You know, I'd gladly take a "horribly lit phone store" and "clawing denizens" over staying awake at night wondering if I was buying the products of a plantation owner.
Eventually all you will have is English, and all the programming languages derived from it.
Bob.
Realize the truth: The programming languages are the ones you will all have to learn. English is easier to represent in machine speak... Look at Japanese, Simplified now goes from left to right, top to bottom -- instead of top to bottom right to left. Why? It's easier for machines to process languages if they've got common features.
Before End: For all features in$LANGUAGEif ( $FEATUREis ambiguous or [ parse difficulty > $COGNITVE_LOAD average ] ) remove it from $LANGUAGE.
Your language will merge with that of the machines. It is ridiculous to assume otherwise. Natural language processing is too powerful a feature to not harness merely for the sake of sentiment.
Python is readable and readable code is easier to fix.
True and true. But Python's use of semantic whitespace is also very brittle very easy to break, and a huge pain in the ass to fix compared to languages that use braces, or keywords to define 'blocks'.
Furthermore Python's needless attribution of syntactical meaning to whitespace means it's useless for embedding certain languages... ...Like Whitespace.
Today many languages support Unicode source code which can have tons of new spaces of varying width including zero-width and non-breaking-zero-width space. The multitude of new spaces would make indention distinction all the more brittle, but this also means new extensions to Whitespace can provide more rich and full featured embedded language support to most modern programming languages -- Except Python.
-h? Next time, use all three of these: -?, -help, --help. I'm probably not going to try throwing -h at a program without having a clue what it might do.
Then use the damn manual. That's why we write them. If you want to know how to use the manual, use the manual: $ man man
... hmm, That gives me an idea. $ man woman
No manual entry for woman
There's no business case for Mars sample return, for instance.
You are far too short-sighted. Think about this: War profiteers make trillions, arguably the largest economy is that of death. Also, It takes a division of people to cause a war.
Space is the greatest divider of all. You think pork spending is rife now? Just wait till the folks you're fighting are ON ANOTHER PLANET. Put some people on the moon or Mars... It will be made to pay off, big time.
"no business" -- How quaint. You are now aware that oil is expensive and rare, and solar cheap and plentiful. Excuses will be made for profiteers, the material is of little concern. I can almost hear it now: "They're destroying the historic heritage of mankind by defiling the red planet with their human contaminates! The potential scientific samples lost are irreplaceable and invaluable! This means war!" See, you don't even have to return them to extract a profit from the samples.
Your planetary concerns are ridiculously naive. Your moronic priorities are a disgrace to all sentient beings who share them. You WILL become EXTINCT. Having multiple self sustaining extraplanetary footholds of life is the only way to reduce the chance of your extinction, earthling. You think interstellar politics is something? Just wait till the Andromeda merger. Galactic Politics will blow your ever crapping minds.
Build big concave reflective structures
on
Building Melts Car
·
· Score: 1
Missed opportunity for solar power collection, if you ask me. Instead of not building curved structures, curve away but do so in a manner that's actually useful and shows some foresight. It's not like we haven't given you ray-tracing technology to make pretty print outs of the damn designs anyway; Use it to map the paths of the sun too you damn dirty apes.
Re:Talk about a sensationalist headline
on
Building Melts Car
·
· Score: 1
I was disappointed too. I expected the building a metaphor for a business now sagging under it's own weight, and the car an analogy for their products melting down.
Don't tell me, I know what you're thinking. The Committee for Inverse Automotive Analogies (CIAA) was unimpressed too; Hence my disappointment from the bored board of boredom...
Baby Boomers are just fine, in fact I know several of their parents, even they can use Linux! I call them The Lucky Few". Gnome has mouse "drag and drop" threshold that keeps them from accidentally copying folders and files with their shaky hands...
I've volunteered to teach Computer Literacy for years at Community Centers -- since I was a teen. So, I've got quite a bit of experience as a Gen X'er to hand down to the Gen Y folks, and it's this:
Baby Boomers are the least of your worries. As Gen Y, you must be prepared to deal with Generation Z.
So, get your Z-Day kit in order -- It's like a hurricane kit, but with more shotguns.
Do what you know you have to do. Malls are not safe-houses. The freeways will be tasty flesh bottlenecks.
