The ideal length for a document is going to vary, project to project, but by building documents in a modular fashion it should be rarely necessary to have a document longer than about 20 sides of A4. Most should be around 10 sides. Anything longer likely covers unrelated topics and can be split up. (Remember, it is easier to open 20 books to one page each, than to open one book to 20 different pages.)
Yes. Tetris and MS Office have the same target complexity, to within fifty percent. Also, generalizations are helpful.
I think people misunderstand what happens when code is compiled. Compiling is not "the compiler uses the source code as instructions to produce an executable"; it's merely a translation of human-readable instructions into computer-readable instructions. I can "read" code and produce the same results by stepping through by hand; the executable code does the same thing (generally much faster).
This viewpoint seems to be largely tautological - two forms of an algorithm are equivalent because their input/output behavior is equivalent.
Of course, the counterargument is complex and more than I care to handle at work, but let me point out two things:
1) a binary running quicksort and my hand stepping through bubble sort aren't equivalent, even though one being run by the machine and the other being run by the human have the same end-result; input/output equivalence isn't the same as identity equivalence, and
2) various compilers don't output the same binaries for the code, and in the case of a naive and a cutting edge compiler can generate vastly different binaries with majorly different underlying behavior; hell, with optimizations, even the same compiler won't generate the same binary.
The source code most certainly is a generative set of instructions, rather than an equivalent form of output; take a look into compiler optimizations about proving whole sections of code are unnessecary. That the generative instructions are significantly different than the output is in fact the crucial bases of some techniques like SFINAE.
This argument is roughly the same as arguing that a mansion and a home are equivalent just because you can enter them, recieve housing and protection services from them, and because they have the same interface (doors, spigots, electrical outlets, garage, etc.)
In this sense, the code *IS* the final product; the Reeves article incorrectly equates compiling to building. The "building" is the writing of the code. Compiling is more like translating a book from English to some other language.
I just don't think this is correct. The purpose of Reeves' article is to equate programming to design as opposed to construction; all you've done is to take the opposed viewpoint. Whereas the case can be made for either, in the context of Reeves' arguments the latter viewpoint doesn't make sense.
To wit, if you want to discuss building, you should observe that the output in best possible world should be identical every time; that's a reasonable goal for architecture, but not for implementation. Why do you suggest that building is coding? Saying so without rationalization isn't discussion, it's argument.
When I use the blueprints for an automobile to build the automobile, I get something different than the blueprints.
Uh, no, you don't. That's kind of what mass production is about, is that within the limits of machine technology, every car is the same. If you go to a junkyard, you can use pieces from other cars. You can get replacement pieces at a dealership without anyone measuring your car.
Cars to a single line are effectively identical. If you'd like to learn what the difference is, read about the problems WW1 doughboys had because of their Hotchkiss weapons not being able to exchange parts, then consider that that's just a question of low quality manufacture; the reason you want to look that up is because of the glaring contrast with the well-manufactured Browning, which the military didn't deploy because it was the superior weapon of the day, and because they didn't want its design to fall into enemy hands.
Cars most certainly are identical per design, unless you want to go off onto non-issues like micrometer differences due to machining, scratches in paint, et cetera. The average educated adult cannot look at four of the same make and model of new car, have them rearranged, and still tell them apart, provided they're clean; The Price Is Right relies heavily on that fact for more th
Building long bridges and tall elevators are not comprable projects.
In the case of suspension bridges, they are - they're both suspension problems, natch. Especially in these two cases, they are for a second reason as well - the weight of the material involved becomes a significant problem, because its presence creates an additional drag strong enough to threaten our best tensile-strength materials.
The point the grandparent poster was making is that the problem of bridging that gap is far smaller than the problem of a space elevator, and so we need to take this in appropriate developmental steps.
Er. No. Batch protien folding is expensive, because you're folding 10^preposterous possible protiens. Folding one protien is relatively trivial; you could do it realtime on a z80. Amusingly, that means that the Classic Gameboy has enough horsepower to pull it off.
Molecular interactions are simple. The problem with batch protien folding is the sheer number of foldings which need to be addressed.
Yeah, and the problem is, if you accept the first seven axioms, Dianetics makes a lot of sense, too. You can't build an argument on faith. This is a textbook case of the fallacy of false premise - it doesn't matter whether the things you're taking faith on are true or not; if they're not known to be true they're false. Period.
Oh, also, you can pretty easily raise Alf to God on a set of logic built from two false base axioms, if you try. Watch:
1) Ecologically dominant creatures are superior. 2) Anything higher on the food chain is ecologically dominant. 3) Alf eats cats. 4) As the Egyptians well knew, cats are gods. 5) As a predator of cats, Alf is higher on the food chain to, and thus superior to, cats, which are gods; therefore Alf is a superior god.
