Well done sir, you neatly dodged answering his criticism by indulging in condescending sophistry. As despairing of your myopia as I am, I cannot help but be impressed by the depth of your cognitive dissonance.
True, but my brain just auto-converted that to a car analogy: "You know, if I take off one of the wheels off this fancy sports car, it doesn't drive too good":)
No, it uses white space for block structure only, and honestly, don't knock it until you've tried it. Most people working with C-derived languages use some form of block indentation, and large shops usually have coding standards that insist you stick to it rigorously. This means most people already have the tooling in place to enforce indentation, so it's not like it'd be any extra effort to do it for Python. I'm in no way suggesting you'd find it to be a revelatory experience, but I think you would find that when it comes to writing code, it doesn't make things any harder, it in fact makes things slightly easier. But the difference is so small that it's practically irrelevant. I used to think the same way as you, that it was the dumbest idea I'd ever heard of. Then I tried it and realised I couldn't care less:D
I'm just going to jump in here and yell "BULLSHIT!". Ever looked up the definition of normal? Aspergers is a significant deviation from how a person functions mentally on average.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and guess that you don't actually have a statistical definition of normal human mental processes to hand, so trying to use formal definitions of "normal" and "significance" is meaningless.
What a nice load of pathos. All irrelevant to the topic.
No. I'm pointing out that humans have a cognitive defect that causes us to label inconvenient mental configurations as "diseases", rather than addressing the important questions directly. Is this person happy? Can they achieve their goals without assistance? Can they effectively function in our society as it currently exists?
Diseases of the brain sometimes nothing but semantics. When you declare something as being a disease, you are implicitly saying it's not normal, it's disadvantageous and it's something that we should seek to cure. But it's culturally-defined what is and isn't normal. There are situations where being a sociopath are an advantage. There are (controversial) theories that suggest that schizophrenics were treated as shaman in hunter-gatherer societies. And obviously, we can't forget the DSM's classification of homosexuality as a disease. As you point out, things we regard as genetic diseases sometimes confer benefits, which why they haven't been selected out of the gene pool. Evolution doesn't draw this line between normal and diseased, but we insist on trying to do so, which is why the DSM skitters about like water on a frying pan - all it's doing is tracking cultural norms and current obsessions. Personally, I think we should do the opposite of what you're suggesting: abandon the word "disease" for all mental differences. Stop trying to draw artificial distinctions. Stop trying to pigeonhole. Approach each one - and each person - as an individual.
That is not the only thing that "yield" is for; it can be used to perform just-in-time execution of memory- or CPU-intensive operations, but it can also be used to make composable chains of list iterators that only process as much of the list as they need to satisfy the caller's requirements. Microsoft's own guidance explicitly states that properties should avoid side effects. Anyone dumb enough to code like that is not smart enough to think of using "yield", or to use it correctly.
I look at the average person and think, now here is a guy with more money than sense. Yeah nice to have some overpriced gadget to sit between a more expensive gadget that can actually do stuff, and time spent actually enjoying life and not surfing the web and writing emails. Most people with less or no money to waste have no choice but to do the correct thing in down time and enjoy life and not surf the web and write emails.
Uhuh. Of course, it's still disputed whether that role was positive or negative. Personally, I'd be more tempted to lay most of the blame on the 4 billion USD's worth of E-mini contracts dumped onto the market by an exceptionally dumb trading algorithm. The more I learn about traders, the more horrified I become that we apparently have so many people writing trading bots with, it seems, almost no understanding of economics. They understand the layered, arcane rules of the game they play on the stock exchange, but seem to have no particular deep understanding of what's actually happening.
Yes. The simplest long position is one you hold in a cash account. Trading on margin is for those who do it for a living or who alternatively have lots of spare time to watch the market.