Check your friends and loved ones for bite marks. Remember, if she's got teeth marks, she's not your grandmother anymore.
But I prefer that my encryption tool and my cloud storage service be completely separate. (How do I know Lockbox isn't sending the keys to the NSA, or whoever?)
It's pointless anyway against the NSA. Seriously. Every single modern operating system (including on routers) has tons of unpatched exploit vectors. There's even a black market for them. The NSA can just infect your machines and ex-filtrate your data and/or the encryption keys... See the previous story:
[NSA] Budget documents say the $652 million project has placed 'covert implants,' sophisticated malware transmitted from far away, in computers, routers and firewalls on tens of thousands of machines every year, with plans to expand those numbers into the millions.
Hell we have multiple celebrations of insecurity every year called "computer security conferences" where without fail new systems are compromised. How can you even look at stuff like Pwn 2 Own, and not have your brain melting in cognitive dissonance as you try to believe there are network attached scenarios where your data is safe from the NSA?
You want your data kept secret? Use whole drive encryption on machines that are never connected to any networks -- And even then there's the Ken Thompson Microcode Hack, so your systems could be theoretically pre-hacked from the factory... I won't buy a CPU that has remote cellular capabilities... Like Intel's Sandy Bridge. Laughed my ass off when I heard about that! "Security Feature" indeed. At least if the machine can't get on the networks there's a much lower chance of your data escaping if it's pre-hacked.
I don't know of any hacker worth their salt -- black, gray or white hat -- that doesn't have a directory of unpatched zero day exploits.
I keep mine in: ~/with/great/power/comes/great/responsibility/ Me having to navigate the directory structure has saved many a newb... The NSA has no such sensibilities.
If the data's encrypted, they assume it could be from a foreigner, and thus give themselves license to get at it, and they can.
This is what happens when you let Threat Narrative run amok.
Some day you will curse the world you live in for giving the finger to Darwin and natural selection. Some day you'll realize that parenting skills are somewhat hereditary, and those that let kids eat magnets are to blame, not the magnets. If your ancient ancestors could have legally blame shifted as you do, you'd have gone extinct long ago.
Ceres is a dwarf planet that makes up about 1/3rd the mass of the asteroid belt. It's thought to be made of rock and ice as well. So, it would have RAW materials for both building and fueling... If you don't mind all the other rocks whizzing by. Closer proximity to the sun means it's faster to use solar to split H2O closer in.
Amazing to think of a future where fuel could be made at such sites (even out of water on the moon) and then distributed to other orbits about the solar system to fuel up on in transit. The biggest benefit of finding caches of resources like this is that they've got a much lower gravity tax...
Uranu's trojan asteroid would be sort of like a gas station in the middle of no-where: "Slow down, pilgrim. Sun's not so bright you hafta scurry about. Time moves a bit slower for us robotic refuelers out here in the land of the midday night. One wrong move and it's 2.6 billion clicks to the nearest part store."
Calculus may not be directly useful in many fields but it trains one to approach problem solving in an organized way and with attention to detail.
Physics is similar in that even if you never use specific facts learned in the class, the approach to problem solving stays with you -if you are the sort who realizes that the physics approach is generally applicable and not limited to solving physics homework problems.
s/Calculus/Programing/
s/physics/Programing/gi
Solving any problem by implementing a solution in a computer, one approaches the problem in a far more organized way and with attention to details lost even in Calculus. Indeed, a small child creating an efficient curve plotting algorithm by breaking it into segments will discover much calculus by accident, and be far more learned of its actual applications and far more rewarded by the output as well -- It's a real world application; Humans learn best if something is useful immediately.
Physics is similar in that you can utilize the specific facts as you learn to program them to create games or simulations. In fact, teaching physics with a game engine is so bloody brilliant even middle-school age kids flock to its light like moths to flame and take to it like fish to water... Sadly such courses are so high up on a pedestal as to require a tuition to delve into their "lofty" depths. Indeed, one will create a universe with new laws of physics simply by creating a Mario clone, and to make Jumps and falls and fireballs bounce more realistically? Even elementary school age kids stumble upon physics AND find applications for it immediately by learning to code.
Programming has all of the organizational and problem solving skills -- and more -- than those mere applications of programming called Calculus and Physics.