The false premises are #1 and #4. #2 isn't false because the definition of ecologically dominant is already established as fairly clear reductionist nonsense, but from that reductionist nonsense definition #2 would be valid. #1 is the kind of "yeah, so if you just accept this" thing you just did, and #4 is Argumentum ad Verecundiam, which you commit both when you refer vapidly to scientists "arguing" about the burst patterns in the developmental record, which hasn't been argued since a year after it was noticed - having records is funny that way.
So, look, evolution is obviously true, and Alf is God. But hey, when those martians show up and start eating us, we'd better not fight back, because they're our predators and therefore ethically superior, too; the appropriate way to do things would be to worship them all the way down their throat.
And also we need to follow John Travolta to a meeting. You should read Dianetics, some time: it's pretty crazy how if you just accept the first ten crooked things, the rest just all falls into place.
Rotten foundations make rotten arguments, in short.
It's exactly this sort of intolerance to the beliefs of others that leads to the burning of books. Science is as guilty of this theme as religion. get down off of your horse - a person has the right to believe what they want to, and your belief in the quantum model doesn't give you the right to give them shit in public.
Whether or not you were trying to be funny, this is the sort of thing that give atheists the appearance of being intolerant. It doesn't matter if you mean it; people take it to heart anyway. Quit your bitching and act like the kind of enlightened individual you're challenging them to become. Their belief system got them out of the chaos that was early mankind. Who are you to question it? It obviously leads to successful societies, and we all know where "I am right you are wrong" eventually leads: the phlogiston, the ether, direct current city grids and Nazi Germany.
So shut up, please. You're annoying the adults, be they Bible-thumpers, Quantuum-thumpers or whatever else. (Just remember, in 1900 we thought the atomic model was on giant tinkertoy. Now we think it's based on dice. Chances are, if you'll pardon the pun, the dice model is an approximation of something even weirder; good current contenders are coiled superstring theory and n-brane topologies. And those will probably end up revealing something even deeper. Reality is, in essence, an Escher painting; the harder you look, the weirder it gets. You don't understand it any better than they did, and Christ has done more for humankind than the LED ever will. Bite them.)
Creationism isn't science, it's literature. Get over it.
Actually, it's social engineering. There's a damn good reason that throughout early human history there were conclaves of religious and non-religious people, and the religious ones always won. History is replete with examples, and every single major culture in human history up until about the 1400s was religiously grounded. That's not chance.
The primary function of religion from the perspective of the anthropologist is to serve as a preamble to what we now use government for - to set laws and appropriate punishments, to issue edicts in the interest of protecting the public health (food laws, sexual practice laws, age protection laws, etc,) to proscribe appropriate weights and values for trade, tariffs, taxation (christians call it tithing) to an entity which issues public works, and so forth.
The reason God always won, no matter what name (s)he/they c(ome|ame) under, was that religious people organized, cooperated better, shared viewpoints, had less internal clash, had lower crime rates, distributed public wealth into infrastructure development, and so on. The pseudoreligious Roman God-Emperor is an extreme case of the success of this method when integrated with social norms and the allowance of alternate belief systems.
It doesn't matter if people are in your country and believe different things. The importance isn't that everyone follows the same religion; the USA is a current example of the efficiency of a system where alternate beliefs are tolerated. What matters is that there is a single unified system for proscribing what is tolerable, and what may not be done. The USA will allow you to give you thirteen year old son psychedelic drugs, if it's been part of your culture for a thousand years and you apply first for the license, which they are burdened to give unless medical issues arise. That said, the USA will not condone ritual murder under any circumstance except impending death, and even that is a difficult issue in most states right now. There are limits, and they are (usually) clear as crystal.
This is the function which religion served. It was in no unclear terms a form of government interested in the public good, which gave standards, laws, reliable measures, protection from outside forces, the organized production capabilities, resource distribution in times of defecit, wealth redistribution to the destitute, deployment, public health, psychological help, moral and ethical compass, and in many cases even judiciary support.
