We schould teach our children to doubt and question absolutely everything. To me, the need for a continuous search for answers is one of the greatest attributes a person can have.
I think such absolute skepticism is impossible to maintain in the face of how much there is in the world to understand.
No, it's not impossible to maintain, and I'm of the opinion that no amount of skepticism is enough. You can exercise a healthy dose of prejudice (understood as that the momentary suspension of rational judgement, either because you've seen it before, or it's "intuitive" to accept at face value, or you don't have time to judge it now) to avoid the cognitive burden. It's all about the economy of thought: it is in principle better for you to be rational about the world, unless the cost of being so offsets its benefits. Every received idea, every prethought thought burdens you with the actual cost of you analyzing it, and the implied, future cost of you trusting it and being wrong about it.
Meaning that they weren't so-called at the time. Was this because of oppression - or was it because the idea of associating sexual preference with identity and not with just behavior had not yet arisen?
Nonsense. The romans called pathicus to the habitual anal passive, cynaedos to the habitual anal active. Both words are Greek in origin, and attested as pathikos and kunaidos. Irrumare was a verb denoting forceful orally-insertive penetration, and is attested as used in a same-sex context (irrumator is the verbal noun; see Catulli Carmen XVI). Aristophanes was ever quick to point out flaws of character in various personages for comic effect, and used colorful language to label "homosexuals". Furthermore, you have Paul's wonderful arsenokoitês (lit. "male-fucker"). All these words were used in a context denoting categorial thinking (i.e., the words were used as labels more than as adjectives), this is especially easy to see in Paul.
A quick Googling yielded numerous references, all in the context of exegesis: see for yourself. There's copious amounts of textual analysis of ancient sources to support (indeed, looking to support) the idea that the "male homosexual" category existed since Classical antiquity.
I'm gonna get troll-tagged into oblivion for this, but here goes nothing:
Joel's argument is a platitude at best, and a fallacy at worst. He is plying his trade, no mistake about it: "Lots of programmers think they can hold the bug list in their heads. Nonsense. I can't remember more than two or three bugs at a time". Nonesense? Joel, buddy, casuistics ain't argument; what's good for you is... well, just good for you, not justification for anything. If you can't remember your name on odd days, it doesn't mean that everybody must put yellow Post-It's with their monikers on every flat, clean surface.
Also, from the funny-advice-dept, maybe you could try focusing more in your programming, to the point that you make three or fewer errors per release cycle. It's not impossible, you know, if you're intelligent enough. On the other hand, if a safety net makes you prone to feats of recklessness, and you enjoy the adrenaline rush...
Er... I don't think so. Whereas thong is a proper Germanic word designating a strip of leather (twang is a cognate), I think the sense migrated to denote skimpy underwear under the influence (no pun intended) of the tupó (or guaraní, if we're not being academically precise) tanga, which does designate the underware/swimsuit-style outfit. That word is in current use in Argentina and Brazil (and I would assume also in Uruguay and Paraguay), so it might have come to the States by way of Rio de Janeiro.
Just to offer a more accurate picture on the issue, the name Isabella is the Italian rendition of the Spanish name Isabel. Furthermore, she was Queen of Castille and Aragon, and not Leon; however, the present-day region of Castilla does include the province of León, while Aragón is, iirc, another region.
A private party generates a flurry of jealous, petty bitching from a bunch of self-posessed technobrats? And this is a world-class, newsworthy event? People bitching against first, and then backpedaling and trying to brown-nose some Tim O'Reilly to get it? Grow the fuck up, already...
BTW, I know the O'Reilly name. It's just, who is he anyway?
It's easy. First off, it has to be a symmetric function of a, b, c; that is, for every permutation p(a,b,c) of a, b, c, it must be f(p(a,b,c)) = f(a,b,c). Second, it suffices for two out of three to agree independently on a result (be it 0 or 1). So the "best" answer is: a&b | b&c | c&a. An "operational reading" of the three-majority-vote would be that "less than two 1 are not enough".
Furthermore, it is usual to inflate costs by not taking amortizations into accout. That is what happens when, for instance, US media quotes the material costs of hurricane devastation in the nine figures: if living in Florida were that costly, the area would be deserted and/or inhabited by very precarious settlements. Whereas the truth is, all costs are already taken into accout by insurance, fixed costs, &c.
