FWIW...see this more recent post, Knuth got it wrong, in which, in addition to the assertion in the title, kdawson reports an "off-by-ten error in btrees." Try to figure out what Knuth was "wrong" about, and where the "off-by-ten error" is.
He wasn't, and there isn't. Kdawson simply made that stuff up (unless we redefine the terms "wrong" and "off-by-ten error" so that they mean...uhhh...what they don't mean).
I'm not trolling...just annoyed by B.S. and the people who use it.
I used to hate kdawson only for his idiotic political posts during the final days of the Bush administration.
I know, right? There's nothing worse than people injecting politics into an otherwise technical discussion. Too bad it's all too common. ..
Ummm...no...the GP did not suggest there's something wrong with people injecting politics into a technical discussion. That was your straw man construct...easy to rebut your own soft lobs, eh?
He did say that kdawson writes idiotic political posts. If you are familiar with kdawson's posts, you should know that the GP is correct. Often, kdawson overtly abandons truth as he makes a mad dash for his notion of an entertaining post. For many of us, those posts are insultingly inflammatory and unsubstantiated. They are, by preponderance of their context, WRONG, and as such, IDIOTIC.
When kdawson directs his trite distortions to malign another one of his boogie men, it may be fun for people who want to ride in that posse, but for others, distortion is, well, distortion. And that's not helpful in _any_ discussion.
The challenge here, for those of us who are concerned about damage and risk mitigation, is to accurately assess risk and formulate appropriate action. To do so requires knowledge and reasoning.
For you, this appears to be an emotional experience. And though politicians will be doing a lot of dancing and shouting to pander to your popular feelings, all of that will have little to do with effective risk mitigation. The show is for you. But the work is for others, and you and your thinking are MASSIVELY DIVERSIONARY AND SO TRULY BESIDE THE POINT.
Do you think oil toxicity is analogous to cyanide toxicity? Of course you don't. And it's not as if you care. But it's fun to note that cyanide, having a low-end lethal dose of 1.5 mg/kg, diluted in water at.5 ppm, would require a drink of about 50 gallons of your "cyanide water" to kill a 60 kg person. I suspect a glass of.5 ppm cyanide water, being 1/800th of a lethal dose, would be quite benign.
Whatever your mission, it is only tangentially related to health and safety. You may take solace in knowing that there are many smart people on this earth working to improve health and mortality, and you will benefit from the fact that their thinking employs the kind of discipline that is absent from your own.
More than any other type, businesses are run by salesmen. These are people whose strongest attributes are the ability to build relationships, to communicate value, and a strong inclination to increase their personal wealth.
Increasingly, the stuff salesmen sell is based on complex technologies that, really, are beyond the reach of their comprehension. They kind of understand the products they sell, but really, they don't. If the world only had salesmen, there wouldn't be any sophisticated products.
Say hello to the engineer...a person who builds products. His strongest attributes are a desire to solve problems, a willingness to absorb the tedious but essential details needed to build a complex system, and a personality that derives gratification from doing so.
We now begin the business cycle. The salesman says, "Build me something I can sell."
The engineers says, "I will build you something that works well."
And therein begins a lifetime of the two, symbiotically, talking past each other. The engineer serves the salesman, and the salesman serves himself. But make no mistake about it: the salesman is in control.
For a salesman, QUALITY means it works well enough for him to sell more, and most importantly, to make more money for himself. For an engineer, QUALITY means it works reliably and efficiently. To be sure, QUALITY is an abstract and moving target that varies according to the eyes of the beholder. But to understand why we have the predicament described in this article, we need only understand the SIGNIFICANCE OF QUALITY TO A SALESMAN.
I would continue to expound, but then, most readers here need only reflect on their already frustrated pasts to understand the mechanics of this convenient but often vacuous relationship.
Re:In the US we have an inflated estimate of US
on
H.264 and VP8 Compared
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· Score: 2, Interesting
they have a system that's similar that is proven to work over a span of 5,000 years
Care to estimate how much capital they've been able to create through the use of intangibles, and compare that to our ability to do so?
Our intellectual property laws allow our economy to realize the value of intangibles, to the recipient of the intangible at the time that he realizes the value, and to the producer at the same time. That puts food on people's tables, clothes on their backs, roofs over their shoulders.