I will not debate the validity of the actual theological intent of religion with you; it is not something I feel certain of. However, I do feel that to suggest it is literature is simply not correct, and ignores thousands of years of history and evidence. When we look at the eyes of the human and the octopus in biology, we're told about convergent evolution - how there are a ton of different approaches to the eye that get taken underwater and how the eye in humans and octopi diverged when they were still light sensitive pits on the skin, but how similar demands in the later species drove evolution to produce almost the exact same structure. This is no different: human population distributed (probably) before we had language at all; religion didn't show up until a certian population density, which happened globally uniformly around 25-20,000 years ago, and didn't really get its shit together until higher order language and history allowed a written exchange of very large documents (since the oral tradition introduces errors which after a certain size become extremely pervasive.) Written language spreads like a shitstorm - exactly how or why is still under debate - and shows up the whole world over in human populations with no contact about 6-4,000 years ago. Suddenly we can write out how things happen and why. The dominant belief systems emerge within one to two thousand years of the emergence of writing in any given area; early victors include Hinduism, Zoroastr
I agree that the people who think an elevator can be up and running within 15 years are probably overoptimistic to the point that you could call it "hype", but I've honestly never seen anyone besides you compare the space elevator to a biblical story.
Well, the emotional impact of going God on a cutting-edge science project aside, it's a particularly apt metaphor. I'm agnostic, but I see the value of the Bible as parables, other possible values remaining undiscussed. As is the case with all of the major holy books, the Bible provides a huge compendium of practical wisdom appropriate for everyday life, which helped its practicioners life better not only for themselves but also as a community. Considering human behavior before religion, this was a huge step, and should not be underestimated.
Most of those life lessons, the well decried exceptions like dietary law aside, still apply today, because most of them are about human nature and human emotional systems, which haven't changed much in the last five thousand years, or about ethics and morals, whose significant compass almost hasn't changed at all (note to argumentative philosophy majors: just because we understand morality better doesn't mean it's changed; just that we're less blind to it. The changes in moral compass come from ideas like the Ubermensche, and none of those have taken root in the common populace. Ever.)
The Tower of Babel parable is absolutely astoundingly appropriate, given its topical similarity to the question at hand. (That old rub about man's desire to build into the sky: just how dead-on is it? I've always wondered, especially when I lived near big skyscraper cities; people say it's about land value, but better mass transportation would be cheaper, more effective and safer, and there are a few cities which have implemented that at various levels throughout history - venice, graz, morgantown west virginia; tokyo's got it so bad that they've done it more than once, and they still need skyscrapers...)
Meh. Anyway, look. The point of the Babel fable is that the builders were experiencing hubris. They wanted to build a tower into the sky just for the sake of building a tower into the sky; they too should share the heavens. They didn't actually need, or in fact use, the tower for anything; they merely wanted to see the heavens, up close, whenever they wanted, and that was that. Indeed, in the modern day in many ways we do behave exactly this way: note for example the CN Tower, whose glass floor is most fun if one of your relatives can't handle it, and don't understand just how little impact you jumping up and down really hard actually has.
Now, these little bastards getting up into the heavens pisses god off, so god knocks them back down to the ground and gives them the anti-babelfish meme, and thus they can't talk to one another and therefore can't organize and build another one, which is roughly what plagues Los Angeles, like um, to this day, okay fer shure. This is how The Bible works: it teaches life lessons by treating chance or happenstance as the Wrath of God, which is pretty much how Europe explained everything - for other parts of the world's excuses, qv Djinn, sprites, elves, demons, wu-jen, meckla, coyote trickster, aya'p'atl, hobgoblins, ashanti's children, and pretty much all those other things dungeons and dragons players are rattling off in their heads right now. The lesson here is only superficially "get your ass out of the sky, mammal;" certainly the original speaker wasn't being so literal, or else he'd also have some fairly atypical views about airplanes, possibly from the inside of a padded room.
The real lesson in the Tower of Babel story is that you shouldn't be doing dumbass things just for the sake of doing them, because sometimes they fail, and if you haven't even thought about what's going to happen when it fails, you're gonna get screwed, really really hard.
The Space Elevator is in fact such a case: think about the absolute nightmare a cab
It's going to support the bandwidth and servers, actually; the amount that Amazon makes off of the process is far offset by the extra amount generated by the more broadly available shopping.
I mean, you might as well call the US Mail profiteers in the scheme, too. But the real profitters by a huge margin are the people who will continue to use the service for free online.
B: UNIX is the only one unrecognizable in it's current state. (Mac OS X)
MacOS X is Unix in exactly the same way that Windows ME is DOS. You'd do better to compare to real unices, like BSD, which still look, feel, act and smell like unix, instead of plastic gumdrops with icons that, to quote that movie, "bounce up and down like a Jack Russell fucking terrier."
From a technology standpoint, I don't use the same computers that were out in 1981. I don't drive a car that was made or designed in 1981. I don't even talk on a phone whose carrier techology was around in 1981.
You use a Von Neumann machine, which is from the 50s, and which has since been supplanted by many superior architectures. It's an implementation of the mechanical computation concept by Babbage in the 1880s using the electronic mechanisms from Colossus by Tiltman and Flowers in the 1940s using algorithms devised by Newman in the late 1930s and Turing in the early to mid 1940s.
