someone to take pro bono.
The best teachers I had were many times more effective than the worst ones. In physics, I practically had to teach myself the material. In math one year, my teacher taught me more than I learned in the three before it combined. In the five years since I left, half of the good teachers retired because if they didn't, they were going to lose 1/3 of their benefits.
Putting aside teachers who teach to the willing, there were also teachers that excelled at motivating students. My English teacher had a way of making poor students at least try, and I've had a few math teachers that inspired the less willing students to do better. There's no doubt that some students will always be more motivated and better able to learn than others, but pretending that teachers don't have a role in motivating students is wrong.
Moving forward, we need to pay teachers more to attract better talent. Right now there are horrible teachers that have jobs because there aren't any replacements that will do better. My math teacher could have gotten a job where he would have made 6 figures a year; instead he was a high school teacher earning less after a decade than I made after 1 year programming. How is that right?
The AC above you was absolutely correct in saying that we need to use our resources better, but all the improvement in the world won't give us better teachers with smaller classes unless we put more money into the system. We need to pay teachers more so that we have good teachers so that they can motivate the students and teach more to the ones who are serious about it.
At the very least, they should be paying to get their top engineers teaching courses in high school and junior high.
I use them to buy civilization.
Can you blame us for wanting a refund?
The C-first approach leads to an early focus on low-level details. It also obscures programming style and design issues by forces the student to face many technical difficulties to express anything interesting.
Expressing interesting things doesn't happen in a CS course, at least the ones where you're learning the language. It takes new CS students hours to implement the most simple linked list because it's not familiar to them. I learned low level first and I'm finding that it's the best way to teach my sister-in-law who's a beginning CS student. They're trying to teach object oriented features before they teach arrays or loops. Objects are constructs on top of the other programming concepts and should be taught as such. It was only after showing her how to use low-level features that she was able to start doing any semblance of OO programming.
People get so caught up trying to teach the "right" way to program that they don't teach how to program first, which is a mistake. Students need to learn the power and wonder of while, for, and regular functions before you can teach them the power of object oriented programming. Computer science is unfamiliar and strange, let students learn the simple things before throwing the advanced concepts at them.
I guess what I'm saying is that a good course would teach functional programming before teaching object oriented programming later in the same course.
That's because you know MySQL, so of course something that works differently is going to be more work for you to figure out.
I spent much of last night doing my third Postgres install. It took me roughly one and a half hours to get it to where I wanted it, with a user that can access it over the local network and an empty database from which to build my app. My third mysql install took roughly 20 minutes to get to that point, and that was a few years ago when I didn't know half as much about databases as I do today.
I don't know what the general trends in the population are, but for me and the people that I've dealt with, MySQL has always been vastly easier to use than Postgres, and that was the sticking point. From everything I've read and seen, people tend to share my opinion. Postgres is the better tool (by far) if you're willing to give up some user friendliness; however, for newbs, user friendliness is the difference between using something and throwing up your hands and giving up.
That's only using the client which hides the actual queries from you. If connecting through code, \dt doesn't work; in mysql, show tables does.
Maybe when you're out of training you'll see the difference.
But seriously, if the quality of the programs is the same, then the openness alone should make the decision. As someone else pointed out, sometimes it takes a lot of work to find out there's a bug in a proprietary program, and then you're at the mercy of the corporation that made the program. When something's wrong in an open source program, the backers of the program are usually more open about it and you can go into the source and fix it yourself if you want to. I would consider those technical advantages.
On what do you base this statement?
Experience. I've used MySQL for years and didn't have any problems with configuration. It worked out of the box for everything I needed. Just last night I was configuring Postgres and had some issues with the configuration that I had to look up in their manual. The same thing in MySQL would have taken me thirty seconds now, and no more than 15 minutes when I was starting out. With Postgres, it took me upwards of 20 minutes when it should have taken much less time. MySQL is more willing to hold new users hands and has a lot of easy shortcuts built into it. Postgres does things well and gives you a lot of options, but it's not as forgiving to new users. Things like "SHOW TABLES" are either considerably more difficult in Postgres or harder to find out.
I would prefer if the programs were written so that you could use the RDBMS you already have installed. For me this is a small hint that the developers might have a thought when it comes to design.
When you're using MySQL for applications that aren't being distributed and installed by your customers, but are running on servers you control, there's no real need to make it work with any database other than the one that you're using.