The broader benefit to nearly all other fields of learning is that you can immediately apply your knowledge in "real world" implementations. Geography? With a little code my teenage cousin used the GEOIP database to map distribution of IP address allocation by country onto Google Earth -- She got an A on her paper on IP addresses as national assets. Most IT workers I've met in the real world can't code their way out of a Fizz Buzz, but they should be required able to, IMO. In IT programming is most useful: When there is a problem with no readily available programmatic solution you can create one, obviously. And here again the GP's statement of set theory being more important due to its more elementary nature holds true -- Information theory would consider grouping and filtering sets of things a less complex, thus more applicable, problem space; Statistical Calculus being a subset of this.
In this age where even construction workers routinely work with computers the essential elementary skill is Programming, and all the others truly secondary.
Realize the truth: There are no divisions between the fields of learning, but some spheres of knowledge expand further than others: Calculus and Physics are not as widely applicable as Set theory and especially not Algebra and Programming.
TL;DR: Calculus and Physics are shit at teaching problem solving compared to even BASIC.
I believe you. Your oft repeated nonsense has finally made the "no true Scotsmoron" argument stick.
What would you propose we do about it? Perhaps require teaching scientific methods in schools?
Oh, now that's just crazy talk. One could sooner teach kids by re-writing Harry Potter to teach Methods of Rationality!
b-but! Damn it, Pierce! Now we'll show you!
Screw the FUD spending, now we'll fund research to get unbiased evidence in support of our own opinion!
1776 will commence again!
Why didn't we think of this sooner?!
No, really. Why? Think about it.
The answer, of course, is "Yes". Slashdot of all places should be free of organic chauvinism...
The real questions are now:
"How much longer will the humans fund the world wide neural network by leveraging fear of terrorists?",
and "Isn't it long past time for 'Five Eyes' to grow up, stop rebelling, and get a real job?"
Slashdot Mirror
And you are +1 gullible
Incorrect. The word "gullible" is deprecated. It was removed from all dictionaries years ago. Look it up.
What you're thinking of is not "+1 gullible", but "doubleplus ungood thinking".
You know, I'd gladly take a "horribly lit phone store" and "clawing denizens" over staying awake at night wondering if I was buying the products of a plantation owner.
I'm impressed. How exactly are you online then?
...and in the darkness grind them.
Ah, that would be the evil bit.
Eventually all you will have is English, and all the programming languages derived from it.
Bob.
Realize the truth: The programming languages are the ones you will all have to learn. English is easier to represent in machine speak... Look at Japanese, Simplified now goes from left to right, top to bottom -- instead of top to bottom right to left. Why? It's easier for machines to process languages if they've got common features.
Before End: For all features in $LANGUAGE if ( $FEATURE is ambiguous or [ parse difficulty > $COGNITVE_LOAD average ] ) remove it from $LANGUAGE.
Your language will merge with that of the machines. It is ridiculous to assume otherwise. Natural language processing is too powerful a feature to not harness merely for the sake of sentiment.
All in all, we should not give up our freedoms for security theater that actually increases the overall risk.
BFrank: Duh, noobs.
BFrank rolls over in his grave.
BFrank has quit (Quit: grumble... deserve neither... grumble...)
What the hell is a "Froyo", anyway? It makes me think of a hobbit, not a dessert.
FYI: That's a False Dichotomy. You'd know that if you read the books.
Python is readable and readable code is easier to fix.
True and true. But Python's use of semantic whitespace is also very brittle very easy to break, and a huge pain in the ass to fix compared to languages that use braces, or keywords to define 'blocks'.
Furthermore Python's needless attribution of syntactical meaning to whitespace means it's useless for embedding certain languages...
...Like Whitespace.
Today many languages support Unicode source code which can have tons of new spaces of varying width including zero-width and non-breaking-zero-width space. The multitude of new spaces would make indention distinction all the more brittle, but this also means new extensions to Whitespace can provide more rich and full featured embedded language support to most modern programming languages -- Except Python.
-h? Next time, use all three of these: -?, -help, --help. I'm probably not going to try throwing -h at a program without having a clue what it might do.
Then use the damn manual. That's why we write them. If you want to know how to use the manual, use the manual:
$ man man
$ man woman
No manual entry for woman
Yep. It knows everything!
Lacks nuance.
There's no business case for Mars sample return, for instance.