Your car was invented in 1870 and your phone's carrier technology is from 1972.
Pre-emptive strike: "But I have slightly modified versions with moderately refined mechanisms, even though the core concepts haven't changed!"
Yeah, that's also true of the Space Shuttle. It's been revised constantly since its inception in the 1960s, when it basically looked like a DC-50. In fact, this story is about one such change. The shuttle has changed more in the last 40 years than your computer, your car and your phone put together.
Hell, DOS software from 1981 still works on modern Windows boxes without any special stuff. How, exactly, aren't these the same machines anymore? Because you switched OSes? DOS still runs on them, and they wouldn't have suddenly been different computers back in 1981 if you'd switched from DOS to, say, Q-Dos...
So why, WHY are we launching people into space with a program older than I am?
Because it's still the best thing we've got. If you want to go out-science a few thousand of the brightest minds on earth - all rocket scientists, mind you - then go right ahead. Until then, unless you've got a UFO in the basement, don't catcall; you can't replace a program if there's nothing with which to replace it.
Besides, the space shuttle has a better safety history than any car on the road. Besides that that's because of intense scrutiny by brilliant men and women, it's worth acknowledging that the astronauts are in significantly more danger driving to their job than doing their job.
And of all things, if we're really so keen on going to Mars, why should this of all things be our jumping off point?
Why shouldn't it? Because it's old? Hey, those highways better go, too, as well as the railroads, both wired and wireless telephones, light bulbs, ice cream machines, air conditioners, canned food, steel, knives, wheels, granaries, and all sorts of other technologies which have served us perfectly well for hundreds to thousands of years.
I suppose you'd like to replace hands, too. If it ain't broke, and you ain't got nothing better...
Vannevar Bush had the world wide web pretty down pat in the 1930s; the Victorians were pretty well prepared for radio under the ill guise of controlled ripples in the Phlogiston; Archimedes foresaw the turing machine a few hundred years before the birth of the person we set our calendar by.
Science fiction isn't wrong just because it's foreseeing, and turning your eyes from the future just because you might end up wrong is a great way to not be prepared.
Grandparent is correct. Whereas a pyramid may have any polygon for a base, a tetrahedron, meaning four faces, cannot. Since grandparent was referring to the use of the word tetrahedron in regard to a solid with five faces, his or her initial admonition is not in error. TETwalker is incorrect.
Kinda blurs the line between what's alive and what's machine.
I see no line to blur. Life is autonomous, spawning machinery. We've already got examples in carbon, silicon and virtual materials. I don't see how moving to steel really changes anything.
Wait, so let me get this straight. As a programmer, your idea of differences in the operating system are in an ancillary image decoding DLL, in the fully portable foundation classes, an external portable driver wrapper and a font?
Jesus, why don't you go the full nine yards and call word and.NET compelling parts of 2k3 dataserver?
yada yada yada. If you are developing closed source commercial applications the licensing cost of qt is like a speck of dust in the universe. If you really think these euros is too much, all it tells is that either you have no idea what it costs to have people employed, or that you are a cheap bastard that want first class tool for nothing.
Throwing money away just because there's more money somewhere else bankrupts a company very quickly. The cost of QT is reasonable for large developers, and arguably for some midsized developers with special needs. For typical midsized and small developers, it's a huge expenditure.
Um, sorry. Cleartype is quite a bit more than subpixel rendering; it's near-color balancing, stripe counterocclusion, subpixel vector estimation (think turning a bitmap into a set of curves to get the appropriate subpixel curvature too,) etc.
Yes, subpixel AA is common; hell, my GBA games do it. Cleartype is a much much larger system, and it's indeed quite MS-only.
Knowing apple, they'd probably put the camera on two rotating servos in the center of the back of the monitor, allow the user to set their seated height so that it'd be right, then teach that icon dock thing at the bottom to move the camera cown a little bit when an icon swelled so it'd look like it was getting heavy and weighing the monitor down.
But I'm not sure you can assert that the nature in which Ramanujan was referred to as "Indian math guy" in the parent post, was an artifact of prejudice, ignorance, disrespect or a combination of these things and more.
The plural of fish is fish. Room, tomb and flume rhyme. Glouchestershire is pronounced "glosster." And, in English, the past tense of copyright is copywritten. Fowler, the University of Chicago and Strunk and White all agree. Look it up.
Slashdot Mirror
The ideal length for a document is going to vary, project to project, but by building documents in a modular fashion it should be rarely necessary to have a document longer than about 20 sides of A4. Most should be around 10 sides. Anything longer likely covers unrelated topics and can be split up. (Remember, it is easier to open 20 books to one page each, than to open one book to 20 different pages.)