The canvas is a drawing plane together with a JavaScript API. If you read the examples, you don't manipulate the canvas through a DOM-like interface, but you draw on it, or rather, issue draw commands to it. This is very much like Java's Graphics, except you don't have to compile, test, debug, compile ad nauseam to try simple graphics or hacks, you can just use Firefox and Venkman to try, play and prototype.
SVG is an XML application for vector graphics, and the programming and interaction model for it is, as far as I can tell, quite complicated. You'll probably need something like an authoring environment for anything but the simplest drawings.
The <canvas> is cool. Safari compatibility or not, this could be the LOGO of the noughties. JavaScript is a fun language when you're not trying to be cross-compatible with every browser under the sun.
However, the last paragraph reads:
If fallback content is desired, some CSS tricks must be employed to mask the fallback content from Safari (which should render just the canvas), and also to mask the CSS tricks themselves from IE (which should render the fallback content). Todo: get hixie to put the CSS bits in
(emphasis in the original). While I commend Ian's commitment to standards, I can't imagine he will be very pleased with this tasks (for those who don't know him, he's victriolic against violations of the standards. He's a first-rate purist). I predicts the flames will be very pretty to look at.
You can't tunnel, 'cos the ISP can't allow you to. From Par. (e): "ISPs shall not, under any circumstances, incorporate networking architecture, technology or equipment that would limit remote interception of communications as disposed by legally established procedures. They shall not incorporate services that would hinder, limit or diminish, in any way, the retrieval of the interception, and any and all information as consigned herewith."
It's wide and far-reaching because it's absolutely ill-conceived, with no regards to what's actually possible, and more imortant, what's already not possible at all, given the "technological means" already in widespread use.
the little buggers are everywhere. They have a penchant for making nests behind tiles and in utility conduits in buildings, with the effect that all Buenos Aires feels like a huge anthill. I have to put bread, flour and sugar inside Ziploc bags to keep them out. Pest control makes them disappear for a month, and then they return.
The only good thing about the ants is that they keep cokroaches away.
Manipulatives *are* empaths!
on
Broken Angels
·
· Score: 1
conditioning gives them iron emotional control, a lack of empathy, extra combat awareness, and skill at psychologically manipulating others
Both highlighted assertions are mutually incompatible.
authors [...] have a right to not have their works consistently and persistently changed
No. Rights are the actual benefits of the social contract, and as the latter changes the former obviously do too. If there is no god-given social contract, there cannot be god-given rights. Inasmuch gods vary from society to society, there can't be the god-given social contract, hence your categorical assertion is mere wishful thinking.
In "primitive" societies without the concept of authorship, the bards and singers would pass their yarns to be respun and reweaved by the community. Some of us do it too, with spoofs and parodies "to be sung to the tune of".
10+ years of experience in the Financial/Banking sector might not tell you much, but it has taught me that business/domain logic changes so frequently so as to make any possibility of portability be remote, in the best case. Stored Procedures just save your life, period. Also, and perhaps more relevantly, your client probably has made a substantial investment on the RDBMS, and they won't even dream of switching DB layers down the line.
If you're confident about the choice of RDBMS vis-à-vis its architectonic permanence (Is the client happy with it? Are you sure it's gonna sustain the load you plan?), you shouldn't worry about portability in, say, mid-termish 3 years after installation. However, if what you want is to re-sell (that is, productize) the code to another potential client who might have a different RDBMS, your design goals should be adjusted accordingly (for instance, you can insist on portability, by building a middle-tier; or you can push for a RDBMS you know you can pitch together with your system to whomever you want to sell it afterwards).
CAR (Contents of Address Register) and CDR (Contents of Decrement Register) are effectively mnemonics for what we call nowadays (in ML or Haskell) the hd (head) and the tl (tail) of a list.
But, since in Latin head is caput and tail is cauda, you could say that CAR stands for CApite Regesta (literally, "what's written at the head") and CDR for CauDa Regesta ("what is written at the tail")! The Classicist purists among you will probably find that a better non-etymology would be "CApitis Recensio" and "CauDae Recensio", but who's worrying anyway. Then of course, you have that CONS is also Latin for "CONStruo".