It's not like hard lines are secure. The FBI can tap your calls from their desks. With a warrant, obviously, cough cough. How much do you wish to inconvenience yourself to protect yourself from theoretical monitoring? How many technologies are you going to allow your fear to block you from using? People use these phones willingly because they find value in them. If you don't use something you desire because you're afraid of what your government would do to you, then aren't you oppressed? Aren't you actually allowing them to oppress you, complicit in your own subjugation?
The problem is that GUI and SUI are not synonymous, which should be obvious if you read the supplied link. Which i sense you didn't. It was the correct term. An equivalent term would've been "GUIs which mimic the attributes of analogous physical objects", which is unwieldy.
I was imprecise, I apologise. I think, from other comments, you're from a farming family? So I don't mean a poor harvest, I mean loss of your entire crop. And it happening over and over again, because the crop is especially vulnerable.
Extending the pet analogy, yes I take your point about congenital defects, but what would you think of someone who deliberately or carelessly (as in, being capable of knowing better) bred those defects into their children?
The banana hasn't actually been as successful as it could be, because of its vulnerability to disease. And that vulnerability has put the livelihood of banana growers at risk. Most of them are on lower incomes (globally speaking), so one bad harvest can be catastrophic. Random catastrophic shocks to economies leads to social instability.
As for dogs, I'm taking it from your comment that you don't assign any negative value to the suffering of non-humans. Fair enough. I do, which is why I refer to it as a cost, and as something to be avoided in future.
Um. Saying that one should go into genetic modification with ones eyes open, prepared for unexpected consequences, learning from the mistakes we've already made? That's silly?
The problem here is that people seem to think I'm against genetic modification, which is something I never said. In fact, you'll notice I claimed genetic engineering is "capable of wonders", so I'm a little perplexed how people are getting such negative vibes from my comment. I'm just saying, picking the banana and the dog shows stunning ignorance and hubris, as those are two cases where we've made huge and costly mistakes. Why not use something like Golden Rice as an example? That said, I think there are valid concerns about Golden Rice becoming a victim of its own success, leading to a loss of biodiversity. But's that's where should learn our lessons from the banana, and take steps to prevent it.
You mean the Cavendish banana, that repeatedly comesunder fungal and viral attack, that it can't defend itself from due to its lack of genetic diversity? Or the relentlessly inbred pedigree breeds that have defects in their breathing, walking or vision? Genetic engineering is and will be capable of wonders, but we shouldn't blind ourselves to the dangers.
I hate to be crude, but to an outside observer, it appears you've both got your heads up your respective arses. It's like watching an acrimonious divorce. "Go on then, take your car, but you'll better get it out of my garage!" You know there's no happy ending there, both parties are going to bleed.
I'm not assuming Hansen is correct, but your analysis is flawed. You are comparing studies of local conditions with a study of global conditions. Just because a single heat wave is not anomalous locally, it does not mean that a series of distributed heat waves is not anomalous globally. In case that's not clear, consider an extreme example : A hurricane in Florida in a year is not anomalous. Each major coastal city in the world being hit by a hurricane in the same year would be.
The reason you don't see this discussion happening much is it's already happened, some time ago. Conservative voices weren't in it because they were still arguing with the evidence (note that I say with, not about). There are both pros and cons to being conservative.
For balance, please read consider the opposing view on the history of McIntyre, Briffa and the Yamal data. And no, the two terms are not synonymous (although group think is a type of positive bias).
Beyond that, the way I see it, is if I have the choice between letting the left soft-kill me because we just *have* to reduce population, or dying off because the planet can't sustain my modern way of life, I'll take my gamble on the latter.
Forget AGW for the moment. If you accept that we're going to run out of fossil fuels at some point in the relatively near future, then I would suggest you skim read Sustainable Energy - without the hot air. Taken purely from the energy-use perspective, it makes a rational, scientific argument that our "modern way of life" is clearly not sustainable, and something is going to have to give. It's a less attractive gamble than you might think.
Shouldn't I not be able to go outside without a suit to protect me from the sun?