Yes. Tetris and MS Office have the same target complexity, to within fifty percent. Also, generalizations are helpful.
I think people misunderstand what happens when code is compiled. Compiling is not "the compiler uses the source code as instructions to produce an executable"; it's merely a translation of human-readable instructions into computer-readable instructions. I can "read" code and produce the same results by stepping through by hand; the executable code does the same thing (generally much faster).
This viewpoint seems to be largely tautological - two forms of an algorithm are equivalent because their input/output behavior is equivalent.
Of course, the counterargument is complex and more than I care to handle at work, but let me point out two things:
1) a binary running quicksort and my hand stepping through bubble sort aren't equivalent, even though one being run by the machine and the other being run by the human have the same end-result; input/output equivalence isn't the same as identity equivalence, and
2) various compilers don't output the same binaries for the code, and in the case of a naive and a cutting edge compiler can generate vastly different binaries with majorly different underlying behavior; hell, with optimizations, even the same compiler won't generate the same binary.
The source code most certainly is a generative set of instructions, rather than an equivalent form of output; take a look into compiler optimizations about proving whole sections of code are unnessecary. That the generative instructions are significantly different than the output is in fact the crucial bases of some techniques like SFINAE.
This argument is roughly the same as arguing that a mansion and a home are equivalent just because you can enter them, recieve housing and protection services from them, and because they have the same interface (doors, spigots, electrical outlets, garage, etc.)
In this sense, the code *IS* the final product; the Reeves article incorrectly equates compiling to building. The "building" is the writing of the code. Compiling is more like translating a book from English to some other language.
I just don't think this is correct. The purpose of Reeves' article is to equate programming to design as opposed to construction; all you've done is to take the opposed viewpoint. Whereas the case can be made for either, in the context of Reeves' arguments the latter viewpoint doesn't make sense.
To wit, if you want to discuss building, you should observe that the output in best possible world should be identical every time; that's a reasonable goal for architecture, but not for implementation. Why do you suggest that building is coding? Saying so without rationalization isn't discussion, it's argument.
When I use the blueprints for an automobile to build the automobile, I get something different than the blueprints.
Uh, no, you don't. That's kind of what mass production is about, is that within the limits of machine technology, every car is the same. If you go to a junkyard, you can use pieces from other cars. You can get replacement pieces at a dealership without anyone measuring your car.
Cars to a single line are effectively identical. If you'd like to learn what the difference is, read about the problems WW1 doughboys had because of their Hotchkiss weapons not being able to exchange parts, then consider that that's just a question of low quality manufacture; the reason you want to look that up is because of the glaring contrast with the well-manufactured Browning, which the military didn't deploy because it was the superior weapon of the day, and because they didn't want its design to fall into enemy hands.
Cars most certainly are identical per design, unless you want to go off onto non-issues like micrometer differences due to machining, scratches in paint, et cetera. The average educated adult cannot look at four of the same make and model of new car, have them rearranged, and still tell them apart, provided they're clean; The Price Is Right relies heavily on that fact for more th
Someone should tell that site how to spell bleeding.
Building long bridges and tall elevators are not comprable projects.
In the case of suspension bridges, they are - they're both suspension problems, natch. Especially in these two cases, they are for a second reason as well - the weight of the material involved becomes a significant problem, because its presence creates an additional drag strong enough to threaten our best tensile-strength materials.
The point the grandparent poster was making is that the problem of bridging that gap is far smaller than the problem of a space elevator, and so we need to take this in appropriate developmental steps.
Er. No. Batch protien folding is expensive, because you're folding 10^preposterous possible protiens. Folding one protien is relatively trivial; you could do it realtime on a z80. Amusingly, that means that the Classic Gameboy has enough horsepower to pull it off.
Molecular interactions are simple. The problem with batch protien folding is the sheer number of foldings which need to be addressed.
Yeah, and the problem is, if you accept the first seven axioms, Dianetics makes a lot of sense, too. You can't build an argument on faith. This is a textbook case of the fallacy of false premise - it doesn't matter whether the things you're taking faith on are true or not; if they're not known to be true they're false. Period.
Oh, also, you can pretty easily raise Alf to God on a set of logic built from two false base axioms, if you try. Watch:
1) Ecologically dominant creatures are superior.
2) Anything higher on the food chain is ecologically dominant.
3) Alf eats cats.
4) As the Egyptians well knew, cats are gods.
5) As a predator of cats, Alf is higher on the food chain to, and thus superior to, cats, which are gods; therefore Alf is a superior god.