I think that the problem reflected in the article is one of impedance mismatch. You can think of deconstructionist theory as a kind of "alternate logic" that doesn't submit to the rules of classical, Aristotelian logic. Let me explain:
What is important in decon is the web of references a text is immersed in and establishes with other texts. This is why the jargon seems impenetrable to the uninitiated: the words are specific signifiers (pointers if you will) evoking specific concepts from the Founding Fathers (all mentioned in the article: Saussure, Lacan, Baudrillard, Derrida, Lyotard; more or less in actual intellectual precedence order). They're shortcuts, they're macros. So the first step would be to learn the bodies of the macros; then, understanding pomo-talk is really easy, since the underlying concepts are simple enough.
The second thing to consider is that, as a relational reality, a deconstruction is not true or false, not even right or wrong: it can be contentious, it can be insightful, it can be trite, whatever; you can make judgement calls about the evocativeness of the relations uncovered in/by the (critical) text, but you can't say "that relationship doesn't follow". If you want to demolish a deconstruction, you have to outwit the author at its own game (that is, at the decon game).
Yes, I do understand the Principle of Parsimonious Explanation. see here where it says "Occam's Razor is a useful tool for formulating hypotheses for testing. It says nothing at all about whether a hypothesis is valid." and here where it says "Use Occam's Razor to prune the list of hypothetical explanations of the observation". I won't suffer any more ad-hominems.
And you don't want heuristics for selecting heuristics because the object of your study aren't heuristics but observables (hint: heuristics aren't, except in Epistemology). Note that while there exists an a-priori conclusive proof of the hypothesis "Voynich is real" (a successful decipherment), a proof of "Voynich is a hoax" is, by necessity, indirect and, barring the uncovering of documentary evidence, circumstantial.
BTW, you still have the burden of proof. You might state that you are unconvinced, or convinced of the contrary option, in an informal setting; but that is an expression of a belief, and beliefs aren't proofs.
Personally, I don't expect to ever in my lifetime see the matter settled.
Anyone can say anything is a hoax but it takes scientific evidence - actual empirical data - to prove such a claim.
No. It is the proponents of the idea that the book is genuine's job to prove that it is indeed that. One doesn't need to prove that something is a hoax if it is, Occam's Razor does that job. What explanation is contains the fewest ubstantiated assumptions: That something was written a language nobody knows, containing valuable information nobody has any idea about, or that it was produced using a simple encryption technique to fool somebody to pay loads of shiny ducats?
No, to you. Occam's Razor is a heuristic for selecting hypotheses to test. It doesn't relieve you of the burden of proof just because your burden is heavier. You definitely do need to prove that "X is false", if that is the hypothesis you selected based on whatever heuristics you choose.
Voynich is patently written in an unknown code (i.e., language): that's not an assumption, it's a given for both hypotheses. The first hypothesis (you used the non-synonim "unsubstantiated assumption") is that Voynich has high information content in the algorithmic sense. The second hypothesis is that Voynich has low information content, again in the algorithmic sense. Considerations of value, motive, etcetera are irrelevant to this analysis although they might be of heuristic value for selecting hypotheses, but not for application of Occam's Razor (which is another heuristic).
To sum it up, you still have the burden of proof, and you can't use heuristics for selecting heuristics.
Argentina has these things there, too (I lived there a few years). They're basically little stores where people go in and pay to get on the Internet. I can't remember the prices now, but the people there are so poor, that they only charged in increments of either 10 minutes or an hour.
FWIW, it's around 1 USD/hour, usually in 15' increments.
Plus, a lot of the shops are run by the monopolistic telephone company there - Telefonica Argentina.
It's a duopoly, actually. The other provider is Telecom Argentina, formerly a property of France Telecom and now locally owned (I think).
Their rates are reasonable to get online, but usually it's dialup -- not highspeed
I don't know where were you visiting, but in Buenos Aires it's DSL or cable, mostly. Some cafes even have dedicated fiber-optic lines.
For people who open up their own shops, who actually have enough money, I can see absolutely no reason why they would want to use Microsoft Windows, when at the very *least* Linux can do everything it can for free, and at the very best... well, we all know the advantages.:)
I'm convinced of this, too; but I haven't been able to persuade anybody around here. They go with the usual quip the people won't know Linux, they won't use it. I say go with a good kiosk-like configuration of Gnome or what have you and they would be none the wiser. What I still don't see how to do is metering, though.