This has nothing to do with GW. I presume you're referring to the hole in the ozone layer. The reason that particular "chicken little" scenario didn't come to pass is that the politicians actually responded to the science in a timely fashion and banned CFCs. Your argument here sounds similar to people who complain that the Millenium Bug was a lot of fuss over nothing, ignoring the possibility that nothing particularly bad happened in 2000 because people spent a lot of time and money making sure that it didn't. The rational response to potential disasters is not to do nothing to prevent them until they're actual certainties - because nothing is a certainty until it's actually happened.
Shouldn't a major city/state be underwater by now?... Shouldn't we be getting snow in July in Atlanta? Or was it that it was never supposed to snow again?
People without scientific qualifications in the relevant discipline who make predictions that something bad is/is not definitely going to happen are probably loons, and their opinions should not be given equal weight. I honestly don't know where you heard this unless it was from James Lovelock, who is, unfortunately, a bit of a loon.
And being a man of science, who needs to see evidence with my *own* two eyes of something before I believe it, without actually becoming a climate scientist myself, there's no way for me to determine who is right and who is wrong.
Wait, what? Are you honestly saying that you aren't willing to accept any scientific findings unless you've personally repeated the experiment yourself?
Well, that's an interesting topic. Pests thrive in a monoculture, and so you need pesticides for those acres of corn. Organic farming, because of the need to avoid pesticides, often involves deliberately avoiding a monoculture by mixing your species. This makes life harder for the pests and encourages predators. So, by definition, this type of organic farming will always need more unit area of land for the same unit volume of crops. So is the study effectively one giant tautology? Wouldn't we be better served by comparing yields on crop volumes? Bearing in mind, as others have said, that claiming that this study means that we won't feed the world's growing population on organic food is silly, as we won't feed them on conventional food either.
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Well done sir, you neatly dodged answering his criticism by indulging in condescending sophistry. As despairing of your myopia as I am, I cannot help but be impressed by the depth of your cognitive dissonance.
Ok. Which is easier to fix?
Which looks a little like how Python would look without list comprehensions:
True, but my brain just auto-converted that to a car analogy: "You know, if I take off one of the wheels off this fancy sports car, it doesn't drive too good" :)
No, it uses white space for block structure only, and honestly, don't knock it until you've tried it. Most people working with C-derived languages use some form of block indentation, and large shops usually have coding standards that insist you stick to it rigorously. This means most people already have the tooling in place to enforce indentation, so it's not like it'd be any extra effort to do it for Python. I'm in no way suggesting you'd find it to be a revelatory experience, but I think you would find that when it comes to writing code, it doesn't make things any harder, it in fact makes things slightly easier. But the difference is so small that it's practically irrelevant. I used to think the same way as you, that it was the dumbest idea I'd ever heard of. Then I tried it and realised I couldn't care less :D
I'm just going to jump in here and yell "BULLSHIT!". Ever looked up the definition of normal? Aspergers is a significant deviation from how a person functions mentally on average.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and guess that you don't actually have a statistical definition of normal human mental processes to hand, so trying to use formal definitions of "normal" and "significance" is meaningless.
What a nice load of pathos. All irrelevant to the topic.
No. I'm pointing out that humans have a cognitive defect that causes us to label inconvenient mental configurations as "diseases", rather than addressing the important questions directly. Is this person happy? Can they achieve their goals without assistance? Can they effectively function in our society as it currently exists?
Diseases of the brain sometimes nothing but semantics. When you declare something as being a disease, you are implicitly saying it's not normal, it's disadvantageous and it's something that we should seek to cure. But it's culturally-defined what is and isn't normal. There are situations where being a sociopath are an advantage. There are (controversial) theories that suggest that schizophrenics were treated as shaman in hunter-gatherer societies. And obviously, we can't forget the DSM's classification of homosexuality as a disease. As you point out, things we regard as genetic diseases sometimes confer benefits, which why they haven't been selected out of the gene pool. Evolution doesn't draw this line between normal and diseased, but we insist on trying to do so, which is why the DSM skitters about like water on a frying pan - all it's doing is tracking cultural norms and current obsessions. Personally, I think we should do the opposite of what you're suggesting: abandon the word "disease" for all mental differences. Stop trying to draw artificial distinctions. Stop trying to pigeonhole. Approach each one - and each person - as an individual.