The false premises are #1 and #4. #2 isn't false because the definition of ecologically dominant is already established as fairly clear reductionist nonsense, but from that reductionist nonsense definition #2 would be valid. #1 is the kind of "yeah, so if you just accept this" thing you just did, and #4 is Argumentum ad Verecundiam, which you commit both when you refer vapidly to scientists "arguing" about the burst patterns in the developmental record, which hasn't been argued since a year after it was noticed - having records is funny that way.
So, look, evolution is obviously true, and Alf is God. But hey, when those martians show up and start eating us, we'd better not fight back, because they're our predators and therefore ethically superior, too; the appropriate way to do things would be to worship them all the way down their throat.
And also we need to follow John Travolta to a meeting. You should read Dianetics, some time: it's pretty crazy how if you just accept the first ten crooked things, the rest just all falls into place.
Rotten foundations make rotten arguments, in short.
It's exactly this sort of intolerance to the beliefs of others that leads to the burning of books. Science is as guilty of this theme as religion. get down off of your horse - a person has the right to believe what they want to, and your belief in the quantum model doesn't give you the right to give them shit in public.
Whether or not you were trying to be funny, this is the sort of thing that give atheists the appearance of being intolerant. It doesn't matter if you mean it; people take it to heart anyway. Quit your bitching and act like the kind of enlightened individual you're challenging them to become. Their belief system got them out of the chaos that was early mankind. Who are you to question it? It obviously leads to successful societies, and we all know where "I am right you are wrong" eventually leads: the phlogiston, the ether, direct current city grids and Nazi Germany.
So shut up, please. You're annoying the adults, be they Bible-thumpers, Quantuum-thumpers or whatever else. (Just remember, in 1900 we thought the atomic model was on giant tinkertoy. Now we think it's based on dice. Chances are, if you'll pardon the pun, the dice model is an approximation of something even weirder; good current contenders are coiled superstring theory and n-brane topologies. And those will probably end up revealing something even deeper. Reality is, in essence, an Escher painting; the harder you look, the weirder it gets. You don't understand it any better than they did, and Christ has done more for humankind than the LED ever will. Bite them.)
Creationism isn't science, it's literature. Get over it.
Actually, it's social engineering. There's a damn good reason that throughout early human history there were conclaves of religious and non-religious people, and the religious ones always won. History is replete with examples, and every single major culture in human history up until about the 1400s was religiously grounded. That's not chance.
The primary function of religion from the perspective of the anthropologist is to serve as a preamble to what we now use government for - to set laws and appropriate punishments, to issue edicts in the interest of protecting the public health (food laws, sexual practice laws, age protection laws, etc,) to proscribe appropriate weights and values for trade, tariffs, taxation (christians call it tithing) to an entity which issues public works, and so forth.
The reason God always won, no matter what name (s)he/they c(ome|ame) under, was that religious people organized, cooperated better, shared viewpoints, had less internal clash, had lower crime rates, distributed public wealth into infrastructure development, and so on. The pseudoreligious Roman God-Emperor is an extreme case of the success of this method when integrated with social norms and the allowance of alternate belief systems.
It doesn't matter if people are in your country and believe different things. The importance isn't that everyone follows the same religion; the USA is a current example of the efficiency of a system where alternate beliefs are tolerated. What matters is that there is a single unified system for proscribing what is tolerable, and what may not be done. The USA will allow you to give you thirteen year old son psychedelic drugs, if it's been part of your culture for a thousand years and you apply first for the license, which they are burdened to give unless medical issues arise. That said, the USA will not condone ritual murder under any circumstance except impending death, and even that is a difficult issue in most states right now. There are limits, and they are (usually) clear as crystal.
This is the function which religion served. It was in no unclear terms a form of government interested in the public good, which gave standards, laws, reliable measures, protection from outside forces, the organized production capabilities, resource distribution in times of defecit, wealth redistribution to the destitute, deployment, public health, psychological help, moral and ethical compass, and in many cases even judiciary support.
I will not debate the validity of the actual theological intent of religion with you; it is not something I feel certain of. However, I do feel that to suggest it is literature is simply not correct, and ignores thousands of years of history and evidence. When we look at the eyes of the human and the octopus in biology, we're told about convergent evolution - how there are a ton of different approaches to the eye that get taken underwater and how the eye in humans and octopi diverged when they were still light sensitive pits on the skin, but how similar demands in the later species drove evolution to produce almost the exact same structure. This is no different: human population distributed (probably) before we had language at all; religion didn't show up until a certian population density, which happened globally uniformly around 25-20,000 years ago, and didn't really get its shit together until higher order language and history allowed a written exchange of very large documents (since the oral tradition introduces errors which after a certain size become extremely pervasive.) Written language spreads like a shitstorm - exactly how or why is still under debate - and shows up the whole world over in human populations with no contact about 6-4,000 years ago. Suddenly we can write out how things happen and why. The dominant belief systems emerge within one to two thousand years of the emergence of writing in any given area; early victors include Hinduism, Zoroastr
I agree that the people who think an elevator can be up and running within 15 years are probably overoptimistic to the point that you could call it "hype", but I've honestly never seen anyone besides you compare the space elevator to a biblical story.