There are indeed cases to be made for intangibles being _free_, particularly when the capital needed to create them is low (as in many software patents). But when the capital requirements are high, the economic incentive to create value can be almost non-existent in the absence of intellectual property laws. That's a losing proposition, both for would-be creators and for would-be recipients.
Your purported sensitivity to other cultures sounds more like an unduly simple dogma born more of regret than the very discerning and practical considerations by which good law is born.
...where you choose a vendor who will make your computer be reliable.
Gimme a break.
Apple weenies (and a bunch of slashdotters too) need to let go of that aged-out belief that Windows isn't reliable, or that an unreliable app makes the whole platform unreliable. You don't need to switch vendors...you just need to stop using the bad app(s).
Apple users are going to great lengths these days to rationalize the fact that they have chosen a platform with somewhat limited choices. The fact is that they have chosen a computing STYLE, and in so doing, have to some extent limited their computing CAPABILITIES. So, for example, they choose the iPad STYLE and they lose Flash CAPABILITY.
Enough of the "less-is-more" argument in Apple-land...less may be prettier, but it's still less.
Why not [...] ask if any of the prospective jurors have accessed information about the previous case [...] Too sensible a solution, perhaps?
Unhelpfully idealistic, I'd say.
Quite often during trial, despite counter instructions from the court, jurors engage in potentially prejudicial extrajudicial activities including discussing the case with family/friends, reading media accounts, and more recently, doing internet research. Just one juror doing so can taint the deliberations of a jury.
The emphasis here is on the goal of delivering a fair trial to the defendant. Treating jurors with unfettered trust is not helpful toward that end, nor should it be particularly important to anybody else as long as restrictions are reasonably justified. (Note that in particularly exposed cases, we resort to juror sequestration.)
the judges are the ones that let the lawsuits happen in the first place. Try these in Europe, and most would never make it into the system
I would hope that the reason for that being the case in Europe, as in the U.S., is not that judges decided what lawsuits should be allowed, but that laws delineate the terms under which judges allow lawsuits. Citing judges for being responsible for lawsuits is like citing referees for responsible for people playing sports.
You don't really refute the GP's argument. Instead, you switch to an electric-car-as-savior argument. But wind turbines do nothing to address the deficiencies of electric cars (it's not like they're being held back by a shortage of electricity).
Electric cars would be great, if they didn't suck at doing important things that petrol-powered cars do. So until some dream of yours which you can't really articulate comes true, your electric-car-as-savior theory remains no more than an optimist's dream.
And, so, your cute exercise in word logic doesn't [in reality, today] solve our problem, and certainly has nothing to do with wind power.
(And, no, throwing money at a problem is not a sure way to solve it.)
You can always rely on the BBC to back the government's bad decisions. It's because of the unique way they're funded.
Nice way to back into a conclusion. Of course, in order to believe it, you would have to ignore the very common, almost routine instances in which the BBC reports or expresses opposition to government positions.
Someone needs to remind our government of the meaning of NIMBY.
Aye-aye, Captain! The time travel vessel is being readied in the launch bay, and your message will be delivered to those 1914 morons in just a few minutes!
Yes. It would be bait and switch...as long as you could prove:
1) That the offer really was unlimited. (To do that, you'll have to show the judge the ad and hope he ignores the fine print at the bottom. You'll also want to destroy your copy of the contract that you endorsed with your cable company, and pray they don't present that at your trial.)
2) You'll have to defend yourself against the cable company's accusation that you knew very well the very practical limitations of shared networks. You will be the plaintiff, so you will be compelled to testify. You can try to explain your excessive bittorrent utilization while claiming to be a babe in the woods about network capacity. Good luck painting yourself as unknowing. (Lying probably won't help you here...the cable company's evidence will be good by trial time.)
Good luck there. I hope you get a stupid judge. (I've never seen one yet.)
Wow...imagine being mislead into believing you could have _unlimited_ internet? And then to be clipped? The scale of the deceit...the magnitude of the victimization...it astounds me!
But wait...that bold print in the ad...UNLIMITED...that wasn't the contract? The AD wasn't a CONTRACT? There was more? There was an ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY?