Slashdot Mirror
It might be arrogance, it could be distrust... Let me just say that the point I was trying to make was larger than what you quoted.
No, it's not impossible to maintain, and I'm of the opinion that no amount of skepticism is enough. You can exercise a healthy dose of prejudice (understood as that the momentary suspension of rational judgement, either because you've seen it before, or it's "intuitive" to accept at face value, or you don't have time to judge it now) to avoid the cognitive burden. It's all about the economy of thought: it is in principle better for you to be rational about the world, unless the cost of being so offsets its benefits. Every received idea, every prethought thought burdens you with the actual cost of you analyzing it, and the implied, future cost of you trusting it and being wrong about it.
Meaning that they weren't so-called at the time. Was this because of oppression - or was it because the idea of associating sexual preference with identity and not with just behavior had not yet arisen?
Nonsense. The romans called pathicus to the habitual anal passive, cynaedos to the habitual anal active. Both words are Greek in origin, and attested as pathikos and kunaidos. Irrumare was a verb denoting forceful orally-insertive penetration, and is attested as used in a same-sex context (irrumator is the verbal noun; see Catulli Carmen XVI). Aristophanes was ever quick to point out flaws of character in various personages for comic effect, and used colorful language to label "homosexuals". Furthermore, you have Paul's wonderful arsenokoitês (lit. "male-fucker"). All these words were used in a context denoting categorial thinking (i.e., the words were used as labels more than as adjectives), this is especially easy to see in Paul.
A quick Googling yielded numerous references, all in the context of exegesis: see for yourself. There's copious amounts of textual analysis of ancient sources to support (indeed, looking to support) the idea that the "male homosexual" category existed since Classical antiquity.
I'm gonna get troll-tagged into oblivion for this, but here goes nothing:
Joel's argument is a platitude at best, and a fallacy at worst. He is plying his trade, no mistake about it: "Lots of programmers think they can hold the bug list in their heads. Nonsense. I can't remember more than two or three bugs at a time". Nonesense? Joel, buddy, casuistics ain't argument; what's good for you is... well, just good for you, not justification for anything. If you can't remember your name on odd days, it doesn't mean that everybody must put yellow Post-It's with their monikers on every flat, clean surface.
Also, from the funny-advice-dept, maybe you could try focusing more in your programming, to the point that you make three or fewer errors per release cycle. It's not impossible, you know, if you're intelligent enough. On the other hand, if a safety net makes you prone to feats of recklessness, and you enjoy the adrenaline rush...
Er... I don't think so. Whereas thong is a proper Germanic word designating a strip of leather (twang is a cognate), I think the sense migrated to denote skimpy underwear under the influence (no pun intended) of the tupó (or guaraní, if we're not being academically precise) tanga, which does designate the underware/swimsuit-style outfit. That word is in current use in Argentina and Brazil (and I would assume also in Uruguay and Paraguay), so it might have come to the States by way of Rio de Janeiro.
Oracle? ... MS-SQL? ... SAP? No. Postgres? No. Firebird? No. Who's left?
Sybase?
Just to offer a more accurate picture on the issue, the name Isabella is the Italian rendition of the Spanish name Isabel. Furthermore, she was Queen of Castille and Aragon, and not Leon; however, the present-day region of Castilla does include the province of León, while Aragón is, iirc, another region.
I did say that I know who he is, didn't I?
A private party generates a flurry of jealous, petty bitching from a bunch of self-posessed technobrats? And this is a world-class, newsworthy event? People bitching against first, and then backpedaling and trying to brown-nose some Tim O'Reilly to get it? Grow the fuck up, already...
BTW, I know the O'Reilly name. It's just, who is he anyway?
It's easy. First off, it has to be a symmetric function of a, b, c; that is, for every permutation p(a,b,c) of a, b, c, it must be f(p(a,b,c)) = f(a,b,c). Second, it suffices for two out of three to agree independently on a result (be it 0 or 1). So the "best" answer is: a&b | b&c | c&a. An "operational reading" of the three-majority-vote would be that "less than two 1 are not enough".