Well, the emotional impact of going God on a cutting-edge science project aside, it's a particularly apt metaphor. I'm agnostic, but I see the value of the Bible as parables, other possible values remaining undiscussed. As is the case with all of the major holy books, the Bible provides a huge compendium of practical wisdom appropriate for everyday life, which helped its practicioners life better not only for themselves but also as a community. Considering human behavior before religion, this was a huge step, and should not be underestimated.
Most of those life lessons, the well decried exceptions like dietary law aside, still apply today, because most of them are about human nature and human emotional systems, which haven't changed much in the last five thousand years, or about ethics and morals, whose significant compass almost hasn't changed at all (note to argumentative philosophy majors: just because we understand morality better doesn't mean it's changed; just that we're less blind to it. The changes in moral compass come from ideas like the Ubermensche, and none of those have taken root in the common populace. Ever.)
The Tower of Babel parable is absolutely astoundingly appropriate, given its topical similarity to the question at hand. (That old rub about man's desire to build into the sky: just how dead-on is it? I've always wondered, especially when I lived near big skyscraper cities; people say it's about land value, but better mass transportation would be cheaper, more effective and safer, and there are a few cities which have implemented that at various levels throughout history - venice, graz, morgantown west virginia; tokyo's got it so bad that they've done it more than once, and they still need skyscrapers...)
Meh. Anyway, look. The point of the Babel fable is that the builders were experiencing hubris. They wanted to build a tower into the sky just for the sake of building a tower into the sky; they too should share the heavens. They didn't actually need, or in fact use, the tower for anything; they merely wanted to see the heavens, up close, whenever they wanted, and that was that. Indeed, in the modern day in many ways we do behave exactly this way: note for example the CN Tower, whose glass floor is most fun if one of your relatives can't handle it, and don't understand just how little impact you jumping up and down really hard actually has.
Now, these little bastards getting up into the heavens pisses god off, so god knocks them back down to the ground and gives them the anti-babelfish meme, and thus they can't talk to one another and therefore can't organize and build another one, which is roughly what plagues Los
Angeles, like um, to this day, okay fer shure. This is how The Bible works: it teaches life lessons by treating chance or happenstance as the Wrath of God, which is pretty much how Europe explained everything - for other parts of the world's excuses, qv Djinn, sprites, elves, demons, wu-jen, meckla, coyote trickster, aya'p'atl, hobgoblins, ashanti's children, and pretty much all those other things dungeons and dragons players are rattling off in their heads right now. The lesson here is only superficially "get your ass out of the sky, mammal;" certainly the original speaker wasn't being so literal, or else he'd also have some fairly atypical views about airplanes, possibly from the inside of a padded room.
The real lesson in the Tower of Babel story is that you shouldn't be doing dumbass things just for the sake of doing them, because sometimes they fail, and if you haven't even thought about what's going to happen when it fails, you're gonna get screwed, really really hard.
The Space Elevator is in fact such a case: think about the absolute nightmare a cab
It's going to support the bandwidth and servers, actually; the amount that Amazon makes off of the process is far offset by the extra amount generated by the more broadly available shopping.
I mean, you might as well call the US Mail profiteers in the scheme, too. But the real profitters by a huge margin are the people who will continue to use the service for free online.
Bandwidth doesn't grow on trees.
B: UNIX is the only one unrecognizable in it's current state. (Mac OS X)
MacOS X is Unix in exactly the same way that Windows ME is DOS. You'd do better to compare to real unices, like BSD, which still look, feel, act and smell like unix, instead of plastic gumdrops with icons that, to quote that movie, "bounce up and down like a Jack Russell fucking terrier."
From a technology standpoint, I don't use the same computers that were out in 1981. I don't drive a car that was made or designed in 1981. I don't even talk on a phone whose carrier techology was around in 1981.
You use a Von Neumann machine, which is from the 50s, and which has since been supplanted by many superior architectures. It's an implementation of the mechanical computation concept by Babbage in the 1880s using the electronic mechanisms from Colossus by Tiltman and Flowers in the 1940s using algorithms devised by Newman in the late 1930s and Turing in the early to mid 1940s.
Your car was invented in 1870 and your phone's carrier technology is from 1972.