Or you could actually read the article that link points to and discover that your prejudices are incorrect. Educated people end up in these jobs too.
That is not the only thing that "yield" is for; it can be used to perform just-in-time execution of memory- or CPU-intensive operations, but it can also be used to make composable chains of list iterators that only process as much of the list as they need to satisfy the caller's requirements. Microsoft's own guidance explicitly states that properties should avoid side effects. Anyone dumb enough to code like that is not smart enough to think of using "yield", or to use it correctly.
Of course, people also laugh at things that are laughable, and they don't end up winning.
I look at the average person and think, now here is a guy with more money than sense. Yeah nice to have some overpriced gadget to sit between a more expensive gadget that can actually do stuff, and time spent actually enjoying life and not surfing the web and writing emails. Most people with less or no money to waste have no choice but to do the correct thing in down time and enjoy life and not surf the web and write emails.
...or post to /.? Your signature is apposite.
Uhuh. Of course, it's still disputed whether that role was positive or negative. Personally, I'd be more tempted to lay most of the blame on the 4 billion USD's worth of E-mini contracts dumped onto the market by an exceptionally dumb trading algorithm. The more I learn about traders, the more horrified I become that we apparently have so many people writing trading bots with, it seems, almost no understanding of economics. They understand the layered, arcane rules of the game they play on the stock exchange, but seem to have no particular deep understanding of what's actually happening.
Yes. The simplest long position is one you hold in a cash account. Trading on margin is for those who do it for a living or who alternatively have lots of spare time to watch the market.
It's not like hard lines are secure. The FBI can tap your calls from their desks. With a warrant, obviously, cough cough. How much do you wish to inconvenience yourself to protect yourself from theoretical monitoring? How many technologies are you going to allow your fear to block you from using? People use these phones willingly because they find value in them. If you don't use something you desire because you're afraid of what your government would do to you, then aren't you oppressed? Aren't you actually allowing them to oppress you, complicit in your own subjugation?
The problem is that GUI and SUI are not synonymous, which should be obvious if you read the supplied link. Which i sense you didn't. It was the correct term. An equivalent term would've been "GUIs which mimic the attributes of analogous physical objects", which is unwieldy.
I was imprecise, I apologise. I think, from other comments, you're from a farming family? So I don't mean a poor harvest, I mean loss of your entire crop. And it happening over and over again, because the crop is especially vulnerable.
Extending the pet analogy, yes I take your point about congenital defects, but what would you think of someone who deliberately or carelessly (as in, being capable of knowing better) bred those defects into their children?
The banana hasn't actually been as successful as it could be, because of its vulnerability to disease. And that vulnerability has put the livelihood of banana growers at risk. Most of them are on lower incomes (globally speaking), so one bad harvest can be catastrophic. Random catastrophic shocks to economies leads to social instability.
As for dogs, I'm taking it from your comment that you don't assign any negative value to the suffering of non-humans. Fair enough. I do, which is why I refer to it as a cost, and as something to be avoided in future.
Um. Saying that one should go into genetic modification with ones eyes open, prepared for unexpected consequences, learning from the mistakes we've already made? That's silly?
The problem here is that people seem to think I'm against genetic modification, which is something I never said. In fact, you'll notice I claimed genetic engineering is "capable of wonders", so I'm a little perplexed how people are getting such negative vibes from my comment. I'm just saying, picking the banana and the dog shows stunning ignorance and hubris, as those are two cases where we've made huge and costly mistakes. Why not use something like Golden Rice as an example? That said, I think there are valid concerns about Golden Rice becoming a victim of its own success, leading to a loss of biodiversity. But's that's where should learn our lessons from the banana, and take steps to prevent it.