Well this just goes from bad to worse. I mean...where's the fairness? How can one possibly avoid being defrauded by these hucksters?
Okay...aside from the offer being an unreasonable one, you want to talk about _enforcement_? You want to go _legal_? Well then look at the ISPs' purposely ambiguous acceptable use policies and their ability to defend their positions _legally_. They win on that front.
There's nothing particularly principled about enforcing an inequitable agreement. See how much fairness you get out of trying to enforce an unfair deal. Such is the fruit of yet another ethically weak tree.
Frankly, most of the posters in this discussion _would_ expect that. The proposition reflects a meeting of two unreasonable, somewhat disingenuous parties: the seller who falsely suggests you can consume as much as you want at a fixed cost, and the buyer who suggests he should be entitled to such an offer (as if economics could/should somehow transcend the conservation of matter and energy).
And then they mod you down in consideration of your quite reasonably applicable analogy. Congratulations: you've stung the fools.
I'm sorry...I thought you said x86 isn't a passable architecture...at all.
Just last week I found a good word for this: hyperbole.
You'll have to ratchet it down at least a couple of notches to get close to truth. See the parent's reference to "coyote-ugly" (x86) and x86-haters (you).
And that, my friend, is why you will never be "successful" in the US.
Sorry, "my friend." I enjoy Benjamins, boats and booz, _and_ the widely held respect of others (particularly in business). I would probably meet your narrow definition of being "successful."
My guess is that you have little experience with the upper echelons of U.S. society, and in particular, a lack of inside familiarity with high-level corporate executives (the most "successful" of Americans) and the mechanisms that drive their egos. Money/material is but one measure of social standing, and social standing is _everything_ when we speak of some shared notion of "success." Yes, money is all it takes to _look_ like a successful figure. But at the heart of this brand we call "success" is _social affirmation_, most importantly, from other "successful" people. One doesn't have to be rich for long to feel how hollow is the envy of needy or money-grubbing people.
Wealth is as simple as you describe. But success is much more complicated than that. And successful people have to cover a lot more ground than your remark would suggest.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW...see this more recent post, Knuth got it wrong, in which, in addition to the assertion in the title, kdawson reports an "off-by-ten error in btrees." Try to figure out what Knuth was "wrong" about, and where the "off-by-ten error" is.
He wasn't, and there isn't. Kdawson simply made that stuff up (unless we redefine the terms "wrong" and "off-by-ten error" so that they mean...uhhh...what they don't mean).
I'm not trolling...just annoyed by B.S. and the people who use it.
Ummm...no...the GP did not suggest there's something wrong with people injecting politics into a technical discussion. That was your straw man construct...easy to rebut your own soft lobs, eh?
He did say that kdawson writes idiotic political posts. If you are familiar with kdawson's posts, you should know that the GP is correct. Often, kdawson overtly abandons truth as he makes a mad dash for his notion of an entertaining post. For many of us, those posts are insultingly inflammatory and unsubstantiated. They are, by preponderance of their context, WRONG, and as such, IDIOTIC.
When kdawson directs his trite distortions to malign another one of his boogie men, it may be fun for people who want to ride in that posse, but for others, distortion is, well, distortion. And that's not helpful in _any_ discussion.
The challenge here, for those of us who are concerned about damage and risk mitigation, is to accurately assess risk and formulate appropriate action. To do so requires knowledge and reasoning.
For you, this appears to be an emotional experience. And though politicians will be doing a lot of dancing and shouting to pander to your popular feelings, all of that will have little to do with effective risk mitigation. The show is for you. But the work is for others, and you and your thinking are MASSIVELY DIVERSIONARY AND SO TRULY BESIDE THE POINT.
Do you think oil toxicity is analogous to cyanide toxicity? Of course you don't. And it's not as if you care. But it's fun to note that cyanide, having a low-end lethal dose of 1.5 mg/kg, diluted in water at .5 ppm, would require a drink of about 50 gallons of your "cyanide water" to kill a 60 kg person. I suspect a glass of .5 ppm cyanide water, being 1/800th of a lethal dose, would be quite benign.
Whatever your mission, it is only tangentially related to health and safety. You may take solace in knowing that there are many smart people on this earth working to improve health and mortality, and you will benefit from the fact that their thinking employs the kind of discipline that is absent from your own.