Pre-emptive strike: "But I have slightly modified versions with moderately refined mechanisms, even though the core concepts haven't changed!"
Yeah, that's also true of the Space Shuttle. It's been revised constantly since its inception in the 1960s, when it basically looked like a DC-50. In fact, this story is about one such change. The shuttle has changed more in the last 40 years than your computer, your car and your phone put together.
Hell, DOS software from 1981 still works on modern Windows boxes without any special stuff. How, exactly, aren't these the same machines anymore? Because you switched OSes? DOS still runs on them, and they wouldn't have suddenly been different computers back in 1981 if you'd switched from DOS to, say, Q-Dos...
So why, WHY are we launching people into space with a program older than I am?
Because it's still the best thing we've got. If you want to go out-science a few thousand of the brightest minds on earth - all rocket scientists, mind you - then go right ahead. Until then, unless you've got a UFO in the basement, don't catcall; you can't replace a program if there's nothing with which to replace it.
Besides, the space shuttle has a better safety history than any car on the road. Besides that that's because of intense scrutiny by brilliant men and women, it's worth acknowledging that the astronauts are in significantly more danger driving to their job than doing their job.
And of all things, if we're really so keen on going to Mars, why should this of all things be our jumping off point?
Why shouldn't it? Because it's old? Hey, those highways better go, too, as well as the railroads, both wired and wireless telephones, light bulbs, ice cream machines, air conditioners, canned food, steel, knives, wheels, granaries, and all sorts of other technologies which have served us perfectly well for hundreds to thousands of years.
I suppose you'd like to replace hands, too. If it ain't broke, and you ain't got nothing better...
Vannevar Bush had the world wide web pretty down pat in the 1930s; the Victorians were pretty well prepared for radio under the ill guise of controlled ripples in the Phlogiston; Archimedes foresaw the turing machine a few hundred years before the birth of the person we set our calendar by.
Science fiction isn't wrong just because it's foreseeing, and turning your eyes from the future just because you might end up wrong is a great way to not be prepared.
Grandparent is correct. Whereas a pyramid may have any polygon for a base, a tetrahedron, meaning four faces, cannot. Since grandparent was referring to the use of the word tetrahedron in regard to a solid with five faces, his or her initial admonition is not in error. TETwalker is incorrect.
Kinda blurs the line between what's alive and what's machine.
I see no line to blur. Life is autonomous, spawning machinery. We've already got examples in carbon, silicon and virtual materials. I don't see how moving to steel really changes anything.
Let me get this straight. You think that a response of slaughtering an entire species based on a potential threat is itself not xenophobia?
You usually don't spend weeks testing how the wall interacts with the drywall and foundations.
You do in any building over eight stories tall.
Wait, so let me get this straight. As a programmer, your idea of differences in the operating system are in an ancillary image decoding DLL, in the fully portable foundation classes, an external portable driver wrapper and a font?
.NET compelling parts of 2k3 dataserver?
Jesus, why don't you go the full nine yards and call word and
Not much of a programmer.
yada yada yada. If you are developing closed source commercial applications the licensing cost of qt is like a speck of dust in the universe. If you really think these euros is too much, all it tells is that either you have no idea what it costs to have people employed, or that you are a cheap bastard that want first class tool for nothing.
Throwing money away just because there's more money somewhere else bankrupts a company very quickly. The cost of QT is reasonable for large developers, and arguably for some midsized developers with special needs. For typical midsized and small developers, it's a huge expenditure.
How ironic
Not in the slightest.
Um, sorry. Cleartype is quite a bit more than subpixel rendering; it's near-color balancing, stripe counterocclusion, subpixel vector estimation (think turning a bitmap into a set of curves to get the appropriate subpixel curvature too,) etc.
Yes, subpixel AA is common; hell, my GBA games do it. Cleartype is a much much larger system, and it's indeed quite MS-only.
Wait, did you just ask if the US Military has enough money? Isn't that like checking that Antarctica hasn't quite run out of cold?
Knowing apple, they'd probably put the camera on two rotating servos in the center of the back of the monitor, allow the user to set their seated height so that it'd be right, then teach that icon dock thing at the bottom to move the camera cown a little bit when an icon swelled so it'd look like it was getting heavy and weighing the monitor down.
And then charge $800 extra.
But I'm not sure you can assert that the nature in which Ramanujan was referred to as "Indian math guy" in the parent post, was an artifact of prejudice, ignorance, disrespect or a combination of these things and more.
It's just because nobody can remember his name.
The plural of fish is fish. Room, tomb and flume rhyme. Glouchestershire is pronounced "glosster." And, in English, the past tense of copyright is copywritten. Fowler, the University of Chicago and Strunk and White all agree. Look it up.