Furthermore, it is usual to inflate costs by not taking amortizations into accout. That is what happens when, for instance, US media quotes the material costs of hurricane devastation in the nine figures: if living in Florida were that costly, the area would be deserted and/or inhabited by very precarious settlements. Whereas the truth is, all costs are already taken into accout by insurance, fixed costs, &c.
In other words, fraudulent accounting practices.
The canvas is a drawing plane together with a JavaScript API. If you read the examples, you don't manipulate the canvas through a DOM-like interface, but you draw on it, or rather, issue draw commands to it. This is very much like Java's Graphics, except you don't have to compile, test, debug, compile ad nauseam to try simple graphics or hacks, you can just use Firefox and Venkman to try, play and prototype.
SVG is an XML application for vector graphics, and the programming and interaction model for it is, as far as I can tell, quite complicated. You'll probably need something like an authoring environment for anything but the simplest drawings.
The <canvas> is cool. Safari compatibility or not, this could be the LOGO of the noughties. JavaScript is a fun language when you're not trying to be cross-compatible with every browser under the sun.
However, the last paragraph reads:
(emphasis in the original). While I commend Ian's commitment to standards, I can't imagine he will be very pleased with this tasks (for those who don't know him, he's victriolic against violations of the standards. He's a first-rate purist). I predicts the flames will be very pretty to look at.
That's precisely why, the moment I cross the door to my apartment, I strip naked.
Yes, even in winter.
You can't tunnel, 'cos the ISP can't allow you to. From Par. (e): "ISPs shall not, under any circumstances, incorporate networking architecture, technology or equipment that would limit remote interception of communications as disposed by legally established procedures. They shall not incorporate services that would hinder, limit or diminish, in any way, the retrieval of the interception, and any and all information as consigned herewith."
It's wide and far-reaching because it's absolutely ill-conceived, with no regards to what's actually possible, and more imortant, what's already not possible at all, given the "technological means" already in widespread use.
I'm sick, I can't read anymore.
the little buggers are everywhere. They have a penchant for making nests behind tiles and in utility conduits in buildings, with the effect that all Buenos Aires feels like a huge anthill. I have to put bread, flour and sugar inside Ziploc bags to keep them out. Pest control makes them disappear for a month, and then they return.
The only good thing about the ants is that they keep cokroaches away.
conditioning gives them iron emotional control, a lack of empathy, extra combat awareness, and skill at psychologically manipulating others
Both highlighted assertions are mutually incompatible.
authors [...] have a right to not have their works consistently and persistently changed
No. Rights are the actual benefits of the social contract, and as the latter changes the former obviously do too. If there is no god-given social contract, there cannot be god-given rights. Inasmuch gods vary from society to society, there can't be the god-given social contract, hence your categorical assertion is mere wishful thinking.
In "primitive" societies without the concept of authorship, the bards and singers would pass their yarns to be respun and reweaved by the community. Some of us do it too, with spoofs and parodies "to be sung to the tune of".
(Bear with me, it's not a troll).
10+ years of experience in the Financial/Banking sector might not tell you much, but it has taught me that business/domain logic changes so frequently so as to make any possibility of portability be remote, in the best case. Stored Procedures just save your life, period. Also, and perhaps more relevantly, your client probably has made a substantial investment on the RDBMS, and they won't even dream of switching DB layers down the line.
If you're confident about the choice of RDBMS vis-à-vis its architectonic permanence (Is the client happy with it? Are you sure it's gonna sustain the load you plan?), you shouldn't worry about portability in, say, mid-termish 3 years after installation. However, if what you want is to re-sell (that is, productize) the code to another potential client who might have a different RDBMS, your design goals should be adjusted accordingly (for instance, you can insist on portability, by building a middle-tier; or you can push for a RDBMS you know you can pitch together with your system to whomever you want to sell it afterwards).
CAR (Contents of Address Register) and CDR (Contents of Decrement Register) are effectively mnemonics for what we call nowadays (in ML or Haskell) the hd (head) and the tl (tail) of a list.