A "scientist was awed by the density" of the plume? At HALF A PART PER MILLION???!!!
Am I missing something, or am I just a dullard whose panties don't get bunched over TRACE CONCENTRATIONS?
Now, if you dropped that A8 into a DMC-12 and cranked 1.21 GW into the flux capacitor, THAT would get interesting.
More than any other type, businesses are run by salesmen. These are people whose strongest attributes are the ability to build relationships, to communicate value, and a strong inclination to increase their personal wealth.
Increasingly, the stuff salesmen sell is based on complex technologies that, really, are beyond the reach of their comprehension. They kind of understand the products they sell, but really, they don't. If the world only had salesmen, there wouldn't be any sophisticated products.
Say hello to the engineer...a person who builds products. His strongest attributes are a desire to solve problems, a willingness to absorb the tedious but essential details needed to build a complex system, and a personality that derives gratification from doing so.
We now begin the business cycle. The salesman says, "Build me something I can sell."
The engineers says, "I will build you something that works well."
And therein begins a lifetime of the two, symbiotically, talking past each other. The engineer serves the salesman, and the salesman serves himself. But make no mistake about it: the salesman is in control.
For a salesman, QUALITY means it works well enough for him to sell more, and most importantly, to make more money for himself. For an engineer, QUALITY means it works reliably and efficiently. To be sure, QUALITY is an abstract and moving target that varies according to the eyes of the beholder. But to understand why we have the predicament described in this article, we need only understand the SIGNIFICANCE OF QUALITY TO A SALESMAN.
I would continue to expound, but then, most readers here need only reflect on their already frustrated pasts to understand the mechanics of this convenient but often vacuous relationship.
Care to estimate how much capital they've been able to create through the use of intangibles, and compare that to our ability to do so?
Our intellectual property laws allow our economy to realize the value of intangibles, to the recipient of the intangible at the time that he realizes the value, and to the producer at the same time. That puts food on people's tables, clothes on their backs, roofs over their shoulders.
There are indeed cases to be made for intangibles being _free_, particularly when the capital needed to create them is low (as in many software patents). But when the capital requirements are high, the economic incentive to create value can be almost non-existent in the absence of intellectual property laws. That's a losing proposition, both for would-be creators and for would-be recipients.
Your purported sensitivity to other cultures sounds more like an unduly simple dogma born more of regret than the very discerning and practical considerations by which good law is born.
...none of the scientists in the article asserted any significant concern about the relative safety of the device.
Radiation safety issue? Gimme a break.
Nice headline; no story. You must be a student of the KDawson school of editorial?
...where you choose a vendor who will make your computer be reliable.
Gimme a break.
Apple weenies (and a bunch of slashdotters too) need to let go of that aged-out belief that Windows isn't reliable, or that an unreliable app makes the whole platform unreliable. You don't need to switch vendors...you just need to stop using the bad app(s).
Apple users are going to great lengths these days to rationalize the fact that they have chosen a platform with somewhat limited choices. The fact is that they have chosen a computing STYLE, and in so doing, have to some extent limited their computing CAPABILITIES. So, for example, they choose the iPad STYLE and they lose Flash CAPABILITY.
Enough of the "less-is-more" argument in Apple-land...less may be prettier, but it's still less.
Phew! For a moment there, I thought you were engaging in analysis based on wild speculation.
Unhelpfully idealistic, I'd say.
Quite often during trial, despite counter instructions from the court, jurors engage in potentially prejudicial extrajudicial activities including discussing the case with family/friends, reading media accounts, and more recently, doing internet research. Just one juror doing so can taint the deliberations of a jury.
The emphasis here is on the goal of delivering a fair trial to the defendant. Treating jurors with unfettered trust is not helpful toward that end, nor should it be particularly important to anybody else as long as restrictions are reasonably justified. (Note that in particularly exposed cases, we resort to juror sequestration.)
I would hope that the reason for that being the case in Europe, as in the U.S., is not that judges decided what lawsuits should be allowed, but that laws delineate the terms under which judges allow lawsuits. Citing judges for being responsible for lawsuits is like citing referees for responsible for people playing sports.
Errr...I believe the precise number would be 10^571.