As long as, of course, we also knew what—if any— beneficial effects those genes had and had plans to compensate for their loss.
You mean the Cavendish banana, that repeatedly comes under fungal and viral attack, that it can't defend itself from due to its lack of genetic diversity? Or the relentlessly inbred pedigree breeds that have defects in their breathing, walking or vision? Genetic engineering is and will be capable of wonders, but we shouldn't blind ourselves to the dangers.
I hate to be crude, but to an outside observer, it appears you've both got your heads up your respective arses. It's like watching an acrimonious divorce. "Go on then, take your car, but you'll better get it out of my garage!" You know there's no happy ending there, both parties are going to bleed.
I'm not assuming Hansen is correct, but your analysis is flawed. You are comparing studies of local conditions with a study of global conditions. Just because a single heat wave is not anomalous locally, it does not mean that a series of distributed heat waves is not anomalous globally. In case that's not clear, consider an extreme example : A hurricane in Florida in a year is not anomalous. Each major coastal city in the world being hit by a hurricane in the same year would be.
The reason you don't see this discussion happening much is it's already happened, some time ago. Conservative voices weren't in it because they were still arguing with the evidence (note that I say with, not about). There are both pros and cons to being conservative.
For balance, please read consider the opposing view on the history of McIntyre, Briffa and the Yamal data. And no, the two terms are not synonymous (although group think is a type of positive bias).
Beyond that, the way I see it, is if I have the choice between letting the left soft-kill me because we just *have* to reduce population, or dying off because the planet can't sustain my modern way of life, I'll take my gamble on the latter.
Forget AGW for the moment. If you accept that we're going to run out of fossil fuels at some point in the relatively near future, then I would suggest you skim read Sustainable Energy - without the hot air. Taken purely from the energy-use perspective, it makes a rational, scientific argument that our "modern way of life" is clearly not sustainable, and something is going to have to give. It's a less attractive gamble than you might think.
Shouldn't I not be able to go outside without a suit to protect me from the sun?
This has nothing to do with GW. I presume you're referring to the hole in the ozone layer. The reason that particular "chicken little" scenario didn't come to pass is that the politicians actually responded to the science in a timely fashion and banned CFCs. Your argument here sounds similar to people who complain that the Millenium Bug was a lot of fuss over nothing, ignoring the possibility that nothing particularly bad happened in 2000 because people spent a lot of time and money making sure that it didn't. The rational response to potential disasters is not to do nothing to prevent them until they're actual certainties - because nothing is a certainty until it's actually happened.
Shouldn't a major city/state be underwater by now? ... Shouldn't we be getting snow in July in Atlanta? Or was it that it was never supposed to snow again?
People without scientific qualifications in the relevant discipline who make predictions that something bad is/is not definitely going to happen are probably loons, and their opinions should not be given equal weight. I honestly don't know where you heard this unless it was from James Lovelock, who is, unfortunately, a bit of a loon.
And being a man of science, who needs to see evidence with my *own* two eyes of something before I believe it, without actually becoming a climate scientist myself, there's no way for me to determine who is right and who is wrong.
Wait, what? Are you honestly saying that you aren't willing to accept any scientific findings unless you've personally repeated the experiment yourself?
Well, that's an interesting topic. Pests thrive in a monoculture, and so you need pesticides for those acres of corn. Organic farming, because of the need to avoid pesticides, often involves deliberately avoiding a monoculture by mixing your species. This makes life harder for the pests and encourages predators. So, by definition, this type of organic farming will always need more unit area of land for the same unit volume of crops. So is the study effectively one giant tautology? Wouldn't we be better served by comparing yields on crop volumes? Bearing in mind, as others have said, that claiming that this study means that we won't feed the world's growing population on organic food is silly, as we won't feed them on conventional food either.