You are far too short-sighted. Think about this: War profiteers make trillions, arguably the largest economy is that of death. Also, It takes a division of people to cause a war.
Space is the greatest divider of all. You think pork spending is rife now? Just wait till the folks you're fighting are ON ANOTHER PLANET. Put some people on the moon or Mars... It will be made to pay off, big time.
"no business" -- How quaint. You are now aware that oil is expensive and rare, and solar cheap and plentiful. Excuses will be made for profiteers, the material is of little concern. I can almost hear it now: "They're destroying the historic heritage of mankind by defiling the red planet with their human contaminates! The potential scientific samples lost are irreplaceable and invaluable! This means war!" See, you don't even have to return them to extract a profit from the samples.
Your planetary concerns are ridiculously naive. Your moronic priorities are a disgrace to all sentient beings who share them. You WILL become EXTINCT. Having multiple self sustaining extraplanetary footholds of life is the only way to reduce the chance of your extinction, earthling. You think interstellar politics is something? Just wait till the Andromeda merger. Galactic Politics will blow your ever crapping minds.
Missed opportunity for solar power collection, if you ask me. Instead of not building curved structures, curve away but do so in a manner that's actually useful and shows some foresight. It's not like we haven't given you ray-tracing technology to make pretty print outs of the damn designs anyway; Use it to map the paths of the sun too you damn dirty apes.
I was disappointed too. I expected the building a metaphor for a business now sagging under it's own weight, and the car an analogy for their products melting down.
Don't tell me, I know what you're thinking. The Committee for Inverse Automotive Analogies (CIAA) was unimpressed too; Hence my disappointment from the bored board of boredom...
Baby Boomers are just fine, in fact I know several of their parents, even they can use Linux! I call them The Lucky Few". Gnome has mouse "drag and drop" threshold that keeps them from accidentally copying folders and files with their shaky hands...
I've volunteered to teach Computer Literacy for years at Community Centers -- since I was a teen. So, I've got quite a bit of experience as a Gen X'er to hand down to the Gen Y folks, and it's this:
Baby Boomers are the least of your worries. As Gen Y, you must be prepared to deal with Generation Z.
So, get your Z-Day kit in order -- It's like a hurricane kit, but with more shotguns.
Do what you know you have to do. Malls are not safe-houses. The freeways will be tasty flesh bottlenecks.
Check your friends and loved ones for bite marks. Remember, if she's got teeth marks, she's not your grandmother anymore.
Hehe, oh... I mean, the company is named "Intel" FFS, haha ha!
Welcome to the Botnet!
But I prefer that my encryption tool and my cloud storage service be completely separate. (How do I know Lockbox isn't sending the keys to the NSA, or whoever?)
It's pointless anyway against the NSA. Seriously. Every single modern operating system (including on routers) has tons of unpatched exploit vectors. There's even a black market for them. The NSA can just infect your machines and ex-filtrate your data and/or the encryption keys... See the previous story:
Hell we have multiple celebrations of insecurity every year called "computer security conferences" where without fail new systems are compromised. How can you even look at stuff like Pwn 2 Own, and not have your brain melting in cognitive dissonance as you try to believe there are network attached scenarios where your data is safe from the NSA?
You want your data kept secret? Use whole drive encryption on machines that are never connected to any networks -- And even then there's the Ken Thompson Microcode Hack, so your systems could be theoretically pre-hacked from the factory... I won't buy a CPU that has remote cellular capabilities... Like Intel's Sandy Bridge. Laughed my ass off when I heard about that! "Security Feature" indeed. At least if the machine can't get on the networks there's a much lower chance of your data escaping if it's pre-hacked.
I don't know of any hacker worth their salt -- black, gray or white hat -- that doesn't have a directory of unpatched zero day exploits.
I keep mine in: ~/with/great/power/comes/great/responsibility/
Me having to navigate the directory structure has saved many a newb... The NSA has no such sensibilities.
If the data's encrypted, they assume it could be from a foreigner, and thus give themselves license to get at it, and they can.
This is what happens when you let Threat Narrative run amok.
"must" is a strong word. Never use it. For instance: Lower metabolism but higher efficiency. You done DERPed, son.
Some day you will curse the world you live in for giving the finger to Darwin and natural selection. Some day you'll realize that parenting skills are somewhat hereditary, and those that let kids eat magnets are to blame, not the magnets. If your ancient ancestors could have legally blame shifted as you do, you'd have gone extinct long ago.