But, since in Latin head is caput and tail is cauda, you could say that CAR stands for CApite Regesta (literally, "what's written at the head") and CDR for CauDa Regesta ("what is written at the tail")! The Classicist purists among you will probably find that a better non-etymology would be "CApitis Recensio" and "CauDae Recensio", but who's worrying anyway. Then of course, you have that CONS is also Latin for "CONStruo".
In my opinion as an author, that solution is morally untenable, since it amounts to self-labeling and self-censoring.
I think that the problem reflected in the article is one of impedance mismatch. You can think of deconstructionist theory as a kind of "alternate logic" that doesn't submit to the rules of classical, Aristotelian logic. Let me explain:
What is important in decon is the web of references a text is immersed in and establishes with other texts. This is why the jargon seems impenetrable to the uninitiated: the words are specific signifiers (pointers if you will) evoking specific concepts from the Founding Fathers (all mentioned in the article: Saussure, Lacan, Baudrillard, Derrida, Lyotard; more or less in actual intellectual precedence order). They're shortcuts, they're macros. So the first step would be to learn the bodies of the macros; then, understanding pomo-talk is really easy, since the underlying concepts are simple enough.
The second thing to consider is that, as a relational reality, a deconstruction is not true or false, not even right or wrong: it can be contentious, it can be insightful, it can be trite, whatever; you can make judgement calls about the evocativeness of the relations uncovered in/by the (critical) text, but you can't say "that relationship doesn't follow". If you want to demolish a deconstruction, you have to outwit the author at its own game (that is, at the decon game).
Yes, I do understand the Principle of Parsimonious Explanation. see here where it says "Occam's Razor is a useful tool for formulating hypotheses for testing. It says nothing at all about whether a hypothesis is valid." and here where it says "Use Occam's Razor to prune the list of hypothetical explanations of the observation". I won't suffer any more ad-hominems.
And you don't want heuristics for selecting heuristics because the object of your study aren't heuristics but observables (hint: heuristics aren't, except in Epistemology). Note that while there exists an a-priori conclusive proof of the hypothesis "Voynich is real" (a successful decipherment), a proof of "Voynich is a hoax" is, by necessity, indirect and, barring the uncovering of documentary evidence, circumstantial.
BTW, you still have the burden of proof. You might state that you are unconvinced, or convinced of the contrary option, in an informal setting; but that is an expression of a belief, and beliefs aren't proofs.
Personally, I don't expect to ever in my lifetime see the matter settled.
No, to you. Occam's Razor is a heuristic for selecting hypotheses to test. It doesn't relieve you of the burden of proof just because your burden is heavier. You definitely do need to prove that "X is false", if that is the hypothesis you selected based on whatever heuristics you choose.
Voynich is patently written in an unknown code (i.e., language): that's not an assumption, it's a given for both hypotheses. The first hypothesis (you used the non-synonim "unsubstantiated assumption") is that Voynich has high information content in the algorithmic sense. The second hypothesis is that Voynich has low information content, again in the algorithmic sense. Considerations of value, motive, etcetera are irrelevant to this analysis although they might be of heuristic value for selecting hypotheses, but not for application of Occam's Razor (which is another heuristic).
To sum it up, you still have the burden of proof, and you can't use heuristics for selecting heuristics.
Argentina has these things there, too (I lived there a few years). They're basically little stores where people go in and pay to get on the Internet. I can't remember the prices now, but the people there are so poor, that they only charged in increments of either 10 minutes or an hour.
FWIW, it's around 1 USD/hour, usually in 15' increments.
Plus, a lot of the shops are run by the monopolistic telephone company there - Telefonica Argentina.
It's a duopoly, actually. The other provider is Telecom Argentina, formerly a property of France Telecom and now locally owned (I think).
Their rates are reasonable to get online, but usually it's dialup -- not highspeed
I don't know where were you visiting, but in Buenos Aires it's DSL or cable, mostly. Some cafes even have dedicated fiber-optic lines.
For people who open up their own shops, who actually have enough money, I can see absolutely no reason why they would want to use Microsoft Windows, when at the very *least* Linux can do everything it can for free, and at the very best ... well, we all know the advantages. :)
I'm convinced of this, too; but I haven't been able to persuade anybody around here. They go with the usual quip the people won't know Linux, they won't use it. I say go with a good kiosk-like configuration of Gnome or what have you and they would be none the wiser. What I still don't see how to do is metering, though.