You don't really refute the GP's argument. Instead, you switch to an electric-car-as-savior argument. But wind turbines do nothing to address the deficiencies of electric cars (it's not like they're being held back by a shortage of electricity).
Electric cars would be great, if they didn't suck at doing important things that petrol-powered cars do. So until some dream of yours which you can't really articulate comes true, your electric-car-as-savior theory remains no more than an optimist's dream.
And, so, your cute exercise in word logic doesn't [in reality, today] solve our problem, and certainly has nothing to do with wind power.
(And, no, throwing money at a problem is not a sure way to solve it.)
Wow. I had no idea all that was going on. In the mind of whom?
Nice way to back into a conclusion. Of course, in order to believe it, you would have to ignore the very common, almost routine instances in which the BBC reports or expresses opposition to government positions.
As an AC once said: "Fail."
Easy...you press the "BLAST OFF" button to test.
Aye-aye, Captain! The time travel vessel is being readied in the launch bay, and your message will be delivered to those 1914 morons in just a few minutes!
Brilliant advice, Sir!
Yes. It would be bait and switch...as long as you could prove:
1) That the offer really was unlimited. (To do that, you'll have to show the judge the ad and hope he ignores the fine print at the bottom. You'll also want to destroy your copy of the contract that you endorsed with your cable company, and pray they don't present that at your trial.)
2) You'll have to defend yourself against the cable company's accusation that you knew very well the very practical limitations of shared networks. You will be the plaintiff, so you will be compelled to testify. You can try to explain your excessive bittorrent utilization while claiming to be a babe in the woods about network capacity. Good luck painting yourself as unknowing. (Lying probably won't help you here...the cable company's evidence will be good by trial time.)
Good luck there. I hope you get a stupid judge. (I've never seen one yet.)
Wow...imagine being mislead into believing you could have _unlimited_ internet? And then to be clipped? The scale of the deceit...the magnitude of the victimization...it astounds me!
But wait...that bold print in the ad...UNLIMITED...that wasn't the contract? The AD wasn't a CONTRACT? There was more? There was an ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY?
Well this just goes from bad to worse. I mean...where's the fairness? How can one possibly avoid being defrauded by these hucksters?
Okay...aside from the offer being an unreasonable one, you want to talk about _enforcement_? You want to go _legal_? Well then look at the ISPs' purposely ambiguous acceptable use policies and their ability to defend their positions _legally_. They win on that front.
There's nothing particularly principled about enforcing an inequitable agreement. See how much fairness you get out of trying to enforce an unfair deal. Such is the fruit of yet another ethically weak tree.
Frankly, most of the posters in this discussion _would_ expect that. The proposition reflects a meeting of two unreasonable, somewhat disingenuous parties: the seller who falsely suggests you can consume as much as you want at a fixed cost, and the buyer who suggests he should be entitled to such an offer (as if economics could/should somehow transcend the conservation of matter and energy).
And then they mod you down in consideration of your quite reasonably applicable analogy. Congratulations: you've stung the fools.
I'm sorry...I thought you said x86 isn't a passable architecture...at all.
Just last week I found a good word for this: hyperbole.
You'll have to ratchet it down at least a couple of notches to get close to truth. See the parent's reference to "coyote-ugly" (x86) and x86-haters (you).
Sorry I misunderstood you. My analysis of the term "success" would include issues similar to the ones you raise.
And though I do suspect that I would be considered successful by most people, that is more by coincidence than intent.
Cheers.
Sorry, "my friend." I enjoy Benjamins, boats and booz, _and_ the widely held respect of others (particularly in business). I would probably meet your narrow definition of being "successful."
My guess is that you have little experience with the upper echelons of U.S. society, and in particular, a lack of inside familiarity with high-level corporate executives (the most "successful" of Americans) and the mechanisms that drive their egos. Money/material is but one measure of social standing, and social standing is _everything_ when we speak of some shared notion of "success." Yes, money is all it takes to _look_ like a successful figure. But at the heart of this brand we call "success" is _social affirmation_, most importantly, from other "successful" people. One doesn't have to be rich for long to feel how hollow is the envy of needy or money-grubbing people.
Wealth is as simple as you describe. But success is much more complicated than that. And successful people have to cover a lot more ground than your remark would suggest.