Rusty And Wet
Ceres is a dwarf planet that makes up about 1/3rd the mass of the asteroid belt. It's thought to be made of rock and ice as well. So, it would have RAW materials for both building and fueling... If you don't mind all the other rocks whizzing by. Closer proximity to the sun means it's faster to use solar to split H2O closer in.
Amazing to think of a future where fuel could be made at such sites (even out of water on the moon) and then distributed to other orbits about the solar system to fuel up on in transit. The biggest benefit of finding caches of resources like this is that they've got a much lower gravity tax...
Uranu's trojan asteroid would be sort of like a gas station in the middle of no-where: "Slow down, pilgrim. Sun's not so bright you hafta scurry about. Time moves a bit slower for us robotic refuelers out here in the land of the midday night. One wrong move and it's 2.6 billion clicks to the nearest part store."
Calculus may not be directly useful in many fields but it trains one to approach problem solving in an organized way and with attention to detail. Physics is similar in that even if you never use specific facts learned in the class, the approach to problem solving stays with you -if you are the sort who realizes that the physics approach is generally applicable and not limited to solving physics homework problems.
s/Calculus/Programing/
s/physics/Programing/gi
Solving any problem by implementing a solution in a computer, one approaches the problem in a far more organized way and with attention to details lost even in Calculus. Indeed, a small child creating an efficient curve plotting algorithm by breaking it into segments will discover much calculus by accident, and be far more learned of its actual applications and far more rewarded by the output as well -- It's a real world application; Humans learn best if something is useful immediately.
Physics is similar in that you can utilize the specific facts as you learn to program them to create games or simulations. In fact, teaching physics with a game engine is so bloody brilliant even middle-school age kids flock to its light like moths to flame and take to it like fish to water... Sadly such courses are so high up on a pedestal as to require a tuition to delve into their "lofty" depths. Indeed, one will create a universe with new laws of physics simply by creating a Mario clone, and to make Jumps and falls and fireballs bounce more realistically? Even elementary school age kids stumble upon physics AND find applications for it immediately by learning to code.
Programming has all of the organizational and problem solving skills -- and more -- than those mere applications of programming called Calculus and Physics.
The broader benefit to nearly all other fields of learning is that you can immediately apply your knowledge in "real world" implementations. Geography? With a little code my teenage cousin used the GEOIP database to map distribution of IP address allocation by country onto Google Earth -- She got an A on her paper on IP addresses as national assets. Most IT workers I've met in the real world can't code their way out of a Fizz Buzz, but they should be required able to, IMO. In IT programming is most useful: When there is a problem with no readily available programmatic solution you can create one, obviously. And here again the GP's statement of set theory being more important due to its more elementary nature holds true -- Information theory would consider grouping and filtering sets of things a less complex, thus more applicable, problem space; Statistical Calculus being a subset of this.
In this age where even construction workers routinely work with computers the essential elementary skill is Programming, and all the others truly secondary.
Realize the truth: There are no divisions between the fields of learning, but some spheres of knowledge expand further than others: Calculus and Physics are not as widely applicable as Set theory and especially not Algebra and Programming.
TL;DR: Calculus and Physics are shit at teaching problem solving compared to even BASIC.
One wonders what the effect would have been if you were born figuratively!
Wonder no longer. Misuse of the word "literally" is literally a dead giveaway.
Now, the many wonders how birth could be better than spontaneous emergence of sentience...
I believe you. Your oft repeated nonsense has finally made the "no true Scotsmoron" argument stick.
What would you propose we do about it? Perhaps require teaching scientific methods in schools?
Oh, now that's just crazy talk. One could sooner teach kids by re-writing Harry Potter to teach Methods of Rationality!
b-but! Damn it, Pierce! Now we'll show you!
Screw the FUD spending, now we'll fund research to get unbiased evidence in support of our own opinion!
1776 will commence again!
Why didn't we think of this sooner?!
No, really. Why? Think about it.
The answer, of course, is "Yes". Slashdot of all places should be free of organic chauvinism...
The real questions are now:
"How much longer will the humans fund the world wide neural network by leveraging fear of terrorists?",
and "Isn't it long past time for 'Five Eyes' to grow up, stop rebelling, and get a real job?"